作者：弗朗西斯.福山
3月6日 （电脑软件自动翻译）
弗朗西斯福山是斯坦福大学的高级研究员和民主，发展与法治中心主任。他的着作"身份：尊严的需求和怨恨的政治"将于9月出版。
自1978年以来，中国的专制政治体制与其他所有独裁政体有所不同，部分原因是执政的共产党一直遵循继承规则。高级领导层的任期限制已经三次以规则的间隔每10年进行一次，而该党培养和培训新领导人以取代即将离任的领导人的体系使其避免了埃及，津巴布韦，利比亚等国家的停滞。安哥拉，总统统治数十年。
但现在这一切都已经过去了，因为中国国家主席习近平最近宣布将取消对国家主席任期的限制。这意味着他可能会成为中国终身的统治者，一举将制度化的专制制度变为私人专制制度。这是建立在他一直培养的大量个人崇拜的基础上的，"习近平思想"现在与毛主席并列在宪法中。
明确规定限制任何一个人的权力对于任何政治制度的成功至关重要，无论民主与否，因为没有任何人是明智的或善意的，无法无限地裁决。因此，继承是所有独裁统治的一个弱点：缺乏规则需要对最高领导人的死亡造成破坏性的权力斗争。
中国对当代俄罗斯的巨大优势恰恰在于这些规则：如果俄罗斯总统弗拉基米尔普京明天心脏病发作去世，那么巨大的权力真空就会出现，并且当强大的精英们互相争斗时，这个国家就会陷入不确定性。即便是缺乏连续性的，定期领导的流动意味着新思想和新一代人可以重振政策，并让前任领导在一定程度上负起责任。
刚刚被废除的规则是中国自身经历文化大革命痛苦经历的结晶。几个世纪以来，该国传统专制政治体系的弱点被称为"不好的皇帝"问题。独裁法院，自由媒体或民选立法机关等行政权力相互制衡的专政，在皇帝好的时候可以做出令人惊叹的事情：在新加坡成长初期，如前总理李光耀。早期中国政权的垮台一直是一位坏皇帝的出现，他可能会让这个国家陷入可怕的危机，因为他或她的权力没有有效的限制（比如唐代的"邪恶的武则天"）。
中国的最后一个坏皇帝是毛泽东。毛解放了外国占领的国家，但后来也引发了两次巨大的灾难：从20世纪50年代末开始的大跃进和从20世纪60年代末开始的文革。后者使中国倒退了一个世代，并使那些经历过这场灾难的精英们伤痕累累。集体领导是对这种经历的直接反应：邓小平和党的其他高级领导人发誓说，他们决不会让一个人像毛泽东那样积累如此强大的权力。
中国体制的不透明性并不能让我们明确地知道习近平如何以及为什么能够巩固其个人统治背后的力量。动机的部分原因可能源于对权力已经渗透到一些地区和部长权贵阶层的腐败和难以控制的担忧（如重庆市的前党委书记薄熙来）。另一个问题可能是"太子党"（像共产党高级官员的子女）习惯于鄙视被江泽民及其继任者提携起来的官僚如习近平。
另一个因素是随着时间的流逝，与在东欧一样，通过苛刻专政生活的经历伤害了个人并使他们接受了希望复活允许这种无限制力量的体系。正如一位高级政党官员曾告诉我的那样："如果你不了解文化大革命的真正灾难，你就无法了解当代中国。"但那个时期下放到农村的精英阶层正在变老，关于毛的血腥遗产这个国家没有年轻人进行应有的教育。他们可以听到那个时代的歌曲，比如"东方红"，并幻想象那是一个更加团结和幸福的时代。
中国似乎随意取消任期限制说明了为什么宪政是一件好事。中国宪法是党的最高领导层制定的，并不限制他们。相比之下，拉丁美洲充满了宪政民主，其司法往往令人惊讶地独立。在阿根廷，委内瑞拉，厄瓜多尔，哥伦比亚和该地区其他地方的总统都试图延长他们的任期，但他们实际上不得不花费政治资金这样做，而且他们并不总是成功。
例如，前哥伦比亚总统乌里韦希望在2009年增加第三任总统职位，但遭到宪法法院的阻挠，宪法法院裁定该延期违宪。他继任哥伦比亚总统可能会做好事，但这个制度迫使人民的总统到期离任会让这个国家的情况要更好。去年，厄瓜多尔的专制总统拉斐尔·科雷亚同样原因被迫下台，他的继任者列宁莫雷诺总统为该国的民主创造了新的生机。
中国目前的皇帝将会有多么糟糕，尚未确定。迄今为止，他破灭了许多中国人建立一个更加开放，透明和自由的社会的希望。他强调党对整个国家的全面领导，镇压一切异议事件的苗头，并建立了一个使用大数据和人工智能来监控该国公民日常行为的社会信用体系。因此，习近平的中国可能最终向世界展示21世纪极权国家可以采取的无法想象的形式。
Francis Fukuyama: China's 'bad emperor' returns
Francis Fukuyama is a senior fellow at Stanford University and director of its Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. His book "Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment" will be published in September.
