Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium Chapter XXI 醒   Awakenings is Oliver Sacks’s 1993 account of a group of patients who contracted sleeping-sickness during the great epidemic just after World War I.… Read

Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium Appendix XXII 幽 Bao Tong 鮑彤, a prominent reformer and aide to Zhao Ziyang, the Party General Secretary ousted by Deng Xiaoping and his colleagues in a ‘soft coup’ that accompanied the remorseless violence of the Beijing Massacre on June Fourth 1989, died in Beijing on the 9th of November 2022, four days after his ninetieth birthday.… Read

Epilogue to
China’s Highly Consequential Political Silly Season In October 2022, the Chinese Communist Party duly re-appointed Xi Jinping, leader of the party-state-army of the People’s Republic and the man we dubbed China’s ‘Chairman of Everything’ in 2014.… Read

A New Sinology Jotting   On Monday 31 October 2022, the Vietnamese Communist Party chief Nguyễn Phú Trọng met with Xi Jinping, the party-state-army leader of China. Nguyễn was the first foreign dignitary to visit Beijing following the Twentieth National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party which granted Xi Jinping a third five-year term in office.… Read

Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium Appendix XXI 責   We previously noted that: There were media reports that, on 16 October 2022, the first day of the Twentieth Congress of China’s Communist Party, [Xi Jinping’s predecessor, former Party General Secretary] Hu Jintao had failed to applaud Xi Jinping’s two-hour long report to the convocation as custom would usually demand.… Read

Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium Appendix XX 花甲 Professor Xu Zhangrun’s sixtieth birthday falls on the 25th October 2022. He was born in an impoverished village in Anhui, a province that has been devastated both by the murderous policies of the Great Leap Forward and by torrential rains and flooding.… Read