Xi's Party Congress May Outlast America's Wars — SkimNews
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- Xi Jinping may arrive at his 2027 party congress as the first Chinese head of state to 'paint the great Western power into a corner,' with the US-China truce potentially holding through the 2028 US presidential election.
- Trump and Xi held their second meeting of the year in Washington in September after a May Beijing summit, with both leaders effectively skipping the UN General Assembly that opened September 23 in New York.
- Japan PM Sanae Takaichi traveled to Washington the day before Xi's arrival and announced a phone call with Trump right after the Trump-Xi meeting, making the summit effectively multilateral rather than bilateral.
- China has built the CIPS payment system as an alternative to America's SWIFT hub, gaining transaction privacy, though the article notes the dollar and Wall Street remain central and China is 'playing defense.'
- Iran is suffocating under its own naval blockade — closing the Straits of Hormuz cuts both ways, denying Tehran economic revenue even as it disrupts US oil access and shipping.
- Trump faces November 3 midterms with approval sinking amid the oil crisis from two wars, and Tehran has incentive to keep the straits closed past the election to weaken him further.
Why it matters: Tehran's strategy of keeping the Straits of Hormuz closed through the November 3 midterms could directly erode Trump's political position, and the source says the resulting US-China truce opens a window for Xi to consolidate unchallenged through his 2027 party congress — the first time a Chinese leader could claim to have outmaneuvered America since the Opium War.
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