Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.
In a civilized world, this is non-negotiable. Yet in the shadow of Xi Jinping's dictatorship, this right has not only been violated—it has been obliterated. No room is left for independent thought. No conscience survives the indoctrination machine of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Belief is permitted only when it kneels before the CCP.
Xi Jinping doesn't merely censor expression—he criminalizes thought. He presides over a surveillance empire so vast, it has turned dystopia into daily reality. From AI-enhanced monitoring to forced "ideological training", the CCP under Xi Jinping has weaponized technology to enforce political obedience at a molecular level. It is not enough for people to remain silent—they must believe what the CCP commands. Thought reform is no longer metaphorical. It is practiced.
Take the case of Zhang Wuzhou, a schoolteacher in Guangdong dismissed for "improper political attitude" after posting a single, indirect criticism of the government on her private social media account. She did not call for revolution. She did not organize protests. Her so-called crime? Asking a question. In Xi Jinping's China, inquiry itself is insubordination.
Or the brutal treatment of Chen Hao, a philosophy graduate student from Beijing, detained for possessing "counter-revolutionary" reading material. That material? Essays by Enlightenment thinkers. Nothing subversive—unless reason itself is subversion. He was tortured in custody, forced to confess that his "Western thinking" was a danger to state stability. In a nation where the CCP is God, even Descartes becomes contraband.
Under Xi Jinping, the goal is not passive compliance—it is active submission. Universities have been purged. Professors dismissed. Students pressured to spy on one another in exchange for favor. Thought-policing is no longer covert—it is policy. The regime knows that the most efficient way to silence the body is to dominate the mind. And so Xi Jinping rules not through legitimacy, but through ideological suffocation.
The regime labels this "stability". In reality, it is terror. This is not governance. It is the psychological colonization of over a billion people.
What Xi Jinping has built is not a state—it is a soul-crushing machine. It strips every individual of dignity, autonomy, and moral selfhood. The CCP no longer simply demands obedience. It demands internalization. It does not ask people to pretend—it requires them to believe. Or at least, to be afraid enough to simulate belief so convincingly that their own thoughts disappear.
This is not stability. It is decay. And it will rot the foundations of the nation.
The Chinese people are not subjects. They are individuals with minds, hearts, and consciences—many of which now bleed in silence. Every arrest for a tweet, every forced confession, every career destroyed for a thought never spoken aloud—is a bullet fired into the promise of Article 18.
Xi Jinping's legacy will not be a "great rejuvenation". It will be remembered as a war against the human mind, a grotesque display of authoritarian fear masquerading as strength.
The world must stop speaking of China as "rising". Under Xi Jinping, China is shrinking—shrinking inward, shrinking ethically, shrinking into a pit of paranoia and repression where truth has no home, and freedom is a forgotten word.
If the international community remains silent, it becomes complicit.
The right to think freely is not Western. It is not cultural. It is universal. It is human.
And under Xi Jinping, that right is being murdered in plain sight.
