[REWIND] The Research Paper That Got Me Fired from a Chinese Think Tank
It was a 2018 critique of Xi Jinping's decision to end presidential term limits
This is a reader-supported publication. I give it all away for free but could really use your support if you want me to keep doing this.
[NOTE: I first shared this report in a 9 December 2023 Substack post.]
Stunningly — at least to me, I was asked to write the paper by the think tank itself, the Beijing-based Knowfar Institute for Strategic and Defence Studies (KISDS), where I served as their inaugural visiting (non-resident) research fellow from 2015 to right after I turned this in. KISDS knew the decision was coming out and they wanted to weigh in — or at least let the guy living outside the country weigh in.
So I did.
The report went up on Knowfar’s website for several minutes …
It was, unsurprisingly, the last report I ever wrote for Knowfar.
It stands up pretty well to time, seeing as I wrote it 7 years ago.
I post it here … mostly because I think it’s pretty good and still worth reading, by also as follow-up to my Thursday post about Xi.
So here it is, in full.
THE STRATEGIC RISKS OF CHINA’S ELIMINATION OF PRESIDENTIAL TERM LIMITS
By Thomas P.M. Barnett, PhD, Senior Research Fellow, Knowfar Institute
5 March 2018
This report examines the near and long-term strategic risks associated with the recently announced proposal by the Chinese government to submit legislation that would eliminate the national constitution’s limit on presidential and vice-presidential terms. Internal risks are identified to demonstrate why the outside world is already viewing this step as inherently dangerous for China’s long-term stability. External to China’s domestic dynamics, this report focuses on how this decision damages the nation’s development brand (China model) and derails the long-held Western belief in the persistently peaceful – and mutually beneficial – strategic trajectory of the People’s Republic since Chairman Mao’s passing in 1976. In many ways, history may well remember this troubling move as a decisive step in the slow-motion ramping-up of a second East-West cold war – this time centered on China and the United States.
China’s Short-Term Benefits Are Easily Identified, But Are Modest in Nature
Despite, and in large part due to, China’s astonishingly successful multi-decade developmental “rise,” Beijing faces a host of very difficult demographic, economic, political, security, and environmental challenges over the next 10-to-15 years. Many are historically inescapable, to include:
Steady loss of labor input and unprecedented rise in dependent elder population
Peaking and steady diminishment of socially tolerable environmental pollution (per Kuznets Curve)
Construction of robust regulatory environment to protect national financial stability
Effective processing of rising middle-class demands for more individual control over their lives, to include broader political participation (see the example of South Korea in late 1980s)
Redirecting national economy from export-led growth to consumption-led growth, thus escaping “middle income trap”
Elevating national economy along the production “ladder” (toward higher-end manufacturing) while simultaneously locking in strategic access to:
Suppliers of critical raw materials (via foreign direct investment)
Global economy’s migrating concentration of cheap-labor (now centered in Southeast Asia but moving over time to South Asia and beyond to the Middle East and Africa)
Exploding middle-class consumption associated with those ongoing and future regional “demographic dividends” (which track westward with China’s One Belt, One Road [OBOR] scheme)
Recasting national security establishment from homeland-centric, defense-in-place force structure to expeditionary doctrine and power-projection capabilities that likewise track geographically with the OBOR scheme.
In sum, this cluster of developmental challenges is the most difficult faced by a rising world power since America’s ascent at the turn of the 20th century, with China being nowhere near as blessed as the United States was then with its super-abundant supplies of natural resources.
As such, it is unsurprising that the Chinese state now seeks to establish a clear sense of political continuity – and unity – at the top of the government, military, and ruling party. Removing the presidential term limit allows Xi Jinping to simultaneously remain in all three top posts indefinitely, which sends a number of reassuring near-term signals both domestically and abroad, to include:
Avoidance of near-term intra-party factional disputes or potential succession struggles
Continued follow-through on the ambitious and costly OBOR scheme
No respite in the anti-corruption campaign
Overwhelming intent to expand financial and economic reforms
Steady projection of Chinese military power extra-regionally.
