Two five-year terms would have given him 10 years as President. But when you can have Xi...
So, are we looking at yet another ‘Eternal President’, a moniker previously favored by some African and North-East Asian despots, this time closer homeIJ That’s what a reading of the tea leaves seems to suggest. On Sunday, the Communist Party of China (CPC) announced plans to remove the clause in the party constitution that limits the term of the country’s President (and Vice-President) to two consecutive terms and on Monday the party plenum rubber-stamped it without further ado. And, as we know, when you rule an absolutist party-state as the CPC does the People’s Republic of China, this move enables current President Xi Jinping, already arguably the most powerful leader of China in modern history, to continue in power well beyond 2022 when his second term as the head of state would have ended.
What this means for the people of China, virtually an entire population save the very old who have known nothing but the iron grip of the CPC and who have long since internalized state-dependency as a fait accompli because the albeit ‘revolutionary’ state knows best, is a topic for detailed debate and discussion. Suffice it to say that with complete and unprecedented control over the party and the military (People’s liberation Army or PlA), the 64-year-old Xi can and will shape China in his image. It is a difficult to ascertain what precisely this will be, though, because the Chinese President, known to be an intensely private person despite “Xi Jinping Thought” being recently enshrined in the party constitution, is not giving much away. What can safely be said, however, is that China’s not going down the route of a multi-party democratic system premised on universal adult franchise anytime soon. Nor is there likely to be any deviation from Beijing’s single-minded determination to become the world’s economic powerhouse and its ambitions of moving from being a major world power to one of the globe’s primary powers alongside the US, Russia and the EU. The Middle Kingdom in its Communist avatar is already a global big-hitter and the economic prosperity of Chinese citizens, though controlled and injected in doses from the top, will continue to grow exponentially given the lag between policy formulation and implementation in China is not hostage to the will of the people, as it were.
Do spare a thought, though, for President Xi Jinping’s contemporaries, as he rides into eternal presidentship. In the US, where the rule on a maximum of two terms for the President is more or less sacrosanct, Donald J Trump despite being characterized as a ‘demagogue’ is hanging on to his presidency by the skin of his teeth as his opponents try to impeach him even before he can complete his first term. And in India, where there is no limit to the terms a Prime Minister can serve but there is a vibrant if fractious democratic tradition extant, Narendra Modi, critcized for being ‘dictatorial’, will have to pull out all the stops to win again in 2019, with the possibility of a non-Modi face to head a BJP-led coalition if the party falls short being discussed openly. China rules, anyoneIJ