STEVE PIECZENIK TALKS

Chinese Trump, Ren Zhiquiang, Defies Communist Party Leader President Xi Jinpeng!

The American Trump Revolution has spread to China where billionaire real estate tycoon, Ren Zhiquiang “publicly derided President Xi and the Chinese Communist Party in his microblogs.” [NYTimes Chris Buckley, March 18,2016]. Normally Ren would have been arrested or even kowtowed by the Chinese media as a ‘capitalist traitor’ and banned from China forever. However, the sophisticated Chinese people, including scholars, journalists, students and dissidents supported Ren against the Chinese Communist Party. That is quite amazing and unprecedented in modern times.

Normally, when the leader of the Chinese Communist Party reprimands anyone for ‘deviating from the party line’, they are arrested, or worse yet, killed. Like our Donald, Ren was described as follows by a well-known Chinese businessman /historian: “The Ren incident has been an eruption of feelings pent up inside the system for a long time…..I think a lot of people felt fed up, and they felt that finally somebody had spoken up. The backlash [against the President XI] over the Ren attacks went beyond what the authorities expected.” [NYTimes]

What is really happening in China may be the closest thing to a new Chinese Revolution.  The events are not quite on par with Mao’s barbaric Cultural Revolution of 1966 where millions of innocent Chinese adults were butchered by their own people on Mao’s orders.

President Xi has proven, as I have written in my former  blogs, to be completely incompetent in handling the economic crisis looming over China. Thanks to our beneficent American trade policies over the past twenty years, we, Americans, have literally encouraged the Chinese GDP to grow over 6% every year; allowing countless of Chinese peasants to escape poverty and enter their middle class. In return, we garnered the cheap Chinese made products found in every Walmart, Ace Hardware, and elsewhere. We also made the average American worker lose good paying jobs and lowered our standard of living. Good for China, bad for America.

However, those days are over. In turn, Xi a princeling, whose father was part of the Communist bourgeoisie class [ a political contradiction], decided to invoke the antiquated principles of Maoist theocracy as a way of controlling the far more sophisticated Chinese people [1.2 billion in size] who were now entering the Middle Class, earning greater wages than they had before.

So GDP has slowed to a trickle. China has to constantly devalue it’s Yuan in order to maintain a quasi-effective export program [because of its higher workers’ higher wages].

In turn, Xi has a very serious problem of maintaining political/economic stability in his country. He was neither a trained economist, nor a business man. Absent of talent or professional expertise, Xi turned to the nonsensical sayings of Mao in order to maintain some modicum of stability. Then, like Mao, Xi turned despotic.

Like his Khmer Rouge protégé, Pol Pot, Mao was not a man of conviction; but a coward invested in torture/slaughter/barbarism of his own people. President Xi is a spoiled princeling of the antiquated Communist Revolutionaries; who squirmed his way up the greasy pole of the Chinese Communist Party through corruption and cronyism. Xi is bereft of any formal profession or any talents of significance.  

In the meantime, the Chinese citizens have been screaming the same American discontent that we find in our own Trump Revolution: “Don’t use the taxpayers’ money to do stuff that does not provide services to the taxpayers… The people have been tossed into a forgotten corner.” [NYTimes].

Sound familiar?

The Chinese establishment, akin to our corrupt Democratic/Republican parties, is seriously being challenged.Yet, unlike our country, the Chinese people will go into the streets of Tiananmen Square [1989] and defy the tanks that Mao’s progenitors ordered. President Xi has been in very serious trouble for the past year. His base of support is not within the Chinese population; nor even within the peasant class [Mao’s base]. 

Xi has no real base of power; other than a fictional notion that he somehow represents some vestige of a deteriorating, ossified Communist Party.  In contrast, the formidable Chinese military /industrial complex saturated with the best and the brightest, has ascended in both political/economic legitimacy, acting as an effective counterforce to Xi’s corrupt party bureaucrats. China is moving too quickly for Xi. His words ring with the perfect tone of hypocrisy and political cronyism as did Mao’s. Xi’s wife is a famous actress/singer and his children attended Harvard College.

Xi has no right to preside over an ever evolving China. He is at best irrelevant; at worse, detrimental to its growth as a super power in the world. Xi’s gibberish of Communism and Maoism has been relegated to the virtual vaults of obscurity and ridicule.

Now, China (like America) must find and elect a new type of leader, vital and defiant; someone akin to Ren, who can entertain thoughts of government transparency, and equal wage benefits; without the destructive cult of personality. 

The following Chinese proverb describes President Xi aptly:

Jiu niu yi mao[ pronounced: joe nee-oh eee mao]

Literal Meaning: nine oxen one hair

Idiomatic meaning: Xi is “of no importance; insignificant”.