Billionaire George Soros, on Monday said Chinese president Xi Jinping was the “greatest threat” to open society throughout the world. However, he added in his speech that the crisis engulfing China’s “unsustainable” property market could be the downfall of Xi, along with other mounting problems such as containing Omicron, the pursuit of total social control, and a plummeting birth rate.

Soros, the retired hedge fund manager who has long warned groups such as BlackRock against investing in China because of its authoritarian regime, likened the upcoming Winter Olympic Games to a Nazi Germany propaganda stunt.

“Like Germany in 1936, [China] will attempt to use the spectacle to score a propaganda victory for its system of strict controls,” Soros told think tank Hoover Institution’s forum on China on Monday (Tuesday AEDT).

But the striking prediction from the 91-year-old, who maintains China is the greatest threat to open societies in the world, is that the Xi regime could be replaced this year as his economy and pandemic responses fail.

“Xi Jinping has many enemies. Although nobody can oppose him publicly because he controls all the levers of power, there is a fight brewing within the CCP that is so sharp that it has found expression in various party publications,” Soros said.

Additionally, the threat to the west from the Chinese government is “more brazen, more damaging” than ever before, FBI director Christopher Wray has said, accusing Beijing of stealing American ideas and innovation and launching massive hacking operations.

Wray’s remarks made clear that even as American foreign policy remains consumed by Russia-Ukraine tensions, the US continues to regard China as its biggest threat to long-term economic security.

“When we tally up what we see in our investigations, over 2,000 of which are focused on the Chinese government trying to steal our information or technology, there’s just no country that presents a broader threat to our ideas, innovation, and economic security than China,” Wray said, according to a copy of the speech provided by the FBI.

"The harm from the Chinese government’s economic espionage isn’t just that its companies pull ahead based on illegally gotten technology. While they pull ahead, they push our companies and workers behind,” Wray said. “That harm – company failures, job losses – has been building for a decade to the crush we feel today. Its harm felt across the country, by workers in a whole range of industries.”

Image courtesy: Bloomberg