Jinping Quotes

While tackling the refugee crisis, we should also get to its roots. Why would anyone want to be displaced if they had a home to return to?

Daily media reports of China’s “aggressive” behavior and unwillingness to accept the “international rules-based order” established by the US after World War II describe incidents and accidents reminiscent of 1914. At the same time, a dose of self-awareness is due. If China were “just like us” when the US burst into the twentieth century brimming with confidence that the hundred years ahead would be an American era, the rivalry would be even more severe, and war even harder to avoid. If it actually followed in America’s footsteps, we should expect to see Chinese troops enforcing Beijing’s will from Mongolia to Australia, just as Theodore Roosevelt molded “our hemisphere” to his liking. China is following a different trajectory than did the United States during its own surge to primacy. But in many aspects of China’s rise, we can hear echoes. What does President Xi Jinping’s China want?

Little reliable information reaches the outside world, but what is known is that at least half a million Tibetans have been detained in a massive system of concentration camps constructed across China’s western provinces, pursuant to the CCP’s unique hybrid of public health and security policy: Fangkong.[81]

We assume, without too much thinking, that any regime change in these places will be for the better. But it easily could be for the worse. Both Putin and Xi Jinping are rational actors, holding back more extreme elements. They are bold, but not crazy. The idea that more liberal regimes might replace them is an illusion.

Over decades in power, the CCP had constructed a multilayered system for stifling dissent in China based on the Soviet psychological warfare technique of Zersetzung, which translates roughly to “psychological decomposition.”[96] The regime’s threats instill fear of open discourse about reality, resulting in self-censorship. To avoid the cognitive dissonance of this silence, individuals willfully play down the evidence before their own eyes. The collective psychological effects are deceptively enormous.

But the country’s grim history also helps explain why they are so determined not to give ground to the demonstrators in Hong Kong who want to replace the territory’s fake democracy with the real thing. Xi Jinping, China’s president, and his colleagues believe that the party’s control over the country is the only way of guaranteeing its stability.

Pursuing protectionism is just like locking one's self in a dark room: Wind and rain might be kept outside but so are light and air.

The world was fighting a virus from China with a public health policy from China that effectively turned the world into China, and the narrative of the day was that all this was perfectly normal.

In Xi Jinping's China, it's uncomfortable for two strangers to go too deep into the subject of politics. There are no clear cut consequences for discussing politics. After all, this is preceisely how the system of censorship works, with a shadowy unease that looms over public conversations. Censorship is not made explicit, you just censor yourself. No one knows the consequences of critique, but no one wants to find out.

With its growing economic and political power, China increasingly takes advantage of the political and economic openness of other countries while not providing these countries with the same opportunities to engage within China.

Putin was a new modern “strongman,” Peskov said, an archetype who was spawning imitations across the globe. “People around the world are tired of leaders that are all similar to each other. There’s a demand in the world for special sovereign leaders, for decisive ones who do not fit into general frameworks,” the Kremlin spokesman explained. “Putin’s Russia was the starting point.” Others that fit the mold included Viktor Orban in Hungary, Xi Jinping in China, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Recep Tayyip Erdog˘an in Turkey.

Whatever the reason, western governments proved unprepared to cope with or even comprehend wide-scale scientific fraud. The judges deferred to the politicians. The politicians deferred to the health officials. The health officials deferred the WHO. The WHO deferred to China. And China deferred to Xi.

Many people believe that it is OK to be like China for a time, because when the crisis ends we can go back to being like Britain again. These people are making a serious mistake. We cannot switch in and out of totalitarianism at will. Because a free society is a question of attitude, it is dead once the attitude changes.

