Washington: Chinese President Xi Jinping’s policies have left the country with very few friends and is now facing fire at home as well as abroad, The Washington Post reported.

China’s slow economy is giving a hard time to its residents and as well as to the Chinese President. The country’s population is shrinking and also aging which is questing the work force. At the same time, the youth employment had reached to such striking data that the government suspended publishing the relevant data this summer.

In 2008, China allowed Xi to become the head of the country and he was leading the nation into the path of making it one of the economic engines but the current situation is just showing a different picture. One that can be seen in the macroeconomic data as well as the waning optimism of a younger generation that knew only the boom times.

China has still not recovered from the wounds that the nation received during the pandemic’s draconian lockdowns, and now the overheated real estate sector is making the situation even worse, as per The Washington Post.

Xi’s ever-tightening authoritarian grip over virtually all facets of life in China is arguably making the situation worse. “The government’s pursuit of total control has set the country on a path of slower growth and created multiplying pockets of dissatisfaction,” wrote Ian Johnson, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a long time China watcher.

China’s policy is also impacting its ties with foreign nations. Recently, US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo visited China and warned that the prevailing uncertainty, stoked also by the tough actions taken by the Chinese government against foreign businesses, is making China “un-investable” in the eyes of U.S. investors.

“China needs to recognize that they can no longer rely on the sheer mass of their market to attract that type of foreign investment,” The Washington Post reported while quoting Naomi Wilson, vice president of policy, Asia and global trade of the Information Technology Industry Council.

“Even among Chinese companies, there have been efforts to relocate outside of China,” she added.

Recent surveys of global public opinion find largely negative views of China’s influence in international affairs, including in some middle-income countries outside the West. In Asia, the United States has steadily bolstered a web of alliances and partnerships with China’s neighbours, bonds being strengthened directly out of concern for China’s increasingly aggressive behaviour.

Chinese officials resent the implication that their state — rather than what they see as the overweening US hegemon — represents a threat to stability and order. But Beijing can’t seem to help itself, The Washington Post reported.