Category Archives: Xi Jinping

Trump’s US investment ban aims to cement tough-on-China legacy

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Move is latest chapter in deteriorating relationship with Beijing and improvement under Joe Biden is unlikely

Donald Trump has banned US investment in a further 89 Chinese companies, and reportedly sent a navy admiral to Taiwan, as he seeks to secure a tough-on-China foreign policy legacy.

Multiple media outlets have reported plans by the Trump administration for a series of confrontations with China before Biden’s inauguration on 20 January, and the moves were largely expected. Foreign policy and political analysts believe Trump wants to leave a legacy of being tough on China, while simultaneously conducting a “scorched earth” policy on his way out of the White House.

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Russia and China silence speaks volumes as leaders congratulate Biden

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Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping stay silent while Iran waits to see how US will compensate for Trump sanctions

Most world leaders rushed to congratulate Joe Biden on his election, but Russia and China, two likely losers from the defeat of Donald Trump, remained silent, perhaps waiting for the outgoing president to concede defeat.

The president of the Maldives, Ibrahim Mohamed Solih, is thought to be the first to have congratulated Biden, tweeting his welcome within 24 minutes of the US networks declaring Biden victorious. By contrast, Vladimir Putin, accused of collusion in Trump’s 2016 victory, and Xi Jinping kept their counsel.

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Hong Kong chief executive postpones key policy speech

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Carrie Lam to consult Beijing in attempt to protect city’s status as international finance hub

Hong Kong’s chief executive, Carrie Lam, has postponed a key annual policy address scheduled for Wednesday, claiming she must consult Beijing on some of her proposals.

The unprecedented delay to the speech was also attributed to plans by the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, to visit Shenzhen to mark the 40th anniversary of the special economic zone on Wednesday, which was announced only on Monday and which Lam would also attend.

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The Guardian view on the US presidential debate: a bad night for the world | Editorial

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The dismal spectacle reminded viewers what is at stake in November for the US – and the rest of us

One unmistakable winner emerged from Tuesday’s presidential debate: Xi Jinping. The loser was the American public – and anyone else unfortunate enough to have sat through the grim 90-minute spectacle.

Variously described by commentators as a trainwreck, dumpster fire, shitshow and the worst debate in presidential history, it reflected the state of the race and the nation after four years of Donald Trump. This is America in 2020: wracked by a pandemic that has killed 200,000 people and highlighted its deep structural failings on healthcare and inequality, as well as the parlous state of its politics – a realm of bitter divisions in which facts appear to be optional.

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United Nations general assembly: China rejects Trump’s ‘baseless’ Covid accusations – live

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Follow live as Jair Bolsonaro, Donald Trump, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin – among others – deliver video messages

...and we have photos of Xi Jinping’s background:

Some more analysis, this time from our diplomatic editor, Patrick Wintour, on Turkey’s talk:

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan used his general assembly address to set out Turkey’s bitter objections to its exclusion from the East Mediterranean, but said he was ready to resume talks bound by international law to address their contested maritime claims in the eastern Mediterranean and Aegean. By his recent rhetorical standards, the speech was one of Erdoğan’s mildest.

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Report charts China’s expansion of mass labour programme in Tibet

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Researcher says 500,000 rural workers trained for factories this year in programme likened to Xinjiang operations

Chinese authorities are dramatically expanding a mass labour programme in Tibet, which analysts have compared to alleged forced labour operations in Xinjiang, according to evidence compiled by a German anthropologist and corroborated by Reuters.

China has set quotas to move hundreds of thousands of Tibetan rural labourers off their land and into “military-style” facilities to train them as factory workers, according to documents analysed by researcher Adrian Zenz for the Jamestown Foundation, a US research institute.

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Countryside fit for a superpower? Inside China’s colossal rural revamp

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Beneath the veneer of Xi Jinping’s ambitious agricultural plan farming communities remain marred by homelessness, poverty and unstable markets

The official pictures tell a delightful tale. China’s leader, Xi Jinping, is seen touring fish farms, rice paddies and vineyards in Ningxia, ambling through lily fields in Shanxi, and inspecting mushroom- and fungus-growing operations in Shaanxi.

The carefully choreographed images aim to create a vision of his latest signature policy – rural revitalisation. Billions of dollars will be spent on revamping the countryside – increasing prosperity, improving its ecology, and integrating it with the development of China’s shining cities, which had largely left rural areas behind.

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‘Chairman Xi’ seeks only to purge and subjugate. That is his weakness | Simon Tisdall

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From Tibet to Taiwan, China’s leader is intent on wielding absolute power. Instead he is fanning the flames of dissent

It’s often said that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely – but does it also induce leaders to act in foolhardy, headstrong and ultimately self-destructive ways? History, especially Chinese history, is full of examples of omnipotent rulers whose unchecked behaviour led to disaster. Xi Jinping, China’s comrade-emperor, is a modern-day case in point. Xi seems to think he can do no wrong. As a result, not much is going right.

Xi’s authoritarian, expansionist policies, pursued with increasing vehemence since he became communist party chief and president in 2012-13, have enveloped China in a ring of fire. Its borderlands are ablaze with conflict and confrontation from Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, Tibet and the Himalayas in the north and west to Hong Kong, the South China Sea and Taiwan to the east. More than at any time since Mao’s 1949 revolution, China is also at odds with the wider world.

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China’s Cai Xia: former party insider who dared criticise Xi Jinping

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Prominent dissident explains how she came to doubt her fervent beliefs in party orthodoxy

In the mid-1990s, Cai Xia, a devout believer in Chinese communist doctrine, experienced her first moment of doubt.

She was a teacher at the central party school for training cadres when a friend called with some questions. Cai, an expert in Marxism and Chinese communist party theory, enthusiastically answered.

