An existential threat to our way of life has arisen in China. This threat to the free world is something that we have known about for a long time, though the current response is not what it needs to be to protect us and the average person seems to remain ignorant of it.
I wish that I were referring to the virus that the World Health Organization has cowardly designated as COVID-19 (as opposed to the regionally-derived names given to diseases originating in countries without the willingness or ability to exert political influence), which originated in the Chinese province of Wuhan. COVID-19 likely spread from bats to humans, either through an exotic food market or a Chinese disease control laboratory studying the animals.
This virus, though it may threaten our lives and those of our loved ones, pales in comparison to the true threat that China poses to our way of life.
I should make clear that it is, by and large, the government and not the people of China that should be blamed for this threat. The Chinese Communist Party has long been an enemy of freedom, democracy, and fundamental human rights.
This history of abuse dates back to even before the dark days of Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” and the deaths of millions due to the CCP’s totalitarian centralized government, which considered any loss of life acceptable if it propped up their political agenda, but that’s as good a starting point as any. Somewhere between fifteen and thirty-five million people died in three years, often of starvation.
The Cultural Revolution which followed was accompanied by at least a million murders, and during this time the Chinese social and cultural identity was attacked in an effort to replace local beliefs with Communist traditions.
It is in the light of these events that China opened itself up to the outside world with Mao’s overtures toward the United States and United Nation. In 1971, they took over the UN representation that had previously belonged to what we refer to as Taiwan.
Since that time, it has become popular to refer to the People’s Republic of China as an increasingly Westernized nation. That cultural shift may be represented in the interests of its people, who have information about the outside world that filters past the regime’s information control, but the government itself has merely given up on central planning in favor of indirect state control, where the government or its subsidiaries own major stakes in businesses and can engage in extrajudicial actions against its own people.
The situation in East Turkmenistan, also known as Xinjiang, is one example of this. The indigenous Uighur population is predominantly Muslim and is a distinct ethnic group from the Han Chinese that make up the bulk of the PRC’s leadership.
In a situation that has mirrored the treatment of other minority groups (including Christians and practitioners of Falun Gong, a neo-traditional Chinese spiritual movement), the Chinese government has a policy of dehumanizing and exterminating their own populations when they are considered inconvenient to the regime.
All of this is going on while the Chinese have been found on many occasions to engage in violations of intellectual property law (both by industrial and academic fraud) and deliberate attempts to propagandize worldwide (through economic outreach, Chinese state-run press suborning local press through the use of sponsored messages, and the Confucius Institute) with the full backing of the government.
The greatest threat from China is not a virus. We will survive the virus. I do not even believe it is fair to blame China for the virus (though it is certainly absurd to deny that it came from China) because there is no evidence of malpractice or deliberate spread on behalf of the regime.
The greatest threat from China is not their people. Although some may be complicit in the schemes of their government, they are predominantly its greatest victims, forced into subjugation by those who seek to gain power by exploiting the fruit of their labors in China and abroad.
The greatest threat from China is the system of government they operate under and the political ideology they espouse.
Author’s Note (added 3/18/20): In the past couple days I have had a couple people talk to me about the blame that the CCP bears for the novel coronavirus. There are numerous concerns with the Chinese handling of the COVID, starting with the credible reports of the CCP silencing a doctor who was one of the first to become infected and die himself.
More recently, there have been allegations that in addition to trying to enforce information controls domestically and falsify the statistics presented to the world, there was an earlier effort to destroy not only evidence of COVID-19 but also the research that had already been done on the virus.
I think it is actually fair, in light of this, to say that at the very least the regime’s handling of the epidemic itself was abhorrent and morally flawed. My original critique (or lack thereof) was focused more on the practical side of things, from the perspective that there was really no effective way to prevent the spread of such a highly contagious virus.