The first posters appeared on a bulletin board at University of California, San Diego on March 1. Two days later, they popped up at Columbia University and New York University. Now they’ve spread to nine more colleges across the United States, Canada, Australia, and United Kingdom. The twin posters — one in Chinese, one in English — read, “Not my president,” the words superimposed over a photo of Chinese President Xi Jinping.
The signs are part of a small but growing campaign among Chinese university students abroad to express their opposition to the Chinese Communist Party’s proposal, announced last week, to scrap presidential term limits, paving the way for Xi to stay in power indefinitely. “The single most important driving force behind China’s growth in the past 30 years has been the check on the party leader’s power on the institutional level,” the organizers, told Foreign Policy in a message, after being contacted initially through a Twitter account associated with the campaign.
The signs are part of a small but growing campaign among Chinese university students abroad to express their opposition to the Chinese Communist Party’s proposal, announced last week, to scrap presidential term limits, paving the way for Xi to stay in power indefinitely. “The single most important driving force behind China’s growth in the past 30 years has been the check on the party leader’s power on the institutional level,” the organizers, told Foreign Policy in a message, after being contacted initially through a Twitter account associated with the campaign.
