China's war on COVID-19 spurs expat exodus, but lockdowns are only part of the story - "The American businessman first travelled there in the 1980s. He lived in Shanghai for 19 years and raised his family in the city. "When I first arrived in China, there was a sense of optimism, of openness and curiosity," he said. After finishing his tenure as the president of the American Chamber of Commerce in China late last year, Mr Gibbs decided to return to the US. He said his decision was driven in part by the COVID-19 lockdowns and travel restrictions, but also by an increasingly repressive atmosphere in China. "The current direction is troubling"... Even before the pandemic, foreigners had begun to leave China en masse. Official figures show the number of foreigners in Shanghai decreased from 208,000 in 2010, to around 163,000 in 2020. The downturn was even starker in Beijing, where the number of foreign residents declined by 40 per cent over the same period... Jörg Wuttke — the head of the European Chamber of Commerce in China — said earlier this year that the "number of foreigners in China has halved since the pandemic began". In a survey conducted during the strict lockdown of Shanghai in April, 85 per cent of the 950 respondents said the lockdown made them rethink their future in China. A quarter said they want to leave China as soon as possible. Pandemic measures are only part of the story. Many say the spirit of openness that underpinned China's economic rise may be in terminal decline... Brian Klein — a former US diplomat and chief global strategist at Ridge Point Global — said Mr Xi's appointment of party apparatchiks known for their loyalty to leadership positions over pro-market pragmatists would do little to quell anxiety over the country's direction. "Politics trumps economics now"... "Some people think the overall vibe has changed from an openness and curiosity about interacting with foreigners … China is not as open towards international connection." For some, there appeared to be a link between deteriorating geopolitical relations and brooding hostility on the ground... xenophobic sentiment is on the rise in Xi Jinping's China, driven by tensions with the West and a belief that foreigners are importing not only COVID-19 but also monkeypox. "People kind of avoid you on the road and people maybe don't want to sit next to you on the bus"... Another geopolitical issue giving expats pause is the increasing tension over Taiwan. Some analysts note the congress hinted at an accelerated timeline for China's desire to reunify with Taiwan, possibly by force. Such a prediction has companies looking with increasing anxiety at the commercial exodus out of Russia after its invasion of Ukraine... "Xi Jinping has not been hiding the fact that he wants Chinese companies to thrive … and he's building a new model for China that diverges significantly from the past"... while American businesses remain profitable, most companies have less confidence in China's economic management. A third have redirected planned China investments elsewhere in the past year, almost double the number of companies that did so in 2021... Mr Zheng said there is a trend towards localisation for foreign-owned businesses. "Many [American] companies here are now headed up by Chinese nationals … more and more I think you'll see Chinese nationals are running multinational companies in China"... "This is a China that's living in angry isolation … we do have history as a guide, these periods of time have led to disastrous consequences [for China] in some way in the past," Mr Gibbs said. Mr Tsai said pushing foreigners out is an 'own goal' for Beijing. He said that with fewer foreigners in China, in particular journalists, real stories about China are rarer... Mr Tsai also said hopes about China opening up completely were always misguided. "Make no mistake, China has not fundamentally changed since the reform and opening — they just wanted to get rich, they needed to do that." "And they've arrived, now it's time to go back to the old game plan.""
