Cai Qi (1955– )
The Fujian-born official who became Beijing party secretary in May 2017 and entered the Politburo the same year without prior Central Committee membership: six months into the job he directed the 40-day citywide clearance campaign after the Daxing fire, in which tens of thousands of migrant tenants were ordered out in midwinter in what public opinion called the expulsion of the 'low-end population.' Accountability stopped at district and town level; he himself rose on to the Politburo Standing Committee, the first-ranked Secretariat post and the directorship of the General Office, becoming Xi Jinping's core chief of staff, with no public sanctions record.
1. From Fujian and Zhejiang to Beijing: the rapid rise of a former secretary
Cai Qi was born on December 5, 1955. His official biography lists Youxi County in Fujian as his native place. He began work in March 1973 as a sent-down youth at the Xiyang Commune in Yong'an County, Fujian, joined the Chinese Communist Party in August 1975, and studied political education at Fujian Normal University, graduating in 1978 and staying on to work in the university party committee office. In 1983 he moved to the General Office of the Fujian Provincial Party Committee, rising from clerk to deputy director, and for much of that time he served as a personal secretary to Chen Guangyi, then the provincial party secretary. That early experience matters for understanding his career. Cai learned his trade at the edge of the leadership core, handling documents, schedules and confidentiality, rather than grinding through the minutiae of county and township administration. It also foreshadows why he would later be judged a natural fit for the Central Committee's General Office. In September 1996 he became deputy party secretary of Sanming, and in November 1997 its mayor, completing the move from provincial staff work to governing a city in his own name.
In May 1999 Cai was transferred across provincial lines to Zhejiang, serving successively as mayor of Quzhou, party secretary of Quzhou, and, from April 2004, party secretary of Taizhou. Xi Jinping led Zhejiang as provincial party secretary from 2002 to 2007, so the two men's careers overlapped there just as they had in Fujian, and researchers and international media alike treat those two stretches of shared service as the root of the trust between them. In 2007 Cai became mayor of Hangzhou, the provincial capital, entering vice-ministerial rank. In January 2010 he joined the provincial standing committee as head of the Organization Department, and in November 2013 he became executive vice governor of Zhejiang. His Zhejiang years also had a very public second face. He was one of the earliest senior Chinese officials to use microblogging heavily, amassing more than ten million followers, being celebrated in state media and online as an internet-famous official, and at one point announcing his own job change on his account before the official release. That open, communicative image stands in sharp contrast to the security-first governing style he later displayed in Beijing, a contrast commentators still puzzle over.
In March 2014 Cai was brought to Beijing as deputy director of the General Office of the newly created Central National Security Commission, a body chaired personally by Xi Jinping, and in April 2015 he became its executive deputy director, reaching full ministerial rank. Placing him in that office was itself an act of inner-circle positioning. On October 31, 2016, he was parachuted into the Beijing municipal government as deputy party secretary, vice mayor and acting mayor. He was formally elected mayor on January 20, 2017, and on May 27, 2017 he succeeded Guo Jinlong as secretary of the Beijing Municipal Party Committee. Counted from his ministerial-level post, he had climbed through the National Security Commission office, the Beijing mayoralty, the Beijing party secretaryship and Politburo membership in under four years. At the first plenum of the 19th Central Committee in October 2017, he entered the Politburo without ever having served as a full or even alternate member of the Central Committee. Analyses by Reuters and by the Brookings scholar Cheng Li both stressed that the appointment broke nearly every convention governing the capital's top job in the post-Cultural Revolution era, and that it can only be explained by the personal trust of the top leader. In other words, Cai's authority in Beijing did not come from seniority in a queue. It came from the appointment itself, and that origin shaped what he had to prove in office: unqualified loyalty and flawless execution.
2. The Daxing fire of 2017 and the forty-day clearance campaign
On the evening of November 18, 2017, fire broke out at an apartment building known as Jufuyuan in Xinjian Second Village, Xihongmen Town, Daxing District, on Beijing's southern fringe. According to the official investigation report published later, the fire started in a basement cold-storage unit, where an electrical fault ignited polyurethane insulation material in the walls, and smoke and carbon monoxide killed 19 people and injured 8. Eight of the dead were children, according to an open letter signed by more than a hundred intellectuals and to multiple media reports. The building was a classic product of Beijing's urban-rural fringe: production, storage and sleeping quarters mixed together in a subdivided rental block, occupied overwhelmingly by migrant workers. Cai Qi and acting mayor Chen Jining went to the scene that night to direct the response. The next day the municipal leadership held a meeting at the site and then a televised citywide conference to launch the response. The Beijing Municipal Work Safety Commission decided that from November 20 the whole city would carry out a 40-day special campaign of major inspection, clearance and rectification of safety hazards, targeting rental apartment blocks, rental courtyards, color-steel-sheet buildings, factories and workshops, warehouses and logistics sites, auto-parts markets and wholesale markets.
