China Moves to Let Xi Stay in Power by Abolishing Term Limit
China’s Communist Party has cleared the way for President Xi Jinping to stay in power, perhaps indefinitely, by announcing on Sunday that it wants to abolish the two-term limit on the presidency — a dramatic move that would mark the country’s biggest political change in decades.
The party leadership “proposed to remove the expression that the president and vice president of the People’s Republic of China ‘shall serve no more than two consecutive terms’ from the country’s Constitution,” Xinhua, the official news agency, reported.
With each term set at five years, the Constitution currently limits Mr. Xi, who became president in 2013, to 10 years in office.
But the announcement appears to be the strongest signal yet that Mr. Xi, 64, intends to hold onto power longer than any Chinese leader in at least a generation.
“I think this is without a doubt the clearest confirmation we’ve had yet that Xi Jinping plans to stay in power much longer than we thought,” said Jude Blanchette, an expert on Chinese politics in Beijing who works for the Conference Board, which provides research for companies.
“We should expect Xi Jinping to be the dominant political force in China for the next decade.”
The announcement also confirmed that Mr. Xi has amassed enough power to rewrite the rules that had constrained his predecessors, Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin, both of whom stepped down after two terms.
Those rules were aimed at preventing the reappearance of the cult of personality that had surrounded the People’s Republic’s founding father, Mao Zedong.
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