Washington finds itself waiting to see where the history-altering blow from China will fall
The general secretary of China’s Communist Party is a different kind of leader. Now in his third five-year term, Xi Jinping believes that time is running out for him to secure his legacy as Mao Zedong’s true successor. He spent a decade dismantling the technocracy and politburo consensus government ushered in by Deng Xiaoping after Mao’s death, rolled back the authority of local party nomenklatura in favor of more centralized control from Beijing, and worked to subordinate China’s economy to the Communist Party’s (meaning Xi’s) political priorities.