The manner of execution quickly went beyond what inspecting for hazards normally means. Multiple media outlets and residents' accounts describe a chain of territorial responsibility pressed down level by level: tenants ordered to leave within hours or a few days, doors knocked on or smashed in the middle of the night, apartments cut off from water, electricity and heating, and buildings demolished, with doors and roofs torn off, before tenants had finished moving out. It was the depth of Beijing's winter, with nighttime temperatures below freezing, and large numbers of tenants were photographed and filmed dragging their belongings through the streets in search of somewhere to sleep. Social media carried the images across the country within days. Fragments of internal speeches that circulated online showed Cai demanding that grassroots cadres work with an unsparing, confrontational attitude toward clearance targets; those fragments were published by overseas media and have never been confirmed by the Beijing authorities, so this page marks them as unverified. A similar internal mobilization speech by Wang Xian'yong, party secretary of Fengtai District, urging subordinates to use harsh and fast measures, was likewise reported by Hong Kong and Taiwan media and likewise never officially confirmed, and is also marked unverified here. The harshness of the enforcement itself, however, does not depend on any single source: it is corroborated by a large body of independent reporting and imagery.
Accountability for the fire itself moved quickly, and its limits are part of the record. By the end of November, Daxing deputy district head Du Zhiyong had been suspended and placed under investigation, Xihongmen party secretary Zheng Yajun and town mayor Si Wentao had been suspended and investigated, and district head Cui Zhicheng had resigned. The investigation report published in June 2018 recorded that 15 responsible persons had been placed under criminal investigation on suspicion of the crime of causing a major-liability accident, 21 party and government personnel had received party or administrative discipline, and three companies involved had been fined a total of 9.6 million yuan. What deserves emphasis is where accountability stopped. Those punished were district- and town-level officials and company managers. No leader of the municipal party committee or government that designed and directed the citywide campaign received any sanction, and Cai Qi himself continued to rise in the years that followed. On December 13, 2017, another fire in a self-built rental house in Shibalidian Township, Chaoyang District, killed 5 people and injured 9. Cai responded by insisting that fire-hazard clearance could not pause for a moment. The campaign's basic tone did not change under public pressure.
3. The scale of the evictions and the people who bore them
How many people lost their homes in the campaign has never been officially answered. Beijing has never published a total for buildings demolished, tenants moved out, or people resettled, and a search of official notices and mainstream state media for this page found no such figure. That absence is itself a fact of the archive: there is no official number. The estimates that do exist diverge widely and can only be presented side by side. In the first week, field reporting by Reuters, the Associated Press, CNN and other international outlets consistently described thousands of people forced out in the opening days, with some apartment blocks given a single day, or even a few hours, of notice. The intellectuals' open letter estimated that several hundred thousand more people faced clearance. Some Taiwan media reported the number already evicted in the hundreds of thousands. A complaint later submitted to United Nations human rights mechanisms spoke of people affected in the tens of thousands. These figures were compiled at different moments, over different areas, with different definitions; they cannot be added together, and none of them can be treated as definitive on its own. The floor this page can stand on is that those affected numbered at least in the tens of thousands, concentrated among the lowest-paid migrant workers with the least bargaining power of anyone in the city. For the ceiling, there is no reliable basis, and this page offers no speculation.
Behind the numbers were specific lives, documented by reporters on the ground. A cook and cleaner from Henan in her fifties, her apartment demolished, laid out her shoes, pans and heater on a cloth on the street to sell, preparing to give up on Beijing and return to her village. Logistics workers, restaurant staff and garment workers lost their workplaces at the same time as their rooms, because the campaign shut the small factories, warehouses and workshops that employed them together with the dormitories attached to them, which meant losing income and shelter in a single night. Families who had lived in Beijing for years with children born in the city faced a second wall: without a Beijing household registration, their children could only attend privately run migrant schools, and in December 2017 a number of those schools were closed on the grounds that they did not meet standards. Spontaneous relief efforts were also curtailed. The charity Tongzhou Jiayuan posted offers of temporary shelter and moving help for the evicted on November 24 and was ordered by police to stop the same evening, and the organization was shut down, an episode reported by multiple outlets. WeChat articles circulating relief information were blocked for content violations. The authorities did take some remedial steps. At the November 27 meeting of district party secretaries, Cai called for proper arrangements for the production and livelihood of those affected, the human-resources authorities held a job fair in Xihongmen, and the municipal government said more than 1,800 jobs had been offered, alongside promises to build rental housing. Critics answered that 1,800 jobs bore no proportion to the numbers displaced, and that jobs and housing offered after the fact could not undo the sequence of putting people on the street first, on freezing nights. This page records the official account and the criticism together, and leaves the weighing to the reader.
