He's also overstaying the normal retirement age for party leadership of age 70, which honestly kinda worries me. In theory, he should be positioning a new generation of leaders to take up the torch. But a great deal of the Xi-Era has involved rooting out corruption and taming the bitter influence of western capitalism in the national bureaucracy.

I understand the impulse not to let a bunch of Bo Xilai types replace you once you're gone and undo all the work you've done. But you can't live forever, man. I only hope this third term will establish enough of a dedicated cohort of ideological contemporaries to bridge the gap into the next decade.