Melissa Chen

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’.

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.

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.

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.

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’.