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China’s Xi Jinping facing widespread opposition in his own party, insider claims

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Exclusive: Cai Xia, who has been expelled from the elite Central Party School, says president’s ‘unchecked power’ has made China ‘the enemy of the world’

A former professor at China’s elite Central Party School has issued an unprecedented rebuke of the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, accusing him of “killing a country” and claiming that many more want out of the ruling Chinese Communist party.

Cai Xia, a prominent professor who taught at the school for top officials, was expelled from the party on Monday after an audio recording of remarks she made that were critical of Xi was leaked online in June. The school said in a notice that Cai, a professor at the party school since 1992, had made comments that “damaged the country’s reputation” and were full of “serious political problems”.

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‘Operation empty plate’: Xi Jinping makes food waste his next target

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Restaurant diners told to order one dish less than number of people under new system criticised as overly controlling

The Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, has launched a campaign targeting a new enemy of the country: food waste.

“Waste is shameful and thriftiness is honourable,” Xi said in a speech published on Tuesday, describing the amount of food that goes to waste in the country as “shocking and distressing”, according to the state news agency Xinhua.

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Why is Xi Jinping pitting China against the world?

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Xi has stifled dissent at home and is increasingly willing for China to assert itself abroad

Earlier this week, Chinese leader Xi Jinping held a rare meeting in Beijing with business leaders. Admitting that the Covid-19 pandemic had a “huge impact” on the country’s economy, Xi used a Chinese idiom to assure his listeners.

“While the green hills last, there will be wood to burn,” he said. “If we maintain our strategy … we will find opportunity in crisis and turbulence. The Chinese people will surely prevail over all difficulties and challenges ahead”.

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Xu Zhangrun, prominent critic of Xi Jinping, released from detention

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The law professor has been released six days after a police raid at his Beijing home, friends say

A Beijing law professor who has been an outspoken critic of China’s president, Xi Jinping, and the ruling Communist party was released on Sunday after six days of detention, his friends have said.

Xu Zhangrun, a constitutional law professor at the prestigious Tsinghua University, returned home on Sunday morning but remained under surveillance and was not free to speak publicly about what happened, one of his friends, who declined to be identified, told Reuters.

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Britain’s citizenship offer to Hong Kong: how China could respond

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China said UK will ‘bear all consequences’, raising possibility of retaliation

China has responded angrily to a UK promise to offer nearly 3 million residents of Hong Kong with British national overseas status (BNO), the right to settle in the UK.

China’s foreign ministry spokesman, Zhao Lijian, said Britain would “bear all consequences”, and China’s ambassador to the UK later said that Beijing “reserve[d] the right to take corresponding measures”.

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US v China: is this the start of a new cold war?

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Coronavirus has brought the rivalry to a head sooner than expected – and the scope for non-alignment is narrowing

George Kennan, the US charge d’affaires in Moscow at the end of the second world war and the author of the famous Long Telegram in 1946, captured in his memoir how quickly perceptions in international relations can change.

The man widely seen as the intellectual author of the cold war recalled that if he had sent his telegram on the nature of the Soviet threat six months earlier, his message “would probably have been received in the state department with pursed lips and raised eyebrows. Six months later, it probably would have sounded redundant, a preaching to the converted.”

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Bolton’s book shows it’s still possible to be shocked by Trump’s presidency

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Damaging revelations may disrupt Trump’s anti-China re-election strategy, but will it change any votes?

The conventional Washington wisdom before Wednesday afternoon was that it was hard to imagine anything that would still have the capacity to shock us about Donald Trump and his presidency.

Then John Bolton’s memoir leaked, with recollections of his time as national security adviser that appeared to have gone beyond parody and just kept travelling.

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Trump was willing to halt criminal investigations as ‘favor’ to dictators, Bolton book says

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Donald Trump was willing to halt criminal investigations to “give personal favors to dictators he liked”, according to a new book written by his former national security adviser John Bolton.

Related: How Trump's missteps undermined the US's recovery from pandemic

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Only three out of 53 countries say US has handled coronavirus better than China

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Survey reveals deep global dissatisfaction with US leadership under Donald Trump

China has beaten the US in the battle for world opinion over the handling of coronavirus, according to new polling, with only three countries out of 53 believing the US has dealt with the pandemic better than its superpower rival.

The survey comes ahead of a major conference on the future of democracy this week, due to be addressed by the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, the former secretary of state John Kerry and the Hong Kong democracy activist Joshua Wong. The conference is likely to be a rallying point for pro-democracy activists as China and the US enter an ever more explicit ideological contest.

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Why reassertion of Xi Jinping’s authority spells violence in Hong Kong

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Sedition legislation would allow Chinese security forces on to streets and may mean end of city’s autonomy

Around this time last year, criticism was mounting in Hong Kong over a proposed bill that would allow people wanted by the Chinese authorities to be sent to the mainland. Demonstrators marched on the city’s legislature and scuffles broke out between pro-democracy and pro-Beijing lawmakers.

Within a few weeks, more than a million people took to the streets, decrying legislation they believed would mark the end of Hong Kong and the freedoms that set it apart from China. A protest movement was born and for months the city was engulfed in violent street battles, in what has been described as Hong Kong’s worst crisis since the 1997 handover of the former British colony to Chinese control.

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Xi Jinping defends China’s handling of coronavirus and backs review of global response – video

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The Chinese president is backing calls for an independent review of the global response to the Covid-19 pandemic, but only after the virus is under control.

Xi voiced his support in a video message to a virtual meeting of the World Health Organization's decision-making body, the World Health Assembly. He defended China's handling of the pandemic and pledged $2bn (£1.64bn) over two years to help with the response.

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