After the first U.S.-China trade war in 2018, Chinese leaders began to formulate a new grand strategy that shifted their priority from economic development to security. The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) blueprint for the 14th Five-Year Plan (FYP), released in October 2020, provides a preview of this strategy. Conceptually, Mao’s doctrine of protracted warfare likely shapes how Chinese leaders see the Sino-American “new cold war” and influences their strategic calculus. Due

History may record the 2020s as the period during which China’s vision for updating the international political order came into focus. Chinese leaders and experts have laid their cards on the table, arguing that the era of “hegemonic politics” needs to be replaced by a new order that redistributes power away from its concentration in liberal democracies toward a more equal distribution among states, while protecting the inviolability of sovereign states to govern their popula

Perhaps no state in modern history has intervened in human reproduction as extensively as the People’s Republic of China, yet few reversals of reproductive policy have been as visibly ineffective as Xi Jinping’s pro-natalist turn. The country’s population fell for a fourth consecutive year in 2025 as the birthrate plunged to another record low despite the introduction of a raft of birth- and family-friendly subsidies and measures since the one-child policy officially ended in

This article proposes a revisionist framework of factionalism to explain the latest escalation in the purge of high-ranking CCP cadres and to understand the changes in leadership politics during Xi Jinping’s third term in office. Based on Aristotle’s distinction between oligarchy (ruling power resting in a small group) and tyranny (one-man rule) as two different non-democratic regime types to analyze factionalism, the article argues that this distinction affects the unfolding

The removal of PLA senior generals Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli in January 2026 represented the peak, if not the end, of a massive purge of the military leadership that began in mid-2023. The absence of credible information from Beijing has allowed many theories about the causes of these dismissals to circulate, which often center on factional politics or power consolidation. An examination biographical records, however, yields more support for the view that most purges are in

China’s leadership, state media, and foreign policy analysts consider the U.S. a declining but dangerous power. That assessment has remained durable since Michael Swaine analyzed views in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in his 2021 essay for China Leadership Monitor , though the frequency of that assessment has fluctuated. The resilience of such views in the PRC press reflects genuine assessments of U.S. internal contradictions, the Chinese Communist Party’s Leninist pre

The proposal for the 15 th Five-Year Plan (FYP), approved by the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party at its 4 th plenum in late October 2025, is substantively similar to the proposal for the 14 th FYP. The most important message conveyed in this document is that the party will continue to pursue the security-centered development strategy unveiled in October 2020. Based on the more pessimistic assessments of China’s external environment, the proposal for the ne

The 21st National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, which will convene in late 2027, will continue the Xi Jinping leadership as he enters his fourth term as supreme leader. When Xi secured his third term as party leader at the 20th Party Congress in 2022, he effectively abolished the term limits that had been in place since the 1990s, so it is unrealistic to expect that he will not seek a fourth term at the forthcoming Party Congress. Regardless of widespread rumors