‘Times’ blind to Xi’s motives
The New York Times published an article out of Beijing by Jane Perlez and Keith Bradsher that the Taipei Times carried, which seems to speak of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) “One Belt One Road” initiative as an alternative to the “inward-looking” US under US President Donald Trump (“Xi positions China at center of a new economic order,” May 18, page 9).
When I read the opening I felt so much disappointment with the old gray lady, whose series of articles offering somewhat glowing reviews of Xi’s plan symbolizes the hypocrisy of leaning so far left that the extreme right seems only moments away and fascism looks promising.
How can the New York Times not recognize Xi’s true nature? Is it because he smiles as he threads the hook? Because he speaks lovingly of the poor and the disadvantaged as he weaves a web of deceit and oppression, and has his security troops beat those poor and disadvantaged who complain at home into the ground behind the censors’ veil?
Prattling on about the details of Xi’s plan, the article nowhere discusses the true nature of the plan, and does not mention the doublespeak and innuendos in the plan (as I discussed at Straittalk.blog, in “One Belt One Road One Noose One Way”).
I understand writing from Beijing, reporters might be limited in what they can say negatively about China. For this reason, the New York Times should stop publishing puff pieces and innocuous analysis from Beijing of a plan that has as its central tenet garnering world influence, destroying democracy and effecting China’s dream of changing the world so that its dictatorship is the norm, not the exception.
I feel betrayed by the New York Times, but that is nothing new apparently. The article contains so many holes, it is difficult to address them all.
Suffice it to say that the article hardly addresses the insidious strategy of China’s so called “One Belt One Road” program (which in reality is China’s “one belt one road one noose one way”) to construct Trojan horses that can be inserted into any number of the participants in its “new economic order” (a ridiculous way of describing Xi’s plan to corrupt as much of the world as possible) to bring about a situation where China holds all the cards, and countries participating must kneel to China or else risk ruin.
The “economic” plan is not economic at all, except to the extent the “kommunist kash” involved while masked as generous loans for infrastructure, is used for blackmail and extracting political concessions to Beijing’s “one China” rule, its hegemony and its intention to impose its “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” — which means “follow Beijing or else” — throughout the new one road, which is basically merely “one noose.”
I have written several times about this and about Project Syndicate’s articles promoting China as an alternative to the US to the Taipei Times and in my blog. If international news organizations keep leaving out the animus behind China’s proposal, we will have to keep calling them out on these incomplete analyses, and provide our own more direct and clear analysis.
China is not saving the world. It is planning to pound the world into China’s own shape.
I recently heard a song called I’m Not Clay by a young US singer, about relationships among the young. I thought of this song because it is a ballad about staying true to yourself.
There are countries along the proposed new silk road where China intends to implant its tentacles, squeezing until eventually they must all obey China’s “core interests,” allow China to continue to spread the influence of its tyranny and to obligingly intone its mantras, fearful to say anything untoward about the Chinese Communist Party dictatorship, until they are remade into fawning followers of Beijing.
It has already happened in many corners, China’s trade a powerful incentive to lavish praise on its tyranny.
The New York Times article, while fawning over Xi’s initiatives, does not discuss the most important point about “one belt one road one noose one way.”
China cannot remake democracy into dictatorship, nor turn free people into supporters of its tyranny, no matter how widely Xi smiles and how hard China tries. Frankly, we are not clay.
Lee Longhwa
Los Angeles, California
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