ART MOORE
Chinese President Xi Jinping's securing of an unprecedented third term as the Communist Party's general secretary, his packing of the Politburo with with loyalists and dramatic removal of his predecessor, Hu Jintao, during the National People's Congress are ominous signs, warns China scholar Gordon Chang.
"The Chinese despot is pushing the region - and the world - toward war, and we are now far closer to conflict than many once thought," he wrote in a column for The Hill,
Another China watcher, Jacob Helberg, pointed out Wednesday on Twitter that the New York Times is reporting a Chinese spy chief has joined the Chinese Communist Party's top ranks for the first time.
"Is it me, or does this new Politburo look a lot like a wartime team?" wrote Helberg, a senior adviser at the Stanford University Center on Geopolitics and Technology. "Or maybe it's just Xi bringing up 'security' 89 times in his speech."
Commenting on the tweet, Chang affirmed Xi is "assembling a team to go to war."
"Why are we not making defensive preparations?" he asked of the United States.
In his column for The Hill, Chang said Xi's report opening the party's 20th National Congress on Oct. 16 "revealed his dark vision of the future."
Noting Xi warned of "dangerous storms" ahead, Chang pointed out that back in March, the Chinese central government declared in its report to the National People's Congress that it is committed to "resolving the Taiwan question in the new era."
The "new era" is language Xi began using last November, and it followed his declaration in 2019 that the Taiwan "problem" should not be allowed "to be passed down from one generation to the next," observed Chang.
"New era," therefore, he said, appears to mean the period of Xi's rule.
"He has, unfortunately, made the destruction of the island's democracy a test of his legitimacy," wrote Chang.
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