World

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.

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.