China’s parliament drops term limits
Amendment to constitution to allow Xi to rule for life
BEIJING — President Xi Jinping can now rule China for as long as he’d like.
Yesterday afternoon, nearly 3,000 delegates at China’s ceremonial parliament cast ballots in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People to amend the nation’s constitution, allowing Xi to remain president well past 2023, when he was due to step down.
The amendment was widely expected — the parliament, called the National People’s Congress, hasn’t voted down a Communist party decision in its 64-year history. Yet it is a striking break from precedent. China added term limits to the constitution in 1982, after decades of Mao Zedong’s disastrous political campaigns showed the dangers of one-man rule.
Two delegates voted against the change, and three abstained, giving Xi 99.8 percent approval.
Xi holds three posts: general secretary of the Communist Party, chairman of the Central Military Commission, and president of the nation. The last is the least consequential, and the only one that carried term limits — China’s last two presidents, Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin, each stepped down after two five-year terms. State media has cast the revision as a common-sense move to bring the presidency into line with the other two posts.
Yet Xi’s landslide vote belies a deep anxiety among Chinese intellectuals, students and former officials about the implications of his seemingly limitless power.
Chinese students abroad, in a rare show of dissent, have reportedly strewn flyers on campuses showing a photo of Xi superimposed with the words: “not my president.” Censors have rushed to block open discussion of the revisions on social media sites; on Sina Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, forbidden terms include “re-election,” “proclaiming oneself an emperor,” and “I don’t agree.” They have also banned images of Winnie the Pooh, a cartoon character that many Chinese internet users believe shares some of Xi’s features.
“My greatest feeling is confusion and worry,” said a graduate student studying social sciences in Beijing who requested anonymity to avoid official retaliation. The student questioned whether the revision implied “that there are no institutional barriers to the return of totalitarianism.”