Constitutional Amendments and Party Power Centralisation in China

In March 2018, Chinese President Xi Jinping kick-started his second term at the annual National People’s Congress, which amended the country’s constitution to allow Xi to remain in power beyond his scheduled departure in 2023. Xi’s power consolidation also came with the Party’s reinforced Leninist control of state apparatus at various levels, corporations, civil society, the media and the academia. Party-State reforms in 2018 were a reversal of Party-State separation (dangzheng fenkai) initiated by Deng Xiaoping.