Today, Explained - President for Life

Episode Date: March 5, 2018

China's National People's Congress opened its annual two-week meeting today. The country’s parliament is expected to change China’s constitution to allow President Xi Jinping to abolish term limits. Sean Rameswaram speaks to Fordham professor Carl Minzner and The New Yorker’s Jiayang Fan to find out what it means that the leader of one fifth of the world's population just decided he’s never stepping down. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

My guess is you're going to brush your teeth later. You might want to try brushing with Quip. You can get an electric Quip toothbrush for just 25 bones. And if you go to getquip.com slash explained right now, you'll get your first refill pack free with a Quip electric toothbrush. G-E-T-Q-U-I-P dot com slash explained. Remember when candidate Donald Trump used to talk a lot of trash about China? They're making it impossible for our businesses, our companies to compete. They think we're run by a bunch of idiots.

And what's going on with China is unbelievable. That was then. This is now. China's great, and Xi is a great gentleman. He's now president for life. President for life. No, he's great. Look, he was able to do that.

I think it's great. Maybe we'll have to give that a shot someday. He's the most powerful president in 100 years, you know, personally, in 100 years in China. That's a recording CNN got a hold of, President Trump speaking at a private lunch at Mar-a-Lago on Saturday.

Hopefully he was joking. But over in China, Xi Jinping is not. Today, the Chinese parliament begins its big annual conference. The main event is a vote on term limits. Xi Jinping requested they go away, and everyone expects they'll be gone by Sunday. So what does it mean that the president of one fifth of all the human beings on planet earth just decided he's never stepping down? I'm Sean Ramos for M, this is Today Explained.

So it's not every day you elect a forever president. But China did in 2013, and didn't even know it until about a week ago. China's Communist Party preparing constitutional changes that would eliminate presidential term limits and allow President Xi to basically stay in power indefinitely. It sets Xi up to be the most powerful leader of China since Mao Zedong. If you want to take after Chairman Mao, you have to start early. Xi Jinping is what's known as a princeling. He is the closest thing to Chinese royalty,

which means that his father was one of the founding leaders of China. Zhang Yongfan writes about China for The New Yorker. His father was what's called an old party elder. He was head of the Chinese Communist Party's propaganda department. When he was purged under Mao, he was purged several times. He was then rehabilitated and rose again to a prominent Chinese office. But the experience, I think, must have taught Xi, his son, how volatile Chinese politics is. Xi Jinping subsequently took a much more low-key route to power when his fellow princelings were enjoying the privilege of living in Beijing.

He, at age 29, went down to the outer provinces, to Hebei, and became a minor party secretary, really kept his head down. At one point donated his Sudan, you know, rare privilege at the time for anyone to be having a car. And the fact that he had the political acumen not to use it himself, but to give it to party elders, gives you a sense of the kind of strategic politician that he was and is. And at that point, he gradually rose. He had a real knack for courting the right allies and removing political obstacles out of his way. And that's how he gradually became party leader of progressively larger cities and ultimately became the vice president of the country and then became the president.

And now, President for Life. But actually, Xi Jinping is about to be much more than just President for Life. Xi Jinping is the leader of China. He holds three different posts. Carl Minzner teaches people about China at Fordham Law School. One is the President of China, which is a state position. It's kind of like, it's more of a symbolic post head of state. The real power lies in the other two, which is as the general secretary of the Communist Party and as the head of the military. All that power makes Xi Jinping more emperor than president. And Carl says Xi's triple crown, state, party, military, is why his move to abolish term

limits is such a big deal. Five years ago, there was quite the logical expectation that what would happen would be that Xi Jinping would step down in 2022, 2023. With the removal of these term limits in the Constitution, that also sets up the likelihood, the extremely strong likelihood, that going forward, Xi Jinping is likely to serve in all three roles indefinitely into the future, which of course would be a significant reversal from recent practice since the beginning of China's reform era. So this is less like Bloomberg giving himself an extra term and more like Putin pretending to go away and then coming back, huh? That's exactly – well, but notice that you don't even have to come back.

