China’s Xi Begins Term With a New No. 2 to Tackle Trump

BEIJING — Xi Jinping started his second term as China’s president on Saturday, flanked by a new vice president, Wang Qishan, who even without any other titles to his name is shaping up as a potent deputy to Xi, with a potentially powerful say in grappling with the Trump administration over trade disputes.

Xi and Wang shook hands after the National People’s Congress, the Communist Party-controlled legislature, endorsed them for the posts in a closely controlled ritual ballot. Xi won all of the 2,970 votes cast for president, and all but one legislator voted for Wang, admired and feared for his previous role as the party’s chief anti-corruption enforcer, for vice president.

“We all support Wang Qishan to be vice president,” Fang Jianqiao, a delegate from Zhejiang province in eastern China, said before the vote. “His partnership with President Xi Jinping can promote better contacts abroad,” he said. “It will also help to better fight corruption and promote clean government.”

In China, the vice presidency is not an inherently powerful job. The previous incumbent, Li Yuanchao, faded from view, clouded by corruption scandals involving former subordinates and a widespread impression that Xi disdained him. But Wang appears poised to break that pattern and serve as an influential adviser and political guardian for Xi.

On Sunday, Xi secured a constitutional change from the congress that ended a two-term limit on the president and vice president, allowing him and, in theory, Wang to stay in power for at least another decade. Xi is also Communist Party leader and military chairman.

“Wang Qishan is one of the most important figures in Xi’s inner circle, and this position allows him to retain a formal position,” said Wu Qiang, a former lecturer in political science at Tsinghua University in Beijing who now works as an independent researcher.

“Even in the United States, the vice president is usually ceremonial, there just as backup,” Wu said. “But Wang Qishan will add substance to the role of vice president. The amendment of the constitution has raised the status of the presidency, and the vice presidency will also benefit from that.”

Party insiders and experts have said Xi wants Wang to act as a counselor, possibly helping to watch economic policy and anti-corruption efforts and manage ties with the West, especially with the United States. President Donald Trump has considered placing stiff trade sanctions and investment restrictions on China.

Wang appears likely to “play a leading role in overseeing U.S.-China relations,” said Ryan Hass, a former director for China at the National Security Council and now a fellow at the Brookings Institution. Wang will work alongside Yang Jiechi, the former Chinese Foreign Ministry official who last year was promoted to the Politburo, a council of 25 senior party members, Hass said.

“Wang will operate at a more strategic level, in theory to help keep the relationship from going off of the rails,” Hass said.

But Wang could face a potent rival within the Chinese government for influence over trade policy toward the United States: Liu He, a longtime economic adviser to Xi who is expected to be named on Monday by the National People’s Congress as one of the country’s four vice premiers.

Wang will bring long-standing bonds with American politicians and business leaders to the task. His ties to Wall Street executives include John L. Thornton, a former president of Goldman Sachs, who last year helped arrange a meeting between Wang and Stephen Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist. Wang also helped to steer trade and investment talks with Washington.

“He is the man China’s leaders look to for an understanding of the markets and the global economy,” Henry M. Paulson Jr., who was Treasury secretary under President George W. Bush and knew Wang well, wrote in 2009. “He is a Chinese patriot, but he understands the U.S.”

But Chinese officials have felt frustrated in their attempts to negotiate with Trump’s White House. There is no sure evidence that Wang can succeed, especially if Vice President Mike Pence does not emerge as his counterpart to manage tensions, Hass said.

“Trump really values being the person in the cockpit steering U.S.-China relations,” Hass said. “So I think Wang Qishan’s impact on the relationship remains an open question.”

While many National People’s Congress delegates welcomed Wang’s elevation, his election was also a sign of how Xi has recast political conventions so that he can consolidate power and surround himself with trusted supporters. For five years, from late 2012, Wang was in charge of the party’s discipline commission, from which he pursued Xi’s withering drive against corruption and political laxity.

Party sources said last year that Xi had raised the idea of keeping Wang in the formal party leadership, which would have bent an unspoken rule that top officials step down if they have reached age 68 when the congress meets to appoint new leadership. Instead, Wang, now 69, left his party positions at that congress and largely disappeared from public view.

But it turned out that Xi still had plans for him. In January, Wang was named a delegate to the legislature, a sign that his career was not over.

“I think Wang will play an important role in determining whether Xi succeeds over the next five years and can smoothly make a transition to a third term,” Wu, the analyst in Beijing, said. “Xi thinks there are many challenges still ahead, I believe, so Wang has been kept on as kind of a consultant.” Xi and Wang first met about five decades ago during the Cultural Revolution, when both were sent from Beijing to work as “sent down youth” in rural northwest China, a poor and dusty corner of the country. Wang lived on a commune about 50 miles from Xi, who has said Wang stopped by for a night and took away a book on economics.

After China began to loosen controls on the economy from the late 1970s, Wang left his job as a historian in a state institute and became an expert on rural reforms, zipping around Beijing on a Japanese motorbike, then a rare sight in Beijing.

Wang accumulated experience in economic policy, and from the 1990s he rose through a series of senior government jobs, defusing financial messes and getting to know financiers on Wall Street. In 2003, he was made mayor of Beijing to deal with SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, a virus that spread after officials hid the epidemic.

As deputy premier for five years from 2008, Wang was a key negotiator in trade and investment talks with the United States. After the global financial crisis erupted, he also took charge of a group of officials assigned with designing China’s response.

But Wang is no economic liberal.

“You were my teacher,” Wang told Paulson, the former Treasury secretary recalled in his memoir. “We aren’t sure we should be learning from you anymore.”