“You can see the whole Chinese propaganda machine has geared up to promote his personality,” said Xiao Qiang, an adjunct professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who monitors developments in Chinese media and censorship for the website China Digital Times. “It’s become over the top.”
While many Chinese welcome a strong, plain-speaking leader, critics say the zealous promotion of Mr. Xi has begun to show some of the hallmarks of a personality cult, alarming those who see echoes of the hubris that engulfed Mao."
I think XI has been in power long enough that it's safe to start to call out trends like this if they're apparent. To me it's chicken and the egg. Do you need to have this type of unassailable position if you're going to root out very powerful corrupt peers/figures? Or do you root our very powerful peers so you can have an unassailable position? Or does 1 morph into 2 after time?
I wonder about the premise: I think the widely accepted theory is that 'assailability' and corruption have an inverse relationship; that is, the less assailable you are the more likely you are to be corrupt. I think the real chicken and egg question is, 'do you need an unssailable position to root out your political opposition, or do you need to root out your political opposition to become unassailable'.
Democratic leaders are far more assailable -- they have limited power, they can be removed from office, and they are open to public attacks by the media, the public, and competing politicans -- but are considered, partly for that reason, to be less corrupt.
I don't think it is 'evil, scary'. Evan Osnos has been in China sufficiently long, as a profile journalist, to not fluff a piece.
But I get a lack of direction. The meat comes in the middle, but fizzles out without follow-through, flipping to Bo and other stuff.
But the change in normal day-to-day China since he took power, particularly the past 2 years since he took power has been stunning, particularly where it is most visible: most (not all) high end restaurants. They have little to no high receipt custom (people on seats are still there, but now not spending ridiculous amounts of money), not because their former customers were exclusively government, but no one wants the association.
Corruption could be as deep as it ever was, the fear of a Xi audit is not there, but the fear of someone proposing a Xi style audit, publicly, and the chiming in of the government in support and guaranteeing a prosecution is an echo of Mao's 1960s policies.
tl;dr: Don't be corrupt, you will be prosecuted, because people think Xi thinks so.
A friend is studying journalism. Last week he told me about 90% of western media on China follows that narrative, and around 30% of international headlines in recent months have been about China. Sad. Then again, media in China on the west is not exactly impartial and well researched, either.
The Bloomberg article was about the wealth amassed by Xi's extended family.[1] This New Yorker piece cites an article by Geremie Barme which points out that of the 48 highest-profile corruption cases, none were targeted at "second-generation reds" (aka princelings)[2]. Note that the very high profile case of corrupt princeling Bo Xilai was just prior to Xi's appointment. The ostensible anti-corruption crusade embarked on afterward was targeted at scapegoat officials "from ‘commoner’ 平民 families." Indeed, Barme's article quotes numerous princeling Party officials extolling the inherent virtue of "bureaucrats from the Red Second Generation" and their naturally-born resistance to vice and corruption (Bo Xilai is an exceedingly rare anomaly). Instead, the real danger is "Bureaucrats who come from extreme poverty in youth easily fall prey to vile excesses of corruption, whoring and gambling."
> It goes with saying that, in the murky corridors of Communist power, an impressive number of party gentry progeny, or the offspring of the Mao-era nomenclatura, have been implicated in corrupt practices, but word has it that, like the well-connected elites of other climes, they’ve enjoyed a ‘soft landing': being discretely relocated, shunted into delicate retirement or quietly ‘redeployed’. It’s all very comfy; and it’s all very much business as usual.
1. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-06-29/xi-jinping...
2. https://www.thechinastory.org/2014/10/tyger-tyger-a-fearful-...
Or is it simply putting his opponents to jail?
> By the end of 2014, the Party had announced the punishment of more than a hundred thousand officials on corruption charges. Many foreign observers asked if Xi’s crusade was truly intended to stamp out corruption or if it was a tool to attack his enemies. It was not simply one or the other: corruption had become so threatening to the Party’s legitimacy that only the most isolated leader could have avoided forcing it back to a more manageable level, but railing against corruption was also a proven instrument for political consolidation, and at the highest levels Xi has deployed it largely against his opponents. Geremie Barme, the historian who heads the Australian Centre on China in the World, analyzed the forty-eight most high-profile arrests, and discovered that none of them were second-generation reds. “I don’t call it an anticorruption campaign,” a Western diplomat told me. “This is grinding trench warfare.”
One of the characteristics of bureaucracies is that laws are enforced arbitrarily.
Also, your objection isn't very convincing coming from an account created just to post that comment.
http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1234453/seven-subject...
"Mainland universities have been ordered to steer clear of seven topics in their teaching, including universal values, press freedom and civil rights, two university staff said, offering an insight into ideological control under the new Communist Party leaders."
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/05/world/chinas-maoists-are-r...
"China’s Maoist ideologues are resurgent after languishing in the political desert, buoyed by President Xi Jinping’s traditionalist tilt and emboldened by internal party decrees that have declared open season on Chinese academics, artists and party cadres seen as insufficiently red."
China has an authoritarian government that produces pollution that threatens the entire world, ignores human rights and free speech, and supports dictators in Russia and Africa. We need to curb commerce with China.
This doesn't seem in keeping with what he's actually been doing vis-a-vis China's "reds", which is mostly suppressing them. For example Bo Xilai, formerly mayor of Chongqing, is probably the most prominent neo-Maoist in China [1], and Xi Jinping had him arrested. There's more generally been a crackdown on leftists across China, especially those attempting to organize within trade unions, who are seen by the leadership as potentially dangerous. In addition to certain pro-western things being taboo in universities (like supporting multiparty democracy), so are certain leftist things (like criticizing the corporate-lackey nature of the official PRC trade unions, or highlighting dangerous working conditions in factories).
[1] Famous for the neo-leftist "Chongqing model" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chongqing_model