For a whole year, the Communist Party of China has been preparing for the party’s centennial, with pigeons banned from flying, drones banned from releasing and mail banned from being delivered, and older sunrise mothers struggling to keep a close eye on what they see as suspicious pedestrians. …… The time has finally come, and on July 1, Xi Jinping delivered a lengthy speech. But looking through the relevant reports in major overseas media, it seems that the only sentence that is remembered is: Xi Jinping said that China will never allow foreign forces to bully the Chinese people. In Xi’s mind, there is a big imaginary enemy-foreign forces!
Xi Jinping said this with a strong voice: “The Chinese people will never allow any foreign power to bully, oppress and enslave them.” If these “foreign forces” do not know what is good for them, then Xi warned, “Whoever tries to do so will surely break their heads in front of the Great Wall of Steel built with flesh and blood by more than 1.4 billion Chinese people.” The organized crowd in the square, which was quiet and deadly pressed just waiting to applaud, got up in a small commotion after hearing those words. The official media said it was a popular cheer!
“Foreign forces”? Some analysts take it as self-explanatory, referring mainly to the United States, or to the West in general. But Xi Jinping has a key word in this sentence: “delusion”, delusion, fantasy, fantasy is more arrogant, since it is a delusion, what are you afraid of? Xi Jinping should not have worried a bit about this, but he said the next sentence in a bloody way, as if delusions could come true, and if so, the flesh and blood of the Chinese people could form a great wall of steel to “break the heads of those who want to do this”.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian has also made such a statement before, to the effect that the Chinese people are the bronze wall of the Chinese Communist Party. With the Great Wall of Flesh and Blood in front of him, Xi should have no qualms, but he said it in a murderous manner. Many observers have pointed out that the truth is very different from the scenario described by Xi Jinping, not that there is a foreign power that wants to bang on the porcelain, but the biggest delusion is Xi Jinping himself, who is afraid that there is a foreign power that wants to “bully, oppress and enslave” the Chinese people.
There are many comments online that this is a kind of persecution paranoia, a kind of mental illness that always feels that you are being followed, listened to and sabotaged by others, and in serious cases it can develop into a systematic thought of persecution, such as thinking that the whole assassination group is deploying assassination operations, and that the foreign power Xi Jinping envisages here is actually more serious by the assassination group, and that this foreign power wants to enslave the Chinese people. In fact, under Xi Jinping’s rule, many Chinese people today are instead facing the reality of being tracked, bugged, and imprisoned by the state apparatus, and foreign powers, if any, are only remotely concerned with their human rights issues.
In today’s international environment, is anyone thinking of enslaving the Chinese people? Xi Jinping is presumably referring to the United States, whose only misfortune is that it “cares” too much about China. Since the resumption of U.S.-China relations in the 1970s, the U.S. side’s greatest desire has been to bring China into line with the international community, a dream that has been in place since the U.S. decided to pursue a policy of engagement, a dream that became clearer and more urgent after China was admitted to the World Trade Organization, a rich, powerful China with a rising middle class, an environment in which China would gradually initiate political reform and democratization. If the United States has delusions of grandeur, it is about the hope that China will one day subscribe to universal values, and nothing more.
Xi Jinping’s reference to foreign powers is certainly not entirely empty from another perspective. If Beijing continues to expand in the South China Sea and provoke in the Taiwan Strait, as it is currently doing with its aggressive war-wolf stance, the possibility of a conflict one day is not out of the question, but it is not a matter of Xi Jinping saying that foreign powers are bullying us. This is not the same as what he said about bullying and enslaving the Chinese people.
Rather, some observers have pointed out that China’s rulers are quick to invoke the threat of foreign powers, and that foreign powers have actually become a shield for them to suppress “internal forces. This is what they did in Hong Kong, where millions of Hong Kong people protested against the “anti-China” movement, against Beijing’s commitment to “one country, two systems” and the independence of the judiciary, but the Beijing authorities suppressed Hong Kong people in the name of foreign interference and instigation, clearly imposing their own version of national security laws on Hong Kong, and finally suppressing them with draconian laws that were condemned by democratic countries for depriving human rights. What does the pro-democracy camp in Hong Kong have to do with foreign powers?
Since Xi Jinping ruled China, he has become more vigilant against “foreign forces” in a broad sense, including Western ideas, laws, universal values, etc. Anyone outside who is concerned about human rights in China has become a “foreign force” with bad intentions. Sometimes when the Chinese themselves express their discontent, they are falsely accused of having foreign powers. According to an analysis by Lu Yezhong, a professor at the Department of Foreign Affairs at National Chengchi University in Taiwan, Xi’s message appears to be directed at “anti-China forces” led by the United States and other Western countries, but the audience is actually members of the Party and the domestic public. This is more of a “domestic security element than an external one”, and it accounts for the voice of the hardliners in China.
In the history of the Chinese Communist Party since its establishment, the real enemy has always been the Chinese people themselves. Under this sense of domination, countless Chinese people have lost their lives.
The latest Pew Center poll shows that most people in democratic countries have a very poor opinion of China, and their confidence in Xi Jinping is close to the bottom. This should be attributed to Xi Jinping’s iron-fisted rule of China since he took power, his harsh suppression of dissidents, and his trampling on human rights in Xinjiang and Hong Kong.
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