President Xi Jinping is continuing his pervasive crackdown on anyone and anything that stands in the way of the Chinese Communist Party — the more blood spilled, the better.
Beijing this month will impose new laws on Hong Kong and Macau giving the state broader powers for asset seizure, visa denial and deportation against those it says enable foreign sanctions.
That’s an answer to increasing US and European sanctions over Xi’s often-genocidal human-rights abuses and piratical approach to trade: Put Western businesses trying to work in China in the crosshairs.
The Biden administration just warned US companies that China’s year-old “national-security” law for Hong Kong already makes it perilous to do business in the once-free island city.
Beijing is also coming down hard on its own tech giants in the name of antitrust enforcement and consumer protection. Its Ministry of Industry and Information Technology last week announced a new six-month “rectification” program targeting issues from “disturbing market order” to “unauthorized Internet connections.” The crackdown is about asserting CCP power over firms Xi thinks have too much independence. Even one-time poster boy Jack Ma has been slapped hard.
Meanwhile, Beijing has taken to persecuting the China-based families of exiled critics. The New York Times reported last week on expat Uighur activist Abduweli Ayup, who says his niece died last year in state custody. Two of his siblings had already been detained and imprisoned — all for his efforts to expose Uighurs’ plight in torture-ridden concentration camps.
US-funded Radio Free Asia reports that more than 50 relatives of its journalists have been detained in prison and in the camps. And the sister of Uighur-American activist Rushan Abbas is serving a 20-year sentence on terrorism charges.
But the Muslim Uighurs are hardly the only religious group Beijing is oppressing: It’s been cracking down on Christians for years, banning children from church, tearing down places of worship, imprisoning pastors and even editing the Bible to fit the CCP line. Xi also browbeat Pope Francis into letting the regime choose Catholic bishops.
Beijing also started more camps for Buddhists in Tibet and continues a ruthlessly brutal campaign against the ethnic-Chinese Buddhists of Falun Gong.
Xi isn’t just bent on making China more totalitarian, he’s happy to wade as deep in blood as Mao, Stalin and Hitler.