That Modi, Erdoğan, Abe and Chinese president Xi Jinping all bet their careers on economic growth testifies to the almost religious status growth has managed to acquire throughout the world. Indeed, it may not be wrong to call the belief in economic growth a religion, because it now purports to solve many, if not most, of our ethical dilemmas. Since economic growth is allegedly the source of all good things, it encourages people to bury their ethical disagreements and adopt whichever course of action maximises long-term growth. Thus Modi’s India is home to thousands of sects, parties, movements and gurus, yet though their ultimate aims may differ, they all have to pass through the same bottleneck of economic growth, so why not pull together in the meantime? The credo of ‘more stuff’ accordingly

Angered by his quick recovery, commentators sought to recast the triumphant scene of his return to the White House. When Trump appeared on the White House balcony after his return from Walter Reed, NBC News’s presidential historian Michael Beschloss tweeted, “In America, our Presidents have generally avoided strongman balcony scenes—that’s for other countries with authoritarian systems.”61 While the tweet was amplified by Beschloss’s fellow Resistance members, Americans with better knowledge of presidential history responded with pictures of every other president pictured at the balcony, be it President Barack Obama (many, many times—once with communist dictator Xi Jinping, no less), President George W. Bush, President George H. W. Bush, President Ronald Reagan, President Jimmy Carter, President Richard Nixon, on back to President Dwight D. Eisenhower and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.62

Obama met with the president of China, Xi Jinping, in a sterile hotel conference room, untouched cups of cooling tea and ice water before us. There was a long review of all the progress made over the last several years. Xi assured Obama, unprompted, that he would implement the Paris climate agreement even if Trump decided to pull out. “That’s very wise of you,” Obama replied. “I think you’ll continue to see an investment in Paris in the United States, at least from states, cities, and the private sector.” We were only two years removed from the time when Obama had flown to Beijing and secured an agreement to act in concert with China to combat climate change, the step that made the Paris agreement possible in the first place. Now China would lead that effort going forward. Toward the end of the meeting, Xi asked about Trump. Again, Obama suggested that the Chinese wait and see what the new administration decided to do in office, but he noted that the president-elect had tapped into real concerns among Americans about “the fairness of our economic relationship with China. Xi is a big man who moves slowly and deliberately, as if he wants people to notice his every motion. Sitting across the table from Obama, he pushed aside the binder of talking points that usually shape the words of a Chinese leader. We prefer to have a good relationship with the United States, he said, folding his hands in front of him. That is good for the world. But every action will have a reaction. And if an immature leader throws the world into chaos, then the world will know whom to blame.

If the people merely have the right to vote, but no right of extensive participation, in other words, if they are awakened only at election time but go into hibernation afterwards, this is token democracy. Reviewing our experience with people's democracy since the founding of the PRC, we have made it clear that in such a vast and populous socialist country, extensive deliberation under the leadership of the CPC on major issues affecting the economy and the people's quality of life embodies the unity of democracy and centralism. Chinese socialist democracy takes two important forms: in one the people exercise their right to vote in elections, and in the other, people from all sectors of society undertake extensive deliberations before major decisions are made. In China, these two forms do not cancel one another out, nor are they contradictory; they are complimentary. They constitute institutional features and strengths of Chinese socialist democracy.

Xi Jinping has articulated a simple but powerful vision: the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.

Xi Jinping, who took over as China’s leader in 2012, has shown even less inclination than his predecessors to let citizens express their preferences through the ballot box. Yet the public has become ever more vocal on a wide variety of issues—online, through protests, and increasingly via responses to opinion polls and government-arranged consultations over the introduction of some new laws. The party monitors this clamour to detect possible flashpoints, and it frequently censors dissent. But the government is also consulting people, through opinion polls that try to establish their views on some of the big issues of the day as well as on specific policies. Its main aim is to devise ways to keep citizens as happy as possible in their daily lives. It avoids stickier subjects such as political reform or human rights. But people are undoubtedly gaining a stronger voice.

When Xi Jinping took power in 2012, many online commentators rejoiced, ‘At last! A Chinese leader who can speak Putonghua!