Since 1978, China's authoritarian political system has been different from virtually all other dictatorships in part because the ruling Communist Party has been subject to rules regarding succession. Term limits for senior leadership have kicked in at regular 10-year intervals three times so far, and the party's system of cultivating and training new leaders to replace the outgoing ones had allowed it to avoid the stagnation of countries like Egypt, Zimbabwe, Libya or Angola, where presidents ruled for decades.
But all of this is out the window now because of Chinese President Xi Jinping's recent announcement that term limits on the presidency will be abolished. This means that he will likely be China's ruler for the rest of his life, turning at one stroke an institutionalized autocracy into a personal one. This builds upon the massive cult of personality he has been cultivating, with "Xi Jinping Thought" now canonized in the Constitution alongside Chairman Mao.
Clear rules putting limits on the power of any one individual are critical for the success of any political system, democratic or not, because no one individual is ever wise or benevolent enough to rule indefinitely. Succession is therefore a point of weakness of all dictatorships: the lack of rules necessitates a damaging power struggle upon the death of the supreme leader.
A great advantage that China has had over contemporary Russia was precisely in those rules: should Russian President Vladimir Putin drop dead of a heart attack tomorrow, a huge power vacuum would emerge and plunge the country into uncertainty as powerful elites fought one another. But even short of succession, regular leadership turnover means that new ideas and new generations can rejuvenate policy and hold prior leaders accountable to some degree.
The rules that have just been tossed out the window were the result of China's own painful experience during the Cultural Revolution. The weakness of the country's traditional authoritarian political system has for centuries been called the "bad emperor" problem. A dictatorship with few checks and balances on executive power, like independent courts, a free media or an elected legislature, can do amazing things when the emperor is good: think of former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew during the early years of Singapore's growth. The downfall of earlier Chinese regimes has been the emergence of a bad emperor, who could plunge the country into terrible crisis since there were no effective limits on his or (as in the case of the Tang Dynasty's "Evil Empress Wu") her power.
The last bad emperor that China had was Mao Zedong. Mao liberated the country from foreign occupation but then went on to trigger two enormous catastrophes: the Great Leap Forward starting in the late 1950s and the Cultural Revolution starting in the late 1960s. The latter set China back a generation and scarred the elites who endured it. Collective leadership emerged as a direct reaction to that experience: Deng Xiaoping and other senior leaders of the party vowed that they would never let a single individual accumulate as much charismatic power as Mao.
The opacity of the Chinese system does not allow us to know definitively how or why Xi has been able to consolidate power behind his personal rule. Part of the motive may stem from worries that power has leached out to a number of regional and ministerial barons who have been corrupt and hard to control from the center (like Bo Xilai, former party chief of Chongqing). Another issue may have been resentment from "princelings" (children of high Communist officials) like Xi of the outsiders who were let into the party under Jiang Zemin and his successors.
Another factor is the simple passage of time. As in Eastern Europe, the experience of living through a harsh dictatorship scars individuals and inoculates them from wanting to resurrect the system that allowed this type of unchecked power. As I was once told by a senior party official: "You cannot understand contemporary China if you don't understand what an utter disaster the Cultural Revolution was." But the generation of elites that were sent to the countryside in that period are getting older, and the country has not done anything to educate its young people about Mao's bloody legacy. They can hear songs from that era like "The East Is Red" and imagine that this was a time of greater solidarity and happiness.
The seemingly casual abolition of term limits in China shows why constitutional government is a good thing. The Chinese Constitution is written by the party's top leadership and does not constrain them. By contrast, Latin America is full of constitutional democracies with judiciaries that are often surprisingly independent. Presidents in Argentina, Venezuela, Ecuador, Colombia and elsewhere in the region have tried to extend their terms in office but they actually have to spend political capital to do so, and they have not always been successful.
Former Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, for example, hoped to add a third term to his presidency in 2009 but was stymied by the constitutional court, which ruled the extension unconstitutional. He may have done good things for Colombia as president, but the country is much better off with a system that forces even popular presidents to leave office. Last year, Ecuador's authoritarian President Rafael Correa was similarly forced to step down, and his successor, President Lenín Moreno, has breathed new life into the country's democracy.
How bad China's current emperor will be has yet to be determined. So far, he has crushed the hopes of many Chinese for a more open, transparent and liberal society. He has emphasized the party over the country, cracked down on the slightest instances of dissent and instituted a social credit system that uses big data and artificial intelligence to monitor the daily behavior of the country's citizens. As such, China under Xi may end up showing the world the unimagined forms that a 21st century totalitarian state can take.
This was produced by The WorldPost, a partnership of the Berggruen Institute and The Washington Post.
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