China’s Xi Jinping awarded a third five-year term as president in race with no opponent

Chinese leader Xi Jinping on Friday was awarded an unprecedented third five-year term as president, making him the longest-serving ruler of the communist nation since Mao Zedong. 

His reappointment was a foregone conclusion, as Xi ran unopposed in what is portrayed as a contest. 

The nearly 3,000 members of China’s National People’s Congress, a rubber-stamp legislature, unanimously voted in favor of the 69-year-old Xi in a vote that took an hour to complete and all of 15 minutes to tally.

Xi abolished presidential term limits in 2018 for what is in China a largely ceremonial title

Xi secured his actual power last October when he was reconfirmed as general secretary of the central committee of the ruling Chinese Communist Party for another five years. 

With the presidential election over, officials approved by Xi will now be appointed or elected to fill top positions in his cabinet. 

Li Qiang, a protege of Xi, is expected to be named China’s premier in the coming days, which is the No. 2 post in the Asian nation. 

Li was spotted sitting next to Xi and chatting with him during Friday’s vote.

Xi’s reappointment comes as tensions between China and the US have been elevated since last month’s spy balloon incident — which saw surveillance craft reportedly launched from China’s Hainan Island hover over sensitive US nuclear weapons sites and cross the US mainland before being shot down off the coast of South Carolina on Feb. 4. 

US officials say China has rebuffed calls from Washington since the shoot-down. 

In a rare rebuke of US policy, Xi on Monday accused the US of leading “containment, encirclement and suppression” efforts against the communist power.

“Western countries — led by the US — have implemented all-round containment, encirclement and suppression against us, bringing unprecedentedly severe challenges to our country’s development,” Xi said in a speech to China’s top political advisory body. 

Beijing has also been riled by reports that top US agencies, including the Department of Energy and the FBI,  have concluded that COVID-19 originated from a lab in the Chinese city of Wuhan researching bat coronaviruses. Chinese officials have denied the so-called “lab leak theory,” blasting it as defamatory.