As China’s government confronts economic challenges from weakened domestic demand, rising employment, the housing market crisis, increasing government debt, currency depreciation, and the risk of increasing restrictions on China’s access to global technology, capital, and market, one may notice a shift in its policy style and how it coordinates across different policy domains. To understand this shift, it’s important to recognize the distinctive policy style of Xi Jinping’s administration in its first two terms.

Under the previous two administrations—headed by technocratically minded Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao—policy was characterized by careful research, cautious planning, incremental experimentation, and close monitoring of implementation. While their administrations retained traces of what Elizabeth Perry and Sebastian Heilmann call “guerrilla policy style,” they were always embedded in a technocratic approach. The Xi administration, by contrast, exhibits what can be called a “laobing (Original Guard) policy style”: quick, bold, ambitious, determined, abrasive, and often able to catch people by surprise—yet short on rigorous planning and monitoring of implementation. This style underlies everything from the Belt and Road Initiative, to the Xiong’an project, to the “common prosperity” campaign.

“Laobing” refers to the first wave of high school students who, in the summer of 1966, formed the first Red Guard organizations and whose rallying cry, “rebellion is justified,” was instrumental in the opening chapter of the Cultural Revolution. Mainly children of revolutionary cadres, they distinguished themselves from subsequent Red Guards by referring to themselves as the “Original Guards” (“laobing”).

The laobing policy style was best exemplified by the Western District Red Guard Picket Corps (Xijiu), a group of laobing who found themselves in charge of much of Beijing for several weeks in August and September 1966: running schools, smashing the “Four Olds,” and arranging Mao’s reception of Red Guards in Tiananmen. They issued 10 “general orders,” which often combined stylized heroism with the kind of willful determination that is characteristic of states of emergency. These “orders” often created messes that Premier Zhou Enlai would have to clean up.

Although none of the Xi administration was involved in the Xijiu, some of them spent their formative years imbued in its ethos. Since 2012, this style, with its contempt for technical considerations, has been crucial to Xi’s increasing dominance, enabling him both to overcome systemic challenges from civil society and competing factions and to preempt pushback from technocrats. As a result, under Xi, rather than contributing to research, or recommending and designing policies, technocrats more often find themselves charged with executing or cleaning up after policies made without their input.

Two conditions of the thriving of this laobing policy style will likely change after the 20th Party Congress. First, the mounting economic challenges have decreased disposable resources and shrunk Xi’s policy toolkit, making it harder to disregard technical considerations. Second, as competing factions recede, the Party bureaucracy will be politically more submissive. This will make it possible for Xi to yield more policymaking autonomy to technocrats, who will be able to coordinate across domains to research, recommend, and make policies, just as Mao yielded more policymaking autonomy to Zhou Enlai and the State Council after the 9th Party Congress in 1969.