China

If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, what does it mean when a phone doesn’t ring? This philosophical chestnut recurs whenever a new American president phones his allies and clients or, if you’re Joe Biden when the calls are to your deepest frenemy Benjamin Netanyahu or your ex-friend and now quasi-enemy Xi Jinping. Now and then, you are reminded that the Khomeinis and Khameneis, and the Osama bin Ladens too, have a point. America’s politicians are decadent and feckless. They substitute image for reality, and when it goes wrong, they pretend it never happened. Everything about Joe Biden is false, from his teeth to the random musings that float past them.

So, according to the World Health Organization‘s latest findings, it is most likely that the COVID-19 virus jumped from an animal to a human. It is unlikely that the pathogen spread due to a leak from a lab in Wuhan. The WHO did not rule out the possibility of a lab leak entirely, but made clear they would not investigate that thread any further. The WHO, of course, has proven itself to be far from trustworthy on matters related to China and the coronavirus. The international organization last January repeated a false claim from Chinese authorities that there was no evidence of 'human-to-human transmission' of COVID-19.

We’re told that Biden is going to be tough on China because the new President has called Xi a ‘thug’. But look at the realities. At the virtual Davos, the world heard Xi Jinping assert China’s role as a world leader, confidently setting the terms of how other countries and institutions should engage with it. While Xi didn't single out the US, his subtext was clear. And if this first week is a sign, the next 100 days of the Biden administration will be a gift to China’s ambitions to reshape the world order. Xi admonished those who 'slip into arrogant isolation' and 'build small circles or start a new cold war’. It’s amusing to hear the Chinese premier lecture the world on 'equal rights, equal opportunities and equal rules' given the Uighur genocide in Xinjiang.

President Trump cut foreign aid to China in half in just one year, according to an Office of Management and Budget report obtained exclusively by The Spectator. The report, which provides a full accounting of US spending on China and is the first of its kind, revealed several key trends that are sure to thrill China hawks. Direct aid to China fell from $62 million in Fiscal Year 2019 to $30 million in Fiscal Year 2020, a decrease of 52 percent. Spending on strategic competition with China jumped from $42.4 billion to $47.5 billion, a 12 percent increase. The US also imposed $60 billion worth of duties on imported Chinese goods.  Multiple China support programs saw major reductions in spending or were ceased entirely under the Trump administration.

While final negotiations on the UK’s relationship with the EU continue to drag, No. 10 is moving rapidly to expand Britain’s role in the Indo-Pacific, returning ‘east of Suez’ after a half-century absence. Tied to this goal, Prime Minister Boris Johnson unveiled a modest, yet real, increase in Britain’s defense spending last month, totaling some $21.25 billion and pledging to once again make Great Britain the foremost naval power in Europe. Johnson’s budget announcement sets the stage for implementation of London’s long-awaited ‘Integrated Review’, which is touted as the most significant strategic reassessment of the UK’s diplomatic and security policies since the end of the Cold War.

The idea that SARS-CoV-2 — the virus which causes COVID-19 — could have man-made origins has been rejected by many scientists, dismissed by some as nothing more than a conspiracy theory. A different view, however, has been put forward by Rossana Segreto of the University of Innsbruck in association with Yuri Deigin of Canadian genetics company Youthereum Genetics. In a paper published on Wiley Online, they have again raised the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 could indeed be a man-made virus, and that its passage into the human population could be the result of a laboratory accident. 'The artificial creation of SARS-CoV-2 is not a baseless conspiracy theory that is to be condemned,' they write.

The phrase has shot throughout the fringes of Right-Wing Twitter like a virus through a karaoke bar. According to Pauline Hanson of the Australian party One Nation it is an attempt to establish a 'socialist left Marxist view of the world’. James Delingpole describes it as a 'global communist takeover plan’. This might sound like something cooked up in the lizard-stalked imagination of a nut but it refers to a real phenomenon. The World Economic Forum, which organizes the annual conference Davos, has launched an initiative called, yes, 'the Great Reset’. It has its own website. So, it is not just a feature of hot-headed conspiratorial fantasies. It exists. But as what?

Xi Jinping was widely praised on Tuesday after he told the United Nations General Assembly via videolink that China would ‘achieve carbon neutrality before 2060’. Environmental activists, academics and government leaders in the West hailed the move as a big deal, a significant step toward addressing climate change. The New York Times couldn’t resist framing this story as a ‘pointed message to the US’ which under Trump has increasingly diverged from the growing scientific and political consensus on climate change. President Trump, famously, initiated the process of withdrawing the country from the 2015 Paris Climate Accords.

When future historians chronicle the period after the Cold War, the rise of China will dominate their accounts. Beginning in the 2000s, China unleashed a flood of state-sponsored manufactures, many of them produced by western multinational corporations using Chinese labor on Chinese soil. This impoverished much of the already pressured industrial working class in the US and Europe, triggering populist revolts in rustbelts like the American Midwest, the north of England and eastern Germany. The recycling of profits from China’s chronic trade surpluses through the global financial system enriched western financial interests and helped to inflate bubbles in the real estate and stock markets. These burst in 2008, causing the Great Recession.

There was no way to know that the last trip I took to Hong Kong just a few years ago would likely be my last. I assumed we still had another 27 years before Hong Kong and China’s ‘one country, two systems’ framework reached its end, but Beijing had other plans. Increasingly emboldened in its domestic social control and assertive in its foreign policy, the Chinese government broke its promise when it sidestepped Hong Kong’s legislature to pass a sweeping national security law targeting ‘secession’, ‘subversion’ and ‘collusion’. These concepts are so broadly-defined as to be easily weaponized against even a nominal critic of the CCP, with a possibility of life in prison as punishment.

