Sports

BEIJING (AP) — The just-concluded Winter Olympics weren’t China’s big event of the year — internally, at least. For the Communist Party, that comes this fall at a major meeting that will likely cement Xi Jinping ’s position as one of the nation’s most powerful leaders in its seven decades of Communist rule.

The party congress, held every five years, is expected to appoint Xi to a third five-year term as its leader, breaking with recent past practice that limited the top person to 10 years in power. That would pave the way for him to get a third term as China’s president at the following year’s annual meeting of the legislature.

For China’s 1.4 billion people and the rest of the world, Xi’s tightening grip on power signals at least a partial return to the cult of personality that characterized the rule of Mao Zedong, who led Communist China from its founding in 1949 until his death in 1976, and that the party had moved away from after the disaster of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

“The 20th Party Congress will be extremely important even though and maybe because there will be no leadership change,” said Bonnie Glaser, the director of the Asia Program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. “Xi Jinping will likely lay out his priority agenda, which will provide insights into the legacy items he hopes to achieve.”

https://apnews.com/article/winter-olympics-sports-beijing-legislature-mao-zedong-bf3630017349478029d8d9ddfafa03c1