Originally published by Gatestone Institute
·
In an article in Xinhua, one of the Chinese
Communist Party's mouthpieces, Beijing threatened to halt pharmaceutical
exports, after which America would be "plunged into the mighty sea of
coronavirus... — Yanzhong Huang, senior fellow for global health, Council on
Foreign Relations, Twitter, March 4, 2020.
· China's leaders are probably hoping that you
cannot challenge a powerhouse that is selling you most of your vital
medications.
· "Hidden behind declarations of solidarity,
China plans to buy out our troubled companies and infrastructure" — Bild, March 19, 2020.
· Italy, a country hit hard by China's coronavirus
pandemic, is now at the center of a strategic Chinese propaganda campaign.
Beijing has sent doctors and supplies to Italy and is doing the same all over
Europe. In Italy you can see posters saying, "Go, China!" China is
trying to buy our silence and complicity. Sadly, that is already taking place.
· China is not helping at this point out of
"solidarity". The Chinese regime is now seeking to portray itself as
the world's savior. Beijing, at the beginning of the pandemic, did not care
about the lives of even its own people: it was busy censoring the news.
·
"The West is
so tolerant, passive, accommodating and naive towards Beijing. Westerners...
are seduced like an old man in front of a young girl.... Europe shows all its
weakness. It does not realize that the Chinese offensive threatens its freedom
and values". — Liao Yiwu, Chinese writer exiled in Berlin, Le Point International, April 6, 2019.
The Chinese Communist Party is the "central threat of our
times", US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo astutely said in January.
Back then, coronavirus was already spreading throughout China and over the
world; the Communist Party's attempt to hide the epidemic proved that Pompeo
was more than right. "My concern is that this cover-up, this disinformation
that the Chinese Communist Party is engaged in, is still denying the world the
information it needs so that we can prevent further cases or something like
this from recurring again", Pompeo added this week.
Had China responded to the outbreak three weeks earlier than it did,
cases of coronavirus could have been reduced by 95%, according to a study by the
University of Southampton. In those three weeks, China was busy hiding the
truth. According to Steve
Tsang, director of the University of London's SOAS China Institute, "It is
the cover-up of the Communist Party for the first two months or so which
created conditions to generate a global pandemic".
Chinese
leaders, however, seemed obsessed only with the sustainability of their
totalitarian regime, and as eager to silence any criticism as they have been in
the past. Since January, the
evidence of China's deliberate cover-up of the coronavirus in Wuhan has become
a matter of public record. The
Chinese government censored and detained brave
doctors and whistleblowers who attempted to sound the alarm. One of China's
richest entrepreneurs, Jack Ma, recently disclosed that
China hid at least one-third of the coronavirus cases.
China
has been able to grow into a superpower because it adopted economic practices
from the West. No other country ever achieved such rapid economic and social
progress for such a sustained period of time. However, hopes placed by the West
in the Chinese market also nourished a dangerous mirage. We in the West thought
that a modernizing China with a rising GDP would also democratize and come to
respect transparency, pluralism and human rights. Instead, the mirage turned
into a disaster as we watched China become even more of a "totalitarian state".
The
nature of the Chinese regime -- its ban on the free press and
all critical voices; the
absolute domination of the Communist Party over social, spiritual and economic
actors; imprisoning minorities and crushing freedom of conscience -- is also
contributing to the emergence of this public health disaster. The cost, in
terms of human lives and world's GDP, is immense.
The
Chinese government's complicity in the pandemic is now an opportunity for the
West to reevaluate its ties to Beijing. According to Guy
Sorman, a French-American expert on China:
"Like useful idiots, we have
not only helped the Party prosper but, even worse, we have given up on our
humanitarian, democratic, and spiritual values in doing so."
"It
is time", stated the American columnist, Marc A.
Thiessen, "to immunize our economy and national security from our
dependence on a deceitful regime".
