https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18966/china-xi-leader
Having changed the party’s constitution, he is no longer required to retire at age 68 and, heading to be 70 next year, he may hang on to power for another 10 years. Nevertheless, things may not be as easy as Xi hopes.
The Chinese Communist Party, with a membership of 98 million, is full of young and ambitious men and women who regard Xi and others in his generation of party chiefs as “Red Princes”, sons of first-generation Communists who owe their ascendancy to nepotism.
Then there is China’s huge and rapidly growing military machine, which consumes over $200 billion each year and contains tens of thousands of young, highly educated and ambitious officers who may not see Xi, a man with no military background, as the sole arbiter of the nation’s fate.
Xi faces two other problems.
First, the Chinese economy is clearly slowing down, with hundreds of businesses going bust and tens of thousands of projects abandoned, while stagflation looms on the horizon.
The second is what some see as systemic corruption. Xi has launched a massive anti-corruption campaign, even issuing death sentences for some senior party figures. But many in China suspect that he is using the campaign as a cover for purging opponents in the party.
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.