One cannot help but admire the sheer brass neck of China’s propagandists. On Wednesday, the Chinese State Council Information Office released “The Report on Human Rights Violations in the United States in 2020,” a 16-page document that opens with the quote: “I can’t breathe,” which were among the final words of George Floyd, a black man who died in police custody in Minnesota.
Conveniently ignoring China’s egregious human rights record, including the systematic destruction of Tibetan and Mongolian culture, and the mass internment of more than 1 million Uighurs and other ethnic minorities in China’s Xinjiang region, the report accuses the US of gross human rights violations.
Ethnic minorities have been “devastated by racial discrimination,” “systemic racism and economic inequality” have “worsened,” the US has committed “systemic ethnic cleansing and massacres” of Native Americans and “an agenda of ‘America first’ isolationism” hangs over the country, the report says.
It paints a picture of a nation in the grips of “horrific” racism, pushed by a toxic cocktail of “white nationalists, neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan.”
China’s propaganda scribes are masters at manipulating the US political zeitgeist. Through close observation of US society, fed back to Beijing by Chinese diplomats, they intuitively know which buttons to push and on which smoldering tinder to pour the gasoline.
During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, potent incantations of “racism,” “discrimination” and “xenophobia” against Chinese were repeatedly invoked by Beijing to cause confusion in US politics and hamper Washington’s response to the crisis.
The report reads like a plagiarized postgraduate thesis: stitched together with copied and pasted assertions made by US media pundits, politicians, think tanks, academics and UN committees, taken from one side of the political debate during the febrile atmosphere of a particularly fraught US presidential election.
Although framed through the lens of human rights, the report’s underlying aim is to discredit the US’ democratic system of government and those of other democracies — including Taiwan. To this end, the report includes clumsy Chinese Communist Party phraseology, such as “American democracy disorder” and “American democracy crisis,” and dwells heavily on “continued social unrest,” “political chaos,” “mass unemployment” and an alleged “food crisis,” which it attributes to the US’ “incompetent pandemic response.”
Since 1998, the office has been releasing an annual “China Human Rights Report” as a tit-for-tat retort to US criticisms of China’s human rights abuses in the US Department of State’s annual “Country Reports on Human Rights Practices.”
However, what is different this year is the extent to which the US’ long-running “culture war” has metastasized throughout the entire US body politic, engulfed all its institutions and fanned out to other Western democracies. This has significantly opened up the number of attack vectors for China’s propagandists to exploit.
Since much of the governing US Democratic Party has spent the past year engaged in high-profile introspection, chiefly over the issue of systemic racism, it is politically impossible to issue a rejoinder when China levels this accusation. Beijing has naturally made hay of it, pouncing to conflate racism with genocide.
Despite all its manifest faults and contradictions, the US has over many decades demonstrated an uncanny ability at national rejuvenation. The essential difference that separates democracies and totalitarian regimes is that in democracies arguments are out in the open. While it can get messy at times, this ability to self-correct is the fundamental strength of democratic systems. The world is still waiting for China to self-correct from its seven-decade-long nightmare.
When US budget carrier Southwest Airlines last week announced a new partnership with China Airlines, Southwest’s social media were filled with comments from travelers excited by the new opportunity to visit China. Of course, China Airlines is not based in China, but in Taiwan, and the new partnership connects Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport with 30 cities across the US. At a time when China is increasing efforts on all fronts to falsely label Taiwan as “China” in all arenas, Taiwan does itself no favors by having its flagship carrier named China Airlines. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is eager to jump at
The muting of the line “I’m from Taiwan” (我台灣來欸), sung in Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese), during a performance at the closing ceremony of the World Masters Games in New Taipei City on May 31 has sparked a public outcry. The lyric from the well-known song All Eyes on Me (世界都看見) — originally written and performed by Taiwanese hip-hop group Nine One One (玖壹壹) — was muted twice, while the subtitles on the screen showed an alternate line, “we come here together” (阮作伙來欸), which was not sung. The song, performed at the ceremony by a cheerleading group, was the theme
Secretary of State Marco Rubio raised eyebrows recently when he declared the era of American unipolarity over. He described America’s unrivaled dominance of the international system as an anomaly that was created by the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War. Now, he observed, the United States was returning to a more multipolar world where there are great powers in different parts of the planet. He pointed to China and Russia, as well as “rogue states like Iran and North Korea” as examples of countries the United States must contend with. This all begs the question:
Liberals have wasted no time in pointing to Karol Nawrocki’s lack of qualifications for his new job as president of Poland. He has never previously held political office. He won by the narrowest of margins, with 50.9 percent of the vote. However, Nawrocki possesses the one qualification that many national populists value above all other: a taste for physical strength laced with violence. Nawrocki is a former boxer who still likes to go a few rounds. He is also such an enthusiastic soccer supporter that he reportedly got the logos of his two favorite teams — Chelsea and Lechia Gdansk —
RSS