Much ado about nothing

2,300 delegates representing 90 million members who absolutely control the lives of their 1.4 billion compatriots and who base their legitimacy and popular acceptance on the remarkable feat of having lifted 600 million out of poverty thanks to the astuteness of Deng Xiaoping, the man who said things like having patience and hiding one's own abilities or that it didn't matter whether a cat was black or white as long as it caught mice. His pragmatism sometimes makes us forget that his hand did not tremble when he ordered the Tiananmen massacre, nipping in the bud any hint of democratisation in the name of economic development.

With Xi at the helm for another five years (he has now been at the helm for ten) things have changed quite a bit. From being seen as "Uncle Xi" in 2012, an approachable and quasi-paternal leader, to the authoritarian and repressive monarch he is today, obsessed with maintaining above all else the power of the party and his own, as he revealed in his speech in Hainan last April when launching his Global Security Initiative. Although Xi is clear about his desire to become part of the Chinese Communist Holy Trinity, along with Mao and Deng, his obsession is not so much to imitate them as to avoid ending up like Gorbachev. As he will be re-elected at this congress for another five years and without term limits, Xi believes he will have time for what he sees as his historic mission to put China in its rightful place of political, economic and military strength in a world still dominated by the United States, a country Xi sees as in inevitable decline. And for that he has to win the technology race. Mao said that China was humiliated during the hundred years following the Opium Wars because it missed the train of the Industrial Revolution and Xi is not prepared to allow that to happen again. That is why he has launched initiatives such as "Made in China 2025", the Silk Road and a generous state aid programme ($300 billion) to ensure the mastery of Artificial Intelligence, because he knows - because Brookings has said so - that whoever masters AI in 2030 will dominate the world in 2100.

Kevin Ruud, former prime minister of Australia and a China insider, says Xi is taking "politics to the Leninist left, economics to the Marxist left and foreign policy to the nationalist right". I am missing the totalitarian label of something that in any case is a potpourri that is difficult to handle. What is certain is that under Xi, domestic repression has run amok with the "social credit cards", ending Hong Kong's freedoms (in violation of the pact that obliged it to maintain them at least until 2047), and ending Deng's slogan of "one country with two systems", something Taiwan has no doubt taken note of. Such repression has reached intolerable limits in Xinjiang where some are already calling what is being done to the Uygur people genocide. The economy is following the path of capitalism with strong state interventionism to create national champions while, given what Russia is suffering today with the sanctions, it is also seeking to create a double-cycle model that protects it from the outside world, while its modest growth (2.8% this year) is weighed down by the controversial "Covid Zero" policy and by threatening bubbles such as the real estate bubble.

And from a low-key, low-key foreign policy, Xi has moved to "wolf diplomacy" with the declaration of sovereignty over the South China Sea - something that violates the rights of other coastal countries such as Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia and Vietnam), support and rapprochement with Russia despite the invasion of Ukraine, border disputes with India and Vietnam, trade disputes with Australia, disagreements with Europe over human rights and trade practices, and a trade corridor standoff with Australia, and with a long-distance confrontation with the United States, which has gone from a policy of cooperation when it thought economic development would bring democracy to China to the current one of "restraint" because it believes - as Biden recently said - that it has become "the only country that wants to reshape the world order and at the same time increasingly has the capacity in the economic, diplomatic, military and technological fields to move forward to do so". For his part, Xi has not hesitated to say that the US is "the greatest source of chaos in the world today". So much for that. The red warning lights have gone on in Washington - and this is one of the few issues on which Democrats and Republicans agree - where they already see a technology battle raging and fear a worse one, this time a military one. the few issues on which Democrats and Republicans agree - where they already see the technology battle raging and fear a worse one, this time of a military nature, over Taiwan, where many believe China and the United States are on a course that will sooner or later lead to a collision.

So a lot of fanfare around the CCP Congress, a lot of personality cult and, in principle at least, little change in sight.

Jorge Dezcallar Ambassador of Spain