Jim O'Neill distances himself from Western commentators who have been decrying China’s abolition of presidential term-limits, that allow Xi Jinping to remain in office beyond 2023 after having served his regular two terms. He urges critics to focus more on the necessity to keep Xi in power, rather than questioning the president’s own personal ambition.

Although the author does not approve of an unlimited tenure for an unelected strongman, he does believe that Xi should remain in power and continue his mission – “to make China great.” The country had in reent decades lifted hundreds of million out of poverty “without adhering to the conventional Western approach to development.” Obviously this economic model works. Hence democracy should take a backseat. Besides, “Chinese citizens appear to be rather content.“

The author says “small-scale protests are not uncommon, even among those in the top 20%, they tend to be scattered and fleeting.” Can he explain why Xi has to crack down on journalists, human rights lawyers and activists? Even if that “young Beijing-based entrepreneur” the author met recently “estimates that at least 20% of Chinese – over 250 million people – are now making $40,000 per year,” income inequality is so crass that Beijing chooses to ignore it.

Apart from the US, “no other country in the world has that many people generating that much individual wealth. Whether Westerners like to admit it or not, that is a remarkable achievement.” A 2016 study from Peking University found that the poorest 25 per cent of Chinese households owned just 1 per cent of the country’s aggregate wealth, while the richest 1 per cent owned a third of the country’s total wealth.

China is on its way to outdo the US as the world’s biggest economy. Among the “looming threats to China’s GDP growth” the author believes the “hukou” could prove China’s “ultimate undoing.” The hukou is a controversial system of household registration required by law in China. It was set up in the late 1950s to control the movement of people between cities and the countryside. It requires all Chinese people to be classed as either urban or rural.

Critics have compared it to a caste system, intended to control internal movement and aimed initially at stopping peasants moving to cities. China has seen the greatest migration in human history, with hundreds of millions of people streaming from the countryside to fast-growing cities. This trend will intensify under Xi, who seeks “unprecedented reforms” to speed up urbanisation, by allocating rural families to cities to boost the GDP per capita.

The author says the government’s arrangement does not afford migrant workers “the same rights as urban-born dwellers,” who face economic and social discrimination. Citizens from the countryside have a rural hukou, that can not be altered even if they move to the cities. It is often much harder to access jobs, housing, education and healthcare there for anyone from rural areas. Many are forced to leave their children behind in the villages, to be brought up by grandparents.

Apparently the government is aware of the problem the Hukou system poses. While it has tried to abandon it “in smaller cities where it wants to promote growth, it has refrained from doing so in the big cities.” Officials fear that ditching “the system altogether would impose an unsustainable burden on megacities such as Beijing and Shanghai” and huge strains on the country’s fledgling social security net, raising the prospect of social unrest in the future.

No doubt reform is inevitable, because “a two-tier system in which almost half the population enjoys Western levels of wealth while the rest have no right to health care or social security cannot survive another 15 years.” If change happens, it will constitute “a dramatic shift in political governance.” For this reason the Communist party’s “upper echelons would want to be particularly careful about leadership changes in the years ahead.”

According to the author, when Xi took office in March 2013, “some at the top of the party tried to resist the changes he was bringing.” The two five-year terms may be too short for tackling fundamental issues relating the country’s future. He says the apparatchiks „do not want a permanent Xi presidency so much as they want to avoid a forced change of leadership in 2023. He advises Western commentators not to focus too much on Xi’s “personality and ambition, but on economic and other political issues.

The author has failed to see how fragile the political system is in China. If the country does not have strong institutions and a robust civil society that can function on their own and has to depend on the leadership of one man to thrive, then dictatorship is the only form of governance to avoid chaos and disruption. He has also forgotten why Deng Xiaoping introduced term limits in the 1980s, as part of his effort to ensure that China was never again subjected to a crushing dictatorship like that of Mao Zedong and the turmoil it brought about.