In the past decade, China has turned ‘smoke and mirrors’ diplomacy into an art form. It has mesmerized foreign multinationals and an array of prominent world leaders.
But in the last 12 months, the smoke has cleared and the mirrors have started to crack, revealing the authoritarian face of the ruling Communist Party.
Moreover, President Xi Jinping’s administration has not been afraid to throw its weight around at home or abroad while still brandishing its “free trade,” “globalization” and “reformist” credentials.
Beijing has pursued an aggressive policy to militarize the South China Sea by turning reefs and atolls into fortified complexes. China has even disregarded a United Nations ruling in favor of the Philippines while continuing to impinge on the sovereign rights of other nations.
Issues such as these are conveniently glossed over by the state-run media machine along with “debt diplomacy” in the form of the new Silk Road superhighways, or the Belt and Road Initiative, and the internment of at least one million Muslim Uighurs in the province of Xinjiang.
As for Taiwan, the mere mention of the island tends to send Beijing’s spin doctors into fits of collective hysteria.
“In Xinjiang, reports are piling up of a monumental deployment of technology and state security to impose what most agree is an almost universal curfew that goes far beyond trying to route out small cells of radical Islam,” Kerry Brown, a professor of Chinese Studies and the director of the Lau China Institute at King’s College in London, wrote earlier this week.
‘Muscular’
“In the South China Sea, China’s behavior has been muscular and resurgent. The often tepid dialogues China once had on human rights and other contentious issues are now largely dead … because of its new prominence, there is a sense that China does [not] need to even play along anymore,” Brown, who is also an associate fellow at Chatham House, added.
Quite simply, Beijing’s attitude has hardened, despite a bruising trade war with the United States and disputes with the European Union about intellectual property rights violations and a slowdown in reforms.
After all, wealth leads to power. Between 2007 and 2017, China’s trade surplus with the rest of the world was a staggering US$3.192 trillion, according to statistics from statista.
The economic miracle also produced a booming middle class of approximately 300 million shoppers. Consumerism now walks hand in hand with Communism in the world’s second-largest economy.
But this new found status has come at a price. Political dissent is denied oxygen as the Great Firewall encircles China’s internet, upgraded with more sophisticated AI, or artificial intelligence, monitoring technology.
Words such as democracy are bracketed with pornography, news feeds contain a steady drip of state-sanctioned snippets, and commentaries and editorials are contained within the Party line.
Even harmless children’s cartoons, such as Winnie the Pooh and Peppa Pig, are regularly banned for political or ideological reasons.
“On the human rights front, China’s more confident behavior feels like a direct existential threat because it seeks to subvert the fundamental norms which have shaped global progress toward greater respect for liberal democracy and the rule of law,” Ted Piccone, a senior fellow in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution, the Washington-based think tank, said.
Similar comments are collectively ignored by Beijing or strenuously attacked by the Party’s battalions of online trolls, spouting the gospel according to Xi.
Yet they probably keep one or two senior officials awake at night in Zhongnanhai, the secure compound of the political elite. Unfortunately, the chance of real political reform died along with countless young lives during the Summer of Protest in 1989, which culminated in the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
Chants calling for democracy were silenced by PLA bullets. Student slogans were crushed under the tracks of tanks.
“Nearly three decades after Tiananmen, repression in China is worse than ever,” Michael Caster, a human rights advocate and the editor of The Peoples Republic of the Disappeared: Stories from inside China’s System for Enforced Disappearances, said.
“Amid a widespread crackdown on human rights defenders, China has systematized enforced disappearances and extralegal detentions,” he added. “The government has also developed a vast system of digital surveillance that intrudes into people’s daily lives, nowhere more so than in Xinjiang.”
Beijing rejects this.
Framework
Last year, the State Council published a document, entitled New Progress in the Legal Protection of Human Rights in China. The government’s de facto cabinet spelled out the framework and judicial protection of Chinese citizens.
“The rule of law is a symbol of human progress, and serves as the guarantee for ensuring human rights,” the State Council stated. “It is the determination and ultimate goal of the Communist Party of China and the Chinese government to fully implement law-based governance of the country, strengthen legal protection of human rights in all areas, ensure that the Chinese people fully enjoy their rights and freedoms, achieve social fairness and justice, and promote overall human development and social progress.”
