A report on General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and Hu Jintao

Today the party's leader holds the offices of general secretary (responsible for civilian party duties), Chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC) (responsible for military affairs), and State President (a largely ceremonial position).

Hu Jintao, Jiang Zemin's successor as general secretary, took office in 2002.

Xi Jinping (born 15 June 1953) is a Chinese politician who has been serving as General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC) since 2012, and President of the People's Republic of China (PRC) since 2013.

In 2008, he was designated as Hu Jintao's presumed successor as paramount leader; to that end, Xi was appointed Vice President of the PRC and Vice Chairman of the CMC.

The officeholders are usually General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and Chairman of the Central Military Commission.

The term has been used less frequently to describe Deng's successors, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping, who have all formally held the offices of General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (party leader), President of the People's Republic of China (head of state) and Chairman of the Central Military Commission (commander-in-chief).

It is nominally headed by the General Secretary, though the position of "General Secretary" was not always one and the same as the top party leader.

Wan Li, Hu Qili, Hu Jintao, Zeng Qinghong, Xi Jinping, and Liu Yunshan have all successively held the position of the first-ranked Secretary of the secretariat.

According to the party's constitution, the General Secretary of the Central Committee must also be a member of the Politburo Standing Committee.

At the 14th Party Congress in 1992, seven people – Jiang, Li Peng, Qiao Shi, Li Ruihuan, Zhu Rongji, Liu Huaqing, and Hu Jintao – were named to the Standing Committee, this arrangement remained unchanged until the regularly scheduled 15th Party Congress in 1997, where Qiao Shi and Liu Huaqing retired and were replaced by Wei Jianxing and Li Lanqing, showing the first signs that the PSC would become a term-based body operating on a fixed schedule.

However, as a matter of convention, the presidency is held simultaneously by the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, who also serves as the chairman of the Central Military Commission, and thus is often the paramount leader of China.

The current president is Xi Jinping, who took office in March 2013, replacing Hu Jintao.

He participated in the historic emergency session on 7 August 1927 in which, by Soviet instruction, the Party dismissed its founder Chen Duxiu, and Qu Qiubai became the general secretary.

He continued to be widely regarded as the "paramount leader" of the country, believed to have backroom control despite no official position apart from being chairman of the Chinese Contract Bridge Association, and appointed Hu Jintao as Jiang's successor on 14th Party Congress in 1992.