Xi wants to be his country’s ‘unrivalled helmsman’ but what does this mean for China and the rest of the world?

What’s Xi up to?

By moving to abolish presidential term limits this week, Xi Jinping has obliterated any lingering doubts over his desire to remain China’s “unrivalled helmsman” for many years to come.

“Unless he’s deposed, we’ve got this guy for the rest of our functional lives,” predicts Orville Schell, who has been writing books on Chinese politics for more than four decades.

Why does Xi want to stay in power?

The obvious explanation is his apparent conviction that he, and only he, can make the ideologically lax, corruption-riddled Communist party – and China – great again. Xi took power in 2012 vowing to restore the Middle Kingdom to its rightful place at the centre of world affairs; last year he declared the advent of “a new era” of global Chinese might. He seems determined to see that project through.

But Xi’s resolve to remain may also be about self-preservation. He has purged, humiliated and jailed so many powerful foes that China’s best-known political prison is reportedly packed to the rafters. He may see everlasting power as the only way to prevent vengeful rivals one day condemning him to a similar fate.

“The fear would be that potentially, if his reign doesn’t continue, people would try to settle scores,” says Carl Minzner, the author of a new book on China’s “authoritarian revival”.
Are there upsides to China’s tack towards one-man rule?Possibly, depending on how much you value freedom. Some argue Xi’s supremacy will give him the authority he needs to vanquish rampant corruption and push through painful economic reforms. Others say it could benefit the rural poor, whose cause China’s populist leader has championed.

With a climate sceptic occupying the White House, there are even those who hope Xi will emerge as the world’s most despotic eco-warrior, a tree-hugging tyrant willing to use his authoritarian powers to save the planet.

“If you postulate that the world needs leadership, that America is in disarray and that Europe is a dish of loose sand, then maybe Chinese leadership has some virtues, particularly in areas like nuclear proliferation, climate change [and] pandemics,” says Schell. “Whatever you may think of his authoritarian kind of leadership, at least he can lead.”

What are the dangers?

For dissidents and liberals, already smarting from the harshest political crackdown in decades, the extension of Xi’s shelf-life is a nightmare. Qiao Mu, an exiled academic, said Xi’s move condemned refuseniks to a life of “darkness and fear”. 

But some also warn of calamitous consequences for the country as a whole, with contemporary Chinese history offering a potent lesson in the perils of one-man rule. Mao’s deranged push for industrialisation condemned tens of millions to their death during the Great Famine. A decade later, the Cultural Revolutionturned China on its head and devastated the economy.

Minzner is among those who fears a return to an era of “purges, political turmoil, and the writ of one man over everything”. Under Mao, Chinese politics was “like blood sport, where you really didn’t know what could happen to key people within the system from day to day”, he recalled, adding: “We had thought China was moving away from that.”

James Palmer, the author of The Death of Mao, said he also feared China would pay a heavy price for its sharp regression into “full-blown dictatorship”. “With power now concentrated in a single man, and with nobody willing to challenge him, the likelihood of calamitous mistakes has soared,” he warned in Foreign Policy.

So why hasn’t the international community condemned Xi’s power grab?

The lack of censure is probably in part the result of the west’s growing nervousness about upsetting an ever more powerful and prickly China for fear of hurting economic ties.

Minzner believes it also highlights the low regard in which most western governments already hold Beijing. “It would be different if some sort of democratic state cancelled elections [but] China was an authoritarian state to begin with, so there weren’t necessarily high expectations,” he says.

A third explanation, however, may be the global ascendancy of authoritarian regimes from Moscow to Manila. “When the high school history books are written, this is not going to be the Age of Enlightenment … it will be the Age of the Big Leader,” says Schell.

Seen through that prism, Xi’s confirmation as the strongest of the 21st century’s strongmen looks less like an aberration and more like a mode.