BRUSSELS: Chinese President Xi Jinping’s Unity Law lays bare the racial chauvinism at the foundation of his rule. By dismantling the safeguards of the former Chinese leader Mao Zedong’s era and legally entrenching Han dominance, Xi has fashioned a system arguably “more insidious than Mao’s chaos”, a report has stated. Mao relied on violence to destroy; Xi uses the law to erase. In doing so, Xi has emerged as the “worst recent Chinese leader” — not simply for resurrecting Maoist authoritarianism, but for reshaping it into a durable, racialised autocracy, Khedroob Thondup, the nephew of the Dalai Lama, wrote in ‘European Times’, earlier this week.
“When historians weigh the legacies of China’s rulers, Mao Zedong inevitably looms as the architect of both revolutionary triumph and catastrophic suffering. Yet in the decades after Mao, China’s leadership sought to avoid repeating his excesses by building collective governance, term limits, and a cautious balance of power. Xi Jinping has not only dismantled those safeguards — he has introduced new instruments of authoritarianism that make him arguably the worst Chinese leader since Mao,” Thondup detailed.
He stressed that Xi’s "so called Unity Law" is a clear manifestation of this regression, revealing the “racial chauvinism and political absolutism” underpinning the Chinese President’s rule.
“After Mao’s death, Deng Xiaoping and his successors tried to stabilise China by embedding collective leadership and limiting personal power. Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao were cautious technocrats, presiding over economic growth without dismantling institutional checks. Xi Jinping reversed this trajectory. Term limits were abolished in 2018, enabling indefinite rule. Leadership purges sidelined rivals and stacked the Politburo with loyalists. Centralisation of authority shifted decision making from collective bodies to Xi himself,” Thondup added. (IANS)
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