Array
Chinese President Xi Jinping is to open the 20th Communist Party Congress on Sunday, a week-long event where he is widely expected to win a third leadership term and cement his place as the country’s most powerful ruler since Mao Zedong.
The gathering of roughly 2,300 delegates from around the country is scheduled to begin at 10 a.m. (0200 GMT) in the vast Great Hall of the People on the west side of Tiananmen Square.
The congress will likely open with Xi, 69, reading a lengthy report in a televised speech that reviews the party’s achievements of recent years and outlines broad-brush priorities for the next five years. Analysts generally do not expect any significant change in policy direction.
In his decade in power, Xi has set China on an increasingly authoritarian path that has prioritised security, state control of the economy in the name of “common prosperity”, a more assertive diplomacy, a stronger military and intensifying pressure to seize Taiwan.
