Xi Jinping
This article's content is marked as Mature The page Xi Jinping contains mature content that may include coarse language, sexual references, and/or graphic violent images which may be disturbing to some. Mature pages are recommended for those who are 18 years of age and older. If you are 18 years or older or are comfortable with graphic material, you are free to view this page. Otherwise, you should close this page and view another page. |
|
“ | The Chinese Dream is about making our country prosperous and strong, revitalizing the nation and bringing a happy life to its people. It is a dream of peace, development, cooperation, and mutual benefit. It has many things in common with all the beautiful dreams, including the American Dream, of people all over the world. | „ |
~ Xi Jinping, June 2013 |
Xi Jinping (born June 15, 1953) is a Chinese strongman and politician serving as General Secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC), President of the People's Republic of China (PRC), and Chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC). Often described as China's "paramount leader" since 2012, he officially received the title of "core leader" from the CPC in 2016.
As general secretary, Xi holds an ex-officio seat on the Politburo Standing Committee of the Communist Party of China, China's top decision-making body. He is also the first general secretary born after World War II and the establishment of the People's Republic of China.
Biography edit
The son of Chinese Communist veteran Xi Zhongxun, he was exiled to rural Yanchuan County as a teenager following his father's purge during the Cultural Revolution, and lived in a cave in the village of Liangjiahe, where he worked as the party secretary. After studying at Tsinghua University as a "Worker-Peasant-Soldier student", Xi rose through the ranks politically in China's coastal provinces.
Xi was governor of Fujian from 1999 to 2002, and governor, then party secretary of neighboring Zhejiang from 2002 to 2007. Following the dismissal of the CPC Secretary of Shanghai Chen Liangyu, Xi was transferred to replace him for a brief period in 2007. He joined the Politburo Standing Committee and central secretariat in October 2007, spending the next five years as Chinese paramount leader Hu Jintao's presumed successor. Xi was vice president from 2008 to 2013 and vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission from 2010 to 2012.
Since assuming power, Xi has introduced far-ranging measures to enforce party discipline and to ensure internal unity. His signature anti-corruption campaign has led to the downfall of prominent incumbent and retired Communist Party officials, including members of the Politburo Standing Committee. Described as a Chinese nationalist, he has tightened restrictions over civil society and ideological discourse, advocating internet censorship in China as the concept of "internet sovereignty".
Xi has called for further socialist market economic reforms, for governing according to the law and for strengthening legal institutions, with an emphasis on individual and national aspirations under the slogan "Chinese Dream". He has also championed a more assertive foreign policy, particularly with regard to China-Japan relations, China's claims in the South China Sea, and its role as a leading advocate of free trade and globalization. Xi has sought to expand China's African and Eurasian influence through the Belt and Road Initiative.
Considered the central figure of the fifth generation of leadership of the People's Republic, Xi has significantly centralized institutional power by taking on a wide range of leadership positions, including chairing the newly formed National Security Commission, as well as new steering committees on economic and social reforms, military restructuring and modernization, and the Internet. Said to be one of the most powerful leaders in modern Chinese history, Xi's political thoughts have been written into the party and state constitutions, and under his leadership, the latter was amended to abolish term limits for the presidency.
Due to his accumulation of more power than anyone since Mao Zedong, the significant increase of censorship and mass surveillance, significant deterioration in human rights, the return to a cult of personality and the removal of term limits for the President in 2018 under his rule, Xi Jinping has been called a dictator by many political observers. However, Xi Jinping remains widely popular in China. A YouGov poll released in July 2019 found that 22% of Chinese people list Xi as the person they admire the most.
In 2017, The Economist named him the most powerful person in the world. In 2018, Forbes ranked him as the most powerful and influential person in the world, replacing Russian President Vladimir Putin who had been ranked for five consecutive years.
Beginning in 2017, Xi established re-education camps in Xinjiang in an attempt to suppress extremism, terrorism, and separatism among the Uyghur population of that province. Conditions in these camps are brutal, and some have called them "concentration camps" or "gulags". In 2020 it was reported that under Xi's order's, Uyghur women were forced to use contraceptives, get sterilized and get abortions, while use of contraceptives was actually declining across the rest of China. This caused severe drops in Uyghur birth rates, declining 24 percent from 2019 to 2020. Because of the decline, many have accused Xi of genocide.
Villainy edit
- Imprisoning Muslims in concentration camps (this is believed to be an attempt at ethnic cleansing or forced assimilation of the Uyghurs).[1]
- Forced contraception, sterilization, and abortion of Uyghur women constitute genocide as "imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group".[2]
- Supporting some Dictators like Rodrigo Duterte, Kim Jong-un, Bashar al-Assad, Mohammad bin Salman, Nicolás Maduro, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow, Vladimir Putin, Alexander Lukashenko, Serzh Sargsyan, Ali Khamenei and Nursultan Nazarbayev. He also was friendly with Islam Karimov.
