JAPAN PROF WARNS XI: PEOPLE’S HUNGER TO END YOUR RULE

Prof. Akio Takahara has warned Chinese President Xi Jinping in an opinion piece for Mainichi Shimbun that despite his assertiveness and his posturing as a modern-day head of the Celestial Empire, he can hardly hold on to his post for life.

A professor at the Graduate School of Public Policy at the University of Tokyo, Takahara says Xi is busy trying to quell internal and external anxieties and build momentum to maintain his position as supreme leader and his banning the publication of an essay by former Premier Wen JIabao has been met with criticism, barely a year after he eked out consent from the leadership of the Communist Party of China to have a seconds term as president.

Xi was also roundly jeered by Chinese netizens when his lieutenants tried to launch a campaign to have millions of Chinese thank the leader for “quelling” COVID-19 and critics snapped back at him for trying to grab credit from medical experts, including the late whistleblower Dr. Li Wenliang, who exposed the pandemic.

Li’s last words were "there should not be only one voice in a healthy society," a slap in the face of Xi who has argued: "The Party Center is the brain and the nerve center; the Party Centre must have one person with the highest authority to set the tone with a single blow of the hammer." Xi is not considered a charismatic leader and theoretician but only as an acceptable caretaker of the government for several party factions.

“Faced with a crisis, the Xi administration made urgent efforts to suppress the virus through the use of coercive measures, to restore prestige through strong information control and propaganda, and to revive the economy through subsidies, tax cuts, and other measures. These steps have produced significant results, and the propaganda of the superiority of China's leadership system seems to have spread widely among the people, in part due to the delay in the West's efforts to contain COVID-19,” Takahara said.

The professor said XUI should stop bragging about China’s rising economic clout, which is speaking while the wheel is still in spin, and wrongly arguing that the world treated China badly and it must pay.

The errors of imperial China cannot be tossed to other nations, including its yielding Taiwan to Japan, for which the world must pay. Xi must grapple with China’s problems—widening chasm between the rich and poor, the poverty of retirees and bureaucrat-capitalism that enriched the party elite at the expense of the poor.

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