The Woke Chinese Communist Party Beijing uses progressive rhetoric to attack Western interests.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-woke-chinese-communist-party-11615153949?mod=opinion_lead_pos3
Chinese state media rarely deserves attention but lately it’s taken a notable and instructive turn. It is invoking the woke themes of American progressives as a propaganda weapon against the U.S.
“Canada, the UK and Australia, three members of the Five Eyes alliance, have recently taken action to put pressure on China. They have formed a US-centered, racist, and mafia-styled community,” said a Feb. 23 editorial in Global Times. “They are becoming a racist axis aimed at stifling the development rights of 1.4 billion Chinese.”
The Communist Party-run paper notes that the members of Five Eyes, an intelligence-sharing network, “have a strong sense of civilization superiority.” U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton is a “neo-Nazi and extreme racist” and “the Trump administration is an extremely typical white supremacy government.” By resisting this bloc of English-speaking countries, the editorial concludes, “China is not only defending its own interests, we are also defending the diversity of the modern world.”
Note the use of “white supremacy” and “diversity” and “civilization superiority,” which come straight from the progressive critique of America as a country that is “systemically” racist and oppressive. The Global Times editors may be crude but they’ve obviously been reading the New York Times. Their dismissal of Mr. Cotton as racist is what you see on progressive Twitter.
Readers of a certain age will recall how the Soviet Union’s propagandists used the social and antiwar turmoil of the 1960s to sow dislike of America around the world. But whatever its political differences, the U.S. then was still largely confident and united in its fundamental principles.
The goal of the civil-rights movement was to match American practice with its founding principles, while today’s woke activists find America fundamentally flawed. The entitled workers at Google worry more about the Pentagon than they do Chinese censorship. China’s ruling Communists are trying to exploit this growing lack of American self-belief as they bid for global supremacy.
The truth is that the U.S. is among the most diverse and tolerant nations on the planet. So are the other Five Eyes nations. Political criticism is tolerated and is a core democratic strength. Meanwhile, China’s Communists are attempting to erase ethnic Uighur Muslim identity in Xinjiang while repressing Tibetans and other minorities.
China’s elites think they’re winning the global competition as they see an America wracked by division and self-doubt. They are overestimating American weakness, but their invocation of woke ideology shows they realize its threat to American confidence and purposes.
Comments are closed.
