Why Xi Jinping Can Stay in Power Indefinitely

On October 22, 2007, after the First Plenary Session of the 17th Central Committee, the new members of the Politburo Standing Committee walked onto the stage in order of rank. Sixth was Xi Jinping; seventh was Li Keqiang. Until then, most outside observers had bet on Li Keqiang, whom Hu Jintao had groomed personally. Xi had been Party Secretary of Shanghai for only seven months and was far less known. He ranked ahead because every faction thought he would be easy to deal with: his father, Xi Zhongxun, had a good reputation inside the Party, and Xi himself had spent more than twenty years in Fujian and Zhejiang without showing any sharp edges or offending anyone. Later, leaked US diplomatic cables carried another account: Zeng Qinghong's retirement from the Standing Committee was part of the trade that put Xi ahead of Li.

For the next five years, as Vice President and Vice Chairman of the Central Military Commission, he barely said a word more than he had to. The only time I remember him showing his true colors was in February 2009, meeting overseas Chinese in Mexico. He said some foreigners with full bellies and nothing better to do were pointing fingers at our affairs: China does not export revolution, does not export hunger and poverty, and does not go around making trouble for you. Some people back home cheered at the time, finding the heir apparent refreshingly blunt. Looking back, those few sentences sound more like the real man than any speech he has read since. Saying he spent those years playing the meek grandson is no exaggeration: he took no sides, never stuck his neck out, and let everyone believe he was someone they could control.

At the 18th Party Congress in November 2012, he took over as General Secretary and Chairman of the Military Commission. Hu Jintao chose a "naked retirement," handing over the military chairmanship as well, instead of holding on to it for two extra years as Jiang Zemin had done. At the time this was praised as a graceful exit; in hindsight, it gave away the last thing that might have restrained him. In his first few years he said all the right things: power must be locked in a cage of rules, tigers and flies would be swatted alike. Many people believed him. Even some of my friends who had long given up on the Communist Party thought that this time, someone was finally serious.

The anti-corruption blade was real. Bo Xilai was sentenced to life in 2013. Zhou Yongkang was put under investigation in 2014 and sentenced to life in 2015, the first Politburo Standing Committee member since the CCP took power to be brought down for corruption. Of the two former vice chairmen of the Military Commission, Xu Caihou died of illness before he could be tried, and Guo Boxiong got life. Ling Jihua, Hu Jintao's chief aide, also got life. According to figures released by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection during the 20th Party Congress, 553 centrally managed cadres had been investigated since the 18th Congress, and more than 4.6 million cases had been opened nationwide. But look at who fell: the political-legal apparatus was a Jiang Zemin-era network, the two military vice chairmen had been promoted by Jiang, and Ling Jihua was Hu Jintao's man, while the old subordinates Xi brought with him from Fujian and Zhejiang almost all kept rising during that decade. Few CCP officials are clean, so where the blade falls depends entirely on who holds it. The discipline commission answers only to the Party, and the Party answers only to the General Secretary. Those under investigation have no independent court to plead their case and no free press to cry injustice to. By the end, the anti-corruption campaign had turned everyone who might challenge him into someone waiting in line to be investigated.

In October 2016, the Sixth Plenum of the 18th Central Committee named him the "core." In July 2017, Chongqing Party Secretary Sun Zhengcai was taken down. Sun, together with Hu Chunhua, had been seen as a likely entrant to the Standing Committee at the 19th Congress and a successor in 2022; the next year he was sentenced to life. Three months later, when the 19th Congress ended, not one member of the new Standing Committee was under sixty. The successor who by custom should have appeared did not, and his name went into the Party Constitution together with his thought. By this point, anyone who understood the system could see where things were heading.

