Lord Acton once famously said that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. This truism applies to all leaders who are drunk on power, but this untrammelled power also leads or induces leaders to become headstrong and ultimately lead in the direction of self-destruction. Chinese history, has many instances of leaders who thought they were emperors who could do no wrong and President Xi Jinping illustrates this with aplomb. Xi’s problem is that he seems to think that as head of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) anything he does will be correct and that party cadres will agree. However, the results of his actions in Tibet, Hong Kong, Mongolia and Xinjiang all indicate that things are not going well at all.

Xi has since becoming President and CCP Chairman taken an increasingly aggressive, authoritarian, and expansionist line with regard to internal politics and external security. Consequently, China has been encircled by more detractors than ever before. This situation became even more pronounced with the China virus taking hold of the entire globe and a concerted effort made to blame the origins of the virus on China. This has led to new heights of confrontation with the United States, both directly and in the South China Sea, with a belligerence shown by China that goes well beyond diplomacy. Foreign policy has been substituted by Xi’s policy, a personalised, vendetta driven mechanism that aims to tackle head-on any dissent internally and attempt to overpower anyone who opposes China externally.

President Xi Jinping is also Chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC). In 2016, Xi took on a hands-on approach to the Chinese military by initiating a major reorganization that centralized military power. It also resulted in a large percentage of top officers having to pledge personal loyalty to him. As with many of Xi’s power plays, this was supposed to reduce “corruption,” but has not deliver on the promises. President Xi’s constant exhortation to the PLA to be loyal to him and the CCP is a way of ensuring control over the armed forces. With the Chinese forces spreading themselves across several fronts, Xi plans to rejig the entire organization and structure with the aim of intensifying party control.

An agency is saying that what Chairman Xi is doing is simultaneously pushing China to the brink of military confrontations in several theatres. It is here that one sees the personal touch of Xi like when he authorised the launch (26 August 2020) “aircraft carrier killer” ballistic missiles into the South China Sea.

At the same time, Xi has been tightening control over internal security units by putting them under the direct control of the CCP instead of the government bureaucracy and its oversight committees. Xi is fond of cementing these power grabs by presenting each unit he takes control of, with a brand new flag in a “pompous ceremony.”

In a democracy with adequate checks and balances, conventional political wisdom would have demanded a pause for the leadership to take stock of the situation before forging ahead. But in regimented and one-party ruled China, there is little opposition to Xi. Instead, he has prepared himself for the long haul since 2012-2013, fighting an anti-corruption campaign, promoting his own continuance in office and ensuring that everyone, and this literally means everyone in the party show loyalty to him. Is it possible that soon he may declare himself “Chairman Xi”?

For instance, a perusal of Xi’s recent instructions to party cadres in Tibet demonstrates his hard-line approach to ethnic minority tensions in China’s periphery. He called on the party cadres to build an “impregnable fortress” to guard against “splitism”, or separatism, and ensure ‘frontier security’ in Tibet. The latter is a message to Tibet to guard against a possible Indian attempt to grab territory in Ladakh. Look at who is grabbing territory!! Xi also insisted on further subjugating Tibetan Buddhism to socialist principles.

It is ironic that President Xi wants to impose more restrictions on a land and people that have been under 24*7 surveillance, its cultural ethos forcefully merged into Han culture and its religion to be followed only by observing the strict rules laid down by the CCP for the last 70 years!

The ‘occupied’ nature of Tibet is crystal clear and anyone who is aware of the narrative on Chinese rule in Tibet knows that this is story of repression, destruction of religion and cultural ethos. Going further back, the series of self-immolations by Buddhist monks and before that the aerial bombing of monasteries to destroy them as symbols of Tibetan Buddhism during the invasion of Tibet remind us of the horror perpetrated on the Tibetan people.

