China set for Xi in power indefinitely

Beijing, February 25

In an unprecedented move, China’s ruling Communist Party today prepared the ground for President Xi Jinping to stay in power indefinitely after the end of his second term in 2022 as it proposed to remove presidential term limits from the party’s Constitution.

The CPC Central Committee proposed removing the clause that the President and Vice-President “shall serve no more than two consecutive terms” from the Constitution, state-run Xinhua news agency reported today.

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The removal of the term limit, expected to be endorsed by the party Plenum that begins tomorrow, would  give 64-year-old Xi, regarded as the most powerful leader in modern China, a limitless tenure.

Xi’s predecessors, Jiang Zemin who was in power from 1993 to 2003 and Hu Jintao from 2003 to 2013, stepped down as the general secretary of the party as well as the President after the widely followed rule as well as a convention of two terms to promote collective leadership system in the one-party state. If China pushes ahead with the proposal, Xi would become the country’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong, who ruled for more than three decades.

President Xi, who is also the general secretary of the CPC and chairman of the Central Military Commission, began his second five-year tenure last year.  

A seven-man leadership committee unveiled last year included no potential successor, raising the prospect that Xi intends to govern beyond his second term. Since then, all organs of the party have declared him as the topmost leader, setting aside the principle of collective leadership followed during the last three decades.

The CPC Central Committee today also proposed writing Xi Jinping’s ‘Thoughts on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era’ into the Constitution.  This would make Xi the only leader after Mao and his predecessor Deng Xiaoping whose thoughts were written into the Constitution. It would place him above the rest of the leaders of the party.

Besides the two-term rule, top Chinese leaders also followed a convention of retiring after 68 years. With the status of  “core leader” and his name written into the Constitution, the retirement age limit is not expected to be applicable to Xi. 

Since Xi took over power, he consolidated his hold with a massive anti-graft campaign in which over a million officials were punished. — PTI