Few Americans can claim to know China as well as Ambassador Stapleton Roy. Born in China, a fluent Mandarin speaker, Roy also served as the American ambassador to China from 1991 to 1995 and has stayed exceptionally well informed on US-China relations. He explained what happened: In a joint press conference with President Obama on September 25, 2015, Xi Jinping had proposed a more reasonable approach on the South China Sea. Xi had supported full and effective implementation of the 2002 Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea, signed by China and all ten ASEAN members; had called for early conclusion of the China-ASEAN consultations on a Code of Conduct for the South China Sea; and had added that China had no intention of militarizing the Spratlys, where it had engaged in massive reclamation work on the reefs and shoals it occupied. Roy said that Obama missed an opportunity to capitalize on this reasonable proposal. Instead, the US Navy stepped up its naval patrols. China responded by proceeding with militarization. In short, Xi did not renege on a promise. His offer was effectively spurned by the US Navy. The big question is how an untruth becomes accepted as a fact by well-informed, thoughtful Western elites.

Xi Jinping’s first stop on his first foreign trip as president in 2013 was Moscow. China became Russia’s largest trading partner. The respective roles were very clear. China provided manufactures, consumer goods, and finance; Russia, oil, gas, coal, and other commodities—and geopolitical alignment.

Perhaps nothing threatens the CCP more than the Constitution of the United States. China’s president, Xi Jinping, has stated as much, and CCP documents that I will share make clear that fundamental American concepts—the rights of free speech and freedom of religion—are threats to the authoritarian power of the CCP, which believes that these liberties must never be allowed to take root in China and must never be the rights of Chinese citizens. The

In January 2017, Zhou Qiang, China’s top judge and president of the Supreme People’s Court, made himself very clear to an assembly of magistrates in Beijing: We should resolutely resist erroneous Western ideas such as ‘the separation of powers’ and ‘independence of the judiciary’. We need to oppose those who talk against the leadership of the Communist Party and attack the Chinese socialist system. We need to be ready to respond, to bring out our weapons and prepare for battle. In short, while there are more references to Taoist proverbs than to Legalism in Xi Jinping’s speeches, Legalism holds more sway in his intellectual universe. There is every reason to believe that he is personally inspired by Legalism, and that it is of great assistance in his countering of Western legal thought.

The debate in Australia over China has long been framed by a number of influential essays by Hugh White, a former bureaucrat and academic. White’s thesis is summed up by the title of one of his books, The China Choice, which argued that Australia’s refusal

In 2002, scholars from the Ningxia Party School published the results of a survey among urban residents in Ningxia: roughly “25 percent did not believe in the cause of socialist construction any more, 50 percent doubted the CCP’s role as vanguard of the working class . . . and 79 percent had lost their close emotional ties to the party.

Xi Jinping is of a new generation—the first Chinese leader born after World War II. His father, a veteran of the revolution, had risen to vice premier, before being purged and imprisoned.

When it became clear that Xi Jinping was placing his bet on fortifying the status quo, another Party aristocrat, Hu Dehua, the sixty-three-year-old son of a previous Party chief, Hu Yaobang, used the protection afforded by his family name and pedigree to openly criticize the president. The real reason the Soviets fell, Hu Dehua argued, was that they couldnt stop themselves from appropriating public property by graft and bribery. The Party, Hu said, was indeed facing a crisis. There are two options: to suppress the opposition or to reach reconciliation with the people, he said. It had faced this choice once before, in 1989; and in an astonishing acknowledgment of the bloodshed at Tiananmen, he asked, What does this mean: man enough? Is driving battle tanks against your own people man enough?

Some believe his political vulnerabilities have not only driven him into the arms of Mao but also the clutches of the country’s generals and admirals, who run what may effectively be the Party’s largest and most powerful faction, the People’s Liberation Army. Indeed, some, like veteran China watcher Willy Lam, believe the military is now Xi Jinping’s faction.

