Resolves to the name of the next General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party following Xi Jinping.
In the event of duplicates, the first will be chosen.
There is no time limit for this question, it runs until Xi Jinping ceases to be General Secretary.
If Xi Jinping does not have a successor as General Secretary, resolves to Nobody. That includes if the office is restructured and there is no longer a General Secretary position, even if there is a clear "leader of China". If the CCP ceases to exist, or ceases to exist as a party in China, also resolves Nobody.
If the office is just renamed, or the CCP is just renamed, then it still resolves to the successor.
Related questions
What if the spirit of this was fulfilled but there was a Donitz figure?
If the CCP is collapsing and there's a successor for 2 months, still resolves to the successor.
The spirit of this question is to resolve to the successor. The spirit is not to predict anything else.
What if the party was expelled from China and the next General Secretary took office in exile?
Uh... I guess it's not really the Chinese Communist Party if they are expelled from China. That case sounds like it would resolve to Nobody.
If you want to bet on the collapse of the CCP, I would suggest making a market dedicated to that topic. This market is supposed to be pretty simple, just resolve to the successor, and it's a very small edge case that there is no successor.
More relevant pedantic edge cases in my mind are:
What if the position is renamed? If it's exactly the same position but renamed, will resolve to the successor in the renamed position. If it's almost the same, I guess I'll probably judge by what consensus on e.g. Wikipedia is.
What if the offices are restructured and there's no more General Secretary, but there is a clear "Leader of China"? I was originally thinking to be more literal and resolve to Nobody in this case, because there's too many ambiguous cases where there is no clear leader of China, but I could be persuaded otherwise.
@jack when Deng Xiaoping was 'leader of China' he wasn't the General Secretary.
My strong preference is that this market be taken literally (renaming aside) or else changed to who will be 'paramount leader'. Otherwise I think *if* the situation becomes unclear it will be very hard to resolve in a way that doesn't lead to controversy.
"I guess it's not really the Chinese Communist Party if they are expelled from China."
in this case it would still be though. It's an organisation that defines itself, rather than being defined by the state (quite notably, historically!)
Maybe the better way to phrase this is to say that the question no longer applies if the CCP loses power?
My strong preference is that this market be taken literally (renaming aside) or else changed to who will be 'paramount leader'. Otherwise I think if the situation becomes unclear it will be very hard to resolve in a way that doesn't lead to controversy.
Yeah, that was exactly my reasoning as well for being very literal.
"Paramount leader" isn't well-defined and could also become controversial, right?
"I guess it's not really the Chinese Communist Party if they are expelled from China."
in this case it would still be though. It's an organisation that defines itself, rather than being defined by the state (quite notably, historically!)
Maybe the better way to phrase this is to say that the question no longer applies if the CCP loses power?
Yeah, my point there was that it's a smaller potential tweak to just define that the CCP must in fact be a party in China for the purposes of this market, which I think should be uncontroversial. But I agree, I think saying it no longer applies if CCP loses power is totally reasonable, and also fine to change now.
@jack Paramount leader is hard to define, but we've not had a situation where we didn't know who it was (excluding that times where there genuinely wasn't one)
There is a paramount leader question on the site somewhere -
@JoshuaWilkes https://manifold.markets/JuJumper/who-will-be-the-next-paramount-lead?r=Sm9zaHVhV2lsa2Vz
Well, not much to go on here...
FYI I updated the question text with clarifications as discussed above. LMK if there are any questions/concerns.
If Xi Jinping does not have a successor as General Secretary, resolves to Nobody. That includes if the office is restructured and there is no longer a General Secretary position, even if there is a clear "leader of China". If the CCP ceases to exist, or ceases to exist as a party in China, also resolves Nobody.
If the office is just renamed, or the CCP is just renamed, then it still resolves to the successor.
I decided not to require the CCP to stay in power, given that "in power" can be difficult to define (see as an example the opposite resolutions we have seen to whether Hamas is in power in Gaza)
I don't think predicting on the distinction between next paramount leader as opposed to the next General Secretary is too important - until we get closer, there's basically no difference, and when we do get closer we can fine-tune the questions.
I do think it's interesting to predict how long Xi stays as leader, and I have a question on that:
This is a great market but Chinese elite politics is incredibly opaque and there are no "favorites" among the options. Most of the listed candidates are/will be too old given Xi's timeline (one unspoken rule is when you reach 70 you have to retire unless you are the leader). There's also the incentive for Xi to make a surprise pick to minimize infighting and lame-duck-ness.
@PlainBG Just to be clear, this is a free response and you can add people - so if you think there are other favorites not listed, add them!
@jack Since this has no preset deadline, and successor names can be added, people are vastly overbetting on 'Other'. Given the nature of the system/process, a successor will almost certainly be chosen from an existing Politburo Standing Committee member at the time it's announced, however many cycles out. The other possibility would be some chaotic succession process, in which case the 'Other' option should converge to the 'No One' option.
@Maniuser The problem is the standing committee roster is not remotely predictable one or two cycles out. Several favorites were not chosen in 2022 for instance
Yes, I agree with these points that it's likely very hard to predict more than one cycle out. And we have a market on whether Xi will step down in 2028. https://manifold.markets/jack/will-xi-jinping-continue-to-lead-ch It suggests that ~33% of the probability should be assigned to the current top contenders (e.g. PSC members who are favored by Xi and aren't too old, etc)
@PlainBG There's is not cutoff date for adding names or this market. So, the problems you mentioned are not issues.
I'm pretty sure one of you is misunderstanding how other works. How it works is that betting on other is precisely the same as betting on all answers that are not added yet (aka all answers that are added in the future). That's the whole point.
@jack Ah, thanks for the elucidation, I was focused on the end outcome and ignored the time-linked value changes to get there. Though for the knowledge gained, it was mana tuition well spent.
@DavidFWatson he's famous for being a tourist!
https://www.newyorker.com/books/second-read/how-a-book-about-americas-history-foretold-chinas-future
@Joshua some of these chinese titles are just ridiculous in english (first ranked secretary of the secretariat of the communist party)
@SemioticRivalry I will never get over the fact that there is a PLANAF - the Army's Navy's Air Force.