4. The low-end population: origins of a term and the dispute around it
In public memory the campaign is permanently bound to four Chinese characters meaning low-end population, and the term's history has to be stated accurately, because it involves both fact and position. On the factual side, the term was not invented by internet users. It genuinely appeared in Beijing planning and government documents over a decade. The 2007 Daxing New Town plan spoke of reducing the spatial concentration of the low-end out-of-town population. The 2011 Fangshan District outline for the twelfth five-year plan spoke of avoiding an influx of large numbers of low-end outsiders. Shijingshan District's 2016 population-control work plan and its report on the 2017 economic and social development plan used language about clearing and rectifying the low-end population. An article in the overseas edition of the People's Daily on August 1, 2016 used the term in discussing population control. The China Media Project and the Jamestown Foundation, among others, reconstructed this paper trail document by document after the evictions. Hong Kong's Ming Pao explained the term as a shortened form of a longer bureaucratic phrase meaning workers and employees in low-end industries. The broad scholarly and commentary consensus is that the phrase graded human beings directly by the supposed level of the industry they worked in, which is why it detonated public anger: it was not a description of jobs but a ranking of people.
On the official side, Beijing's position was denial. After the campaign began, the Municipal Work Safety Commission told CCTV News that there was no such thing as expelling a low-end population and no such concept at all. A Beijing Daily commentary argued that the campaign was not a clearance of any low-end population, that those affected included white-collar workers and Beijing locals as well as migrants, and that linking the campaign to expulsion was malicious. Cai Qi himself is not recorded using the term in public remarks; at the November 27 meeting he spoke of fire hazards and of the capital's security and stability, and he cautioned against simplistic and hasty implementation in individual localities. The dispute turns exactly on this gap. Critics argue that whose mouth the words came out of is beside the point: the city's own population-control documents had used the expression for years, and the population actually hit by the campaign matched the documents' target profile closely enough that a quarrel over wording cannot launder an outcome. The official position is that the campaign's sole legal basis was safety hazards, and that population relocation was a separate policy track. This page's recording position is that both of the following are true at once and neither can be dropped: the term demonstrably appeared in Beijing planning documents, and the 2017 campaign's own official documents and public speeches did not name the campaign with that term, while the authorities explicitly denied that it targeted any so-called low-end population. After the campaign, searches and discussion of the term on mainland social platforms were blocked on a large scale. The words were erased from public discourse. The governing logic they named was not.
5. Security-first governance: relocation, the Olympics, the centenary and COVID
The 2017 clearance should not be read as an isolated overreaction. It was the first full performance of the governing style Cai brought to his five years in Beijing, whose ordering principle was that security outranks everything else. The first thread was population and function relocation. The relocation of non-capital functions had been set at the central level in 2014 and 2015, with Beijing committed to holding its permanent population within 23 million by 2020 and cutting the population of the central districts by roughly 15 percent from 2014 levels. Under Cai, those targets were implemented as a continuous clearance of wholesale markets, industrial courtyards, subdivided rental housing and urban villages, and Beijing's permanent population recorded its first decline in many years in 2017. Supporters call this unavoidable management of a megacity. Critics answer that what got relocated was never institutions or power, but the tenants least able to refuse. The second thread was the securitization of major events. The seventieth anniversary of the People's Republic in 2019 and the centenary of the Party in 2021 were both staged in Beijing, and each brought tightened security grades, grid management and screening of designated persons. As early as September 2017, during preparations for the 19th Party Congress, Cai publicly called for strengthened social control and cybersecurity defenses and for cracking down on what he called political rumors and harmful information. That formulation, carried in official reporting, can stand as his own summary of his philosophy of rule.
