Commentary
The two facts about China most important to the interests of freedom in the world (one, if you will, the enemy to the other) are that, one, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is succeeding in its stated goal to become the dominant power on the globe by midcentury, and two, another Tiananmen Square massacre, the 34th anniversary of which was last week, is almost certainly not possible for the CCP to get away with in the age of social media.
There is no denying that Beijing must be stopped from taking the place of the United States and our allies in preeminent superpower status; the ripples of such a development would imperil liberty everywhere. But the fact that popular protest within China cannot be stamped out as bloodily as it once was presents an opportunity for the Chinese people, and for the private businesses in the West that owe so much to the Chinese workers whose labor has generated so much wealth for them.
It might be too much to hope that the regime could actually be toppled, as the Tiananmen martyrs found when attempting to follow in the footsteps of the peoples of the Soviet Union’s Eastern European satellites who, with weapons like fax machines and VCR cassettes, liberated themselves from Moscow’s yoke. Still, it has been shown in recent years that Beijing inflicts in reaction to the pressure of popular agitation.
When a fire in an apartment building in Urumqi, the capital of the western region of Xinjiang, left 10 dead last November, and months-long strict COVID lockdown restrictions apparently hindered emergency services from rescuing occupants, there was no suppressing news of the tragedy from China’s people. Or of suppressing the protests that erupted in Urumqi, with demonstrators seen on social media toppling a barrier, arguing with officials, and shouting demands that the regime’s COVID restrictions be scrapped. Indeed, one would be hard-pressed to find comparably spirited public demonstrations within America and other free countries against the excessive approach taken in many of our COVID lockdowns.
Some locals observed that the tragedy could easily have happened to any one of them, as they were often trapped in their homes by barriers erected by authorities in the course of imposition of the harsh restrictive measures, and government response to the fire has included appeasing the people by lifting local lockdowns.
The local orientation of many of the protests of recent months might suggest that a curbing of expectations are in order, but the messages and slogans often embraced suggest real dissatisfaction with the CCP, including the lyric “Arise! Ye who refuse to be slaves!” from “March of the Volunteers,” China’s current national anthem. Although authored by a communist, the song’s origin is deeply nationalistic, “volunteers” referring to the armies that fought imperial Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in the 1930s; nationalist hero Gen. Dai Anlan made it the anthem of the division under his command in the Burma campaign during the Second World War. Video taken last autumn also showed students chanting: “Democracy, rule of law, freedom of expression!” And in Shanghai, residents were even found to be shouting “Step down, Xi Jinping!”
In the wake of all this, China’s economic recovery from its COVID lockdowns is proving to be a major disappointment, with the once-projected growth rate of over 5 percent for 2023 now a pipedream because of massive overvaluations in housing and credit. This letdown will not only lessen Western investment in mainland China but is sure to foment further domestic protests, compounding those of last year.
If we lived in more normal times, instead of an era when both elected governments in the West and major multinational corporations are fully bought into woke ideology, the U.S. government and this country’s business leaders would be meeting behind closed doors to strategize ways to exploit Beijing’s unexpected weaknesses. Instead, we find CEOs who should know better scurrying to the Middle Kingdom to see if they can help a genocidal governmental enterprise stay strong, a regime that should long ago have been consigned to the ash heap of history with its Moscow and Berlin cousins.
And we find the Biden administration rolling the red carpet out for the likes of Hong Kong chief executive John Lee Ka-chiu, who helped Beijing suppress and abuse freedom fighters in the island, inviting him to attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in San Francisco this year—the opposite of the kinds of actions the U.S. government should be taking to back Chinese who seek freedom for themselves and their posterity.
Government and business should together be seeking the newest and most effective ways of informing the Chinese people, in detail, about what is going on in their country. From caging over a million ethnic-minority Uyghers in reeducation camps, and subjecting millions of the rest of them to involuntary sterilization, forced labor, religious prohibitions, and surveillance, to the torture and even harvesting of organs of adherents of the Falun Gong philosophical discipline rooted in ancient Chinese tradition, Communist China is one of the bloodiest tyrannies in history, even since the death of Mao and the opening to the West. And all too many rank-and-file Chinese people don’t, or don’t fully, know it.
Notions of an economic downturn lessening the China threat to the Free World have it backward; the disastrous Soviet economy did not quell Moscow’s expansionist practices during the Cold War, and Beijing’s ongoing military growth and global audacity both reinforce Xi Jinping’s hold on power and fuel the regime’s long-term objectives of upending U.S. superpower status. An adversary’s weakness calls for attack, not retreat.
China’s economic troubles are an opportunity for businesses who have gotten rich from the sweat of the Chinese people to express their thanks by revealing to them how much blood their rulers have spilled in recent years, thereby giving them the inspiration and motive to arise and refuse any longer to live as slaves.
