While Western leaders and analysts have had an increasingly negative view of President Xi and his country’s stance on the South China Sea, Taiwan, and numerous other policies, his authoritarian impulses and the party’s tough zero-Covid policy appears to have put him offside with many younger Chinese.
CNN reported on Sunday that Chinese students at overseas universities have been posting anti-Xi slogans such as those hung on a banner on the Sitong Bridge in Beijing recently, damning their president as a dictator who “ramped up surveillance and control of the Chinese diaspora, intimidating and harassing those who dare to speak out and threatening their families back home.”
With the party’s relentless crackdown on dissent, these young critics say it is only in toilets they are able to express their real feelings given the limited space for free expression in China, the report said, noting that Ren Zhiqiang, the billionaire who criticized Xi’s handling of China’s initial Covid outbreak and condemned the top leader as a power-hungry “clown”, was jailed for 18 years on corruption charges.
Read the full report: CNN
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