Xi Jinping engineers change to make himself president for life

President Xi Jinping is changing China’s constitution to enable him to stay in ­office indefinitely.

Chinese President Xi Jinping. Picture: AFP

President Xi Jinping has seized the day — having crushed all potential domestic rivals and critics — and is changing China’s constitution to enable him to stay in ­office indefinitely.

The central committee of the Communist Party of China has proposed that the National People’s Congress, the country’s parliament, will remove from the constitution the requirement that the president and vice-president “serve no more than two consecutive terms” of five years.

The NPC, whose annual session was to start yesterday, invariably endorses any proposal that comes from the ruling party.

Mr Xi’s prime role is general secretary of the party, which he ­attained in 2012, leading to his formal appointment as President of the country by the NPC the following year.

At its five-yearly congress four months ago, the party enshrined his “thought on socialism with Chinese characteristics for a new era” into its own constitution, elevating him to a higher status than any leader since Mao Zedong.

At that congress, Mr Xi’s hand-picked team of six colleagues as members of the standing committee of the Politburo — China’s most powerful leadership group — did not contain any person of the appropriate age or seniority to succeed him.

This led many to forecast that he intended to continue in power beyond the next party congress, in late 2022.

That expectation has now been underlined in the forthcoming change to the constitution that will enable him also to remain President.

That is the title that provides him with the prestige and protocol to be accorded maximum respect as he travels internationally on his great new mission to elevate China towards succeeding the US as the world’s greatest power.

Many also anticipate that his close ally Wang Qishan, who stepped down from the Politburo standing committee last year due to the party’s convention on retiring at 68, will be named vice-president during the NPC meeting. This NPC meeting will also introduce a new nationwide Super­visory Commission, which, operating separately from the ­judicial system, will impose on every government employee a similar “anti-corruption” regime to the one party members have faced under Mr Xi.

This is intended to test and to guarantee the loyalty of the entire apparatus to the leadership.

This leadership is now structured — in a manner known only briefly before during the CPC’s 69-year rule, during the Cultural Revolution unleashed by Mao — around a single, absolutely dominant figure.

Mr Xi has already re-engineered the country’s policy formation around “leading small groups” whose membership he picks, as well as chairing the most important six on key issues ranging from domestic and international security to the internet and economic reform.

Mr Xi is an apparently fit 64-year-old, who clearly now anticipates remaining in unchallenged and unchallengeable power for at least another decade.

This would see him preside over the 70th ­anniversary of the party’s seizure of control of China, and the centenary of the party in 2021.

Willy Lam, politics professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, told the news agency Agence France-Presse: “He will become emperor for life … If his health permits, he wants to serve 20 years, which would mean until 2032 as secretary-general of the party, and 2033 as state president.”

Mr Xi’s predecessors Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao set a pattern of two terms each as party general-secretary and president of the country.

But Mr Xi has already broken the mould in many ways, pushing aside all barriers to his personal control, perceiving himself as ­embodying the party that embodies, as he sees it, all that is best in China’s past, present, and in its ­future aspirations.