Editor’s note: The author of the following article is a Chinese netizen actually in China.  From the perspective of Chinese civil society, the author reviews the numerous examples of Xi Jinping’s defiance of CCP tradition in the past ten years since he has come to power, and lists the undeniable facts of China’s economic decline, its people’s hardships, the substantial deterioration in China’s position in the international environment, and the close relationship between Xi and Vladimir Putin that has further endangered the interests of the Chinese nation.

The author argues that Xi Jinping must step down when his second term, the constitutional limit for Chinese leaders, expires. If he does not, China’s corruption and decline will accelerate, and Chinese who have been able to escape disaster thus far will not be able to avoid it.

The author’s appeal: neither CCP officials nor the Chinese people want to be buried along with Xi Jinping, so at a critical moment in history, Chinese leaders specifically and people more generally who are loyal to their country should prevent Xi from staying in office, thus preventing him from bringing China to disaster.

Throughout Xi’s Jinping’s time on office, the CCP has strongly repressed voices opposed to him. Under the current ruthless atmosphere of pressure and terror, although it is not easy, Chinese people who do not fear such violence should transmit their appeal overseas, as I do here.

 

The coming months are another critical period for China’s leadership. Following the practice of more than 40 years, this year will see another meeting of the General Congress of the Communist Party of China, now held every five years. In addition, according to this tradition a new generation of leaders, the first not to have experienced the Cultural Revolution, should assume power.  However, the expansion of Xi Jinping’s personal desires has led him to break these existing political rules and conventions, in particular daring to try and in fact succeeding in 2018 in getting the country’s constitution amended to abolish presidential term limits. As they are about to learn from the example of Vladimir Putin’s remaining in power for 20 years, the dream of having the post-60s generation be in charge in China will be shattered.  But people must act, as most believe that Xi Jinping must step down, otherwise China will cease to be a country!

1. Neither heaven nor the Chinese people are with Xi Jinping; they all want him to step aside.

As the 20th National Congress nears, Xi at nearly the age of 70 wants to continue in office. But in online China, there are few who support him — rather, more intellectuals, business leaders and Chinese officials are all partial to Prime Minister Li Keqiang. Even among the common people, few want Xi to continue as leader, because his time in office has brought them almost nothing in the way of real achievements (the opposite in fact), ten years is enough, and so someone else should lead. Who that person might be is something of great interest to all. 

Currently, the situation in China is getting ever-worse, and the common people increasingly cannot put food on the table. And so they are looking forward to a new king coming to power and bringing with him a new atmosphere. It can be said that nationwide public opinion actually expects Xi to step down when his current term ends, and indeed there is a belief that this is the will of heaven. In the past year or two, omens have been frequent. On the second day of the second month of China’s lunar calendar this year (March 4 in the Western calendar) this year, a holiday historically associated with a dragon raising its head to achieve a good harvest, several doors in the Hall of Supreme Harmony in the Forbidden City in Beijing were blown off their hinges by the wind.

More concretely, China is now seeing one natural catastrophe after another, from plagues to floods to heat and drought. And so some people are saying that “only a national-level demon can bring so much disaster to the people from one end of the country to another.”  And who is the national demon? Xi Jinping of course!  He has offended heaven, lurching from one wild policy to the next. In the past few years, he has discharged many longtime officials, and shattered Chinese diplomacy. And in the past three years, he has used the epidemic as an excuse to further damage the economy and people.  Heaven cannot abide this predicament, this combination of natural and man-made disasters, any further!  In imperial times, if something similar happened, an emperor would see himself as having sinned and needing to beg for heaven’s forgiveness. But Xi Jinping is not this sort of leader. He not only refuses to repent and resign in accordance with the will of the people, but is actually intensifying his efforts to stay in office, to continue to torment China!

  1. Xi Jinping has in fact become a stumbling block to the “rejuvenation of the Chinese people”

As Stalin was for Mao, so too Putin has served as Xi’s model for ruling, yet seems to have learned nothing. He has instead earned the distrust of much of the world, leaving China nearly without friends internationally. Domestically, corruption among both public officials and society more broadly now tragically grows without relent, and the welfare of the Chinese people continues to deteriorate. 

