Thứ Sáu, 24 tháng 4, 2020

The World Is Awaking to the Ugly Realities of the Chinese Regime

World

The World Is Awaking to the Ugly Realities of the Chinese Regime


Therese Shaheen
National Review

Earlier this month, a McDonald’s restaurant in Guangzhou, in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, was forced to remove a sign warning that “black people are not allowed to enter.” Upon removing it, McDonald’s told NBC News in a statement that the sign was “not representative of our inclusive values.”
That sounds like what it almost certainly is: a product of the company’s communications department, called in to do damage control. And while we can accept that the McDonald’s corporation itself is not, on the whole, racist, the sign does unfortunately represent China’s values.
As NR’s Jim Geraghty has noted, the incident is an example of the “xenophobia and racism” on display just now in China. This phenomenon is not new to the PRC, but the government has an extra incentive to lean into it now, because it helps the government’s concerted campaign to deflect blame for the global coronavirus pandemic.
There is ample evidence of this. A recent Reuters report noted that ambassadors from several African nations recently engaged the Chinese foreign ministry to raise concerns about how their citizens are being mistreated in China. Passport holders from African countries are subject to extreme stop-and-search practices. Many who are coronavirus-negative are being forced into 30-day quarantines anyway. Foreigners from a range of countries who can document clean bills of health are being denied entry to places of business and other facilities simply because they are foreigners.
Much of this is taking place in Guangzhou, known to some as “Little Africa” because it has the largest African-immigrant population in China. To some extent, African immigration to China is a by-product of Xi Jinping’s effort to build a global network of trade and infrastructure investment that gives the regime a perceived geopolitical advantage over the West in the developing world. Ghanaians, Nigerians, and other immigrants to China are all too happy to take advantage of the work and educational opportunities China offers. But many of them have learned the hard way just how limited the country’s kindness is.
In fact, China’s ill-treatment of foreign-minority populations reflects how the Chinese government treats its own citizens. Muslim minority Uighurs are being held in so-called re-education camps intended to strip them of their religious and ethnic identity, and in many cases subjected to forced labor. In Tibet, which China has oppressed since the very beginning of Communist rule in 1949, things have gotten worse under Xi: Last year, Freedom House named Tibet the second-least-free territory on Earth, behind only war-torn Syria.
It would be natural to presume that such discrimination is a regrettable result of the dominance of the Han Chinese, who are more than 90 percent of China’s population and dominate its society. (By comparison, ethnic Uighurs, for example, make up less than 1 percent of the population.)  The Han Chinese, with 1.3 billion members, are the largest ethnic group not just in the PRC but in the world. Antipathy, oppression, and discrimination toward minority ethnic groups in a country with such a dominant majority is regrettable but not surprising, and not unique to the PRC.
Beijing’s response to critics who note all of this is to try to drown them out by highlighting America’s own well-documented history of racial discrimination. But that’s the point: Our historical sins are well-documented, and they inform just about every aspect of our public policy. A free press and other institutions hold up our actions for the world to see. There is no mystery about how our country continues to deal with the effects of the institutionalized discrimination that persisted for nearly two centuries after our own founding, and for a century after we fought a war to end it.
That said, there is a quality to the pattern of behavior in the PRC that transcends ethnicity. Chinese racial discrimination is horrifying in its own right, of course. But it also suggests a farther-reaching chauvinism that is emerging as the defining characteristic of the Xi era.
Han Chinese make up the same percentage of the population in Hong Kong as on the mainland, and are 97 percent of the population in Taiwan. Neither Hong Kongers nor Taiwanese have suffered any less at Xi’s hands for that. Nor, for that matter, have the 400 million mostly Han Chinese living on less than $5 a day in the country outside China’s megacities, who face vicious discrimination from urban elites.
In some ways, the gulf between the rich in China’s cities and the poor in its rural areas has been institutionalized through the longstanding “hukou” system of internal registration, which hampers movement between regions and creates what amounts to an economic caste system. While Xi has made hukou reform a priority in order to create greater opportunity for urban migration and prosperity, the system continues to reinforce the divide between urban haves and rural have-nots. As the former become wealthier and more global in their perspective, the disdain they frequently show for those who are different — whether from Africa or rural China — is becoming more pronounced.
Xi-era chauvinism is beginning to create a backlash around the world. One example is the cooling ardor toward the Belt and Road Initiative, Xi’s aforementioned effort to gain footholds in foreign markets. Many projects have caused host countries to take on excessive debt. In one instance, a strategic port in Sri Lanka was ceded to China when the debt burden became too high. Politicians in Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and other countries have reversed earlier positions of support because of what they see as China’s discriminatory debt diplomacy.
This backlash is appearing even in European countries that once saw China as a potential counterbalance to the Trump administration. In Sweden, for instance, some cities have ended sister-city relationships with Chinese counterparts, and the country has closed its Confucius Institute schools, dealing a blow to one of Beijing’s other soft-power propaganda operations. European leaders, including NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenburg and French president Emmanuel Macron, have also called for better understanding of how Beijing handled the coronavirus pandemic and pushed back against China’s campaign to deflect blame for it.
In short, the world finally seems to be recovering from its decades-long love affair with the PRC, which peaked with the rise of Xi, who was initially viewed as a reformer who would bring China onto the world’s stage as an equal, responsible actor. The true nature of the regime is becoming more apparent, and the world doesn’t like what it sees: the dreadful treatment of ethnic minorities and the rural poor; the obvious interference in Taiwan’s recent presidential election; the belligerence toward Hong Kong as the “one country, two systems” agreement is systematically dismantled and pro-democracy leaders are arrested or just disappear; the bullying of emerging economies through debt diplomacy; and now what is very likely a global pandemic caused by Chinese negligence.
For the first time since the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre 30 years ago, the world has awakened to these ugly realities, and if anything good has emerged from this chaotic geopolitical era, that might be it. Here’s hoping that more aggressive action to counter Beijing comes next.

