XI SEEKS WANTS CHINA’S IMAGE TO BE ‘TRUSTWORTHY, LOVABLE’

President Xi Jinping has urged his officials to strive hard to change China’s national image, make it “trustworthy, lovable and respectable” even as the country needed to “be open and confident, but also modest and humble,” Adam Taylor and Claire Parker commented for the Washington Post.

Taylor and Parker said Xi’s comments would not end the furious activities of Chinese wolf warriors like Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian who had warned, insulted and intimidated critics and even entire countries using non-sequiturs and salty language.

Xi’s statements to the Politburo come after China had been slammed worldwide for the repression of the Uyghur ethnic minority in Xinjiang, aggressive rhetoric and action against Taiwan, India and Hong Kong activists, and relentless obfuscation over the coronavirus darkening China’s global image.

Worse, China is now losing the debate on its debt trap of poorer nations, with the debtors losing their territory and infrastructure to China if they default on their payments. By claiming 90% of the South China Sea, China has become a pariah in Southeast Asian countries.

“China’s reputation in the West has plunged of late. In a Pew Research Center survey of 14 countries released in October, a majority of respondents gave a negative appraisal of China. Negative views reached decade highs in nine of those countries. This decline in China’s international image took place during a period in which the United States was led by a globally unpopular leader whose policies of ‘America First’ drew little support outside US borders and record hostility within,” Taylor and Parker argued.

“However, it was not rude tweets that brought China’s international standing into disrepute. It is Xi’s actual policies of repression in Xinjiang and Hong Kong, or the systematic embrace of secrecy and paranoia that may make finding the cause of the coronavirus impossible, that disrupt its relations abroad,” they added.

“Moreover, China is entangled in a variety of ugly disputes with countries it once got along with politely. Relations with the European Union broke down amid disputes over Xinjiang, effectively ending plans for a trade and investment treaty. Relations with Australia and India have broken down, with the latter in a small-scale but very real border conflict with China last year.”

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