This has a number of knock-on effects. If you know that you have to step down at the end of ten years, you moderate your behavior. You don’t want to have a whole set of enemies waiting to get you. So, the tenor and tone of the administrations that followed Deng Xiaoping were altogether calmer than during the era of Mao Zedong.
Term limits also solved the question that has bedeviled China’s politics, which is the question of succession. All through the imperial period — 2,000 years of naked power struggles and succession struggles — you see the bad effects of not having a constitutional succession process. And we saw it also in the first years of Chairman Mao, when every person who was named number two, and therefore could be expected to succeed Mao, ended up either dead or in jail. [...]
There are a couple of possible explanations for that. One, it dovetails very well with an international role. As president, he gets to interact with other presidents, whereas as general secretary it’s a little more complicated to meet Queen Elizabeth or a US president. [...]
It’s not really clear how the state is going to deal with that going forward. There have been some measures to clean up what they call gray banking and shadow banking sectors, where financial instruments of the kind that caused so much trouble in the Western financial system were devised by local authorities and by state-owned enterprises in order to go on fueling their growth. You can’t run like that forever, and that is one of the problems that Xi Jinping is going to have to address. [...]
I think the ultimate vision is a restoration of the sense that China is the center of its world. That was the way China felt about itself for many centuries, partly because it didn’t really go very much farther. There was a brief period in the Ming Dynasty when ships went up and down the coast of Africa, and there was always land-based trade along the Silk Road, but China was content to treat the states and its neighbors in the immediate region as tributaries that paid homage to China as the great regional power. It was 20 percent of the world’s economy, which is pretty much where we’re heading back to.
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