During his first decade as China’s leader, Xi Jinping regularly promoted the importance of opening up the economy even as he pushed the country sharply in the opposite direction. But as he laid out his ambitions at an important political meeting, he barely paid lip service to the notion.
Xi, who is expected to secure a groundbreaking third term when the Communist Party congress concludes this week, made just three references to markets in his nearly two-hour speech Sunday and omitted more than a dozen others from a longer, written version. He instead focused on issues of national security and corruption, extolled state projects in spaceflight and supercomputers, and pledged to create a larger role for socialism and the public sector.
When he did talk about markets, the message was established rhetoric. He lauded "socialist market economic reform,” while also arguing that China’s economy should "give full play to the decisive role of the market in resource allocation.”