Chinese communist leader and Chinese President Xi Jinping spoke at the celebration for the 100th founding anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party on July 1, 2021 in Beijing, China.
Lintao Zhang | Getty Images News | Getty Images
BEIJING — One hundred years since the founding of China’s Communist Party — which it says was born out of a secret meeting on a boat — President Xi Jinping now stands a chance to lead the country to becoming the world’s largest economy.
Achieving that level of growth will require China to propel itself past looming challenges: the so-called middle income trap, lack of innovation and a rapidly aging population. That’s according to analysts, mostly looking in from abroad.
For Xi, his eyes are already on the next hundred years, and an unfulfilled dream of the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” which he reiterated at centenary celebrations for the party this week. Xi also holds the top political position of the general secretary of the ruling Communist Party’s central committee and heads China’s military commission.
“He has iron in his soul, more than [former President] Hu Jintao, who ascended the ranks without experiencing the trials and tribulations that Xi endured,” the late founder of modern Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, told American foreign policy experts Graham Allison and Robert D. Blackwill in 2012, just before Xi officially became president.
The 68-year-old is the son of an early Communist leader who rose to vice premier, then suffered political persecution for 16 years under the party’s dominating founder Mao Zedong.
Xi himself spent about seven years working in the countryside as a teenager during the Cultural Revolution, which Mao used to regain his power and eliminate his political rivals.
Xi’s political career
Xi had a stint as a village party secretary, studied at Tsinghua University’s chemical engineering school, then worked his way up through government positions across the country, notably in Fujian province and Shanghai, according to state media.
Meanwhile, the architect of China’s economic reforms, Deng Xiaoping, spearheaded an economic restructuring that allowed individuals and even foreign businesses to take ownership from the state. Many credit those changes for helping lift hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty, and turning China into an economy that now ranks second only to the U.S.
The key factors that really drove China’s phenomenal growth have either ended or declined in performance.
Tony Saich
Professor, Harvard Kennedy School of Government
“When you think about the centenary of the party, you think not so much about the party as about the economic progress of the last 30 years,” said Dmitri V. Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center.
“Most people here bank on a continuing progress and even higher achievements in the years ahead. Clearly history doesn’t work that way,” he said….
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