China’s Master Plan: Exporting an Ideology

(This is the second in a series of columns on China's effort to supplant the U.S. as the world's pre-eminent geopolitical power. Read the other parts here: A Global Military Threat | A Worldwide Web of Institutions)

The 19th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in October 2017 is sure to loom large in future accounts of China's relations with the world. It was then that the party cleared the way for Xi Jinping to rule indefinitely, and when Xi himself advertised China’s global ambitions by declaring that Beijing would now “take center stage” in world affairs. It was also when Xi threw down the gauntlet in an equally consequential way.