Since China’s Communist Party unveiled plans to let Xi Jinping remain president indefinitely, delegates to the national legislature have gushingly likened him to a Buddhist saint or the world’s longest-serving monarch
BEIJING — Since China’s Communist Party unveiled plans to let Xi Jinping remain president indefinitely, delegates to the national legislature have gushingly likened him to a Buddhist saint or the world’s longest-serving monarch.
Their devotion translated into a near-unanimous vote on Sunday to scrap presidential term limits and approve other constitutional changes to entrench Xi and his Communist Party’s dominance over Chinese life.
The vote, a formality for a congress dominated by Xi’s ruling party, stripped away an institutional check against one-man rule installed after the 1976 death of Mao Zedong, whose autocratic rule was marked by policy disasters and bloody power struggles.
It brought presidential tenures in line with Xi’s other, more powerful, posts of party chief and military-commission chairman, which aren’t subject to formal term limits.
