China moves from one-party rule toward one-man rule

Puppycow

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Scrapping Term Limits Fits the ‘Dictator Forever’ Model

It took Xinhua, the official news agency of China, only 36 words to send a chill down the spines of millions of people, in China and elsewhere: an announcement that the Communist Party will toss away the nation’s 35-year-old limit that its president and vice president may serve only two terms. It almost certainly means that President Xi Jinping, 64, plans to remain in power for the rest of his life.

“China does not need another Mao, but it’s going to get one anyway,” Gordon Chang, a noted China analyst and a Daily Beast columnist, told me. “God help us all, Chinese and others.”

Chang reminded me that after Mao Zedong’s bloody and ruthless 27 years of one-man rule, which ended with his death in 1976, reformers vowed not to take chances that one person could monopolize power again. Deng Xiaoping and other survivors of the Cultural Revolution, including the father of Xi Jinping, sought to limit arbitrary power. They set a limit of two five-year terms on the presidency and vice presidency, and safeguards to ensure that major decisions would be made by a collective leadership.

Since he first took office, Xi has consistently worked to centralize his authority. Anti-corruption campaigns have carefully targeted political rivals and driven them out of office. He has waived informal retirement-age requirements so that Wang Qishan, his right-hand man, can stay in office. Xi’s portrait hangs everywhere in the country, in a clear effort to create a cult of personality. Along with putting an end to term limits, the 205-member Central Committee of the Communist Party has also announced that it will insert “Xi Jingping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era,” a 14-point basic policy plan, into the nation’s constitution. It’s as if President Trump tried to add the tenets of The Art of the Deal to our governing document.

All of this amounts to a slow-motion coup against the safeguards that Communist reformers set up in the 1980s. When, in October 2017, CNN asked Jeff Wasserstrom, a China analyst at the University of California, to name the five most powerful people in China, he replied: “Xi, Xi, Xi, Xi, and Xi.”
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This is probably very bad for China's future. It won't be just the party trying to stay in power no matter what, but also individuals.
 
Puppycow said:
Scrapping Term Limits Fits the ‘Dictator Forever’ Model
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The only step up from that is to establish a hereditary dictatorship as N Korea has done. Stalin and Mao don't seem to have aspired to this, but Augustus did in Rome, changing the empire from an oligarchic republic to a family-based monarchy.

Will China follow suit? If it does it will in the end degenerate into complete inertia and corruption, as it did under various dynasties in the past.
 
Am I the only on vaguely surprised this wasn't already the case?

I mean, it's not like China is known for its adherence to democratic norms. The Great Leap Forward wasn't exactly a long-jump competition.
 
And it's not like the Party is suddenly ceding all their power to one man. My WAG is that the ruling committee is actually content with their status quo, and have thus taken steps to preserve it. Rather than get into an awkward slapfight about whose turn is it to sit at the head of the table, just keep the current seating arrangements. I suspect the committee still has the power to replace him if he loses their support, no matter what the "due process" is.
 
Belz... said:
Well, we don't have term limits in Canada, either. :)
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Quite right. Neither does the UK nor Australia/New Zealand nor most parliamentary systems. Australia's longest serving Prime Minister was Sir Robert Menzies at 16 years. Australian democracy wasn't harmed in the slightest by this length of tenure.

As long as there are no plans to do away with elections, I find term limits undemocratic.
 
psionl0 said:
As long as there are no plans to do away with elections, I find term limits undemocratic.
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Term limits are neither democratic nor undemocratic. It's just a way to ensure change. The people still have the power. Personally, I'd prefer if we had them up here, just to make sure complacency doesn't become the rule.
 
Belz... said:
Term limits are neither democratic nor undemocratic. It's just a way to ensure change. The people still have the power. Personally, I'd prefer if we had them up here, just to make sure complacency doesn't become the rule.
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There is no room for complacency with Australian PMs. If a poorly performing PM doesn't lose the next election, the most likely reason is that they have been turfed out by the party.

John Howard was Australia's second longest serving PM at nearly 12 years. However, a miscalculation over a labour relations bill ("Work Choices") not only cost the Liberal Party government in the 2007 election but saw John Howard himself lose the blue ribbon seat of Bennelong.
 
