Xi’s regime is flawed — and someday those flaws may prove fatal — but it has a lot of life left in it yet.
China has hit a rough patch. As it widened its COVID lockdown catchment areas in 2022, the economic ramifications caught up with it, resulting in its second-worst economic growth rate since the 1970s. Late in the year, just as President Xi Jinping secured another decade-long term atop the party-state, people across China began to challenge its procrustean COVID policies with demonstrations beginning in Beijing and spreading as far afield as Kunming and Lanzhou. This winter has now seen a reversal of the Chinese state’s 36-month zero-COVID policy and a wave of infections and deaths across the country.
Continue reading the entire piece here at The American Spectator (paywall)
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Jordan McGillis is a Paulson Policy Analyst at the Manhattan Institute
Photo by Lintao Zhang/Getty Images