IH

Well, it’s a slightly curious move. As you may recall, Deng Xiaoping, the great reformer, was trying to set in place a series of structures in the Chinese state and in the party that would guard against any one man attaining the kind of power that Mao Zedong had attained and the bad things that can follow from that.

So, he instituted a number of measures. One was a move toward a more collective leadership, and the other — the one that’s relevant here — is the tradition that a Chinese president could serve two terms, each of five years, so that after ten years, essentially, he had to step down.

This has a number of knock-on effects. If you know that you have to step down at the end of ten years, you moderate your behavior. You don’t want to have a whole set of enemies waiting to get you. So, the tenor and tone of the administrations that followed Deng Xiaoping were altogether calmer than during the era of Mao Zedong.

Term limits also solved the question that has bedeviled China’s politics, which is the question of succession. All through the imperial period — 2,000 years of naked power struggles and succession struggles — you see the bad effects of not having a constitutional succession process. And we saw it also in the first years of Chairman Mao, when every person who was named number two, and therefore could be expected to succeed Mao, ended up either dead or in jail.

It’s a recipe for instability, and it’s a curious move at this point.