The psychological techniques used by the CCP in united front work have been developed and refined over decades and are taught to cadres with the help of classified manuals. James To observes that the techniques are effective for ‘intensive behavioural control and manipulation’ while appearing to be ‘benign, benevolent and helpful’.9 Speaking to the Central United Front Work Conference in 2015, Xi Jinping emphasised that the art of ‘making friends’ must be practised because it is ‘an important method of carrying out united front work’.

Other former ambassadors have lent their support to Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative. Michael Schaefer, Germany’s ambassador to China from 2007 to 2013, was praised by Xinhua for being ‘among the first German politicians to advocate China’s BRI’.29 Schaefer has said that the BRI is ‘an amazing project of the 21st century’. Well connected to Germany’s elite circles, Schaefer is on the board of the German-Chinese Business Association and he chairs the board of the BMW Foundation Herbert Quandt.30 He is also on the board of Europe’s leading China-focused think tank, the Mercator Institute for China Studies.

From the outset, the BRI has been presented as a model of ‘inclusive globalisation’ and aimed at those who feel shut out. The language plays to the dream of global harmony through trade and cultural exchange. When Xi Jinping uses the phrase ‘community of shared future’, the subtext is that China’s new world order will replace the postwar American hegemony. The BRI can be seen as the CCP’s principal vehicle for promoting and entrenching the Party’s alternative discourse system for the world. To the outside world, Xi and other leaders talk about ‘win-win cooperation’, and ‘a big family of harmonious co-existence’ and ‘a bridge for peace and East-West cooperation’, but in discussions at home, the talk is of achieving global discursive and geostrategic dominance.

Today's China is not just a geopolitical challenge to the West. It is a real-time, empirical experiment challenging the West's post-Cold War ascendancy. Far from being a pre-modern throwback to discredited authoritarian ways, Xi's project is taking shape as a post-modern phenomenon, a surveillance state with a fighting chance of success at home and the potential to replicate its core elements abroad. If Xi, and whomever takes over from him eventually, does manage to sustain the system, China will have decisively rebuffed any notions that democracy is the sole system capable of building a successful, rich country. This is not so much the end of the end of history. Xi's China marks the start of history all over again.

Other fronts for engaging with foreigners are the so-called people’s organisations. ‘The people’ and their ‘friendship’ with foreigners are concepts with special meanings in Chinese politics—meanings that few in the West understand. The Party’s cynical, opportunistic concept of friendship was explained in 2017 by Xi Jinping, who told cadres that their friends outside the Party are not their ‘own personal resources’, but should be made ‘friends for the Party’ or ‘for the public good’. He went on to say, ‘Of course, friendships made outside the party will develop into personal friendships. But personal friendships must comply with the work for the public good. Principles, discipline, and rules must be maintained.’65

The resurrection of Jacobson has been compared to “resurrecting Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson, or Korematsu”—historical Supreme Court cases referred to as “anticanon” owing to not only their lack of intellectual rigor but to the awful human tragedies they precipitated.

There is no foreseeable scenario under which Beijing will back away, either rhetorically or in practice, from its territorial claims in Taiwan and in the South and East China Seas. As Xi Jinping told the then US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis in June 2018, China will not give up 'even an inch' of its territory, which includes its expansive maritime claims and a large land area disputed with India. Within the Chinese system, any leader who stepped back from these claims would be committing political suicide. The internal sensitivity of the territorial issue helps explain the bellicose way Beijing handles these disputes outside of its borders. China constantly schools its Asian neighbours on its red lines in territorial disputes, all the while rapidly building up its military capability and regional diplomatic sway to entrench them. With the possible exception of Vietnam, smaller countries have taken to either submitting or swerving in the face of Beijing's pressure. Yet it is far from game over, if history is any guide. Total capitulation in international relations is rare. Behind the scenes in Beijing, there has always been recognition that it was dangerous for China to bully its way to regional domination. 'The history of contemporary relations does not provide any precedent of a large country successfully bringing to its knees another country,' wrote Wang Jisi, formerly of Peking University, and for many years an informal government adviser. Wang pointed to America's experience in Vietnam and more recently Afghanistan, where its vastly superior military firepower couldn't drag it out of a military and then political quagmire. Wang was writing in 2014. Such strategic humility is rare in Beijing these days, either because the Chinese themselves have become cockier or because the country's diplomats fear being caught out of step with the temper of Xi's times. Nonetheless, the point stands. Beijing cannot bully its way to superpower status without engendering a strong pushback from other countries, which is exactly what is happening.

