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2018 Constitutional Amendment Removing Presidential Term Limits

On March 11, 2018, the first session of the 13th National People's Congress passed a constitutional amendment — 2,958 in favor, 2 against, 3 abstentions — deleting the clause that the president and vice president "shall serve no more than two consecutive terms." The fifth amendment to the 1982 Constitution, it was the first time in 36 years since Deng Xiaoping established term limits that China's highest office was reopened to indefinite rule.

Time

March 11, 2018 (vote); September 2017–March 2018 (process)

Place

Great Hall of the People, Beijing — first session of the 13th National People's Congress

Decision-makers

Xi Jinping (initiator, CCP General Secretary); Zhang Dejiang (head of the constitutional revision group); Li Zhanshu and Wang Huning (deputy heads); Wang Chen (NPC Standing Committee vice chairman, presented the draft); voted on by nearly 3,000 NPC delegates

Background: the 1982 term-limit system

After founding the PRC in 1949, Mao Zedong ruled for life — 27 years until his death in 1976. Under his rule China endured the Anti-Rightist Campaign, the Great Leap Forward, the Great Famine and the Cultural Revolution, with tens of millions of unnatural deaths. After Mao's death, Deng Xiaoping led reform and opening-up; to prevent a return to Mao-style lifelong dictatorship, the 1982 Constitution wrote in institutional constraints, the most important being Article 79, paragraph 3: "The term of office of the President and Vice President of the People's Republic of China is the same as that of the National People's Congress, and they shall serve no more than two consecutive terms."

This was the first time in modern Chinese history that the top leader's tenure was limited by constitutional provision. Though Deng himself retreated behind the scenes after 1989, this clause established the principle of "abolishing lifelong tenure in leading posts." Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao both honored the ten-year, two-term norm, handing over power on schedule and creating a relatively predictable succession mechanism for the reform era.

Notably, the limit applied only to the state offices of president and vice president. The other two supreme posts Xi holds concurrently — General Secretary of the CCP and Chairman of the Central Military Commission — never had term limits in the constitution or Party charter. After taking power in 2012, Xi purged large numbers of rivals through the anti-corruption campaign (including Zhou Yongkang, Guo Boxiong, Xu Caihou and other senior military and civilian officials), was designated the "core" of the Party Central Committee in 2016, and named no successor at the 19th Party Congress in 2017 as convention required — all harbingers of the term-limit removal.

By the 19th Party Congress in October 2017, Xi's power had reached heights unseen since the Mao era. The constitutional amendment merely wrote an accomplished fact into law.

Who decided

The decision-maker was Xi Jinping. The Party's internal process was never disclosed — stated plainly. The verifiable public chain:

• September 2017: Xi chaired a Politburo meeting deciding to amend the constitution (disclosed afterward by the Party, via AP).
• January 18–19, 2018: the 19th Central Committee's 2nd Plenum adopted the amendment proposal; the Party Center formally tabled it January 26.
• March 11, 2018: the 13th NPC's first session passed the amendment 2,958 for, 2 against, 3 abstentions, deleting the "no more than two consecutive terms" limit for the state president and vice-president.
• The 1982 system's origin: the term limit was Deng Xiaoping's safeguard against lifelong personal rule, drawn from the Cultural Revolution's lessons; its 2018 removal was widely read as Xi's key step toward ruling for life.

Detailed timeline

September 29, 2017: Xi Jinping chaired a CCP Politburo meeting that decided to launch constitutional revision work. A constitutional revision group was formed under the Politburo Standing Committee, headed by then-NPC Standing Committee Chairman Zhang Dejiang, with Li Zhanshu and Wang Huning as deputies. This was the starting point — not yet disclosed to the public.

December 27, 2017: Xi chaired another Politburo meeting deciding to convene the 2nd Plenum of the 19th Central Committee in January 2018 to discuss proposed constitutional revisions — the Party's first formal disclosure that revision work had begun.

January 18–19, 2018: The 2nd Plenum of the 19th Central Committee adopted the "Proposal of the CCP Central Committee on Revising Parts of the Constitution." Its communiqué revealed for the first time that "Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era" would be written into the constitution.