During this period when the people’s livelihood has been substantially reduced due to the pandemic, while governments in Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, Europe and the United States were providing funds to enable their peoples to cope, Xi Jinping not only did not provide such assistance to his own people, he forced them to provide money to deal with the consequences of natural and man-made disasters at every turn, and confiscated the properties of corrupt officials and celebrities yet never used them for such assistance. China’s national wealth, the fruit of China’s people, was given by Xi to foreign countries, and his so-called anti-corruption campaign did not dare to implement transparency with respect to who owns what, as even Putin did to some extent. Xi even put idealistic people with who called for such disclosure in jail!  So in this respect he is actually worse than Putin!  But Xi nonetheless has no difficulty boasting about his magnificent status, his life story being almost divine, his historical role comparable to that of Mao Zedong and surpassing that of Deng Xiaoping. But this fools no one. The Chinese people know the truth, and laugh, although silently, knowing Xi’s actual character.

And so this is Xi Jinping — a man who has also added that he is setting the direction for all mankind, and can provide solutions to the world’s problems. China has been rocked by his depleting of the nation’s treasury, and Hong Kong too has been destroyed by him. He also dreams of doing the same to Taiwan, and indeed to the world. Recently the Chinese people, especially young people, are “lying flat,” in large and growing numbers refusing to work hard or marry and start families. Yet Xi is still not satisfied, but he continues, as the Chinese say, to “cut leeks” — to without remorse harvest the produce of the common people — to amass wealth and continue to destroy the country to meet his so-called ambitions, this even though it will cause China to be buried with him, to ruin China’s future just as Putin is ruining Russia’s now! The Chinese can’t permit the continuation of Xi Jinping’s lunacy, to let him continue to destroy China!

Compare the ten years before and after Xi Jinping ascended to power. Ten years ago China’s industries had been revitalized, the national treasury was flush, relations with the rest of the world were good, and people’s livelihoods were improving rapidly. In particular, farmers could benefit from agricultural subsidies and a new reimbursement system for medical costs in rural cooperatives. Ten years later, China’s industries have withered and, with the exception of a few countries such as Russia, North Korea, and Pakistan, relations with major countries in the world such as the United States, Japan, South Korea, and Europe have become increasingly hostile, and relations with Taiwan have also deteriorated to the point where people worldwide worry about war.  At this point, the relationship with neighboring countries is tense, filled with mutual distrust. Xi Jinping has brought China’s relationship with much of the world back to its original state in 1949.

After Deng Xiaoping took power, China began to improve its relations with the world and achieve some degree of friendship with Europe and the United States. In the era of former presidents Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin,  it can be said that China had the best relationship with other countries in its history, and this was also the period with the fastest development and in which overall China achieved the most. It saw a comprehensive strategic partnership with Russia, a constructive one with the United States, a good-neighborly and friendly relationship with neighboring countries, and the best relationship ever achieved with Taiwan on the basis of the unprecedented 2005 meeting between Hu and Taiwan’s Vice President Lien Chan. But once Xi Jinping came to power everything changed. Now China’s foreign relations have deteriorated spectacularly, putting China in a terrible (and worsening) situation!  I believe that all those who chose Xi Jinping to come to power had hoped that he would help China continue its move toward a prosperous future, rather than cause China’s decline. However, cruel reality informs us that this was just a pipe dream. Not only did China not move forward, it is now actually declining.  Whatever achievements are proclaimed, to the extent they exist at all they have been achieved by Xi’s subordinates.

When Xi Jinping crossed the river and then burned the bridge over it behind him, he not only betrayed those who had promoted him, but also failed to live up to all those who put their hopes in him. He destroyed the wealth accumulated by the leaders of what were post-1949 its most powerful families, and also caused the blood of countless martyrs to be shed in vain.  With respect to solving the South China Sea issue, Xi is even more incapable of taking back the territory occupied by Russia during the 19th and 20th centuries. Instead, Xi takes pride in flattering Putin! He is incapable of handling either foreign or domestic affairs. What he cares about is the ability to appoint his cronies to power, to preside over political gangs, and time and again to destroy political order and rules, thus causing major damage to communist China’s recently and tentatively established civilized politics!

