The Chinese Communist Party has proposed making a change to China’s constitution to remove the current 10-year limit on the president’s term in office, opening the door for Xi Jinping to continue his rule well beyond 2023, The Guardian reports.
The state newswire, Xinhua, announced the change in a terse 36-word statement on Sunday. Now that it has been made public, the constitutional amendment is almost certain to be confirmed in next month’s government meeting in Beijing.
“It’s an unequivocal signal that Xi Jinping has designs to stay on past 2023. I don’t think there is any other way to read it other than the four-decade long project that Deng Xiaoping initiated to set hard term limits on power to make sure that a Mao figure never came back is being dismantled,” Jude Blanchette, an expert on Chinese politics from the US research group Conference Board, told The Guardian.