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This is storytelling from Compact Mag, it doesn't have anything to do with reality. Xi's dream is not to 'stop things from changing'. His dream is to make change, to reunite Taiwan into China and make it the most powerful country in the world, reshape the world system.
There's too much mysticism and obscurantism in discourse about transhumanism, I think at least in part because people are pattern-matching mystic, obscurantist religious dogma to transhumanism since both promise immortality and transcendent power. It's story-reasoning, not real reasoning. 'Tyrants don't want change'. Depends on the change! 'Xi Xinping wants to be immortal, as some eternal guardian of Chinese stasis'. That's fiction. Xi is a normal kind of leader. He wants more power. He wants advantageous change but not instability. The whole Marxist dialectic that Xi studies is in large part about systemic change due to technological and social development. He accepts the need to adapt.
The ideas behind transhumanism are actually based on something, it's not schizobabble. They're based on understanding of the human mind as an information system, not a soul or something forever tied to an organic body.
If you can render one person immortal, you can render many immortal. Xi Xinping is very unlikely to be so powerful that he can restrain the rest of the politburo from living together, not to mention business leaders pursuing immortality in secret. Whatever technology that allows for immortality will probably have many other economic and social effects that will likely destabilize the system and bring about new leadership dynamics. If he is so powerful as to suppress human greed for longevity, technological diffusion and economic-military-social transformations of the world, then transhumanism is secondary to whatever his personal hegemony is derived from, that's the interesting thing in this scenario.
This is a story idea. It's super abstract. I just don't see how you can call other, rooted-in-reality discussion of transhumanism childish and then write this.
By "childish" I meant: the abdication of all responsibility, the demolition of any barriers between you and the immediate satisfaction of your desires. Turning the cosmos into an eternal playroom. Traditional Christian "folk" conceptions of Heaven are childish for the same reasons.
Undoubtedly I chose the word for its normative connotations, but I certainly don't think that being childish is a bad thing in every instance. I think that traditional notions of "being an adult", "being a man", etc, are essentially scams, and I take a childish attitude regarding them, and I frequently encourage others to do the same.
There's nothing childish about stories, insofar as it's a story that structures a vision and a mode of life. Stories are how meaning is revealed.
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