All that remained was a single line in the State Constitution. To see why that line mattered, you first need to understand how power is arranged in China. There are three hierarchies: the Party, the state, and the military. On the Party side, the highest body is the Central Committee, but day to day the twenty-odd members of the Politburo, and above them the seven members of the Politburo Standing Committee, make the decisions, with the General Secretary at the head of the Standing Committee. On the state side, the constitution names the National People's Congress as the highest organ of power, with the State President, the State Council, the Supreme People's Court and the Supreme People's Procuratorate below it. But NPC deputies are nominated and vetted by the Party, the Premier is a high-ranking member of the Party's Standing Committee, and the courts and procuratorates are run by the Party's political-legal committees at every level; in the end they are all subordinates of the Party. On the military side there is the Central Military Commission: the Party has one and the state has one, two nameplates for the same group of people, and the first line of the oath every soldier takes on enlisting is to obey the leadership of the Communist Party of China. So real power lies in two posts, General Secretary and Chairman of the Military Commission, and neither the Party Constitution nor the State Constitution has ever put a term limit on them. The State President, by contrast, is largely ceremonial: signing laws, issuing orders and receiving foreign guests are all done according to Party decisions. But the post represents the country abroad, and foreign visits and meetings with other heads of state as an equal are all conducted under that title. Since Jiang Zemin, one person has held all three posts, General Secretary, State President and Military Commission Chairman, and of the three only the State President was bound by the constitution's two-term limit.

On January 18, 2018, the Second Plenum of the 19th Central Committee met to discuss amending the constitution. On the same day, Beijing lawyer Yu Wensheng published his own proposal for constitutional amendments online; the next day he was taken away. The CCP Central Committee's amendment proposal was dated January 26, but it was kept from the public for a month until Xinhua suddenly released it on February 25. From publication to the NPC vote on March 11, there were only two weeks.

The proposal had twenty-one items. Most of them changed wording or added slogans; these were the ones that mattered. Item one wrote Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era into the preamble as a guiding ideology of the state, placed after Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought and Deng Xiaoping Theory, putting the name of a sitting leader into the constitution. Item five added a sentence to Article 1 in the main text: the leadership of the Communist Party of China is the defining feature of socialism with Chinese characteristics. The Party's leadership had previously appeared only in the preamble; now it was in the main text, and opposing the Party's leadership became unconstitutional. Item fourteen deleted the provision in Article 79 that the President and Vice President may serve no more than two consecutive terms. The last item added a new section to the constitution creating the National Supervisory Commission, extending the discipline commission's methods, which had covered only Party members, to everyone paid from public funds. Most ironic of all, the same amendment specified that the director of the newly created National Supervisory Commission may serve no more than two consecutive terms: it removed one man's term limit and imposed one on someone else. With that, since the General Secretary and Military Commission Chairman posts had never had limits, and the State President, the last title with a limit, was now open-ended, he could hold all three posts indefinitely, with his thought and the Party's leadership both protected by the constitution.

During those two weeks, it was not as if no one spoke up. The day after the news came out, Li Datong, former editor of the China Youth Daily supplement Freezing Point, wrote an open letter to the fifty-five NPC deputies from Beijing, asking them to vote no at the session. In it he said the two-term limit on the presidency had been written into the constitution after hard lessons from the Cultural Revolution; it was a safeguard against personal dictatorship and one of Deng Xiaoping's most important political legacies. Entrepreneur Wang Ying said she had no plans to emigrate and that abolishing the top leader's term limit was turning back the clock of history. Zhao Xiaoli and Yang Peng also publicly declared their opposition. To get past keyword censorship, their statements could only be posted as images, some deliberately upside down or sideways. Ordinary netizens, without that kind of name recognition, spoke in roundabout ways: some mentioned Yuan Shikai, some shouted "Long live Your Majesty," some posted pictures of Winnie the Pooh, and searches for "emigrate" on Baidu shot up overnight, with screenshots passed around everywhere.

