At a meeting with a senior Chinese official a few months ago, I jokingly said that my 30-plus years of "understanding" China may have been a fluke, because I couldn't comprehend some policies the country had adopted in recent years. The only way I could rationalize them was to conclude that they must be part of some tactical maneuver to neutralize factions within the CPC's upper echelons ahead of the Congress. Judging by who the Congress has chosen to be next to Xi in the new leadership, there have certainly been further purges of opponents - and very few signs of a reversal of the policies of recent years.

Unless the post-Congress days and weeks produce a big surprise, I see growing dilemmas emerging for Xi and the CPC.

In the BRICs analysis (the purported rise of Brazil, Russia, India, and China) that my then-colleagues and I produced a generation ago, the decade 2021-30 was supposed to be when China's economy closed in on the US in nominal terms. This was why the BRICs economies collectively might go on in the next decade to become larger than the G7, which would of course represent an enormous change to the modern world order.

This assumed that countries would achieve their long-term potential productivity rate, because Chinese GDP growth would decelerate as its labor-force growth peaked, implying that most of the 4.5-5% GDP growth we had assumed would reflect productivity gains. This growth rate is consistent with what China has stated is both required and desired to double its GDP per capita by 2035 from the 2020 level.

But the last three years suggest that China is unlikely to achieve this target unless it reconsiders its current policies. Virtually all scientific evidence suggests that it is impossible to eradicate COVID-19. The only plausible way to manage it is with proven vaccines. Chinese leaders' fear that abandoning the zero-COVID policy would overrun the health system and cause mortality to rise is understandable, but the policy is entirely inconsistent with the path to the 2035 goal. It has been clear for some time that China can achieve its goal only if Chinese consumers become a central part of the country's growth model. Rolling lockdowns make this virtually impossible.