One Year After Wuhan Outbreak Overturned World Order, Xi Jinping Announces Ambitions for China's Future
Exactly one year after China acknowledged the discovery of a novel coronavirus in the crossroads city of Wuhan, the country’s highest leader praised citizens’ endurance and vowed a future where the Chinese Communist Party reigns supreme in a “modern socialist country.”
The coming year is particularly auspicious for the ruling party, as it marks a century since the group’s founding in 1921.
According to Chinese President Xi Jinping, the coming decades will prove the CCP’s resolve and lead to a major rise for the party.
Xi celebrated not only the CCP’s past but also his ambitious goals for its future during a Thursday new year address to the nation.
“I am proud of our great motherland and people, as well as the unyielding national spirit,” Xi said. “Only in hard times can courage and perseverance be manifested. Only after polishing can a piece of jade be finer.”
While the COVID pandemic walloped China first, the country made a suspiciously speedy recovery as the rest of the world was left to suffer under a frozen global supply chain.
Even as other countries continue to struggle, China is closing the books on 2020 with substantial economic growth.
The pandemic, which reshuffled the global order, appears to have left China in a much better position than any other country.
This fact is not lost on Xi.
“2021 will see the 100th birthday of the Communist Party of China,” Xi said. “Its 100-year journey surges forward with great momentum. Its original aspiration remains even firmer one hundred years later.”
“At the historic crossroad of the ‘Two Centenary Goals,’ the new journey of comprehensively building a modern socialist country is about to start,” Xi later continued. “The road ahead is long; striving is the only way forward. We have strived, broken through brambles and thorns, and crossed ten thousand rivers and thousands of mountains.”
According to the state-owned Xinhua News Agency, the “Two Centenary Goals” are to improve the lives of China’s poor by 2021 (100 years after the CCP’s founding), and to build a modern socialist state by 2049 (100 years after communist forces declared victory in mainland China).
Judging from what we know about the deathly evils of socialism, giving the ideology a 21st-century reboot creates some haunting worries.
While President Donald Trump spearheaded the decoupling of America from China, a potential disaster awaits if presumptive President-elect Joe Biden ends up taking the White House.
Biden, who China’s Xi calls an “old friend,” is unlikely to keep a Trump-like level of pressure on the growing communist superpower.
The United States already faces an uphill battle in any potential conflict with China, and the imbalance will likely grow wider as the Asian powerhouse focuses on its military.
Earlier this month, Xi vowed his country would do just that in a speech where he stressed the importance of national security.
Without a world leader powerful enough to check his ambition, Xi’s ongoing cultural genocide and calls for conquest only threaten to grow worse.
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