Chinese President Xi Jinping has called for accelerating the building of a world-class military while touting the fight against COVID-19 as he kicked off a Communist Party Congress.

Mr Xi, 69, is widely expected to win a third leadership term at the conclusion of the week-long congress that began on Sunday morning, cementing his place as China’s most powerful ruler since Mao Zedong.

Roughly 2300 delegates from around the country gathered in the vast Great Hall of the People on the west side of Tiananmen Square amid tight security and under blue skies after several smoggy days in Beijing.

Mr Xi described the five years since the last party congress as “extremely uncommon and abnormal”, during a speech that lasted less than two hours – far shorter than his nearly three-and-a-half-hour address at the 2017 congress.

“We must strengthen our sense of hardship, adhere to the bottom-line thinking, be prepared for danger in times of peace, prepare for a rainy day, and be ready to withstand major tests of high winds and high waves,” he said.

He mentioned “safety” or “security” 73 times, compared with 55 times in 2017, according to state news agency Xinhua’s transcripts, and said China will strengthen its ability to build a strategic deterrent capability.

By comparison, Mr Xi said “reforms” 16 times in the televised speech, far fewer than the 70 mentions five years ago.

Mr Xi called for strengthening the ability to maintain national security, ensuring food and energy supplies, securing supply chains, improving the ability to deal with disasters and protecting personal information.

The biggest applause came when Mr Xi restated opposition to Taiwan independence.

In his decade in power, Mr Xi has set China on an increasingly authoritarian path that has prioritised security, state control of the economy in the name of “common prosperity”, a more assertive diplomacy, a stronger military and intensifying pressure to seize democratically governed Taiwan.

Mr Xi said little about COVID-19 other than to reiterate the validity of a policy that has made China a global outlier as much of the world tries to coexist with the coronavirus, which emerged in central China in late 2019.

“We have adhered to the supremacy of the people and the supremacy of life, adhered to dynamic zero-COVID … and achieved major positive results in the overall prevention and control of the epidemic, and economic and social development,” Mr Xi said.

On the economy, he restated support for the private sector and allowing markets to play a key role, even as China fine-tunes a “socialist economic system” and promotes “common prosperity”.

“We must build a high-level socialist market economic system … unswervingly consolidate and develop the public ownership system, unswervingly encourage and support the development of the private economy, give full play to the decisive role of the market in the allocation of resources, and give better play to the role of the government,” Mr Xi said.

-Reuters