On August 22, as China marked the 115th birthday of Deng Xiaoping, the paramount leader who led China into the reform era, flowers were laid at the feet of a bronze statue of Deng in his hometown of Guang’an in Sichuan province. In some media, the birthday was an occasion to revisit Deng’s ideas and writings.
But a discussion soon bloomed across social media that the authorities found unacceptable, and a hasty wave of deletions across WeChat, Weibo and other platforms ensued.
The Party has decided to put an end to the virtually lifelong tenure of leading cadres, change the over-concentration of power and, on the basis of revolutionization, gradually reduce the average age of the leading cadres at all levels and raise their level of education and professional competence, and has initiated this process.
Reform of the political system was a key priority for China in the 1980s, and into the 1990s. The smooth handover of power to from Jiang Zemin to Hu Jintao in November 2002, and again to Xi Jinping in 2012, was regarded as a proof that the system of leadership succession and of collective leadership were being institutionalized, making real the limits on personal power that Deng Xiaoping had envisioned.
But in the less than seven years since Xi Jinping came to power, all of this progress seems to have unravelled. There is chatter enough in the halls to suggest that Xi’s dismantling of term limits in March 2018, through a constitutional amendment that was introduced without sufficient (or any) debate in the wake of the 19th National Congress of the CCP, has angered some with the Party, who are concerned that Xi now has too much power.
And of course, there have been plenty of signs that Xi has a tendency toward self-obsession and self-aggrandizement, that he envisions himself as a leader after the mold of Mao Zedong. For an illuminating, and amusing, look at this aspect of Xi’s personality, please revisit Qian Gang’s analysis of Xi Jinping’s signature.
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