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  World
To Confront China After Coronavirus, We Must See the Bigger Picture



Lewis Libby
National Review



(correct translated Vietnamese)
Họ cho phép không phải một, mà hàng ngàn người nhiễm bệnh rời khỏi Trung Quốc và bước vào một thế giới không nghi ngờ, một thế giới bị Bắc Kinh ru ngủ.
 
NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE I n a popular movie two decades ago, hard-eyed criminals released into Sydney a woman infected with a virus, knowing that unsuspecting Australians would catch the highly contagious disease and, traveling on, unwittingly spread death across a hundred homelands. This past winter, the hard-eyed leaders of China did worse. They allowed not one, but thousands of infected to leave China and enter an unsuspecting world, a world lulled by Beijing. The crucial question is: Why?
“China caused an enormous amount of pain [and] loss of life . . . by not sharing the information they had,” Secretary of State Pompeo said on April 23. America is angry, he added, and while much remains to be known, China “will pay a price.”
No subpoenas, no oversight committees, no tell-all books will expose President Xi’s calculations as the novel coronavirus spread inside China. The unelected of Beijing guard well their secret debates. The CCP knows the virtues of opacity, of letting uncertainty, complacency, and wishful thinking paralyze the West. Exploiting these has been its way.
In 2018, a major Trump-administration speech called CCP misdeeds to task. Some, including, notably, Japan’s prime minister, applauded. But many nations looked toward their feet, too reluctant, too sophisticated, perhaps too intimidated to bestir. Staggering COVID-19 losses may yet remind the world of the dangers of drift as great powers go astray.
Today’s American, European, Japanese, and Asian policymakers, like those of centuries past, bear the burdens of judgment. Uncertainty has ever been the statesman’s curse. America’s famed diplomat, former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, has written, “Nations learn only by experience, they ‘know’ only when it is too late to act. But statesmen must act as if their intuition were already experience. . . .”
A reassessment of Xi and the CCP looms. From their actions and practices, from assessments of their motives and apparent long-term aims, today’s statesmen, like their forebears, must judge future risks and craft the surest course ahead. These are early days, but the picture of Beijing presented so far is troubling.
Even before the virus spread in Wuhan, Xi brooded over a worrying hand. The CCP could not intimidate prolonged protests on the streets of freedom-loving Hong Kong. And the Party’s oppression there, in determined violation of treaty commitments, spurred voters in Taiwan to rebuff Beijing’s hopes for a more amenable regime in Taipei. The world was finally awakening to Xi’s increasingly autocratic surveillance state, his harsh repression of Uighur Muslims, and his predatory Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). China’s economy, essential to Xi’s hold on power, had stumbled, in part because of the Trump administration’s move to counter China’s unfair, neo-mercantilist practices and to condemn their grim geopolitical implications. Worse yet, America’s markets hummed, raising reelection hopes within the Trump administration, which had also surpassed modern predecessors in challenging China. Rumors of Party dissatisfaction with Xi seeped out.
COVID-19’s outbreak in Wuhan further darkened Xi’s prospects. As long as the virus raged primarily inside China — derailing only her economy, stigmatizing only her government — his troubles would soar. All the while, the world predictably would have leapt ahead, taking Chinese customers, stealing China’s long-sought glory.
The disease’s spread to Berlin and Paris, New York and Tokyo, improved Xi’s prospects, at least in the near term. Pandemic diverted foreign eyes from Hong Kong’s and the Uighurs’ plight. Desperate needs rendered disease-weakened nations more susceptible to China’s goods and BRI’s short-term appeal. Asian states, wary of Beijing, had new cause to doubt the commitment of a pandemic-preoccupied Washington, while a weakened economy and vastly increased debts would likely constrain future U.S. defense spending, essential to Asian security. An unpredictable element had entered into America’s 2020 election.
As events unfolded, might Xi have recognized that COVID-19’s leap into the wider world promised such political and geopolitical gains? Some say a desire to protect itself first fed a CCP cover-up, as if putting this before the health of innocents were not bad enough. But were CCP leaders blind, as days passed, to other benefits? It is the Chinese way, the noted French Sinologist François Jullien has written, to exploit the potential inherent in unfolding situations. CCP leaders still study China’s legendary strategist, Sun Tzu, who advised centuries ago that if, “in the midst of difficulties, we are always ready to seize an advantage, we may extricate ourselves from misfortune.”

Read more:  https://www.yahoo.com/news/confront-china-coronavirus-must-see-103029830.html
World


Malaysia committed to safeguarding its interests in S.China Sea - foreign minister


Reuters


KUALA LUMPUR, April 23 (Reuters) - Malaysia remains committed to safeguarding its interests and rights in the South China Sea, Foreign Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said on Thursday, amid a standoff between Chinese and Malaysian vessels in the disputed waters.
U.S. and Australian warships arrived in the South China Sea this week near an area where a Chinese government survey vessel has been operating close to a drillship contracted by Malaysian state oil company Petronas, regional security sources have said.
Hishammuddin said any disputes should be resolved through peaceful means.
"While international law guarantees the freedom of navigation, the presence of warships and vessels in the South China Sea has the potential to increase tensions that in turn may result in miscalculations which may affect peace, security and stability in the region," Hishammuddin said in a statement. (Reporting by Rozanna Latiff; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)
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