Playing devil’s advocate here...this may not be the worst thing in the world. Reasons:
His rein hasn’t been blanket terror so far. There’s been some glaring examples of hypocrisy and high-anxiety shining through, like the heavy-handed treatment of the media/human rights lawyers/booksellers, not to mention the outright brutal, primitive godfather style put down of American spies. Then again, he’s been flat out gentle in his treatment of other factions in the ruling class.
If I were to put his actions to consolidate power during his time so far on a spectrum, I find improvements in the appearance of “due process” introduced for the handling of fellow party members; BAU in terms of treatment of non-party agitators (sure, it’s bad what and how they go about their business, but it’s arguably what they’ve always been known to do, and it’s just that those crappy powers are being exercised more often, rather than a systemic decline); and genuine decline in the vicious way foreign elements are dealt with.
Ok, it’s hard to muster any serious advocacy for them, frankly, but what strikes me about all this is how organised everything is. And while the mafia is an example of how organisation isn’t everything, this announcement was calculated and presented in a certain way that makes it seem (at least for now) that it’s not a direct slide back to the excesses at the end of the Mao era. It’s not naked tyranny. Whatever the Global Times or wherever that statement was from, it’s not to be 100% scoffed at outright that they’re saying this doesn’t mean he’ll stay on for the rest of his life. Most you can say fairly is that all this remains to be seen.
Say if he can shape the system to allow extensions for when a leader is successful enough to a certain degree, but only for a constrained time after that, I don’t see why that’s so bad exactly. The hard term limit on the American system is hardly doing it any favours in the two-party system, for example.
The bar will be high, I’m not saying any watchers should cut these guys any slack. But if a graceful exit can be engineered and ingrained within the system...that would indeed be progress in the history of Chinese politics.