Xi Jinping Consolidates Power
Xi Jinping became General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party in November 2012 and president the following March, and proceeded to concentrate power more completely than any Chinese leader since Mao. He inherited a system Deng Xiaoping had deliberately designed against strongman rule: collective leadership, term limits, a rough separation between party and state, and a succession pattern in which each leader served two five-year terms and a successor was visible in advance. The handover to Xi was itself unsettled by the Bo Xilai affair, in which a rival Politburo member fell after his wife murdered a British businessman. Xi launched an anti-corruption campaign within weeks that ran for a decade and disciplined over a million officials, including a former security chief and two vice-chairmen of the Central Military Commission. It addressed a genuine and destabilising problem and removed a great many people who might have obstructed him. He restructured the military, chaired the leading small groups that took policy out of the State Council, and had his ideology written into the party constitution in 2017 under his own name — an honour previously given only to Mao while living. The presidential two-term limit was removed from the state constitution in March 2018. He took a third term in 2022 with a Politburo Standing Committee composed entirely of his own appointees. Under him the party has tightened control over private business, civil society, Hong Kong and Xinjiang, and abandoned the low-profile foreign policy Deng had advised. Growth has slowed markedly and the property sector has been in crisis since 2021. Whether the concentration of authority has made the system more capable or more brittle is the central question about contemporary China, and no successor is visible.
- Year: 2012 CE
- Category: Political