China's economy rotting from the head - "China highlights a long-debated question about economic development: Can a top-down autocracy outperform liberal market economies in terms of innovation and growth?... some astute China observers pointed out that the Communist Party of China's iron grip did not bode well for the country's prospects. But the more common view was that China would sustain its astonishing growth. While there were debates over whether China would be a benign or malign force globally, there was little disagreement that its growth was unstoppable. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank made a habit of projecting past Chinese growth rates into the future, and books with titles like When China Rules the World proliferated. For years, one also heard arguments that China had achieved "accountability without democracy", or that the CPC leadership was at least constrained by term limits, a balance of powers, and other good-governance stopgaps. China won praise for demonstrating the virtue of government planning and offering an alternative to the neoliberal Washington consensus. Even those who recognised China's model as a form of "state capitalism" -- with all the contradictions that entails -- projected that its growth would continue largely unabated. Perhaps the most potent argument was that China would control the world by dint of its ability to achieve global dominance in artificial intelligence. With access to so much data from its massive population, with fewer ethical and privacy restrictions than those faced by researchers in the West, and with so much state investment in AI, China was said to have an obvious advantage in this domain. But this argument was always suspect. One cannot simply assume that advances in AI will be the main source of economic advantage in the future; that the Chinese government will allow for ongoing high-quality research in the sector; or that Western companies are significantly hampered by privacy and other data regulations. China's prospects today look far less rosy than they once did. Having already eliminated many internal checks, President Xi Jinping used the CPC's 20th National Congress to secure an unprecedented third term (with no future term limits in sight), and stacked the all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee with loyal supporters. This consolidation of power comes despite major unforced errors by Mr Xi that are dragging down the economy and sapping China's innovative potential. Mr Xi's "zero-Covid" policy was largely avoidable and has come at a significant cost, as has his support for Russia's war in Ukraine. Even more and greater blunders are likely to follow now that Mr Xi wields unchecked power and is surrounded by yes-men who will avoid telling him what he needs to hear... China's rapid industrial growth in the 1990s and 2000s was built on huge investments, technology transfers from the West, production for export, and financial and wage repression. But such export-led growth can go only so far. As Mr Xi's predecessor, Hu Jintao, recognised in 2012, China's growth would have to become "much more balanced, coordinated, and sustainable", with far less reliance on external demand and much greater reliance on domestic consumption. At the time, many experts believed that Mr Xi would respond to the challenge with an "ambitious reform agenda" to introduce more market-based incentives. But these interpretations overlooked a key question that China's regime was already grappling with: how to maintain the CPC's political monopoly in the face of a rapidly expanding, economically empowered middle class. The most obvious answer -- and perhaps the only answer -- was greater repression and censorship, which is exactly the path Mr Xi took. For a while, Mr Xi, his entourage, and even many outside experts believed that the economy could still flourish under conditions of tightening central control, censorship, indoctrination, and repression. Again, many looked to AI as an unprecedentedly powerful tool for monitoring and controlling society. Yet there is mounting evidence to suggest that Mr Xi and his advisers misread the situation and that China is poised to pay a hefty economic price for the regime's intensifying control. Following sweeping regulatory crackdowns on Alibaba, Tencent, and others in 2021, Chinese companies are increasingly focused on remaining in the political authorities' good graces, rather than on innovating. The inefficiencies and other problems created by the politically motivated allocation of credit are also piling up, and state-led innovation is starting to reach its limits. Despite a large increase in government support since 2013, the quality of Chinese academic research is improving only slowly. Even in AI, the government's top scientific priority, advances are lagging behind the global tech leaders -- most of them in the United States. My own recent research with Jie Zhou of MIT and David Yang of Harvard University shows that the top-down control in Chinese academia is distorting the direction of research, too. Many faculty members are choosing their research areas to curry favour with heads of departments or deans, who have considerable power over their careers. As they shift their priorities, the evidence suggests that the overall quality of research is suffering. Mr Xi's tightening grip over science and the economy means that these problems will intensify. And as is true in all autocracies, no independent experts or domestic media will speak up about the train wreck he has set in motion."
