(John Ransom, Headline USA) Progressive billionaire George Soros is issuing rare criticism of Chinese communist party chair Xi Jinping, calling him a danger to society and warning that the pandemic, a cooling economy and falling population growth may endanger his regime.
“China’s Xi Jinping is the greatest threat that open societies face today,” said Soros via Twitter. “The country’s roiling real estate market, falling population, and fast-spreading omicron variant might be his undoing, all during his prestige project of the Winter Olympics.”
For Soros, 91, it marks a big change, as he was previously complementary about the regime in China. But with the ascendancy of Xi and his ambition to match chairman Mao in historical significance, Soros has become more concerned about the danger China poses.
China’s Xi Jinping is the greatest threat that open societies face today. The country’s roiling real estate market, falling population, and fast-spreading omicron variant might be his undoing, all during his prestige project of the Winter Olympics. https://t.co/1Pf0XEy29M pic.twitter.com/WMyWpPKg0y
— George Soros (@georgesoros) January 31, 2022
“Perfect order and global governance are not realistic expectations,” Soros told acolytes at the Paris Club in 2011, according to Business Insider. “However, it is a sad fact that Western democracies provide less successful leadership than China.”
Since then Xi has been appointed president for life and has rolled back many of the free market initiatives and human rights that saw China flourish and transform itself, beginning in the 1980s from a feudal agricultural society, into a more modern industrialized country.
In September, 2021 Soros made a volte face on China’s system of management, warning that Xi was enemy of free society.
“The Chinese people as a whole are among his victims,” said Soros about Xi in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, “but domestic political opponents and religious and ethnic minorities suffer from his persecution much more.”
“I find it particularly disturbing,” added Soros “that so many Chinese people seem to find his social-credit surveillance system not only tolerable but attractive.”
Soros went on to warn that China was becoming increasingly inefficient under one-man rule that left no room for anything other than “yes men” who served Xi.
“To illustrate,” said Soros, “a state-owned company produced a Covid-19 vaccine, Sinopharm, which has been widely exported all over the world, but its performance is inferior to all other widely marketed vaccines.”
Since the start of the pandemic China, like many other countries, has faced unprecedented economic dislocation, one effect of which has been an historic plunge in real estate values.
And China economic problems have been compounded by the lack of a free market response that is often the death-knell for dictators.
