The Chinese Communist party congress displayed all the qualities beloved by Leninist institutions over the ages, of deep secrecy mixed with stern pageantry, leveraged in the service of reinforcing their leaders’ inviolate right to rule.



Its closure on Wednesday in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People also highlighted a familiar ritual, the unveiling of the membership and the ranking of the new leadership team, known as the politburo standing committee.



The leadership line-up always attracts the most media attention, but it is not how the meeting will be remembered in the history books. More than anything, the congress has been a transformative, coming of age for the Communist party, not just in China but on the global stage.

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Xi Jinping embodies the party’s ascendancy, and may well stay on beyond his second five-year term, which finishes in 2022. The congress has already consecrated his reign by putting his “socialist thought” into the party constitution, placing him alongside Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping in the pantheon of revolutionary leaders.

Xi, however, is not the story. The real star of the congress is the party itself.



It once sought a lower profile, both at home and abroad. In the 1980s, Deng dictated that China should “bide its time and hide its light” in foreign policy while the country gained strength. A similar credo prevailed with the Communist party.



If the propaganda pouring out of the congress is any guide, Xi’s China and party have tossed such restraint aside. “By 2050, two centuries after the opium wars, which plunged the ‘middle kingdom’ into a period of hurt and shame, China is set to regain its might and reascend to the top of the world,” said Xinhua, the official news agency, at the close of the congress.

“Though it will take immense work, the picture is clear. China is set to become the world’s largest economy, and incomes will be high with an effective social welfare system, a responsive and people-serving government, clean politics ensuring people’s rights and a beautiful country loved by its citizens.”



These statements are remarkable from a party which has long tried to keep a low profile. It has always extolled the value of its system, but has never explicitly suggested it was something that could be exported around the world.

Such confidence could easily be interpreted as hubris and it may well prove to be so, but there are a number of reasons why China is more powerful and more confident than it perhaps has been for two centuries.

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The first is that the leadership, at least in public, believes it has stabilised the economy after a brief crisis two years ago, and returned the country to healthy growth. After also getting through the global financial crisis intact 10 years ago, the self-belief is enormous.

The second is instability, self-doubt and introspection in the west, especially in the US but also in the UK and Europe. China, by contrast, is firing on all cylinders, both politically and economically.



In Xi, the country has the most disciplined and most powerful leader in a generation. Trump, by contrast, is the most undisciplined and, judging by his record in Congress, ineffective president for generations. It is a stark and, for those who believe in democracy’s efficacies, depressing contrast.

There are obviously lots of caveats to the party’s unyielding tale of success. Its fate, and its ability to maintain legitimacy at home and project power abroad, ultimately hang on the continued health of the economy. At the moment growth remains far too dependent on debt, and there are no signs of any fundamental change on this front.



Far from instituting further market reforms, Xi is intensifying efforts to entrench China’s hybrid model, in which politics and economics will be fused into one arena.



For the moment, China, like many other countries, has some breathing room on pressure for change because of the general buoyancy of the global economy. Given China’s debt, however, that could change quickly. The path of strong growth built on rising debt means a financial crisis of some kind will inevitably follow.

For all those qualifications, the sheer, overwhelming triumphalism in Beijing this week should finally provide a wakeup call to those in the west who have long believed not just that China would fail. Many were convinced that, as an authoritarian state, that it must fail.

For the moment, however, China is succeeding. If it continues on its current path, the world as we have known it will never be the same again.

Richard McGregor is author of The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers