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KnowingandFeelingthe“ChinaDream”:LogicandRhetoricinthePoliticalLanguageofXi'sChina Kerry Brown...

When the first waves of Chinese graduate students arrived on American campuses in the early 1980s, they were excited at entering an unfettered learning environment. After the recent ravages of the Cultural Revolution, political science students had few inhibitions about studying what had gone wrong in China as they were growing up.

In 755 the Tang dynasty poet Tu Fu wrote about the corruptions of court life:In the central halls there are fair goddesses; An air of perfume moves with each charming figure. They clothe their guests with warm furs of sable, Entertain them with the finest music and pipe and string, Feed them with the broth of camel’s pad, With pungent tangerines, and oranges ripened in frost.

With Xi casting himself as a 21st-century Mao, China risks ‘arbitrary rule’.

The secretiveness of Beijing’s ruling party is often dismissed as an eccentricity but with Xi on the verge of a norm-breaking third term, it has real-world consequences.