Xi Jinping Touts Hong Kong ‘Integration,’ Threatens Taiwan in Lunar New Year Speech

Chinese dictator Xi Jinping used his Lunar New Year address to praise tighter “integration” with Hong Kong and Macau while denouncing “Taiwan independence” and “interference by foreign forces” in China’s affairs.

“We have actively supported the better integration of Hong Kong and Macau into the overall development of the country,” Xi declared.

In Hong Kong’s case, that “integration” required shocking and horrifying human rights defenders around the world by imposing a tyrannical “national security law” that effectively criminalized all dissent against the Chinese Communist Party.

The Beijing-controlled puppet government of Hong Kong has ignored international calls to repeal the national security law, including from the United Nations.

As the international community realized Hong Kong was no longer a haven for free enterprise, a plush front lobby from which the outside world could do business with China, billions of dollars in Hong Kong’s wealth evaporated. In January 2024, the Hong Kong stock market slipped below its volume on the day China took control of the island in 1997.

Xi said that over the past year, his regime “strongly opposed separatist acts of Taiwan independence and interference by foreign forces, and resolutely defended the country’s sovereignty, security and development interests.”

As the South China Morning Post (SCMP) truculently noted, Xi has always loathed Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen as an alleged “separatist,” waged a relentless diplomatic campaign to isolate the island as punishment for electing her, and used everything from propaganda to threats to knock her party out of power in Taiwan’s January election — but Tsai’s vice president and chosen successor William Lai Ching-te won a landslide victory anyway.

Xi claimed China’s diplomacy “brought certainty and positive energy to a world of change and chaos” in 2023 — a rather difficult boast to back up, given the state of the world at the end of the lunar year, but he probably wanted his audience to think of something like the China-brokered rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran. China has been tirelessly promoting that agreement as evidence it has arrived as a major force on the geopolitical stage.

China has been profoundly unhelpful in the Hamas atrocities perpetrated against Israel and refuses to criticize Russia for invading Ukraine despite pleas from around the world for the Chinese to use their influence constructively. In February, China shifted its stance from awkward silence on Ukraine to active support for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasion.

Xi gave himself a pat on the back for creating a “good political ecology” in China by fighting corruption — which never seems to get any better in China, no matter how hard Xi claims he is fighting it — and “resolutely implementing” changes to pandemic policies to create “economic recovery and development.”

Xi’s insane citywide coronavirus lockdowns only ended in November 2022 because the Chinese people rose up in near-revolt against them, and China’s economic recovery has been extraordinarily weak. 

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) predicted that China’s economic slump will last until at least 2028. India’s stock market is booming as investors pull out of China’s faltering economy and build their “de-risking” portfolios to make themselves less dependent on China.