RUTHFULLY YOURS

The anti–“zero Covid” protesters in China may be finished with the CCP, but the CCP isn’t finished with them. After making a public show of easing some Covid restrictions, Xi Jinping and his army of Stasi-like thugs set about making an example of those involved in the regime’s monthslong embarrassment. The show of force against the protest movement was typical of dictatorships that rely, at least in part, on fear as a mechanism for maintaining power. But the efforts to delegitimize the anti-regime demonstrations had an ideological component as well. A New York Times piece on the crackdown today reported:

The party is also working to discredit the protesters by casting them as tools of malevolent foreign powers. Beijing has long dismissed dissent at home — from calls for women’s rights to pro-democracy activism to ethnic unrest — as the result of Western-backed subversion. The protests against “zero Covid” were no exception: One Chinese diplomat suggested that some of the demonstrators had been “bought by external forces.”

Describing the detention of four Chinese women who were alleged to have been involved in anti-regime activities, the Times reported: “The police have asked the women about their use of overseas messaging platforms or involvement in feminist activities, such as reading groups. . . . Chinese propaganda has decried feminism as another tool of foreign influence.” As a descriptive matter, feminist movements in China probably do draw inspiration from Western ideology. Yet the irony in Beijing’s narrative is that Chairman Xi still has plenty of enablers in the West — particularly among the left-wing cultural movements tied to the kind of activism his regime decries.

This is not to say that the progressive forces that have emerged from academia in recent years — fourth-wave feminism, critical race and gender theory, and so on — are pro-CCP. When pressed, most of their advocates would likely mouth bromides about the Chinese regime’s human-rights violations and its oppression of women. The Left, for the most part, is not motivated by an admiration for China, as segments of it were toward the Soviet Union. What today’s progressives are motivated by is a distaste for the idea of America having a set of “national interests,” let alone any serious efforts to defend them.

That distaste is all the more potent when those national interests are antagonistic toward a region inhabited by non-Western peoples who were once the subjects of European colonialism and conquest. No matter how awesome China’s power may be, the Chinese nation will always be a victim of unjustified Western aggression within an ideological framework that sees Western racism as the driving force in world history. Ayanna Pressley (D., Mass.), one of the 65 Democrats to vote against the recently formed House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) — “a clearinghouse for concerted congressional action on China, spanning trade, espionage, defense, foreign infiltration, and more,” as NR’s editors put it — explained her opposition to the committee in candid terms: “It’s really clear that this is just a committee that would further embolden anti-Asian rhetoric and hate and put lives at risk.” A statement released by Pressley and 22 other House progressives struck a similar tone:

We are concerned about the direction of this committee given past statements and actions by Republicans. In the hands of President Trump and Congressional Republicans, reckless and prejudiced rhetoric and policy contributed to a rise in anti-Asian sentiment across the country and a 339 percent increase in anti-Asian hate crimes in 2021. . . . This also should not be a committee about winning a ‘new Cold War’ as the Chair-Designate of the Committee has previously stated. America can and must work towards our economic and strategic competitiveness goals without ‘a new Cold War’ and without the repression, discrimination, hate, fear, degeneration of our political institutions, and violations of civil rights that such a ‘Cold War’ may entail.

If the forming of a congressional committee to advance one’s strategic-competitiveness goals is unacceptable on the grounds that it might “embolden anti-Asian rhetoric and hate,” one wonders how, precisely, progressives believe we can advance those goals. The lack of alternative proposals speaks volumes about the priorities of Pressley and her merry band of anti-Sinophobes. The fact of the matter is that this is a serious geopolitical struggle between two civilization-states; for our civilization to triumph over the Chinese alternative, serious efforts to undermine, combat, and expose the Chinese regime are necessary. But to think that rooting out anti-Asian sentiment — or, more accurately, anything that could theoretically lead to anti-Asian sentiment — is more important than avoiding a global order in which Xi Jinping calls the shots is an untenable proposition.

Our enemies are well aware of this built-in weakness in contemporary Western culture. The Chinese regime took a break from disappearing its own citizens to gleefully egg on the Black Lives Matter protests. (As did ISIS and Al-Qaeda.) Beijing regularly waves the “systemic racism” allegation against the U.S. and deflects criticisms of its handling of the pandemic, considering it an instance of Western anti-Asian prejudice and using the language and terminology of campus anti-racism. Western progressives were all too happy to play along: “When America makes another country its enemy, it usually makes enemies of some group of Americans as well,” Peter Beinart declared. “It is no coincidence that [anti-Asian] violence is rising at the same time that, according to Gallup, the percentage of Americans who consider China our ‘greatest enemy’ has doubled over the last year.” The premise that America has made China its enemy, rather than the other way around, is an article of faith for Beinart. It’s not clear that he has considered the possibility that the alternative could ever be true.

A nation that is obsessed with apologizing for itself is ill-prepared to confront external threats. Insofar as campus progressivism is enamored with this ethos of self-flagellation, Xi Jinping need not regard it as a tool of dangerous foreign subversion. If anything, he should be giving its loyal advocates the Medal of the Republic.