China’s omnipotent ruler Xi Jinping is facing “death threats” and people are on the streets to oppose his third consecutive rule, sources said. Earlier, “Resign Xi Jinping,” and “Death to Dictator” movements had started in different provinces of China.
People are resisting restrictions and demanding individual freedom. According to internal sources, apart from the ban on social media, even a political discussion can lead to jail.
Just days before China’s most significant event of its five-year political cycle, giant banners were unfurled over a flyover in Beijing on Thursday, calling for boycotts and the resignation of Xi Jinping. Discussion of this unusual protest has been rigorously restricted by Chinese officials.
Images and videos of the demonstration on the Sitong bridge appeared on social media. These images and videos also showed smoke plumes rising from the bridge, which spans a busy street in the capital’s Haidian area.
“PCR tests are not what we want. We prefer liberty over lockdowns. We seek to respect, not deception. We don’t want a Cultural Revolution; we want reform. Not a leader, but a vote, please. One banner read, “We want to be citizens, not slaves,” and another called for a strike, a school boycott, and the ouster of Xi.
The images soon went viral on western social media, but they were quickly taken down from sites blocked by China’s “Great Firewall” of the internet.
According to the Associated Press, posts with the terms “Beijing,” “bridge,” or “Haidian” were rigorously prohibited, and a song with the same name as the bridge was removed from streaming platforms.
On Twitter, some individuals said that after sharing images of the protest on WeChat, a significant Chinese social media network, their accounts had been temporarily suspended.
However, at a period of great political sensitivity, such an unusual demonstration attracted notice. Before it was also banned on Friday morning, the Weibo hashtag “I saw it,” which allowed users to mention the occurrence without actually mentioning it, had been viewed more than 180,000 times. Some posters also had their Weibo accounts terminated for breaking the site’s rules.
China’s five-yearly Communist Party Congress wraps up Saturday, with President Xi Jinping likely to seal a norm-breaking third term in power.
➡️ https://t.co/J335cxhAdE@lauriechenwords @matthewwalsh91 pic.twitter.com/FxUluzWMnl
— AFP News Agency (@AFP) October 21, 2022
The journey of Xi Jinping
A team from Beijing state television traveled to the Fujian coastline province in southern China to record a profile of a future politician. He was a chubby-cheeked party member who had just been chosen president of the neighborhood party school. At the time, in 1993, he was thought to be a promising political talent. Xi Jinping is his name.
He cooked some shrimp in a wok while being recorded by the television crew. Then, as his young daughter sat in his lap donning a pink stocking hat, they recorded an interview with him. In the video, the staff starts laughing out loud out of the blue: “Did she go pee-pee?” a lady wonders while bringing over a towel. Yes, she urinated, adds Xi with a smile. The father had damp pants, and the incident was caught on camera.
Since then, nearly 30 years have passed. The big cheeks are still there, but Xi Jinping no longer comes across as approachable. In China today, nothing is left to chance. Today, the head of state and the party is seen on television in front of adoring crowds that spontaneously stand to applaud when he arrives and do so for extended periods of time.
It is a personality cult similar to the one in North Korea, a nearby country. Xi is everywhere.
He frequently finds himself reading his own name in the newspaper when he opens it in the morning. The propagandists at the People’s Daily managed to start each of the 12 headlines on the main page of their publication with the same three characters during the 2022 Winter Olympics: “Xi,” “Jin,” and “Ping.”
The most influential person in the world and the most influential Chinese leader since Mao Zedong is Xi Jinping. Xi holds the three most important positions in the nation: president of the state, general secretary of the Communist Party, and supreme commander of the armed forces. He is in charge of an economy that will probably soon surpass that of the United States and 1.4 billion people. The world’s largest navy and most soldiers are under the direction of Xi. Huge cities with millions of people can be put on lockdown with the flick of a finger, and to carry out his zero-COVID policy, Chinese citizens are practically always being watched. In the nation, there is no organized political opposition against which he can benchmark or compare himself.
He has an impact all the way to Germany. China is a major market for sales for brands like Mercedes and Volkswagen. Olaf Scholz will visit Beijing for the first time as German chancellor in early November, and despite the ongoing discussion about the German economy’s unsustainable reliance on China, he is likely to bring a sizable delegation of German businesspeople with him.
