Xi Refashions China

The People’s Republic of China was born in 1949 when Mao Zedong won the Chinese Civil War and consolidated control over mainland China. By every measure, Mao was a communist revolutionary and true believer in Marxist-Leninist ideology: He launched a branch of the Socialist Youth League, led a people’s army in waging guerilla warfare, wrote treatises on revolutionary struggle and proletarian movements, unleashed brutal collectivization programs, supported foreign communist movements with military and economic aid, erased all traces of the individual, and justified his ruthless means by pointing to his “glorious” ends.

Mao’s successors would reform the PRC, drag it into the international community, pivot away from Maoist cruelties, limit the terms and power of the general secretary, and even embrace elements of market economics. But in the last decade, under the rule of Xi Jinping, China seems to be replacing Maoist-Marxism with another antihuman ideology.

Xi’s Nationalism
Marxism embraces a transnational brotherhood of the proletariat and promises a post-national world where the state withers away and global communism takes its place. But Xi’s China increasingly embraces an ugly brand of old-fashioned nationalism.

For example, the Economist points out that under Xi, Beijing is nurturing a form of nationalism that emphasizes “the humiliation China suffered at the hands of foreigners,” a “sense of victimhood,” and a feeling of “gratitude to the party for making China strong again.” That sounds a lot like what poisoned Germany after World War I.

Moreover, under what has been called “Han supremacism” and “Han chauvinism,” the Han ethnicity is treated and viewed by Beijing more favorably than China’s minority ethnic groups—and far more favorably than other ethnicities and nationalities worldwide.

As a recent Economist report details, Xi espouses and promotes the idea of Han “common blood.” The Han Chinese, Xi has said, “never forget their home country, their origins or the blood of the Chinese nation flowing in their veins.” The Economist adds that “Unless someone is the child of a Chinese national, no matter how long they live there, how much money they make or tax they pay, it is virtually impossible to become a citizen.”

Non-Han minorities are bypassed for employment and education opportunities, and minority languages are not taught or allowed to be spoken in some cases. However, some minorities are treated far worse.

Crimes
Fueled by Xi’s vision of Han supremacy, Uighur Muslim men are packed into freight trains and herded into concentration camps; Uighur women are forcibly sterilized; Uighur babies are forcibly aborted. The United States and other democratic governments have labeled Xi’s assault on the Uighurs as genocide and rightly so.

China’s Uighur Muslim region, according to a human-rights watchdog, “resembles a massive internment camp…a no-rights zone.” More accurately, all of China is a no-rights zone.

Tibetans are deprived of basic human rights and brutalized by Xi’s security forces. Again, the cruelties include forced abortions, forced sterilizations, arbitrary killings, torture, arbitrary arrest, restrictions on religious freedom, and restrictions on movement. Tibetan Buddhist temples have been bulldozed by the Xi regime.

Likewise, Christian churches in Dazhou, Zhejiang, and Shaanxi are demolished, ransacked, and raided. Christian pastors are jailed. Bishops rot away in prison. Christians are banished to laogai slave-labor camps.

Freedom House reports that “hundreds of thousands” of religious people all across Xi’s China—many of them guilty of “simply possessing spiritual texts in the privacy of their homes”—are sentenced to forced labor or worse. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom adds that “independent Catholics and Protestants face arrests, fines, and the shuttering of their places of worship.” Buddhists, Uighur Muslims, practitioners of Falun Gong, folk religionists, and Protestant house-church attendees “face long jail terms, forced renunciation of faith and torture in detention…Protestants and Catholics who refuse to join the state-sanctioned religious organizations continue to face severe restrictions, including efforts to undermine and harass their leaders, arrest and detentions, and property destruction.”

Worse, Xi’s China is a place where cruelty is a part of statecraft. Not only are Christians sent to work camps for the crime of confessing Christ, but they are also ordered to produce rosaries, Christmas wreaths, Christmas trees, and Christmas lights for export to the West.

Not only are Muslims monitored and brutalized, but Xi’s henchmen have also “hung Chinese flags on mosque walls in the direction of Mecca” so that when the religious bow for prayer, they are reminded of their godless masters.

Not only have millions of women been forced to abort their babies, many of them have been forced to endure unspeakable inhumanity after enduring that trauma. As the Washington Post details, a woman pregnant with her second child was arrested and ordered to pay $6,000 in fines. “When the family couldn’t get the money together...officials gave her an injection that killed the baby, whom the mother delivered stillborn while in police custody.” The government then forced the woman to wait alongside her baby’s lifeless body while bureaucrats finished their work.
Anything
A regime capable of committing such cruelty is capable of justifying and doing anything—violating treaties, annexing foreign lands, leveraging a pandemic for geopolitical advantage, waging wars of aggression, and launching fifth-column attacks. As dissident leader Xu Zhangrun observes, “A polity that is blatantly incapable of treating its own people properly can hardly be expected to treat the rest of the world well.”

Part two of this series will explore where Xi’s ethno-racialist tyranny might take the world.