POPE XI:

The son of a senior party official imprisoned by Mao as an alleged rightist, the 15-year-old Xi was sent to the countryside for "re-education" during the Cultural Revolution. Under Deng, the family's fortunes improved; Xi's father re-emerged as a reforming provincial boss. Xi himself became a political adviser to the military, then a party apparatchik. While he did not stand out for his political or intellectual prowess, he continued to ascend the party ladder. His status as a princeling played a large part: because his father was an economic reformer, people assumed that Xi would be one, too.

Though it is difficult to pinpoint the exact causes of Xi's political rise, it is clear that several enabling trends predated his presidency. For example, the CPC had already begun consolidating power by the time Xi became its top leader. Under Xi's predecessor, Hu Jintao, party leaders worried they were losing their grip on the economy and attempted to reassert government control over the private sector.

Moreover, the notion that the CPC must engage in an "intense struggle" against Western values - the subject of the now-infamous "Document No. 9" that was widely circulated among party members in 2013 - was likely agreed upon before Xi came to power. To be sure, once installed, Xi threw himself into the struggle with gusto.

Similarly, party leaders had been spooked by an alleged attempt by two prominent political figures - Bo Xilai, the then-party chief of Chongqing, and Zhou Yongkang, the party's former security chief - to seize power in 2012. At the same time, the rise of Big Tech, together with the splintering effects of globalization and urbanization, had made the CPC's top brass increasingly nervous. So, when Xi insisted on being given greater powers than his predecessors before taking over, they did not put up much of a fight.

Once in power, Xi proved adept at exploiting this growing nervousness to strengthen his control over the party, the government, and the country. His desire to maintain the CPC's authority over every aspect of life in China has fueled a growing cult of personality that places Xi's "Chinese Dream" at the heart of the Communist creed.

Increasingly convinced that Western democracies - namely, the United States - are in decline and that the future lies with his model of authoritarian governance, Xi has also overseen a shift in Chinese foreign policy toward grievance-based nationalism. 

A kind of right-wing character who exalts the genocidal Chinese regime and bemoans the United States' raison d'être has come into existence in recent years. I've dubbed this cohort "ChiCons," in spite of the fact that little about these people can be called conservative, in the American sense.

Sohrab Ahmari, a founder and editor of Compact, is a charter member of the ChiCon Club. Last October, he wrote a column for the American Conservative that decried American individualism while downplaying the genocide China is perpetrating against its Uyghur population. Before that, he had professed to be "at peace with a Chinese-led 21st century."

"Late-liberal America is too dumb and decadent to last as a superpower," he explained. "Chinese civilization, especially if it recovers more of its Confucian roots, will possess a great deal of natural virtue."

Now, Ahmari has produced another instant classic. At a conference held at Franciscan University of Steubenville earlier this month, he pontificated that "if China treated workers the way Amazon does, American elites would be outraged."

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