By Judson Berger
Friday, October 02, 2026
You might not have heard of the case of Guo Degang. He’s
a popular comedian in China who recently was investigated for the offense of
modifying the lyrics to a Chinese revolutionary song in, of all places, Wuhan.
Reportedly, he changed the line, “The sun is about to set in the west; all is
quiet on Weishan Lake,” by swapping the lake for “the Forbidden City.” You had
to be there, I suppose. For this lyrical tweak, “he was reported to [Wuhan’s]
culture and tourism bureau,” according to the New York Times, and fines followed.
Now, before you say, “but Jimmy Kimmel” — if only Kimmel
could have been so subtle. Yet the Guo episode is one of many reminders lately that the China model is nothing to
emulate.
For the record, the FCC’s Kimmel fit was “preposterous,” as we’ve editorialized, and the court system is taking up that fight. And that is a crucial
detail, the independent judiciary. Ask Jimmy Lai. Jianli Yang, writing on Xi Jinping’s visit to
Washington, cites a more recent administration fight with the media to point up
and appreciate our differences in that regard:
Here an apparently
unrelated event during Xi’s visit becomes important.
The White House
had barred CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from White House grounds. The
organizations sued. Other major media organizations stood with them. Then U.S.
District Judge Timothy Kelly, appointed by Trump himself, ordered their access
restored. The administration complied.
Consider how
strange this must appear from Beijing. A president appoints a judge. The judge
later rules against the president. The president is angry. The ruling
nevertheless takes effect.
Jianli goes on to argue that, in the emerging AI debate,
America must hold onto its values and not adopt, for instance, “China’s methods
of surveillance, information control, centralized data collection, and
political management” in pursuit of technological goals.
Yet Beijing’s command of economy and society continues to
hold a certain allure among Western policymakers and provocateurs alike:
whether seen in the New Right’s pursuit of an industrial policy of our own or
the far left’s fandom toward (in the words of one noxious host) “Chinese-style
Communism” and “Cultural Revolution sh**” or, going farther back, the media’s early praise for China’s Covid response.
Thérèse Shaheen, addressing other misconceptions,
explains that the country is not doing nearly as well economically as is often
portrayed. She writes,
The Chinese
Communist Party has been working overtime to present China as an unstoppable
economic and technological power. Artificial intelligence has become
particularly useful to this narrative. China’s advances in AI are real. So are
its accomplishments in electric vehicles, batteries, robotics, drones, solar
panels, and advanced manufacturing. But the Trump administration, along with
other Western governments, much of the business world, and many economic and
political analysts confuse the technologically sophisticated portions of the
Chinese economy with the Chinese economy itself. China remains a mostly poor,
mostly uneducated, aging society riven with internal inconsistencies. Only a
sliver of its population is involved in the tech sectors that have the world so
mesmerized.
Despite Trump’s praise for Xi as a “great leader” and his
touting of their “fantastic relationship,” Jim Geraghty also lists the myriad ways China and its entities have tried to
(almost literally) blow up that relationship: sending components to Iran that
can be used in drones and missile guidance systems, providing satellite images
to Iran of a U.S. base in Jordan before a fatal attack over the summer,
allegedly conducting a cyber-espionage campaign that compromised federal
agencies, and so on.
But most important, the personal liberties we take for
granted remain unrealized in China, certainly by comparison. Guy Denton
published a startling profile this week on a member of the long-persecuted
Uyghur minority. Read it:
When Mihrigul
Tursun arrived in the United States, nothing around her made sense.
The food, clothes,
and buildings that permeated her new life were unfamiliar and disorienting.
Insomnia and anxiety haunted her. When she managed to sleep, she was plagued by
nightmares of what she’d escaped. In moments of distress, she would withdraw to
the bathroom to scream and weep in privacy, running the shower and playing loud
music to conceal the noise from her young children.
Slowly, however,
she adjusted. And while the trauma of her past life will never fully disappear,
America has come to feel like home. “I am safe here,” she told National
Review in a telephone interview. “Nobody can hurt me.”
Tursun, a Uyghur
Muslim, fled China to escape the government’s relentless campaign of religious
persecution. Her arrival in America came only after years of abuse in China’s
vast network of Uyghur internment camps. And her story is emblematic of a
broader crisis unfolding in China that the Western world seems reluctant to
address. The Chinese Communist Party does not simply wish to exterminate the
Uyghurs — it seeks to purge China of all forms of religious faith.
As Guy reports, Tursun was detained in a Xinjiang camp
several times, held once “in a roughly 45-square-foot cell with more than 60
other women,” conditions that led to several deaths: “The prisoners were
frequently tortured. Tursun was once strapped to a chair and electrocuted.
Others, she learned, were forcibly sterilized. Before she left China, Tursun
was injected with a mysterious substance. She fears that it may eventually kill
her.”
By all means, Hasan Piker, keep ranting
about the model of Chinese-style imprisonment.
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