Taken in whole, Chinese officials are naturally tempted to argue that this apparent abandonment of the Deng Xiaoping-crafted “consensus rule” paradigm is forced upon Beijing by this set of unprecedented circumstances. This is not unlike the argument once pushed by the U.S. Democratic Party concerning the unprecedented third and fourth presidential terms of Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression and World War II.
There are, however, several distinct problems with any such rationale:
Externally Beijing faces a decidedly benign strategic environment. Militarily, it dominates East Asia and faces – for now – only modest pushback (primarily from India and Japan) concerning its westward OBOR scheme. North Korea remains worrisome, but it is also a Chinese dependency of sorts (much like Pakistan). Russia is a declining power and behaves as such, while the United States is clearly a distracted and distant strategic competitor under the Trump Administration. Nothing here “demands” this constitutional move by China.
The global economy is doing quite well, despite the rising tide of protectionist sentiment in the United States. China is arguably now just as important to the global economy as the U.S., a structural reality that offers it great financial security.
Internally, the Xi Administration has, by all accounts, eliminated any potentially competitive centers of political power, while instituting pervasive social controls over increasingly restive urban, educated, and young populations. Here the constitutional move seems like overkill – unnecessary at this time and only likely to foster more dissent.
Xi’s personal standing, both nationally and internationally, has never been higher. Indeed, he is routinely described as the “most powerful Chinese leader since Mao.” Without a doubt, he retains the passionate support of China’s rural, labor, and elder populations, but these groups represent the nation’s developmental past – not its future.
It seems fair to say that, by taking this political step, Xi assumes the support of China’s more conservative social elements (less advanced interior provinces) will be enough to stem any resistance from its more progressive counterparts (more developed coastal provinces). But here Xi faces a long-term domestic challenge that cannot be overcome with hard power: he needs only the acquiescence of the nation’s conservative elements to continue his reform agenda, but he needs the clear cooperation of its progressive elements to make those reforms both successful and sustainable. This constitutional move puts the latter’s support at grave risk.
The Puzzling Nature of The Timing of This Move
Stipulating that Xi now possesses sufficient political, military, and ideological clout to serve as China’s supreme leader for the foreseeable future, what remains puzzling to most external observers, given the modest short-term gains afforded by the elimination of presidential term limits, is the question why now? Why does Xi choose to announce his ambition to remain president indefinitely while still in his first term? Why not wait until deep into his second term? Or why not skip the subject altogether and simply retain control of the military and party posts indefinitely, while allowing – much like Vladimir Putin did with Dimitri Medvedev – a lesser figure to inherit an obviously reduced-in-power presidency in 2023?
To outsiders, this is the most troubling aspect of the recent announcement, for it suggests that Xi is pursuing this option now simply because he can. However, to-date Xi has demonstrated virtually none of the personal characteristics routinely associated with power-mad – as opposed to merely power-hungry – leaders. To put it simply, this early-stage Xi is no late-stage Mao, and he is highly unlikely to ever become such a megalomaniacal or destructive figure. It is simply not in Xi’s persistently displayed personality for him to evolve in that manner. Indeed, this is his primary point of appeal at this decisive stretch of China’s history: he is a calm, reassuring leader with great ambitions and a disciplined decision-making style.
In that case, Western observers’ next-most logical assumption is that Beijing’s elite are so fearful of near-term domestic instability (here, meaning the next decade or so) that it is willing to absorb any externally-imposed costs triggered by this bold move. Analogizing to ancient Rome, Xi is thus historically cast as the trusted magistrate of the People’s Republic – or the originally conceived dictator who is granted the full authority of the state to deal with a combination of perceived internal and external national emergencies for some extended period of time. Here, America’s historical examples of controversial presidential overreach are all associated with the extreme political circumstances of war: Abraham Lincoln in the Civil War, Woodrow Wilson in World War I, Roosevelt in World War II, Richard Nixon during the Vietnam War, and George W. Bush in the Global War on Terrorism. In each instance, the U.S. legislative and judicial branches offered some level of resistance (most fiercely against Nixon), in many cases later instituting political barriers to such power grabs – the most pertinent to this discussion being America’s 22nd constitutional amendment that limits any individual’s maximum tenure as president to two full terms or a decade in the case of vice-presidential succession (a direct response to Roosevelt’s 12 years in office).