You just stay on permanently. Right, but in this case, it's even better for – Right. I mean if you think about it, Putin even felt the obligation after his two terms were up to take the step of having Medvedev come in as president for five years. Yeah. But this is a situation where you're just changing the constitution to make it possible for you to stay on in the presidency. So Putin's the obvious example to compare Xi Jinping to. But how does the situation differ other than the fact that he didn't even

step away? I mean, how are they monopolizing power in the country similarly or differently? You have to remember where the PRC came from. I mean, for the first three decades of the People's Republic of China, from 1949 to 1978, we were in the Maoist era. OK. Power was highly concentrated in a single individual who cultivated a cult of personality. You know, the bureaucracy was roiled daily, weekly by internal struggles and purges. High officials would fall in and out of favor with Mao on a regular basis. The beginning of the reform era back in 1978 and early 1980s was an effort by Chinese leaders who were scarred by that experience to seek to put the Chinese political system on a more stable footing.

Sure, it still would be a one-party system, but it was going to be collective leadership instead of one-man rule. It was going to be bureaucratic norms rather than just whatever Mao happened to wake up and say in the morning. And I think one of the real risks that China faces, which is, you know, an important thing to pay attention to, is how much of some of those earlier problems and earlier instability might start to reemerge as China sort of begins to walk back towards the path of a more, you know, personalized authoritarian system. Huh. So they put in these term limits after Mao, no more dictators. How is Xi Jinping the first to try and abolish the term limits? Surely he wasn't the first leader since Mao to want to

stick around. Right. Well, I mean, that is an interesting question. And I think in comparison to his immediate predecessor, I mean, he's definitely wielded power in a stronger way. The question of how he managed to pull that off is a really interesting one. And, you know, if I was trying to provide my own answer to that, I would say it was a step by step progression of taking out his rivals one by one. I don't know if, you know, the audience might remember, but immediately after coming into office, there was a spectacular scandal in which Bo Xilai, one of these other

competitors for top power, ended up falling out of favor. Huge scandal involving the death of a British citizen. Tonight, we go to China, where there's a new development in the international murder case that has shaken the highest levels of the Communist Party. Arguably, in which his wife was implicated. And she sort of used that as the first effort to take out a political rival. The wife of Chinese politician Bo Xilai was charged with the murder of British businessman Neil Heywood. Bo had been a prominent Communist Party official, expected to rise to national leadership until his dismissal in March derailed his political career and threw the leadership in the country into turmoil.

After that, he then began to go after the security czar. Subsequent years, you started to see certain generals fall. So I think it was a very savvy step-by-step campaign where you begin to sort of take out one person and then mobilize support within a bureaucracy for going after that person. And then you say, well, then the next person has to go with this person. And at the end of a couple of years, lo and behold, you've created an atmosphere which once was collective leadership. Now you actually have managed to cow a lot of folks and impose your own stamp on what was a pretty, you know, divided and unruly party bureaucracy. And it's pretty impressive just, you know, from a tactical political sense,

how somebody could have pulled that off. Certainly five years ago, I would have said, well, you know, China's sort of a party oligarchy in which it's hard for any one person to, you know, manage to stand out. And he's managed to do that. And how about internationally? How does this look to China's neighbors? Well, I mean, you know, we're living in a world in which there's essentially an authoritarian revival worldwide. So, you know, maybe in the 90s, this would have caught a lot more people's attention. But if you look at Turkey, if you look at the United States,

if you look at the Philippines, you see some of these trends happening in a range of other countries as well. But China seems like the biggest deal. I mean, President Trump has this sort of seesaw love-hate thing going on, but he loves to frame China as our arch nemesis when it's convenient. Did some sort of Chinese threat just get bigger? You know, I'm not sure that the domestic shifts in China are directly linked towards the, you know, what it means for U.S. power. I think that's a little bit too far.

