China goes for it
Ditching term limits, it’s president-for-life time
The Chinese Communist Party announced on Sunday that it planned to abolish constitutional term limits on its presidents. This opened up the possibility that current leader Xi Jinping has his sights set on being China’s president for life.
Mr. Xi has done a reasonable job of leading China, economically, politically and militarily. That’s not the point. The point is that, unless one does not want to see China be all that it can be, leadership by one person and, inevitably, his clique, for more than 10 years does not serve a country’s population well.
Countries need new leaders from time to time. They bring new approaches to what may be old problems. They bring fresh eyes. They should be able to attract new, original assistants to help them in attacking the country’s problems. They can also bring youth and zeal to nations that have watched their country’s leaders age and gray in office as the work takes its inevitable physical toll on them.
It is also the case that the people of a country need to have a role in choosing new leaders from time to time. Otherwise they don’t feel that they have ownership, a stake, in the leaders who have been chosen and are thus able to disassociate themselves easily from their governments and their decisions. The governments become “they,” not “ours.” If the people believe that some foreign country has played a role in choosing their leaders, that is also an element in a national feeling of the government not being theirs, in the process disassociating themselves from it. That feeling lies to a degree behind Americans’ interest in the Mueller inquiry into Russia’s role in the United States’ 2016 elections.
China, like the United States, has a basic right to choose whomever it pleases, however it pleases, as its leader. Americans, attached to democracy as a form of government, have the right to see as a bad choice. The 22nd Amendment limited our presidents to two terms. That wasn’t because Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who won four terms, had been a bad president, although he probably should not have sought a fourth term based on his health, but because we believe that countries benefit from fresh leadership on a regular basis.
The fashion in some countries, such as Cuba, Egypt, Russia, Syria, Turkey and odds and ends of Persian Gulf and African countries, is for some leaders to hold onto power as long as they possibly can, jiggering their constitutions if need be. The frequency of that approach does not mean that it is a good idea in terms of governance, including in China. Mr. Xi is a competent leader by some measures, apparently, but he, too, has a given useful shelf life as president, which he now apparently seeks to exceed.