Last year, during several trips in which I travelled across China by train, two things in particular caught my attention. First, the red hammer and sickle—the universal symbol of the Communist Party—seemed to be proliferating on posters in cities, towns, and villages with the kind of vigor that I hadn’t seen since my childhood, growing up in an army hospital in Chongqing. Second, the only image I saw more frequently—in elementary-school classrooms, in airports and shopping malls, on billboards on highways and in rice paddies—was the face of President Xi Jinping. Each image was identical: the country’s supreme leader, with raven-black hair and a face fastidiously airbrushed to erase any hint of human blemish, smiling calmly against a sky-blue background: an unimpeachable deity in an officially atheist state.

The announcement, made last Sunday, that the Party is proposing to abolish term limits for the Presidency further confirms the notion that Xi aims to be something other than just another leader in a parade of apparatchiks. In October, when he presided over the nineteenth Communist Party Congress, where his doctrines were enshrined in the constitution, I wrote that Xi’s status licensed him to “play an almost imperial role in shaping the fate of the nation.” Shortly after the term-limits announcement, a widely shared image of China’s last Emperor, Pu Yi, with the caption “Emperor calls: ‘Is my Qing Dynasty returning?,’ ” was banned on WeChat, China’s most popular messaging app.

The People’s Daily, however, noted of the move to abolish term limits that the “Party’s proposition is in accordance with the people’s will.” It is true that, while China’s liberal intelligentsia laments Xi’s increasingly repressive policies—which have curbed human rights and undermined the rule of law in the most severe crackdown on civil society in decades—the majority of Chinese people, who do not live in the élite coastal cities or have access to news beyond the Great Firewall, take comfort and pride in Xi’s projection of strength. Still, if Xi wants to extend his rule indefinitely, there are a few historic truths that he will need to confront.

The Communist People’s Republic of China was founded in a theatrical break with history. In 1949, Mao Zedong stood atop the Gate of Heavenly Peace and declared that the “Chinese people have finally stood up,” a slogan that became the origin story of the modern nation. Equating the people’s independence with the Communist takeover was imprinted in the minds of every man, woman, and child. To my mother’s and my grandmother’s generations, the Party is what saved the nation from existential peril. China’s current leaders, including Xi, remain the beneficiaries of that origin story.

Sun Yat-sen, the first President of the Republic of China, had laid the groundwork for it a couple of decades earlier, in his manifesto “The Three Principles of the People.” He wrote, “If we do not earnestly promote nationalism and weld together our four hundred million into a strong nation, we face a tragedy—the loss of our country and the destruction of our race.” Xi echoed that conviction at last year’s Communist Party Congress, promising to “strive with endless energy” to restore China to its rightful superpower status by 2049, and invoking Sun’s principle of “national rejuvenation.” But Sun also highlighted the greatest challenge to that plan. “Despite four hundred million people gathered in one China, we are, in fact, but a sheet of loose sand,” he wrote. This is a point that Xi may do well to heed. He is stridently confident and has broad support among the population now, but, by attempting to concentrate political power in his own hands, in a nation of not four hundred million but 1.4 billion people, Xi is assigning himself the sole responsibility of protecting an origin story that has largely been a myth.

In the more than a century since Sun’s rule, China’s loose sand seems hardly to have settled into concrete. The market reforms that Deng Xiaoping introduced, in the late nineteen-seventies, ushered in a period of prosperity (there are now nearly six hundred billionaires in China), and Xi, with his immensely ambitious Belt and Road Initiative, clearly intends to go far beyond Deng’s goals and make China the economic engine of the world. But, despite the improvement in the average standard of living, China has gone from being a collectivist state that aspired to be egalitarian to being one of the most baldly unequal societies in the world. According to a report from Peking University, the poorest twenty-five per cent of households own just one per cent of the country’s total wealth, and the income gap is increasing. And the wealth is accumulating among the coastal élites, while the economy in the remote rural regions, many of which are inhabited by minority populations, remains stagnant. China’s Han majority has always been culturally dominant, but the nation is home to fifty-five officially recognized ethnic minorities, and the culturally distinct and significantly poorer western borderlands of Tibet and Xinjiang are the scene of increasingly violent unrest.

One-person rule is also prone to the kind of excesses and paranoia that may not only alienate the citizenry but undermine the institutions that previously insured the country’s stability. The crackdown has affected not only pro-democracy activists but also Xi’s high-ranking opponents in the Party. The military, which Xi heads, has taken an aggressive stance in territorial disputes in both the East China Sea and the South China Sea. Internet censorship is increasingly absurd—this week saw the banning of not only Winnie the Pooh (because he has been compared to Xi) but, reportedly, the English letter “N” (because it may denote the number of terms Xi may want to remain in office), along with the words “shameless” and “disagreement.” The portraits of Xi that I saw all across China serve as a reminder that a government’s need for propaganda tends to be inversely proportional to the strength of its political mandate.

China’s slated return to a one-person autocracy is sobering but hardly exceptional, given the rise of populist strongmen around the world. Xi’s particular asset—and what may sustain his support—is the deferred dream of true solidarity that Mao promised the nation nearly seventy years ago and that generations have held onto. But then, as now, authoritarian command of the nation requires not that the Chinese people “stand up” but that they bow to authority.