The third thread was the Olympics. From June 2017 Cai chaired the Beijing Organizing Committee for the 2022 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games. The Games were held in February and March 2022 inside a closed-loop bubble, Cai spoke at the opening ceremony, and he afterwards received the Olympic Order in gold. The International Olympic Committee praised the organization itself, and that belongs in the record. So does the overlap: the entire final preparation period coincided with the pandemic, and Beijing enforced some of the strictest entry and return controls in the country. On the pandemic front line, when a cluster erupted at the Xinfadi wholesale market in June 2020, Cai was put in charge of the capital's response, and the city moved into a wartime-style regime of screening and localized lockdowns. Over the following two years Beijing's controls stopped short of the extremes of Shanghai's spring 2022 lockdown, but testing regimes, health-code pop-up restrictions and checkpoint screening of everyone entering the capital became long-term fixtures, with ordinary convenience routinely subordinated to the safety of the capital as a matter of course. Read together, the three threads share one logic. Beijing was treated first as a security space that had to be held, and only second as a city where ordinary people live. Holding one's post for the Party center, a phrase Cai used repeatedly in public speeches, was the stated duty. The people put out onto the street in the winter of 2017 stood, in that ordering, at the end of the queue that is sacrificed first.
6. Into the Standing Committee and the General Office: from executor to chief of staff
On October 23, 2022, at the first plenum of the 20th Central Committee, Cai Qi entered the Politburo Standing Committee, ranked fifth, and simultaneously became a secretary of the Central Secretariat, ranked first among its members. He gave up the Beijing secretaryship on November 13, 2022, and moved to full-time central work. On March 20, 2023, he succeeded Ding Xuexiang as director of the General Office of the Central Committee. A Standing Committee member holding the General Office directorship was an arrangement unseen since Wang Dongxing in the late 1970s, and media and research institutions alike read it as a measure of his singular standing. The General Office controls the top leader's schedule, documents, security and channels of information; the Secretariat manages the implementation of the Central Committee's day-to-day work. Holding both, with a Standing Committee seat on top, made Cai the gatekeeper in the literal sense, Xi Jinping's chief of staff. He was subsequently disclosed as a vice chairman of the Central National Security Commission, and the South China Morning Post reported that he had also taken over the Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission; that second appointment has not been formally announced officially, and this page marks it as media reporting. He appears constantly at Xi's side on domestic inspection tours and foreign engagements, and his role in presiding over arrangements for Jiang Zemin's memorial in December 2022 was widely read as another signal of trust.
In June 2026 the authorities announced that Cai would also serve as president of the Central Party School and of the National Academy of Governance. As Reuters noted, both Xi Jinping and Hu Jintao had headed the Party School before reaching the very top, and Cai now combined the machinery of organizational operations, ideological training and the administrative center in a single pair of hands, a rare concentration of power within the Standing Committee. The other side of that power deserves equal emphasis. Cai has no local factional base of his own and never climbed the Central Committee ladder; his entire ascent rests on the trust of one man. In Chinese Communist politics that is simultaneously the greatest asset and the greatest vulnerability a career can have. The 2017 clearance, which drew an open letter of protest from more than a hundred intellectuals and an international outcry, left no visible mark on his record at all. In the internal accounting of his career it appears to have counted as proof of execution capacity. That fact alone makes his file a specimen for observing what this system rewards and what it punishes.
7. Responsibility: an assessment
Responsibility in this case separates into three layers, and they should not be blurred. The first is decision responsibility. The 40-day campaign was deployed by the Beijing Municipal Party Committee and government, its deployment meetings were chaired by the municipal party secretary, and the demands for territorial responsibility and for top local leaders to take personal charge were transmitted down the hierarchy from the top. The countdown clearances, the cutting of water and power, and the incentives to demolish fast at the grassroots were the predictable products of exactly that pressure structure. In his November 27 remarks Cai both demanded firm continuation of the campaign and warned against simplistic haste. The order and the wording of those two instructions show that the municipal decision level was not wholly unaware that local implementation might overreach, and chose to press ahead at high pressure first and adjust the tone afterwards. A decision-maker cannot claim the speed that pressure produces and then assign the consequences entirely to how subordinates understood their orders. The second layer is policy responsibility. The hazards of subdivided rental housing were real, and so were the 19 lives lost. But the same hazards had been exposed in full in April 2011, when a fire in Jiugong, in the same district, killed 18 people. In the six years that followed, neither affordable housing supply, nor schooling for migrants' children, nor basic services for the floating population improved in any substantive way. When disaster struck again, the accumulated bill of that neglect was collected, within weeks, from the tenants least able to pay it. That was a policy choice, not a law of nature. The third layer is political responsibility, and its absence. In a system with functioning accountability, the official in charge of an operation that produced a humanitarian controversy of this scale would face at minimum public questioning and an independent inquiry. Here, accountability stopped at the district and town level, the municipal leader in charge was not sanctioned in any form, and he was promoted twice more within five years. The intellectuals' open letter and an alumni letter from graduates of Peking University, Tsinghua and Renmin University urging Cai to resign, reported by overseas media, received no public response of any kind. The conclusion of this assessment can therefore only be the following. Cai Qi bears the highest municipal decision responsibility for the 2017 campaign. That judgment rests on the public deployment record and on his office, not on any unverified internal speech. And that responsibility has never been called to account inside the system he serves.
