China

The Capitol Hill Club, home to DC's most high-profile Republicans since the 1950s, is on thin ice with its conservative members. Cockburn, who has enjoyed many a cocktail inside the oak-lined walls of the club, is hearing that Republican members of Congress are incensed at the Capitol Hill Club for complying with DC mayor Muriel Bowser's vaccine mandate. As of January 15, DC restaurant and entertainment venues are required to check that all of their patrons are fully vaccinated. According to a GOP insider, House Minority Whip Steve Scalise warned the Republican conference at a meeting last week that members should not go to the Capitol Hill Club if they are not prepared to show their papers. In essence, comply or be quiet.

History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme. In the 1980s, the gravest threat to America’s freedoms came from the Soviet Union, which President Ronald Reagan called the Evil Empire. That rhymes with today’s equally serious threat from Communist China, the New Evil Empire. Xi Jinping rules China with absolute power, like an emperor. He has complete control over China’s sole political party, the CCP, the government, the economy, the military, the police, the judiciary, and the media. Even over religion: Christian churches must display Xi quotes instead of the Ten Commandments.

The international community has failed regarding China and the 2022 Olympics. It's a moral failing above all, but it's also an administrative and symbolic failing. Beijing's worldwide abuses of human rights, international trade, military aggression toward neighbors and, of course, the unleashing of the Covid-19 pandemic has been allowed to fester, and gone unpunished. In return, China has been granted an international nod of approval by getting to host the 2022 International Olympic Games in Beijing, with the blessing of the International Olympic Committee and European and Western democracies. Sure, there are the diplomatic boycotts that have been issued by several countries, including the United States.

Fifteen years ago, I remarked to an acquaintance over lunch that it looked like China might eat America’s lunch in naval power. My interlocutor, a person well-known in leadership positions in the China studies community, scoffed at my comment. Over the next few years, he never missed an opportunity to ridicule my wild-eyed prediction. I often wonder what he thought in February 2021 when, less than a month after becoming president, Joe Biden warned US senators that if America didn’t “get moving, [China is] going to eat our lunch.” I claim no credit for prescience, just a historian’s sensitivity to trends over time. The fiftieth anniversary of President Richard Nixon’s visit to China falls in February 2022.

After over a month of deliberation, the Biden administration announced last week that they had settled on a diplomatic boycott of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics. The decision not to send an official delegation, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said, was in response to the "ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang." This is a relatively toothless and inoffensive form of protest, but it is welcome that the Biden administration at least acknowledges China's human rights abuses. What was more concerning was the administration's response when asked if they would push American companies to pull advertisements from the games. "What individual companies do is entirely up to them.

In the toxic world of American politics, the bipartisanship showed by the House of Representatives last week in overwhelmingly passing a bill to stop the import of Chinese products made with forced labor from Xinjiang is a rarity. The 428-1 vote on the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, the second in as many years, is the clearest indicator yet of how a new era in American relations with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is developing. It's one where national security and moral concerns find common ground in opposing the oppressive and predatory policies of the Communist Party of China (CPC).

Anything short of a full boycott of the 2022 Beijing Olympics is an abdication of America’s responsibilities and a rejection of its values. Dispatching athletes to China in February would also violate the Olympic spirit. In a November 2 social media post, three-time Olympian Peng Shuai accused former Chinese vice premier Zhang Gaoli of sexual assault. That post was deleted within minutes and Peng promptly disappeared. The Chinese government has clearly seized control of her and her whereabouts, while Chinese state media has taken control of her story, releasing an email, purportedly from Peng, rescinding her allegations. It's also published photos, purportedly from her friends’ social media, as claimed evidence that she is happy and healthy.

As recently as a week ago, there was talk that Monday night’s virtual summit between President Joe Biden and Chinese Communist Party general secretary Xi Jinping was an opportunity to “reset” the US-China relationship. By the time the two leaders sat down in front of their video screens, the summit had been downgraded to a “meeting” and the White House made clear that little concrete agreement, and no breakthrough, was to be expected. The meeting lived down to expectations, uneasily combining a more sober and realistic US assessment of the parlous state of bilateral ties with what seems a return to a pre-2017 model of surface bonhomie and references to the “the long-term work that we need to do together,” according to a senior US official.

China in late September celebrated the 2,572nd birthday of Confucius, a mark of pride for the Chinese Communist Party. A week later, it celebrated its 72nd “National Day,” commemorating the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Chinese President Xi Jinping regularly gushes over Confucius in speeches and even in his 2015 book. Since 2004, the Chinese government has sponsored more than 500 “Confucius Institutes” — public educational and cultural promotion programs — to the price tag of billions of dollars. But how Confucian is China? And is Confucian statecraft a good thing?

