Xi Jinping will likely emerge from the conclave with a third term, ensuring at least five more years in control.
Susan Walsh/AP Photo
A collision course with the U.S.
Xi’s goal of economic, diplomatic and military dominance will point China in direct conflict with the Biden administration’s commitment to democracy, human rights and a rules-based international order. That’s antithetical to Xi’s hawkish vision of “national rejuvenation” of the Chinese nation.
“I would anticipate ‘more of the same’: more domestic repression, more external assertiveness and possibly aggression. Xi is not about to change course, and certainly not in a more liberal or cooperative direction,” said David Shambaugh, founding director of the China Policy Program in the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University.
“Xi and China may become even more brazen externally — further solidifying the de facto alliance with Russia, confronting the United States, probing and attempting to undermine Western resolve and U.S. alliances worldwide, leveraging China’s power against its Asian neighbors and Taiwan, and continuing to broaden China’s military footprint worldwide,” added Shambaugh.
The Biden administration hasn’t publicly commented on the implications of Xi’s third term in office.
The fractious state of U.S.-China relations — punctuated by trade tensions, Chinese military intimidation of Taiwan and the administration’s accusation of genocide in Xinjiang — makes it highly unlikely that Biden will congratulate Xi on his third term as then-President Donald Trump did when Xi got his second term in 2017.
Total control over the state
Xi’s growing power has allowed him to reach into corners of Chinese society once considered untouchable. One of those targets has been China’s new generation of affluent elites known as the “fuerdai,” or rich second generation.
His emphasis on reducing social inequities — part of his “common prosperity” initiative — has included moves to “adjust excessive incomes to promote social fairness and justice,” the CCP’s Central Committee for Financial and Economic Affairs said in a statement in August 2021.
Xi’s inequality campaign has put a target on China’s once freewheeling tech sector and the billionaires behind it, following his call in August 2021 that China’s most wealthy should “give back to society more.” Chinese tech mega-firms like Tencent and Alibaba have donated billions of dollars to common prosperity initiatives to demonstrate corporate submission to Xi’s economic agenda.
Worrying signs in the economy, and abroad
But when Xi emerges from the 20th Party Congress with CCP validation of a third term in office, the array of challenges facing China — many linked to Xi’s own policies — leave no time for a victory lap.
China’s youth joblessness rate rose to 19.9 percent in July, its highest rate since Chinese statisticians began calculating it in 2018. That’s sobering news for a one-party state that relies on delivering rising living standards as a key plank of its legitimacy.
Xi’s signature zero-Covid strategy may have saved many lives, but mass urban lockdowns have angered citizens and fueled unemployment. Meanwhile, one of the main drivers of economic growth, China’s property sector, is sputtering as real estate developers default on their debts prompting a sharp decrease in housing construction.
Xi also faces severe headwinds outside China’s borders. Beijing’s unfair trade practices and weaponization of state-backed espionage to power its military industrial complex have roiled China’s relationships with partners. And China’s human rights abuses in Xinjiang, the impacts of a draconian National Security Law imposed on Hong Kong in 2020 and worsening military intimidation of Taiwan has fueled a growing international China threat narrative.
China is “the most serious long-term challenge to the international order,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared in May.
Those suspicions are pushing the U.S. and China into “a new Cold War,” China’s ambassador in Washington, D.C., Qin Gang, warned in July.
On the continent, relations between China and the European Union have curdled over the past two years in response to Beijing’s efforts to economically throttle Lithuania in reprisal for deepening ties with Taiwan.
And concerns about China’s increasingly aggressive military posture in Asia and its willingness to use economic coercion against trading partners has sown a growing China threat narrative in the Indo-Pacific from Australia to South Korea.
Xi’s perceived management failures of these problems — and concern about his personality cult — has sparked rumors of internal CCP opposition to his third term.
“The next five years require a great deal of crisis management in China [and] the major priority for Xi will be economic growth, political [and] social stability, and external political and national security,” said Alfred Chan, professor of political science at Huron University College and author of Xi Jinping: Political Career, Governance, and Leadership, 1953-2018.
Chinese President Xi Jinping, front row center, stands with his cadres during the Communist song at the closing ceremony for the 19th Party Congress at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, Oct. 24, 2017.