Tag: Xi Jinping

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general freedom international affairs media and media people

Tyranny Without Limits

Hu Jintao, President Xi Jinping, China

This weekend, at the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), a unanimous vote of elite communist party officials gave President Xi Jinping his third five-​year term.

But the story that made the headlines focused on the physical removal from the main chamber of Hu Jintao, the previous Chinese leader (2003 – 2013), on the final day. No one is sure what it means, but we cannot unsee the pattern.

“In 10 years of ruling China, Xi Jinping has expunged political rivals, replacing them with allies,” notes The New York Times. “He has wiped out civil society, giving citizens no recourse for help but his government. He has muzzled dissent, saturating public conversation with propaganda about his greatness.”

The Times forgot to mention the genocide against Uyghurs or the full extent of CCP censorship or repression or the stepped-​up harassment and threats to invade democratic Taiwan, but the article does convey that Xi is a thug of totalitarian proportions. 

“What is happening is potentially very dangerous,” Willy Wo-​Lap Lam, a political scientist at the Chinese University in Hong Kong, argued back when the limit was repealed, “because the reason why Mao Zedong made one mistake after another was because China at the time was a one-​man show.” 

Those “mistakes” cost millions of Chinese their lives. One-​man totalitarian rule is bad news for everybody everywhere. Xi’s personal power makes China more repressive at home as well as more dangerous and aggressive abroad. 

“For Xi Jinping, whatever he says is the law,” Lam added. “There are no longer any checks and balances.”

Lam meant internally, but, for better or worse, we are likely to see what checks and balances and defenses there are outside of communist-​run China. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom ideological culture international affairs

‘Ideological Prejudices’

Xi, China, communism, foreign policy

“‘One country two systems’ has been tested and proved time and again,” Chinese ruler Xi Jinping told his hand-​picked Hong Kong audience last week, “and there is no reason to change such a good system.”

Twenty-​five years into that “good system” — created when the United Kingdom signed it over to the Chinese Communist Party with the proviso it would recognize basic civil liberties in Hong Kong until 2047 — Xi was taking a victory lap. 

He had successfully squelched freedom of speech and of the press.

“China’s government is,” Ian Easton writes in The Final Struggle: Inside China’s Global Strategy, “far more powerful and sophisticated than any that came before. Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, the Soviet Union, and Putin’s Russia all pale in comparison.”

Easton, who studies defense and security issues involving the U.S., China, Japan, and Taiwan at the Project 2049 Institute, also pointedly suggests that it is “of national importance that Hollywood begins to make movies about China that are not censored.”

Censored by Beijing, he means. 

China’s long list of tyrannies has gotten so bad that even NATO — yes, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization — has recognized the threat posed by the totalitarian country engaged in the largest military build-​up in human history. 

“NATO has listed China as one of its strategic priorities for the first time,” Al Jazeera reported weeks ago, “saying Beijing’s ambitions and its ‘coercive policies’ challenge the Western bloc’s ‘interests, security and values.’”

To which the Chinese objected, arguing the NATO statement “vilifies China’s foreign policy” and “China’s natural military development” and was “filled with … ideological prejudices.”

They have a point. It’s about time the West shows a bit of “bias” against totalitarianism and genocide.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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international affairs

Strait Democracy

Xi, China, Taiwan

“China vows ‘peaceful reunification’ with Taiwan,” was The New York Post’s takeaway from Chinese ruler Xi Jinping’s speech at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing over the weekend.

What fantabulous news! Peace for our time … in Asia. 

That same message was echoed by The Washington Post, which also noted that Xi’s statement comes “days after sending a surge of warplanes near the island.”

With China’s massive military build-​up, ongoing threats to attack, invasion drills around Taiwan, not to mention flying squadrons of warplanes across the Taiwan Strait and into the island nation’s air defense identification zone — 150 such incursions last week — tensions have escalated to a fever pitch. 

“We are very concerned,” warned Taiwan’s Foreign Minister Joseph Wu, “that China is going to launch a war against Taiwan at some point.” 

Thank goodness, then, that at this scary moment, our Fourth Estate can herald Xi’s promise of peace!

The only problem? 

The Chinese dictator gave no such assurance. 

Xi merely stated a preference for Taiwan’s peaceful surrender to his one-​country, one-​system totalitarianism — over having to snuff out Taiwan’s freedom by missile attack and invasion, murdering millions. Which the genocidal autocrat is still threatening to do whenever the opportunity presents.

Cancel the parade. 

Still, if Xi’s rhetoric constitutes “a more conciliatory approach” from Beijing, chock it up to free countries finally waking up and pushing back against the Chinazis. 

Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-​wen, noting her nation’s position “on the front lines of democracy and freedom,” focused on the fight against Chinese “coercion.” As she eloquently wrote in Foreign Affairs: “[T]he future of Taiwan is to be decided by the Taiwanese through democratic means.” 

Provided there is the military might to deter Chinese aggression.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability moral hazard term limits too much government

Dictatorship with the Usual Characteristics

Mao, term limits, China, Xi Jinping, censorship, Mao Zedong

“Argh, we’re going to become North Korea,” a dejected Chinese citizen wrote on his country’s social media site, Weibo. 

His comment, later removed by China’s “safe space” police, responded to the Communist Party’s announcement that it would soon remove term limits on President Xi Jinping.

While neighboring North Korea has been ruled in totalitarian dynastic fashion by the Kim family since 1948, the Chinese have had their own experience with extended one-​man rule, 33 years of Mao Zedong.

“From 1958 to 1962, his Great Leap Forward policy led to the deaths of up to 45 million people,” the Washington Post clarified, “easily making it the biggest episode of mass murder ever recorded.”

A decade after Mao’s death in 1979 — there’s always that ultimate term limit — even Communist Party apparatchiks embraced a formal limit on the president and the vice-​president of two five-​year terms … to block dictatorship.*

Talk about a reform popular across the political spectrum!

So popular that, as Business Insider explained, “Criticism of the Chinese government’s desire to abolish presidential term limits has seen censorship soar since Sunday.” Searches for “two term limit,” “third consecutive term,” and “Emperor Xi” were blocked. 

“There are no longer any checks and balances,” complained a political analyst at the Chinese University in Hong Kong.

This is bad news for everybody everywhere. 

The need to limit those in power is universal. At National Review, John Fund reminds us of our “ongoing job here at home to limit the insatiable urge of incumbents to remain in office for years, even decades, and sometimes until they die of ripe old age.”

Early retirements for all!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* There are also five-​year limits on the tenure of those serving in the National People’s Congress. Do I hear six years for our Congress?

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