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(This post appeared on the author’s blog<\/a>.)<\/em><\/p>\n The National People’s Congress (NPC) has been in full swing this week in Beijing. Even if it’s mostly just theater, the NPC offers an important stage for up-and-coming politicians to jockey for position. In two years (2012), President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao are expected to retire, along with nearly half of the 25-member Politburo. An entirely new generation of Chinese leaders will take over, and exactly who that will be is still being thrashed out.<\/p>\n I was recently reading the first in a series <\/a>of upcoming articles in China Leadership Review<\/em> by Cheng Li, of the Brookings Institute. The series is called “China’s Midterm Jockeying: Gearing Up for 2012,” and the first part focuses on provincial leaders. It’s a worthwhile read on many levels, but I was particularly struck by one point where he mentions that “approximately 58 percent of [provincial] leaders were born in … six provinces, and about 40 percent were born in four provinces of Eastern China (Shandong, Zhejiang, Jiangsu, and Anhui).” This seems to be a rather remarkable concentration, and I decided to explore the question further.<\/p>\n Those who have read my article “The Nine Nations of China<\/a>” in The Atlantic <\/em>may recall that I highlighted the region I call the Yellow Land (the Yellow River Valley and North China Plain) as the traditional center of political power in China. I also noted that the Metropolis (the Yangtze Delta) is the only region wealthy and central enough to rival the Yellow Land for political primacy. This was essentially a historical argument based on the observation that, in virtually every period when China was ruled as a unified state, the capital was located in the Yellow Land. The only exceptions to this rule were a handful of times it was moved to the richer Metropolis. None of the other regions have ever ruled over a unified China.<\/p>\n The implication — unproven — is that certain of the Nine Nations may continue to exert greater political influence in China today. That’s also what intrigued me about Cheng Li’s observation that China’s leaders tended to come from certain provinces. Are the historical patterns I noted reflected in the composition of China’s present-day leadership?<\/p>\n To answer this question, I decided to focus on two groups. The first is the 204-member Central Committee of the Communist Party. This body includes not only China’s top leaders, as defined by the Politburo, but also most of its government ministers, top military leadership, senior party functionaries, and a large number of provincial party leaders and governors. <\/p>\n The second group consists of all 62 provincial party leaders and governors, plus the chief executives of the Hong Kong and Macau Special Administrative Regions (SARs) and the director of the State Council’s Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office — a total of 65 officials. Taiwan was not included in the analysis, because of the difficulty of making reasonable comparisons across political systems.<\/p>\n The following is the breakdown for each group, based on their members’ place of origin. In a handful of cases where an official’s biography emphasized that he or she had been born in one place but is considered a native of somewhere else, I went with the latter. Of course, one must also compare the results with the population of each region, which is not evenly distributed across China:<\/p>\n\n\n