When considering present-day China, the problems of granting extraordinary authority to one leader arise from the conflicting impulses driving the decision. Beijing does not want to signal its fears, but instead seeks to project supreme confidence with this move. But if there are no looming existential threats to regime stability, then why abandon the exceedingly successful, post-Mao consensus-rule system? Here, the offered Chinese rationale of wanting to “perfect” the leadership system seems woefully weak. One does not tinker with such a high-functioning political model merely to “perfect” it.
This defines China’s conundrum going forward: the move to abolish presidential term limits suggests to the West that deep fear pervades Beijing’s ruling elite regarding its ability to retain firm political control over its billion-plus citizens for the foreseeable future. The Xi Administration will thus be tempted to counter any Western perceptions of domestic instability with firm – even aggressive – projections of national power abroad. That will eventually push the West, and the United States in particular, to step up a containment strategy backed by a military build-up. In sum, a vicious cycle of rising superpower tension ensues – stoked, wherever possible, by Russia – further stressing China’s political system when it can least afford it. Little wonder that numerous Western analysts are already describing this as Xi Jinping’s riskiest move yet.
The Domestic Dangers of This Decision Are Substantial – Perhaps Even Existential
First, there is the distinct possibility that Xi’s dramatic reach for extended rule will alienate not just China’s “best and brightest,” who have streamed back home in significant numbers in recent years to aid in the nation’s ongoing rise, but likewise an entire generation of young people who harbored hopes of far greater political liberalization within their lifetimes. This could lead to an exodus of much-needed talent over time.
Second, the specter of a president-for-life will likely only further incentivize the nation’s wealthiest individuals and families to move their assets overseas, in addition to seeking legal sanctuary for their most valued intellectual properties. Credible polling has long indicated that a sizeable portion of China’s millionaires/ entrepreneurs either desire and/or expect to leave the country at some point in the future, presumably in response to a disturbing political development such as this. Xi’s ambitious reform agenda naturally creates economic winners and losers. The losers will see little value in remaining in China so long as Xi retains ultimate power, while the winners will never quite feel their winnings are secure so long as Xi’s personal power so clearly trumps the rule of law.
Third, Xi’s consolidation of his personal power has required the clamping down on debate within the party, a development that is likely to produce increasingly deficient policymaking in the years ahead. Western observers traveling to China have been tracking this development since Xi’s anti-corruption purges began in 2013 and expect it to grow far more pronounced with this decision. The same can be said of investigative journalists and crusading legal professionals, two groups that are historically crucial in “speaking truth to power” and thus furthering progressive reforms of the type Xi hopes to achieve over his tenure.
Fourth, Xi’s successful elimination of party rivals means there is no one now capable of standing up to him on key policy decisions. With virtually no channels for pushing critical data and reporting up the bureaucratic chain to Xi, he will grow increasingly isolated from harsh, on-the-ground truths that contradict his chosen policies. Falsified data will inevitably flow upward unimpeded, fostering a dangerous hubris atop the government and party.
Fifth, by breaking the tradition of generational rule, Xi’s fifth-generation leadership will systematically stymy the natural development of the succeeding sixth generation, robbing the political system of their talents and potentially creating their long-term enmity toward its perceived injustices. In their growing resentment, this group will interpret Xi’s reach for power as a threat to their own natural ambitions – in addition to clearly rejecting their leadership talent. Thwarting the next political generation’s rise is a recipe for longer-term political infighting of the worst, most self-destructive sort.
History teaches us that, for any leader, his most important job is to groom suitably talented and experienced replacements, while his most important decision is when to give up power. By embracing extended rule and choosing to delay succession planning, Xi is fostering an après moi le déluge leadership dynamic that could end up plausibly constituting the gravest threat to single-party rule that China has ever faced.
