RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/03/understanding-and-misunderstanding-china/

The Hong Kong protesters should demonstrate to us once and for all that the Chinese are not genetically conditioned, compliant and quietist “yellow ants”, as many in the West still assume. Nor must we forget 1989 when young freedom protesters surrounded a Statue of Liberty on Tiananmen Square. About one million Beijing residents from all walks of life, including numerous party and union officials, demonstrated for reform and greater freedom. Most remarkably, Zhao Ziyang, the general secretary of the Communist Party of China after a long career in the Party elite, addressed the crowds on the square. He advocated freedom of the press and freedom of association, free markets and parliamentary democracy. Could a leader like that again one day emerge from the bosom of the CPC?

Of course, earlier generations of Chinese had to knuckle under to survive, buy a decent apartment and give their children a good education. Many still do. But many of their children and grandchildren now have attained middle-class living standards or better, together with the education and knowledge which come with that. More and more Chinese—in the PRC and the diaspora, including in Australia—now aspire to civic, economic and political rights. And they are prepared to stand up for their liberties.

During my visits to the PRC over the past forty years, I have seen a pervasive shift from unquestioning compliance and the pursuit of narrow material aspirations to demands for individual freedoms. Many Chinese now complain about the oppressors in Beijing and the surveillance state. “It takes the authorities a mere seventeen minutes to know exactly where everyone is at the moment,” they joke. “China is so poor at soccer because the national team consists of players with money to bribe the selectors,” you are told. Ordinary folk one meets decry openly the blocking of Google, Wikipedia and YouTube by online censorship—and show you how to circumvent the ban. America-based, Mandarin-speaking bloggers, whose political comments are critical and often well-informed, have hundreds of thousands of tech-savvy, VPN-enabled followers in the PRC. Their blogs often attract a hundred times the number of viewers that the PRC’s main broadcaster gets.

The professors and students of Shanghai’s Fudan University, whose charter contains the motto “freedom of thought”, but who have been officially instructed to drop it, now defiantly sing their campus anthem daily, extolling “freedom of thought and academic independence”. Many in the rapidly growing middle class speak admiringly of the individual freedoms they have observed in the West during holiday trips or semesters of study.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/06/coming-migrant-wave-set-to-exact-consequences-in-europe/

The Obama era, it is often falsely suggested, was one of “no corruption” and a “strong multilateralism” on the international stage where Atlanticism held sway and challenges to U.S.-led western liberal democratic order were easily neutralized. Then, we were assured, the policymakers at the U.S. State Department and their like-minded allies at Langley had everything under control.

This is the impression left by a horribly biased media on both sides of the pond, still raging at the audacity of hoi polloi who dared not only to elect the unpalatable Donald Trump as president of the United States, but who also saw to it that Brexit be seen through to the end.

Upon closer inspection, one will note that Afghanistan continues to be a raging quagmire, with the Taliban threatening what little is left of the U.S.-backed Afghan National Army. Presidential candidate Joe Biden promised everyone way back in 2012 that U.S. forces were on the way out within months. This is America’s longest historical conflict, soon to break the two-decade milestone should current peace talks collapse (a very safe bet).

Libya, where the United States “led from behind” (as per President Obama), continues to be ravaged by civil war between various tribal and jihadi factions. Muammar Gaddafi’s removal was sold as an easy “pick off” but Obama’s legacy (and to be fair, the legacies of the UK’s David Cameron and France’s Nicolas Sarkozy) is one of modern-day slave markets, a destroyed economy, an annihilated society, and a continuing migrant crisis for which Europe continues to foot the bill.

And as they are paying the price for Obama’s Libya policy, Europe is still paying the price for his Russia policy. Wrenching Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit has been presented as a victory for liberal democracy and the Western-led global order against an “authoritarian” and “revanchist” Russia.

What could have been the biggest strategic victory of Obama’s foreign policy instead descended into a stalemate whereby a horribly corrupt rump Ukraine has exposed all sorts of shady practices and practitioners, ranging from Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort to the clearly corrupt Hunter Biden. The steadily increasing sanctions regime leveled at Moscow and key Russians by the United States had the added effect of harming European business interests, leading to resentment among both German and French manufacturers. Ukraine’s conflict continues to fester as an open wound, with resolution still far off in the distance.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15670/china-coronavirus-lies

“The epidemic has exposed this country completely in its corruption, bureaucracy, information control and censorship.” — Phillip Wu, a freelance writer in Beijing, The Guardian, March 1, 2020.

Then there are many instances of journalists and activists who told the truth, but who were arrested or “vanished”. The Chinese regime is now even announcing plans to publish a book in six languages about the outbreak that portrays President Xi as a “major power leader” with “care for the people”.

Italy’s main fatal mistake was trusting China’s regime. Instead of checking everyone — Chinese or Italian — returning from China since January, Italy kept its borders open. We are now dealing with tens of thousands of Italians under quarantine….

The idea that the coronavirus might be related to Wuhan’s virus research laboratory is considered by some a “conspiracy theory”, yet China’s refusal immediately to accept help from the US Centers for Disease Control understandably arouses suspicion.

“On current course, China is liable to do significant damage to the rest the world, by accident or intent,” wrote columnist Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal on January 29.

“The Chinese Communist government increasingly poses an existential threat not just to its own 1.4 billion citizens but to the world at large”, wrote the noted historian Victor Davis Hanson on February 20.