[There are many reasons for such moves by Mr. Xi and others — including protecting their power and perks in an age of unrest, terrorism and war amplified by new technologies — but a significant one is that few countries have the standing or authority, morally or otherwise, to speak out — least of all, critics say, the United States.]
By
Steven Lee Myers
 |
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The
Communist Party is abolishing limits on presidential terms, effectively
allowing
President Xi
Jinping to lead China indefinitely. Credit Mark
Schiefelbein/Associated Press
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BEIJING
— There was a time, not so
long ago, when a Chinese leader setting himself up as ruler for life would have
stirred international condemnation for bucking the global trend toward greater
democracy. Now, such an action seems fully in keeping with moves by many
countries in the other direction.
The surprise disclosure on Sunday that the
Communist Party was abolishing constitutional limits on presidential terms —
effectively allowing President Xi Jinping to lead China indefinitely — was the
latest and arguably most significant sign of the world’s decisive tilt toward
authoritarian governance, often built on the highly personalized exercise of
power.
The list includes Vladimir V. Putin of
Russia, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt and Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, all
of whom have abandoned most pretenses that they rule according to the people’s
will. Authoritarianism is also reappearing in places like Hungary and Poland
that barely a quarter century ago shook loose the shackles of Soviet
oppression.
There are many reasons for such moves by Mr.
Xi and others — including protecting their power and perks in an age of unrest,
terrorism and war amplified by new technologies — but a significant one is that
few countries have the standing or authority, morally or otherwise, to speak
out — least of all, critics say, the United States.
“I mean, who is going to punish him
internationally now?” asked Susan L. Shirk, the chair of the 21st Century China
Program at the University of California, San Diego.
She and other experts described this
“authoritarian reversion” as a global contagion that has undermined the abiding
faith that forging liberal democracies and market economies was the surest path
to prosperity and equality.
“Thirty
years ago, with what Xi did, with what Erdogan has done, there would have been
an outpouring of international concern: ‘You’re getting off the path,’ and so
on,” said Michael A. McFaul, a political scientist and diplomat who, before
serving as the American ambassador in Moscow from 2012 to 2014, wrote
extensively on building democracies.
“Nobody is making that argument today,” he
added, “certainly not Trump.”
The White House on Monday brushed off
questions about Mr. Xi’s move. “I believe that’s a decision for China to make
about what’s best for their country,” said Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White
House press secretary. “But as you know, the president’s talked about term
limits in a number of capacities during the campaign. It’s something that he
supports here in the United States, but that’s a decision that would be up to
China.”
Almost no one would have described China as
genuinely democratic before the latest move, which was announced without
fanfare on Sunday; the country remains a one-party state with extensive control
over political, social and economic life.
Even so, Mr. Xi’s gambit ended a period of
collective and term-limited leadership begun by Jiang Zemin, who held the same
post as Mr. Xi from 1993 to 2003, that many had hoped was leading China toward
greater rule of law and openness. Sunday’s move confirms a growing view that
those expectations were probably naïve, some say.
“We’re deluded in our conviction that
everybody is going to become a democracy like us,” Merriden Varrall, the
director of the East Asia Program at the Lowy Institute in Australia, said.
Mr. Xi, who will be 69 when his second
five-year term ends in 2023, is not simply following the example set by Mr.
Putin or other leaders, she and other experts said. His motivations are unique
to Chinese history and politics. Yet, they were deeply shaped by the fall of
the Berlin Wall in 1989 and collapse of the Soviet Union two years later.
Those historical milestones ushered in an era
of expanding political and economic freedoms. Mr. McFaul said that for nearly a
quarter of a century autocratic leaders “had to play defense” against the
democratizing trend that seized the post-Cold War order.
Even the Russia that emerged from the ruins
of the Soviet Union adopted a democratic constitution and instituted free
elections. Whatever the chaos of Boris N. Yeltsin’s era in the 1990s, democracy
was taking root when Mr. Putin came to power — in a relatively free and fair election,
no less.
The rumination of Francis Fukuyama, the
scholar, has come up repeatedly. In a famous essay titled “The End of History?”
(note the question mark), he argued that Western liberal democracy had become
recognized as “the final form of human government.”
“The end of history is no more,” Brad W.
Setser, a Treasury official during the Obama administration who is now at the
Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in a message after news emerged of Mr. Xi’s
move.
In hindsight, Mr. Putin was the vanguard of
what Mr. McFaul called the “illiberal international,” a new version of the
Communist International founded by Lenin to spread communism around the world.
Authoritarian leaders now act with greater
impunity — or at least less worry about international isolation. Aspiring
authoritarians like Viktor Orban of Hungary in turn seem enticed by the kind of
power Mr. Putin and Mr. Xi wield, untroubled by the need to compromise or
consult or, in the case of corruption and cronyism, to answer for evidence of
misrule and malfeasance.
President Trump’s critics say that while he
may not yet have eroded democracy in the United States, his populist appeals
and nativist policies, his palpable aversion to the media and traditional
checks on power, and his stated admiration for some of the strongest of
strongmen are cut from the same cloth.
The trend toward authoritarianism, while
specific to each country’s history, is rooted in insecurities and fears
afflicting the world today: globalization and rising inequality, the stunning
and scary advances in technology, the disorienting chaos and extreme violence
of civil wars like Syria’s, separatism and terror.
The institutions of the post-Cold War — which
reflected the bedrock values of Western liberalism — no longer seem able to
cope. Countries that once were beacons for others are consumed by the same
anxiety and weakness, and internal strife.
Mr. Putin has long cited such flaws to shore
up his power at home; the campaign to interfere in the 2016 presidential
election in the United States seemed intended, in the first place, to discredit
American democracy still more.
“Liberal democracies in the United States and
even in Europe no longer look like such an inspiring model for others to
follow,” said Mr. McFaul, whose book on his experience shepherding Russian
policy in the Obama administration, “From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American
Ambassador in Putin’s Russia,” will be published in May.
From China’s perspective, the end of the Cold
War was hardly an inspiration, having led to the toppling of one-party
dictatorships. The “contagion” of 1989, which saw popular protesters bring down
Communist governments in Central and Eastern Europe, infected China, too. A few
months before the Berlin Wall came down, Chinese students massing in Tiananmen
Square posed what officials in Beijing viewed as an existential threat, a
legacy that continues to color everything the government does to this day.
“If anything gives Xi Jinping and the party
nightmares, it is perestroika and the fall of the Soviet Union,” Ms. Varrall
said, referring to the reforms the last Soviet leader, Mikhail S. Gorbachev,
sought before the system unraveled.
Mr. Xi, as a result, believes that only
stability can ensure his vision of China’s revival and emergence as the world’s
power. “He seems to genuinely believe that he’s the only person who can achieve
this vision,” she said. In last fall’s Communist Party congress, Mr. Xi even
presented China as a new model for the developing world — a thinly veiled
argument that the United States and Europe were no longer as attractive as they
once were.
The need for a strong grip appears to be a
long-held conviction of Mr. Xi’s. According to a 2009 diplomatic cable
disclosed by WikiLeaks, an old associate told the American ambassador in
Beijing at the time, Jon M. Huntsman, Jr., that as a son of one of China’s
communist revolutionary leaders, Mr. Xi was an elitist who believed deeply in
the unwavering authority of the party.
“One cannot entirely escape one’s past,” the
associate said. “Xi does not want to.”
Keith Bradsher contributed reporting from
Beijing, and Mark Landler from Washington.
Follow Steven Lee Myers on Twitter:
@stevenleemyers