China’s Xi gets unprecedented third term

Chinese president, Xi Jinping, secured an unprecedented third five-year presidential term after a parliamentary session on Friday.

Nearly 3,000 members of China’s rubber-stamps parliament, the National People’s Congress (NPC), voted unanimously in the Great Hall of the People for the 69-year-old Xi in an election where there was no other candidate.

Xi set the stage for another term when he did away with presidential term limits in 2018, and has become China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong, who founded the People’s Republic.

China’s presidency is largely ceremonial, and Xi’s main position of power was extended last October when he was reconfirmed for five more years as general secretary of the central committee of the Communist Party.

The annual parliamentary session, the first since China dropped three years of COVID restrictions, will end on Monday, when Xi will give a speech that will be followed by a media question-and-answer session by Li.

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The parliament on Friday also elected Zhao Leji, 66, as the new parliament chair and Han Zheng, 68, as the new vice president. Both men were from Xi’s previous team of party leaders at the Politburo Standing Committee.

Xi, who has taken China in a more authoritarian direction since assuming control a decade ago, extends his tenure amid increasingly adversarial relations with the Washington and West over Taiwan, Beijing’s backing of Russia, trade and human rights.

Domestically, the world’s second-largest economy faces a challenging recovery from three years of Xi’s zero-COVID policy, fragile confidence among consumers and businesses and weak global demand for Chinese exports.

China’s economy grew just 3% last year, among its worst performances in decades, and during parliament Beijing set a modest growth target for this year of just around 5%.

Zainab Sa’id