Is China’s Xi falling into the traps that Deng Xiaoping warned of?

Chinese president and party leader Xi Jinping risks dragging Asia’s biggest economy down a perilous path. For all the pageantry in Beijing this month, the National People’s Congress boiled down to Xi sidelining the Communist Party and aggregating absolute power around himself.

Much ink has been spilled about what Xi’s imperial presidencyportends for Beijing politics. What, for example, is Premier Li Keqiang’s role, if any, in the political-industrial complex Xi is constructing? But more attention should be paid to how Xi is stepping into a trap of which Deng Xiaoping warned. Deng, the architect of modern China, feared the “excessive concentration of power” and saw unchallenged “leadership of a single person” as a recipe for mistakes.

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