IN THIS year of drama, intrigue and scandal at the highest levels, the opaque machinery of China’s political system has received unusual scrutiny. The outcome of intra-party manoeuvring among China’s ruling Communist Party officials was finally revealed in November, at the 18th Party Congress. Now, as Xi Jinping and other party leaders get their feet under their new desks, the focus turns to the reshuffling of senior government posts due in March.

But even when that is done, there will still be plenty of mystery. China’s power grid is a tangle of interlocking entities, overlapping vertical and horizontal lines of authority, and complex interplay between government, party and military bureaucracies. The arrangement borrows much from the Leninist model of the Soviets, who pioneered it for themselves and decades later helped adapt it to China.

For foreigners, the first challenge is determining whether the officials they meet actually have the authority implied by their titles. Diplomats meeting counterparts in China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, for example, are dealing with some of the least powerful actors in the system. Positions that foreigners expect to be powerful, such as foreign minister, defence minister and finance minister, are not even members of the Politburo, let alone its standing committee.

Kenneth Lieberthal, a China specialist and former senior American official now at Brookings, a think-tank, points to a profound “lack of co-ordination between the foreign ministry and the military.”

He served on America’s National Security Council from 1998 to 2000, and recalls that American naval commanders needed to check with his office before entering sensitive waters. His office would then consult other agencies. “We said no 60% of the time, and no meant no. And we never heard another peep,” he says. Chinese diplomats, says Mr Lieberthal, are not consulted and hear of such events afterwards.

This is one consequence of all those jumbled horizontal and vertical lines. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) enjoys the same rank as China’s State Council, or cabinet, meaning the executive branch of the government can issue no orders to the PLA. Even the Ministry of Defence lacks command authority over China’s armed forces, functioning mainly as a vehicle for interacting with foreign armed forces.

Instead, the party, through its Central Military Commission (CMC), commands the army. “Civilian control of the army is deeply ingrained,” says Mr Lieberthal, “but civilian supervision and co-ordination with other organs is very weak.”

Things become even more complex when several agencies take an interest in an issue, as in the South China Sea, where China is embroiled in territorial disputes. A report by International Crisis Group, an NGO, counted 11 agencies asserting their interest, including provincial governments, the navy and the Bureau of Fisheries Administration. “The conflicting mandates and lack of co-ordination among Chinese government agencies have stoked tensions in the South China Sea,” the report said. In China more power is held by “leading small groups”, informal bodies that report directly to party leaders, than by ministers, who control portfolios in most systems of government. There have been calls, not least from foreign governments, to raise the profile of foreign-affairs experts within the system. Some Chinese analysts suggest a National Security Council to co-ordinate policy, but such calls have met with institutional resistance. Don’t tell me what to do Internal affairs also have tangled webs of power. Central ministries rank equal to provincial governments. So do many large state-owned enterprises (SOEs), a fact which, according to a study by America’s Congressional Research Service, leads to vast regulatory difficulties. SOEs, it said, sometimes outrank party and state leaders in their locales, and so are not bound by their orders. China’s five largest banks have comparable rank to the banking regulator, allowing them to resist oversight.

Jean-Pierre Cabestan of Hong Kong Baptist University says the same problem plagues sectors like oil, gas and heavy industry, where SOE leaders enjoy the rank of minister-level officials. Some, he says, also serve on the powerful party Central Committee. “These SOE leaders belong to the nomenklatura. They are aristocrats, or promoted through connections,” he says. For the party-state apparatus, Mr Cabestan adds, it is vital that the most important positions stay in the hands of people who can be trusted.