A proper diagnosis of China, then, doesn’t lead to any easy categorization: Washington will have to deal with a powerful and wealthier China that is also experiencing probable economic stagnation and internal decay.

Read: China’s great leap backward

Xi does not sound like the leader of a country experiencing political decay or economic stagnation. In 2012, soon after he became secretary general of the CCP and president of the People’s Republic of China, he delivered the rejuvenation speech at a historical exhibition within China’s National Museum, in Beijing. The exhibit, called “Road to Rejuvenation,” highlighted China’s “century of humiliation,” from the Opium Wars to the fall of the last Qing emperor in 1911. But while the exhibit featured China’s mistreatment by foreign powers, it also conveyed another message—that China was progressing toward a rebirth.

Xi reminded his audience that the CCP had long struggled to restore China to its historic centrality in international affairs. “Ours is a great nation,” he said, that has “endured untold hardships and sufferings.” But the Communist Party, he said, had forged ahead, “thus opening a completely new horizon for the great renewal of the Chinese nation.”

And China is powerful. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is developing its capabilities at a rapid speed, changing the balance of power in Asia to its advantage. The International Institute for Strategic Studies estimates that, since 2014, the People’s Liberation Navy has “launched more submarines, warships, principal amphibious vessels and auxiliaries than the total number of ships currently serving in the navies of Germany, India, Spain, Taiwan and the United Kingdom.” Its shipbuilding program is outpacing that of the U.S. China is also spending vast sums on breakthrough technologies like artificial intelligence, hypersonics, and robotics, which could tilt the nature of warfare to its advantage. What the PLA has achieved since the end of the Cold War will one day be compared to what Meiji Japan achieved in the decades leading up to its victory in the Russo-Japanese war.

Moreover, China’s scale alone can be daunting for smaller countries even if its geo-economics initiatives aren’t quite as large as they seem. For example, Xi’s signature initiative—One Belt, One Road (OBOR)—is not the new geo-economic order that he wants it to be. Nevertheless, for its smaller, less developed recipients, OBOR is still large in scope. What might be economically insignificant for the U.S. still has large geopolitical payoffs for China.

This is all to say that even a relatively weaker China than many imagine can change geopolitics and geo-economics. And Xi may slow down China’s growth even further. He has accelerated a political change in China that has focused the party more on weiwen, or “stability maintenance,” and less on growth.