Xi Jinping: China’s leader for life
Xi Jinping should know all about the perils of autocratic rule, said Charlie Campbell in Time. Like millions of his contemporaries during the mid-1960s Cultural Revolution, China’s president was sent to live in the countryside, where he toiled in the fields and slept in a flea-infested cave. His father, a senior Communist official, was purged several times by Mao Zedong. Strange, then, that Xi seems intent on becoming a Mao-like strongman himself. He has cultivated a cult of personality, having his “eponymous political thought enshrined in the national constitution”. He has departed from China’s recent collective leadership model by failing to appoint any successors to the Communist Party’s ruling body. And now, even before officially completing his first five-year term in office, he is moving to abolish the two-term limit on the presidency, paving the way for him to remain in power for as long as he wants.
When Xi came to power, he vowed to restore the Middle Kingdom to its rightful place at the centre of world affairs, said Tom Phillips in The Guardian, and he “seems determined to see that project through”. A positive take on his latest power grab is that it will give him the authority to quash “rampant” corruption and enact difficult reforms. A more pessimistic take is that Xi sees “everlasting power as the only way” to protect himself from the many rivals he has purged and jailed on corruption charges. Either way, his move is in line with “the global ascendancy of authoritarian regimes from Moscow to Manila”. As the US academic and China expert Orville Schell puts it, we’re living in “the Age of the Big Leader”.
You might think that Western politicians would protest about the forthcoming changes to China’s constitution, said Kerry Brown on Cnn.com, but they’ve kept their own counsel. Most had already assumed that Xi was “here to stay”, and that’s fine with them as long as he continues to deliver “strong, stable, predictable leadership”. But for how much longer will he do that, asked Noah Feldman on Bloomberg. The collective leadership model that China has followed for the past three decades may have had its flaws – it “bred corruption” among the elite, for one thing – but it did create “unprecedented stability in the midst of unprecedented economic growth”. Autocrats, on the other hand, are prone to believing their own propaganda, and succumbing to hubris and paranoia, all of which leads to poor decision-making. History shows that the president-for-life model rarely ends well.