At the height of the 2008 financial crisis I was invited to an off-the-record media lunch with a famous investor. I was taken aback when one of the world’s most successful capitalists announced that the crisis showed the Chinese had a superior economic model. China has tried something different from traditional capitalism, with its reliance on the ‘hidden hand’ of the free market. Since the first economic reforms in 1978, the heavy hand of the state has grown and modernized the economy with staggering results. If you believe the data, eight hundred million Chinese people no longer live in poverty and China has averaged 10 percent growth a year since reforms began.

Some time between now and the next 10 years war between the United States and Communist China is certain. The only questions are when and how it will start — and how many millions of people will die. Why would I dare make such a bold prediction? Simple. History has conspired to create the perfect mix: trillions of dollars in trade up for grabs, a geopolitical rivalry, military tensions, bad blood, competing national egos and a quest for tech dominance. Washington and Beijing seem on the way to a world war the likes of which mankind has never before seen. And the most likely spark for this war is Taiwan.

Debt is as much a part of the real estate business as bricks and mortar. And as the great New York builder William Zeckendorf once famously remarked, 'it’s better to be alive at 20 percent than dead at the prime rate.' But the Evergrande Group, the second largest real estate company in China, has taken corporate debt to new heights, with liabilities of a staggering $310 billion, to finance its breakneck growth. In 2010, it had revenues of $7.3 billion and assets totaling $16.7 billion. In 2020, the figures were $81 billion and $368 billion. To be sure, it is a huge company, with 1,300 projects in more than 240 cities in China and 200,000 employees. This year alone, it began 77 new projects.

Cockburn is a traditional sort. He is favorably disposed toward anything that has existed for a long time, even things that don’t deserve it, like the United States Senate or the Washington Post. He therefore bears no ill will towards Britain’s vestigial royal family. There’s something admirable about any family that can do so little, possess so much and avoid a guillotine. But Cockburn does grow a tad cross when he is persistently made to weigh in on something those vestigial royals do or say. royal news is even worse than most celebrity news. If Kanye West says something insane, well, at least Kanye has made some albums people liked. But Prince Harry?

The Chinese Communist party’s origin story, like so many of its official lines, appears to be an apocryphal tale. But a month-long patriotic extravaganza leading up to its centennial celebration has featured military parades, skyscrapers emblazoned with hammer-and-sickle decor and propaganda blitzes on TV. None of the agitprop raised eyebrows as much as the main speech delivered by the Chinese president and general secretary of the party, Xi Jinping, in which he marked the milestone and praised China’s ‘tremendous transformation’ and the historical inevitability of its ‘national rejuvenation’.

On July 1, 1921, the founding congress of the Chinese Communist party was held in Shanghai, when 12 men gathered in a villa in the richest part of the city. Today, the party has over 90 million members. It has transformed not only China but the history of the entire world. The main stages in its development are well-known. In late 1920, Mao Zedong took over and reoriented the party from city workers to poor farmers. In the mid-1930s, the Long March, although a retreat, established a link between the party and the people across China. In 1949, revolution won. From 1958 till 1975, the Great Leap forward and the Cultural Revolution tried to enforce fast economic and social change.

How can America hold China to account? Its ruling party has committed human rights abuses and bears responsibility for the pandemic that has killed an estimated three million people and crashed economies worldwide. The Biden administration is making feckless requests of the CCP — and not demanded much more. As questions mount about the origins of the COVID-19 virus and the growing possibility that it escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and may even be an engineered virus created through gain-of-function research, (research in-part outsourced and paid for by American taxpayers), begging China to cooperate with the US, its allies and the World Health Organization isn’t going to cut it.

In an unforgivably cringeworthy mea culpa delivered in surprisingly fluent Mandarin, John Cena has apologized to his fans in China. He had said in a promotional interview with a Taiwanese media outlet that Taiwan would be 'the first country that can watch' his new Fast & Furious movie, F9. Uh oh. To the Chinese Communist party and a billion Chinese citizens, the slightest hint of Taiwan’s sovereignty is considered blasphemy in the highest order. 'I made a mistake,' the former WWE champion said in a groveling video posted to the Chinese social media platform, Weibo. 'Now I have to say one thing which is very, very, very important: I love and respect China and Chinese people.' He continued: 'I’m very sorry for my mistakes. Sorry. Sorry. I’m really sorry.

We still don’t know the origins of COVID-19, a full year and a half out from the start of the pandemic. The Chinese government initially claimed that the virus was spread through a wet market in the Wuhan province or that it perhaps came to China from parts of Europe in frozen food trucks. Almost immediately, any inquiries into how the outbreak started beyond the CCP’s original story were brushed aside and dubbed conspiracy theories by the US’s corporate media. Quite why is a question that should trouble any independent-minded person. When Sen.