In other news, elders missing after comments about government
Zeng Qinghong,a former vice president has been reported dead this morning by rare bullet-in-brain disease.
So…your username…
The dynamics of the CCP are really fascinating and widely misunderstood. Mostly for political reasons people I’m the west these days try and portray Xi as someone with absolute power but that really isn’t the case. Not to say that it’s a democracy or anything.
He was supposed to be limited to 2 terms as general secretary, the only person to break that tradition was Mao.
His anti-corruptiom prosecutions also happened to be anti-rival prosecutions.
He does have absolute power, sort of, there is just no direct path to remove or bypass him. It’s like we have no direct path to become president without winning an election, though we do have indirect paths that should never happen save for exceptional circumstances.
He’s more autocratic than recent Chinese leaders, but, at least looking from the outside, he doesn’t seem to be fostering the kind of generalized fear environment needed for total control, like Stalin or Hitler did. The level of public dissent that’s allowed at least still seems to be in line with the garden variety authoritarian dictatorship and not with a totalitarian one.
Make fun of him online and it’s straight to prison.
As Mel Brooks said, “Rhetoric does not get you anywhere, because Hitler and Mussolini are just as good at rhetoric. But if you can bring these people down with comedy, they stand no chance.”
This means that smart dictators can address most criticism by a mix of rhetoric and half truths, but handling mockery is much harder for them. So it’s not that surprising that a dictatorship might crack down on forms of humor that damage the image they want to build of its leaders even if they allow some level of opposition.
He hasn’t had a cultural revolution, totally agree.
But it’s also clear his path has been to ensure control of HK, TW and other “properties” of china to keep his domestic populace happy, while ensuring safe loyalty via all-encompassing electronic surveillance.
He’s smart enough that he doesn’t have to be hitler/Stalin, but you’re right he’s not them.
Yeah I was interested to learn that there is a cadre of retired CCP “elders” who have enough gravitas to reprimand the president. But I believe it. Xi is not the whole CCP. And Chinese culture has a lot of reverence for elders in it.
Xi vented his frustration, pointing fingers at his three predecessors – Deng Xiaoping, Jiang and Hu.
“All the issues that were left by the previous three leaders are on my shoulders” he is believed to have said. “I’ve spent the last decade tackling them but they remain unresolved. Am I to blame?”
So Deng left the one-child policy, Jiang left financialization/inequality and Hu left the housing bubble?
This deserved to become a meme. (See attached image /kbin)
In fairness, these are huge problems that he inherited, but that’s what you get when you wanna become leader of any country, even more if you wanna act like an emperor.
Wow a yellow skin character representing Xi? That’s racist!
/s
My bad. I forget we’re supposed to use the image of Winnie the Pooh when representing Xi.
“I’ve spent the last decade tackling them but they remain unresolved. Am I to blame?”
Yes… unless he is admitting that the issues are unsolvable. People are calling for blood if the US president doesn’t solve the issues by his 3rd year, a decade is 2.5 cycles in the US, basically like a half century in democracy time equivalent because most of their time in office is spent fundraising and campaigning for another cycle.
Eh, but you have examples of long-term problems created by each president: you had Clinton’s half-baked Eastern European legacy, Bush II’s middle east legacy that lasted a while, Trump’s completely polarised political landscape. I’m not sure what Obama’s main fuckup was, but there were many small neglects (maybe the main one was how he handled the 2008 crisis that Bush II left him)…the more influence you have as a country and as a person, the more shit falls on your plate to deal with :/
What a fucked-up opt-out model this site has.
