Thursday, March 01, 2018

Xi Jingpin and the "Forces of History"


"That history [term limits] suggests that Beijing’s leaders are on what former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton once called a “fool’s errand”: trying to uphold a system of government that cannot survive in the modern era." Granted that Ms. Clinton is an expert on fool's errands, both she and this article are way off base. The mystical and unmeasurable "forces of history" are always trotted out to cover up ignorance of the real situation and to justify mere speculation as knowledge. China introduced term-limits in 1982 to stabilize and strengthen the political situation in the aftermath of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Nevertheless, Deng Xiaoping remained the "paramount leader" both in and out of office until his death in 1997. The real source of a leader's political power today is in the office of General Secretary of the CPC which is not subject to term limits. The change being proposed is purely cosmetic and all the hoopla in the Western press is nonsense. The stability of the Chinese government is due to the CPCs ability to properly perceive the economic and political realities of the modern world and to guide the Socialist project embarked upon with the triumph of the revolution in 1949.
China kept a half-century of global democratic growth at bay by at least nodding to the importance of institutions and rules. Now what?
NYTIMES.COM|BY MAX FISHER

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