Channeling Putin and Mao, Xi plots to rule for life

BEIJING >> Almost exactly five years ago, a newly anointed President Xi Jinping met his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, and declared they shared similar “personalities.”

The comments, reported by the Kremlin news service but not by Chinese state media, went largely unnoticed at the time. But on Sunday, the parallels between the two leaders were too stark to ignore.

China’s Communist Party is to abolish a two-term limit on the presidency, state media announced, potentially opening the door for Xi to rule for life.

In that simple step, the Communist Party showed that it has forgotten one of the main lessons of the despotic rule of Mao Zedong, wrote Chinese legal expert and New York University professor Jerome Cohen in a blog post.

The two-term limit was inserted into the constitution after the brutal and chaotic Cultural Revolution to prevent a return of oneman dictatorship. “Its abolition signals the likelihood of another long period of severe repression,” Cohen wrote.

There was no fanfare surrounding the news here: it was buried within an article about much less portentous constitutional arrangements on page two of Monday’s print edition of party mouthpiece, the People’s Daily.

Censors also got to work to prevent any popular debate. The freeweibo.com website, which monitors content censored from weibo, China’s version of Twitter, cited key phrases being deleted, including “serving another term in office.”

The implications are likely to be felt around the world, experts said. Xi has already fostered a sharp rise in Chinese nationalism, bolstered by a sense of grievance at historical “humiliations” by foreign powers, experts say.