January 26, 2018: The CCP Central Committee submitted the proposal to the NPC Standing Committee. January 30: The 32nd meeting of the 12th NPC Standing Committee unanimously adopted the draft amendment based on the Central proposal and decided to submit it to the first session of the 13th NPC.

February 25, 2018: Xinhua published the full text of the Central Committee's proposal — the first official disclosure of the revision's contents, just half a month before the vote. A Hubei NPC delegate later said the public had never participated in any discussion of the amendment; after arriving in Beijing she had only taken part in repeated "study, consultation and deliberation" sessions, with the Standing Committee deciding the outcome.

March 5, 2018: The first session of the 13th NPC opened in Beijing. That morning, NPC Standing Committee Vice Chairman and Secretary-General Wang Chen presented the explanation of the draft amendment. March 6: Xinhua published a summary of the draft.

Afternoon of March 11, 2018: The congress held its third plenary meeting to vote on the draft. Voting began in the afternoon; Xi led the seven-member Politburo Standing Committee in casting orange ballots into red boxes, followed by rank-and-file delegates. The process took about ten minutes. At 3:52 PM the presiding officer announced the results (see figures table below).

Evening of March 11, 2018: Xinhua published the full amendment text. March 17: The NPC elected the state president — Xi Jinping won re-election as PRC President and CMC Chairman with all 2,970 votes, the immediate "deliverable" six days after the amendment.

Who executed

Execution chain: Xi (decision) → the Politburo/2nd Plenum (proposal) → the NPC Standing Committee (procedure) → NPC deputies (vote) → the censorship apparatus (silencing dissent).

• The NPC vote: of 2,958 deputies, only 2 voted no and 3 abstained; the deputies had been thoroughly "unified in thinking" beforehand — the outcome was never in doubt.
• The censorship machine: after the news broke, "emperor," "coronation," "lifelong rule," "Winnie the Pooh" were swiftly blocked on social media; discussions deleted.
• The propaganda line: state media uniformly called it "improving the state leadership system" for "long-term stability."

Vote results & figures

Other provisions of the amendment

The term-limit removal was only the most watched of 21 articles. Other key provisions:

Xi Jinping Thought enshrined. "Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era" was written into the preamble alongside Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought as state guiding ideology — the third leader-named doctrine so enshrined, after Mao Zedong Thought and Deng Xiaoping Theory.

Party leadership in the main text. "Leadership by the Communist Party of China" had appeared only in the preamble; a new paragraph was added to Article 1: "Leadership by the Communist Party of China is the defining feature of socialism with Chinese characteristics." Party rule moved from political declaration to constitutional article — questioning one-party rule became, legally, "unconstitutional."

National Supervisory Commission. A new state organ ranking alongside the State Council, Supreme Court and Supreme Procuratorate, consolidating anti-corruption powers over all public officials exercising public power — institutionalizing Xi's anti-corruption campaign by building discipline-inspection power into the state apparatus.

Constitutional oath. Established at the constitutional level the system of state functionaries swearing an oath to the constitution upon taking office.

Local legislative power. Granted legislative power to cities with districts.

Who opposed

1. The dissenting deputies: of 2,958 NPC deputies, 2 voted no and 3 abstained. Their identities were never disclosed — against expectations of unanimity, those 5 ballots are themselves a rare dissent record.

2. Online mockery: netizens jeered with "Winnie the Pooh," "emperor," "coronation" — each swiftly scrubbed. The censorship's breadth became part of the story: even discussing the ban was banned.

3. Li Datong: the former China Youth Daily "Freezing Point" editor published an open letter opposing the amendment, calling it "driving history in reverse."

4. International criticism: foreign media and scholars called it a reversion to personal autocracy, betraying Deng's 1982 intent.

5. The amendment's other contents: "Xi Jinping Thought" was written in; the National Supervisory Commission was created. But scrapping term limits was the most consequential clause — it dismantled the Deng era's most important check on power.

