Better than Mao. Xi is in his third term

No other leader of communist China, including Mao Zedong, held the formal title of head of state for more than 10 years.

Xi Jinping has surpassed Mao Zedong himself. The General Secretary of the Communist Party of China has been re-elected for a third presidential term for the first time in Chinese history. No other leader of communist China, including Mao Zedong, held the formal title of head of state for more than 10 years.

The constitution was changed

On March 10, representatives of the National People’s Congress unanimously re-elected 69-year-old Xi Jinping to the position of leader of China for a third five-year term. Elections of the head of state are held in the plenary session by secret ballot. Xi’s candidacy was overwhelmingly approved.

Xi Jinping became the first Chinese president to be re-elected for a third five-year term. Until 2018, the tenure of this post was limited to two terms. Subsequently, the Chinese Constitution was amended to remove these restrictions.

A few months ago, on October 23, 2022, Xi Jinping was re-elected as General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), also for an unprecedented third term. He also retained the position of head of the Central Military Council of China, which is responsible for the leadership and unified command of all the country’s armed forces.

The last person to lead the Communist Party for so long was Mao Zedong, who served as head of the CPC Central Committee from 1945 until his death in 1976. However, Mao was formally the leader of the PRC for only ten years – when 1949-1959. Xi has led the country since March 2013.

Wonderful departure

Xi’s re-election is the culmination of a remarkable rise from a relatively unknown party apparatchik to the leader of a global superpower.

The publication wrote that after the dictatorial rule of Mao Zedong, China “shunned unilateral rule for decades” in favor of a more consensual, even autocratic, model of leadership. This model imposed time limits on the chief ceremonial role of the president: two of Xi’s predecessors, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, stepped down after 10 years in office.

However, Xi Jinping ended these rules by removing the term limit for the country’s leader in 2018. His current “coronation” means that Xi is laying the groundwork to remain in power the longest modern leader of China and will rule the country at the age of more than 70 years, if he is healthy and if not challenged by another contender for power.

Way Xi

In his youth, Xi showed no indication of a career as the head of one of the world’s most powerful authoritarian regimes. He was refused admission to the Chinese Komsomol nine times – the petition was granted only on the 10th attempt, in 1974. The fact is that the father of the future party leader, Xi Zhongxun, was a revolutionary, a prominent figure in first generation of communist regime leaders and a staunch supporter of Mao Zedong; but in the 1960s he was removed from his post as vice chairman of the State Council of the People’s Republic of China and arrested several times on political charges. After his father fell out of favor, 15-year-old Xi was sent for “labor re-education” to one of the country’s poorest provinces, Shaanxi. After a few months, tired of the unbearable conditions, the teenager fled to Beijing, but he was arrested and sent back. For almost seven years he had to live in a cave without a proper bed and toilet.

The situation improved in the 1970s, when Xi himself was accepted into the party, and the reformer Deng Xiaoping rehabilitated his father. In the following years, Xi Zhongxun actively participated in the establishment of the market system in the south of the country as the head of Guangdong Province. His son graduated from the Chemistry and Technology Department of the prestigious Tsinghua University in the capital, after which he successively held various administrative positions and climbed the party career ladder.

Former US Ambassador to China Terry Branstead served as Governor of Iowa in 1985 when Xi visited the state to study modern farming methods. The American politician remembered the Chinese boy as a shy person. Since the mid-1980s, Xi has held various leadership positions in Fujian Province. In 2000, he was appointed its governor, and two years later he became a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party under the new President of China, Hu Jintao.

When, in 2018, Chinese politician and Mao Zedong’s personal secretary, Li Rui, was asked about meeting Xi Jinping in the early 2000s, he recalled being struck by the interlocutor’s low level of education. At that time, the future leader of China had already completed postgraduate studies in the specialty of Marxist theory and ideological and political education, and also received a doctorate in law.

In 2007, Xi headed the Shanghai branch of the Communist Party, and the following year he was elected Vice President of the People’s Republic of China. Fighting for the status of a potential successor to Hu Jintao, Xi had to endure competition from the populist Bo Xilai, who was later accused of corruption and expelled from the party.

In September 2012, shortly before Xi’s expected appointment as party general secretary, the favorite for the position unexpectedly disappeared within two weeks. There were rumors that he was wounded or the victim of a conspiracy, but in November, Xi was expected to be named party leader.

Most analysts believe that during Xi’s absence, he gave an ultimatum to senior communists: either they will give him the coveted position, or they will find an entirely new candidate. Fearing instability, members of the party’s elite preferred to cede control to the proven Xi. In the early 2010s, colleagues viewed him as a malleable bureaucrat with no source of power of his own and a potentially useful figure for further rapprochement with the US.

“When Xi came to power, everyone in Beijing tried to check him, contacted people who worked with him in Fujian and Zhejiang,” said Desmond Shum, a businessman and author of the book “Red Roulette” about the local political elite, who left China. “The general opinion is that he is a narrow-minded man with no outstanding qualities and that under him business will be conducted in the same way as before.”