In one incident, Xi was paraded onto a stage wearing a heavy metal dunce cap. His mother was forced to attend and shout “Shame on Xi Jinping!” along with the crowd. But Xi never lost faith in the Party, later recalling how he “recited the thoughts of Chairman Mao every day late into the night.

In 2013, Xi’s General Office issued a secret directive known as Document No. 9, describing an “intense, ideological struggle” for survival, with “the very real threat of western anti-China forces and their attempts at carrying out westernization.

Italy was simultaneously bombarded with Chinese propaganda and disinformation. From March 11 to 23, roughly 46% of tweets with the hashtag #forzaCinaeItalia (Go China, go Italy) and 37% of those with the hashtag #grazieCina (thank you China) came from bots.

In a 2015 speech to the PLA, Xi Jinping outlined his vision for the CCP’s international propaganda: Wherever the readers are, wherever the viewers are, that is where propaganda reports must extend their tentacles, and that is where we find the focal point and end point of propaganda and ideology work.

Beginning at Tiananmen Square, the CCP sought to prove that even the newest information technology could be subverted to tyrannical ends, and that ideas really could be killed with the right amount of violence

Eric Feigl-Ding, a WEF Global Shaper, became a major pro-lockdown celebrity with his long series of wildly-inaccurate COVID tweets. This led to several interview spots with CNN and the New York Times, despite his evident lack of qualifications and his being denounced as a “charlatan” by prominent scientists on all sides.

Without fail, ZeroCovid supporters—whether “scientists,” influencers, or otherwise—would insist that China’s manifestly-fraudulent data was real. When asked to define a “real” lockdown—one which had succeeded in a mainland country—they could point to only one example: China.

Fauci wrote of Nilsen’s email: “Too long for me to read”; the email was 1,700 words.

What would Mao do” indeed.

You make some very good points Donald,” Fauci replied.

Roberts’ opinion is problematic in several respects. First, Jacobson had been overruled many times, not least because it was subsequently used to justify eugenics in Buck v. Bell, a decision that was then cited by several Nazi leaders at the Nuremberg trials.

From these photos, it might have seemed like they were sending mixed messages. Not so. The message was loud and clear: “We know you know we’re lying about COVID-19. To be one of us, you need to keep lying as well.

Data showed that over 60% of business closures during the COVID-19 crisis were permanent, amounting to more than 97,000 businesses lost in the U.S. alone.[552] Half of Black-owned small businesses in the U.S. were wiped out.

A survey found that 22% of Canadians were experiencing high anxiety levels, a four-fold increase from before lockdowns, while the number reporting symptoms of depression doubled to 13%.[556] U.S. drug-overdose deaths soared nearly 30%.

The CDC revealed that young adults aged 25-44 saw the largest increase in excess deaths from previous years, a stunning 26.5% jump, despite accounting for fewer than 3% of deaths from COVID-19.

About 230 million Indians fell into poverty—defined as living on less than $5 a day—in the first year of the crisis. Around 15%—including 47% of female workers—had failed to find employment by the end of 2020.

Department luncheon Joe is hosting for the visiting Chinese president, Xi Jinping, whose patronage Hunter enjoys by proxy. “All international politics is only personal,” Joe tells Xi and assembled guests, including Henry Kissinger. “If you can’t establish a personal relationship where you understand one another, it’s awfully hard to get anything done. And more than four years ago, President Obama and…President Hu decided that then-Vice President Xi and I should get to know one another.

