Chinese President Xi Jinping has started to expand his powers and promote his allies after successfully acquiring an unprecedented 3rd term as the Asian nation's leader.
The official has become the first leader since Mao Zedong, who ruled from 1949 to 1976, to be chosen as party chief for a third term. During his decade as China's president, he has centralized power in his own hands, brutally eliminated his rivals, promoted a cult of personality, stomped down criticism, and had his ideology enshrined in the constitution.
Xi Jinping
His ideology is known as "Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era." But Rebecca Karl, a professor of Chinese History at New York University said that despite their similarities, it is a mistake to compare Xi to Mao with such simplicity.
She argued that such an act dismisses everything that has happened between the two officials' rules. Xi's path to the top was far from being considered inevitable and it was defined primarily by his ambition and his party's desire to repeat Mao's disastrous one-man rule, as per BBC.
Karl noted that her introduction to China was in the 1980s when the debates about the country's future were huge, significant, and consequential. Karl noted that the party itself was involved in those debates, but in 1989, all of that was shut down.
During that time, the Soviet Union was breaking up and China's hopes for change were quickly crushed by tanks and automatic gunfire. Furthermore, the Asian nation was still recovering for a time following Mao's death.
According to the Associated Press, China's Communist Party also named a seven-member Standing Committee, which is its inner circle of power, that is dominated by Xi's allies. It comes after the number two leader, Premier Li Keqiang, who is an advocate of market0style reform and private enterprise, was dropped from the leadership on Saturday.
Unprecedented Third Term
A Chinese politics expert at Hong Kong Baptist University, Jean-Pierre Cabestan, said that power will be even more concentrated in the hands of Xi. He added that the new appointees are all loyal supporters of the Chinese president and there is no counterweight or checks and balances in the system at all.
Hu-Jintao, the 79-year-old predecessor of Xi, abruptly left a meeting on Saturday of the party Central Committee with an aide holding his arm. That act prompted questions about whether or not Xi was flexing his powers by expelling other leaders from the event.
The Chinese president and other members of the Standing Committee, none of whom were women, for the first time appeared as a group in front of reporters. They stood in the Great Hall of the People, the seat of China's ceremonial legislature in central Beijing.
China's congress this year, which closed on Saturday, cemented Xi's control over the nation even further. He is now positioned to be the Asian country's most powerful leader since Mao, whose nearly unfettered authorities allowed him to rule China into years of famine and bloodshed, the New York Times reported.
