Xin Jinping to rule for life?

 

Chinese President Xi Jinping is already one of the most powerful leaders in his country’s history. Now he’s poised to make history by staying in office for potentially decades to come.

That’s because the Chinese Communist Party on Sunday proposed changing the country’s constitution to allow Xi to remain in power beyond his scheduled departure in 2023. The party will vote on the proposal — which would abolish term limits by removing the phrase that says China’s president and vice president “shall serve no more than two consecutive terms” — in March.

That will pave the way for Xi to lead the country into the indefinite future. It will give him the time and political space to turn his deeply nationalistic vision for China into a reality.

In practice, that means Xi will continue to reform that state’s control of the economy, allowing it to function like a pseudo-free market, while giving the country’s armed forces freer reign to project Chinese power further and further.

Under Xi, China took even more control of the disputed South China Sea by bullying its neighbours. But as Xi accumulates even more power, expect the Chinese military to act even more aggressively on the world stage, throwing its weight around in ways that will worry US allies like Japan, South Korea, and Vietnam — and possibly even challenging the United States.

There’s little stopping Xi from realizing his vision. Last October, the Communist Party’s more than 2,300 delegates voted unanimously to enshrine “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era” into the party’s constitution. The addition of that phrase — which some analysts joke is as unwieldy in Chinese as it is in English — effectively means that Xi’s vision for China is officially part of state doctrine.

As the New Yorker’s Evan Osnos put it in January, “Xi Jinping has the kind of Presidency that Donald Trump might prefer.” But Xi’s consolidation of power is more historical than that: Xi is now in the same pantheon as Communist Party legends Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping.

The Chinese Communist Party has only added only one leader, Mao, to the constitution while he was alive. The party added Deng’s name and vision for China to the constitution after he died in 1997. No other Chinese leaders have had their name added to the constitution.

“Xi Jinping will certainly continue,” Zhang Ming, a former historian at Beijing’s Renmin University, told the New York Times on Sunday. “In China, he can do what he wants to do, and this is just sending a clearer signal of that.”