The communist regime in China has created a new alliance to challenge the United States and Western democracy, according to Johnnie Moore, a former U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) commissioner.
“They’re creating a new axis of collaborators against the Western democratic order,” Moore said, referring to the alliance of China, Pakistan, and the Taliban, in a recent
interview with The Epoch Times’ “
American Thought Leaders” program. He called the alliance a “geopolitical catastrophe.”
China has openly backed the Taliban in recent months. In June, China’s foreign minister Wang Yi, at a meeting with his counterparts from Pakistan and Afghanistan, vowed to “bring the Taliban back into the political mainstream.” A month later, Wang
welcomed a visiting Taliban delegation led by Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar.
After the Taliban’s swift takeover of Kabul in mid-August, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) quickly
welcomed the Taliban’s rise in the war-torn nation, though the Chinese regime has yet to formally recognize the terrorist group.
The Taliban has also seen the CCP as an important ally. In a recent interview with the Italian newspaper la Repubblica, Taliban spokesperson Zabiullah Mujahid
praised Beijing as a “main partner” and a “gateway to markets around the world.”
Moore said there are three reasons Beijing values a partnership with the Taliban. First, the Chinese regime wants to tap into Afghanistan’s rare earth and other minerals, which are
estimated to be worth up to $3 trillion.
Rare earths are 17 elements on the periodic table that are vital in many industries including consumer electronics, defense, and green technologies. Currently, China controls about
80 percent of the global rare earth supply, and has previously cut off its exports as a
retaliatory tactic against other countries.
Additionally, Beijing wants to control movement across its shared border with Afghanistan, Moore said.
China’s far-western Xinjiang region and Afghanistan share a 46-mile-long border. The Chinese regime fears that Uyghur militants might use the border crossing to launch attacks in Xinjiang, where Beijing has locked up more than 1 million Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in internment camps.
Most important of all, Moore said, Beijing wants to “exploit the current situation in order to diminish the prestige of the United States.”
Beijing has used the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan as fodder for its
propaganda campaign, painting the United States as an unreliable partner. Most recently, on Sept. 3, state-run China Daily published an article criticizing U.S. democracy. It argued that when the United States “exported” its “model of democracy,” it brought “disaster to the countries concerned.”
The CCP’s ‘Neocolonialism’
“The relationship between Beijing and the Taliban is the latest example of a neocolonialism and exploitive foreign policy emanating from the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing, that aims to take advantage of any country and any leader gullible enough to accept their promises, which are almost never fulfilled,” Moore said.
Many developing countries, including
Kenya,
Nepal, and
Mozambique, have become indebted to China after they signed up to China’s Belt and Road investment initiative (BRI). Beijing rolled out the initiative in 2013 to build up trade routes linking China with other parts of the world in an effort to build up geopolitical influence.
Both Pakistan and Afghanistan are also BRI members; the latter signed up to the Chinese initiative in 2016. On Sept. 2, the Taliban
expressed a desire to continue being part of the BRI.
That day, Abdul Salam Hanafi, a senior member in the Taliban negotiating team, told assistant Chinese foreign minister Wu Jianghao that the BRI would “contribute to the region’s development and prosperity.”
Moore said: “What they [CCP] do is they exploit vulnerable countries through leaders in order to advance their agenda.
“And what’s happening around the world slowly and what the Taliban will learn, and what Pakistan will learn, and some of these other countries that have chosen to go down this path, is what the Chinese people long ago learned but aren’t allowed to say: The first victim of the worst vices of the Communist Party is its own people, the Chinese people.”
