Rumor has it that he will remain in office behind Cui Tiankai’s extra-long tenure

Cui Tiankai, the Communist Party’s ambassador to the U.S., has long passed the age of 65 for retirement from the Communist Party at the full ministerial level, but it was recently announced that he will remain in his post. Some analysts believe that one of the reasons for Cui’s extra-long tenure is the lack of a suitable successor.

Last week, the South China Morning Post reported, citing sources in Beijing, that Cui Tiankai, the Communist Party’s ambassador to the United States, is expected to remain in his post. The Chinese government does not plan to replace Cui Tiankai in the near future, in order to manage tensions with the Biden administration and prepare for a long-term confrontation with the competition.

Cui Tiankai, who has turned 68, became ambassador to the U.S. in April 2013, the first ambassador to the U.S. since Xi Jinping took office and the longest-serving CCP ambassador to the U.S.

On March 23, an op-ed in the Hong Kong newspaper Ming Pao said that the fact that Cui Tiankai will not be replaced in the short term means that Beijing judges that the Biden Administration will continue the Trump administration’s policy toward the CCP in the short term, so China’s (CCP) strategy toward the U.S. will not need to change either.

The article suggests that another possibility for Beijing not to replace Cui Tiankai is that there is no suitable successor at the moment.

The article concludes that there is no way to tell why Cui Tiankai’s tenure is so long, but he has not been able to return to China for at least three years. He was once a member of the last National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) and returned to Beijing every March to attend the National People’s Congress, but after 2018, he stepped down as a CPPCC member, and Trump has already launched a trade war against the Communist Party of China, plus the Epidemic reasons last year and this year, Cui Tiankai fears that he will hardly have a chance to return to China. Now it seems that he will have to wait at least another year and a half to return to China.