China Moves to Let Xi Stay in Power by Abolishing Term Limit
February 26, 2018 by admin
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The Constitution now limits Mr. Xi, who became president in 2013, to two terms in that office, amounting to 10 years. But the party leadership has proposed removing the line that says the president and vice president “shall serve no more than two consecutive terms,” Xinhua, the official news agency, reported on Sunday.
By moving so early in his tenure, Mr. Xi, 64, is in effect proclaiming that he intends to stay in office well past 2023, overturning rules of succession in Chinese politics that evolved as the party sought stability following the power struggles to replace first Mao, and then Deng Xiaoping.
“Xi Jinping will certainly continue,” said Zhang Ming, a retired historian at Renmin University in Beijing. “In China, he can do what he wants to do, and this is just sending a clearer signal of that.”
Mr. Xi already serves as the party’s general secretary and the military chief, positions with no term limits.
“This is the next step in the continuing breakdown of political norms that had held sway in China’s reform era,” said Carl Minzner, a professor of law at Fordham University in New York and author of a new book on Mr. Xi’s increasing authoritarianism.
“What are the risks of these shifts?” Professor Minzner said. “In the short term, all the traditional dangers that arise from the excessive centralization of power in the hands of one person. But in the long term, the real question is how far the breakdown in political norms could go.”
Jiang Zemin, the leader who succeeded Deng, was installed during the Tiananmen protests of 1989 and served two terms as president from 1993 to 2003. But he lingered in power until 2004 by retaining control of the committee that runs China’s military.
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His successor, Hu Jintao, stepped down from all his positions after his two terms — an example that some experts had expected Mr. Xi to follow.
But as Mr. Xi’s first term comes to an end, few in China see much likelihood of his power being subdued anytime soon by rivals in the leadership elite.
“Xi is now unfettered. He owns the entire policy process,” Susan Shirk, the head of the 21st Century China Center at the University of California, San Diego, wrote in a forthcoming paper about politics under Mr. Xi. “And Chinese domestic and foreign policy is only as restrained or aggressive as he wants it to be. The risk of policy misjudgments is greater than it has been under any other leader since Mao died.”
During his first term, Mr. Xi pressed an aggressive campaign against corruption and dissent, a crackdown that has silenced potential rivals in the leadership. At the same time, many party elders, who once held intimidating influence, have died or are too old for political intrigue. Mr. Jiang is 91, and Mr. Hu, 75, has shown no appetite for taking on Mr. Xi.
On the Chinese internet, some people eluded the party’s censors and mocked Mr. Xi’s ambitions by sharing images like that of Winnie the Pooh — portly like Mr. Xi, and used by critics to represent him — hugging a huge jar of honey.
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But many people in China have applauded his campaign against official corruption. And harsh security measures make mass protests against a central leader nearly impossible. So any major public backlash against Mr. Xi’s move appears unlikely.
“I don’t see any reasonable challenges for him,” Wu Qiang, a political analyst in Beijing who formerly taught at Tsinghua University, said of Mr. Xi. “He has removed any potential political competitors. So far, there is no organized political competition for him.”
The proposed constitutional changes were released in the name of the Central Committee, a council of hundreds of senior party officials, who will meet starting on Monday for three days.
Mr. Xi had already built expectations that he would stay in office past two terms, and some analysts said he must have decided to move while at peak political strength. Usually, authority begins to ebb from Chinese leaders as retirement nears.
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“I can see where his thinking is that he’s riding high, he’s got the momentum, and took the initiative to ram this through,” said Jude Blanchette, an expert on Chinese politics in Beijing who works for the Conference Board, which provides research for companies. “Why risk diminished power three years from now if the economy tanks or there’s a conflagration with North Korea, and not have the ability to do it?”
In another victory for Mr. Xi, the draft amendments to the Constitution would add his trademark expression for his main ideas — “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era” — into the preamble of the Constitution, as well as adding a nod to the ideological contributions of his predecessor, Mr. Hu.
The proposed amendments would also authorize a new anticorruption commission that Mr. Xi has pushed. The commission would expand the reach of corruption investigations, which up to now have mostly been conducted by a Communist Party agency acting largely beyond the law.
