Why is "president for life" in China such a big deal?

Question

"Great Leap Backward" was the title announcing the term limit removal in China. This BBC article tells us more about this:

The constitution has been altered to allow Xi Jinping to remain as president beyond two terms and they would not have gone to this much trouble if that was not exactly what he intended to do.

I am wondering why it is this so important.

Putin is de facto leader for more than 3 mandates (not much big difference from "for life") and I do not remember to be illustrated so harshly:

Commentators, analysts and some politicians[7][8][9][10] concurred in 2008 and early 2009 that the transfer of presidential powers that took place on May 7, 2008, was in name only and Putin continued to retain the number one position in Russia's effective power hierarchy, with Dmitry Medvedev being a figurehead or "Russia’s notional president".

Also, China seems to be less active than Russia regarding external conflicts nowadays.

Question: Why is "president for life" in China such a big deal?

Answer 1

Putin is de facto leader for more than 3 mandates (not much big difference from "for life") and I do not remember to be illustrated so harshly

Consider revisiting your news sources somewhat. There was an international outcry at the time (in the West anyway), because he had the constitution changed to stay in power.

Plus, whataboutism is a logical fallacy.

Why "president for life" in China is such a big deal?

Because as undemocratic as the regime may have been in recent decades, it has had a somewhat inexplicable knack for having one or two term dictators rather than a series of dictators for life like North Korea. Some (many?) fear that this change might be a return to the Mao days. Which might be sort of fine to outsiders if you're a backward developing country, but not so inviting to outsiders when you're the second largest economy in the world and the main US trading partner.

Answer 2

There will be others wanting power in China. If the President has a 10 year maximum term then those others can hope to gain power keeping out of trouble, biding their time, building networks of support. I.e. playing the usual political games.

If the President cannot be removed by constitutional means, then the only way for him to be removed is extra-constitutional means.

This is a big deal in both Russia and in China. But in China there has been a change of the rules, and so it is currently receiving greater focus and attention. Putin achieved his status by stealth, gradually eliminating credible opposition, using interpretations of the constitution rather then changing it.

Previous Chinese leaders with this kind of power include Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. We may recall the kind of human rights record that these leaders had.

Answer 3

Why "president for life" in China is such a big deal?

— Because the increasing shift towards a dictatorship state¹ may trigger a chain of uncontrolled events that, in turn, would undermine the Western investments and the international trade.

---

TL;DR

The logic is fairly simple:

1. In any country, the government is a mixture of various groups of influence;
2. Individuals (or small groups) tend to make mistakes, but the looming risk of losing power make the ruling faction to listen up to the opposition: to the electors if there are elections, or at least, to the opposition factions existing in the same political party; this is how, basically, the self-regulation works everywhere;
3. The absence of the opposition makes mistakes unnoticed; One obvious example, the nationalization of foreign assets can be very tempting, or a political/military demarche would lead to sanctions imposed;

4. For years, China was considered an undemocratic country, and this almost zeroed its trade with the West. However,

   Throughout the 1980s, the normalization of political relations between the two countries and China’s economic reforms paved the way for acceleration in the American-Chinese transfer of goods, values, ideas, personnel, and technology. — source.

   Here's how it looks like:

   

In 1978 the total value of China’s import and export was only 20.6 billion U.S. dollars […]
In 2010 the total value of China’s import and export reached 2.974 trillion U.S. dollars, 144 times as much as that in 1978 […]
— The State Council of the People's Republic of China

---

Summary

To a great extent, the growth of the Chinese international trade is a result of political and economic reforms in China.

Stepping back would impose numerous risks to the international companies who build their business around the trade with China. Therefore, they consider such a drastic constitutional change a "Great Leap Backward", straight to 1980's.

That's why it's a big deal.

---

¹ — it does not actually matter whether or not this constitutional change makes China a dictatorship. It only matters how the businesses perceive it.

Answer 4

Russia is a democracy (at least nominally). Vladimir Putin could lose a race for the presidency. Xi Jinping will not have to face this at more than the most nominal level. This is not to say that there is no way for him to leave office short of death, but if he does leave, it won't be as a result of public voting. He would leave by some form of coup.

