Mainland China never been ever close to constitutional rule. It's unbelievably naive to think that term limits would've ever been something other than a decoration, and a propaganda point with communists.
Judging their systems and dynamics from our point of view misses the point in some cases.
There's an eye opening video about "The Social Credit System" from CCC (Chaos Communication Conference). Take a look if you have time:
https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9904-the_social_credit_system
It's an hour long talk.
The argument has been that China needed a reset badly. Free-for-all capitalism hasn't been so great for most folks in the U.S. either, has it? That has been the justification for the heavy hand of the government during Xi's rule. There's also the argument that Western-style term limits prevent long-term strategic planning.
All of those are really tempting and solid arguments, especially given how corrupt China had become with capitalism-ruling-all, but one really does wonder.
As far as Alibaba goes, it's to my understanding that there are no real alternatives to Alibaba Cloud in China (unless you want to go for a foreign solution like AWS or Azure). It would seem that the current government thinks they can get away with making an example of the company as they see fit. There may be some geopolitical logic to that, because Xi's government seeks to make China more independent after Trump's trade wars, and if you have a big, wealthy internet company drawing in the country's top talent, then that's fewer that's e.g. going towards the semiconductor companies they now seek to bolster.
Now there may have been a "correct" policy solution to this, a la antitrust, but it seems Xi's government prefers to be heavy-handed. For me, that's setting some scary precedents, because as other commenters have said, it isn't clear how succession will be handled going forward, and it may well be brutal.
Two orderly successions with no political executions isn’t a particularly high bar…
disagree. Mao started the culture revolution because he was ousted and succeed in taking back the powers. its a high bar that all leaders after Mao didn't try another culture revolution.
It seems to me that term limits are mostly the reserve of countries that have a genuine fear of authoritarian takeovers from recent experience, e.g. the nonaligned countries in South America and Africa.
Countries with executive power vested in a member of Parliament don’t have such limits, hence how you get people like Merkel, Thatcher and Mark Rutte serving as Prime Minister for so long. You also have long-term planning with the maintenance of a professional civil service rather than political appointees and the use of cabinet level decision making rather than allowing the Head of Government to unilaterally make decisions.
America and France are really the only significant “western” (politically rather than geographically) countries you can say have term limits on executive power. In both cases the introduction of term limits are post-ww2 changes. To use either example as a criticism of “the west” as a whole requires a rather narrow view of the world I think.
No, he did not. He built a cabinet of marionettes, and set himself to be a gray cardinal to run the state from behind the curtain. Jiang Zemin then ousted him out of power.
You know nothing about China past the popular propaganda image they wanted Westerners to see.
> The Communist Party of China proposed amending the Constitution, for the first time after 2004,[3] including writing Scientific Outlook on Development and Xi Jinping Thought into the Preamble,[4] and removing the provision that the President and Vice President "shall serve no more than two consecutive terms" from the Constitution.[5]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_National_People%27s_Con...