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When Xi Jinping took his place as leader of the ruling Chinese Communist Party in 2012, some commentators expected he would be a weak president beset by factional strife in the wake of the jailing of former Chongqing party chief Bo Xilai and cryptic official references to rumors of a coup in Beijing.
Yet Xi has evoked more comparisons with late supreme leader Mao Zedong than any other leader since Mao's death in 1976, with his cult of personality, his abolition of presidential term limits and his intolerance of any kind of public criticism or protest, including in Hong Kong.
Blamed by many outside China for his government's handling of the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in Wuhan, Xi seriously damaged his reputation among the Chinese people with three years of grueling lockdowns that saw some people welded into their own apartments and others carted off to mass quarantine camps in the middle of the night.
While the zero-COVID years eventually ended in late 2022 amid nationwide protests known as the " white paper" movement, a mass exodus of people dubbed the " run" movement was already under way. Refugees and dissidents, private sector executives and middle-class families with children have been willing to trek through the Central American rainforest to get away from life in China, in the hope of gaining political asylum in the United States.
"I left China for Ecuador and Colombia, then walked north through the rain forest," one migrant -- an author whose writings were banned under Xi -- told RFA Mandarin in a recent interview. "I left on Aug. 8 and entered the United States on Oct. 21."
"I was limping from my second day in the rainforest, and I was robbed by bandits," the person said. "I could have died."
Another recent migrant -- a writer -- said they left because everything they wrote had been banned.
"My articles were banned from newspapers and magazines, my name was not allowed to be mentioned, and I couldn't take part in public events," they said. "I realized if I stayed in China, my life would just be a huge disaster, so I fled in a hurry."
Xu Maoan, a former financial manager in a private company, said he used to make a good professional salary of 10,000 yuan (US$1,400) a month, but lost his job due to the COVID-19 restrictions.
He never succeeded in finding another, despite sending out hundreds of resumes, and recently joined many others making the trek through the rainforest to the U.S. border.
"I didn't find out about the white paper movement until I got to the United States," Xu told RFA Mandarin. "All news of it was blocked in China."
Reversing course?
But it wasn't just the pandemic; Xu and many like him were growing increasingly concerned that Xi was reversing the investor-friendly policies of late supreme leader Deng Xiaoping, with his confrontational attitude to Western trading partners and hair-trigger sensitivity to " national security," an elastic term used to describe any activity that could threaten or undermine the ruling Chinese Communist Party's official narrative.
"I have personally experienced how the government drove away foreign investors and cracked down on the private sector, in the name of national security," Xu said. "The government is in financial difficulty, so if they don't like you, they raid you."
"[Xi] quarreled with Europe and the United States, frightening foreign investors, who withdrew to Vietnam and India," he said. "His values are the opposite [of Deng Xiaoping's]."
"The domestic economy has collapsed, but they just won't admit it," he said. "I was afraid we would be going back to the days of famine and forced labor of the Mao era, so I left in a hurry."
Xi's abolition of presidential term limits in 2018 and the creation of what some fear is a Mao-style cult of personality around him is also driving concerns.
"Xi has deified himself as the ' core' leader with his own personality cult, but he lacks Mao's charisma," Ma Chun-wei, assistant politics professor at Taiwan's Tamkang University, told RFA Mandarin in a recent interview. "He requires everyone to study Xi Jinping Thought throughout the party and the whole education system."
Oppression of Uyghurs, Tibetans
Xi has also presided over the mass incarceration of Uyghurs in Xinjiang's "re-education" camps, the surveillance and suppression of Tibetans and their culture, as well as the upgrading the Great Firewall of internet censorship and the installation of surveillance cameras in schools to monitor students and teachers alike.
Under his tenure, private companies have been forced to set up Communist Party branches, and censorship is tighter than it has ever been, Ma said.
Yet Xi is one of the most ridiculed leaders in recent Chinese history, according to exiled author Murong Xuecun.
