Watching China’s maniacal fight against COVID, it’s easy to wonder what’s gone awry with the country’s leadership. In fact, China’s pandemic-fighting efforts are only the most obvious example of a greater shift in the way the country is governed. The Communist regime has always been brutal, but it was at least predictable and, in its own way, practical. While much of the developing world has in recent decades been mired in political tumult, China has stood out as an oasis of stability, with a leadership team that changed with clockwork regularity and a consistent policy direction. That’s been the often-understated foundation of China’s ascent on the world stage.

More and more, however, politics is beginning to trump pragmatism. The change has been percolating for some time, but it is also inseparable from the rise of Xi Jinping. He has concentrated more political power in his own hands than any other Chinese leader in decades, in the process upending the more balanced, government-by-committee approach that has predominated since the 1980s, thus leaving the most important decisions of the state—and the future of the world’s most populous country—dependent on one man and his ideas, ambitions, and political calculations. China is entering a new era in which it “begins to veer steadily more wildly based on the whims of a single individual,” Carl Minzner, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told me. “It is a very dangerous trajectory.”

The result could alter China’s position in the world, and international economics more broadly. Multinational companies, so vital to the country’s industrial juggernaut, could redirect their investment elsewhere over worries regarding the future direction of Chinese policy, reversing China’s integration into the global economy and reordering supply chains. A less predictable foreign policy might further strain Beijing’s relations with its Asian neighbors, and with the United States. And most of all, China’s 1.4 billion people, already unable to participate in their own government, will be left adrift on the unsure waves of Chinese politics—and Xi’s predilections.