- Eliminating "bourgeois" concepts of "term limits", allowing himself to be in power for life.[3]
- Persecuting Falun Gong practitioners even more than his predecessors.[4]
- Banning innocent media for little to no reason, most infamously banning Winnie The Pooh simply because a child compared the latter to him.[5]
- He has repeatedly threatened the territorial integrity of Taiwan, openly declaring his desire to re-unify China and Taiwan by force and routinely having his military rehearse an invasion of Taiwan.[6]
- He has also repeatedly attempted to impose the will of mainland China on Hong Kong in spite of its governmental sovereignty, banning those insufficiently loyal to Beijing from running for Hong Kong President[7] and imposing sentences of up to life imprisonment for "subverting" Mainland China's power, widely perceived as meaning any form of protest against Mainland China's power in Hong Kong.[8] Protests against Mainland autocracy in Hong Kong in 2014, 2019 and 2020 have been brutally supressed by Chinese authorities.[9]
- In 2012, shortly after coming to power, Xi announced a massive crackdown on political corruption in China, resulting in over 100, 000 officials being indicted. While the crackdown was praised in China, critics have noted that many of the high-ranking officials jailed as a result were opponents of Xi and have accused him of using corruption as an excuse to prosecute his political enemies.[10]
- Western officials have accused the Chinese government of forcing Ukraine to withdraw its support for an investigation into China's human rights violations by threatening to withhold COVID-19 vaccine shipments.[11]
- During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Chinese government enacted controversial public health legislation forcibly isolating anybody who tested positive for the disease even if they are found to be asymptomatic. This includes forcibly separating children from their parents.[12] Chinese authorities were also recorded rounding up and killing pets belonging to COVID-positive owners.[13]
- He claims that Han Chinese are racially superior to other ethnic groups.[14]
- He also supports anti-semitism by arresting and killing Kaifeng Jews.[15]
Concentration Camps edit
Since 2017, the CCP under Jinping has operated a network of concentration camps in the Xinjiang autonomous region as part of a campaign of persecution against Uyghur Muslims.[16] Between 2017 and 2021 operations were led by Chen Quanguo, a CCP Politburo member and committee secretary who led the region's party committee and government.[17] The camps are reportedly operated outside the Chinese legal system; many Uyghurs have reportedly been interned without trial and no charges have been levied against them (held in administrative detention).[18] Local authorities are reportedly holding hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs in these camps as well as members of other ethnic minority groups in China, for the stated purpose of countering extremism and terrorism and promoting social integration. Widespread medical experimentation, rape and torture have been reported in the Uyghur internment camps.[19][20][21] A number of Uyghur children have reportedly been separated from their parents and forced to assimilate into mainstream Chinese culture,[22] at least 16 thousand mosques are thought to have been demolished on the Chinese government's orders[17] and Uyghur women are alleged to have been forced to undergo sterilization and abortion procedures to keep birth rates down.[23]
The internment of Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in the camps constitutes the largest-scale arbitrary detention of ethnic and religious minorities since World War II.[24] As of 2020, it was estimated that Chinese authorities may have detained up to 1.8 million people, mostly Uyghurs but also including Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and other ethnic Turkic Muslims, Christians, as well as some foreign citizens including Kazakhstanis, in these secretive internment camps located throughout the region.[25]
In May 2018, Randall Schriver, US Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs, said that "at least a million but likely closer to three million citizens" were imprisoned in detention centers, which he described as "concentration camps".[26] In August 2018, Gay McDougall, a US representative at the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, said that the committee had received many credible reports that 1 million ethnic Uyghurs in China have been held in "re-education camps".[27] There have been comparisons between the Xinjiang camps and the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
Videos edit
References edit
- ↑ China’s Repression of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, Council on Foreign Relations
- ↑ Gynecologist Exiled From China Says 80 Sterilizations Per Day Forced on Uyghurs, Newsweek
- ↑ China's Xi allowed to remain 'president for life' as term limits removed, BBC News
- ↑ China Still Presses Crusade Against Falun Gong, The New York Times
- ↑ Why China censors banned Winnie the Pooh, BBC News
- ↑ China's designs on Taiwan, The Week
- ↑ Hong Kong electoral reform: LegCo passes 'patriots' law, BBC News
- ↑ Hong Kong national security law: What is it and is it worrying?, BBC News
- ↑ China and Hong Kong: Five moments in fraught relationship since handover, BBC News
- ↑ Banyan: Tiger in the net, The Economist
- ↑ Exclusive: Diplomats say China puts squeeze on Ukraine, Associated Press
- ↑ China defends policy of separating COVID-positive kids from parents in locked-down Shanghai, CBS News
- ↑ Horror as pets stuffed into bags and reportedly euthanised as Shanghai's brutal lockdown approaches end of fourth week, Sky News Australia
- ↑ Could Han Chauvinism Turn the 'Chinese Dream' into a 'Chinese Nightmare'?, The Diplomat
- ↑ China is not only persecuting Uighur Muslims, but they are also suppressing Kaifeng Jews: Read how, OpIndia
- ↑ One million Muslim Uighurs held in secret China camps: UN panel, Al Jazeera
- ↑ 17.0 17.1 The Architect of China's Muslim Camps Is a Rising Star Under Xi, Bloomberg News
- ↑ “Break Their Lineage, Break Their Roots” - China’s Crimes against Humanity Targeting Uyghurs and Other Turkic Muslims, Human Rights Watch
- ↑ 'Their goal is to destroy everyone': Uighur camp detainees allege systematic rape, BBC News
- ↑ Prisoners in China's Xinjiang concentration camps subjected to gang rape and medical experiments, former detainee says, The Independent
- ↑ Uyghur advocates speak out after horrifying accounts of rape and torture in Xinjiang camps in China, ABC News
- ↑ Uighur children fall victim to China anti-terror drive, The Financial Times
- ↑ China cuts Uighur births with IUDs, abortion, sterilization, Associated Press
- ↑ Why Scholars and Activists Increasingly Fear a Uyghur Genocide in Xinjiang by Joanna Finley, Journal of Genocide Research
- ↑ 1.5 million Muslims could be detained in China's Xinjiang: academic, Reuters
- ↑ China putting minority Muslims in 'concentration camps,' U.S. says, Reuters
- ↑ China Uighurs: One million held in political camps, UN told, BBC News