Last year, there was rarely a week when international attention wasn't on China.
Disappearing celebrities, billionaire crackdowns, the Evergrande fiasco, hypersonic missile tests, Hong Kong activist arrests, trade wars, climate goals, COVID.
This was hardly a coincidence.
When President Xi Jinping came into power in 2012, he set out to make his agenda widely known — both domestically and internationally.
Unlike his predecessor Hu Jintao — a man of mystery who carried the stereotype of being dull and wooden — Mr Xi has fiercely asserted himself on the world stage.
While at home, he has strategically consolidated power, and enforced sweeping structural reforms in Chinese economy and society that have transformed the country at warp speed.
President Xi has secured his place in history as China's most powerful leader since Chairman Mao. (Reuters)
In the last few years, the high-profile leader has been ramping up his bold diplomatic rhetoric, stamping out opponents, and spreading the country's tentacles of influence across the Pacific, the South China Sea, Africa and beyond.
And after abolishing presidential term limits in 2018, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in November last yearpassed a "historic resolution" elevating Mr Xi's authority to the same pedestal as era-defining leaders Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping.
It seems unlikely the President will be shrinking away anytime soon.
He currently heads all branches of the CCP, government and military, and the 68-year-old's sights are set to inevitably extend his rule into a third five-year term this year.
Let's look back at some of his signature moves over the past nine years, and what the future holds for China and the world under his leadership.
China's biggest anti-corruption crackdown
Introduced soon after becoming Chairman of the CCP, Mr Xi's pledge to crackdown on "tigers and flies" – high- and low-level officials – has become China's most sweeping anti-corruption campaign.
It has been both his greatest challenge and strongest political weapon.
"He inherited a communist regime, and the Chinese Communist Party was facing a lot of challenges," Dr Ming Xia, a professor of political science at the City University of New York, told the ABC.
"It was divided among itself, and the corruption was out of control."
Mr Xi arrived when China was basking in the glow of its economic golden years.
For two decades, China had the fastest-growing economy in the world and entrepreneurs were becoming billionaires seemingly overnight.
Leading with the catchcry, "to get rich is glorious", the reforms of supreme leader Deng in the 70s and 80s helped pave the way for the country's rapid accumulation of wealth.
This surged to new heights in the succeeding decades, but with little regulation a culture of corruption was allowed to spread throughout the business world and into the CCP ranks.
Well-connected Chinese business tycoon Desmond Shum detailed the extent of the political palm-greasing in his memoir Red Roulette.
On any given night, he said entrepreneurs would host members of the communist party elite in private hotel dining rooms, buying favours to seal lucrative business deals.
Wooing government officials with $1,000 bowls of maw fish soup, $25,000 watches and so many deal-brokering trips to the bathhouse that one employee's skin started peeling off was "just the cost of doing business in China in the 2000s," Mr Shum told the ABC.
4 million snared in the great party purge
Focusing much of his attention within the CCP itself, in 2014 Mr Xi set an example when ex-security chief Zhou Yongkang became the most senior Chinese official to be arrested and expelled from the Communist Party for corruption.
There were many more to come.
By 2018, the campaign had reportedly snared more than 2 million party, government, military, and state-owned company officials.
According to Professor Xia, that number now stands at around 4 million.
"This purge has been a chance for him to be regarded as a meat grinder. As this meat grinder he is working very fast and hurting the Chinese elite," he said.
Singaporean former diplomat and political commentator Kishore Mahbubani sees the crackdown as one of Mr Xi's great achievements, saying he has so far successfully overcome "many big challenges like growing corruption and factionalism in the party".
"He's been riding a very wild horse over the last nine years, and kept going at a steady pace," he told the ABC.
While the anti-corruption drive has instilled more trust among some parts of society, the President has been accused of using the campaign to neutralise political opponents.
"We know that this anti-corruption has been used – and to some extent abused – by Xi Jinping to purge his political opponents or competitors," Professor Xia said.
Mr Shum claims that many corrupt officials are still within the top echelons of the political party today, and they were being protected through Mr Xi's "selective" campaign.
Full article- President Xi Jinping is set to extend his 10-year rule in 2022. This is how China has transformed under his reign - ABC News