Editor’s Note for Wednesday, July 13, 2022
A note for Access newsletter readers from Jeremy Goldkorn.
My thoughts today:
Xi’s the one and only — that’s the message from Bill Bishop’s Sinocism newsletter yesterday. He wrote:
Hong Kong’s Ming Pao, which often gets leaks of PRC political news, though they are not always accurate, has a story today claiming that Xi will be re-elected to another term and after the 20th Party Congress Xi will be officially named as “People’s Leader 人民领袖” [énmín lǐngxiù] and the propaganda formula around that title will be “One Leader/Lingxiu is essential.”
It’s been clear since at least 2014 that Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 is a man of epochal ambition (I first predicted he would try to stay on for life in a Sinica podcast that year). By now, there really is no point in asking if he will seek a third term, or a fourth.
The interesting questions are: How long will he live? What will he do with that time?
On that subject, and a few others, I was interviewed by Radio New Zealand yesterday.
Our word of the day is heatstroke (中暑 zhòngshǔ).
