The country is at a dangerous moment after the president’s bid to extend his rule
The country is at at a dangerous moment after the president’s bid to extend his rule
Yao Shuping has understood the perils of one-man rule ever since teenage fanatics came for her mother in the summer of 1966.
It was “Red August”, and as Chairman Mao plunged China into a decade of carnage, Red Guards stormed He Dinghua’s home, ransacking the apartment, shearing off her hair and pummelling her with a nail-studded plank. Finally, they slit the housewife’s throat, condemning her to the mortuary of Beijing’s Number Six People’s Hospital where, days later, her daughter found her corpse as it was carted off for cremation.
“She left this world… her feet bare and blue, her heart filled with terror,” Yao, then 26, recalled in a written account of her mother’s ordeal at the start of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. “It never once occurred to her that she would be sent to her death by the ruthless struggle launched by the great man she worshipped.”
Memories of those murderous years have resurfaced with the shock announcement that China’s current leader, Xi Jinping, is seeking to set himself up as ruler for life by abolishing presidential term limits. These rules were written into China’s constitution in 1982 – six years after Mao’s death – precisely to guard against the kind of personality-led lunacy that destroyed Yao’s family, and so many others.
“To build the fate of a country on the renown of one or two people is very unhealthy and very dangerous,” warned Deng Xiaoping, Mao’s successor and the man behind the political reforms.
“Deng would not tolerate the cult of personality that Mao happily indulged in,” Ezra Vogel wrote in his 2011 biography of the founder of Chinese state capitalism. “Virtually no statues of Deng were placed in public buildings and virtually no pictures of him hung in homes.”
After five years of relentless political purges and arrests, few harbour any illusions about Xi’s authoritarian inclinations. China’s 64-year-old leader has waged war on dissenters, both inside and outside the Communist party, in a drive to establish total control, crushing civil society and jailing rivals to ensure his coronation as China’s most powerful leader since Mao at last year’s party congress.
Even so, for those who witnessed and suffered the excesses of Mao’s megalomania, Xi’s power grab – which paves the way for him to lead China well into the 2030s – has proved a step too far, leaving them fearful their country is slipping back towards its tumultuous past.
“This is a very dangerous moment in China,” warned Yao, who is now 78. “Nobody thought he would take this step – but he did… It is a very, very bad situation.”
Yao, who has lived in the United States since 1989, is by no means the only one sounding the alarm.
Cheng Li, a prominent expert in Chinese politics who had previously accused some of drawing “premature conclusions” about Xi, said his decision “to revert the country… to the era of strongman politics and the personality cult” was a mistake. “The result may be a leadership split and political instability in China,” the Brookings Institution scholar warned in a recent essay.
There has been outrage, too, on the authoritarian mainland, even if tight political controls still restrict the overt response to whispers or coded online posts.
In perhaps the boldest public expression of dissent, Li Datong, a former newspaper editor, reminded the Communist party that it introduced term limits “after the immense suffering [wreaked] by the Cultural Revolution” and urged legislators to block the move when they convene in Beijing this week for their annual summit.
“This was the highest and most effective legal restriction preventing personal dictatorship and personal domination of the party and the government… It was also one of the most important political legacies of Deng Xiaoping,” Li protested in an open letter.
