Lifetime leadership for President Xi to be discussed in China
President Xi Jinping is poised to make a historic power grab as China’s legislators gather from today to approve changes that will let him rule indefinitely.
This year’s gathering of the ceremonial National People’s Congress has been overshadowed by Mr Xi’s surprise move, announced just a week ago, to end the constitutional two-term limits on the presidency.
The changes would allow Mr Xi, already China’s most powerful leader in decades, to extend his rule over the world’s second-largest economy for life.
“This is a critical moment in China’s history,” said Cheng Li, an expert on elite China politics at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
The move is widely regarded as the culmination of Mr Xi’s efforts since being appointed leader of the ruling Communist Party in 2012 to concentrate power in his own hands and defy norms of collective leadership established over the past two decades.
Mr Xi, 64, has appointed himself to lead bodies that oversee national security, finance, economic reform and other major initiatives, effectively sidelining the party’s No 2 figure, Premier Li Keqiang.
A spokesman for the National People’s Congress said yesterday that scrapping term limits was to ensure that three of Mr Xi’s main leadership positions were unified.
Zhang Yesui said the con-
Many expressed shock and disbelief at what they perceived to be a return to the Mao era and the violence and chaos of the Cultural Revolution
stitutional amendment was simply aimed at bringing the office of the president in line with rules on Mr Xi’s posts as head of the Communist Party and the Central Military Commission.
But the move would upend a system enacted by former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping in 1982 to prevent a return to the bloody excesses of a lifelong dictatorship typified by Mao Zedong’s chaotic Cultural Revolution of 1966 to 1976.
Although passage of the amendment by the congress’s nearly 3,000 handpicked delegates is all but certain, observers will be looking to see how many abstain from voting as an indication of the reservations the move has met within the political establishment.
Some Chinese figures have publicly objected to the move, running the risk of official retaliation.
Li Datong, a former editor of the state-run China Youth Daily, wrote that lifting term limits would “sow the seeds of chaos” and urged legislators to reject the amendment.
Wang Ying, a businesswoman who has advocated government reforms, called the proposal “an outright betrayal”.
Many expressed shock and disbelief at what they perceived to be a return to the Mao era, and the massive upheaval, violence and chaos of the Cultural Revolution 50 years ago that has barely faded from memory.