Opinion | In the US-China trade war, where is the bilateral humanity and the listening ear?

A China of 1.4 billion people cannot possibly be sewn up into one massive blanket of monochromatic metaphor. And if the Communist Party (membership: 89 million, all by itself) does efficiently enlist so many of the country’s brightest, how can all these ambitious Communist Party minds possibly agree on everything?

New reports highlight that Xi Jinping, China’s president and party chief, is narrowing the parameters of permissible debate, that the mainland media is feeling more fenced in than usual, and that professors are being pressured to toe the party line.

A law professor from the famed Tsinghua University, Xi’s alma mater, fears that his beloved China is heading back to the future, one with intellectually closed ranks and mandated Communist catechisms. Last but not least, out in China’s West, a sort of Rohingya-comparable detention and purge campaign looks to be playing out against Muslim Uygurs.

For the first time, doubts about Xi, the term-limitless president, are starting to crawl out from under the party floorboards. On the one hand, it is said, Xi enjoys too much control. Pessimists – or alarmists – now claim to see, rising from the historical miasma of mainland politics, the ghoulish outlines of the ghost of Mao Zedong, though it must be noted this would hardly be the first such post-Deng Xiaoping “sighting”.