In 2013, the party released a blueprint for the next generation of economic change — transforming China from an old model of high growth, based on low-wage, labor-intensive manufacturing for export and supplemented by high levels of state investment in basic economic infrastructure, to a new model accepting lower, sustainable growth rates based on expanding domestic consumption, the services sector and the replacement over time of state-owned enterprises with a new generation of private companies like Alibaba.

However, over the past five years, the pace of reform has slowed, in large part because the party has feared losing control. The 13th National People’s Congress has promised to accelerate the reform program once more, with a renewed commitment to put “the market” at the center of the economy. We will see.

Perhaps the greatest analytical error across the West has been the view that Xi Jinping would want to continue to sustain the liberal, international rules-based order once its economic power began to rival that of the United States. Again, this hope goes against the well-known facts: China has long said that it sees the existing order as one invented by the victors of the last world war, one in which China did not have a seat at the table.

China has never shared the West’s view of human rights. It has long sought to weaken the powers of the United Nations Human Rights Commission. China has at best had an ambivalent attitude to free trade — just look at its qualified support for the World Trade Organization, its opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership and its own long history of mercantilism.

And as for the global security order, China has never changed its hostility to the global system of American military alliances, in particular those in the Asia Pacific, which it has long attacked as legacies of the Cold War. That’s in addition to China’s assertion of its territorial claims in the South China Sea.

For these reasons, Mr. Xi has explicitly called for “a new type of great power relations,” “a new type of international system” emerging out of the “current struggle for the international order” and a new type of activist Chinese diplomacy that puts to bed Deng Xiaoping’s dictum of “hide your strength, bide your time, and never take the lead.” Hence its efforts to foster an alternative multilateral system with the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the Belt and Road Initiative.

Over time Mr. Xi would like to turn the page on the liberal Western order and write a new chapter in world history. If China in the next decade becomes the largest economy in the world with Mr. Xi still likely its leader, the country’s economic success would be based on a form of state capitalism that rejects the notion that rising income parallels broader economic liberalization and political democracy.

None of us knows how much Mr. Xi will seek to apply the principles of this “China model” to the wider international order. There will be tensions here. But we should be very clear about what Mr. Xi wants for China itself, rather than seeing it through the rose-colored glasses of the West, still shaped by the images of Deng Xiaoping’s China, a quarter of a century ago. Xi Jinping’s China is radically different.