As soon as the unrest began in Minneapolis, the inevitable comparisons with Hong Kong began. We saw throngs of masked demonstrators take to the streets holding placards and chanting slogans while police in riot gear discharged rubber bullets, pepper spray and tear gas. We saw skirmishes in which protesters were pinned to the ground with excessive force. We saw smoldering barricades and burning police vehicles. But that’s where the superficial similarities between the two protest movements end. Hong Kong’s protests began as a revolt against the controversial extradition bill (which would have allowed extraditions to mainland China). It built upon past pro-democracy movements and morphed into an existential battle against the Chinese Communist party.

If you’ve been watching the news, you would think the United States is a third world nation on the verge of collapse. Less civilized countries all over the world have noticed American policing problems and the volatile riots we’re having; riots that they either experience on a weekly basis — or their governments don’t allow to take place at all. Take Iran, for instance. Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif tweeted, ‘some don’t think #BlackLivesMatter. To those of us who do: it is long overdue for the entire world to wage war against racism.

We don’t yet know the full story of the coronavirus outbreak in China. Even so, it already has a tragic hero: Dr Li Wenliang. His name is known around the world now, but the details of what happened to him are telling. On December 30 last year, Li warned fellow medics on a WeChat group that seven patients had been quarantined at his hospital in Wuhan. They had some kind of coronavirus. A few days later, after screenshots of his messages were posted to the wider internet, he was summoned by the Wuhan Public Security Bureau. The secret police presented him with a typed confession stating he had lied. He signed it. He had to. The police document was sententious but chilling: ‘Your behavior severely disrupted social order... We advise you to calm down and reflect carefully.

On May 9, Vladimir Putin had been due to review a parade of troops and military hardware on Red Square alongside Xi Jinping and Emmanuel Macron. Russia’s coronavirus lockdown forced Putin to cancel the elaborate celebrations of the 75th anniversary of the end of World War Two in Europe — as well as to postpone a national referendum that would have extended his personal rule until 2036. But though Putin and Xi have been deprived of the opportunity to make a show of solidarity amid the sea of Soviet flags that bedecks Moscow annually for Victory Day, the coronavirus crisis promises to throw Russia and China closer together than they have ever been. China needs friends; Russia needs money.

On December 30, Ai Fen, director of the emergency department at Wuhan Central Hospital, got the lab results back about one of her patients who had a flulike illness. The words she read on the report made her blood run cold: ‘Sars coronavirus’. She circled the word ‘Sars’, took a photo and emailed it to a doctor at a neighboring hospital. Within hours, the photo had been sent to dozens of people in the Wuhan medical community. One of them sent a series of messages to a private group on WeChat, advising his colleagues to take precautions, and someone took screenshots of those messages and shared them more widely.

Should we blame China for the spread of coronavirus? And how should the West respond if the communist regime did cause the pandemic by lying about the virus as it emerged? I spoke about these questions to the dissident author Ma Jian, who has been described — by another dissident — as ‘one of the most important and courageous voices in Chinese literature’. His novels have been called — by a critic — ‘a powerful corrective to the self-interested Western view of China’. Ma believes that the economic miracle in China that has given us cheap goods in the West is also bribing the Chinese to forget their past and infantilizing them in their relationship with their rulers.

Got a cough, cold, rheumatic fever? According to the World Health Organization what you might really need is a good dose of pangolin scales. This is the surprising advice coming from a UN agency which has been accused of cozying up too closely with China and which in a little noticed development last year, decided to officially endorse Traditional Chinese Medicines (TCMs). In mid-2019, the WHO ratified the grandly titled 11th International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD-11). When it comes into force from January 2022, for the first time TCMs will be regarded as having met ‘the diagnostic classification standard for all clinical and research purposes’.

Kill a chicken to scare the monkeys, the Chinese say. In this case, Australia is the chook, the butchers in Beijing are holding a knife at the nation’s throat and around the world, monkeys — or at least the highest form of primates, the naked ape — look on in horror. China’s threat that its consumers, students and tourists will boycott Australian beef, wine, universities and resorts if federal politicians persist in an independent inquiry into the origins of SARS-Cov-2 has at least had one positive outcome — it has made the inquiry unnecessary.

Eyes are opening to the evil of the authoritarian Chinese regime that represses its people, genocides entire cultures, and influences investments and policy all over the globe. As most of the world is under coronavirus lockdown, the Chinese Communist party detains hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of Uighur Muslims in concentration camps in east China. Not to mention the brutal occupation of Tibet, where China is also allegedly responsible for the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Tibetans over the last 70 years due to its brutal occupation.The CCP’s mishandling of the viral contagion from Wuhan may have exposed its obsession with power at all costs, but its next, greater threat is still developing in the shadows: imperialism.

My first personal encounter with victims of a modern authoritarian government came last October, when I sat down with Zumret Dawut and Mirighul Tursun, two Uighur women who survived China’s so-called 're-education' camps in Xinjiang. I was particularly struck by one story from Ms Tursun:'She endured several days of beatings and electrocution. Her torturers mocked her when she called to Allah.'Then they ask me, "Where is your God? You say God, where is your God? Tell him, if he is stronger than me, to help you,”’ said Tursun.'Your god is Xi Jinping,' the guards told her.It is not enough for Chinese authorities to repress faith; they must also replace it with a secular, party-approved deity.