China’s authoritarian President Xi Jinping spewed gory rhetoric on Thursday while left-wing news org CNN dubbed the dictator “the real star” of the Chinese Communist Party’s centennial celebration.
Why does CNN call Xi Jinping a “star”?
Mass murderer Mao Zedong—who worked, starved, or beat to death 45 million of his own people in just four years—gathered with his delegates in secret to found the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) “[o]ne hundred years ago this July, in a small brick house in Shanghai’s former French Concession,” CNN recalled almost nostalgically.
CNN’s digital producer Ben Wescott authored the piece titled “The Chinese Communist Party is about to turn 100 but Xi will be the real star” in which he referred to Thursday’s CCP centenary festivities as a “trip down memory lane.”
As pointed out by Mediaite, the CNN article does acknowledge dark chapters of Chinese modern history like the Tiananmen Square Massacre, government censorship, and the disastrous impact of the Cultural Revolution, but it says nothing about the coronavirus pandemic’s origins in the country nor China’s genocide of the Uighur people, for example, while mostly focusing on what the future might hold for the CCP.
Wescott’s article gushed over “powerful” Xi’s role in strengthening China, insisting that the CCP had “much to celebrate,” while pointing to China’s “growth from one of the poorest nations in the world into an economy on the brink of overtaking the US.” Elon Musk on Twitter called the same “truly amazing,” as he attempts to push Tesla into the Chinese market.
“Under Xi, the party has consolidated its hold on key sectors and industries, while tightening its grip on daily life,” wrote Wescott for CNN. “As Xi himself said at the 17th Party Congress in 2017, ‘In the east, west, south, and north, the party leads everything.'”
But the words Xi chose to mark the celebration of his Communist Party’s centenary were gruesome. Reuters reports the portion of the Dictator’s speech during which he took aim at “any foreign force” who wanted to “bully, oppress, or subjugate” the Chinese people:
“Anyone who dares try to do that will have their heads bashed bloody against the Great Wall of steel forged by over 1.4 billion Chinese people,” [Xi] said, sparking applause from an invited audience of 70,000 gathered in the massive square in central Beijing.
Market Watch reports that said “applause” in response to Xi’s bloodthirsty prose was the “biggest” of the night. And according to The Washington Post, the phrase “Heads bashed bloody” became a trending topic on China’s Twitter-like Weibo on Thursday morning with more than 900 million views.
China itself apparently recognizing the alarming nature of its Chairman’s language (and as even CNN had to admit), Xi’s troubling comments were later “softened” in the Chinese government’s own English language translation of the speech.
But Xi went on not only to vow that China would “utterly defeat” Taiwan’s struggle for “independence” from the Chinese mainland, but also to call for China’s armed forces to be elevated to “world-class standards,” insisting “We must accelerate the modernization of national defense and the armed forces.”
Now, as CNN continues to push the Senate Committee-debunked narrative that U.S. President Donald Trump “incited” (here, here, here) violence during the Jan 6 unrest at the Capitol in Washington, D.C.—though Trump in fact called for peace multiple times that day—, the left-wing news organization decided not to rebuke Xi’s warmongering, his oppression of his own and the Taiwanese people, nor even his outright threat to bash people’s heads “bloody” against the Great Wall.
Instead, CNN apparently stands by it’s positive characterization of Chairman Xi as “the real star” of the centenary of one of the most murderous regimes in world history, calling into question CNN’s ability to understand the clear threat Xi and China pose to American, if not world, safety.
For, speaking at a recent Hudson Institute event, Japan’s number two defense official—State Defense Minister Yasuhide Nakayama—warned that China’s activities in the Pacific show signs they could be planning to launch “a Pearl Harbor-style attack on the U.S., similar to how Japan did on Dec. 7, 1941, propelling the U.S. into World War II,” according to American Military News.
“If some country shoot’s [a nuclear weapon] from their continent towards Honolulu, that missile’s . . . the warheads compared to Hiroshima, it’s 200 times more than Hiroshima,” Nakayama said. “So I’ve been to Hiroshima before and I went to the museum before, from that experience and the perspective, if 200 times more strong atomic bombs or torpedoes or missiles, warheads towards Honolulu, I think Honolulu will be erased from the map. So we have to think before using those powers, we have to think how to stop it.”
“Seventy years ago, we attacked Pearl Harbor, but now the U.S. and Japan [are] very good allies, one of the best allies all over the world,” he said, according to The Washington Examiner, noting that Russia is conducting naval drills in the Pacific this week. “I don’t want to remind [us of the attack] 70 years ago, but we have to be careful of the exercising of the Russians. They are taking place [off] the western side of that, Honolulu, I mean, in Hawaii.”
Nakayama’s warning comes after the Chinese government’s mouthpiece newspaper Global Times threatened the United States with a “high intensity showdown” possibly involving nuclear weapons.
Jon Fleetwood is Managing Editor for American Faith.
