Xi Jinping sets out plans to make China great again

In 1793, in his letter to Britain’s King George III, China’s Qianlong emperor rejected all the British requests to improve the state of trade between England and China. After all, the Middle Kingdom “possesses all things in prolific abundance … there is no need to import the manufactures of outside barbarians”. Half a century later, China was defeated by Britain in the Opium Wars, and started to rethink its place in the world. Ever since, Chinese elites have been searching for answers to the same question: how to make China great again?

The Communist party in China has always claimed that the answer is communism – in more recent years, “socialism with Chinese characteristics” – and that the party is the only force capable of building and maintaining that order. This claim has been driven home as strongly as ever at this year’s 19th party congress, an important meeting of the party that only happens once every five years.

The Chinese president, Xi Jinping, inaugurated the congress with a three-hour-and-20-minute opening speech. His message was clear: a confident China is coming back to claim its rightful place of the world and find back the past glory of Chinese civilisation.

The speech was striking for its sheer ideological confidence. The party has always set great store by ideological and theoretical innovation, and Xi is clearly intent on continuing the tradition. His preferred framing, “socialism with Chinese characteristics for a new era”, is supposedly the new great ideological direction, a successor to the party’s past guiding philosophies: Mao Zedong Thought, Deng Xiaoping Theory, Three Represents, and Scientific Outlook on Development..
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