The embodiment of this reversal is Xi Jinping, the General Secretary and President, who has come to be known among the Party rank and file by a succinct honorific: the Core. In the years before Xi rose to power, in 2012, some Party thinkers had pushed for political liberalization, but the leaders, who feared infighting and popular rebellion, chose stricter autocracy instead. Xi has proved stunningly harsh; though at first he urged young people to “dare to dream,” and gestured toward market-oriented reforms, he has abandoned Deng’s “courageous experiments” and ushered his country into a straitened new age.
To spend time in China at the end of Xi’s first decade is to witness a nation slipping from motion to stagnation and, for the first time in a generation, questioning whether a Communist superpower can escape the contradictions that doomed the Soviet Union.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/30/chinas-age-of-malaise