Roving Periscope: On health front too, Putin, Xi follow other dictators!
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Dictators enjoying superhuman-like powers often suffer from rare diseases that cripple them within. Adolf Hitler suffered from Parkinson’s Disease for years before he committed suicide in 1945. Josef Stalin’s ailed from atherosclerosis and suffered two heart attacks in May and October 1945, soon after the Second World War ended.
After their death, what happened to their countries is only too well known.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping are no different.
According to the media reports, Putin is suffering from abdominal cancer and Parkinson’s. Recently, he was spotted sitting with shaking hands clasped and a blanket covering trembling knees, a rarity for a dictator whose photographs proclaiming his good health the media routinely carried for years.
Now, the media has reported that China’s President-for-Life Xi Jinping is suffering from a rare disease, ‘cerebral aneurysm’, and had to be hospitalized at the end of 2021. It is a ballooning arising from an abnormal focal dilation of an artery in the brain that results from a weakening of the inner muscular layer in the wall of a blood vessel in the brain, according to the Johns Hopkins Institute.
But, in the initial phases after diagnosis, Xi declined hospitalization. He preferred treatment at home with traditional Chinese medicines rather than going for surgery, which softens the blood vessels and shrinks aneurysms.
For months, the Chinese speculated about his health as he avoided meeting the foreign leaders from the outbreak of Covid-19 in January 2020 until the Winter Olympics held in Beijing in February 2022.
A year before the pandemic broke out, Xi’s health issues became noticeable during his visits to Italy and France in March 2019. His gait looked unusual with a limp and he was noticed taking support while trying to sit down.
Likewise, speculations about his health did the rounds during and after an address to the public in Shenzhen in October 2020, as he delayed his appearance, and delivered a short speech slowly amid a bout of coughing.
The fresh media reports came as China’s economy is under a lot of strain because of oil and gas price hikes and disruption to the supply chain caused by the Ukraine conflict, and strict, even brutal, implementation of the zero-Covid policy that has angered millions of home-caged Chinese people.
Despite his personal health problems, however, Xi is seeking a third term as China’s President later this year and trying to humor the people. As the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) prepares to host the 20th Congress, his government has, for now, suspended the much-trumpeted focus on ‘common prosperity” which annoyed the Red Billionaires.
The government has also suspended penalties on technology czars and is trying to focus on stabilizing the stressed economy. Xi is making efforts to attract investments and portray China as a more prosperous, influential, and stable country under his leadership.
