BEIJING -- With the Chinese Communist Party's new seven-member Politburo Standing Committee packed with President Xi Jinping's close allies, dissatisfaction and concern within the party over the concentration of power in Xi appear to be bubbling under the surface.
The announcement Saturday to exclude Premier Li Keqiang, who was second to Xi, from the Central Committee, whose members are selected to make up the party's top ruling body of the Politburo Standing Committee, laid bare the discord within the CCP.
During Saturday's closing ceremony of the party's National Congress, held every five years at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, Li kept his documents on the table and often looked around the hall impassively. He rarely made eye contact with a person he was sitting alongside to whom he is not particularly close: Xi.
