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BEIJING — Almost exactly five years ago, a newly anointed President Xi Jinping met his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, and declared they shared similar “personalities.”

The comments, reported by the Kremlin news service but not by Chinese state media, went largely unnoticed at the time. But on Sunday, the parallels between the two leaders were too stark to ignore.

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China’s Communist Party is to abolish a two-term limit on the presidency, state media announced, potentially opening the door for Xi to rule for life.

In that simple step, the Communist Party showed that it has forgotten one of the main lessons of the despotic rule of Mao Zedong, wrote Chinese legal expert and New York University professor Jerome Cohen in a blog post.

The two-term limit was inserted into the constitution after the brutal and chaotic Cultural Revolution to prevent a return of one-man dictatorship. “Its abolition signals the likelihood of another long period of severe repression,” Cohen wrote.