https://issuesinsights.com/2020/05/29/chinas-communist-regime-shows-its-true-totalitarian-colors/
‘You never want a good crisis to go to waste.” That was Rahm Emanuel’s now-infamous prescription for the Democratic Party following the 2007-2008 financial crisis. Now, China’s applying that same dictum globally, as the Wuhan virus ravages nation after nation, freeing Beijing to do its mischief.
For years, Americans of all political stripes operated under the delusion that China, though nominally communist, was becoming more like the West every day. Our massive, but one-sided, trade with the country would bring changes, we thought. An inevitable consumer economy in China would expand, and bring with it ideas of freedom, human rights and democracy.
China would moderate its behavior, the argument went, perhaps eventually easing its military threats against Taiwan, and letting Hong Kong maintain its status as a free-trading city-state outside of Beijing’s direct control.
That was our folly and our delusion, as we’re now finding out.
To begin with, China’s lies at the very beginning of the pandemic show, at best, gross negligence and incompetence, and at worst, intent to murder. As retired Army Lt. Col. Ralph Peters recently wrote for the Hoover Institution, “Beijing piled lies atop heaps of corpses.”
With the world still distracted by fears of the coronavirus pandemic’s deadly impact and much of the West’s economy shut down, China used the crisis to expand its power by bullying its neighbors, crushing all dissent in Hong Kong, and making not-so-subtle military threats against the U.S.
