President Xi Jinping spent 3.5 hours delivering his maiden political report at the 19th Communist Party congress, outlining his vision for the next five years of development in China.
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For millennia, China and Japan have been locked in a relationship even more mutually dependent, competitive and influential than the much more recent one between Washington and Beijing. Each has sought to dominate, or at least be the most influential in, Asia, and the relations of each with their neighbours has at various points been directly shaped by their rivalry.
Unlike the gossipy, open democracies of Western societies, it is almost impossible to know who truly holds power in the opaque world of Chinese politics. The country is ruled by the Chinese Communist Party, in a one-party system, making whoever occupies the highest positions in the party among the most powerful. Power isn’t just held by the politicians either — influential businessmen and entrepreneurs, the pioneers of China’s economic rise, are also fighting for a seat at the table.
China’s highest-ranking Communist Party members will gather in Beijing beginning October 18 for the Nineteenth Party Congress. The meeting takes place five years since Xi Jinping took the helm of China’s leadership and comes amid a rigorous crackdown on party corruption. While preparations for the congress have been shrouded in secrecy, the event will be closely watched for any changes to the governing system of the world’s second-largest economy and one of its largest militaries.
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American presidents have a habit of describing their Chinese counterparts in terms of awe. A fawning Richard Nixon said to Mao Zedong that the chairman’s writings had “changed the world”. To Jimmy Carter, Deng Xiaoping was a string of flattering adjectives: “smart, tough, intelligent, frank, courageous, personable, self-assured, friendly”… Donald Trump is no less wowed. The Washington Post quotes him as saying that China’s current leader, Xi Jinping, is “probably the most powerful” China has had in a century. Mr Trump may be right. And were it not political suicide for an American president to say so, he might plausibly have added: “Xi Jinping is the world’s most powerful leader.”
The 19th Party Congress will select about 200 people to run China for the next five years, from army generals to executives from China’s biggest state-run conglomerates. A week of pageantry culminates when President Xi Jinping and the handful of other leaders on the all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee walk onto a red-carpeted stage to present themselves to the world…China’s process for choosing top leaders is opaque, but not unpredictable. There are patterns in who rises and falls at the Communist Party’s twice-a-decade reshuffle like the one that begins Oct. 18 in Beijing.
Iranians live in a troubled and unstable region. We cannot change geography, but our neighborhood was not always so stormy. Without delving too far back into history—although as an ancient peoples our memories are measured in millennia, not decades or even centuries—it’s safe to say that our region began to experience insecurity and instability when foreign, indeed completely alien powers, arrived and began interfering, argues Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif.
The most striking thing about the building was, and is, its history. In the nineteen-thirties, during Stalin’s purges, the House of Government earned the ghoulish reputation of having the highest per-capita number of arrests and executions of any apartment building in Moscow. No other address in the city offers such a compelling portal into the world of Soviet-era bureaucratic privilege, and the horror and murder to which this privilege often led.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping inherited two lofty economic targets and a difficult juggling act when he became Communist Party general secretary five years ago. He is on track to achieve the first of the party’s “two centennial goals” in his second term, beginning this month, but has a mixed record on promised economic reforms.
More than 80 countries favour a specific religion, either as an official, government-endorsed religion or by affording one religion preferential treatment over other faiths. Islam is the most common government-endorsed faith, with 27 countries (including most in the Middle East-North Africa region) officially enshrining Islam as their state religion. By comparison, just 13 countries (including nine European nations) designate Christianity or a particular Christian denomination as their state religion. But an additional 40 governments around the globe unofficially favour a particular religion, and in most cases the preferred faith is a branch of Christianity. Indeed, Christian churches receive preferential treatment in more countries – 28 – than any other unofficial but favoured faith.
