World, we have a problem. Although governments and populations would prefer to deny it, the reality is that we have entered a new cold war, and it threatens to end more violently than the last one.
Expressed more accurately, the US and other countries in the West can no longer avoid joining the cold war that China has been waging unilaterally for 40 years.
Put another way, the anti-Western policies of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that began under Mao Zedong (毛澤東) during the original Cold War period have never abated. Instead, they have been disguised or modulated for pragmatic tactical reasons from time to time.
“Hide your capabilities, bide your time” was Deng Xiaoping’s (鄧小平) formula for deceiving the West regarding Beijing’s true intentions.
Now the mask is off, and the face of communist rule in China and toward its neighbors is being revealed in all its ugly features.
Non-Western countries can no longer opt out of the confrontation by dismissing it as a narrow, two-sided East-West conflict that does not involve them. Where is their anger, for example, when millions of Muslims are brutally suppressed and de-Islamized in Chinese-occupied East Turkestan?
Beijing is an equal-opportunity oppressor: Buddhists and other Tibetans, Christians, and Falun Gong are persecuted, imprisoned, have their organs removed or are killed because they believe in something not dictated by the anti-religious Marxist-Leninist ideology.
The same inhuman treatment is accorded to dissidents who espouse the human rights guaranteed by China’s constitution, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, as well as to Chinese lawyers who seek to enforce those rights under the rule of law and impartial justice.
Since 1949, the CCP has followed the same path of tyranny against its own people that Stalin’s Soviet Union, Hitler’s Germany and North Korea’s Kim dynasty imposed on their helpless populations.
It was Mao Zedong who succinctly stated the common approach that defines all those dictators and mass murderers: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”
Also like those past and present tyrants, today’s China turns its anti-human wrath against its neighbors and other countries, and openly threatens world peace. Having joined North Korea in its invasion of South Korea, and seized and occupied Tibet and East Turkestan, Beijing nakedly states its intention to absorb Taiwan and the entire South China Sea.
To deter defensive intervention by the US, the only power capable of stopping Asia’s latest communist aggression, China threatens to obliterate Los Angeles and hundreds of other cities, and to sink US aircraft carriers for the purpose of killing thousands of Americans and frightening 300 million others.
How poorly they understand Americans and their capacity to respond to aggression.
Yet reacting after the fact will not avoid catastrophe. Monstrous regimes in the past century also issued their blood-curdling warnings before actually carrying them out. The world stood by and watched passively as Nazi Germany and imperial Japan prepared for war — and then was shocked when suddenly it was upon them.
There is virtually no international norm the Chinese communists have not contravened or threatened to contravene. The danger is evident everywhere, and in their very words, can no longer be ignored.
The challenge requires the concerted moral, diplomatic and economic force of all freedom-loving peoples to join with the US, bilaterally and multilaterally, in sending a clear message of deterrence to Beijing.
The effort should be reinforced in the UN, the charter of which prohibits the use or threat of force except in individual or collective-self defense and codifies the human rights that China routinely suppresses.
With the veto power wielded by China and Russia, another international aggressor and perpetrator of human rights violations, the UN Security Council would be unable to act — although even a vetoed resolution would send a moral and political message.
However, the heavy lifting would have to be carried out in the UN General Assembly through a Uniting for Peace resolution, such as that employed in 1950 to resist North Korean and Chinese aggression after the Security Council was paralyzed by communist vetoes.
Unlike in the council, any country in the General Assembly, however small, could take the lead in confronting the global danger, and all would have a voice and a vote.
Time is running out, history is on the verge of repeating itself; if inaction prevails, humanity will pay a terrible price.
Joseph Bosco served as China country director in the office of the US secretary of defense and taught a graduate seminar on Taiwan-US-China relations at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. He is a fellow at the Institute for Taiwan-American Studies.
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