Sunday 2 December 2018

Winnie the Pooh: cuddly Xi Jingping isn’t a cuddly at all. He’s a communist crocodile

Chinese have compared Xi to Winnie the Pooh. Obama as Tigger 

The man I love to hate. Not Chinese that I hate. Or China. But Xi Jinping. The man. The dictator. That's who I hate. He's a tyrant. A megalomaniac. A cruel dictator. Yet he wooes the world with fine phrases from Chinese literature. Then again, so did Mao. A man with more blood on his hands than Hitler. Mao was a fine calligrapher. And knew his Chinese poetry. And was a fine poet in his own write. But ruthless. 100 million died because of him.
This article -- “On the World Stage, Xi Fails to Practice What He Preaches” -- shows how Xi is the wooer of the world and it's been successful. The world, the wooee, is wooed, the world, the wooee, is fooled. Because in practice Xi hasn't practiced what he's preached. He's cruel. And he's ruthless. 
The article below doesn't even mention the worst of recent excesses: the roundup of over a million Uighurs for the crime of being Muslim. My view on Islam is pretty clear, I think, but even to me, this strikes me as a pretty horrid policy. But he does it and he's getting away with it. Because: woo....
... For instance, since he came to power in 2012, Xi has tightened the ruling party's – if not his – control over the 1.3 billion-plus-people country's cultural, social, economic and political life. The tightly censored country "was the world's worst abuser of Internet freedom in [Freedom House's 2018] Freedom on the Net for the fourth consecutive year."Under his watch, Beijing has carried out land reclamation and a military build-up in the contested waters of the South China Sea. It has also rejected a landmark ruling by a United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which invalidated many of its contentious claims and unlawful actions in the resource-rich and strategically vital sea.Had his regime not done all this, the world might believe that Xi's China is a benign power – that has "worked hard to advance and uphold human rights" at home, "uphold[s] the authority of the international rule of law," loves its smaller neighbors as itself, or "never seek[s] hegemony, expansion or sphere of influence" – as Xi has publically preached.