China Is Getting Away with It

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Friday, January 01, 2021

 

It was a heckuva year — for the Politburo.

 

In the final week of 2020, China sentenced citizen journalist Zhang Zhan to four years in prison for the crime of being an early challenger to the government’s COVID-19 narrative. It also imprisoned most of the Hong Kong 12, a group of activists who tried to escape from Hong Kong to Taiwan on a speed boat.

 

China broke its treaty with the United Kingdom over Hong Kong this year and destroyed the system of common-law liberty that existed in that island redoubt. It engaged in a cover-up of the emerging coronavirus pandemic in Wuhan and, along the way, it suborned the World Health Organization, forbade foreign health investigators from doing on-the-ground work, lobbied against the inclusion of Taiwanese health authorities in discussions of the emergency, disappeared whistleblowers, and continued sending flights abroad from Wuhan when it had canceled them domestically.

 

Chinese diplomatic personnel threatened that the United States would be “plunged into the mighty sea of coronavirus,” while pondering whether to ban the export of essential pharmaceuticals. The Chinese ambassador to the United Kingdom appeared on one of the premier BBC political chat shows and shrugged at video footage of manacled Uyghurs being loaded like chattel onto train cars in Western China. He then promptly implied that Britain no longer wanted to be a serious nation because it decided to limit the involvement of Huawei, a Chinese-backed telecom, in the building of Britain’s 5G network. Huawei had recently been raided in Poland for spying.

 

What are Western powers doing in response? Why, signaling their submissive willingness to make amends with the Chinese Communist Party, of course.

 

During a year in which it was an unrepentant geopolitical arsonist, China is emerging stronger than ever, thanks to such feckless complicity as follows:

 

European leaders met with Chinese President Xi Jinping this week to bring about a signature Chinese “investment” plan in the European Union. They are doing this, supposedly, to chart a middle way between the United States and the CCP, and to open up access to Chinese markets.

 

“Progress implies cooperation by both sides, implies reciprocity, and implies trust,” said Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, in announcing the agreement. But China does not follow its own agreements. State subsidies and investment are opaque, precisely to use these trade agreements as a form of mercantile expansion. Von der Leyen also said that human rights were non-negotiable European values. And yet, at the conclusion of this agreement, no one was sprung from the prison camps of Xinjiang or from the cells holding Hong Kong political prisoners.

 

Angela Merkel approved a deal to allow Huawei more access to contracts in the German 5G network, and even appeared in a sickening press conference in which the Chinese Communist flag and the EU flag were made to look like they were patterned after one another.

 

It’s not just the EU but the incoming Biden administration that is already signaling that bygones will be bygones after 2020. That’s why Disney Chairman Bob Iger’s name is being floated for U.S. ambassador to China. Disney has been slavishly flattering the Chinese government in hopes of being allowed access to the profitable Chinese market. This included credited “thanks” to the provincial authorities in Xinjiang at the end of the Disney film Mulan. It is these provincial authorities who are carrying out genocidal policies against Uyghurs.

 

These are the leaders of the free world, sucking up to Chairman Xi.

 

Remember, dear reader, all the hysterical objections to backsliding on the rule of law in Central Europe, or all the fear and horror about Russian subversion of democracy? It’s all said by the same people now cozying up to China.

 

They’ve concluded that there is no money to make from Hungarian or Polish nationalism. The cash grab in Russia ended in the late 1990s. Nationalist politics in these countries is partly an attempt to reserve the wealth of national resources for co-nationals. But there is plenty of money to be had selling out Europe and America to the Chinese.

 

The leaders of the free world may have to ignore a genocide in Xinjiang, brush off the cries of imprisoned democrats in Hong Kong, and absorb a pandemic here or there. They may have to find tricky ways of quelling their own native working classes too. But they intend to make the sale.

 

Remember the NBA officials who had to kick out fans criticizing China? That’s a preview of how our elected governments will soon be treating us.