China opens Party Congress to grant Xi 5 more years

China on Sunday opened a twice-a-decade Communist Party conference at the end of which leader Xi Jinping is expected to receive a third five-year term. 

Xi was delivering a lengthy report at the opening in which he extolled the achievements of the past five years and said the party would strive to meet its modernization goals to achieve what it calls the “rejuvenation” of the nation.

More than 2,000 of the party’s 96 million members are attending the opening in the hulking Great Hall of the People overlooking Tiananmen Square in the center of Beijing. The Congress is the 20th in the history of the century-old party.