One has to only turn the pages of the 2019 US State Department report on Religious Freedom, which highlights the ongoing “forced disappearances, arrests, torture, physical abuse, including sexual abuse, and prolonged detentions without trial”. By any standard of international and humanitarian law, these are crimes against humanity.
There is a link between what the CCP is doing in Tibet and what is happening in Xinjiang.

The Chinese state and its representative in Tibet, Chen Quanguo put in place a series of oppressive measures when he was appointed to oversee party affairs in 2011 and converted TAR into a police state which today is the model being followed in Xinjiang. This included using technology to connect all police stations in TAR and tagging all Tibetans to ensure that they could be tracked anywhere. Replication of this model in Xinjiang has allowed the CCP to round up more than a million Uyghurs and put them in “re-education camps” for things as irrelevant as having a Whatsapp account.

Absurd as it may sound, the Chinese State insists on Sinification of its minorities as part of its effort to unify China as a single nation, i.e., a Han nation! However, of far greater concern and pressing immediacy are the reports of the state engaging in a campaign of forced sterilisation, contraception and abortion aimed at reducing the birth rate of the Uyghurs.

These are crimes against humanity, too.
There is another instance of how Xi has demonstrated his obsession for achieving his dream of a “Chinese nation”. Last month, street protesters in Hohhot, capital of Inner Mongolia, and other cities denounced moves by the CCP to limit the use of the Mongolian language in schools and make Chinese the language of use. “Mongolian is our mother language! We are Mongolian until death!” students shouted.

Significantly, former Mongolian President Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj tweeted, “We need to voice our support for Mongolians striving to preserve their mother tongue and scripture in China. The right to learn and use one’s mother tongue is an inalienable right for all. Upholding this right is a way for China to be a respectable and responsible power.”
The case of Hong Kong is only too well known to the world and is telling example of Xi defiance in the face of international opprobrium.

The imposition of the draconian state security law effectively meant that President Xi was willing to go the down to impose authoritarian rule in a ‘democratic’ Hong Kong and challenging the West to respond. For the time being, China has the upper hand as the world is struggling with the pandemic. Not too far away from Hong Kong is Taiwan, which China has been threatening to seize by force for a long time. There is increasing military pressure from China with a sense of urgency that indicates that Beijing may be planning a military invasion of Taiwan in the near future.

The scenario is that President Xi may have calculated that the West having given up on Hong Kong may not intervene, if China invades Taiwan. A chaotic, election mode America may well keep to itself is a situation that Xi may have pondered on and this could lead to a conflict that the world does not need now. In the midst of the enormous row that China has kicked up, President Xi also launched a surreptitious attack on India along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) starting in May 2020.

However, this effort too has rebounded on President Xi. Resultantly, reports suggest that Xi is planning a purge in the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA). According to a report in Nikkei Asian Review (NAR) Chinese leader Xi Jinping is planning “another brutal purge” of his military leadership, this time around he is apparently displeased with the performance of the PLA against Indian troops on the border.

An earlier NAR post (June 2020), written after the brawl (15 June 2020) between Indian and Chinese soldiers along the LAC in Ladakh, suggested that that Xi had not expected his forces to get ‘thrashed’ by the Indians in hand-to-hand combat, that too on the day he celebrated his 67th birthday! Sources say Xi was severely displeased by the resulting loss of “face.” Xi clearly expected his extensively reorganized and centrally controlled military to perform better, which clearly underestimated the Indians’ determination to stand their ground.

China’s strategy has usually been one of slow, patient encroachment and intimidation by pushing its borders steadily outward, assuming its victims will not dare to object too strenuously, until one day announcing the territory it covets has now been fully garrisoned and is an eternal part of China. Why is Xi behaving so aggressively?

Cai Xia, a former party professor says his centralisation of power and purging of party rivals have made him a more formidable figure than Chairman Mao, but he is still insecure. On the other hand, President Xi does what he does simply because he is the emperor of China, and seeks a legacy as the great unifier of China. Is there anybody to stop him, anybody to say “no”? Not as yet, but in the future this may well happen.