All In on Xi

By Bill Lee

China has apparently decided to go all in on President Xi Jinping with the CPC’s decision to abolish term limits for the president. It is not much of a surprise, though the early timing caught some off guard; however, it is natural the decision would come before Xi enters a lame-duck second term. 

Xi has been masterful in consolidating his power by reforming the military to put control of it in his hands, eliminating rivals through the anti-corruption campaign, stifling dissent and reverting to a conservative-leaning moral education in schools, stimulating nationalist pride by turning coral reefs into military bases in the South China Sea, launching the ambitious One-Belt, One-Road initiative, and getting himself written into the Chinese Constitution. The icing on the cake may have been the ludicrous chaos of the Trump administration, which has made many Chinese see Western liberal democracy, as supposedly exemplified by the United States, as not necessarily the ideal model for governance. 

China is making a big bet, though, on just one man. The allure of an autocratic leader is that, if he is good, such a leader has the power to accomplish a lot. The problem of course is that as the years go by and the leader becomes ossified and inert, there is no easy way, short of a nationwide rebellion, to get rid of him. But if most people, even in the United States, had their druthers about whom they would accept as a leader for life, Donald Trump or Xi Jinping, most I think would pick the latter. 

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Photo by Maria Barina via Flickr