Belz... said:
Well, we don't have term limits in Canada, either. :)
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Smiley noted. But since you have a Prime Minister rather than a President, I don't think that term limits are really necessary, are they? At least, not as necessary. Because Prime Ministers can be removed at any time with a vote of no confidence.
 
Puppycow said:
Smiley noted. But since you have a Prime Minister rather than a President, I don't think that term limits are really necessary, are they? At least, not as necessary. Because Prime Ministers can be removed at any time with a vote of no confidence.
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In theory but not in practice (unless it is a minority government). If the PM is not replaced in the party room then you can be sure that the party won't support a no confidence motion in parliament.

But yes, the inability to remove a president who hasn't committed an impeachable offence can be a problem. However, they still have to face the voters at the next election so there is no reason to prevent somebody who may be popular with the voters from running.

It is worth noting that in the entire history of the US, only one president has ever secured a third term - Theodore Roosevelt. Considering that this was in the war years, forcing voters to pick an unknown might not have been the wisest course.
 
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psionl0 said:
In theory but not in practice (unless it is a minority government). If the PM is not replaced in the party room then you can be sure that the party won't support a no confidence motion in parliament.

But yes, the inability to remove a president who hasn't committed an impeachable offence can be a problem. However, they still have to face the voters at the next election so there is no reason to prevent somebody who may be popular with the voters from running.

It is worth noting that in the entire history of the US, only one president has ever secured a third term - Theodore Roosevelt. Considering that this was in the war years, forcing voters to pick an unknown might not have been the wisest course.
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It was FDR, not Teddy.
 
FDR, America's first and last "president for life" (arguably). Not only a third term, but a fourth. Died in office too.
 
Puppycow said:
Smiley noted. But since you have a Prime Minister rather than a President, I don't think that term limits are really necessary, are they? At least, not as necessary. Because Prime Ministers can be removed at any time with a vote of no confidence.
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That never happens, though, because the PM is the leader of his own party and is never voted against. As long as the party has a majority, he can't be removed.
 
China moves from one-party rule toward one-man rule .


More precisely, China moves backward from one-party rule toward one-man rule ...........
 
China’s Censors Ban Winnie the Pooh and the Letter ‘N’ After Xi’s Power Grab :roll:

BEIJING — Liu Jin, a 27-year-old teacher in central China, is the kind of young nationalist that President Xi Jinping can typically count on. Mr. Liu shares propaganda photos of the president in battle fatigues online and reverently calls him “Uncle Xi.”

But Mr. Liu was dismayed this week when he heard that the ruling Communist Party was changing the Chinese Constitution, allowing Mr. Xi to stay in power indefinitely.

“I disagree,” Mr. Liu wrote on Weibo, a microblogging site, listing examples of power-hungry emperors and autocrats. Censors immediately deleted the post.

During his more than five years in power, Mr. Xi has cultivated an image as a man of the people — a centered, sympathetic leader who lines up with workers to buy pork buns while also guiding the world’s most populous nation to growth and global influence.

But the move to abolish term limits, announced on Sunday, has resurrected deeper fears in Chinese society, where memories remain of the personality cult of China’s founding father, Mao Zedong, and the fevered emotions and chaos that it conjured.

Anxious to suppress criticism, and maintain an appearance of mass support, the Communist Party’s censors have scoured the internet and social media for content deemed subversive. The sanitizing has included many images of Winnie the Pooh — Mr. Xi is sometimes likened to the cartoon bear — and search terms like “my emperor,” “lifelong” and “shameless.”

For a short time, even the English letter “N” was censored, according to Victor Mair, a University of Pennsylvania professor, apparently to pre-empt social scientists from expressing dissent mathematically: N > 2, with “N” being the number of Mr. Xi’s terms in office.
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The way I see it, China has always had "one man rule", in the sense that the ruling committee tends to align itself behind the leader of the dominant faction on the committee.

This is not a change to how the committee operates, or how they share power and delegate authority among themselves. This is just a change to how often the committee has to go through the internal slapfight of choosing a new front man from the dominant faction.