Xi Jinping lacks virtue, talent, and competence. He also suppresses talented people, instead promoting mediocrities who only excel at slacking off. He implements a literary prison, resulting in the current state of affairs in which China’s greatest intellectuals have all fallen silent. The civil society initially formed during the Hu-Wen period has been replaced by a society of slaves. So many with lofty ideals have been arrested and sent to prison, and so only the ignorant and helpless are left for him to enslave! Lacking even the modest checks and balances of civil society that had prevailed until recently, China will soon become another North Korea and correspondingly plunged into darkness for years!  How can such an isolated madman/despot be allowed to continue in office?

The record has proven that Xi cannot effectively lead China, cannot bring it a better future. His rule not only cannot promote China’s development, it actually hinders it, along with the flourishing of the Chinese people. His existence is actually the biggest stumbling block to his goal of “rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” and the rise of China.  We must not allow him to stay in office!

  1. In order to insure nothing will stand in the way of his third term, in the name of pandemic control Xi has taken the Chinese back to a darker Orwellian society.
    The Chinese people on both sides of the Taiwan Straits are in a sense united by the motherland.  When Xi Jinping came to power, many people in mainland China believed that Xi Jinping could promote further friendship between the two sides of the straits.  But his ten-year diplomatic performance has been extraordinarily disappointing. He lacks long-term strategic vision, and his short-sighted “wolf warrior” diplomacy has thrown China into, so to speak, the diplomatic flames. Not only does he fail to maintain good relations with neighboring countries, he has caused these  countries to be more worried about China, which basically now has few if any friends among these countries!

    As for India, its biggest neighbor, he has exacerbated the conflict over the Sino-Indian border. And while India’s prime minister has gone to the border to reinforce his country’s soldiers’ morale, Xi dares not show his face at the frontline where his soldiers face India, and the regime controls and censors all information from the front.  Despite this, even in China, the information age assures that the spread of such news cannot be entirely prevented. Broader Chinese society has indeed learned some of the truth of what is happening, generating genuine discussion. After a long interval, the CCP finally revealed information about, as they depicted it, the brave sacrifices of five soldiers who died on behalf of the motherland. The cowardice of CCP leaders has been clearly revealed to foreigners, even as domestically he lies to his people. Such a man is not fit to be a national leader!

    The outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war further exposed Xi Jinping’s unsuitability as a national leader.  Obviously, to pursue its own national interest China could have chosen to be neutral, or to support Ukraine’s resistance. Instead Xi tied China to Russia, thus made enemies around the world, violated basic morality and the UN Charter, and so betrayed China.  The fundamental contradiction with the “Five Basic Principles of Peaceful Coexistence,” propounded with India in 1954 and now found in the preamble to the Chinese constitution, is making the already bad external environment even worse! In order to provide critical support for Russia’s invasion, China is buying its oil. He has used official media and China’s in-name-only unofficial army of Internet trolls (known in Chinese as wǔmáo) to launch a public-opinion war to “stand up for Russia, and denounce Ukraine and America.” To support Russia, and even to proclaim loudly that Chinese-Russian cooperation knows no limits and is invulnerable to any changes in the geopolitical environment, for this he will sacrifice China’s national interests! Even ordinary traitors would not engage in this sort of execrable practice, of specifically harming oneself to benefit others!

    Chinese official and unofficial wolf warriors always boast that their military can take Taiwan in three days or even less time, but the war between Russia and Ukraine has made them see the reality clearly!  When the attack was launched, Putin planned to use a blitzkrieg and quickly take all of Ukraine, but reality slapped him good and hard. After a half year, he has failed in most of his objectives!  Putin, who is engaging in a great injustice, has incurred the condemnation of righteous people worldwide. Many countries and major international companies have pulled out of Russia, Russian oligarchs have had some of their overseas property seized, and Russians are finding it harder and harder to travel to many countries. The country has fallen into a state of near-isolation, even as an energy power! The blow to Russia is devastating, and the journey of its own great rejuvenation has been not only interrupted but set back decades, its situation even worse than when Putin first came to power! For 20 years Putin has been saying that he would give his people a strong Russia, but now for them it is all for naught!