Impact

Ended Deng Xiaoping's institutional legacy. The 1982 term limit was the core institutional design by which Deng sought to prevent another Mao-style lifelong dictatorship — the most concrete fruit of the reform era's "abolition of lifelong tenure." Its deletion in 2018 dismantled the most important power-check mechanism of the post-Mao era. As NPR put it: "In some ways, the move represents the end of China's 40-year-long reform era," which began after Mao's death in 1976 as China tried to move away from his political violence and cult of personality.

The 2023 third term became reality. Five years after the amendment, in March 2023, Xi was elected to an unprecedented third term as president. No PRC president before him had ever served more than ten years. The amendment's direct consequence has been realized.

Comparison with the Mao era. Mao ruled for life — 27 years — launching successive political campaigns that killed tens of millions. Deng's 1982 limit was designed precisely "to avoid the kind of chaos and tumult that can sometimes happen when you have a single authoritarian leader" (Elizabeth Economy, Council on Foreign Relations). With term limits gone, China returned to a system in which the leader may rule indefinitely — even though today's socioeconomic conditions differ vastly from Mao's era, the fundamental feature of unconstrained tenure is the same.

Two narratives. The official line holds the amendment "safeguards the authority of the Party Central Committee," with the People's Daily insisting it "does not mean lifelong terms." Independent commentator Zhang Lifan called it "the biggest regression in China's legal system since the reform and opening-up era." After the vote, social media filled with criticism — comparisons to North Korea, fears of a Mao-like cult — quickly deleted.

The succession mechanism is gone. The relatively predictable ten-year handover rhythm since 1982 no longer exists. Chinese politics returned to the uncertainty of rule by individual: when and to whom the leader hands over power has no institutional answer — it depends solely on the supreme leader's will and health.

The English flash, public reaction and censorship: after February 25, 2018

The way the proposal was disclosed is itself part of the record. On the afternoon of Sunday, February 25, 2018, Xinhua first issued an English-language flash reporting that the CCP Central Committee proposed deleting the constitutional expression that the president and vice president "shall serve no more than two consecutive terms"; the full Chinese text of the proposal followed. Because the English flash came first, the news spread within hours through international wire services and overseas Chinese-language media, then flowed back into Weibo and WeChat — most ordinary netizens first learned of it from screenshots of foreign coverage rather than from domestic headlines. By the time mainland reporting caught up that evening, online discussion was already in full swing: some users dug out Deng Xiaoping's 1980s speeches on abolishing lifelong tenure, some posted Winnie the Pooh images, some simply wrote "I disagree." That gap of a few hours became a textbook case for studying how information control works.

Censorship followed immediately. China Digital Times, the U.S.-based archive of Chinese censorship, compiled the Weibo terms blocked or search-restricted at the time: "I disagree," "emperor," "ascend the throne," "lifelong tenure," "long live," "Yuan Shikai," "Winnie the Pooh," "emigrate" — and even the Latin letter "N" was briefly blocked, because netizens had taken to writing "N terms" to mean unlimited re-election (a number of terms greater than two, expressed as N). Critical articles on WeChat were deleted and some accounts that published dissent were shut down. The ever-growing ban list itself became the story for international media: Reuters and the BBC both framed coverage around the fact that even "I disagree" could not be said. This site records the censorship facts without speculating about who handled individual bans.

Financial markets and business reacted with restraint. On the first trading day after the announcement (February 26), mainland stock indexes dipped intraday, and foreign coverage linked part of the movement to investor unease about long-term political uncertainty; other analysts noted the day's trading was driven mainly by external markets and could not simply be attributed to the amendment. Both readings are presented here; the attribution is unverified. The more consistent judgment came from political analysts: once term limits were deleted, succession turned from an "institutional question" back into a "personal question" — an assessment international China research has repeated for years since.

From lifelong tenure to term limits and back: the historical arc

Understanding the 2018 amendment requires pulling back to 1980. On August 18, 1980, Deng Xiaoping delivered his speech "On the Reform of the System of Party and State Leadership" to an enlarged Politburo meeting, systematically proposing the abolition of lifelong tenure in leading posts, which he called a practice "with feudal overtones" and one root of the personality cult and over-concentration of power. That speech was the direct intellectual source of the term-limit clause written into the 1982 Constitution. Deng practiced it himself: he gave up posts including vice premier in the 1980s, resigned as Central Military Commission chairman in 1989, and retired completely in the 1990s. Although he retained paramount influence after retirement, "leaders should step down" became a consensus norm inside the Party.

