In the meantime, corruption, a widening wealth gap and problems caused by unbalanced development also added to the challenges, as reforms entered a "deep water zone."

To counter these problems, Xi has promised a long list of "supply-side structural reform," including defusing a debt bomb, reducing pollution and phasing out obsolete industrial facilities.

He has also launched the most thorough anti-corruption campaign in decades, giving sharper teeth to the party's discipline agency, and worked to upgrade the Party's state governance.

"Much of what Xi has done so far had been unachievable in the past," said Yan Shuhan, chief expert on Marxist studies with the Party School of the CPC Central Committee.

"In a sense, the endorsement of Xi as the 'core leader' at the sixth plenum is just a formal recognition of a fact," Yan said.

But analysts said the most important thing to examine is not what the core title means nor why Xi was conferred with it. Rather, it is what Xi, and the Party at large, could do with that title.

Speaking on the 95th founding anniversary of the CPC in Beijing in July, Xi said the past 60-odd years have shown that the Party received "good scores in the test of history."

But the test is not over yet, he warned.

China is in the middle of a hard, long-term struggle to transform the economy, clean up the Party and streamline the military, said Yan.

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