Putin had to leave power and then ran again without incumbency. He followed the existing rules, established prior to his presidency to do so. There is some reason to think that Dimitry Medvedev was more independent than Putin would have preferred (although not everyone agrees). This is noteworthy because it is more difficult to run for an open seat than as a challenger. Of course, Putin was a special case. Xi Jinping won't have to do this, as China is changing the rules.

The outcry against Putin occurred when he left office. Because it was clear almost immediately that he intended Medvedev to be only a puppet, to continue to run Russia, and that he would resume the presidency once constitutionally allowed. By the time that Putin actually resumed the office, the outrage had mostly been exhausted. By contrast, right now is the first that anyone realized Xi Jinping's intent. Presumably the actual moment when he should have left office (under the old rules) will pass with less outcry.

Answer 5

Last year, we saw a shift in attitude toward China in part due to the recognition that China is more nationalist than thought. This article from the globalist publication The Economist posits this clearly - the West got China wrong. Xi Jinping is a part of this - he's more of a nationalist than globalists thought. I write globalists because American, German, British and other nationalists actually cautioned that this was always true about the Chinese leader and its communist party - it has its own interests in mind (the AIIB bank, belt and road initiative, etc were all part of this).

The reason that Xi Jinping being a leader for life is a big deal is that it prevents Westerners from any political interference or infiltration. Take for instance the American interference in Russian elections

As soon as Bill Clinton assumed the White House in 1993, his experts discussed “formulating a policy of American tutelage”, including unabashed partisan support for President Boris Yeltsin. “Political missionaries and evangelists, usually called ‘advisers’, spread across Russia in the early and mid-1990s,” notes Cohen: many were funded by the US government. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national security adviser, talked of Russia “increasingly passing into de facto western receivership”.

How can the West do this with China if there is one leader? The one-party system already makes this harder, combine that with one leader, and Chinese nationalism (and later imperialism as their foreign bases in Africa foreshadow) is here to stay for at least the next century and maybe longer.

This is neither positive or negative about China or globalists or nationalists, though readers may perceive bias due to their own views. The reality is that nations have interests and they will play whatever set of cards to convince others they don't have those interests until it's time to disclose their real intent. This is why the Western media turned harsher on China the past two years - some are starting to recognize the rising Chinese nationalism.

Of course, it was Sun Tzu who said "the unpredictable win, the predictable lose."

Answer 6

I am also surprised that it is such a hassle.

China was always called a dictatorship by the West (or more nicely "authoritarian") and China still scores low on the Democracy Index. I don't see such a difference between a dictatorship with one leader or a dictatorship with several consecutive leaders. In the end the situation in a dictatorship really depends on how human the current highest leader is and not at what rate the leadership changes.

Given the comments that Russia already allows president for lifetime and this is no defense: While the President of Germany has also a limit of two consecutive terms each five years, the German Constitution also has no limit for being Chancellor which is the most powerful position in Germany. Merkel can legally be elected again and again until she dies.

So while it is not common in the Western world, it does exist.

Answer 7

It is not a big deal. China will still use the same process for choosing their leader as it has for the past 40 years. The only minor change is that China can now choose the same person as their leader more than twice.

• How to become a president in China (compared to the US and Britain) video

• How the Chinese Communist Party rules infographic

We should really be asking how democratic it is to limit the number of times that the voters in the West can elect the same person. Is this limit just a way to prevent a leader from becoming too "popular" by doing something that would be good for the majority and bad for the Western elites (the wealthiest 0.01%)?

Answer 8

Recall Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was "president for life" of the United States for three terms and part of a fourth until his death: throughout the Great Depression and the Second World War. He was physically disabled and known to use a wheelchair in office, although he did not want to be defined or identified by this condition.

Presidential term limits were not imposed by the Constitution in the U.S. until after FDR's death.

Chinese President Xi Jinping is a head of state in a hostile world. To call him "president for life" is to acknowledge the fact that he faces the risk of assassination in office, among other many other factors that make this a "big deal."