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The treatment the United States gave Xi Jinping during his brief American tour shows clearly to the world Washington acknowledges he is the heir to Hu Jintao as the ruler of China for the next eight years. Xi will succeed Hu as general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party at the end of this year and will be automatically elected president of the People's Republic next year. Unless something untoward happens, Xi will have a second term of four years, and there is no reason why he will follow the Hu line in dealing with Taiwan for the first two years of his first term and then come up with a Xi line.