Many China watchers argue that Xi Jinping has concentrated power in his own hands in a manner unprecedented since the death of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. This article tests the extent of Xi's power consolidation by comparing the strength of his faction during his time in power to similar periods under his two immediate predecessors, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao. Furthermore, we investigate whether a dominant faction is emerging under Xi Jinping, replacing the power balancing between factions that was the norm throughout the reform era. Analysing factional affiliations of Chinese leaders in the top four ranks, we find that Xi has formed a dominant faction. Through statistical analysis of the promotion chances of provincial leaders, we find that Xi has been unusually successful when compared to previous leaders at promoting his clients. This suggests that Xi has boosted the power of his faction by elevating provincial leaders to an extent not seen since the death of Mao and Deng.

We analyze and compare three separate efforts to code bias in Malaysia's media and find strong empirical evidence of an ongoing and profound progovernment bias in coverage. We also find, however, significant variation in bias between different types of news outlets. While Malay and Anglophone sources tended to be strongly progovernment, Chinese-language and online outlets were far more impartial. We demonstrate that both the general bias and the variation in it are largely the result of two factors: (1) government censorship and (2) ownership structures that link many major outlets to the ruling coalition. These findings provide a detailed view of the struggle for media independence in a less-than-democratic regime and supply insight into media bias across both authoritarian and democratic regimes in Asia, as well as outside it.