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After Mao Zedong died at the age of 82 in 1976, his successors deliberately crafted a system that they hoped would prevent the rise of another dictator. Mao had turned against other leaders and put the nation at risk through irrational schemes. Deng Xiaoping, Mao’s former comrade-in-arms who had twice been purged by him, did not blame Mao as an individual for the tragic mistakes of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) and the Great Leap Forward (1958-62). Instead, Deng targeted the systemic source of the problem: “Over-concentration of power is liable to give rise to arbitrary rule by individuals at the expense of collective leadership.”1
Deng and his colleagues introduced fixed terms of office, term limits, and a mandatory retirement age; delegated authority from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to government agencies under the State Council (the cabinet of the People’s Republic of China [PRC]); and started holding regular meetings of CCP institutions such as the Central Committee as well as the Politburo and its Standing Committee (the inner rings of power). All these moves were meant to decentralize authority, regularize political life, and check dictatorial power.
The centerpiece of the effort to prevent dictatorship and regularize political competition was the practice of peaceful leadership succession. Students of authoritarianism often identify leadership succession as its “Achilles heel”-a weak point that threatens regime stability by breeding power struggles and sclerotic leadership. When Jiang Zemin voluntarily retired from the post of CCP general secretary in 2002 (followed by his stepping down as president in 2003 and military chief in 2004), it was the first time that any ruler of a communist nation had left office without dying or being deposed by a coup. After Jiang, Hu Jintao served ten years in the three top offices, then voluntarily retired from all those positions in 2012 and 2013. Peaceful and regular premortem leadership succession has been a remarkable political achievement and the most important source of what Andrew Nathan has called China’s “authoritarian resilience.”2
Yet today, after decades of collective leadership, Xi Jinping is taking China back to personalistic leadership. By the end of his first five-year term, Xi had consolidated greater personal power than Jiang or Hu had ever held. Xi broke precedent by not promoting a...