Shanghai : As Chinese President Xi Jinping landed in India for the BRICS Summit, he was accompanied by a tall, silver-haired official. He is Cai Qi (pronounced Tsigh Chee), widely seen as China’s second-most powerful leader and Xi’s right-hand man. China said Xi’s entourage includes Cai Qi, a member of the standing committee of the political bureau of the Communist Party, and Foreign Minister Wang Yi.
Cai Qi has been more visible. He held a meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his visit to Tianjin last year for the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit, and was spotted at the Xi-Trump meeting in South Korea in 2025. When Trump visited China earlier this year, the first man to shake the US President’s hand was Cai Qi. These may be small gestures, but the optics reveal Cai’s standing in Xi’s eyes. That elevation itself came after he served just a few months as the mayor of Beijing. Such a transition normally takes at least five years. Basically, he did not have to grind through the lower rung of the Central Committee.
The 70-year-old was appointed as the chief of the Communist Party’s central ideology school – the elite academy that trains new officials and shapes party ideology. Besides, he also heads the party’s General Office, making him Xi’s de facto chief of staff. The posts mark a rare concentration of power under one official. It essentially cements Cai’s position as one of Xi’s closest and most trusted lieutenants. Both Cai and Xi started as worker-peasant-soldier students during the Cultural Revolution.
However, the meteoric rise of Cai has also raised eyebrows, particularly because he was once known for his outspoken views and support for transparent governance. In fact, he once reportedly complained about Facebook being blocked in China, according to a report in The Guardian. “Cai is very calculating, obviously very strategic and a high-level operator,” Kerry Brown, the director of the Lau China Institute at London’s King’s College, told The Guardian. Early in his career, Cai was a popular figure on Weibo, often described as the Chinese Twitter, where he went by the pseudonym ‘Uncle Cai’.
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