China Censors Social Media Responses To Proposal To Abolish Presidential Terms (theverge.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Negative social media reactions in China toward the government's interest in abolishing presidential term limits have sparked a crackdown on memes since Sunday evening. China's constitution currently restricts the president and vice-president to 10 years of leadership, meaning that President Xi Jinping would have been out of power by 2023. The Party's Central Committee proposed removing a phrase in the constitution that stated the two leaders would "serve no more than two consecutive terms," according to the state-run Xinhua News Agency. Authorities will vote on the proposal in March. Many took to social media platforms like WeChat and Weibo with Winnie the Pooh memes, as the animated bear resembles President Xi Jinping to some degree. Winnie the Pooh has been associated with Xi for years and this week, he donned a crown and sat on a throne, enjoying his honey pot. These memes and social media posts were then taken down, hours after the Committee's announcement, signaling that the public's reaction was more unfavorable than authorities predicted. An assortment of phrases have been filtered out by new censors, including "constitution amendment," "re-elected," "proclaim oneself as emperor," and "two term limit." The lag time between the censorship and the initial proposal indicates authorities expected the public to react less critically.

Comments

term limits are more than just a limit

[nimbius]

they are an international banner of confidence in your ruling party and the structure of your government. See, they act as a sort of tacit checks-and-balances against entrench-able things like perpetual rent-seeking, cronyism, and the types of long-running blood feuds that plague monarchical institutions like Saudi Arabia. Your best case scenario is that the policy your party seeks to advance is carried through without the dependency of a figurehead. Candidly, Nixon hated blacks and jews, but public policy for medicare and construction funding didnt become contingent upon an antisemites judgement of 3/5ths of a man.
 
Once you abolish the term limit, you quietly acknowledge that any policy now has an implicit dependency on a single person. You have created a choke point in the governance of your nation.

Re:Consider his age

[JaredOfEuropa]

Aren't there some South American countries where even the topic of no limit on terms is outlawed? And I don't mean in the Chinese sense that criticism is censored, I mean in the sense of a constitutional rule that says any politician who proposes it (formally or informally) is automatically ejected from office; all the judge needs to do is establish that they did in fact propose a removal of term limits.
Seems like a sensible precaution.

No, he's a typical Communist

[alternative_right]

Xi is a fucking fa[s]cist.

He's doing what all Communists do. A Right-wing regime may jail you for attacking the regime, but the Leftists will jail you for not being enthusiastic enough in your support of the People's Revolution.

Re: No, he's a typical Communist

[Anonymous Coward]

Well gee, I wonder why? Have you ever noticed that the Communists, who are supposed to be all about equality for all, keep setting up dictatorships? Oh, they're not TRUE Communists or whatever, sure, but they make Communist noises and get the Communist-leaning masses to support them because "it'll be better for everyone" so whatever.

It's funny how they keep using such an unequal government to establish "equality" no? This is why most Communist revolutions fail. Instead of setting up a more-equal government, like democracy, where the power is spread out rather than one guy being dictator for life, they keep doing power grabs to seize private property to "equalize" things, never mind the unequal government.

The few places this sort of thing almost worked were oil-supported states where the government could just distribute the oil money to everyone--a pretty reasonable idea, actually. Of course, Venezuela then failed because corruption led to the loss of said oil money and they're going down the drain quickly now. Our Nordic friends happened to invest their money in the stock market, so they're probably better protected against such a failure mode, but you see how much more pragmatic that decision was. They're so far just about the only experiment to get things right.

Re:On that note:

[hesiod]

Just reading from your link,

"In general, do you feel that the laws covering the sales of firearms should be made more strict, less strict, or kept as they are?"
47% - more strict
52% - less strict (or kept as they are)

That's a very misleading representation of the data on that page. You were not using the most recent poll in the list, and lumping together 13% "less strict" with %38 "kept as now", which are not the same thing. The most recent was 60% "more" and only 5% "keep same".