Chinese President Xi Jinping is on a mission to make China a globally dominant nation, specifically toppling the United States as the current global powerhouse.
China’s ruling party, the Central Committee, recently did away with the constitutional limit of the country’s president, who before was limited to serving two, 5-year terms. This means that Xi can now rule beyond 2023, when his second terms was slated to end. He could, in theory, rule indefinitely, for the remainder of his life.
Analysts have recently pointed out that this is in line with Xi’s vision to make China the dominant world power, and the United States might eventually have to accept China as a dominant power over itself.
“In the Asia-Pacific, the dominant role of the United States in a political and military sense will have to be readjusted,” according to Cui Liru, the former president of the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, The New York Times reported Tuesday. The institute is “a think tank under the Ministry of State Security that often reflects official thinking.”
“It doesn’t mean U.S. interests must be sacrificed. But if the U.S. insists on a dominant role forever, that’s a problem,” he said.
And, when “asked if conflict was likely in the region, Mr. Cui said: ‘I don’t exclude that possibility. In this transitional period, it depends on how the two sides handle it.’ [… It’s] ‘not normal for China to be under U.S. dominance forever. You can’t justify dominance forever.'”
A former Australian defense official, Hugh White, told the Times: “It is now clear Xi’s agenda to rebuild an Asian order with China at its center is here to stay. I think Xi is impatient. He wants China to be the predominant power in the Western Pacific. He wants to do it himself and for it to go down in history as his achievement. That makes him formidable.”
