CHINA’S leader Xi Jinping last month banished term limits to establish himself as the country’s leader for life and confirm his position as one of the world’s most powerful dictators.

He now officially joins a dubious list of 48 other men who rule their countries with an iron fist and regularly kill and torture anyone who gets in their way, reports The Sun.

According to Freedom House’s annual report, there are 49 dictators, or heads of authoritarian regimes, in existence today. Of the total global population, 37 per cent live in countries that are not free democracies.

Based on their rankings, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad is the worst in the world, restricting freedoms across every spectrum of the country, with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un ranked not far behind.

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Many of the dictatorships are in Africa, where longtime strongmen rule countries such as Equatorial Guinea, Swaziland and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Incredibly, Equatorial Guinea’s leader Teodoro Obiang has been accused by political opponents of skinning his enemies alive — then devouring their testicles.

Others, such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping, rule over some of the most powerful countries on the planet.

The report said: “The world’s leading autocracies, China and Russia, have seized the opportunity not only to step up internal repression but also to export their malign influence to other countries, which are increasingly copying their behaviour and adopting their disdain for democracy.

It is said that both Putin and Xi routinely order their state security services to jail, kill and torture political opponents and critics.

Many dictators also still exist in the Middle East. Syria’s leader Bashar al-Assad has waged a six-year civil war against rebels that has left some 400,000 dead.

To do this he’s used chemical weapons, as well as barrel bombs and cluster munitions.

In South-East Asia, Myanmar’s military leader General Min Aung Hlaing has in recent months overseen the slaughter of an estimated 43,000 Rohingya people.

Thousands more of the minority group, located in the country’s rural west, have been dragged from their homes and forced across the border to Bangladesh while government soldiers have destroyed their towns.

The leaders of Central Asia’s Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan fare no better.

And it was only a couple of years ago that Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov — who was notorious for boiling his enemies alive — passed away.

Kim Jong-un became North Korea’s third “Supreme Leader” in 2011 aged just 26 and immediately took off where his father and grandfather — both murderous tyrants in their own right — left off.

He has executed scores of officials and extended family members who he deemed untrustworthy to effectively cement his grip on power and instil fear in anyone doubting his capability to reign.

The heavy-smoking dictator — who is said to love European cheeses and Bordeaux’s finest red wines — also rules with complete disregard for the famine killing thousands of his citizens.

He also presides over the country’s notorious gulags, where thousands of political prisoners are tortured, starved, worked to death, raped and killed.

Despite holding regular elections, Russia’s longstanding leader is a dictator in all but name, having spent the past 18 years pulling the strings of power in various forms.

Recently, Mr Putin has become embroiled in a standoff with the Western world after being accused of ordered the poisoning of KGB defector Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, England on March 4.

The Russian leader has also carried out land grabs of the Crimea, Ukraine, and parts of Georgia, and propped up dictator Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria.

Domestically, the Russians use a method of torture dubbed the “Phone Call to Putin” where prisoners are given electric shocks to their earlobes.

This story originally appeared on The Sun and was reproduced with permission.