The Dawn of Xi Jinping’s Second Decade in Power and the CCP’s 20th Party Congress

Abstract

This chapter discusses the role of the 20th Party Congress in October 2022 in further consolidating Xi Jinping’s political position and his ever-widening ideological blueprint for China’s future. It describes how the CCP believed it had successfully navigated the COVID-19 pandemic with a relatively unscathed economy, unlike the United States and the wider West. This gave rise to a series of ideological addresses by Xi in the lead-up to the Congress which explained in unprecedented detail how Mao’s theory of contradiction applied to China’s current domestic and international circumstances, and why strategic and policy change had been necessary to secure both the party’s and the country’s future. At the 20th Congress itself, Xi Jinping Thought (XJPT) was elevated further by embedding its new official status within the text of the CCP constitution, and by requiring the party to uphold Comrade Xi’s position as the party’s ‘core’ leader. The chapter underscores how Xi’s worldview continued to revolve around the Marxist Nationalist ideology underpinning his entire political enterprise, with changes in ideology continuing to provide a leading indicator of broader changes across the political and policy spectrum—both in senior personnel appointments and in China’s overall economic and foreign policy direction.