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.
Is a new foreign partner for Taiwan emerging in the Middle East? Last week, Taiwanese media reported that Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Francois Wu (吳志中) secretly visited Israel, a country with whom Taiwan has long shared unofficial relations but which has approached those relations cautiously. In the wake of China’s implicit but clear support for Hamas and Iran in the wake of the October 2023 assault on Israel, Jerusalem’s calculus may be changing. Both small countries facing literal existential threats, Israel and Taiwan have much to gain from closer ties. In his recent op-ed for the Washington Post, President William
Taiwan-India relations appear to have been put on the back burner this year, including on Taiwan’s side. Geopolitical pressures have compelled both countries to recalibrate their priorities, even as their core security challenges remain unchanged. However, what is striking is the visible decline in the attention India once received from Taiwan. The absence of the annual Diwali celebrations for the Indian community and the lack of a commemoration marking the 30-year anniversary of the representative offices, the India Taipei Association and the Taipei Economic and Cultural Center, speak volumes and raise serious questions about whether Taiwan still has a coherent India
A stabbing attack inside and near two busy Taipei MRT stations on Friday evening shocked the nation and made headlines in many foreign and local news media, as such indiscriminate attacks are rare in Taiwan. Four people died, including the 27-year-old suspect, and 11 people sustained injuries. At Taipei Main Station, the suspect threw smoke grenades near two exits and fatally stabbed one person who tried to stop him. He later made his way to Eslite Spectrum Nanxi department store near Zhongshan MRT Station, where he threw more smoke grenades and fatally stabbed a person on a scooter by the roadside.
Recent media reports have again warned that traditional Chinese medicine pharmacies are disappearing and might vanish altogether within the next 15 years. Yet viewed through the broader lens of social and economic change, the rise and fall — or transformation — of industries is rarely the result of a single factor, nor is it inherently negative. Taiwan itself offers a clear parallel. Once renowned globally for manufacturing, it is now best known for its high-tech industries. Along the way, some businesses successfully transformed, while others disappeared. These shifts, painful as they might be for those directly affected, have not necessarily harmed society
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