The Communist Party of China, a massive organization with 97 million members—more than the total population of Germany—is the foundation of the nation. The party boldly declares that it leads “the government, the military, civilians, the academic; east, west, south, north, and center.” The self-described “core” of this party is Xi Jinping. The constitution has been amended to include “Xi Jinping Thought,” his political philosophy. Even Russian President Vladimir Putin can only imagine having such power. After the invasion of Ukraine, Xi has remained one of Putin’s few remaining allies.
20th Communist Party conference
The 20th Communist Party conference began on Sunday in Beijing, and if all goes as planned, Xi will leave the gathering with more authority than any Chinese leader has had in decades. Party leaders are going against convention by giving Xi a third term in office: After Mao’s passing, barriers had been put in place to ensure that no one individual would ever again amass such power in China.
However, it appears improbable that anyone in China will be able to overthrow Xi after he is appointed the party’s leader for the third time. In China, the position of party chief is more significant than the title of president. Age of Xi is 69. Like previous emperors, he may continue to rule China for many years to come.
However, for a very long time, nothing suggested that he would be the one to accumulate such power, which makes his career all the more impressive. Xi was seen as a very unremarkable party official without a distinct political agenda. That may explain why liberal reforms were expected to be implemented by politicians, political scientists, journalists, and business leaders all across the world when he became powerful. They yearned for a Chinese Gorbachev, sort of. He was revealed to be just the opposite: a leader who has cut off China from the outside world and actively pursues revisionist goals.
Therefore, who is Xi Jinping? What elements came together to form the person he is today? What does he want to accomplish with his power now? How did he come to possess it?
Shaanxi, a poor region in China’s interior, frequently experiences summers so scorching that residents must seek refuge underground. Farmers in Liangjiahe, an isolated community surrounded by sorghum fields, have carved up cave homes in the cliffs of yellow loess. It is cold and earthy-smelling beneath the arched arch of one of these caves. The dirt has been plowed to a floor that is smooth. In the winter, a brick-raised bed can be heated by a stove. A black-and-white photograph of a man with peach fuzz on his top lip and eyes gazing into the distance hangs above the second of the four berths. This is Xi Jinping.
The current president of China grew up in this area without running water or electricity. He was affected by that time frame, which was from 1969 to 1975. “I was bewildered and lost” when he first came to Liangjiahe as a 15-year-old, he said in his autobiographical essay “Son of the Yellow Earth.” “I had clearly determined my life’s purpose when I left at 22 and I was full of confidence.” “My stay there imprinted a deep belief in me: to accomplish tangible things for the people,” Xi wrote of his time there.
Such statements, of course, have a very obvious propagandistic intent. But they have also played a significant role in shaping China’s perception of Xi. He is described in that story as having “eaten bitterness,” as the Chinese say, which means he is conversant with the conditions of the underprivileged. Much of his political success has been based on the power of this tale.
It’s also true that Xi Zhongxun, his father, was a pioneering revolutionary and one of the Eight Immortals of the Communist Party. As a result, Xi is a “princeling,” a descendant of China’s crimson nobility. He was raised in Beijing with his siblings and was born into the exclusive, gated community of the party elite. The kids were brought up in an authoritarian way by their parents.
It was a privileged upbringing, but it abruptly came to an end when his father lost favor in 1962 for approving the publication of a book that Mao deemed offensive. Xi Zhongxun was demoted from every position he held and made to work in tractor manufacturing. And after the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, things only grew worse for him. Xi Zhongxun was kidnapped and humiliated by Red Guardsmen. He was imprisoned for years before being imprisoned in Beijing.
His relatives suffered as well. Xi Jinping’s half-sister passed away, most likely by suicide. In order to learn from the farmers, Xi Jinping was exiled to the countryside like millions of other youths, which is how he wound up in Liangjiahe, the village with the cave homes.
Since then, it has been transformed into a sort of outdoor museum, with the old villagers having moved into recently built homes in the valley. “Did you already know how much Xi Jinping loves to read?” the instructor asks the class as they take cover from the August sun under the shelter of the village sports field. He came over here with a box of books. A guy is forging soup ladles in the little blacksmith’s shop that Xi is said to have helped establish. Xi is shown directing the farmers in a mural. Gardeners in the village are planting zinnias, eggplants, and hot peppers.
