Xi Zinping for ever

I really can't face ploughing through three and a half hours of President Xi Zinping's speech but the general thrust of it is pretty clear. He thinks in his first five years that he has done a fantastic job and expects to do even better in the next five and would probably like to carry on into his nineties please. The economy, he boasts, is booming and it's time for China to straddle across the world like a supreme power. Well I thought that was what Beijing has been trying to do for years, grabbing all the minerals they need across Africa and elsewhere in return for huge contracts to build roads, railways, hospitals - all part of the Great Silk Road, China's spreading trade routes across the globe. Chinese influence is everywhere. I was in Antigua not that long ago and there were Chinese workers in tin hats en masse, constructing an airport terminal. Not to mention what Beijing has been up to, illegally, in the South China Sea, transforming coral reefs into concrete islands with runways, missile shelters, radar facilities and Chinese take-away restaurants. Not sure about the last item, but you get the picture. China is expanding territorially. Xi Zinping, a purveyor of socialism with its own Chinese character, as he put it, is now hoping to spread the good news of communism with a Beijing face to other parts of the planet. In other words, President Xi is frightfully pleased with himself and appeared to have impressed everyone at the Communist Party Congress, except one former Chinese leader who was fast asleep. He had heard it all before. With all this power at his fingertips you would have thought he could solve the North Korea problem with a gance of his disapproving eyes. But no, according to some North Korean defector who has come out of the woodwork, Kim Jong-un can't stand the Chinese president. He is alleged to have muttered to his quivering cronies that Xi Zinping was a son of a bitch! Well I guess you don't get to become leader of China without being a son of a bitch, even a beaming son of a bitch like President Xi. So China rules the waves, well certainly the waves in the South China Sea.