The XI Supremacy: India's Options

The Party Congress on October 24 stamped Xi Jinping’s authority over the party. What does the prospect of Xi as China’s permanent strongman mean for his home country—and India?

- Ananth Krishnan in Beijing

XU Chuan, a 35-year-old Communist Party Of China (CPC) official and academic from the southern city of Nanjing, was among the 2,200-odd members of the CPC elite gathered in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on the rainy morning of October 18. For three-and-a-half hours at the cavernous hall, Xu sat upright, barely moving a muscle except to burst into loud applause at all the right moments, as CPC General Secretary Xi Jinping opened the party’s key once-in-five-years national congress.

Over a marathon three-and-a-half hour speech, Xu would hear his leader hail the start of what he called “a new era”. It isn’t unusual in China for leaders to proclaim the beginning of “eras”. Each of the previous four generations of CPC leaders did the same, in keeping with the Communist inclination of framing their records as reflecting material progress on their march towards utopia. But party jargon notwithstanding, there certainly was an inescapable feeling that the congress in Beijing had witnessed a momentous shift in China’s politics.