The same destruction of freedom and objective law that enables dictators to become dictators also clears the way to dispensing with any term limits on them. The impact of term limits on full-fledged dictators may be scant and is hard to gauge. When other constitutional restraints are gone, it’s almost pure luck if term limits, intended in part to impose a temporal limit on abuse of power, can survive for very long.
When few if any vestiges of freedom and representative government remain, term limits can easily become a dead letter, as Xi Jinping showed in 2018.
Not a cure-all
Opponents of term limits have often declared that they aren’t a cure-all. They are not. But this doesn’t mean that they are irrelevant or ineffectual. Term limits help a healthy democracy to stay healthy. Many features of a rational constitution also help. A rational culture helps. Good candidates help. Conscientious governance helps. These are also the kinds of things that can help a country begin to return to democracy and freedom.
The Taipei Times reports that according to Chinese university students and ROC Mainland Affairs Council Minister Chiu Chui-cheng, Xi should not be president for life (October 28, 2026).
Chiu made the remarks in response to media queries for comment about a petition reportedly circulating on Monday among Chinese university students from 14 institutions, including Peking University, urging the reinstatement of term limits for Chinese presidents.
Monday was also the opening day of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party’s plenary meeting.
The petition, titled “A Joint Appeal from a Group of University Students in the Republic,” was first posted on a Chinese-language Web site.
The petition, which was quickly taken down, demanded restoring constitutional term limits on China’s leaders and defining the office’s roles and powers.
It also called for initiating democratic constitutional amendments by convening a national conference of the people and improving the mechanisms for election, supervision and recall processes, and protecting spaces for people to discuss public affairs….
The party should reform itself to ensure that power is subject to term limits and checks, and respect the people’s right to criticize and advocate for public affairs, it said.
Xi in March 2018 oversaw the process for constitutional amendments that made him president for life, an act that allowed him to consolidate power and weaken institutional constraints….
Screen grabs obtained by the Chinese-language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’s sister paper) showed the petition had appeared in at least 17 forums with links to Chinese universities.
Chiu says that “every intellectual possessing a conscience would support the open letter.” Let this be true.
