Xi Jinping decides to abolish presidential term limitsMar 1st 2018 | BEIJING
https://www.economist.com/news/china/21737543-unhappiness-china-palpable-xi-jinping-decides-abolish-presidential-term-limitsBLOGGERS in China surpassed themselves in their ingenuity after the Communist Party announced its plan to get rid of presidential term limits, which would have required Xi Jinping to step down as head of state in 2023. One online commentator posted a picture of Winnie-the-Pooh hugging a jar of honey, with the caption “Find the thing you love and stick with it.” The Bear of Very Little Brain is used in China as code for the portly Mr Xi—the post was swiftly deleted by humourless censors. Others posted mock condom advertisements with tag lines such as “Doing it twice is not enough” and “I like how you’re always on top.” (The manufacturer solemnly informed readers that these were fakes.) Other banned terms included “I disagree”, “Animal Farm” (the novel), “emigrate”, “board the plane” (dengji, which also sounds like “ascend the throne”) and “Yuan Shikai”, an early 20th-century warlord who declared himself emperor and died six months later.
Censorship makes judging public reaction in China hard. But there was more inventive mockery in response to the startling announcement on February 25th than there was during the country’s biggest political event of the past few years, a party congress last October. There was also some unusual open dissent. A prominent former editor, Li Datong, and a well-known businesswoman, Wang Ying, both appealed to the legislature through WeChat, a social-media platform, demanding that it reject what Ms Wang called an “outright betrayal”. Many Chinese, it seems, regard scrapping term limits as a return to the bad old days of strongman rule.
Such limits may not matter much in themselves (they will be formally abolished at an annual session of the rubber-stamp parliament, which starts on March 5th). The presidency is a weak office. Mr Xi could stay in power as the party’s general secretary and military chief, to which term limits do not apply. But the abolition is still important partly because it is the clearest evidence that Mr Xi does, in fact, plan to ignore convention that party chiefs step down after ten years, and keep all of his jobs after 2023. It also pierces the veil of politics and shows what kind of ruler he wants to be. At a time when he is trying to boost China’s image globally as a modern, outward-looking and responsible state, the political system he governs seems premodern, opaque and treacherous.
The system itself is extremely unusual. China has two ladders of authority: the government and the party. The party hierarchy outranks the state one. In other countries, the ministers of finance and foreign affairs (government jobs) are usually the most important ones after the president or prime minister. In China, they are not even in the top 25. Neither man is a member of the Politburo, let alone its inner sanctum, the Politburo Standing Committee. Formally, the People’s Liberation Army is controlled by the party, not the government. In one respect, though, Chinese politics is all too normal. As with other Leninist systems, it is bedevilled by the problem of leadership succession. Of the 11 party leaders since 1921 (seven since the party seized power in 1949), only one—Mr Xi’s predecessor, Hu Jintao—has stepped down from all his posts in accordance with a timetable. Seven were executed or purged.
In the 1980s, reacting to the chaos of the Mao era, Deng Xiaoping tried to make the system more orderly and predictable by introducing new rules, norms and precedents. These included the reinstitution of the post of president (there had not been one since 1968), along with a two-term limit for the holder of that office as well as the vice-president. Mandatory retirement ages were also introduced. After Mao’s one-man freak show, Deng argued that China needed “collective leadership”. In a speech in 1980 he said the system should avoid an “over-concentration of power”, which, he warned, was “liable to give rise to arbitrary rule”. He said it should make a clearer separation between the party and the government. And it had to “solve the problem of succession in leadership”. Before he resigned in 1989 as head of the party’s Central Military Commission, Deng said his final task was to “take the lead in establishing a retirement system”.
As the abolition of term limits shows, he failed—or at least, his reforms failed to rein in Mr Xi. Instead of avoiding an over-concentration of powers, the president has made himself chairman of everything. Instead of separating party from state, he has injected party control into areas which had once been relatively free of it, such as private companies (see article). Now he has cast aside Deng’s efforts to introduce a system of succession by timetable.
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