What followed was the most thorough purge I have ever seen. Proclaiming oneself emperor, ascending the throne, "Your Majesty," "long live," life tenure, Yuan Shikai, restoration, donning the imperial robe: these words were blocked one after another, and at one point even the English letter N could not be searched, reportedly because people were using "N>2" to mock the term limit. Winnie the Pooh could not be mentioned, and Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm could no longer be found online. Baidu stopped showing search index data for "emigrate," and Weibo search showed only content from blue-V verified accounts. From February 25 to the end of March, Weibo, WeChat, QQ and Zhihu all barred users from changing their usernames, nicknames, profile pictures and signatures, and even some online games would not let players change their names, all for fear that someone would turn a name into a sentence or a profile picture into a statement. Posts were deleted wholesale. A netizen in Shanghai told Radio Free Asia that several of her articles had been deleted and that sometimes a person would be blocked entirely, after which nothing they posted would go through. Even the official Weibo accounts of Disney and Durex shut off comments because netizens were using them to make pointed jokes. In those few weeks, an ordinary person's most veiled joke could make posts and accounts vanish, and the little freedom of speech Chinese people had left was smashed to an unprecedented degree.

The vote on March 11 was 2,958 in favor, 2 against and 3 abstentions.

The 20th Party Congress in October 2022 showed what the end of this road looks like. On the closing day, Hu Jintao, sitting next to him, was escorted out of the hall by staff, in full view of cameras from around the world. The new Standing Committee unveiled the next day, Li Qiang, Zhao Leji, Wang Huning, Cai Qi, Ding Xuexiang and Li Xi, were all his people. Li Keqiang and Wang Yang, neither yet sixty-eight, simply stepped down, and Hu Chunhua did not even make the Politburo. A year later, Li Keqiang died suddenly of a heart attack in Shanghai at sixty-eight. On March 10, 2023, Xi was elected State President for the third time, with 2,952 votes in favor, not one against and not one abstention. Even the two votes against left over from 2018 were gone.

After that, the blade turned on people he had chosen himself. In 2023, Foreign Minister Qin Gang and Defense Minister Li Shangfu, both promoted by him, were removed one after another. On October 17, 2025, the Ministry of National Defense announced in one go that nine senior generals, including He Weidong and Miao Hua, had been expelled from the Party and the military. He Weidong had been elevated to Vice Chairman of the Military Commission by Xi only in 2022, and Miao Hua came from the 31st Group Army stationed in Fujian. On January 24, 2026, the Ministry of National Defense announced that Military Commission Vice Chairman Zhang Youxia and Chief of the Joint Staff Department Liu Zhenli were under investigation. Zhang Youxia's father, Zhang Zongxun, and Xi Zhongxun had served together in the Northwest Field Army; the two families were old friends, and Zhang Youxia had been seen as the man holding the military steady for him. Of the seven-member Military Commission chosen at the 20th Congress, five have now been taken down.

After the constitutional amendment, his continued rule was fully legitimate. So why did the purges grow harsher, sparing not even people he had promoted himself? My view is that the constitution was never his guarantee; the gun was. A constitution that can be amended once can be amended again, and whatever is written into it today can be deleted just as easily once someone else holds power. At the turning points in CCP history that decided who rose and who fell, such as the arrest of the Gang of Four in a single night less than a month after Mao Zedong's death, what counted was never any law but who controlled the troops.

He understands this better than anyone. In 2018 he pushed the amendment through despite enormous pressure: some ordinary citizens openly opposed it, and not every Party elder was necessarily on board, yet there was not a stir from the military, not a single dissenting voice. At the time, the person watching over the military for him on the Commission was Zhang Youxia, who had just been promoted to Vice Chairman at the 19th Congress in 2017. Zhang had fought in the war against Vietnam and had seniority and prestige in the army; the two families were old friends, and he is often called Xi Jinping's childhood friend. I believe the military's silence, even tacit consent, during the amendment had a lot to do with Zhang Youxia's support behind the scenes. And precisely because Xi Jinping knew how important that support was, once he held all power he had to purge even this childhood friend who had backed him. An army that stands on his side today could stand on someone else's tomorrow; in his eyes, there is only one safe way, and that is to keep the military entirely in his own hands. It was the same with He Weidong and Miao Hua: the more vital the position they were placed in, the less he could rest easy about them. He also refuses to name a successor, so anyone who builds up a little prestige in the Party or the army is treated as a potential rival. On top of that, he wants the military ready to use force against Taiwan at any moment, so in his eyes it must be absolutely obedient; the fall of one Rocket Force commander after another shows that even he does not trust this army. Purges like these will never end, because a dictator's insecurity never ends.