    Now Xi Jinping is imitating Putin step by step, but if Putin’s lesson is there for us to see, shouldn’t we learn from it?  First of all, had Putin not stayed in power for 20 years, and had he ruled well while in office, he would have had a respectable place in history, and there would be no crisis today. But he did stay, and as a result he will be remembered forever for his crimes against the Russian nation! The reason Putin is in the situation he is in, having made a series of poor decisions, is due to his overconfidence, itself due to his being surrounded by sycophants throughout his long reign.  When he decided to attack Ukraine, he was at first tentatively opposed by the Minister of Defense and other advisors. And yet he insisted on going his own way. He had his colleagues  sit far away during meetings and they did not dare to approach him. Putin could no longer listen to different opinions! And so history has once again confirmed that people become detached from reality after being in power for a long time. Whatever their greatness once might have been they reach an age where they must go!  What is more, in China, Xi Jinping has only been in power for ten years, and yet already no one dares to speak truth to him. His underlings can only watch him run around naked in “the emperor’s new clothes,” knowing that he will be in charge for another five years yet!  Once he is officially named to a third term, no matter how damaging his actions are, no one will dare stop him. The damage to the  Chinese people and nation will be gigantic/incalculable!

    How many disgraceful and ill-considered things has Xi Jinping done since taking power?  He has become the laughing stock of the world!  This never happened to China under leaders such as Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao! Xi has now seriously damaged China’s international image, and now now whenever people talk about him in private it is not merely to mock him!

    In short, Xi Jinping’s performance over the past ten years shows that he is unable to shoulder the heavy responsibility of defending China’s sovereignty and dignity, and has no ability to achieve a peaceful reunification of the motherland.  He is not the one chosen by heaven, let alone the sort of national savior who has who comes along perhaps every hundred years, so why should he continue in power, to continue to harm China and the Chinese people?

    1. In order to insure nothing will stand in the way of his third term, in the name of pandemic control Xi has taken the Chinese back to a darker Orwellian society.Since last year, Xi Jinping’s focus has been on the 20th National Congress. During this time, he has acted as though if he is careless in any way, his foes will join forces to oppose his staying in office, which will shatter his dream of continued power. And after he takes care of those who dare to speak up, he will focus on regimenting and dominating the entire society. Of course, he hopes to return to the comprehensive social control still prevailing in North Korea, which earlier prevailed in China as well, so that society stays quiet, no one dares to make trouble, and he can do as he pleases. But China has developed since the early communist times. Its people have become accustomed to being free and living on their own, so they would not have accepted a sudden return to a North Korea-like state!  But the thoroughly political epidemic prevention gave him a chance to solve this problem and do just that. Therefore, Xi and his colleagues tolerated one local COVID-19 outburst after another, and then in the name of epidemic prevention implemented a state of draconian controls over all of society, so that the Chinese people accustomed themselves to the new normal.

      The pandemic’s outbreak in early 2020 made Xi Jinping realize the appeal of, essentially, martial law. Chinese people not only did not object, but actively supported these steps. Occasionally, he encountered a few opponents, and he was also harshly criticized by trained epidemic-prevention personnel. Netizens too denounced the measures!  But it is precisely because of the propagandistic lies spread by the CCP that epidemic prevention was seen as more important than protection of basic human rights, and so more and more even the most personal among these  rights have been trampled upon in one city after another in the name of epidemic prevention!  And people have no right to defend these rights, and instead can only submit and “cooperate with epidemic prevention”!

      But the more they submit, the more the government intensifies control measures!  Now if one person is discovered to be infected, the whole city is tested. The torment of repeated mandatory nucleic-acid testing is endless. This testing and also-mandatory vaccination are no longer for epidemic prevention, but have become merely tools for certain groups to make money. These groups naturally hope to normalize this process.

      In recent months, the common people have suffered greatly, but dare not speak out!  China’s economy and its have been severely damaged. The only exception is the medical industry which, particularly its vaccine and testing manufacturers, has made a great deal of money.  Today, China’s GDP is driven entirely by this industry. Xi Jinping is using the purported health needs of the Chinese people to drive economic growth. It used to be a GDP driven by the people’s blood, sweat and tears, but now it is a GDP driven by only by the forced extraction of blood from them!

      In the face of this lunacy, while the top officials of the State Council have been calling for the ending of compulsory mass testing and for rational epidemic control instead, why do local governments go their own way?  Because local leaders must cater to Xi Jinping’s will! It is Xi Jinping who needs to use epidemic prevention to achieve totalitarian control of society, so he condones relevant interest groups making huge profits and fuels epidemic outbursts, only then to impose complete “dynamic clearing.”

