Below is a comment I made regarding Chinese leader Xi Jinping on Kaiser Kuo’s Facebook page, with very slight change.
In my view, domestically, China under Xi is on the right path, unlike, say, Brazil, India, and the United States.
I believe Xi’s a real believer of socialism and a real progressive. I believe his ideology and moral compass is very well aligned with that of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn than Hillary Clinton and Theresa May will ever be. His heart is in the right place. I recommend this interview highly. It was done when he was the leader in Zhejiang province in 2004, way before anybody would know for sure that he would be the future leader of China.
As can be seen through the interview, he’s honed his leadership skills in a small rural village in 陕西 (along with the villagers, he built the first biogas/methane facility using biowaste in 陕西!), as a deputy in the central military council, as a boss in a small county in 河北正定,and various positions in 福建 and 浙江. That leadership showed as soon as he was picked by the party committee as the leader. The proof is in the pudding. Here is a list I quickly came up with:
1. The unrelenting anti-corruption campaign, very effective with tremendous popular support. At the moment, premier Li is in Canada, negotiating extradition treaty to go after corrupt officials in that country. Similar discussions have been had with other 5-eye countries (NSA term for US, UK, Canada, Australia, NZ…);
2. Emission and pollution control. This encompasses many areas: environmental data transparency, more effective regulation, new Environment Protect Law and its enforcement. This has produced results already, CO2, PM2.5 and other pollutant numbers are in a downward trend. Beijing is having more blue sky days than years past. The rest of country is also getting better. For example, during my last trip to my hometown, I noticed all diesel polluting buses were replaced with clean electric bus;
3. Anti domestic violence law was passed and became law of the land early this year. Badly, badly needed in a huge developing country like China. It’s hard to overstate the significance of this development, although sadly it’s not reported that much;
4. 供给侧改革。This is badly named, but not to be confused with Reagan’s supply-side economics. Essentially it means to curb overcapacity and polluting sectors, such as steel, chemical industries;
5. Poverty alleviation. 精准扶贫,targeted poverty alleviation, is an effort to have accurate and detailed statistics on poverty levels, and then fiscal assistance is provided based on those numbers;
6. Anti corruption campaign now also targets the corruption in election process, imagine that!. Just last week, 辽宁人大代表 election results were nullified due to campaign corruption. This is a very encouraging sign;
7. This is hard to quantify, but like neocons and neoliberals who make s**t up and create a toxic social environment for everybody else in the United States, China has its own share of wackos who make things up all the time. I feel that toxic element (money worshiping, consumerism, lying, cheating) is abating since Xi came to power.
Anyhow, I’m too cynical to worship any leader, but I feel really good about this Xi/Li administration.