China has approved a plan to abolish presidential term limits, opening the door for President Xi Jinping to stay in power indefinitely.
China votes to allow Xi to stay president for life
China is amending its constitution to abolish presidential term limits, paving the way for Xi to remain in office indefinitely.
Emily Stewart covered business and economics for Vox and wrote the newsletter The Big Squeeze, examining the ways ordinary people are being squeezed under capitalism. Before joining Vox, she worked for TheStreet.
China’s National People’s Congress, the country’s national legislative body, voted on Sunday to change the country’s constitution to allow Xi to remain in power beyond his scheduled 2023 departure. In February, the Chinese Communist Party proposed the change; Sunday’s vote was largely considered a rubber-stamp exercise. Out of 2,964 votes, only two delegates voted against the constitutional change, while three abstained. The alteration removes phrasing that says China’s president and vice president “shall serve no more than two consecutive terms.”
According to Vox’s Alex Ward and Zeeshan Aleem, if Xi chooses to lead China for life, he will likely make China more aggressive on the world stage and will have fewer obstacles to realizing his vision for China — which appears to include exerting even more control over the disputed South China Sea and reforming state-owned companies (but not privatizing them). He will continue to reform the state’s control of the economy, allowing it to function as a pseudo-free market while giving China’s armed forces more space to project the country’s power.
Party-controlled state media has said that the constitutional changes “won the heart of the people,” but they have been met with skepticism and worry. “It’s a historic retrogression,” Li Datong, a former editor of China Youth Daily, told the Washington Post. “This is going to cause some serious consternation within certain circles that are not marginal,” Patricia Thornton, a professor at the University of Oxford who studies Chinese politics, told the New York Times. “It’s been clear for some time that Xi doesn’t share power well at all, but it’s also clear to me that he genuinely fears resistance and opposition from within the party.”
Trump said maybe America should give the president-for-life thing a try — but has emphasized it was a joke
President Donald Trump raised eyebrows earlier this month at a Mar-a-Lago fundraiser when he praised President Xi’s power grab and suggested he might not mind trying it himself. “He’s now president for life. President for life. No, he’s great,” Trump said. “And look, he was able to do that. I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot someday.”
At a rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday, Trump brought up the matter again — and media reports of it — and noted his remarks were made in jest. “But I’m joking. And they knew I was joking, everybody in the room was laughing, everybody’s having a great time. I’m joking about being president for life,” he said.
If Trump didn’t have such a habit of admiring dictators and strongmen — including on Saturday, where he publicly admired China and Singapore for executing drug dealers — it might make the public a little less wary about his jokes.
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