Xi Forever Means Xi's Policies Forever
Xi's job performance in the last decade has given us plenty of clues about how he will rule going forward
Xi Jinping, General Secretary and President of China, officially broke the term limit at the recent 20th party congress and was set to rule China for the rest of his life. His job performance in the last decade has given us plenty of clues about how he will rule going forward.
Since he came into power in 2012, Xi has taken China backward politically by discarding the Party’s collective-rule model and consolidating power in his own hands. He values absolute obedience and loyalty more than competence. Through a sweeping anti-corruption campaign that is still ongoing after ten years, Xi has purged rivals, eliminated potential challengers, real or imagined, and even put some of his closest allies on notice. Xi is in charge of almost every essential government body, earning him the nickname “the chairman of everything.” Xi also stamped out any possibility of a military coup by reorganizing the People’s Liberation Army and instilled his most trusted allies in key positions.
Xi always believed that the former Soviet Union fell because Soviet Communist leaders let western democratic values and ideas infiltrate their Party and corrupt comrades’ minds. Therefore, for the last ten years, Xi has strengthened the Party’s ideological control of its over 90 million members by reintroducing Mao-era mandatory study sessions on Marxism, Leninism, and of course, the Thoughts of Mao Zedong and Xi Jinping. Xi may not believe in the ideology, but he recognizes that Marxism-Leninism is a perfect tool for enforcing thought control and ideological conformity. One of the notorious features of these study sessions is the “criticism” and “self-criticism” of members, designed to humiliate party members and dictate their thoughts and behaviors within the invisible fence put up by the Party.
Xi has also revived Mao’s “cult of personality.” His portraits are ubiquitous in China and even hang right next to the cross of Jesus Christ in some government-sanctioned churches.
Like Mao’s little red book, the collection of Xi’s speeches and instructions has been a national bestseller and is compulsory reading for the public, including schoolchildren. In 2017, “Xi Jinping’s Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era” was included in the CCP’s party constitution and later the state constitution.
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