The amendments are almost certain to be passed into law by the party-controlled legislature, the National People’s Congress, which holds its annual full session starting on March 5. The congress has never voted down a proposal from party leaders.
In what would be another break with tradition, Wang Qishan, a close ally of Mr. Xi in his campaign against corruption and disloyalty in the party, appears set to return to power as vice president. Mr. Wang, 69, stepped down from a party position last year because of his age.
The abolition of the term limit may also explain another recent move by Mr. Xi to send one of his closest advisers, Liu He, to Washington on Tuesday. While that trip had initially looked like an attempt to discuss the Trump administration’s tougher rhetoric on trade, it now seems likely to also be a mission to explain Mr. Xi’s plans to American leaders.
At the Communist Party national congress in October, Mr. Xi conspicuously broke with precedent by choosing not to name a pair of much younger officials to the Politburo’s ruling inner circle, the seven-member standing committee, to serve as his potential heirs. Instead, Mr. Xi chose men — no women — who were closer to his own age or older.
Mr. Xi’s strongman style has been compared to that of the Russian president. But even Mr. Putin did not try to erase his country’s constitutional limit on serving more than two consecutive terms as president when he approached that limit in 2008.
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Instead, he arranged for a close adviser, Dmitri A. Medvedev, to serve as president for a single term while Mr. Putin held the post of prime minister. Mr. Putin then returned to the presidency in 2012, and is running this year for re-election.
With Mr. Xi’s hold on power now seems unquestioned for the foreseeable future, the biggest question will be how he chooses to wield it.
“Xi Jinping is susceptible to making big mistakes because there are now almost no checks or balances,” said Willy Lam, an adjunct professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong who is the author of a 2015 biography of Mr. Xi. “Essentially, he has become emperor for life.”
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Can South Korea’s Leader Turn an Olympic Truce Into a Lasting Peace?
February 26, 2018 by admin
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Mr. Moon may see an opportunity in the surprise offer by the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, conveyed in person by Mr. Kim’s sister, to hold their first summit meeting in Pyongyang. Mr. Kim seized on Mr. Moon’s peace overtures before the Olympics to send his sister, Kim Yo-jong, to the opening ceremony and a large contingent of cheerleaders and athletes to the Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea.
But Mr. Moon also knows he must convince the Americans to give him a chance. In a sign of how hard that will be, and how deeply the United States and North Korea distrust each other, Mr. Pence, who was Washington’s envoy to the opening ceremony, and Ms. Kim would not even look at each other despite being seated only a few feet apart.
On Friday, Mr. Moon argued for a South Korean-brokered peace and for the United States-North Korea talks when he met with President Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump, who arrived to attend the Games’ closing ceremony. He told her he wanted to improve ties “in parallel” with efforts to denuclearize the North.
Analysts said that once the Olympics ended, Mr. Moon would be left to sort out how much of the North’s so-called charm offensive, in which it refrained from provocations like missile tests, could last.
“South and North Korea used the Olympics to use each other,” said Yoo Dong-ryul, director of the Korea Institute for Liberal Democracy in Seoul. “The South was desperate to ease tensions. The North wanted to soften its image and weaken international sanctions. Now comes the hard part for Moon, after the Olympics.”
Without a solution to the nuclear issue, relations between the two Koreas “will eventually revert to the same crisis mode before the Olympics,” Mr. Yoo said.
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So far, Washington and Pyongyang seem unable to talk. The North Koreans, including Mr. Kim’s sister, canceled a meeting with Mr. Pence in Pyeongchang after he refused to soften his criticisms of the North’s weapons and human rights.
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North Korea seeks to be accepted as a nuclear power and win economic concessions in return for not advancing its nuclear programs any further, analysts say. But the United States insists it will never enter any serious negotiations or ease sanctions until the North commits itself to nuclear disarmament.
Over the weekend, Mr. Trump announced harsh new sanctions against North Korea and warned of tougher measures if the North fails to relinquish its nuclear arsenal.
The hard line out of Washington has stood in conspicuous contrast with the more conciliatory gestures from Seoul.