China
is waging a double information war: one abroad and one for its own public, both
led by the Chinese authorities with President Xi Jinping at its head. They
apparently see the West as weak and submissive. We have been.
China
seems to believe that it is rising, while the West is in decline. "We find
ourselves in what Germans call a Systemwettbewerb, a 'competition
of systems' between liberal democracies and China's authoritarian state
capitalism, which is increasingly projecting its absolute claim to power beyond
its borders", said Thorsten
Benner, co-founder and director of the Global Public Policy Institute in
Berlin. The Cold War with Russia was clearer.
"We had an ideological and
security antagonist who was not an economic competitor. There was a Chinese
wall between the economies of the West and the Soviet Union. Today, we are
confronted with an opponent who is a powerful economic competitor and intricately
involved in the political economy of the West. At the same time, we also depend
on cooperation with China on transnational issues such as climate change and
pandemics. China's authoritarian state capitalist system with its hegemonic
ambitions is by far the most difficult strategic challenge the West has faced
to date"
According to
historian Niall Ferguson, "China today poses a bigger economic challenge
than the Soviet Union ever did". The Soviet Union could never rely on a
dynamic private sector, as China is doing. In some markets -- such as
technology -- China is already ahead of the United States. Not only that; the
Chinese economy, the world's second-largest, is more closely integrated with
the West than the Soviet one ever was. China's totalitarian one-party rule
allows greater personal freedoms, at least at the moment, than the Soviet Union
did. The coronavirus epidemic is, in fact, partly a consequence of the freedom
of movement Chinese citizens enjoy.
China
has also been able to convince much of the West that it is not an enemy.
Beijing's goal has appeared to be to try to draw the West -- and the rest of the world --
into its economic and ideological orbit. China opened markets in the West while
it offered to its own people a kind of devil's bargain: give up your ideas and
principles and you will enjoy material improvement and societal security.
Meanwhile, China became an industrial and technological behemoth, a feat the
Soviet Union could only dream about.
Consider,
for instance, pharmaceuticals. According to Yanzhong Huang, a senior
fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, Chinese companies
supply the US with more than 90% of its antibiotics, vitamin C and ibuprofen,
as well as 70% of acetaminophen and 40-45% of heparin. The US was never
dependent on the Soviet Union for that.
In
an article in Xinhua,
one of the Chinese Communist Party's mouthpieces, Beijing threatened to halt
pharmaceutical exports, after which the US would be "plunged into the
mighty sea of coronavirus". The Xinhua article was actually entitled,
"Be bold: the world owes China a thank you."
Fox
News host Tucker Carlson was right to blast members of
the American elite for selling out their country to Chinese economic interests.
China's
leaders are probably hoping that you cannot challenge a powerhouse that is
selling you most of your vital medications.
Italy,
a country hit hard by China's coronavirus pandemic, is now at the center of a
strategic Chinese propaganda campaign. Beijing has sent doctors and
supplies to Italy and is doing the same all over Europe. In Italy, you
can see posters saying, "Go, China!" ["Forza China!"]
China is trying to buy our silence and complicity. Sadly, that is already
taking place. In February, while some Italian officials (on the political
right) were urging Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte to quarantine schoolchildren
in the north who were just returning from holidays in China, Italy's highest
officials were busy trying to please Beijing. Italy's President, Sergio
Mattarella; Minister for Culture, Dario Franceschini, and Minister for Foreign
Affairs, Luigi Di Maio, hosted a concert in Rome for "Italian-Chinese friendship".
China's President Xi Jinping warmly thanked them.
China
is not helping at this point out of "solidarity". The Chinese regime
is now seeking to portray itself as the world's savior. Beijing, at the
beginning of the pandemic, did not care about the lives of even its own people:
it was busy censoring the news.
"Hidden
behind declarations of solidarity, China plans to buy out our troubled
companies and infrastructure", according to
Germany's leading newspaper, Bild. Italy was the first G-7 country to sign
up for China's global investment program, a deal that rightly raised concerns
in the US. China seems to be ready to continue its expansion into the Italy's
economy and strategic interests.