Long winded and open to ridicule, the Party’s approach has come under fire from groups such as Human Rights Watch.
“The broad and sustained offensive on human rights that started after President Xi took power five years ago showed no sign of abating in 2017,” it said in a report. “The death of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo in a hospital under heavy guard in July highlighted the Chinese government’s deepening contempt for rights.
“The near future for human rights appears grim, especially as Xi is expected to remain in power at least until 2022. Foreign governments did little in 2017 to push back against China’s worsening rights record at home and abroad.”
At times, it has been difficult to divide the two.
Piccone, a senior fellow in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution, stressed that the state’s “growing power is felt not only at home.”
He highlighted the “expanding portfolio of loans, direct investment, and trade agreements around the world,” and how China uses them as leverage for diplomatic gains, which “challenge the US-led international order.”
Then, there is Taiwan. Beijing’s obsession with the island has only been rivaled by its fixation with Hong Kong before the handover.
But since 1997, the rule of law in the former British colony has been eroded, despite the “One Country, Two Systems” guarantee from paramount leader Deng Xiaoping.
In only 20 years, Hong Kong has become just another city in what China now calls the Greater Bay Area.
Taiwan is next on the list. This young, democratic enclave is being pressured to hop into bed with an authoritarian neighbor for the love of the motherland.
“[China] is making steady progress in isolating democratic Taiwan by offering economic incentives to developing countries like El Salvador, Dominican Republic, and Burkina Faso, which previously did not recognize Beijing,” Piccone said.
“It has [also] begun promoting its model of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ as the preferred path for protecting human rights while chipping away at well-entrenched principles that define the international human rights system,” he added.
Spotlight
Chipping away is a phrase that would resonate with Brown, the King’s College professor and the author of The New Emperors (I.B. Tauris, 2014).
He has looked objectively at the “China model,” while shining a spotlight on “the sharp treatment of Taiwan,” [and] the “incredible, pervasive growth of the surveillance state in China.”
Brown has also opened up a new avenue of debate:
“More people in Europe and the United States are starting to be uneasy about the ways in which Confucius Institutes are allowed to operate in Western establishments without similar freedoms for Western equivalents in Chinese ones. They wonder why the Chinese can buy, invest, and work so freely in their environments while it is so difficult for foreigners to do the same back in China.
“They wonder why Chinese lobbyists and activists are able to freely express their ideas in London, Sydney, or Washington, and seek to influence outcomes that matter to them there, when there is precious little space for this sort of activity back in China. More and more will start to ask the simple question, where is the reciprocity? And they don’t want answers just in soothing rhetoric.
“They want to see real actions and measures that show there is reciprocity. The simple fact is a Chinese citizen can stand before the White House and curse the US system and the president and suffer no consequences as long as they do so peacefully. Try that in front of the central leader’s compound of Zhongnanhai as a foreign passport holder and see how long one lasts!”
Probably as quick as saying, “smoke and mirrors.”
WuKong Sun And how do you come to the conclusion that Chinese export items do not have local competition in the destination countries?
However unlike you Stanley, going by your Christian first name, I dont believe God looks like a bearded caucasian man 😀
Look at the Chinese trolls …. Replying on every comment made.Get this straight, arrogance is the beginning of downfall. Xi in his mad quest for power is on the verge of alienating China and getting his country ganged up on by many countries. China should be a responsible power, these actions will cost it dearly very soon. It will fizzle out before it reaches it’s full potential.
America intervened mostly to get access to the huge chinese market for their own economic benefit
The only mask peeled away is yours, Gordon Watts. Why such suddenly sharp change of tone in your articles all of sudden? You master handed you strict orders for not being aggressive enough in demonizing china lately? Mr. "journalist"?
The source of these complaints is not the Chinese people. It is the CCP’ that dictatorial swill who are not representative of the Chinese people but of the worst and most vile politics ever devised by mankind . . . TYRANNY!!!
