Perhaps no event embodies the unyielding abstruseness and the unforgiving hierarchy of China’s ruling Communist Party as much as its Party Congress, the government’s most important leadership conference. Attended by some twenty-three hundred delegates from across the country, it is held every five years in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People—and when the weeklong meeting finally begins, one can be certain that the crucial politicking has already concluded. What proceeds is a choreographed spectacle bearing fastidiously scripted speeches, pro-forma elections of what has heretofore been determined (a leadership reshuffle in the seven-member Politburo, the highest echelon of power), and, in the case of the 19th Communist Party Congress, which opened today, high-spirited, propagandistic posters reminding the masses that “Life in China Is Good! Everyday Is Like a Holiday!”

This is a message that Xi Jinping, who was appointed President at the previous Party Congress, in 2012, is eager to instill in a country that continues to grapple with a vertiginous pace of change and the outsize influence of politics in everyday life. Xi is almost certainly guaranteed another five-year term, if not longer. Since taking office, he has sought to launch the greatest ideological campaign since the days of Mao. The aim is not so much to bring about a Maoist revival—the terror of the Great Helmsman’s Cultural Revolution still haunts the nation—but to reinvigorate belief in and loyalty to the Party, thereby strengthening the regime’s legitimacy. As he stated during the last Party Congress, the Party, which must constantly remain “vigilant,” will always remain “the firm leadership core.”

Xi’s desire to achieve the “China Dream,” defined as the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” is categorically distinct, in scope and ambition, from that of his predecessors Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin. Whereas Hu and Jiang were competent if colorless and largely uninspiring apparatchiks, Xi instantly and aggressively began consolidating his power, accruing enough political capital to spearhead the most extensive anti-graft campaign in modern Chinese history. The choice was a momentous one. When Xi assumed leadership over the Party, corruption posed the greatest threat to its survival. In toppling “tigers and flies”—powerful officials and lowly bureaucrats—he both burnished his image as a model of rectitude and strategically ousted potential competitors.

Earlier last year, the Communist Party anointed Xi as a “core” leader, granting him a level of authority that had not been bestowed on his immediate predecessor, Hu, and advancing him to the revered ranks of Mao and Deng Xiaoping. Already the head of the Party, the military, and the state, Xi has also made himself the head of several commissions, which allows him to weigh in on everything from economic reform to state security to cyber issues. To be the core leader and the chief executive licenses him to play an almost imperial role in shaping the fate of the nation. As Xi has made clear from the outset, he is intent on both defining a new world order and restoring to Chinese culture its former esteem.

Yet Xi’s mission should be regarded in the context of a collective and profound post-traumatic stress disorder, the result of almost two centuries of cataclysmic events in China, beginning with the devastation of the Opium Wars, which exposed the country for the first time in its history to a superior force—Great Britain—and shook the very meaning of Chinese identity and its inherent sense of exceptionalism. Xi, and many others in China, long for an era when the country occupied the pinnacle of civilization. But those days were accompanied by the absolutism of emperors whose levels of competence were a matter of caprice. The feudal system protected the cycle of dynastic succession, which propped up the despotism of those both fit and unfit for office. For every Tang Taizong, who ushered in the golden years of the Tang Dynasty, there were many others like Empress Dowager Cixi, who usurped the throne, crippled the path of progress, and contributed to the downfall of the Qing Dynasty.

As Xi made clear today, during his three-hour address to the Party Congress, he sees this moment as “a new historic juncture in China’s development”—and himself as the man to seize it. He seems to believe that the more power he amasses, the easier it will be for him to enact the kind of monumental changes necessary to transform China into the world’s leading superpower. In this sense, he is positioning himself as a savior with a cause noble enough to justify his autocratic turn. The logic is akin to that which animated the ambition of many of the Middle Kingdom’s five-hundred-odd emperors. Sure, Xi has rerouted all tributaries of power to run upstream to him, but isn’t it in the service of rejuvenation?

Xi has also used his growing power to curb that of his citizens. Under his rule, China has become increasingly repressive. The media is censored and civil society has been muted. Activists have been silenced and human-rights lawyers arrested. More than a million officials have been disciplined. Despite paying lip service to the constitution—the Party devoted an entire plenary session during the 18th Congress to a discussion of “judicial independence”—Xi is steering the country away from the rule of law and toward the rule of the Party.

Refining his personal control rather than reforming a sclerotic system may seem expedient for Xi, and, in the short term, he may be able to accomplish his immediate goals faster. But setting the precedent of a modern-day emperor ensnares Chinese politics in a cycle of volatility and unsustainability that renders an entire nation vulnerable, once again, to the whimsy of an individual. “Several thousand years ago, the Chinese nation trod a path that was different from other nations’ culture and development,” Xi said in a speech to the Politburo in 2014. “We should be more respectful and mindful of five thousand years of continuous Chinese culture.” Xi’s vision for China’s future suggests a great leap backward, in which old lessons remain unlearned.