The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has voted in favor of lifting the two-term constitutional limit for the president of the People’s Republic, a state-run media outlet said Sunday, paving the way for the country to remain in power of current leader Xi Jinping.
The central committee, a sort of parliament of the CCP, proposed to delete from the Chinese Constitution mention that a president “can not exercise more than two consecutive terms” of five years, said the agency China New. Xi Jinping the president of the People’s Republic since 2013, is expected to leave office in 2023.
Xi Jinping had to leave power in 2023
The CPC Central Committee also proposed to include “Xi Jinping Thought” in the country’s Constitution. These provisions should be submitted to Chinese parliamentarians at the annual plenary session of the National People’s Congress (NPA), which opens on March 5. At the nineteenth five-year congress of the CCP, which took place last October, Xi had already gotten to see his “Chinese-style thinking of the new era” included in the Party’s charter, an honor reserved until now. In his lifetime only Mao Tse-tung, founder of the communist regime in 1949.
Concentration of powers and muzzling of the opposition
Since joining the Party at the end of 2012, Xi Jinping has concentrated his powers on himself as no Chinese leader has done for at least a quarter of a century. He has started a fight against corruption, which has seen more than one million executives punished – but some see it as a means for the president to get rid of internal opposition. His presidency was accompanied by a return of the quasi-cult of personality around the president, omnipresent in the media, and a reinforcement of the repression aimed at defenders of democracy and human rights.