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The 2018 Constitutional Amendment: China’s Presidential Term Limits Removed

Policy question

On March 11, 2018, the National People’s Congress amended the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China, deleting the rule — in force since 1982 — that the President and Vice-President of the state “shall serve no more than two consecutive terms.” The change sat inside a 21-article amendment package that also wrote Xi Jinping Thought into the preamble, made Communist Party leadership a binding constitutional clause, added a constitutional oath for state functionaries, and created a National Supervision Commission. The governance issue is whether fixed leadership-tenure rules are a constitutional safeguard against the return of personal rule, or an adjustable instrument of party leadership that can be rewritten when it constrains the center. The amendment’s supporters, its critics, and the scholars who studied it answered that question very differently.

Background: the 1982 two-term rule

The 1982 Constitution, drafted in the circle of Deng Xiaoping, imposed the two-consecutive-term limit on the presidency and vice-presidency as the centerpiece of a systemic reform aimed at preventing a repeat of the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, according to later scholarly analysis of the amendments. Before 1982, key leadership posts carried no term limits. The NPC’s official English translation of the Constitution (2004 consolidation) stated in Article 79, paragraph 3: “The term of office of the President and Vice-President of the People’s Republic of China is the same as that of the National People’s Congress, and they shall serve no more than two consecutive terms.” The Chinese read: “中华人民共和国主席、副主席每届任期同全国人民代表大会每届任期相同，连续任职不得超过两届” (from People’s Daily’s summary of the 2018 draft explanation).

The proposal and the package

On February 25, 2018, at 4:43 p.m. Beijing time, Xinhua reported that the Communist Party of China Central Committee had “proposed to remove the expression that the President and Vice-President of the People’s Republic of China ‘shall serve no more than two consecutive terms’ from the country’s Constitution.” The proposal came from the 19th CPC Central Committee’s 2nd Plenary Session and was to be considered at the 1st Session of the 13th NPC, opening March 5, 2018.

The same Xinhua release listed the other amendments proposed in the package: adding “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era” and the Scientific Outlook on Development to the preamble; adding “working to build a community with a shared future for humanity”; writing into Article 1 that “the leadership of the Communist Party of China is the defining feature of socialism with Chinese characteristics”; adding core socialist values to the preamble; adding to Article 27 that state functionaries “shall take a public oath of allegiance to the Constitution upon assuming office”; and establishing national and local supervisory commissions as a new section of the Constitution’s chapter on state organs, with the NPC’s Law Committee renamed the Constitution and Law Committee. In total the amendment decision ran to 21 articles, of which the term-limit deletion was Amendment Article 45.

On March 5, Wang Chen （王晨）, vice-chairman of the 12th NPC Standing Committee, delivered the official explanation of the draft amendment to the session. People’s Daily’s summary of his remarks reported that delegates were unanimous in supporting new rules on the presidency’s tenure — “一致赞成对国家主席任期作出新的规定.”

The vote

On March 11, 2018, the 1st Session of the 13th NPC adopted the amendment. Results were announced shortly after 3:50 p.m. Beijing time. The Associated Press reported the tally as 2,958 votes in favor, 2 opposed, 3 abstaining, and 1 invalidated: “The constitutional amendment item has passed,” the announcer declared to polite applause. NPR’s report the same day gave the first three figures — 2,958 in favor, two opposed, three abstaining — without mentioning the invalidated vote.

The substantive Article 79 change, as rendered in an English translation of the amendment decision: the paragraph that read “The president and the vice president of the People’s Republic of China shall have the same term of office as that of the National People’s Congress and shall serve no more than two consecutive terms” was amended to read simply: “The president and the vice president of the People’s Republic of China shall have the same term of office as that of the National People’s Congress.” The Chinese summary confirmed the operative edit: 中”连续任职不得超过两届”删去 — the “shall serve no more than two consecutive terms” clause, deleted.

Contemporaneous responses

Dissent inside China

The most prominent domestic dissent came the day after the proposal. On February 26, 2018, Li Datong （李大同）, former managing editor of Freezing Point （冰点）, the China Youth Daily supplement, posted an open letter on WeChat addressed to the 55 Beijing delegates to the NPC — named recipients included Xu Tao （徐韬）, Ren Ming, Yang Yuanqing, and Chen Jining. He urged the delegates “to enter dissenting votes during the 13th session of the National People’s Congress that is about to take place, overruling the decision taken by the Party’s Central Committee concerning the amendment of Article 14 of the Constitution to abolish term limits for the president.” (China Media Project’s English translation, published February 28, 2018.) Li’s letter says “Article 14” although the term-limit clause stood in Article 79; his wording is quoted here as translated, uncorrected.

To the Associated Press on February 27, Li said lifting the limits would “sow the seeds of chaos”: “If there are no term limits on a country’s highest leader, then we are returning to an imperial regime.” “My generation has lived through Mao. That era is over. How can we possibly go back to it?”

Businesswoman Wang Ying wrote on WeChat that the proposal was “an outright betrayal” and “against the tides”: “I know that you (the government) will dare to do anything,” she wrote, “and one ordinary person’s voice is certainly useless. But I am a Chinese citizen, and I don’t plan on leaving. This is my motherland too!” (Chinese characters for her name were not verified in the research underlying this article and are omitted.)

Beijing-based independent political commentator Zhang Lifan （章立凡） told the Associated Press on March 11: “This marks the biggest regression in China’s legal system since the reform and opening-up era of the 1980s.”

