Muslim Internment Camps, Social Credit System Absent from Time 100 Feature on Xi Jinping by Jon Huntsman

[WestVirginiaRebel]

Breitbart

Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping has used “a blend of soft and hard power to boost China’s international image,” Time magazine noted Wednesday in its list of the 100 most influential people in the world.

Author Jon Huntsman, former ambassador to China before Xi assumed power and former Republican presidential candidate, accuses Xi of attempting to consolidate “imperial one-man rule” and writes that his “authoritarianism being showcased to the world serves as an alternative to the Western model.”

His piece only offers details on his expansive Belt and Road economic initiative rather than specifically addressing Xi’s use of modern-day “concentration camps” againstMuslims, harvesting of organs from thousands of political prisoners, and his imposition of a “social credit system” tracking every move on the general population.

“China’s movement toward center stage has run in parallel with Xi’s personal brand—a modern Son of Heaven recapturing China’s pre-eminence. He has made himself indispensable,” Huntsman writes, stating that Xi’s philosophy has returned China’s ruling regime to “Confucian values – benevolence, virtue, and filial piety.”

Huntsman cites the ambition of Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a plan to ensure China dominance of the world’s most important ports, roads, and railways. It is, he writes, “the first time China has ‘gone global.'”

“Contradictions are many in the world’s second largest economy, where civil society is nonexistent,” the piece concludes. “Xi’s authoritarianism being showcased to the world serves as an alternative to the Western model. His legacy is tied to whether it will be accepted.”

The Time feature acknowledges the existence of severe human rights problems under Xi’s rule without addressing them. Communist China has never had a clean record on the matter – Mao Zedong is believed to have killed at least 45 million people in four years under the Great Leap Forward – but the state of affairs under Xi has deteriorated to levels not seen since before the tenure of reformer Deng Xiaoping. That China, as Huntsman notes, wishes to export its repressive model makes discussing it all the more necessary.

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Their kind of dictator?