8. Disputes and the positions of all sides
Positions on Cai Qi and on the 2017 campaign remain opposed to this day, and this page sets them out side by side without dressing up its own record-keeping as a verdict. The official Beijing position is that the campaign targeted premises with major fire hazards, including premises illegally combining production, storage and residence, that its basis was work-safety and fire law, that it was not directed against any category of people, that those moved out received employment help and relief, and that rental housing construction would afterwards address the problem of having somewhere to live. The critical position is several-voiced. The intellectuals who signed the open letter called the campaign unlawful, unconstitutional and a trampling of human rights that inflicted a serious secondary disaster, and demanded that it be stopped, that the authorities apologize publicly, and that those affected be compensated. Legal professionals pointed out that forcing residents out by cutting water, electricity and heating collides with the prohibition written into Article 61 of the Administrative Compulsion Law. Labor scholars such as Eli Friedman of Cornell University publicly criticized the speed and brutality of the removals as evidence of a moral vacuum in governance. International human rights organizations and United Nations special procedures raised concerns and complaints about the mass evictions, to which the Chinese authorities gave no substantive reply; this page could not verify the full texts of the relevant United Nations documents one by one, and marks that detail unverified. On Cai's personal ascent, analysts who defend the promotions argue that he proved his capacity to carry pressure through the Olympics, the pandemic and the government of the capital. Skeptics answer that every irregular step in his file points to the same explanation, namely that personal loyalty outranked institutional convention and public judgment. A common defense of the 2017 operation holds that without a forceful clearance, subdivided-housing fires would have kept killing people. Its opponents answer with the Shibalidian fire of December 2017 and with the persistence of Beijing's urban villages ever since, arguing that clearance moved the problem further out rather than eliminating it. The Renmin University scholar Ye Yumin's criticism, that successive rounds of urban-village redevelopment have been exclusionary redevelopment protecting local villagers, collectives, developers and local government while leaving the non-registered population to be displaced again and again, represents that second view at the academic level. None of these arguments will be settled soon. The duty of an archive is to preserve each position together with its source, so that the settlement, whenever it comes, has something to work with.
Sources and further reading
- Xinhua: biographies of the Politburo Standing Committee and reports on the Beijing party secretary appointment (May 27, 2017), the 20th Party Congress (October 2022) and the General Office directorship (March 2023); official postings and dates follow these.
- English Wikipedia, Cai Qi, and its cited references including Cheng Li's Brookings Institution profile: early career, National Security Commission office service, and the background to his irregular entry into the Politburo.
- Reuters, October 23, 2022, Beijing party chief Cai, Xi loyalist, vaults to top rank: analysis of the 20th Congress promotion and the four-promotions-in-four-years assessment.
- Reuters, June 18, 2026, on Cai Qi's appointment as head of the Central Party School and the National Academy of Governance.
- Chinese Wikipedia: the Daxing 11.18 fire entry and the 2017 Beijing safety-hazard inspection and rectification campaign entry: fire cause, campaign scope, district and town accountability, and the June 2018 investigation figures (15 persons under criminal investigation, 21 disciplined, three companies fined 9.6 million yuan).
- China Media Project, November 30, 2017, The Making of the Low-End Population: the documentary trail of the term in Shijingshan and other district documents and in the People's Daily overseas edition.
- Jamestown Foundation, China Brief: use of the low-end population formulation in Beijing population-management documents and scholarly criticism.
- CNN, December 2017, Beijing forces migrant workers from their homes: the migrant composition of Xihongmen, on-the-ground accounts of short-notice evictions, and the municipal government's figure of more than 1,800 jobs offered.
- Made in China Journal, Beijing Evicts Low-End Population: course of the 40-day campaign and Cai Qi's November 27 call to avoid simplistic and hasty implementation.
- Open letter signed by more than a hundred intellectuals, November 2017, republished by Global Voices and others: the formulation of 19 dead and 8 injured including 8 children, and the demands to halt the campaign, apologize and compensate.
- Beijing Municipal Work Safety Commission response to CCTV News, November 2017: denial that any expulsion of a low-end population existed or that such a concept existed; Beijing Daily commentary of the same period.
- Jane Hayward, academic article in Modern China (2022): the low-end outsider population formulation in 2007 Beijing planning documents and the governance of urban villages.
- Sanctions check: searches in October 2026 of the public lists of the US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, the European Union and the United Kingdom found no listing for Cai Qi; a search result is not an official certificate.
Contact: endccpworld@proton.me