When he took over as China’s leader 10 years ago, President Xi Jinping was hailed by Western experts and media as a man who would open the path for major political reforms to reflect the rising tiger’s economic transformation. Some even saw him as a wiser version of Mikhail Gorbachev and speculated that he might adopt the end-of-history narrative by accepting democratization as the only option for a modern industrial power.
A decade later, however, we know how wrong those assessments of Xi were. As he prepares for the coming National Conference of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) starting 16 October, Xi may be the subject of another misunderstanding. This time he is presented as an ambitious autocrat whose dream of world domination threatens the fragile world order in place since the end of the Cold War.
