Breaking in the headlines this week, the news that China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, will not be attending the upcoming BRICS summit in Rio de Janeiro has added fuel to speculation that changes are afoot at the top of China’s leadership. Naturally, as the clock counts down to the next congress of the Chinese Communist Party — we tipped over the halfway mark in April this year — questions of succession (or not) will only become increasingly salient.

Adding to this week’s speculation are reports that Xi Jinping has been less prominent in China’s state media. At the Jamestown Foundation’s China Brief over the weekend, Willy Wo-Lap Lam (林和立), always a keen political observer, wrote that “citations of Xi’s name have become thinner and thinner in authoritative official media.” Are we witnessing cracks in the wall of commanding dominance of all things Xi? Is the country’s distant number two, Premier Li Qiang, edging up — or even, dare we say, closing the gap?

At risk of throwing a bucket of cold water on the flames of speculation, our analysis of official media coverage reveals no such decline in Xi’s prominence.

In order to test the top leader’s presence in the most central authoritative official media on this question, we studied Xi’s headline appearances on the front page of the Chinese Communist Party’s official People’s Daily (人民日报) for both the second quarter of 2024 and the second quarter of 2025. We included counts for other members of the Politburo Standing Committee (PSC) in order to determine whether, if indeed there was a decline in visibility, other PSC members were receiving increased attention.

The results, even with four days missing from our dataset for June 2025, suggests that Xi Jinping’s dominance remains largely intact. He appeared in headlines 177 times in the 2024 period versus 157 times this year — a modest decline that will likely be corrected by next Monday.

While these numbers cannot reflect on some of the more insider points Lam makes in his analysis, such as that Xi “failed to demonstrate strong leadership” during negotiations with the US in Geneva last month, they hardly suggest a power shift in the country’s most important paper, which the CCP relies upon chiefly to signal politics and policy.

More telling, however, is the fact that Premier Li Qiang (李强), Xi Jinping’s nearest competitor — though barely a spec on the horizon — shows virtually no change between this year and last. He appears 45 times in 2024 and 43 times in 2025. In all likelihood, Li will notch a few more appearances by Monday, making for a slight but statistically insignificant improvement.

All of this said, it is worth keeping a close eye on authoritative official media for any genuine shifts. In the coming months, we may see clearer indications of Xi’s trajectory — whether his power continues to consolidate, perhaps with the emergence of “Xi Jinping Thought” (习近平思想) as a shortened banner term, or whether others begin to edge toward the front.

But for now, at least in the headlines, China’s most powerful leader in generations looks just fine.