This is not receiving the coverage it deserves. It is probably not new, meaning, it did not just start happening within the last few days (although this “president for life” thing *IS* new) but China is taking a very serious and abrupt turn towards a much more repressive dictatorship. We have become very conditioned in the US to thinking of China as kind of a big panda bear ready to sell us cheap goods and with generally non-belligerent intentions. This illusion is or should be over.
You can thank U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the whole deluded U.S. foreign policy establishment from Kissinger down.
Many still have Marco Polo mentality. That is, they can go to China full of abundant treasure and get fabulously rich. They dismiss every caution which gets in the way of their treasure hunt. We are not living in Medieval Europe, and China is not a country so far away from home that it cannot affect you. But somehow many have been clinging to this myth. The treasure hunt has huge price tag.
They are now seeing the real China up close. I wonder what Tom Friedman can say about this. Or Jim O'Neill.