Then there was the case against Sun Zhengcai. Sun had been in the running to succeed Xi Jinping after Xi’s second term as China’s president and Party boss ended in 2022–2023.

The Chinese Communist Party is not Chinese, not communist, and not a party. The CCP is the world’s largest criminal organization, with no racial or geographic boundaries, which happens to have begun in China—led by an extraordinarily small number of extraordinarily evil people.

When Xi Jinping took command in 2012, some of us anticipated that he might turn foreign policy in a more conciliatory direction by centralizing the policy process and curbing the scrum of interest groups that had characterized Hu Jintao’s oligarchy. Xi’s personal authority was, and is, more than sufficient to restrain the various groups that had been promoting their own interests by overreaching under Hu’s collective leadership.

However, broad-based retrenchment on the BRI is simply not a political option. It began as a personal project of Xi Jinping, and in the Chinese political system, the current leader can never be wrong. It is also important to understand that China’s engagement with its wide western periphery is not limited to the BRI.

Who was Confucius? His real name was Kong Qiu, and he was the extramarital child of an impoverished seventy-year-old aristocrat and his sixteen-year-old concubine. The boy was born 551 years before Christ, and half a century before Rome became a republic.

Like Confucianism, communism is a kind of secular religion. Like a religion, communism connects people through shared rituals and songs, offers explanations for everything and promises a paradise to come.

What would Jesus do (WWJD), in an app? The Chinese Xuexi Qiangguo app could in fact be seen as an early version of this — “What would Xi Jinping do?” — though one could also have decentralized versions.

For example, as of 2019, 48 percent of all AI start-ups globally were listed as Chinese, while 38 percent were American.

The reason for this book is that armed conflict between China and the United States over the next decade, while not yet probable, has become a real possibility.

Xi believes that his New Development Concept, made up of this combination of self-reliance, dual circulation, and common prosperity, will be sufficient to transform China into a superpower strong enough to prevail in its unfolding strategic competition with the United States.

The Communist party, under General Secretary Xi Jinping, has tried to label anyone who tries to oppose China’s crackdown as “separatists” or “terrorists,” designations punishable by life imprisonment or the death penalty, just as they did with pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong and peaceful Buddhist monks in Tibet.

You can’t see the Party because it chooses to stay out of view, and as a result, what visitors to China see are the institutions (which the Party controls from behind the scenes) that on the surface resemble those of any other country: a government and cabinet ministries, courts at all levels, a central bank, two houses of parliament, and of course, above them all, a president. Yet, even the president, largely for the purposes of global optics, dons this title only for the outside world. ‘President’ does not even exist within the lexicon of domestic Chinese politics. China’s English-language media refer to ‘President’ Xi Jinping, but the domestic media translate the same title as the ‘National Chairman’, all aimed at conveying to the world a subtly different message about how this system really works. The title of National Chairman is itself the least important of the three crowns Xi wears. His position as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China is what gives him his power, as does his being the Chairman of the Central Military Commission that controls the PLA. The Party, as always, comes first.

Xi has publicly scolded Party functionaries who don’t give proper attention to the law. “We will spread the rule of law throughout the country,” he once announced. For the CCP, though, the rule of law means something completely different from what it means to most citizens of Western democracies. The Chinese word for rule of law is fa zhi, and is made up of the words fa (law) and zhi (rule). China-watchers spent many years puzzling over where the Party might take this idea. Would they tread a slow path toward the “rule of law” in our sense? Or was the destination to be “rule by law”—with laws mere tools in the service of power? The riddle has long since been solved. Xi Jinping himself has compared the role of laws to the “handle of a knife in the hand of the Party.” In summer 2015 the lawyer Zhou Shifeng, head of the above-mentioned Fengrui practice, explained to me his interpretation of the Party’s “rule of law”: “What they mean by that is: ‘I will take my laws and rule you with them.’” Less than four weeks after our conversation, Zhou was in prison. Shortly afterward he made a forced confession on state television, where he was shamed as the mastermind of a “criminal gang”; and a year later he was sentenced to seven years in jail for “subversion.

