BEIJING—China has launched a broad effort to silence critics of a proposal that would allow President Xi Jinping to extend his reign indefinitely, as Beijing seeks to break decades of political precedent with minimal domestic uproar.
Beijing has mobilized multiple arms of the government to suppress criticism of the Communist Party proposal to remove presidential term limits—expected to be approved at an annual parliamentary session that kicks off Monday—with lawyers threatened with disbarment, police visits to critics and online censorship.
While state media lauded the proposal, saying it would help maintain consistent leadership, questions and critical comments exploded online on Sunday after the announcement from the official Xinhua News Agency, which unusually was made first in English.
Some dissidents said state security officers have shown up to interrogate them on the issue on camera, without saying what the footage would be used for.
Guangzhou-based activist Wang Aizhong said officers filmed him on Saturday, a day before the announcement. “All they asked me that day was what I thought about changing the constitution,” he said. An activist in a different province said he received a similar visit on Sunday, after the announcement.
A Chinese scholar said he received warnings from police and academic administrators after he commented online about the news.
China’s Ministry of Public Security didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Human-rights activists and lawyers in China often receive warning visits from police around sensitive events such as the coming legislative session.
It is rare, however, for so many people to receive warnings against speaking on one specific issue, said Amnesty International researcher William Nee. “It shows that this is seen as a controversial move within the system,” he said.
One particularly stern warning to lawyers in southern Hunan Province was made locally, but has spread through social media and resonated in part because it threatened disbarment.
The notice told law firms in the city of Lengshuijiang that they could have their licenses suspended for two years and that lawyers could be prohibited from practice for five years if they comment negatively online on the proposed change to China’s constitution.
A local lawyer said the circular on city Justice Bureau letterhead was circulated by office superiors.
A publicity official for the Hunan Justice Department didn’t confirm or deny the gist of the document, but called it a mistake by a local worker. He said that it wasn’t in the correct format for an official document from the Lengshuijiang Justice Bureau.
In Sichuan province, one lawyer said a firm supervisor warned staff against commenting about the news online.
Lawyers reached in several provinces said they had also been warned by authorities against commenting on the issue.
Because China’s state-controlled news agency announced the news in English first—Xinhua’s Chinese-language report came more than an hour later—media organizations around the world reported the change before it had been announced to the wider domestic audience in Chinese.
Xinhua didn’t respond to a request for comment why the English version came first.
Before critical comments were removed online, some expressions of criticism focused on risks China was returning to the kind of instability and chaotic policy shifts that marked the Mao Zedong era.
Under Deng Xiaoping, China adopted a limit of two five-year presidential terms as part of a shift toward a model of collective leadership to prevent concentrating too much power in one person’s hands.
The Communist Party effectively cast aside that model at an October congress in which it revised the constitution with a political theory known as Xi Jinping Thought—giving Mr. Xi power unmatched in recent decades and a stature on par with that of Mao.
Following Sunday’s announcement of the proposed end to term limits, phrases from “long live the emperor” to “Xi Zedong” were blocked on social media, as were less obvious ones such as “I disagree.”
A number of Weibo microblog accounts, including The Wall Street Journal’s, had their comment functions restricted or blocked.
Neither Weibo Corp. nor Tencent Holdings Ltd. , which operates mobile messaging service WeChat, responded to requests for comment.
One of the few people to post a lengthy criticism of the move was Wang Ying, a Beijing-based entrepreneur.
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Removing term limits would be “trying to turn the clock back,” Ms. Wang wrote, in an open letter on WeChat Monday, screenshots of which circulated widely online.
Ms. Wang’s comments were swiftly censored, though some WeChat users found ways to share them, including via screenshots flipped on their side.
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Ms. Wang called the term-limit move a key historical moment. “What happens here, this kind of perverse subverting of history, won’t just harm Chinese people,” she said.
“If America sneezes, China gets sick,” she said, citing a U.S. stock market tumble this year that affected Chinese markets. “And if we sneeze, you also get sick.”
State media have continued to laud “proposed constitutional revisions” including the addition of “Xi Jinping Thought” in the national charter, without making specific mention of presidential term limits.
On Wednesday, the Communist Party Central Committee said at the end of a three-day meeting that it had drawn up a much-anticipated list of which officials will be named to senior posts during Mr. Xi’s second term. The lineup will be submitted for approval at next week’s legislative session.
Write to Eva Dou at eva.dou@wsj.com and Te-Ping Chen at te-ping.chen@wsj.com
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