They’re just running desperate. Just wait until the next month/quarter’s economic stats come out when the tax cut boost runs out. Instead of narrowing the trade gap, it’ll widen:
1. US exports are all perishable goods and first source, eg 100% made in USA, eg soy beans.
2. China exporys value added non perishable goods with few competitors, eg electronics, smart phones, lcds that can last months if not yrs, can be exported through another country to bypass tariffs. Of course American consumers will have to pay more. The middle man country will be more than happy to make the easy 10-20% profit.
3. No one will import and re-export USA farm products since it’s perishable and directly compete with its own local farmers. Why not sell direct to China its own farm goods at 20+% higher.
hahahahahaha
Hahhahaha…. Title should read: China’s economic miracles squashed all western attempts at chaos and regime change. hehehehe… Or how about: Chinese are all laughing in "desperation" but they’re really crying for democracy. hahahahah
The fact that Watts has been spewing out anti-China articles non-stop like on a conveyor belt exposes his motivation, shallowness, know nothing and propaganda lies.
An impartial, serious writer or investigator like Seymour Hersh would take months to research and write objective articles. But Watts spins out his imaginations and prefudices as facts.
As compared to the U.S.’s or Europian countries’ "peaceful rises"? China hasn’t been to war since 1979 and that was only to prevent the Vietnamese from invading Cambodia. The U.S. and Europian countries can’t stop themselves from attacking other countries. Which is more peaceful?
Additionally China is covered in American Institutes, which are almost exact copies of Confucius Institutes but teaching about American language and culture. The fact that you agreed with the author on this point shows that you haven’t looked into this.
I can’t believe that this blowhard has the audacity to refer to any other publications as "long winded and open to ridicule." This was such generalized U.S. propaganda that one could easily switch all the references to "China" with the "U.S.", substitute some sources, and republish it as an attack on the U.S. government.
Thanks for the summary of U.S. bullshit.
After "the Russians did it" mindless China bashing seems to be the new career advancement requirement for Western journalists.
It is all true. Death to tyranny!
CIA propaganda.
It’s good that AsiaTimes presents a wide range of views. For that I applaud AT. This article has all the current US propaganda elements of debt enlavement, but primarily exaggerated human rights abuses, that the US uses before it invades/overthrows/regime changes a country.
For the debt enslavement or "debt diplomacy" issue (which is disputed) this is like the pot calling the kettle black. As an American, the author might do a bit of reading of US history. From "The Southeastern Indians".
"His (President Thomas Jefferson), main strategy was to install "factories" (government trading posts) among the Indians, to allow them to fall in debt, and then to force them to cede land as a way of ridding themselves of debt. Thus in 1805, in the Treaty of Mount Dexter, the Choctaws ceded 4,142,720 fertile acres of Mississippi in exchange for cancelling of a $48,000 trading debt and a small quantity of goods".
Maybe the US is so sure this is happening because it’s one of their ideas, and that’s how they would approach loaning money to other countries.
I found these articles to be better written and more insghtful than this one.
http://www.atimes.com/article/here-comes-the-30-year-trade-war/
http://www.unz.com/article/trade-war-iii/
Anytime someone quotes the "…internment of at least one million Muslim Uighurs in the province of Xinjiang.", you know its pure propaganda.
A waste of time reading this racist nut articles!
So the fall of the Soviet Union only got America a far more dangerous enemy. Well deserved. You Americans insisted on lifting up a heavy rock – and it fell on your own foot.
The author is absolutely correct in highlighting China’s phoney "peaceful rise" that it propagated for years, but has now been unmasked as nothing more than a vile authoritarian state that thinks it can ride roughshod over international norms, bully smaller states in its vicinity, and then occupy islets in the SCS, which are also contested by other states, and also buy influence in smaller states via financial inducements!
China needs to be challenged by the democratic states. All Confucius Institutes in the West must be closed down unless China allows the same freedom for foreigners in their country. There should be tit-for-tat measures to counter China’s authoritarian ways by any means necessary. The gloves have to come off!
But it was the USA which enabled the rise of this monster. starting with Nixon visiting China in 1972. Why don’t you admit that?
Xi’s China will soon become an enemy of The United States of America!