Who Will Rescue 1.4 Billion Hostages in Communist China?

An open air market in Shenyang, in China's northeast Liaoning Province, on July 10, 2023. STR/AFP via Getty Images

Commentary

The pressure is mounting in China.

That’s the sad reality for 1.4 billion Chinese citizens who never chose the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to rule over them, threaten other countries in their name, control what they produce, or channel their speech to mimic “Xi Jinping Thought,” in what for some is the kind of admiration for a hostage-taker that professionals call the “Stockholm syndrome.”

Xi and the CCP leaders who preceded him are forcing 1.4 billion Chinese citizens down the path to conflict, including against the United States, Europe, Japan, Australia, Taiwan, and the Philippines. As the world is waking to a war that looms ever closer, business is pulling away from China in fear.

Chinese citizens reliant on censored media appear unaware of the dangers that lurk. They need only to pull back the veil and look at Ukraine or Gaza to understand a bit of the far worse that could befall them. Already, some Chinese citizens are escaping, international business has stopped major investments in China, supply chains are getting cut, and with them, jobs in China are being lost.

What Chinese jobs remain are getting harder. Even in the best of them, as found in the tech industry that includes Pinduoduo, Bytedance, JD.com, Tencent, and Alibaba, for example, workers are getting pressured into longer hours to the point that they sometimes sleep at their desks.

The infamous “996” requirement of tech workers is that they must work 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week. Little is left for friends and family. The 996 schedule is coming back after a brief hiatus. The Chinese tech industry has lost $1.3 trillion in market value since 2021, so it’s trying to make up lost ground by squeezing workers ever harder and extracting ever smaller drops of diminishing productivity.

The pressure of propaganda is also increasing. A rise in the Chinese population’s anti-American sentiment is being pushed by the regime, causing an unwelcome atmosphere for Americans in China. In the worst of recent incidents, a man stabbed four Iowa college teachers with a knife in a park in northeastern China. The U.S. ambassador to China, Nick Burns, implied the park attack could result from anti-American sentiment. Bloomberg cited a broader uptick of violence in China as the result of economic anxiety. Sadly, the regime’s missteps are fueling the very violence and anti-American sentiment that helps push the decoupling it calls a “vicious cycle.”

This irrationality is part of being a dictatorship. Because of fear among Xi’s subordinates, they can’t tell him the inconvenient truths that contradict what he wants to hear. This leads to a dangerously blind irrationality of the all-powerful totalitarian state, such as claiming to want more engagement and business with the United States while following policies that not only purposefully limit the same but court what would be a globally disastrous war.

The CCP claims that Taiwan and the South China Sea are part of China while threatening to invade (in the case of Taiwan) what it believes is its territory. In the case of the South China Sea, Beijing is clearly violating international law and its own supposedly egalitarian principles.

To what end are Chinese citizens being commanded to follow both irrational and self-defeating policies that contribute to the vicious cycle of deteriorating U.S.–China, China–Taiwan, and China–ASEAN relations to the point of becoming a pariah state like North Korea and risking nuclear war? So that Xi can maintain the nationalistic fervor necessary to undergird an invasion of Taiwan or increase his control of the South China Sea? So that he can establish his name in the history books as more than a footnote and justify his tenure as “emperor for life”?

What will this get the Chinese people besides war, sanctions, poverty, misery, and regret? Absolutely nothing. This is what makes Xi’s policies so irrational or worse. Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te noted on June 24 that “democracy is not a crime; it’s autocracy that is the real evil.” Mr. Lai is being threatened by Beijing with the death penalty as a “separatist” for daring to speak the truth. Taiwan is better off independent than subject to the insanity of the CCP.

The regime is ignoring persistent U.S. and allied attempts to show restraint and de-escalate. Does Xi not understand that war in the nuclear age is unspeakable and unwinnable? Does he believe he can bluff his way to a quick victory over Taipei?

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attempt to do so in Ukraine is failing. Even if he does eventually capture Kyiv, it will have been destroyed in the process. Russian occupiers will be attacked from the countryside. The future of Russia and Ukraine—its youth—will continue to be killed on their battlefields or flee their countries in disgrace. Mr. Putin will be left with the ruins of two once-fledgling democracies, turned against each other, and their millions of old, infirm, and wounded on the rolls of his bereft social services and historical legacy.

The same will apply to China and Taiwan if Xi ever invades. Territorial expansion in the 20th and 21st centuries has proven disastrous, as have the leaders who misdirected their citizens toward destruction.

As anti-China sentiment rises around the world, it’s worth taking a moment to remember that the biggest victims of the CCP are the Chinese people, captured by a regime that doesn’t have their best interests at heart. Who can rescue those 1.4 billion hostages? Who, but themselves, before the deluge?

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.