A party delegation from Tibet is in a cave where Xi formerly lived and is in awe of the library of books that he is said to have read, including works by Marx and Engels, Tolstoy, Hemingway, and Sun Tzu. A framed copy of the certificate proving his membership in the party, dated January 10, 1974, sits on the wall. Before he was finally admitted, he had to apply for membership ten times since party authorities were reluctant to accept the son of an outcast. At the beginning of his political career, Xi was appointed party secretary of Liangjiahe in the same year.
But why would Xi choose to devote his life to the group that had torn his family apart and subjected them to suffering? He had every excuse under the sun to despise the celebration.
According to Xi Jinping, his confidence in communism was challenged, which is why he believes in the party so strongly, claims Joseph Torigian, a professor at the American University in Washington and the author of a biography of Xi’s father. Xi is claimed to have once observed, “A lost and then found faith is stronger than anything else.” A former buddy of his informed an American ambassador that he turned “redder than the crimson” to survive, according to a report released in 2009 by the leaking website WikiLeaks.
According to Torigian, “the lesson he seems to have learned from the Cultural Revolution is that you have to prevent a situation from getting out of control, not that you have to limit the Party.” This strategy differs significantly from Mao’s to which Xi is frequently likened due to the amount of authority he has accumulated. Mao occasionally ruled through turmoil, but Xi is determined to maintain stability and order at any cost.
The summation of Xi’s maxims is as follows: Party officials owe the populace honest labor; in return, the Chinese people owe the party allegiance. Freedoms have been severely restricted under Xi, and society has become considerably more homogeneous. He is usually referred to as “chu bu duo,” which translates to “Close enough,” and is dedicated to eradicating a tendency toward anarchy among Chinese people.
Cha bu pair defines an ingrained laxness in Chinese culture that makes the country so livable: The final task is excessively difficult and not absolutely required. There is no actual requirement for absolute precision, therefore we won’t bother. You obtained the incorrect ticket. The conductor will ignore the situation. One pair of each color of sock? Nothing major. Cha bu duo signifies that if the path in front is blocked, a detour is always possible.
It appears that Xi cannot bear it. Draconian rules and orders have been made under his direction, drawing the social corset closer and closer. For instance, the new national intelligence law, which effectively compels every Chinese citizen to become a spy. Or the unusually vague security statute, which characterizes practically any behavior as posing a risk to national security. The law states that China is currently protected in cyberspace, outer space, the ocean floor, and the polar regions. a nation that is constantly vigilant. Stop using cha bu duo.
The Uighurs’ home province of Xinjiang is possibly where this obsession with security is most ruthlessly on display. Officials had mainly concentrated on economic growth to quell the ethnic disputes that frequently flared up until 2014 when Xi came to the area. But Xi ordered that the Communist Party show “no pity” and offered the Xinjiang Muslims an “ideological remedy.” A police state unlike any other in the modern era was soon built in Xinjiang by the hardliner Chen Quanguo, who was dispatched there to lead the party. In reeducation camps, hundreds of thousands of people were imprisoned.
The ethnic groups of China were to live side by side in peace, like “the seeds of a pomegranate,” protected by the red shell of the party, according to Xi. He wants to make the Muslims of Xinjiang into submissive, docile party followers who only think about serving the interests of the country and have no regard for any other ideologies, least of all Islam.
In the past three years, the Hong Kong democracy movement has faced equal ruthlessness, if not quite the same degree of cruelty. Xi probably viewed the city as provocative because of its defiance of the party’s leadership and desire to maintain control over its own political destiny. In 2020, he overcame Hong Kong’s opposition by imposing a new national security law on it. Since then, liberties have been severely restricted, and activists for the opposition are either imprisoned, abroad, or no longer dare to speak out.
Since Xi outlined his plans for China from the beginning, the extent of his changes shouldn’t come as a complete surprise. Gao Yu, a journalist from China, was sentenced to five years in prison for disclosing Document Number Nine just a few months after he entered office. Party leaders issued a warning against the ideologies that “anti-Chinese forces from the West” were attempting to introduce into the nation in a document distributed to all significant Communist Party officials. According to the text, China must use all its strength to oppose concepts like “universal values,” “civil society,” and “the Western conception of journalism” since they threaten the party’s dominance in the political system. In essence, Document Number Nine was Xi’s road map.
The Chinese dystopia has a positive side where those that conform can enjoy a comfortable life and receive greater government services than any previous generation. In that regard, Xi is a devout socialist who bases his policy on the needs of the less fortunate. Combating rural poverty was one of his top concerns, and in 2021 he adamantly claimed victory in that conflict.
