Can China’s ideology tsar, Wang Huning, be the steadying hand in Sino-US relations?

Of the three political parties today that pack serious global pop – the Communist Party in China, and the Democratic and Republican parties in America – China’s comes across right now as the least disorganised and ineffective.

Even so, is it possible President Xi Jinping is now less like an all-powerful Mao Zedong and more like a coalition-canny Abraham Lincoln, whose cabinet famously included quarrelling voices? Some 19th party congress evaluators size up the new Politburo Standing Committee as just that – more like a Lincoln cabinet mash-up than a slate of pure “Xi-sters”. They also note that Xi’s corruption-busting ally Wang Qishan retired. The hypothesis is that the Communist Party is one big happy family when the whole world is watching, but a big squabbling one when out of view, behind closed doors.

So how does surging, ambitious China and surging, ambitious Xi keep the chorus of communist comity singing the same happy tune? One key is Wang Huning, the top-gun librettist on the new Standing Committee. Now something like the chief party theoretician, as well as the go-to speech-writer, Wang has the talent to weave together different policy textures into one fine fabric of collective thought. The youngest law professor to be granted tenure at Fudan University in Shanghai, polishing his French in college (and his English at visiting-fellow stops, including the University of California, Berkeley), Wang is not only a books-and-publication workaholic but also a gifted and usefully flexible theorist.