Given the way the Chinese government appears to operate, I suspect that the term limits were just window-dressing anyway; boilerplate to look like other modern and democratic systems of government. I'm not sure it actually provided any real value, other than letting Chinese citizens feel a little bit like they weren't really ruled by a totalitarian dictatorship.
 
Craig B said:
The only step up from that is to establish a hereditary dictatorship as N Korea has done. Stalin and Mao don't seem to have aspired to this, but Augustus did in Rome, changing the empire from an oligarchic republic to a family-based monarchy.

Will China follow suit? If it does it will in the end degenerate into complete inertia and corruption, as it did under various dynasties in the past.
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Unless they go the hereditary, monarchy-in-all-but name route like North Korea, this pretty well guarantees a succession crisis when the ruler dies. Picking a successor before you die is dangerous; the successor might get tired of waiting for you to die and make it happen on his schedule. Having the successor be a family member reduces, but does not eliminate that possibility. Not picking a successor virtually guarantees a power struggle after the leader dies. For a variety of reasons, this is a bad idea for China.
 
CORed said:
Unless they go the hereditary, monarchy-in-all-but name route like North Korea, this pretty well guarantees a succession crisis when the ruler dies. Picking a successor before you die is dangerous; the successor might get tired of waiting for you to die and make it happen on his schedule. Having the successor be a family member reduces, but does not eliminate that possibility. Not picking a successor virtually guarantees a power struggle after the leader dies. For a variety of reasons, this is a bad idea for China.
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Doesn't the ruling party already have to go through a power struggle, every time the current leader terms out?
 
CORed said:
Unless they go the hereditary, monarchy-in-all-but name route like North Korea, this pretty well guarantees a succession crisis when the ruler dies. Picking a successor before you die is dangerous; the successor might get tired of waiting for you to die and make it happen on his schedule. Having the successor be a family member reduces, but does not eliminate that possibility. Not picking a successor virtually guarantees a power struggle after the leader dies. For a variety of reasons, this is a bad idea for China.
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Shades of "The Death Of Stalin"....
 
The Mandate of Heaven ,as far as I am concerned, can't be withdrawn quickly enough from the current Chinese Government....
 
CORed said:
Unless they go the hereditary, monarchy-in-all-but name route like North Korea, this pretty well guarantees a succession crisis when the ruler dies. Picking a successor before you die is dangerous; the successor might get tired of waiting for you to die and make it happen on his schedule. Having the successor be a family member reduces, but does not eliminate that possibility. Not picking a successor virtually guarantees a power struggle after the leader dies. For a variety of reasons, this is a bad idea for China.
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It's difficult to know what system is best. If there's a strict hereditary line of succession there is almost always a successor in waiting, but what if he or she is an incompetent or an insane person or under the age of reason?

Elective monarchies can be effective too, as the papacy has shown, at least by supplying successors, if not always sane ones, over many centuries; or they can be flawed as in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, dismembered and consumed by its neighbours.
 
Puppycow said:
Smiley noted. But since you have a Prime Minister rather than a President, I don't think that term limits are really necessary, are they? At least, not as necessary. Because Prime Ministers can be removed at any time with a vote of no confidence.
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Not the Prime Minister. The Government is removed. The Prime Minister along with it. The Prime Minister is removed by his own majority parties vote if there is no change of government.
 
The Great Zaganza said:
This is probably very bad for China's future. It won't be just the party trying to stay in power no matter what, but also individuals.
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First and foremost it shows the Chinese political system has broken down. The change means there is one and only one way to secure power, to please Xi or whomever suceeds Xi.

It also increases the risk of catastrophic fallouts in the party and ups the ante for ruling the country. Previously it was up to 10 years in power, now it's permanent and you likely get to pick the successor too.

Downfalls usually happen within a decade or two.

McHrozni
 
Craig B said:
It's difficult to know what system is best. If there's a strict hereditary line of succession there is almost always a successor in waiting, but what if he or she is an incompetent or an insane person or under the age of reason?
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His kid brother has him assassinated, see North Korea.
 
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