Chinese dictator Xi Jinping can only have a third term because he changed the rules of the game. Until 2018, directors were required to retire at age 68, after serving a maximum of two five-year terms. Xi amended the constitution and will be able to remain in power in China even though he is 69 years old.
On October 16, the Communist Party will hold its 20th congress. In this event, the government usually re-elects or changes the occupants of the main seats, as well as formalizing the name of the head of state – who is, at the same time, head of the party and of the army.
Looking forward to the next five years, Xi announced at the end of July that the next term will be economically “critical”. “It will be necessary to focus on the problem of unbalanced and insufficient development,” he declared. “Our country will be faced with risks and challenges, as well as contractions and more complicated problems than we had before. We must prepare for the worst.”
In November last year, Xi Jinping announced that he needed to save the Communist Party from the liberal waves through an “iron fist”. This is how he proposes to resolve this disastrous economic situation, resulting from an unsuccessful Zero Covid policy, economic growth that declines year by year and the threat to the soy route – formerly called “China’s project of the century”.
Dictator prepares third term and is already thinking about fourth
Xi’s project does not stop there. According to Willy Lam, an expert on the Chinese political system, the dictator is already looking forward to a fourth term, from 2027 to 2032, when he will be 79 years old. “On the other hand, by then Xi will have to share some government seats with his political rivals,” Lam anticipates in an article published by the Jamestown Foundation, a think tank from United States.
Despite the country’s communist party’s lack of transparency, experts predict that, for the term that runs until 2027, the change will be less radical, but still important in the Chinese political scene. Cheng Li, a researcher on Beijing, published in the American magazine Brookings Institution that “about two-thirds of the 376 members of the central committee, half of the 25 members of the political cabinet and the seven members of the standing committee will be new staff”.
Apart from the changes engineered behind the scenes, it has already become public that the Prime Minister, Li Keqiang, will step down, as he announced earlier this year. Favorable to the market economy, Keqiang often counterbalances the extreme state interventionism imposed by Xi Jinping.
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