Two successions then proved the norm in operation. At the 16th Party Congress in 2002, Hu Jintao succeeded as General Secretary and took the presidency in 2003; Jiang Zemin fully retired after giving up the CMC chairmanship in 2004. At the 18th Congress in 2012, Xi Jinping took over as General Secretary and CMC chairman, then the presidency in 2013, with Hu Jintao retiring "naked" — surrendering all posts on the same day. Both handovers had their disputes over personnel arrangements, but the ten-year rhythm was never broken. That is precisely why, when the new Politburo Standing Committee unveiled at the 19th Congress in 2017 contained no visibly younger member positioned as a successor, outside observers already widely expected the term limit to be changed — the Xinhua English flash of February 25, 2018 merely confirmed the expectation.

One personnel move passed alongside the amendment is often overlooked. On March 17, 2018, Wang Qishan — who had stepped down from the Politburo Standing Committee at the 19th Congress — was elected Vice President as an ordinary Party member, with 2,969 votes in favor and 1 against. Wang had been the enforcer of Xi's anti-corruption campaign, and his appointment broke the convention that the vice presidency goes to a sitting or symbolic figure; it was widely read as a signal of the amendment's new personnel logic, in which appointments were no longer hard-bound by retirement-age and term conventions. Researchers treat the deletion of term limits and Wang Qishan's vice presidency as two footnotes to the same new logic.

Discussion of "fixed upon one authority" (dingyu yizun) followed close behind. At the National Organization Work Conference on July 3–4, 2018, Xi stated that the Party Central Committee is the Party's brain and torso and "must have the authority of dingyu yizun — the final word settled by one." The classical phrase was thus established as the formal expression for upholding the supreme leader's authority. Official exegesis stresses that it means upholding the Central Committee's centralized, unified leadership; independent commentators widely read it together with the March amendment and personal centralization, as the discursive complement to indefinite tenure. Both readings are presented here. The timing of the phrase — four months after the amendment passed — is itself part of the archive.

What followed (2018–2023)

The most publicly identifiable opponent of the amendment was Li Datong. After his open letter, Li told media he intended to lobby NPC deputies as a citizen to vote against it, and said several deputies had privately expressed the same concerns to him; the letter was swiftly deleted from mainland platforms, and he has rarely spoken publicly in domestic media since. The price paid by scattered individual dissenters drew the boundary line: after 2018, no public record of open dissent against top-level personnel arrangements has appeared on the mainland.

Every institutional consequence was realized within five years. In October 2022 the 20th Party Congress re-elected Xi as General Secretary and CMC Chairman for a third term, breaking the two-term rotation norm in place since 1982; the new Politburo Standing Committee consisted entirely of Xi's close associates, still with no designated successor. On March 10, 2023, the first session of the 14th NPC elected the state president: all 2,952 deputies present voted for Xi Jinping to continue as President and CMC Chairman, with Han Zheng elected Vice President. It was the first third presidential term in PRC history. Between the line deleted in 2018 — "shall serve no more than two consecutive terms" — and the unanimous re-election of 2023 lie five full years of the new system in operation.

As of this page's last verification, no end date for Xi's tenure has been publicly set: neither the Party charter nor the constitution limits consecutive terms for the General Secretary, the CMC Chairman or the state President; the next Party Congress (the 21st) is due in 2027, and when power will change hands, and to whom, has no public institutional answer. This site will keep recording subsequent personnel and institutional changes.

Videos

"The Decision That Allowed Xi Jinping to Rule for Life": in March 2018, fewer than 3,000 delegates dismantled a decades-old succession system in eleven minutes. From Deng's "collective leadership" to highly centralized personal rule — tracing the anti-corruption purges and the missing 2017 successor.

BBC News (March 2018): China scraps presidential term limits — the BBC Chinese Service editor explains what it means.

Related images (external links)

• 13th National People's Congress image category — Wikimedia Commons (includes 2018 session photos)
• Great Hall of the People image category — Wikimedia Commons (the voting venue, CC-licensed photos)