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?

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.

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.

atafutima a a. schunme. atafuti himalayas with xi jinping.

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.

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.

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.

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]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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’.

Chinese Human Rights Defenders documented 897 cases between January and April 2020 of people being punished for challenging “the official propaganda that President Xi Jinping handled the outbreak with transparency and expertise”. Another organisation, Reporters Without Borders (RSF), has kept a careful record of those who have disappeared or been subjected to detention. They say China “is the biggest prison in the world for journalists, with at least 120 detained or missing according to the most recent count made by RSF”.

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.

Not only are lockdowns historically unprecedented in response to any previous epidemic or pandemic in American history, but they were not even mentioned in recent guidance offered by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

For this letter, Ren Zhiqiang was sentenced to 18 years in prison.[177]

But six days in, the lockdown—being “unprecedented in public health history”—had produced no results, so Tedros was actually praising human rights abuses with nothing to show for them.

For decades, western policymakers insisted they saw China as a rival. But once China became their source of wealth and prestige, they came to see the CCP as a friend and a model. The western China class was born.[84]

Elite universities developed an entire business model around the CCP. Chinese money came in through donations and full-freight tuition, and in exchange professors signed lucrative side deals selling federally-funded research to the CCP.[87] Whole academic careers could be made or broken by one’s views on China.

By corrupting global institutions, promoting forged data, publishing fraudulent science, and deploying propaganda on an unprecedented scale, the CCP under Xi Jinping transformed the snake oil of lockdowns into “science,” the greatest crime of the 21st century to date. The

Across the world, governments implemented measures modeled on the mass quarantines imposed in China, commonly referred to as “lockdowns.” What, if anything, individual citizens knew about the virus was of little relevance; in no instance were they consulted. No votes were held. In the span of a month, the long-cherished rights of nearly half the world’s population were upended.

Stories that Beijing was stealing scientific and military secrets, running spy networks in Silicon Valley, compromising legislators, and paying huge retainers to professors were downplayed. Signs that the CCP posed a threat in any way were muted and dismissed.

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.

The hard truth is that an enormous portion of the China-watching, human rights, journalism, and think tank community is controlled opposition to the CCP—financially restrained from reporting anything that might be too damaging to China.

It’s no coincidence that lockdowns were specifically designed to ruin small businesses. They’re the one asset the CCP can’t easily buy.

Lockdowns were, of course, never really meant to end. First it was “flatten the curve,” then the “second wave,” then “control the virus,” then “wait for a vaccine,” then “variants.” All a bait-and-switch to gradually strip the world of human rights.

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.

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.