Xi Jinping re-elected as president, Wang Qishan is vice president

March 18th, 2018

Awake Goy

Christof Lehmann (nsnbc) : The Communist Party of the People’s Republic of China has re-elected Xi Jinping as president with a unanimous vote. After the recent removal of term limits, Xi can now stay on as long as he wants to. His former anti-corruption tsar Wang Qishan is the new vice president of the increasingly totalitarian “People’s Republic”.

It would have been Xi’s second and final term as president and head of state, but last week the rubber-stamp National People’s Congress (NPC), with only 5 dissenting votes, approved the controversial proposal to abolish term limits and a bundle of other sweeping measures. The change, seem by many as a regression to the days of Mao’s tyranny, effectively allows Xi to continue for as many terms as he likes.

The move that effectively turns the “People’s Republic of China” into a corporatist oligarchy with a “supreme leader” at its top was in the making for a while, with prominent and especially not-so-prominent critics including academics being intimidated, bused to other provinces, detained, warned to stay silent, having their social media accounts blocked or bombarded with critical comments posted by Beijing’s cyber-warfare trolls.

On Sunday, March 11, 2018, the controversial decision to scrap the two-term limit on the office of the president of the People’s Republic was approved along with 20 other sweeping changes. The amendments passed smoothly in the rubber-stamp National People’s Congress (NPC) with only five dissenting, fig-leaf-like votes. Of the nearly 3,000 delegates to the congress, 2,958 voted in favor.

The decision to scrap a two-term limit to the president’s term in office was divulged to the public only in late February 2018. The move was well-prepared and the Communist Party and Military Industrial Oligarchy were working effectively on a narrative to make the de-facto decision to turn the country into a corporatist oligarchy, otherwise also described as fascism, palatable to “the masses” in China and to China’s international partners, most of whom were too intimidated by Beijing’s not always so soft economic soft power to complain and to be all too principled.

A party, state and military dominated press in the People’s Republic fulfilled its function as bullhorns for the oligarchs wonderfully, and by March even many critics had been convinced or sufficiently intimidated to perceive the prospect of having another Mao-like dictator as something wonderful or inevitable.

Communist Party leaders argue changes to Article 79 of the Constitution were necessary because other key positions Xi holds as party chairman and head of its Central Military Commission have no term limits. In other words, the elite is using the type of easily debunked circular argument that is constructed so sloppy, that only oligarchs who are so convinced of their invulnerability and their removal from “the masses”, would ever be sloppy enough to use them. It’s tyranny, right into the face of the people saying “it tastes like shit but we know that you are going to love it”.

The oligarchical takeover is being sold to the public by claiming the changes will ensure China maintains continuous strong leadership at a time when crucial reforms are on the horizon and the rising superpower is at a critical stage in its economic development. Speaking after the amendments were passed, NPC official Shen Chunyao said the decision to scrap presidential term limits has a broad consensus nationwide.

Wang Qishan received 2,969 votes in favor of his vice-presidency and one against. The 69-year-old Wang headed Xi’s campaign against corruption and corrupt – or rivalling – officials. He stepped down in October 2017, in time to have a cooling-off period after his anti-corruption efforts helped consolidate the now established party – military oligarchy centered around a Xi who can stay on as long as he wants to.

CH/L – nsnbc 18.03.2018

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