David Straub, a former American diplomat who is now a fellow at the Sejong Institute in South Korea, said there were rising frustrations in Washington that Mr. Moon was “apparently working at cross purposes with the Trump administration’s effort to apply ‘maximum pressure’ on North Korea.”
This “could result in a serious clash of wills between the two allied leaders,” Mr. Straub said. “If the Trump administration or the Moon administation does not change its fundamental position, the odds are increasing that relations between the two will worsen.”
Mr. Moon, a dogged advocate of dialogue with the North, had spent the last year helplessly watching the Korean Peninsula edge toward active war, as the North test-launched intercontinental ballistic missiles and conducted its most powerful nuclear test, and Mr. Trump threatened to rain down “fire and fury” on North Korea.
Desperate to avoid a possible military conflict, Mr. Moon seized upon the Pyeongchang Games to craft what some analysts called an “Olympic truce.”
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“It dramatically lowered the pitch of tension on the Korean Peninsula, replacing tests, threats and tweets with face-to-face talks, and it restored Seoul as a key player in the game,” said John Delury, a North Korea expert at Yonsei University in Seoul.
The question, Mr. Delury said, is the extent to which the Trump administration is willing to let South Korea be a mediator with the North, especially as expectations in Washington have dwindled that the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, can persuade the North to disarm.
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Some Trump administration officials said the United States had to accept that there was now a viable diplomatic channel between North and South Korea, and figure out how to use it for American goals. The first step, according to these officials, is for the administration to settle on a more consistent message toward North Korea.
The United States has veered in recent weeks from expressing openness to diplomacy to reiterating threats of military action if the North does not curb its nuclear and missile programs. The net effect, according to analysts, has been to confuse both North and South Korea.
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White House officials will also have to decide how to react if the inter-Korean diplomacy accelerates. The Trump administration is determined not to make undue concessions to North Korea, a mistake it says both Democratic and Republican presidents have made. On the other hand, if the United States takes too hard a position, analysts said it could prompt Mr. Moon to conclude that the Americans will never come around.
That could prompt Mr. Moon to set off on his own, isolating the United States by driving away one of its most important allies in Asia, which could end up drifting closer to China.
“Once the ball gets rolling, it’s very hard to stop, in large part because Seoul and Beijing want talks so badly,” said Evan S. Medeiros, a managing director at Eurasia Group who was a senior Asia adviser to President Barack Obama.
Analysts said Mr. Moon was trying to get that forward momentum by seizing on this chance to move the peninsula toward peace with South Korea in the driver’s seat.
“Moon Jae-in is not a naïve waif,” said Gordon Flake, the chief executive of the Perth USAsia Center at the University of Western Australia. “The South Koreans are desperately seeking to change the trajectory, which was leading to a conflict, and at the same time to do that while not giving too much space between them and the United States.”
For both the Trump and Moon administrations, the first big test will be what to do about joint United States-South Korean military exercises that were postponed during the Olympics and the Paralympics, which will take place from March 9 to 18.
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North Korea has indicated that it will restart weapons tests if the drills resume, scuttling Mr. Moon’s efforts to broker a peace.
Conservatives in both South Korea and the United States fear that anything less than the full resumption of the war games would only advance the North’s ultimate goal of ridding the peninsula of the American military presence, which they say the South needs for protection.
But progressive South Koreans who support Mr. Moon would most likely see a push by Washington to resume the exercises as “throwing cold water over the South’s Olympic party,” and as an effort to derail Mr. Moon’s push for inter-Korean rapprochement, said Lee Byong-chul, senior fellow at the Institute for Peace and Cooperation in Seoul.
South Koreans who attended Olympic events were cautious about how much the Olympic diplomacy could accomplish.
Yeon Ju-lee, 21, who recently watched a joint Korean team in women’s ice hockey, said she felt relieved that the North’s participation in the Olympics was easing fears of possible war. But, she said, actual political unification “will take a long time.”
Another spectator, Lee Hae-man, 62, said recent developments were promising “because we are all one family together, North and South.”
“I will feel very betrayed if Kim Jong-un goes back to missile tests,” he added.
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