The Damaging Loss of China’s Positive Historical Narrative Should Not Be Underestimated
Western Sinophobes have long played a cynical game when it comes to China’s political evolution, noting that “Nixon goes to China” and yet today the Chinese system still shows no sign of being adequately Americanized! Thus, in their eyes, Washington’s long-term policy of engagement is a “complete failure” that blinds America to China’s dangerous rise and eventual global supremacy. This straw-man argument has always missed the point that U.S.-China strategic cooperation constitutes its own good, particularly now that China joins the U.S. as the second great engine of global supply and – more importantly – demand. It also makes the false assumption that China will somehow master firm leadership of the vast globalization dynamic once launched, nurtured, and defended by the U.S., but which has now clearly grown beyond its direct control. What this critical and inherently belligerent perspective does not realize is that globalization comes with rules – not a ruler.
As China has risen to near co-equal prominence with the U.S. economy within globalization, it has sought to promulgate new rules in its favor, while challenging old ones it considers unfair to its needs. This is both natural and necessary for global stability and tracks very closely with America’s own rise in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Back then, the United States and Great Britain constituted the world’s preeminent great-power partnership, with London playing the hectoring mentor and Washington the brash and impatient protégé rapidly breaking out on its own. Today Washington plays the hyper-critical lead while Beijing plays the frighteningly demanding ascendant power. With little culture and history to unite them, America and China have relied almost solely on their similar devotion to cut-throat capitalism to smooth over their competitive differences while nurturing their shared structural interests.
Without a doubt, this has always been an uneasy – if highly necessary – strategic partnership. China could not have risen within the global economy without America’s implicit sponsorship, just as was the case previously with Japan, South Korea, and the rest of East Asia’s “tigers.” As the global economy’s longtime leading source of consumer demand, it was America’s responsibility to “spread the wealth,” lest globalization choke to death on its own contradictions and inequalities. In turn, China’s decision to marketize its economy and pursue export-led growth (dutifully following the tiger model) elevated American-style globalization from a merely Western phenomenon to a truly worldwide development dynamic. In short, while America created modern globalization, China made it truly global. Despite the inherent tensions in their strategic partnership, China and America are clearly the two nations most directly responsible for the vast and unprecedented reduction of global poverty over the past half-century – in addition to the emergence of a majority global middle class (now routinely estimated at roughly 60 percent of the world’s population).
If that monumentally beneficial gift to human progress does not validate Nixon’s decision to go to China, then nothing ever will. But yes, to the great angst of the West’s panda-bashers, China has stubbornly remained Chinese all these years.
Having said all that, Beijing’s decision to abolish presidential term limits nonetheless inflicts serious harm to the world’s long-held hope that an increasingly middle-class China will eventually succumb to the modernizing forces of broader public participation in its political processes – a vast array of possibilities invariably shorthanded in the West as “democratization.” For the past three decades, China’s calm rotation of leadership generations has been sufficient in providing – among both its supporters and critics in the West – the benefit of the doubt. This rotation scheme convinced the world that China had solved the succession problem that historically crashes authoritarian regimes. In truth, that was all the West needed to see in China to remain optimistic about its future: namely, a growing middle class and a regular rotation of leaders.
But now Beijing’s current president moves to seemingly eliminate – or at least dramatically delay – that rotational scheme, which suggests the party greatly doubts its ability to meet the rising demands for political participation from its rapidly expanding and increasingly self-confident middle class. That profound fear pushes the party to side with its developmental past (rural, aging, conservative) instead of embracing its developmental future (urban, young, progressive). It seems as if party leaders, having reached the developmental “mountaintop,” have seen the future but have decided to turn back. Yes, the party will offer all sort of rationales for this move, but, rest assured, this is how it will be received in the West: e.g., as a “great leap backward” and “the death of the China dream.”
Such views will naturally be discounted by Beijing’s leaders as constituting Western bias and animus, but that would be a tragic mistake. The world’s belief in China’s benevolent and prosperous future is arguably the most valuable soft-power asset enjoyed by Beijing today, much like has long been the case with the United States. America’s current bout of hyper-nationalistic populism has deeply damaged the U.S. global brand, but only temporarily so, because the world knows – and more importantly believes – that the United States will recover over subsequent, self-correcting national elections. For the past three decades, the world regarded China’s generational rotation of leaders in a similarly optimistic light. Now that light appears doomed to be snuffed out.
