China officially scraps term limits on presidency | Hacker News Reader

China officially scraps term limits on presidency

washingtonpost.com

38 pointsjsnathan20 comments

This is marked as a dupe, but I can't find any other stories on this topic that are more active / higher-voted. Can someone provide a link if they have it?

The best way to answer such a question is HN Search, which is linked at the bottom of every HN page:

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=term%20limit&dateRange=all&typ...

In this case there are a lot of them:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16457998

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16465426

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16530555

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16563352

OP here. Sorry if I misunderstood the guidelines, but these are not the same stories. The proposal to scrap the term limits was announced two weeks ago, which is what those stories talk about. This new story is about the proposal having been approved by the parliament (a couple hours ago). Though I suppose there was little chance of it not passing, I did think it's a historic vote, so I thought I'd post this as well.

They're not technically the same story, but the new information isn't enough to alter the topic (abolishing term limits of presidency in China), so the discussion is guaranteed to be the same.

Yeah, I was confused for the same reason.

How did China manage to maintain a rotating system of supreme leaders for as long as it did? It's a fairly rare achievement.

The system never rotated.

China doesn’t have a “Supreme leader”. To conflate North Korea and China in such a way is terribly ignorant. Just say “head of state” if you’re in doubt on such matters.

And the issue of title leads to something of an answer: China is (used to be) run more by committee than a single leader with cult-of-personality authority. This is reflected in the official title: General Secretary of the Communist Party (who is also the President, but that role used to be mostly ceremonial). That, plus a healthy dose of racism, is why you’ll find it hard to name any two former Chinese politicians by name (cue “Who?” Joke).

That system probably remained stable in much the same way western democracies remain stable: there were certain rules that, by custom, convenience, or well-engineered competition between centers of power happened to remain mostly respected. Even among undemokratic governments, there are huge differences in how they actually work. China (and also the Sowjet Union after Stalin) have/had something not entirely unlike a resemblance of rule-of-law with regards to the political process within each country’s communist parties.

I think the question is, how did it end up like that in the first place?

And as far as I can tell, the answer is that the party leadership was sufficiently spooked by the craziness of Mao and the chaos of the Cultural Revolution that they decided to spread out power rather than vesting it entirely in a single person.

The answer might actually be “communism”. Central to that ideology was a democratic element, where certain groups (workers of one factory, say) would elect delegations to similar groups one level up, in a sort of pyramid. This would repeat all the way to the general committee of the party. “General Secretary” is a title that pretty clearly denotes a certain lack of power: compare the UN, where the top post is named the same, very deliberately indicating their rather beaurocratic leadership function, clearly subordinate to the Presidents and Prime Ministers selecting them.

Now, obviously no communist country ever came close to actual communism. But still: if you spend an inordinate amount of the state’s resources on indoctrination, you will at some point raise a new generation of leaders that cannot completely shake these stories they were told (and forced to repeat) during their rise through the ranks. In such a way, lip service becomes service. These leaders have also risen through the ranks of hundreds such committees with their endless late-night cigar-smoking and scheming. Anyone too daring, or too easily bored, will drop out of the competition long before they get to the actual levers of power. That’s why you get uninspiring beaurocrats, and the colorful cool dictators like Qaddafi or Saddam Hussein only ever get to power in their respective “lesser banana republics”

Well, there's apparently a term within China, "paramount leader", describing their head of state.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supreme_leader

"Supreme Leader" isn't a term specific to North Korea. It's a loose term denoting the one who has the most power. There's no need to be rude.

No supreme leader, but a core leader, or, before that, paramount leader.

And I think the term "cult of personality" was invented specifically for Mao as Stalin's spiritual successor.

There were several discussions earlier this week about it. That would be my guess.

Strap yourselves in for 200+ replies. The chinese sock puppet forum sliding is about to begin!

This comment violates the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Lots of previous explanation at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... if anyone wants it.

This is the norm for China, and it has worked (for its large part of world domination history), so nothing to hold your breath for. In that aspect, Deng Xiaoping was rather an anomaly (although his large part is still the norm). China produces anomalies every now and then. For anomalies to become the norm is atypical.

If it's the norm, why would China ever put terms limits in in the first place?

Deng did it, not China. In fact, China do not care about constitution that much. The leaders do care, as always.

Term limits came in during the 80s when china when power was much more distributed among the eight elders.

China historically becomes powerful then brittle then falls apart then unified to become powerful then brittle then falls apart and on and on....

The inefficiency of democracy is supposed to combat the brittleness and power-corrupts-ness of philosopher kings.

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