China re-elects President Xi – for life? : Trump mired in sex scandals, fires Secy of State | Sunday Observer

China re-elects President Xi – for life? : Trump mired in sex scandals, fires Secy of State

18 March, 2018
Trump and Stormy
Trump and Stormy

China’s President Xi Jin-ping was re-elected last week for a second five-year term but with a constitution amendment removing the two-term limit on the office so that he may stand for further terms. Meanwhile, rival America, now finds itself in the humiliating position of being the sole superpower with its own president mired in sex scandals and conspiracy probes.

China’s parliament, the National People’s Congress, having first amended the constitution to remove the two-term limit on the presidency, on Wednesday voted to re-elect President Xi for a second term. The new ability of President Xi to stand for re-election many times more, has prompted much speculation outside China that this was a move by Xi to consolidate power for life. Western liberal analysts, unused to non-liberal systems of democratic governance, largely see the Communist system as a ‘dictatorship’ that rules with totalitarian control and expect communist leaders to behave like dictators in right-wing dictatorships elsewhere.

President Xi in his first term, has worked tirelessly to build up China’s economic and military power with the clear long term goal of positioning his country as a global power on par with other, older, global powers. While certainly China is on track to gradually becoming the world’s dominant economic power, the nature of China’s continued military build-up does not indicate any intention of attaining the kind of superpower dominance that America achieved briefly in the post second World War decades.

Of course, if China’s economy expands phenomenally in the future, such a superpower aspiration may emerge. It is far more likely, however, that, in a world of increasing natural resource scarcity (thanks, primarily, to capitalism’s appetite for production materials), China will refrain from extravagant fantasies of hegemony. In any case, the nature of globalisation today as well as the nature of the global ecological crisis, requires intelligent international cooperation and collective action by all states and China’s collective leadership is aware of this contingency.

We can only pray that China’s political system does not suffer from the same fate of the American one today in which the US now must deal with a head of state who seems to be undermining the very state he presides over.

As we wish Xi Jinping the very best in his stewardship of that great nation, it is with some despair that we look West these days.

Last week was, yet again, a litany of scandals and highly controversial official actions by the current leadership of what remains the sole world superpower. Washington is reeling with multiple shocks over a Presidential firing of his Secretary of State (the US foreign affairs minister), revenge sacking of another top-ranking State Department official, another revenge sacking of a senior FBI official, a stunning opposition Democratic Party upset win in a state by-election and, sordidly, more revelations about the illicit and disloyal sex life of the head of state.

Stormy Daniels has become the world’s best known adult erotic film star, possibly after the star of the adult erotic film ‘Deep Throat’ of the bohemian 1960s. Ms Daniels claim to fame is that she claims to be an illicit lover of Donald Trump some years ago when Trump was just over a year into his marriage with current wife Melania.

Thanks to the US news media’s obsession with scandals as a means of competing for audiences, the Trump-Daniels affair is largely affirmed although the President currently officially denies that he had been disloyal to his legal wife. After first revealing details about this sex liaison, the news media then reported that Trump, through intermediaries, had then paid US$ 130,000 to Ms Daniels to ensure her silence while he contested the presidential elections in 2016.

Now that her onetime illicit lover is none other than her country’s head of state has prompted the pornstar (as such actresses are termed in puritanical America) to explore ways of exploiting this development to her advantage. With a smart Hollywood lawyer representing her, Ms Daniels is milking publicity through the US media networks to the maximum. Even she does not win back her right to reveal all, the current publicity alone will probably keep this film star – who is also an adult film director – rich for the rest of her life.

And Ms Daniel’s lawyer yesterday told news media that several more pornstars were standing by to testify that they too had illicit affairs with Trump in his pre-presidential years with some of them apparently similarly bribed for their silence.

Meanwhile, Trump’s own Republican Party was humiliated last week when a young but accomplished Democratic Party challenger narrowly beat the Republican incumbent in a by-election for a House of Representatives seat in Pennsylvania state, a known Republican stronghold for decades. Analysts are now beginning to count the growing number of House and Senate by-elections in the past year that have reversed the Trump electoral wave of 2016.

With mid-term elections for half the House and Senate looming in November this year, for the first time the opposition Democratic Party has begun to entertain serious hopes of winning back a majority in at least the US Senate.

Neither has it been good for the Republican Party’s image when their President suddenly sacked his Secretary of State Rex Tillerson last Friday despite that business-tycoon-turned-politician’s general record of steady management of the America’s foreign policy (when allowed to by his blundering President). Trump probably never forgave Tillerson for calling his boss a “f..ing moron” at a small official meeting last year and then refusing to deny that he did so!

Worse, the President sacked his foreign minister by means of a tweet – not even a letter, let along a handshake for service to the nation.

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