What will follow is easily imagined: the positive China narrative long touted by so-called Western China-huggers will be swamped by a fear-driven, frighteningly negative China narrative long held in reserve by the West’s China-sluggers. Among the recurring themes already spotted are the following:
“Return to the bad old days of strongman rule” (Economist, 1 March)
“A one-man dictatorship yearning to restore the archaic political norms of China’s imperial past” (The Conversation, 27 February)
“Moment when President Xi Jinping dropped any pretense of following the rules” (Bloomberg, 27 February)
“China’s stability myth is dead” (Foreign Policy, 26 February)
“China will not waver in its quest for regional dominance” (Washington Post, 26 February)
“China braces for a new Cold War” (New York Times, 27 February).
What will be most damaging about these strategic memes is that they will oftentimes be promoted by figures and institutions long associated with relatively benign views on China. These groups will be forced, by Xi’s decision, to embrace more hardline perspectives so as to avoid appearing strategic naïve in the face of a clear and present danger to Western strategic interests.
How This Decision Pushes the Global Business Community to “Go Short” on China’s Future
The global business community has strong norms, based on historical understanding, regarding the proper length of any leader’s reign. From their perspective, the “sweet spot” for an effective chief executive is roughly 6-to-10 years in office. Shorter than that and you risk suffering leaders who simply want to exit with “good numbers” and give little consideration to long-term risks. But longer than that and you risk suffering a leader with outdated ideas, an excess of hubris, a coterie of self-promoting assistants, and no direct sense of the operating environment.
Moreover, when a leader rewrites the constitutional system to stay in power longer than previously allowed, the rule of law suffers, scaring off long-term investors who fear a “hollow state” in the making. Vladimir Putin has managed to do this in Moscow, inflicting more self-harm on Russia’s economy than Western sanctions have. This is because Western business analysts now anticipate an eventual collapse of the Putin political order. Why? History shows that prolonged reigns tend to make leaders reckless in their mounting paranoia, as well as militarily aggressive in redirecting their citizens’ attention away from the nation’s moribund economy. Academic research bolsters this argument by noting that, when leaders abolish or otherwise circumvent constitutional term limits, more than half of the time they are violently removed from office (see Alexander Baturo, Democracy, Dictatorship, and Term Limits, 2014).
Business analysts, taking their cue from academics, will increasingly associate China with other states that endure “presidents for life,” to include Russia, North Korea, and a dozen or so African strongman regimes. None are considered desirable targets for foreign direct investment. As a recent Jamestown Foundation report put it, Xi’s personality cult can now be described as “Putinism with Chinese characteristics” (22 December 2017) – a brand-damaging association precisely because Putin began as an economic reformer only to create a “stagnant kleptocracy.”
In sum, Xi’s move to abolish presidential term limits for himself invariably poisons the global business community’s faith in his judgment. Again, any effective leader knows when it is time to leave, and that his or her most important legacy is leaving behind successors capable of running the enterprise even more effectively. Xi’s decision indicates a lack of faith in the sixth generation of Chinese leaders and/or an inordinate faith in his own capabilities. Both are instinctively viewed by the business world as harbingers of China’s reduced economic performance in the years and decades ahead. This means that, after three decades of “going long” on China’s economic future, global investors will increasingly shift toward a bearish model of “shorting” the country’s long-term economic prospects (i.e., betting more on its decline than its advance). Yes, this was always going to happen in one form or another as China’s economy matured, but Xi’s decision accelerates the dynamic at a time when Beijing can least afford it.
How This Decision’s Dangerous Timing May Accelerate the Rise of a New Cold War
When the global economy plunged into the Great Recession in late 2008, Western national security experts naturally began comparing the worldwide crisis to the Great Depression of the 1930s, fostering speculation of national turns toward authoritarianism, xenophobia, and even fascism. While such predictions did not come to pass during the recession’s worst years, the world has ironically witnessed a decided crisis of confidence among Western democracies in the subsequent years of recovery, culminating in the United Kingdom’s 2016 BREXIT vote and the shocking elevation of the vitriolic businessman Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency only months later. Combined with academic surveys that note a persistent resurgence of authoritarian regimes around the world (12 years and counting, according to Freedom House), the West now believes itself to be suffering a “democracy crisis.”
