Commentary
In early March, the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) “Two Sessions” began, during which time top officials of the CCP met to discuss policy. This year, as expected, Xi Jinping was anointed for a third term as Party chief.
Concurrent with this self-aggrandizing pomp are the “sensitive days,” during which the regime’s stability maintenance agency takes the CCP’s opponents on forced “holiday,” thereby ensuring the regime’s glossy image is not marred by any unsightly nay-saying (namely truth-telling) coming from known dissenters.
The term in Chinese is a decisively passive phrase, “to be taken on holiday,” euphemistically implying without naming outright the sense of lassitude, hopelessness, and lack of any shred of amusement or replenishment commonly associated with “going” on a vacation of one’s own accord. This is a bizarre form of punishment perfected by the regime over the last decade, part of its overall toolkit of repression reserved for those specific actors it has in its spotlight but who remain—for the moment—out of actual prison….