perhaps at the expense of the new moneyed class
That’s a price I am willing to pay
He didn’t just came here randomly, he’s there because the Party successfully synthesised the will of the people and the current state of international and national political economy. That’s what the West will never understand
Indeed, the system in China selects for people like Xi while the system in US selects for people like Biden.
Is it the same system that created omnipresent and blatant corruption Xi’s been purging locally for the last decade?
I say locally because exploitation and cultivation of corruption is still the basis for their relations with developing countries.
This is a good point, and a legitimate reason to temper optimism about China. At worst, though, I think of China as a system where it’s possible for a committed Marxist to come to power (and it seems Xi is that). That’s already miles ahead of any capitalist government, which regularly drum out even halfway decent capitalist reformers.
Yeah it’s the same system. Deng xiaopings reforms didn’t guard against the corrosive tendencies of capitalism well enough which almost endangered the whole Chinese experiment. The CPC official position is that despite Deng’s successes, he made some rightist deviations which need to be corrected.
Xi at one point early in his career was quite taken with Buddhist mysticism, according to the professor. In comments Xi made to the professor, including during the professor’s visit to Xiamen while Xi was serving as an official there, Xi displayed a fascination with Buddhist martial arts, qigong, and other mystical powers said to aid health, as well as with Buddhist sacred sites such as Wutaishan. The professor said he does not know whether Xi was actually religious, or whether he was simply looking for a way to aid his health and well-being. Regardless, the professor said, he was extremely surprised by how much Xi knew about the subject and Xi’s seeming belief in supernatural forces.
The beauty of it is he didn’t achieve his position through pretty privilege and/or wealth, unlike practically every US president.
