Carl Minzner was quoted in a China Digital Times article about the current changing political landscape in China. China’s Communist Party recently announced that it intends to abolish term limits on the presidency, which will help President Xi Jinping stay in power indefinitely.
On Sunday, China moved to end a two-term limit on the Presidency, confirming long-standing rumors and clearing the way for Xi to rule the country for as long as he, and his peers, can abide. The decision marks the clearest expression of Xi’s core beliefs—his impatience with affectations of liberalism, his belief in the Communist Party’s moral superiority, and his unromantic conception of politics as a contest between force and the forced. Decades after Deng Xiaoping warned against “the leadership of a single person,” China is reëntering a period in which the fortunes of a fifth of humanity hinge, to an extraordinary degree, on the visions, impulses, and insecurities of a solitary figure. The end of Presidential term limits risks closing a period in Chinese history, from 2004 to today, when the orderly, institutionalized transfer of power set it apart from other authoritarian states.
“China emerged from the chaos of the Maoist era precisely because it moved away from one-man rule and toward collective leadership,” Carl Minzner, a China specialist at Fordham Law School, and the author of “End of an Era,” a new book on China’s authoritarian revival, told me. Even without meaningful popular voting, China’s political turmoil was curtailed by term and age limits and informal rules that require consensus. “Start pulling out those very building blocks on which the entire edifice is built, and what is China left with?” Minzner asked.