China’s President Xi Jinping faces his biggest political test

After taking less than four years to consolidate his image as China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong and emerging as a world leader as host of the recent G20 summit in Hangzhou, President Xi Jinping might be more confident about pursuing his ambitious national rejuvenation programme as he officiates at National Day celebrations marking the 67th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic.

But Xi still faces the most crucial test of his political career at a Communist Party Central Committee plenum in late October that will decide the agenda for next year’s 19th party congress, at which Xi, also the party’s general secretary, is expected to clearly define his political ambitions and the road map to the power succession at the party’s 20th congress five years later, in 2022.

Xi also faces an uphill battle to reinvigorate the world’s second-biggest economy, which is in the grip of a persistent slowdown, and avoid what economists call the “middle income trap” – a failure to catch up with the per capita wealth of the world’s richest countries.

In July, the party’s decision-making Politburo announced that the sixth plenum would focus on party building, with an agenda centred on the internal political conduct of leading party institutions and cadres, especially members of the Central Committee, its Politburo and the innermost Politburo Standing Committee.

But analysts said Xi would also use the party conclave to kick-start his preparations for a revamp of the leadership at the 19th party congress next year, when a large number of top officials are expected to retire.

After 67 years in power, China’s Communist Party is striving to outdo the former Soviet Union’s 74 years of communist rule. But before it does so it will face another accession battle, a process that since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949 has often descended into a bloody and merciless internal power struggle.