China's
Communist Party also seems to be at war with the free flow of information
internationally. The regime, in the most sweeping media ejection from China
since the death of Mao Zedong, recently expelled US
journalists. Beijing has also tried to shift the blame for the pandemic to the
US by saying that coronavirus originated with US military personnel in Wuhan.
Lijian Zhao, spokesman for China's Foreign Ministry, posted statements to
that effect on Chinese social media and Twitter. The coronavirus crisis is now
a battleground for Chinese propaganda.
The
paradox is that the Global Times, a media outlet of the Chinese
Communist Party, spreads false anti-US propaganda on Twitter, which is banned in China. Twitter,
meanwhile, banned the website
Zero Hedge, for publishing an article linking a Chinese scientist to the
outbreak of coronavirus. Twitter also unfortunately decided that
China's Communist Party does not violate the rules of social media by spreading
lies against the US.
Already
a few years ago, in 2013, a secret Chinese Communist Party directive known
as Document No. 9 called
for the rejection of seven Western ideas, such as "Western constitutional
democracy", "universal values" of human rights, Western-inspired
notions of media independence and civic participation, ardently pro-market
"neo-liberalism," and "nihilist" criticisms of the Party's
questionable past. Targets to combat included "Western embassies,
consulates, media operations and nongovernmental organizations". Huang
Kunming, the Party's propaganda chief, attacks "some
Western countries who use their technological advantages and dominance of
discourse that they have accumulated over a long period to peddle so-called
'universal values'". China's Education Minister Yuan Guiren, a former
president of Beijing Normal University, threw in: "Never
let textbooks promoting Western values appear in our classes".
In
speeches and official documents, the President Xi talks about a struggle
between "socialism with Chinese
characteristics" and "Western anti-China forces" with
their "extremely malicious" ideas of freedom, democracy and human
rights. The West seems to be their target. According to a new study by the
International Republican Institute:
"The Chinese Communist Party...
is employing a unique set of tactics in the economic and information domains
that undermines many developing countries' democratic institutions and future
prosperity as their dependence on China grows."
China
evidently understands how to use Western media for its own propaganda.
"The Vatican and the Western business elite", wrote Michael
Brendan Dougherty, "once instrumental in the West's winning the Cold War,
have been brought to heel by the Chinese Communist party". The Chinese
regime has succeeded where the Soviet regime failed. Last December, a
six-year-old girl in London preparing Christmas cards found a message inside:
"We are foreign prisoners in Shanghai Qingpu Prison China, forced to work
against our will", read the
handwritten note. "Please help us and notify human rights
organization". Western capitalism has even become complicit with
Chinese slavery.
Western
brands are not alone in caving in out of fear of "offending" the
Communist Party. Western culture has been eagerly submitting itself to self-censorship about
China. "The West is so tolerant, passive, accommodating and naive towards
Beijing," said Liao Yiwu, a
Chinese writer exiled in Berlin.
"Westerners look at China with
incredulous eyes, they are seduced like an old man in front of a young girl. Everyone trembles before Chinese omnipotence.
Europe shows all its weakness. It does not realize that the Chinese offensive
threatens its freedom and values".
China's
embassy in the Czech Republic is now financing a study
course at Charles University, the most prestigious in the country. British
universities are today largely dependent on Chinese students; conservative
estimates put their combined tuition fees at about $1.75 billion. Australia
is now even more reliant, with 200,000 Chinese students. If they go back to
China or if Chinese donations stop
coming to these faculties, they stand to lose about $4 billion.
The 1,500 branches of
the Confucius Institute that China's regime has established in 140 countries
offer language and "cultural" programs. However, according to Matt
Schrader, a China analyst with the Alliance for Securing Democracy, these
institutes are "propaganda tools". Last October,
Belgium banned the head of
Confucius Institute in Brussels, Xinning Song, after security services accused
him of spying for Beijing.