Naturally, the West – led by the United States – will seek an exit from this crisis, and the rising narrative about China’s challenge to the post-World War II liberal trade order provides an excellent off-ramp. The world can thus expect Xi’s decision to serve as rallying cry among Western security hawks looking to resurrect national “greatness” in the manner of the Reagan Revolution and massive military build-up of the 1980s. Chinese leaders will, in turn, be preternaturally confident in dismissing such talk as “empty” and “desperate,” just like Soviet leaders once did.
This, of course, would be a dangerous mistake on Beijing’s part. Western democracies tend to atrophy during times of stability and radically innovate during times of crisis – with great success. The resurgence of a bipolar, Cold War-like struggle, this time with China as counterpart, would likely prove an excellent cure to America’s current political funk, accelerating all manner of long-delayed domestic structural reforms and forging a new externally-focused national passion for the protection of allied democracies (see South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, India, and Australia in particular), all of whom are likely to gratefully welcome a post-Trump White House back on stage as “leader of the Free World.”
Already, it seems clear that the U.S. Defense Department is preparing the bureaucratic “battlespace” for this resurgent pathway, as indicated by the new National Security Strategy published late last year. While the document is entirely unreflective of Donald Trump’s worldview, it does accurately portray the perspective of the U.S. national security establishment’s “great power war” faction, which is actively pushing the notion that America must move off its recent fixation on global counter-terrorism to refocus on the inevitability of large-scale advanced warfare with “revisionist” powers such as Russia and China. In truth, Russia poses no great threat to U.S. national security interests, and through its cyber-meddling in the last presidential election, it has provided a useful spur to America’s rethinking of its cybersecurity in general – a long overdue requirement. That leaves China as the obvious focus of any renewed bipolar global conflict/competition dynamic.
Chinese security analysts will counter that China’s military is not even close to challenging the U.S. military on a global basis, and this is true. But it is also irrelevant in terms of spurring U.S. reaction. Indeed, the more the U.S. national security establishment sounds the alarm of how much Russia and China have “narrowed the capabilities gap” between their militaries and the U.S. force (largely by exploiting technologies developed by America), the better the Pentagon’s argument becomes for pursuing a massive, technology-fueled build-out of a next-generation force designed to reassert American military primacy.
The preferred bipolar narrative is easily imagined: China, having abandoned all pretense of a democratic evolution fueled by economic advance, is now the guiding star and patron of authoritarian regimes around the world. America, however reluctantly, is forced to step back into its historical role as the defender of democracies worldwide. Just as an earlier period of rapid globalization succumbed to a “great war” among rival powers seeking to defend their spheres of influence, this era’s globalization – now viewed as eerily similar to its pre-World War I predecessor – must tragically suffer the same fate. With China playing the role of Kaiserian Germany and America filling in for a declining Great Britain, the die is clearly cast for those grand strategists given to spotting “inescapable” cycles in human history.
A Strangely Timed, Self-Inflicted Wound by the Xi Administration
Summing up the logic presented here:
Xi already has sufficient power within China’s political system to pursue his reform agenda and to play his constitutionally-timed role in guiding the nation to global superpower status.
Thus, Xi’s decision to abolish presidential term limits is invariably interpreted throughout the world as a self-induced grab for personal power, a development that bodes very badly for China’s long term developmental trajectory – if history is any guide.
By abandoning consensus rule and generational rotation of leadership, China invites every democratic great power to reassess it as an emergent existential threat to the post-World War II liberal trade order – now known as globalization.
This means democratic great powers, led by a United States eager to trigger its own resurgent greatness, will begin systematically planning for heightened competition and – eventually – direct conflict with a China that “has gone bad.”
Global investors will support this dynamic by subtly-yet-systematically “shorting” China’s future economic prospects, based on their own historical knowledge of what happens to a national economy ruled by a “president for life.”
As these various negative dynamics harden into an East-West bipolar order, the prospect of advanced combat among great powers increases to a degree not yet seen in the Nuclear Era. Whether such warfighting can be prevented from escalating to nuclear exchanges remains to be seen.
