China

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.

You might think a global pandemic and the worst crisis since World War Two would lead to a welcome, if temporary tamping down of military activity in already tense and contested environments. Yet even as the novel coronavirus ravages the world, old fashioned geopolitical jousting continues in Asia, reminding us that the passing phase of COVID-19 will simply return much of the world to the status quo ante of great power competition. In a strange way, the ongoing military activities and geopolitical jockeying of China and the United States in Asia’s vital waterways is almost comforting.

China has tried to restore its image after lying to the world about the seriousness of its coronavirus outbreak, but its attempts at humanitarianism have turned out to be as slippery as its wet markets. After COVID-19 made its way to Italy, decimating the country's significant elderly population, China told the world it would donate Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) to help Italy stop its spread. Reports later indicated that China had actually sold, not donated, the PPE to Italy. A senior Trump administration official tells The Spectator that it is much worse than that: China forced Italy to buy back the PPE supply that it gave to China during the initial coronavirus outbreak.

A troubling pattern has emerged at the World Health Organization. In the wake of this global pandemic, it appears China has been misdirecting and misleading the rest of us about confirmed cases in their own country, with the help of their close financial partner, the WHO.As the WHO and parts of the American media laud China’s response to the pandemic, with NBC News even hailing them as a global leader as the US falls behind, several countries reported massive problems with faulty equipment and supplies.Shortly after China expelled American journalists from its borders, they stopped reporting new cases of COVID-19 altogether, despite Wuhan once again closing down its movie theaters.

Facing harsh criticism for allowing the novel coronavirus to spread, Beijing has settled on an international communications strategy: smearing the United States by claiming the virus originated with American soldiers visiting China. This strategy, based on obvious lies, will not work out well.Nobody outside China’s state broadcasters and some information-starved viewers could possibly believe it. For good reason: it’s bunk, and vile bunk at that. An infected unicorn is more likely to have started the virus in Wuhan than the US military. Yet that is the story the Chinese Communist party (CCP) is trying to peddle.

There’s a recurring flashback from my childhood that never fails to induce a blood-curdling shiver down my spine. My mother’s request for company on her monthly shopping trips to the wet market was always a Hobson’s choice, one I deeply resented because the experience was awful. Deep in the bowels of Singapore’s Chinatown complex was a large open-air market that stood in stark contrast to the surrounding glitzy skyscrapers and immaculate streets. The place was a veritable not-so-little shop of horrors and till today, those horrors remain firmly etched in my memory.A distinctly fetid stench greets you long before entering the market; soon it becomes apparent why they’re referred to as ‘wet’.

I didn’t know this was what they meant by ‘cancel culture’. Sports events, theatre shows, plane flights, weddings, funerals: everyone is in a mad rush to cancel everything. Governments are ordering citizens to remain indoors, with Spanish police even deploying drones to catch miscreants. I don’t know whether it is the best way of tackling coronavirus — the UK government, which has gone to greater lengths than others to explain the scientific modeling behind its decision-making, has come to the conclusion that banning things and forcing the entire population into lockdown will have minimal effect and may even be counter-productive, at least at this stage. But it is going to cause a global recession, if not depression.

Monday night’s House of Commons rebellion over Huawei was on a surprisingly serious scale for a new government with a big mandate. The problem for the UK government is not just the actual danger of our security being breached by Huawei, real though that is. It is also strategic. The government is not treating the subject this way, but sees it as merely a matter for the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. This is a bad mistake. We have achieved Brexit. We are making our own way in the world. Our closest allies in terms of trust, language, cultural links, democratic values and shared interests are our four partner nations in the ‘Five Eyes’ deep intelligence partnership — the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

If anything, stock markets have been slow to respond to the spreading coronavirus outbreak. Stories of Chinese supply interruptions, from JCB digger components to plastic toys, have been circulating since mid-February, while hedge funds have been hard at work short-selling cruise-operator shares: Royal Caribbean and Carnival are both down 30 percent. Now airlines have taken a pasting too, with easyJet and Ryanair among the big fallers in Monday’s sell-off of European stocks, following news of a cluster of virus cases in northern Italy. Meanwhile, a turning point may or may not have been reached in the rate of reported cases in Wuhan, where the outbreak began.

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. I’ve been quarantined, like millions of others in China. It was bound to happen sooner or later. I traveled all the way from Beijing to the third-tier city of Jining in Shandong province, where anyone arriving from another region must be detained for 14 days. There’s no kind way to deliver the news, so a Chinese colleague broke it to me over WeChat in a gentle but firm tone. It felt like being fired or dumped. It could be worse. I’m free to leave my building, but not the walled housing compound surrounding it.

I was one of them.One of the 147 million Americans who had their information compromised in the epic 2017 Equifax data breach. It was one of the largest hacks in history, leaking the names, social security numbers, addresses, and credit history of over a third of the country.At first, we were led to believe it was the result of sloppy cybersecurity and greedy hackers who wanted credit card data.But now, according to last week’s indictment from the Justice Department, we know it was the handiwork of four members of China’s military.To think it was a few renegade black hat hackers with expensive tastes was upsetting enough, but now to learn it was the long arm of the Chinese Communist party? This is serious.What do the Chinese communists want with my credit history?

The Chinese government would have the world believe that the coronavirus is under control and the risks of it spreading to the rest of us is minimal. But foreign governments and intelligence agencies believe that China has been lying about the extent of the epidemic and continues to deny the truth about the numbers of dead and infected.Judging by leaked videos on social media that purpotedly show the dead lying untended in the street, bodies wrapped in sheets lying on benches and crematoriums working 24/7 with bodies unceremoniously stuffed into ovens with no burial rites, millions of Chinese people appear to agree with the foreign assessments.

A successful dictator has to have ruthlessness, control, influence and competence. So how does China’s leader, Xi Jinping, rate as a dictator? Xi has been in power since 2012 and thus has enough of a track record to judge.On ruthlessness, he ranks highly. The concentration camps he has created for China’s Muslim minority in Xinjiang and the suppression of the movement in Hong Kong — in violation of the 1984 agreement with the UK — are the most tangible examples. The November 2019 leak of the 'Xinjiang Papers', more than 400 pages of internal Chinese documents, to The New York Times provided an unprecedented documentation of the origins and implementation of crackdown against Muslims of Xinjiang.

I woke up late on Friday, so missed the livestreamed assassination of Franz Ferdinand and the rolling barrage of tweet-commentary about the super-judicial martyrdom of Hassan Thingy and the start of World War Three. It was all over by lunchtime, bar the shooting, because there could only be one winner. Or was that two?The first winner, as always when it comes to American foreign policy, is Xi’s China. Anything that ties the United States into the open-ended shambles of the Middle East distracts the energies of the United States, and the eyes of America’s allies and clients, from China’s surreptitious campaigns to replace the United States as global patron. In war as in online shopping, China emerges as hegemon not despite American efforts, but because of them.

Michael Bloomberg’s entry into the race for the Democratic nomination for president has been underwhelming so far. As the race tightens, one of myriad problems for the candidate will be his close ties to the major national security threat posed by the US’s strategic rival — China under the leadership of the Chinese Communist party (CCP).Bloomberg panders to the CCP and to its leader, Xi Jinping, recently labeling him 'not a dictator' but rather just a politician, like any other duly elected leader, who has to satisfy his constituents. When challenged, Bloomberg stressed the point, saying 'no government survives without the will of the majority of its people, OK?' Xi, like all leaders, 'has to deliver services'.