Some say this is down to his personal political skill; others say everyone else in the Party was too weak. I prefer to look at the system. When Deng Xiaoping put a two-term limit on the State President in the constitution, he had learned the hard way from Mao Zedong's lifelong rule, but as noted above, he never touched the two posts that carry real power. "Seven up, eight down," designating successors a generation in advance, retirement at sixty-eight: all of these were unwritten conventions. Conventions only count if everyone observes them, and in this system no one can force the most powerful person to observe them. The General Secretary controls the Organization Department, which controls everyone's official post; he controls the discipline commission, which can investigate anyone; he controls the Military Commission, and the military obeys the Party while the Party obeys him. There is no opposition party here, the courts and the media belong to the Party, NPC deputies are nominated and vetted by the Party, constitutional amendments are proposed by the Party Central Committee, and the NPC's only job is to raise its hands. As long as one man dares to tear up the rules, there is no force in China that can stop him. The few constraints Deng Xiaoping left behind lasted thirty years only because Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao chose to observe them; no one was ever able to force them to.

Some people make excuses for him, saying he has arrested so many people that he can no longer step down. There is some truth to that: in ten years more than five hundred centrally managed cadres were investigated and millions of cases were opened, and the military leadership was replaced batch after batch. The families, protégés and old subordinates of all these people are still around. Having personally sent Zhou Yongkang and Bo Xilai to Qincheng Prison, he knows better than anyone what losing power means in the CCP. But that he wants to step down and cannot? I don't believe it. At the Beijing military parade on September 3, 2025, as he and Putin walked side by side toward the Tiananmen rostrum, the microphones on the CCTV live broadcast picked up their conversation. His interpreter told Putin that these days seventy is still just a child; Putin's interpreter said human organs can be transplanted again and again, so you grow younger the longer you live and might even achieve immortality; and Xi went on to say that some predict people this century could live to 150. Putin acknowledged it when answering reporters that day, saying the chairman had talked about it on the way to the parade. A seventy-two-year-old musing, in front of the whole world's cameras, about how to live to 150 does not sound like a man planning to hand over power.

This September, when he visited the United States, there was a new face beside Peng Liyuan. According to several overseas programs, she went by the name Zhang Quan. Many netizens compared the photos and concluded she was their only daughter, Xi Mingze. Some even used AI to compare her with childhood photos of Xi Mingze and said the match was highly likely. She looks very much like her to me, too; I am essentially certain they are the same person. The real giveaway is the name Zhang Quan: read aloud, it sounds like "zhangquan," to hold power. If this really is the alias Xi Jinping chose for his daughter, there is no need to guess any longer whether he will hand over power; whom he wants to hand it to is already written in the name. As the Chinese saying goes, Sima Zhao's intentions are known to every passerby.

This year, rumors overseas that he is about to step down have come in wave after wave: some say he will hand over at the Fifth Plenum, others that Li Qiang will take over as General Secretary. The Zhongnanhai bedroom-eavesdroppers are always trying to hear some big news, but I simply don't believe it. He spent decades playing the meek grandson before he got to the top, then purged for more than a decade before finally getting a firm grip on power. How could he just hand it over? Even if he does leave someday, the CCP system that let one man dismantle every constraint in ten years will still be sitting there intact, and whoever takes the seat next will inherit the same whole apparatus of Organization Department, discipline commission and Military Commission, plus a constitution that can be amended again at any time.