Guwahati: Xi Jinping of China was unanimously appointed as president for a third term. With this, he has surpassed Mao Zedong as the leader of the nation with the longest tenure.
According to reports, thousands of delegates at the National People’s Congress (NPC) in Beijing cast votes to extend Xi’s five-year term as president and commander in chief of the armed forces. However, the procedure became a formality in China’s rubber-stamp parliament after Xi was certified as the leader of the ruling Communist Party at a twice-decade congress in October.
2,952 NPC delegates voted unanimously to support Xi’s renewal of his mandate.
Before to this, the NPC also abolished term limits, paving the path for Xi to perhaps reign for the rest of time.
According to Chinese media, a broad range of reforms, including the creation of a new financial sector watchdog and national data agency, were authorised in a move that could signal stricter regulations on important sectors of the second-largest economy in the world.
Mary Gallagher, a political science professor at the University of Michigan, said: “Xi Jinping is doing two things at the same time. He is centralizing power to the centre while also strengthening the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] at the expense of the state. Doing these two things at once is unprecedented in the reform era.”
He continued by saying that the actions could make it more challenging for local municipalities to run their own affairs as they struggle to cope with paying for enormous virus control expenditures associated with Xi’s flagship zero-COVID policy as well as declining earnings from a weakening real estate market.
“Effective local governance will be more difficult under these conditions though local governments will be more compliant with the center,” he further said.
According to numerous reports, President Xi Jinping wanted the security system directly under his control, so China is gradually becoming into an oppressive police state similar to the former Soviet Union.
There is also a possibility that a new police unit and state security organization will be created, which would be placed under the direct command of Xi, the “core” of the party’s Central Committee.
Moreover, Xi is anticipated to strengthen state security and public security institutions within a wholly unconventional framework.