Xi set to tighten grip on China by scrapping presidential term limit

Four months after a historic Chinese Communist party congress was expected to answer most questions about Xi Jinping’s second five-year term in office, China’s president has demonstrated that he can still “shock and awe” his political rivals.

Until Sunday afternoon, most guessing games ahead of the March 5 opening of China’s annual parliamentary session focused on the imminent political reincarnation of Wang Qishan, the recently retired head of Mr Xi’s anti-corruption campaign, and the race to succeed Zhou Xiaochuan, the veteran central bank governor.

But the party’s announcement that its central committee had recommended scrapping the two-term limit for the state president and vice-president was a reminder that in Mr Xi’s China, such personnel reshuffles matter much less now. One person with close ties to China’s leadership says that people worried about Mr Xi’s authoritarian tendencies are “not just scared, they are desperate”.

The person adds that scrapping the two-term limit “has put us back 30 years”, by threatening painstaking efforts to institutionalise peaceful party and government leadership transitions every 10 years This is not what anyone was expecting at the beginning of the reform era Kevin Carrico, Macquarie University After the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, the two-term limit on the presidency and vice-presidency was written into China’s state constitution by Deng Xiaoping, who launched China’s era of “reform and opening” in the late 1970s and wanted to prevent a return to the excesses of one-man rule experienced under Mao Zedong.

“We’ve had so many steps backwards [under Xi],” adds Kevin Carrico, a lecturer in Chinese studies at Macquarie University in Australia. “Media controls have become stricter, internet controls have become stricter. And now one of the few seemingly effective checks on a senior leader’s power that he can only be in power for two terms is now just being completely cast aside. This is not what anyone was expecting at the beginning of the reform era.”

While last October’s Congress made it clear that Mr Xi would remain the party’s dominant figure as long as he were alive and healthy, Sunday’s announcement paves the way for him to retain the presidency indefinitely, too.

Source : The Financial Times