Should-Read: China has now created a very powerful long-run "bad emperor" problem for itself Martin Wolf: Xi’s power grab means China is vulnerable to the whims of one man: "It had long been evident that... Xi Jinping... could not step down... too many enemies, particularly through his anti-corruption campaign...
...even if he wanted to go.... Yet the announcement that the two-term limit on the presidency is to go, is still shocking.... Xi has discarded the attempt by Deng Xiaoping to institutionalise checks on the power of China’s leaders—itself a reaction to the wild excesses of the era of Mao Zedong. What is re-emerging is strongman rule—a concentration of power in the hands of one man. It now looks a bit like “Putinism with Chinese characteristics”.... The move back from a collective leadership to autocracy negates the hopes of all those who believed a rapidly developing China would move towards democracy as, say, South Korea did in the 1980s.... Autocracy exposes a country to the unchecked whims of one person. As years turn into decades, such concentrated power has too often turned sour, as the ruler grows increasingly detached from reality. Mr Putin began as an economic reformer, but has now created a stagnant kleptocracy. Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Chinese people have the experience of the Great Leap Forward and the cultural revolution to remind them of this great truth....
Autocracy... is, at the least, a high-risk system, even in a country with a tradition of high quality bureaucracy, such as China. This is known as the “bad emperor” problem...
