Xis Third Term Will Double Down on a Mission of Revitalizing Chinese Socialism

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About the author: Seong-Hyon Lee is a senior fellow at the George HW Bush Foundation for US-China Relations and a visiting scholar at Harvard Universitys Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies.

Will Chinese leader Xi Jinping tone down his boldness once he clinches his third term? By now, those who were initially skeptical are accepting the force of reality in China: Xi will almost certainly be granted a renewal of his power. And during his third term , we are likely to see the same Xi, with more or less the same policy mandate that he has marshaled so far, only more self-confident.

The enduring features of Xis third term are likely to be as follows. In politics, the Communist Partys grip over all sectors of Chinese society will be strengthened in the name of comprehensive leadership. As Xi puts it, East, west, south, north and centerthe Communist Party leads everything. In economics, the dual circulation strategy to fortify Chinas domestic demand will be implemented with more vigor. Some misinterpret dual as meaning domestic and international, in the sense of expanding production for exports and for domestic consumption. In reality, it means the worlds second-largest economy is withdrawing to its domestic market and shying away from the world, in order to become a more self-sustaining economy, less dependent on foreign trade and foreign supply chains.

Semantics should be put aside when analyzing Chinas slogan politics. In society, the term common prosperity will be front and center again. This slogan refers broadly to economic inequality and was used to justify crackdowns on the technology sector, among other policies. During the Covid -19 pandemic, it was briefly relegated to the back burner.

In Chinas foreign policy, a new type of great power relations will be the dominant theme, to place China on an equal footing with the US Xi first raised the idea with President Barack Obama in 2013. The Pacific Ocean is big enough to hold both the United States and China, Xi explained at the moment. It took a while for Obamas aides to realize Xis actual meaning. He was asking America to make concessions by renouncing the Western Pacific. In his third term, Xi will not give up on his vision of establishing a new type of relationship with the US

On Taiwan, realizing national reunification will remain an enduring focus of Chinas national mandate. Amid deepening US-China tensions over the Taiwan Strait, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi recently reiterated the importance of Taiwan by describing it as core of core interests. Whenever China wants to identify the issues considered important enough to go to war over, it uses the term core interests. In the case of Taiwan, Wang used the word core twice.

If one looks closely, these platforms are all internal and external policies promoted by the Xi administration over the past decade. Xis policies are all long-term goals, and he will stick to them in his new term.

Those who study Xis disposition call him an ideological purist. That is, Xi is a person who truly believes in socialism. Xi is also a believer in Chinas historic sense of rejuvenation. As he put it in 2019, Our world is undergoing profound changes unseen in a century. Xi senses a once-in-a-century historic opportunity and believes that the Communist Party is destined for victory.

Xi has shown, time and time again, that he differs from his recent predecessors in that he does not hesitate to enter into conflict with the US In a September 2021 speech at the Central Party School, an institution comparable to the Harvard Kennedy School that grooms midcareer officials, Xi diagnosed that the great revival of the Chinese nation had entered a critical period and said, Not wanting to fight is unrealistic. You must abandon the illusion and fight bravely. Xi has also saidThe East is rising, and the West is declining. In Chinas political discourse, the East refers to China, while the West is often a euphemism for the US

Overall, in Xis third term, he will focus on laying the groundwork for the Communist Parties goal of socialist modernization. His goal is to prove the superiority of socialism and turn China into a global power that will awe the West. It also means that Xis foreign policy will pursue ideological competition with the US, in addition to economic, military, and technological competition competition.

Conventional wisdom holds that the task facing the Communist Party today is to maintain the one-party system by strengthening its legitimacy, especially through economic recovery. Xi has somewhat invalidated this old formula, as his larger and more important mission is to demonstrate the superiority of socialism over other considerations. The Western business community has overlooked this aspect of Xis vision in its puzzlement over his policies, including his crackdown on Big Tech entities and the brake he has put on Chinas real estate market, not to mention the rigid zero-Covid policy that severely undermined Chinas economy. They regard these acts as China shooting itself in the foot.

But Xi is simply on a different mission, a grandiose one to revitalize socialism in the 21st century. For that reason, Xi, the strongman, is likely to remain second only to Mao Zedong as the most closely watched and vigorously debated leader in modern Chinese history.

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