After Xi Jinping (age 72)

Good question! When will the Chinese people finally get rid of the communist party running the country since 1949! It is a relic!

When will China finally become more like Taiwan?

Yes, the pending leadership change in an autocratic dictatorship like China can entail a lot of uncertainty! However, China is an ancient civilization with a strong culture.

The article assumes Xi has perhaps up to 10 years in power. I doubt it!

"For more than a decade, Chinese politics has been defined by one man: Xi Jinping. Since Xi assumed leadership of the Chinese Communist Party in 2012, he has made himself into a strongman ruler. He has remade the CCP elite through a wide-ranging purge and corruption crackdown. He has curbed civil society and suppressed dissent. He has reorganized and modernized the military. And he has reinvigorated the role of the state in the economy.

Xi’s rise has also redefined China’s relationship with the rest of the world. He has pursued a more muscular foreign policy, including by increasing the tempo of military drills in the Taiwan Strait and overseeing a growing military presence in the South China Sea. He has encouraged (and then later reined in) a battalion of “wolf warrior” diplomats who engaged in a harsh war of words with foreign critics. And he has pushed China closer to Russia, even after Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a war in Ukraine. In short, it has been a new era for China. It has been Xi’s era. ...

Xi probably has years, perhaps even more than a decade, before he steps down. But the reality is that succession shapes political choices well before leaders finally relinquish control. ...

Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China, in 1949, only one of Xi’s five predecessors stepped aside fully and willingly. Mao, the strongman founder of communist China, wielded overwhelming power and authority within the party-state apparatus and ruled the country until the day he died. ...

Whoever Xi taps will need to survive the cutthroat machinations of those he passes over. A new political game will begin the moment that Xi begins to step aside ..."

After Xi | Foreign Affairs "The Succession Question Obscuring China’s Future—and Unsettling Its Present"

With his 10 years younger wife Peng Liyuan, a contemporary folk singer