China under President Xi Jinping (習近平) appears to be suffering from an acute case of, to coin a term, “national dysmorphic disorder” (NDD).
NDD, like body dysmporphic disorder, could be defined as an obsessive preoccupation that some portion or aspect of oneself is flawed or out of order and exceptional measures are needed to fix it, even if it means chopping the errant bit off, to the detriment of the rest of the body.
Xi has sought to project a national image that under his leadership, China is returning to its rightful place as an economic, political and military power, becoming a mighty global player.
However, judging from the government’s propaganda efforts, all Xi sees when he looks in the mirror is a weak China under threat from hostile foreign forces and domestic critics, who, of course, are being aided and abetted by foreigners.
What else would explain his disembowelment of China’s fledgling civil society, the assault on the nation’s legal profession and the trashing of Hong Kong’s Basic Law, making a mockery of the rule of law he professes to espouse?
These actions are not one of a confident leader of a strong nation, though some pundits say he is just trying to distract the populace from the consequences of a slowing economy.
Xi’s “709 crackdown” on lawyers and human rights activists in July last year led to three farcical trials in Tianjin this week, including one in which Zhou Shifeng (周世鋒), director of the Beijing-based Fengrui law firm, was sentenced to seven years in prison for subverting state power, but took time out during his televised confession to thank Xi because his “strategy to implement the rule of law has made China stronger.”
While Fengrui earned Xi’s and the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) ire because it defended dissidents, members of banned religious groups and others, Zhou made his name during the 2008 milk powder scandal that saw six children die and about 300,000 sickened.
His lawsuit against one of China’s biggest dairy producers forced the government to take action, and it is not a stretch to say that Zhou’s efforts probably saved thousands of lives, even as they embarrassed the party.
The Tianjin court judge said Zhou endangered national security by using Fengrui as a platform to challenge the government, but a government that cannot protect its own people needs to be challenged.
While Zhou pleaded guilty and said he would not appeal the verdict, his apparent change of heart is as believable as those by others swept up in last year’s crackdown — or the televised confessions of the five men from a Hong Kong publishing house and bookstore who were abducted and detained by Chinese security last fall — or any number of others who have spent time in the hands of Chinese interrogators.
While few people outside of China view the nation’s judicial system with any respect, its international standing was further tarnished last weekend when the Supreme People’s Procuratorate posted a risible video on its official microblogging account that warned of the dangers of “color revolutions” and mass uprisings, and painted 19-year-old Hong Kong activist Joshua Wong (黃之鋒) as the key, US-backed instigator of such movements.
The trouble is that young Chinese, such as the 29-year-old doctoral candidate studying in Australia who was reportedly the brains behind the video, know too little of their nation’s own history under the CCP.
Mass uprisings and anti-government conspiracies did not kill millions of Chinese in the 50-plus years since the CCP took power, but the party’s asinine central planning directives, such as the Great Leap Forward, and internal power struggles did — and are continuing to do so with the hampering of pollution control efforts, policies that promote environmental degradation and a resistance to public accountability.
It is not foreign forces that are threatening China, but the CCP’s inability to adapt.
The CCP used to brag that its red revolution would sweep the world.
Now it is afraid of a little color.
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