In advance of the National People’s Congress (NPC) meeting in Beijing, which will mark the official start of Xi Jinping’s second term
as the president of the People’s Republic of China, the Chinese
Communist Party’s (CPC) Central Committee proposed a set of
constitutional amendments, chief among them being the removal of
presidential term limits and the inclusion of “Xi Jinping Thought” in
the country’s constitution.To get more
China news, you can visit shine news official website.
NPC deputies are expected to overwhelmingly support these changes in a vote on Sunday, effectively allowing Xi to remain at the helm of
Chinese politics for as long as he deems fit.
Ever since the 19th Party Congress in October 2017, Xi has been making moves to upend norms of collective leadership and succession that
were cobbled together after the excesses of the Mao Zedong era.
Xi’s rapid consolidation of power has led some to conclude that China is descending into an era of dictatorship, with an all-powerful
strongman in charge. Such claims, while not without basis, gloss over
the underlying nature of the CPC’s specific brand of authoritarianism
and the shifting dynamics of governance in modern-day China. Today,
despite all the accumulation of power, Xi, and even the party itself, is
far more vulnerable than is apparent.
One can, for the sake of convenience, classify these vulnerabilities into two broad, interlinked categories: structural and policy-level
threats. Ever since Xi took charge as the CPC General Secretary in late
2012, he has been working towards increasing the centralisation of
power. To achieve this, he restructured and centralised the policymaking
architecture of the party and unleashed a ruthless anti-corruption
campaign.
The former permitted him to have greater personal supervision over key policy areas. The latter, meanwhile, helped blunt opposing factions
and earn local and institutional compliance, through either the
demonstrable threat of coercive action or placement of key confidantes
in positions of authority.
The centralisation of political power in itself is not necessarily problematic or a threat to the regime’s stability. What matters is how
power is exercised, ie, whether it flows through a system of
institutions that place necessary checks and offer opportunities for
corrective action, or it is arbitrarily imposed on the elites and the
populace alike by the force of personality.
