Liberals suddenly turned starry-eyed over China’s oppressive president Xi Jinping after he gave a speech at a gathering of the 1% in Davos.
Xi spoke to an audience of bankers, politicians and “influencers” at the annual World Economic Forum in Switzerland, delivering a defence of globalization.
The speech – the first by a Chinese leader at Davos – produced gushes of adulation, and drew comparisons with President-elect Donald Trump, who is markedly less keen on globalization in general, and China in particular.
Reporting of Xi’s intervention, at one of the bastions of the Western world order, failed to include much perspective on Chinese society, and whether it matches up to the apparent openness being talked up by its leader.
China’s ruling communist party is famously uncompromising in its intolerance of dissent.
The latest report on the nation by Amnesty International said that state suppression was getting worse, with widespread action against political, religious and intellectual freedom.
A similar exercise by Human Rights Watch concluded: “the trend for human rights under President Xi Jinping continued in a decidedly negative direction.”
The nation is also one of the world’s most proactive censors, operating its famed “Great Firewall”.
According to the GreatFire.org monitoring service, China is currently blocking Google, Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, to name a few.
Despite their complimentary coverage of the speech, nobody in China was allowed to read accounts by news organisations like the New York Times, Reuters, Bloomberg due to the government’s censorship program.