Capstone: Tracing a Real Institutional Change -- The 2018 Term-Limit Amendment

Chinese Political History II: Reform, Opening & the Rise of Modern China

Chapter 10 · Capstone: Tracing a Real Institutional Change — The 2018 Term-Limit Amendment

The course ends with one change followed stage by stage: the removal of the presidential term limit. Chapter 7 gave the facts of the vote. This chapter puts the amendment back in its setting, uses the tools from the earlier chapters to read each stage, and then asks what the whole course shows about how the system works. It adds only one new fact from earlier chapters, the amendment procedure, and it keeps the same discipline of saying what is sourced, what is inferred, and what is missing.

Stage 1: The Rule and How It Can Be Changed

Article 79 said the president and vice president served the same term as the National People's Congress and "must not serve more than two consecutive terms." Article 64 sets the procedure for amending the constitution: a proposal by the NPC Standing Committee or by more than one-fifth of the deputies, and adoption by a vote of more than two-thirds of all deputies.

Tool from Chapter 2: Which Ladder? Article 64 names two state bodies as the source of a proposal. The proposal in 2018 was announced as coming from the Communist Party's Central Committee, a party body that Article 64 does not mention. This is the two-hierarchy point from Chapter 2 in a concrete case: the decision was taken on the party ladder and formalized on the state ladder.

Stage 2: The Preconditions

Precondition	Where it came from
The three top posts held by one person	Chapter 6: general secretary and CMC chair in November 2012, president in March 2013.
Only one of the three had a written limit	Chapter 7: state media said the other two lacked a formal term restriction.
A raised personal status	Chapter 6: "leadership core" (2016) and Xi Jinping Thought in the party constitution (October 2017).
A body for enforcing discipline	Chapter 6: the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection under Wang Qishan, 2012–2017, and the campaign against senior figures.
A weakened set of norms	Chapter 4: the informal age and party-post limits could not be verified, so the written presidential limit was the main visible check.

Stage 3: The Proposal

The Central Committee's proposal was made public by Xinhua on 25 February 2018, a week before the legislature's opening session, and reports say it had been kept secret until then. (One summary gives 26 January 2018 as a proposal date; the two dates may refer to different steps and I could not reconcile them, as Chapter 7 notes.) The secrecy fits the pattern from Chapter 3: important decisions were taken in a small circle and announced when the state bodies were about to act.

Stage 4: The Vote

On 11 March 2018 the first session of the 13th NPC voted 2,958 in favor, 2 against and 3 abstentions. That is far above the more-than-two-thirds threshold in Article 64. I did not verify the total number of deputies in that session, so I cannot state the exact threshold in votes. Compare the Chapter 2 example of the 1992 Three Gorges vote, where about a third of delegates did not vote yes.

What the Margin Does and Does Not Show A vote this lopsided fits a process in which the decision was settled beforehand and the congress ratified it. It does not show what deputies thought, and it does not show whether opposition was discouraged, since the sources I read do not address that. It also says nothing about public opinion, which one study found ranged from 37 to 60 percent support depending on question framing (Chapter 7).

Stage 5: The Package and the Rationale

The amendment also wrote party leadership into the main text, added Xi Jinping Thought to the preamble, created the National Supervisory Commission and codified oaths. State media said the aim was to align the three top posts. Chapter 7 argued this makes the change small in legal power and large as a signal, since the party and military posts never had a written limit.

Stage 6: The Consequences

October 2022: a third term as general secretary at the 20th Congress, with no designated successor on the new Standing Committee.
2023: a third presidential term, which the amendment made possible.
Open questions: the sources do not say what the succession arrangement is now, and I have not tried to predict it.

What the Whole Course Shows

Four threads run through the ten chapters. Each has a case in the first half of the course and a case in the second.

Thread	Earlier case	Later case
Formal posts versus working power	Chapter 2's party and state ladders; Chapter 3's Standing Committee deadlock decided by Deng and Yang Shangkun.	Chapter 7: the presidency's written limit removed to match posts that had none.
Informal authority moving policy	Chapter 1: Deng's Third Plenum speech and the zones; Chapter 4: the 1992 southern tour by a man with no post.	Chapter 6: a "leadership core" status and a personal doctrine beyond the formal titles.
Experiment first, law second	Chapter 1: Xiaogang and the special zones, codified afterwards.	Chapter 8: Hong Kong's autonomy, later reshaped by a national law in 2020.
Contested evidence, stated carefully	Chapter 3's casualty ranges; Chapter 5's two poverty series.	Chapter 8's turnout figures; Chapter 9's unverified counts.

A Reading Habit to Keep For any claim about China's politics, ask which ladder it is on, who actually decided, what the source is, and whether the number is a single-source figure. The course used those four questions in every chapter, and they will still work on events it did not cover.

What This Course Did Not Cover

Hong Kong's 2014 reform dispute and 2021 electoral changes (Chapter 8).
Taiwan's recognition count, its 2024 election and recent polling (Chapter 9).
How the party's secret decision-making works, beyond the accounts noted in Chapter 3.
Foreign policy, ethnic-minority regions, the legal system in detail and the events after the sources I used, all outside the course's scope.

Hands-On Exercises

Exercise 1

Trace the 2018 amendment through the six stages and, for each, name the earlier chapter that supplies the tool used to read it.

→ Solution

Exercise 2

Choose one thread from the table, describe its earlier and later case in your own words, and say whether the later case is a repeat of the pattern or a change from it.

→ Solution

Exercise 3

Write a paragraph of about 120 words on the 2018 amendment that states only what the course sourced, marks one uncertainty, and makes no prediction about the future.

→ Solution

Quick Reference

Article 79: two-consecutive-term limit on president and vice president; Article 64: amendment needs a proposal from the NPC Standing Committee or over one-fifth of deputies, and more than two-thirds of all deputies
Proposal: announced by Xinhua on 25 February 2018 as coming from the Central Committee
Vote: 11 March 2018; 2,958 for, 2 against, 3 abstentions
Package: party leadership in the text; Xi Jinping Thought; National Supervisory Commission; oaths
After: third term as general secretary (October 2022), third presidential term (2023)
Threads: formal versus working power; informal authority; experiment first and law second; carefully stated evidence

Course Complete

This closes Chinese Political History II: Reform, Opening & the Rise of Modern China. Together with Chinese Political History I (Empire's Fall, Revolution & Mao's China), it covers the political history of modern China in twenty chapters.