Opening the National People's Congress in Beijing last Saturday, Prime Minister Li Keqiang set China's growth target for the coming year at 6.5 to 7 percent, the lowest in decades. Only two years ago, he said 7 percent was the lowest acceptable growth rate, but he has had to eat his words. He really isn't in charge of very much any more.

The man who is taking charge of everything, President Xi Jinping, is now turning into the first one-man regime since Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s. The "collective leadership" of recent decades has become a fiction, and Xi's personality cult is being vigorously promoted in the state-controlled media.

He has also broken the truce between the two major factions in the Chinese Communist Party, who might be called the "princelings" and the "populists." Xi, as the son of a Communist Party revolutionary hero who ended up as vice premier, is princeling to the core. His centralizing, authoritarian style is typical of this privileged breed.