Peter Landers
China’s Communist Party chief Xi Jinping doesn’t have to worry about opposition leaders at home criticizing his record. But not far away, a U.S. diplomat has seized that role for himself with barbed and sometimes sarcastic criticism.
Rahm Emanuel, Washington’s ambassador in Tokyo, is stepping up personal attacks on Xi, depicting the Chinese leader as an incompetent steward of the economy, a foreign-policy failure and a bumbling would-be Machiavellian whose government is a mess.
The latest jab on X, formerly Twitter, came Friday when Emanuel speculated with three question marks that Chinese Defense Minister Li Shangfu, who hasn’t been seen in public since Aug. 29, was missing meetings “because he was placed on house arrest???” Alluding to other top officials who have recently lost their jobs under mysterious circumstances, he added, “Might be getting crowded in there.”
U.S. officials said Li was being removed from his post.
A week earlier, Emanuel had been among the first outside China to publicly note Li’s disappearance. He said that Xi’s cabinet “is now resembling Agatha Christie’s novel ‘And Then There Were None’” and suggested that the unemployment rate of ministers might exceed that of China’s young people, which stood at 21% this summer before Beijing stopped disclosing the data.
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