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President Xi Jinping of China is poised to rule the country indefinitely after Chinese lawmakers passed changes to the country's constitution abolishing presidential term limits.
The amendment was sure to pass the country's rubber-stamp legislature, the National People's Congress, which voted 2,958 in favor, two opposed and three abstaining.
Since Xi assumed leadership of China's Communist Party in 2012, he has rapidly consolidated power to levels not seen since the era of Mao Zedong. The constitutional change officially allows him to remain in office after the end of his second term in 2023.
"In some ways, the move represents the end of China's 40-year-long reform era," NPR's Anthony Kuhn explained last month, when the proposed changes were announced. "The era...