BEIJING -- China's Communist Party on Tuesday formally elevated President Xi Jinping to the same status as party legends Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, writing his name into its constitution and setting up the nation's leader for an extended stay in power.
Today, the party's new Central Committee gave Xi a second five-year term as party leader. He also continues to sit atop the seven-member Politburo Standing Committee, five of whose members were newly appointed.
The only other returning member was Premier Li Keqiang, the party's second-ranking official who's primarily responsible for overseeing the economy and leading the Cabinet.
The move to add Xi to the constitution will make him the most powerful Chinese leader in decades, with ambitions to tighten party control over society and make his country a superpower on the world stage, and a political philosophy directly opposed to that of the West.
The unanimous vote to enshrine "Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics in a New Era" in the constitution came Tuesday on the final day of the weeklong 19th party congress, a gathering of the party elite held every five years in the Great Hall of the People on the western side of Beijing's Tiananmen Square.
There is no Little Red Book of pithy quotations as there was under Mao, but instead a denser, drier tome of his speeches on The Governance of China. Nevertheless, Xi's ideas will now become compulsory learning for Chinese students from primary schools through universities.
His is an explicit rejection of Western ideas about democracy and free speech in favor of Communist Party leadership in every aspect of life, and a desire to challenge the United States' pre-eminent role in the Asia-Pacific region and beyond.
The inclusion of Xi's name in the party's document makes him only the third Chinese leader to be so honored, with his ideology joining Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought and Deng Xiaoping Theory as a "guide to action."
"The amendment of the party constitution effectively confirms Xi Jinping's aspiration to be the Mao Zedong of the 21st century -- that means a top leader with no constraints on tenure or retirement age," said Willy Wo-Lap Lam, a political expert at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
China's Communist Party imposed a system of collective leadership after the death of Mao. It was a party scarred by the cruelty and famine that one man had prompted through disastrous policies, notably the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.
As a result, Xi's two predecessors, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, ruled through consensus -- as the "first among equals" at the top of the ladder -- and were limited to two terms in power.
Now the party is moving in the other direction.
Xi's power is not unlimited, and many of his key policy measures reflect ideas adopted by the party before he took power. Yet the past week has seen an explosion of sycophancy toward China's leader, after his 3½-hour speech kicked off proceedings last Wednesday.
Throughout the week, senior officials lined up, one after the other, to laud what they described as Xi's profound, courageous, thrilling, insightful masterpiece of a speech, which shone "the light of Marxist Truth."
Xi would still have to overcome significant obstacles if he wants to remain in power beyond the next party congress in 2022, including a convention that officials retire if they are 68 or older, said Yanmei Xie, a China policy expert at Gavekal Dragonomics in Beijing. By that time, Xi will be 69.
Information for this article was contributed by Gillian Wong and Christopher Bodeen of The Associated Press.
A Section on 10/25/2017