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All eyes will be on Beijing this weekend as the Chinese Communist Party's national congress begins on Sunday.
Xi Jinping has spent the decade consolidating power as general secretary and cultivating ideological devotion as the core of the party. He is all but certain to extend his rule after the week-long event concludes, and he faces opportunities and challenges ahead.
The CCP's 19th Central Committee, formed in 2017 as Xi began his second term as leader, held its seventh and last assembly on Wednesday to approve October 16 as the date for the 20th National Congress, where observers expect changes in personnel atop the party leadership, with Xi likely to install more loyal apparatchiks.
In the period since the CCP last held its twice-a-decade gathering, China has abolished largely ceremonial presidential term limits, adapted to former President Donald Trump's trade war, battled COVID-19 and faced a change in government in the United States.
In the interim, Xi has exerted repressive control over Xinjiang, the officially autonomous territory in northwest China; quashed dissent in Hong Kong; and declared the eradication of absolute poverty as a milestone in the country's rise to great-power status.
In 2020, after COVID-19 brought unprecedented shocks to the international system, Xi saw his government's performance as proof of successful governance.
But he also made the significant decision to tie the pandemic to the CCP's political legitimacy and his own personal legacy, necessitating a campaign-style defense of Beijing's public-health policies in the months leading up to the party congress.
China's go-to solution of fast and hard national lockdowns drew sentiments in the West that bordered on envy as countries scrambled for public-health solutions in the early days of the pandemic. The results were an impressively low official case count and death toll that many believed would help ease the country into a post-COVID era.
However, it became clear in early 2022 that Beijing's strategy, and especially its strong ideological drivers, would remain.
In 2022, there have been more strict snap-lockdowns as part of China's "dynamic zero-COVID" policy to tamp down outbreaks, a zero-tolerance approach that has inevitably hit the national economy hard and made exchanges with foreign businesses and delegations even harder.
When it comes to Taiwan, the Chinese leadership has maintained an equally hard line, one characterized by an intense party-centric nationalism that instills in the public the belief that only the CCP can overcome containment by the West and guide the nation to greatness.
China's war games this past August will be remembered as the moment it put its foot down on the issue of Taiwan's future, which in Chinese eyes, can move in no other direction but toward subsumption under its rule.
Beijing is in no rush; the CCP's Central Committee said in its communiqué on Wednesday that the party had demonstrated its ability to deter Taiwanese independence, and therefore would prioritize domestic political issues while maintaining "strategic determination" on the question of China's core interest.
This forward-leaning posture may please sectors of the Chinese public that are enamored by its leader's confidence, but it is not without its setbacks. The Taiwanese public's trust in Xi, like across much of the West, has declined sharply in the last five years as a result of the assertive tone.
Beijing's fighting talk "leaves little room for constructive communication," said Crystal Tu, an assistant research fellow at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research, Taiwan's top military think tank. The two governments have little meaningful dialogue and few means of crisis communication.
Now, reforms are afoot in Taipei. The government is raising its defense budget in 2023 and is on the brink of extending conscription for military-age males—both with a view of deterring potential adventurism across the Taiwan Strait.
Beijing, meanwhile, is attempting to influence Taiwan's public by bypassing its government. Tu, who studies cyber strategy, told Newsweek that China-originated content both in traditional news media and on online platforms aimed to "shape perspectives toward China by showing a curated image."
Nadège Rolland, a senior fellow at the National Bureau of Asian Research, traces China's biggest foreign-policy shift to the 2008 financial crisis, the aftermath of which saw it overtake Japan as the world's second-largest economy.
"Beijing's then-assessment of China's own strength and confidence in its upward trajectory led to a more assertive posture," as well as an abandonment of the strategic patience practiced by former leaders, Rolland told Newsweek.
"This early assessment has not fundamentally changed. If anything, it has been reaffirmed under Xi Jinping," she said. "What he expresses is the Chinese leadership's assessment of an impending power shift, of epochal magnitude, that will see the rise of China, while the West is declining.
"COVID-19 may have thrown a wrench in Beijing's work, especially economically, but it has not fundamentally altered any of its grand strategic calculations: there can be no turnaround or downgrading on realizing the great rejuvenation of the nation," Rolland said.
Evidence of Beijing's intention to reclaim its place at the center of the international stage, Rolland said, can be found in its efforts to become a champion for the Global South as it insulates itself from the effects of decoupling with the West, as well as Xi's plan to reshape the postwar security order in China's favor.
"These are not signs of a leadership that is rescinding its ambitions," Rolland said.
The path is arduous and entails addressing and managing the future of its most important relationship with the United States. Beijing and Washington are in a full-spectrum rivalry that has at once put relations at a crossroads and on a potential collision course over irreconcilable national interests.
On issues like Taiwan, the two capitals have long disagreed with each other's positions, but they're now locked in a "classic security dilemma," with neither side willing or able to back down, said Adrian Ang, a research fellow and U.S. program coordinator with the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University.
"In the short-term, the principal challenge for China is dealing with the rapidly slowing economy due to a combination of Beijing's restrictive dynamic zero-COVID policies, supply chain issues, and the implosion of the real-estate and construction bubble," Ang told Newsweek.
"In the medium to longer term, China also has to face demographic and economic problems associated with a rapidly aging population and whether it can escape the 'middle income trap'—whether it can grow rich before it grows old," Ang said.
"All the above issues will affect the Chinese economy and the longer trajectory of relative Chinese power vis-à-vis the United States. U.S. relative decline is not a foregone conclusion, just as the inexorable rise of China isn't," he said.
"There is a danger now of overcorrecting and viewing China as having irreversible or terminal problems and going into a decline. A more realistic picture is that both the U.S. and China face pressing domestic and intermestic problems.
"The question is how successful is each in dealing with those problems and whether they are capable of cooperating on the intermestic and transnational problems such as climate change," Ang said.
China-watchers consider Xi's assertive turn, his certitude in U.S. decline, and the depth of his "no limits" partnership with Vladimir Putin—especially since the war in Ukraine—to be among his most costly missteps.
But the Chinese president's next five years in power may be the real test of whether Beijing has emerged the stronger, post-Trump and post-COVID.
About the writer
John Feng is Newsweek's contributing editor for Asia based in Taichung, Taiwan. His focus is on East Asian politics. He ... Read more