This past March, when Xi Jinping’s long-rumored intention to abolish presidential term limits finally materialized, thereby implanting him as dictator for life, many commentators expressed surprise. It even triggered some consternation among China hands in the US foreign-policy establishment. Foreign Affairs magazine published an article by two Obama-era Asia-policy officials Kurt Campbell and Ely Ratner, who declared that American foreign policy “has got China wrong” all along.1 US–China policy since Nixon’s 1972 visit has always been grounded, they averred, on the erroneous assumption that China’s turn to markets will also trigger a shift toward political liberalization. But Xi’s move to abolish presidential term limits seems to have killed any move toward liberalism.
The Liberal Illusion of China and its Discontents
To be fair, Xi’s abolition of presidential term limits only moves China back to the mainstream of authoritarian regimes around the world. Dictators rarely voluntarily retire — it usually takes death or a putsch of some kind to remove them. So when Deng Xiaoping introduced the two five-year term limit for presidents in the Constitution in 1982, it moved China away from the more common pattern of authoritarianism. At the peak growth era of the China Boom, the country was led by Jiang Zemin for ten years and by Hu Jintao for another ten. And under both presidents, competing factions of the CCP elite, many of whom were offspring of revolutionary leaders who helped found the People’s Republic and were dubbed “the princelings,” maintained a balance of power and divided up the dominant sectors of the economy among themselves.
This collective leadership model was long viewed by Western China watchers as an interim arrangement toward more political inclusion, opening, and liberalization. But in fact, it was more akin to feudal ruling arrangements in early modern Europe or domination by the oligarchs in Yeltsin’s Russia. As such, Xi’s abolition of term limits is more like an attack on the aristocracy by a centralizing monarch such as Louis XIV after the Fronde or Putin’s attack on the oligarchs. It is the recurrence of a perennial theme of the monarch vs the lords in autocratic regimes.
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