At a rubber-stamp parliament that convenes this weekend, Xi Jinping will win a third term as China’s leader, maintaining his unchallengeable position in defiance of criticism of his management of the Covid and the economy.
After securing an additional five years in October as the head of the Communist Party (CCP) and the military, the two more important leadership posts in Chinese politics, Xi will undoubtedly be reappointed as president.
Since then, Xi, now 69, has had to deal with unforeseen difficulties and criticism of his leadership due to widespread demonstrations against his zero-Covid policy and its later abandonment, which resulted in the deaths of countless people.
At the National People’s Congress (NPC), a carefully orchestrated event that will also see the introduction of a supporter of Xi as the new premier, those problems are almost certainly going to be avoided.
The NPC, which begins on Sunday, is anticipated to last for about 10 days and conclude with the endorsement of Xi’s presidency by the 3,000 delegates who cast ballots in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People.
“Public opinion is probably not very good about him — zero-Covid has damaged people’s faith,” said Alfred Muluan Wu, an associate professor at the National University of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy.
Yet Xi still enjoys a “pretty strong” position at the top of the party that makes him virtually unchallengeable, Wu said.
Up until the end of last year, China kept some of the strictest COVID curbs in the world in place, crushing social life and economic development with a never-ending barrage of testing requirements, quarantines, and travel restrictions that Xi himself promoted.
In November, public resentment erupted into the largest public protests in decades, which were followed by the policy’s swift demise and a flurry of infections and fatalities that went largely unreported by the authorities.