If a person has never had the right to choose their information, freely associate with any kind of ideology, and develop an individual character with some passion and imagination—how can they become creative? It is against human nature. If you are against every essential value of individualism and independent thinking, and the willingness to take risks and bear consequences, and have a sense of responsibility—what kind of creativity do you expect? . . . It would be impossible to design an iPhone in China because it’s not a product; it’s an understanding of human nature

As a line in an old Chinese poem goes, ‘Honey melons hang on bitter vines; sweet dates grow on thistles and thorns.’ In a philosophical sense, nothing is perfect in the world. One would fail to see the full picture if one claimed something to be perfect because of its merits, or if something were viewed as useless just because of its defects. It is true that economic globalization has created new problems, but this is no justification for writing off economic globalization completely.

China is a sleeping giant. Let her lie and sleep, for when she awakens the world will tremble.” -Napoleon Bonaparte

Call forth the assault,” Xi Jinping declared. China’s leaders have identified their reliance on foreign chipmakers as a critical vulnerability. They’ve set out a plan to rework the world’s chip industry by buying foreign chipmakers, stealing their technology, and providing billions of dollars of subsidies to Chinese chip firms. The People’s Liberation Army is now counting on these efforts to help it evade U.S. restrictions, though it can still buy legally many U.S. chips in its pursuit of “military intelligentization.” For its part, the Pentagon has launched its own offset, after admitting that China’s military modernization has closed the gap between the two superpowers’ militaries, especially in the contested waters off China’s coast. Taiwan isn’t simply the source of the advanced chips that both countries’ militaries are betting on. It’s also the most likely future battleground.

The stability of the planet – and the presumption of restraint – will have to rest in the hands of Xi Jinping and other powerful leaders. To forestall disaster, the rest of the world will have no choice but to try to put themselves in Trump’s shoes.

Friendship is something ritualistic, performed; you must go through the ceremonies and motions to create it. Proclaim friendship often enough, and it just might be forced into existence

Now imagine a world where Donald Trump (a Christian), Xi Jinping (a Confucian Communist), Vladimir Putin (an Orthodox Christian), Ayatollah Khamenei (a Muslim) and Narendra Modi (a Hindu) came together to sign a declaration for peaceful collaboration.

Trump’s reflex effort to talk his way out of anything, however, even a public-health crisis, only undercut his and the nation’s credibility, with his statements looking more like political damage control than responsible public-health advice. One particularly egregious example was a news report that the Administration tried to classify certain public-health information regarding the United States on the spurious excuse that China was involved.33 Of course China was involved, which is a reason to disseminate the information broadly, not restrict it. This, Trump was reluctant to do throughout the crisis, for fear of adversely affecting the elusive definitive trade deal with China, or offending the ever-so-sensitive Xi Jinping.

Chinese techno-authoritarianism scares the West. The language used is dystopian, and the fear heightened. Readers or viewers are meant to take away the idea that Beijing under President Xi Jinping is destined to create a global infrastructure of control, a unique threat to the world and incomparable to any other nation. Take a September 2020 article in the Atlantic in which journalist Ross Anderson painted a petrifying image of China wanting to have worldwide domination of artificial intelligence. “In the near future,” he wrote, “every person who enters a public space could be identified, instantly, by AI matching them to an ocean of personal data, including their every text communication, and their body’s one-of-a-kind protein-construction schema.” He noted that algorithms will soon be able to gather a multitude of data points, such as reading habits, purchases, travel records, and friends, as well as predict political opposition before it occurs.