"He has had the most nicknames of any general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party in the past 70 years," Murong told RFA in a recent interview. "Some people calculate that he has more than 200 nicknames."
Many of Xi's nicknames are now banned from China's internet, including Xi Baozi, Winnie the Pooh and Xitler, and their use has led to imprisonment in some cases.
"The key to all of this is the political system," Murong said. "Xi rose to lead the Communist Party and have power over appointments, the military, the party, the police and national security agencies through a series of opaque and intergenerational processes."
"He commands everything, yet his power isn't subject to any kind of supervision or restriction," he said. "He can purge or replace anyone he doesn't like."
Lying flat
Murong likened China under Xi's rule to "a runaway train rushing towards a cliff with him as the driver."
"China has now entered the garbage times, when everything it does is doomed to failure," he said. "The shadow of Xi will always haunt China."
He said the damage done by Xi is evident in the numbers of young people choosing to " lie flat" in the face of life's challenges. Even high-flying university graduates are moving back in with Mom and Dad and refusing to live up to social expectations like finding a job, marrying, mortgages and children.
"Those who can leave will leave, and those who can't will lie flat," Murong said.
Internationally, Xi has encouraged a far more expansionist and aggressive foreign policy than his predecessors, with island-building and military operations in the South China Sea and Taiwan Strait, and a barrage of nationalist rhetoric around Beijing's claim on democratic Taiwan, which has never been ruled by the Chinese Communist Party.
A Hong Kong-born researcher at the London-based think tank China Strategic Risk Institute who gave only the nickname Athena for fear of reprisals said Xi has strongly rejected international values like freedom, democracy and the rule of law, and cares little about international criticism of China’s human rights record.
Instead, China has taken the fight to international organizations, and was recently accused of " gaming" its human rights review at the United Nations.
Secret police stations
Xi is also pouring trillions of dollars into his Belt and Road infrastructure and supply chain network, and engaging in colonial expansion across Africa, Murong Xuecun said.
China has become known under Xi for its aggressive " wolf-warrior" diplomats, some of whom have resorted to physical violence to get their point across, as well as its transnational network of secret police stations and its pursuit of its critics on foreign soil, as well as its army of "little pinks," who snarl at any criticism of the motherland.
Xi's administration was also instrumental in turning Hong Kong from a thriving financial hub and politically engaged city with freedoms of speech, association and publication intact to a city where the majority of people are being forced to toe the government line or risk imprisonment.
In recent years, international concerns are growing that Xi may be preparing for a military invasion of Taiwan, which he has vowed to "unify" with the rest of China.
Yet he may have more of an internal battle on his hands than he bargained for, according to former Lt. Col. Yao Cheng of the Naval Aviation Force.
"He has been messing with the military for more than 10 years, ever since he came to power," Yao told RFA Mandarin. "Between 2012 and 2015, he arrested hundreds of generals, yet his attempts to reform the military between 2015 and 2017 were a failure."
Part of the problem is that Xi has never been a soldier, despite wearing the uniform of a Commander in Chief, he said.
"Now Xi is commander-in-chief of the Joint Operations Command at the Central Military Commission, managing an army of several million people," Yao said. "Yet he procured military equipment in a haphazard manner, spending money recklessly and winding up with a pile of scrap copper and iron."
Meanwhile Xi has backed up Beijing's claims of sovereignty in the South China Sea with newly built islands and military bases, as Chinese Coast Guard vessels regularly harass China's neighbors, as well as ordering repeated rounds of military drills around Taiwan.
The People's Liberation Army Rocket Force recently launched an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of carrying nuclear warheads into the Pacific Ocean.
Yet Yao believes that Xi ultimately lacks the support of most of China's generals.
"He took down the leaders of the Rocket Force, and wants to attack Taiwan now, but the military won't do this; they will wait and see," he said. "They may be engaging in busywork for now, but they won't do what Xi Jinping wants."
Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Luisetta Mudie and Malcolm Foster.