      Previously, the world saw Tibet and Xinjiang become such strictly controlled societies, but thought it impossible that the nation as a whole would become like this. No one expected this to happen so quickly in all of China. The excuse is now different, but the strategy is the same! Now China is like one big concentration camp. The freedom of Chinese people to live and travel is now substantially restricted, sometimes completely so, and these restrictions have not loosened as the epidemic eases, but have become longer and more arbitrary.

      Having been boiled very slowly like the proverbial frog in a pot, the Chinese people have become accustomed to this unfree state. Although people’s normal lives are seriously affected and their interests trampled upon, still they endure it!  China is now getting closer and closer to the closed state of North Korea. People are now talking about China as the “big” North Korea. Some netizens now call it “West Korea.” China has now returned to the Mao era when people were forbidden to move about freely, requiring certificates (letters of introduction) to enter or exit places. And compared with the people at that time, there are now far more people who are also living behind the CCP’s “Internet Berlin Wall,” where they are hypnotized to waste their time by  passively consuming online entertainment!  This is similar to a caged pet dog kept calm in captivity with rewards and punishments. It is usually locked up but released periodically. When it behaves well it is well-fed, but if not it will go hungry. How you are treated and your fate in life depends entirely on the mood of those who hold the reins of power!  So a joke that is popular on the Internet now accurately expresses the current state of the Chinese people, “It’s not that easy to ask me out, you’ve got to first ask the government and the Chinese people for their permission!”How can such a society continue to live? After forty years of reform and opening up, China is now headed back to what we had overcome! If Xi Jinping feels that it is easy to rule in this manner and is no longer afraid of social resistance, he will intensify his efforts to return to the era of the Cultural Revolution. With the help of high technology, people must live under his surveillance, their lives completely transparent to the state, which knows your every move, everything you eat, drink and otherwise do!

      It goes without saying that to achieve this the price will be to sacrifice the future of the Chinese people and China itself. As Xi and the CCP turn the people into their servants through endless COVID testing, repeated mandatory vaccines, tax audits followed by wealth confiscation for various wealthy celebrities, the continued emptying of the national treasury, the accelerated decline of the economy, and the intensification of conflict with the rest of the world, how long do you suppose you government elites can still keep your wealth?

      After Xi Jinping came to power, he began getting rid of his possible enemies, in the process becoming very wealthy himself. But would he treat the common people the same way? After all, losing their hearts might easily, as the Chinese say, cause a leader to lose the world!  Yet that is what Xi Jinping is actually doing now.

      People are now being actually charged for mandatory testing in so many places; individual bank depositors’ are increasingly losing access to their money, and with no way to complain about it. Under anti-COVID measures people have been sentenced even for trimming their own trees. Tragedies such as the chained woman (a woman who, based on what we now know, was accidentally discovered by a reporter to have been a slave of a man who forced her to have numerous children after buying her against her will, an incident that became a national scandal) continue to happen. Even when the relative good guy in Chinese politics, Premier Li Keqiang, speaks out against some of them, society is becoming more and more bizarre every day. Like an endless stream, the root cause of all this is Xi Jinping! Without his unlawful policies, without him undermining the rule of law and Chinese civilization more broadly, without his complete disregard of public opinion and the effect on people’s livelihood when he acts, none of this madness would have happened, at least to this degree.  Despite the profound concern of over one billion Chinese for the aforementioned chained woman, she has not been able to get any justice to this point, and indeed has disappeared. This is the epitome of the corruption of Chinese society and of Xi Jinping’s mad dash back to the past!

      Therefore, Xi Jinping must step down when his term expires, otherwise  this social corruption and retrogression will accelerate, and the lives of the common people will become ever-more difficult, with no opportunity anywhere to even discuss their suffering!  People who had escaped misery will be forced to return to it. The rejuvenation of the Chinese nation has become a myth, and the CCP will accelerate this nation’s collapse! I think neither CCP officials nor the Chinese people wish to be buried with Xi Jinping, so please, at a critical moment in history, those who are idealists, along with the Chinese people, must make the right choice and unite to prevent Xi Jinping from continuing to lead, thus bringing China to its doom!