For Chinese leaders, Olympics weren’t 2022’s big-ticket item

By KEN MORITSUGU
Associated Press

BEIJING (AP) — The just-concluded Winter Olympics aren’t China’s big event of the year. For the Communist Party, that comes this fall at a major meeting that will likely cement Xi Jinping’s position as one of the nation’s most powerful leaders in its seven decades of Communist rule. The party congress is expected to appoint Xi to a third five-year term as its leader, breaking with recent past practice that limited the top person to 10 years in power. That would pave the way for him to get a third term as China’s president at the following year’s annual meeting of the legislature.