Charles Burton, an associate professor of Political Science at Brock, wrote a piece recently published in The Conversation about revisions with huge political impact hidden within China’s national constitution.

Burton writes:

The Xinhua news agency has just issued a long, unprecedented statement about directions from the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee to the National People’s Congress regarding revisions to China’s national constitution.

The People’s Congress is now required to propose these revisions at its annual meeting next month.

If there was any doubt that China’s national legislature is anything but a toothless rubber stamp for the secretive machinations of the Communist Politburo, there isn’t anymore.

Hidden well inside the turgid text, at the end of Section 14, is the removal of a phrase limiting China’s president and vice-president to two terms in office.

So it looks like President Xi Jinping, aged 64, and his proposed VP, Wang Qishan, 69, are in office for life. (Expect an approving tweet from Donald Trump, who must feel ever more resentful that he’s buckled down by the United States’ comparable constitutional restriction.)

China’s term limit was enacted in 1982 following a reassessment of the later years of Chairman Mao Zedong’s, who was supreme leader from 1935 until his death in 1976.

Continue reading the full article here.