from president to China’s new dictator? The country is at at a dangerous
from president to China’s new dictator?
The country is at at a dangerous moment after the president’s bid to extend his rule
Yao Shuping has understood the perils of one-man rule ever since teenage fanatics came for her mother in the summer of 1966.
It was “Red August”, and as Chairman Mao plunged China into a decade of carnage, Red Guards stormed He Dinghua’s home, ransacking the apartment, shearing off her hair and pummelling her with a nail-studded plank. Finally, they slit the housewife’s throat, condemning her to the mortuary of Beijing’s Number Six People’s Hospital where, days later, her daughter found her corpse as it was carted off for cremation.
“She left this world … her feet bare and blue, her heart filled with terror,” Yao, then 26, recalled in a written account of her mother’s ordeal at the start of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. “It never once occurred to her that she would be sent to her death by the ruthless struggle launched by the great man she worshipped.”
Memories of those murderous years have resurfaced with the shock announcementthat China’s current leader, Xi Jinping, is seeking to set himself up as ruler for life by abolishing presidential term limits. These rules were written into China’s constitution in 1982 – six years after Mao’s death – precisely to guard against the kind of personality-led lunacy that destroyed Yao’s family, and so many others.
“To build the fate of a country on the renown of one or two people is very unhealthy and very dangerous,” warned Deng Xiaoping, Mao’s successor and the man behind the political reforms.
“Deng would not tolerate the cult of personality that Mao happily indulged in,” Ezra Vogel wrote in his 2011 biography of the founder of Chinese state capitalism. “Virtually no statues of Deng were placed in public buildings and virtually no pictures of him hung in homes.”
After five years of relentless political purges and arrests, few harbour any illusions about Xi’s authoritarian inclinations. China’s 64-year-old leader has waged war on dissenters, both inside and outside the Communist party, in a drive to establish total control, crushing civil society and jailing rivals to ensure his coronation as China’s most powerful leader since Mao at last year’s party congress.
Even so, for those who witnessed and suffered the excesses of Mao’s megalomania, Xi’s power grab – which paves the way for him to lead China well into the 2030s – has proved a step too far, leaving them fearful their country is slipping back towards its tumultuous past.
“This is a very dangerous moment in China,” warned Yao, who is now 78. “Nobody thought he would take this step – but he did … It is a very, very bad situation.”
Yao, who has lived in the United States since 1989, is by no means the only one sounding the alarm.
Cheng Li, a prominent expert in Chinese politics who had previously accused some of drawing “premature conclusions” about Xi, said his decision “to revert the country … to the era of strongman politics and the personality cult” was a mistake. “The result may be a leadership split and political instability in China,” the Brookings Institution scholar warned in a recent essay.
There has been outrage, too, on the authoritarian mainland, even if tight political controls still restrict the overt response to whispers or coded online posts.
In perhaps the boldest public expression of dissent, Li Datong, a former newspaper editor, reminded the Communist party that it introduced term limits “after the immense suffering [wreaked] by the Cultural Revolution” and urged legislators to block the move when they convene in Beijing this week for their annual summit.
“This was the highest and most effective legal restriction preventing personal dictatorship and personal domination of the party and the government … It was also one of the most important political legacies of Deng Xiaoping,” Li protested in an open letter.
“China can only move forward on this foundation, and there is emphatically no reason to move in the reverse direction,” he continued. Abolishing term limits would plant “the seed once again of chaos in China, causing untold damage”.
One of the few prominent voices to come out in defence of Xi’s move – the editor of the party-run Global Times newspaper – dismissed Li’s critique.
“I don’t think there will be many people following him,” Hu Xijin tweeted. “Such a move won’t have an impact.” In a video commentary, Hu rejected criticism of Xi’s plan as the work of “sharply voiced” western journalists, whom he labelled “up-to-no-good attackers” set on stifling a rising China. “None of their vicious, ill-fated predictions against China will ever come true,” he vowed.
Beijing has also tried to minimise public anger, particularly among the educated urban elite, claiming there is popular support for the amendment. “I hope everyone can acknowledge the voice of all the Chinese people,” said foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang.
An editorial in the People’s Daily, the Communist party’s official mouthpiece, claimed the move was aimed at “modernising China’s system and capacity for governance”. Amendments to China’s constitution will ensure the long-term stability of the party and the country, it said.
Li Datong predicted they would have the opposite effect. In an interview with theObserver, the former journalist recalled how his family received relatively “mild” treatment during the Cultural Revolution: he was exiled to Inner Mongolia, while his father had his legs broken and was confined to a “cowshed” prison camp for over a decade.
“I can still remember the scene when a group of people came for my father. They stuffed a sock into my father’s mouth and took him away,” Li said. “Many others suffered far more than that. Families were ruined; people died … There is almost no one who was not affected by the Cultural Revolution.”
But Li said Xi’s power grab had left him concerned that China is now on the verge of an “even darker and more terrifying situation” than it faced during that period. Experts estimate that anywhere between 500,000 and two million people were killed in the Mao-era upheaval.
“How can you allow such a dictatorship to recur?” he asked pointing to Mao’s Anti-Rightist Movement and the Great Famine of the 1950s, when tens of millions starved to death in the dictator’s deranged push for breakneck industrialisation. “Limitless power will lead to a situation like that.”
Li insisted he did not fear the consequences of speaking out, although he had heard that the author of a similar petition had been visited by police. “I’m not afraid. If I was afraid, I wouldn’t have spoken out over this,” he said. “My letter didn’t break the law. A citizen expressing his or her opinion is the most natural thing. If anyone regards my letter as illegal, then they should just come straight to me and talk to me.”
But Zhou Fengsuo, a California-based dissident who fled China following the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, said he admired Li for daring to challenge Xi. “This is definitely a very difficult and challenging time for the freedom fighters and the dissident community. Even within the Communist party I think people are afraid to raise any objections.”
Roderick MacFarquhar, author of the seminal Mao’s Last Revolution, said he and many other foreign China specialists had long suspected that Xi, who took power as party general secretary in 2012, would seek to remain president beyond the originally anticipated decade.
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