The thing I really worry about in this scenario is really what it means for the people of China itself. Because, you know, when we think about the reform era, which is now, in my opinion, ending, this unique period of rapid economic growth, relative political openness, ideological openness to the outside world, and partially institutionalized political norms, this was an era where China itself was attempting to emerge from the chaos of the Maoist era. And if you really sort of think of it in that historical perspective, you know, some of the risks of what it means,

the people who bear the risks of this are really the Chinese people themselves. Carl Minzner teaches at Fordham Law School, and he just published a book. It's called End of an Era, How China's Authoritarian Revival is Undermining Its Rise. Coming up in just a beat, why China getting rid of term limits is bad news for Winnie the Pooh. This is Today Explained. When it comes to your health, brushing your teeth is pretty important, and Quip is here to help.

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that's your first refill pack free at getquip.com slash explained. Spelled G-E-T-Q-U-I-P dot com slash explained. This is Today Explained. I'm Sean Ramos for them. There are lots of things you can't talk about on Weibo. Weibo is China's Twitter. It's a place where you can't talk trash about police, the army, the judiciary. But now, with President Xi Jinping's decision to stay in office as long as he wants, there's all sorts of new stuff that's being banned. They banned the word shameless.

Ditto for the letter N, because N could represent an infinite number, like an infinite number of terms in office. And also, Winnie the Pooh. Winnie the Pooh, Winnie the Pooh, cubby little cubby all scuffed with fluff, he's Winnie the Pooh. Exactly. Okay, good, good. Something like that, which I know sounds so crazy and obscure. This is Jiayin Feng from The New Yorker again. Winnie the Pooh has become an avatar for Xi because several years ago there was a picture of the more portly Xi walking alongside the slimmer Barack Obama and Xi looked like Winnie the Pooh and

Obama looked like Tigger. So ever since then, Winnie the Pooh has become a popular representation for Xi and he does not like that at all. What was it about the photo that made Xi Jinping look like Winnie the Pooh and President Obama look like Tigger? Well, Tigger is comparatively slimmer and taller. Oh, OK. And Winnie the Pooh has that adorable little belly that Xi has. He wasn't wearing like just a red T-shirt and no pants or something like that. Even in his very formal suit and tie, you could see just a little curve of his pot belly. But that goes to show the level of paranoia among Chinese censors and on any public conversation that could lead to criticism. And the party realizes how dangerous even the seeds of dissent can be.

From the lessons of 1989, this very bloody democracy student protest. Getting back to that in 1989, I mean, when you think about China in 1989, you obviously think of Tiananmen Square and these massive protests and this huge movement that seemed to capture the country. You don't see much of that right now as a reaction to Xi Jinping's announcement that they're abolishing term limits. Are people sort of resigned to this or are they happy with his administration? The Communist Party propaganda machine is very sophisticated at this point. And for the vast majority of the populace, what they're hearing through the loudspeakers or really what they're reading in the state-controlled newspaper is that this is a very good thing because it ensures political stability and the country gets to focus on more important tasks like defeating the U.S., its rival superpower, and becoming the only superpower in the world.

The propaganda machine wants to tell the people, is telling the people really, that Xi Jinping is the only man in China right now capable of leading the country through such a complicated transition to make China the center of the world again, where it rightfully belongs. Zhaoyang, I know you grew up in China. I know you haven't lived there in a minute. But do you have friends there who you've spoken to about this major development?

And how do they feel about it? I would say that my relatives, they're not terribly sophisticated people. They're in their 50s and 60s. You know, they really do buy what the government is selling, which is that this will only strengthen the country. People of our generation in China, especially in coastal cities who are college educated, there is apprehension and anxiety that his clampdown will continue, if not worsen, in the coming days and years. This is very daunting and certainly not good news. Zhaoyang Fan writes about China for The New Yorker.

I'm Sean Ramos-Famos from This Is Today Explained. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Bridget McCarthy, Noam Hassenfeld, and Luke Vander Ploeg produce the show. Afim Shapiro is our engineer, and the unlimited Breakmaster Cylinder makes music for us. Today Explained is produced in association with Stitcher, and we're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Please follow us on Twitter at today underscore explained. just $25. And if you go to getquip.com slash explained right now, you'll get your first refill pack free with a Quip electric toothbrush. G-E-T-Q-U-I-P.com slash explained.

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