When former President Donald Trump took the stage in Fort Dodge, Iowa, on Saturday, he praised Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping as “strong,” “smart,” and “fierce.”
President Trump made the comments while comparing the CCP leader to President Joe Biden.
“[Biden] walked up with a man who looks like a piece of granite, right, he’s strong like granite, he’s strong, I know him very well—President Xi of China. And he’s standing there, you know he’s a fierce person,” President Trump said.
“The press doesn’t like it when I say good things, but what can I say, he runs 1.4 billion people with an iron hand, and they say, ‘Whoa, he said good things about him.’ He happens to be a very smart person.”
These statements are not only misguided, but risk President Trump’s own legacy and the support of Asian Americans.
Whether you like Xi on a personal level or not, he is the leader of CCP, which is the last major communist regime. Under communist rule, more than 80 million innocent Chinese people have been killed—a number far greater than the death toll in all wars of the past century combined. And the CCP has never stopped killing its citizens.
Xi has had the opportunity for years to steer China away from a communist system to a democratic one. Maybe he has thought about it, but to this day, he has failed to do so. Instead, he has used the CCP to further consolidate power, tying his own fate to that of the Party. In recent years, he has published books championing communist leadership and got the whole country to read his books, just like Mao did with his Little Red Book.
Under Xi’s rule, innocent Chinese citizens such as Falun Gong practitioners, Christians, and political dissidents continue to be imprisoned, with many tortured to death. In September, an 87-year-old woman was sentenced to three years in prison for refusing to renounce her practice of Falun Gong.
Xi has made his top priority the stability of the Communist Party, not the stability of the economy or the daily lives of the people. For fear of losing power, the regime continues to suppress private companies, take away the wealth of business owners, and jail influencers who refuse to follow the CCP’s narrative. Furthermore, with its draconian lockdown policies during COVID-19, it has destroyed its economic engine.
Most Chinese people think of Xi as the opposite of “smart” and “strong.”
By Diana Cheng
