Is Xi’s persecution of China’s Uighur Muslims a genocide in the making?
From the mid-1970s Deng Xiaoping and his successors sought consensus at home and trade and rapprochement with the west after the abominations of Mao’s “cultural revolution”. There was a golden moment when even this one-party state might have been negotiable, but it was tragically crushed when the tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square on 4 June 1989.Even then, however, it was tyranny tempered by trade, capitalism and a degree of circumspection, including term limits on communist party bosses. By contrast, XI is an unfettered emperor in the tradition of Mao.The world now faces not a pragmatic one-party state but a doctrinaire one-man dictatorship. And the dictator, into his second decade of power, is determined to stamp out latent as well as actual dissent, even at the price of western trade an