article: There will be little space for civil society, no Western-style democracy and no listening to "well-fed foreigners who have nothing better to do than to lecture us". Instead the message of the Plenum is that President Xi wants a rules-based system in which a cleaned-up and competent Party/state bureaucracy continues to serve the "masses" unchallenged. Kleptocratic dictatorships which call themselves democratic are not thereby democratic. And the same applies to political parties which call themselves communist. The Chinese Communist Party is an entrenched ruling party whose guiding ideology is not Marxism but national "rejuvenation" and whose leader is now unashamedly reaching back to the language of his imperial forbears to unite his 1.3bn citizens. It would be easier for the world to understand if the Chinese Communist Party were to rename itself the Chinese Nationalist Party, but awkwardly that's the bunch the communists swept from power 65 years ago, so the name is forever off limits. Make no mistake though. Xi Jinping is a nationalist leader with a nationalist credo. In power for two years already, he has a further eight to go. If he can reform China's economy and hold its politics together, his era may see China overtake the US as the world's largest economy in absolute terms (it has just overtaken the US on the measure which takes account of differences in the cost of living). And by the time he leaves office in 2022, China may have built its own space station and assembled the military might to confront US strategic resolve in Asia. This is exactly what Xi Jinping means by "the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation". But for China's "great rejuvenation" to succeed depends now on the success of enormously challenging economic reform, and that in turn depends on the resilience and flexibility of its politics. So what are Xi Jinping's politics? President Xi believes that China is special and different. As he puts it: "Several thousand years ago, the Chinese nation trod a path that was different from other nations." Two years into his leadership, the fond hope cherished by some dissidents and Western observers that he might be a closet liberal has been completely dashed. Since the US and China restored relations in 1979, successive US governments have argued that exposure to capitalism and globalisation would eventually bind China into the existing world order and advance the political freedoms that underpin it. But Xi Jinping has made it clear he has no time for either. Instead he is determined to make China's internal politics fit for a very different world order. And he is a more confident and purposeful leader than China has seen at the top since Mao Zedong or Deng Xiaoping. The evidence suggests that Xi Jinping simply doesn't believe in Western-style liberal democracy for China. Like many of his generation of Chinese leaders, he was dismayed by the collapse of communist rule in Moscow. He is famously reported to have said the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991 because "no-one had the balls to stand up for it". Observers often
summary: At October's top level Communist Party meeting in Beijing, President Xi Jinping set out his vision for China's governance.