China At A Glance

In a lot of ways, you might find this country a little overboard with some of the major things in terms of humanity …. Finding it a little surprising? Wait till it gets a little interesting. So starting off we have the president of USA: Donald Trump, giving a few insights on the country itself. Quoting his words, “China is killing us.”, “What China is doing to us is horrible.”, “China cheats, and they devalue their currency.” But beware that these same words would fool you towards the end. Getting on the point now, we are seriously under informed about this country.

In 2012, one of the interviews with the Chinese president: Xi Jinping by the popular news channel: Al Jazeera revealed that he particularly was also thinking the same thing. “We need to learn more about the world and it needs to learn about us a lot too.” Well that was few years ago and we still don’t know more than we did a couple of years back. Next year when Xi became the president he launched a policy declaring him the president for life. Some of his recent achievements are certainly more than commendable, like the fact that the country’s GDP growth averaged out to nearly 10% a year, making it the fastest sustained expansion which made it possible to bring more than 800 million people out of poverty!, The Belt Road initiative involving 4-8 trillion dollars of investments on over 60 countries for the purpose of reshaping of global trade through improvement in many ancient trade routes like maritime silk route, reshaping of sea routes, building parks, bridges, roads. Also the domestic projects taken up like the Xi Jinping’s Anti-Corruption Drive, a massive crackdown of political corruption leading to investigation and punishment of hundreds of thousands of government officials, some at the very top!

But, there’s a lot of troubling stuff under the surface also. A secretive extra legal process is also what’s going on. Interrogators, extract confessions sometimes through torture from criminals. Experts say that Xi Jinping is deeply concerned with, public opinion could turn on him, economy rates slowing down etc. By having a list of ‘untrustworthy people’, some say that he’s micromanaging his own country. Those untrustworthy people are restricted from travel, buying a house, getting loans too for the next few years! 

  As you can see from above graphics that there’s a social rating system that constantly keeps monitoring its citizens. Possibly undermining the privacy of the people. Anyways, if you want to raise your score you have to involve yourself in community service, and quite awkwardly though, you got to buy Chinese products too. Whereas the numerous possibilities of you reducing your score and getting front row tickets to the government’s cross hairs is by committing fraud, evading tax, and again not quite so funny way by smoking in smoke restricted areas. And not only that, if your score’s too much low you might also be awarded with what is known as the worst nightmare coming true for any ‘Generation Z’ that is loss of access to high speed internet!, not being able to get plane and even train tickets! Not being able to buy any kind of real estate, or cars. Pretty much leaving anyone alone.

The Christian community  in China, even is faced by the unbelievable request by the government to take down the pictures of Jesus and hang portraits of Xi Jinping. In another case the Muslim community isn’t in the good picture too. In August 2018, UN representative heard that over 1 million Uighur Muslims were undergoing,‘re-education’ programmes. However 11 million Uighur Muslims, living in western region of China, Xinjiang feel that their cultural values are being threatened.When the issue of Human rights was taken up in UN meeting, the representatives of China actually asked, “Do you want business or not?”! .Finally the quotes of the president Donald Trump in 2017 during a press conference saying “He’s [Xi Jinping] a terrific guy, I like being around him a lot, a very special person”.   So there’s that… for more interesting topics stay tuned to The Adroit Official.

(Bonus content: Did any of you guys know that Xi Jinping has banned any type of reference to “Winnie the Pooh”? wondering why..... here’s why…

One things for sure… that if he has banned it publicly thinking it would not spread much, actually pretty much the opposite happened. )