In
2013, when the University of Sydney shut down a talk by
Tibet's Dalai Lama on campus, many saw the university's links to
Chinese interests as being involved in the lobbying efforts to stop the
previously approved event. Topics such as Tibet, Taiwan independence, or the
dissident Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, are taboo.
According
to a Bloomberg report, China is also infiltrating Europe's political landscape by
supporting political parties and inviting politicians to China. President Xi,
taking his ideological battle abroad, even donated a statue of
Karl Marx to his German hometown Trier on the 200th anniversary of Marx's
birth.
Beijing,
unsurprisingly, has been using Western multilateral institutions to its own
advantage. As Michael Collins detailed in a report for the Council on Foreign
Relations, Beijing has expanded its presence in the World Health Organization.
"China's WHO contributions have grown by 52% since 2014 to approximately
$86 million", Collins states.
"This is largely due to China's increase in assessed
contributions which are based on a country's economic development and
population. However, China has also slightly increased voluntary contributions
from $8.7 million in 2014 to approximately $10.2 million in 2019".
Like
the former Soviet Union, China now seems to be building a giant apparatus of
control. They call it the "Internet police".
Try to imagine the former East Germany's secret police, the Stasi, using the
most advanced surveillance system in the world: This is China in 2020.
Communist
dictatorships always end up following the same script. The Soviet writer Boris Pasternak was
awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature but the communist regime prevented him
from receiving it. In China, literary critic, writer, poet, and human rights
activist Liu Xiaobo was
awarded Nobel Prize for Peace but was never able to receive it: he died under guard in
a Chinese hospital. The Soviet Union had
forced-labor camps just as China does. Chinese
dissident Harry Wu, who endured 19 years in jail, compared the
Chinese camps (laogai) to the Soviet gulag and Nazi concentration camps.
In
the Soviet Union, writers, politicians, generals and doctors who were silenced
and executed under Stalin, were later "rehabilitated" by the Soviet leaders
after Stalin's death. The Chinese Communist Party just "exonerated" Dr. Li
Wenliang who warned about the coronavirus outbreak. He was accused of "making false comments
and disturbing the social order", then forced to recant, and soon after,
at the age of 33, died of the disease. It is a shameful attempt by the Chinese
officials to whitewash their own image.
In
a column last week for the Spanish daily El Pais, the Nobel
Laureate Mario Vargas Llosa wrote about
coronavirus:
"Nobody seems to be warning that none of this could have
happened in the world if popular China were a free country and democratic
rather than a dictatorship".
Vargas
Llosa then likened the epidemic outbreak to Russia's Chernobyl disaster during
the Soviet era. Both dictatorships censored and silenced information about the
crises. In response, Beijing's regime not only called Vargas Llosa "irresponsible", but
also banned his books
from Chinese e-book platforms. Vargas Llosa has warned Western
"fools" not to believe in China, "the free market with a
political dictatorship", and that "what happened with the coronavirus
should open the eyes of the blind".
The
risk now is that, instead of Chernobyl which led, in part, to Soviet Union's
downfall, China's communist regime will enjoy reinforcement -- especially if,
due to the coronavirus crisis, the American people in November fail to support
the first president in the last 40 years who has openly challenged China.
The
Western dream of a "renaissance of the Chinese nation" has
now turned into a globalized nightmare. Hundreds of millions across the world
are in lockdown; thousands are dead; the economies of Western countries are
paralyzed, with some on the verge of collapse. Empty shops and streets are
commonplace.
This
might be what analysts call "the end of liberal order".
China's communists today are more capitalist than Marxist, at least at the
state level. President Xi has adopted "market Leninism" -- mixing a state-run
economy with a "terrifying form of totalitarianism".
The West needs to wake up to China's duplicity.
Giulio Meotti, Cultural Editor for Il
Foglio, is an Italian journalist and author.
