Opinion

China banking on its expansionist future by extending Xi’s presidency

Itumeleng Makgetla argues that China is taking a considered decision to extend to Xi Jinping’s presidency because of the Belt and Road Initiative.

Nearly 3,000 Chinese lawmakers were nearly unanimous in their approval on Sunday, 11 March, of changes to the state constitution that included removing the term limit on the presidency.

This year’s constitutional revisions received the highest approval rating for such a move since 1999, with the whole voting process also completed in record time. The last time China amended its constitution was in 2004, and it took almost two hours. With the use of technology, the lawmakers took less than an hour to pass what is considered the most ambitious revision to the country’s modern constitution since its first draft in 1982.

This year, the National People’s Congress (NPC) comprised 2,980 deputies representing China’s provinces, autonomous regions, centrally administered municipalities, the special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau, and the armed forces.

This political season was marred by a flurry of criticism in the West, pointing out that President Xi Jinping’s stay at the helm of the Chinese Communist Party and its government is a reminder of the fundamental instability of the Chinese autocratic system of government.

China watchers even went as far as to say that the indefinite extension of Xi’s tenure is tantamount to a power grab and that his elevation being reminiscent of Chairman Mao Tse-dung’s catastrophic Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution of 1966, which ended with grand scale casualties figures that are disputed by historians till this day.

However, Xi’s reign plays out at a time in Chinese history where the odds are in its favour–unlike Mao’s discombobulating coup against Chiang Kai-shek in 1975. Mao inherited the remnants of the 1911 Xinhai Revolution that ended with the abduction of the last emperor, Puyi, preceded by defeats at the hands of colonial Britain in the disastrous First Opium war of 1842, the Second Opium War of 1860 and yet another crushing defeat during the first Sino-Japanese War in 1895 and a Second Sino-Japanese War that crescendoed with the gruesome Nanjing Massacre that claimed the lives of more than 300,000 Chinese people in 1937.

For China, this period embodied by strife, gripping poverty, warlordism and really a century of humiliation.

On the contrary, Xi presides over the Middle Kingdom as the heir of the maturing economic policies initiated by Deng Xiaoping who was the paramount leader of the People’s Republic of China from 1987 until his retirement in 1989. Deng’s far-reaching market-economy reforms laid the foundation for China’s economic success story, with its economy expected to surpass that of the United States within the next decade.

The National People’s Congress passed the historic constitutional amendment to cement Xi’s rulership with 2,958 votes in favour, only two against, and three abstentions. One ballot was invalid and 16 deputies were absent from the elections. Since Mao’s death in 1979, no political personality can claim to have enjoyed popularity like Xi.

This move is in many ways motivated by Xi’s highly ambitious legacy project that is the “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI) that is included in the Chinese Communist Party’s constitution in 2017, the largest project since the Marshall Plan after the Second World War. This initiative is aimed at conjoining Asia, Europe and Africa, traversing through more than 68 countries and reducing time of shipment of goods from China to as far as Duisburg to 12 days from the two months it currently takes via the Strait of Malacca and through the Suez Canal.

Since President’s ascension to the Helm of the Chinese Communist Party in 2012, Xi has has made significant strides in cracking down on corruption, a menace that former President Hu Jintao saw as the greatest threat which faced the party during the end of his tenure in 2012.

Xi’s efforts to bolster the frontiers of China’s influence on the global platform are a long-term project that informs the decision to keep him in the top job. This is not contrary to China’s political philosophy, its cumbersome government places high premium on stability in both its internal policy and in dealing with other countries and regions across the globe.

Many western analysts tend to view Chinese political idiosyncrasies through a prism of Western norms and conventions, while the rise of China casts a shadow on the traditionally held beliefs that Western democracy is the best system of governance and the that the Western World is the panacea of modern civilization. Despite much criticism of the decision of the country’s lawmakers to retain Xi in his position indefinitely, China has a dynamic and responsive government that would likely change its mind should things go awry.

Itumeleng Makgetla
i.makgetla@politicalanalysis.co.za