During Chinese President Xi Jinping’s first years in office, rights activists tried to remain buoyant despite shrinking opportunities to organize.
They staged small-scale protests, switched messaging platforms to avoid surveillance, supported the families and friends of those jailed, and pledged to continue their rights work come what may.
But a move to end presidential term limits, enabling Xi to remain in office indefinitely, may well have slammed the door shut on any hopes for a resurgence of grassroots activism and pressure for democratic political reform.
On Sunday, delegates at the annual meeting of China’s largely rubber-stamp parliament are expected to ratify the necessary constitutional amendment to make Xi the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao Zedong, the founder of communist China.
“To say it’s a low period sounds too superficial. It will be more like a freeze, where not one inch of grass is born. A barren period, for a very long time,” said Zhao Sile, a mainland journalist and activist who is a visiting scholar at National Chung Cheng University in Taiwan, where she recently published a book on social movements in China over the past two decades.
A growing space for activism in the early 2000s, fueled by social media and a movement of liberal reformers in the run-up to Beijing’s hosting of the 2008 Olympics, was buffeted by intermittent crackdowns from late that year to 2013, when Xi assumed power.
But the Xi era has been marked by what many activists say has been an unremitting squeeze on public dissent, including the government’s increasing control and censorship of cyberspace.
China’s State Council Information Office, which also speaks for the ruling Communist Party, did not immediately respond to a faxed request for comment for this article.
Delegates gathered at the parliamentary meeting in Beijing say scrapping the two-term presidential limit is popular with ordinary Chinese who are happy to have a leader of Xi’s caliber.