Censorship

After the February 25 announcement, China’s internet censors moved against criticism on social media. The China Digital Times and Free Weibo reported lists of phrases being banned, including “I don’t agree,” “election term,” “constitution rules,” “Winnie the Pooh,” and “proclaiming oneself an emperor,” while “migration” and “emigration” were also monitored, according to Verdict.co.uk’s February 26, 2018 report. NPR reported on February 26 that censors had “cracked down on criticism posted and shared on Chinese social media, including a meme featuring Winnie the Pooh.” PEN America’s June 2018 “Forbidden Feeds” report recorded that “in July 2017, and again in late February 2018 major online platforms mass deleted images of [Winnie the] Pooh bear,” and that after the February 2018 announcement “some netizens responded with pictures of ‘King Winnie.’” A March 2018 Globe and Mail account, relayed via the Chinese Human Rights Defenders network, described a 19-year-old student known as “Yan” — who had built a tool to find deleted Weibo accounts — being visited by police amid the censorship drive, and reported that at one point even the letter “n” (mathematical shorthand for an unspecified number of terms) was blocked. The Winnie the Pooh meme itself predates 2018: comparisons between the character and Xi Jinping date to 2013–2014; the meme resurfaced specifically around the term-limit proposal.

Taiwan

Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council issued a statement on March 11, 2018: “It is China’s internal affairs the National People’s Congress decided to remove a two-term limit for its leader… China is an important member of the international community and bears heavy responsibility for regional peace, security and stability… it hopes China can follow global trends in promotion of freedom, democracy and rule of law to truly benefit its people’s welfare.” (Via CNA.)

Scholars and overseas commentary

Brantly Womack of the University of Virginia told NPR on February 25: “The question this makes very vivid is, is Xi Jinping’s personal power overriding the power of institutions and the constitution?” Elizabeth Economy of the Council on Foreign Relations told NPR on March 11 that the 1982 limit was put in place “in order to avoid the kind of chaos and tumult that can sometimes happen when you have a single authoritarian leader, as China had with Mao Zedong.” Susan Shirk of UC San Diego told The Guardian on February 26: “A bombshell… I wasn’t anticipating such an open declaration of the new regime… What is going on here is that Xi Jinping is setting himself up to rule China as a strongman, a personalistic leader — I have no problem calling it a dictator — for life.” Sinocism publisher Bill Bishop told The Guardian the move confirmed Xi’s mutation into a species of “Putin-plus” — only Xi was “much more effective, much more powerful and, frankly, much more ambitious” than Vladimir Putin. Renmin University international-relations professor Shi Yinhong （时殷弘） told The Guardian: “It means that for a long time into the future, China will continue to move forwards according to Xi’s thoughts, his route, his guiding principles and his absolute leadership.” The Brookings Institution, in a February 28 analysis titled “China’s constitutional conundrum,” wrote that “undoing this restriction essentially lines Xi up to be ‘President for Life,’” calling the revisions “the most historically consequential power grab by the self-assured Chinese president” while noting the tension with Xi’s “law-based governance” rhetoric.

Competing viewpoints

Four readings of the amendment circulated in 2018. They are presented here as distinct positions, without ranking.

The official framing: improving the leadership system. A Global Times editorial on February 25, 2018, stated: “Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China, there have been multiple adjustments to the institution of the presidency and its terms of reference. Over the past two decades, a trinity of leadership consisting of the CPC Central Committee general secretary, president of the nation and chairman of the CPC Central Military Commission has taken shape and proven to be effective. To remove the two-term limit of the Chinese president can help maintain the trinity system and improve the institution of leadership of the CPC and the nation.” People’s Daily’s summary of Wang Chen’s explanation framed the amendment as a major Party Central Committee decision, taken with Xi as the core, from the strategic height of upholding socialism with Chinese characteristics in the new era.

The liberal “constitutional regression” reading. Li Datong: “sow the seeds of chaos,” a return “to an imperial regime.” Zhang Lifan: the “biggest regression in China’s legal system since the reform and opening-up era.” Wang Ying: “an outright betrayal.” Academic commentary (cited in a China Perspectives paper) summarized the criticism: the amendments “represent a significant setback to China’s constitutional development because term limits for senior [leaders were a key reform-era institution].” Susan Shirk’s “dictator for life” characterization belongs here too.

The leftist/nationalist support reading. Beyond the Global Times‘ trinity argument, state-run media coverage in the immediate aftermath was, as one U.S. nonprofit newsletter put it, “overwhelmingly positive.” No separately verified netizen-level support campaign was documented in the research for this article.

The comparative-scholar “institutionalization reversed” analysis. Womack’s question — whether Xi’s personal power was overriding institutions and the constitution. Economy’s reminder of the 1982 limit’s purpose. A Nippon.com analysis noted that before 1982 there were no term limits on key leadership posts, and that Deng’s circle imposed the two-term limit precisely to prevent a repeat of the Cultural Revolution’s excesses. The China Perspectives paper added a further institutional point: by moving the statement of CCP leadership from the preamble into Article 1 as a binding clause, the amendment deepened the party-state fusion problem for theories of party-state separation.

Implementation and aftermath

The amendment’s effects were visible within days. On March 17, 2018, Xi Jinping was re-elected President and Chairman of the Central Military Commission by the 13th NPC — Xinhua’s report opened “全票当选！众望所归！” (“Elected by unanimous vote! Standing high in the people’s favor!”) — and then took the first public constitutional oath ever sworn by a Chinese president. Li Keqiang was re-elected Premier, and Wang Qishan （王岐山） was elected Vice-President. On March 18, Yang Xiaodu （杨晓渡） was elected the inaugural director of the new National Supervision Commission, the state organ created by the amendment’s supervisory-commissions section and placed under a new Supervision Law adopted during the same NPC session. The Commission absorbed investigation functions previously held by the Party’s discipline bodies and was ranked near cabinet level, above the Supreme People’s Court and Supreme People’s Procuratorate.

Historical Free China Movement record

No contemporaneous Free China Movement response to the 2018 constitutional amendment is on record in the sources reviewed.

Sources