The Xi Jinping Supremacy: The Dragon powers up its helmsman

Xu Chuan, a 35 year old Communist Party of China (CPC) official and academic from the southern city of Nanjing, was among the 2,200 odd members of the CPC elite gathered in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on the rainy morning of October 18. For three and a half hours at the cavernous hall, Xu sat upright, barely moving a muscle except to burst into loud applause at all the right moments, as CPC General Secretary Xi Jinping opened the party's key once in five years national congress.

Over a marathon three and a half hour speech, Xu would hear his leader hail the start of what he called "a new era". It isn't unusual in China for leaders to proclaim the beginning of "eras". Each of the previous four generations of CPC leaders did the same, in keeping with the Communist inclination of framing their records as reflecting material progress on their march towards utopia. But party jargon notwithstanding, there certainly was an inescapable feeling that the congress in Beijing had witnessed a momentous shift in China's politics.

The congress formalised what was indeed becoming apparent over the past five years of Xi's first term, China's ruling party laying the ground for the rise of its new helmsman, and in the process, dismantling the collective leadership model that had, for the past two decades, given China the political stability it needed, without any 'Gang of Four', style purges, for its economic rise. The congress