Why conventional wisdom giving China the military edge over India may not be true - "recent studies from the Belfer Center at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government in Boston and the Center for a New American Security in Washington suggest India maintains an edge in high-altitude mountainous environments, such as the one where the 2020 face-off is taking place... “Recent conflicts with Pakistan give the current IAF a level of institutional experience in actual networked combat,” it says. Lacking such experience, Chinese pilots may have difficulty thinking for themselves in a dynamic aerial battlefield, according to the Belfer report. “Recent PLAAF exercises with unscripted scenarios have found that pilots are excessively reliant upon ground control for tactical direction,” it says. “This suggests that PLAAF combat proficiency may be significantly weaker than often estimated.” While India has the experience in the air, the CNAS report says it is also hardened on the ground, fighting in places like Kashmir and in skirmishes along its border with Pakistan. “India is by far the more experienced and battle-hardened party, having fought a series of limited and low-intensity conflicts in its recent past,” the CNAS report says. “The PLA, on the other hand, has not experienced the crucible of combat since its conflict with Vietnam in 1979.” That month-long border war, launched by China in response to Vietnam’s military intervention in Cambodia, is largely considered a defeat for China. The PLA had trouble making gains against Vietnamese troops that were smaller in number but vastly more experienced after fighting US forces during the Vietnam War... US intelligence and surveillance could help India get a clearer picture of the battlefield... India participates in joint military drills with countries like the US, Japan, France and Australia. “Western troops participating in such war games and exercises regularly have expressed a grudging admiration for their Indian counterparts’ tactical creativity and high degree of adaptability,” the CNAS report says. “China’s joint training endeavors, on the other hand, thus far have remained relatively rudimentary in scope — with the notable exception of its increasingly advanced military exercises with Pakistan and Russia.”"
RCMP investigating reports of Chinese 'police stations' in Canada - "The RCMP says it’s investigating reports of criminal activity at so-called "police stations" reportedly set up by the People’s Republic of China in the Greater Toronto Area. According to a recent and ongoing investigation by a Spanish-based non-government organization (NGO) called Safeguard Defenders, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has undertaken a concerted operation to force Chinese nationals living abroad who are accused of telecom and online fraud to return home. As part of this effort, Safeguard Defenders said China has opened a total of 54 so-called police “service stations” in 30 countries, including three in Canada in the Greater Toronto Area... China has claimed that 230,000 fraud suspects were successfully "persuaded to return" home between April 2021 to July 2022. This was done through a number of tactics, the NGO said, including depriving suspects' children back in China of the right to education as well as other consequences faced by relatives who are found to be "guilty by association.""
China operating over 100 police stations across the world with the help of some host nations, report claims - "Beijing has set up more than 100 so-called overseas police stations across the globe to monitor, harass and in some cases repatriate Chinese citizens living in exile, using bilateral security arrangements struck with countries in Europe and Africa to gain a widespread presence internationally... Madrid-based human rights campaigner Safeguard Defenders says it found evidence China was operating 48 additional police stations abroad since the group first revealed the existence of 54 such stations... Its new release – dubbed “Patrol and Persuade” – focuses on the scale of the network and examines the role that joint policing initiatives between China and several European nations, including Italy, Croatia, Serbia and Romania have played in piloting a wider expansion of Chinese overseas stations than was known until the organization’s revelations came out. Among the fresh claims leveled by the group: that a Chinese citizen was coerced into returning home by operatives working undercover in a Chinese overseas police station in a Paris suburb, expressly recruited for that purpose, in addition to an earlier disclosure that two more Chinese exiles have been forcibly returned from Europe – one in Serbia, the other in Spain... China has also said the offices were a response to the Covid-19 pandemic, which had left many citizens locked down in other countries and locked out of China, unable to renew documentation... Undeclared consular activities outside of a nation’s official diplomatic missions are highly unusual and illegal, unless a host nation has given their explicit consent, and the Safeguard Defenders report claims China’s overseas offices predate the pandemic by several years... China isn’t the only superpower to be accused of employing extrajudicial means to reach targets for law enforcement or for the purposes of political persecution abroad. Russia, for instance, has on two occasions been accused of deploying lethal chemical and radioactive substances on British soil to try to assassinate its former spies – allegations Russia has always denied. In the United States, the CIA was embroiled in a scandal over the extraordinary rendition of terrorism suspects from the streets of Italy to Guantanamo Bay after 9/11... Between 2016 and 2018 Italian police conducted multiple joint patrols with Chinese police – first in Rome and Milan – and later in other cities including Naples where at the same time, Safeguard Defenders says, it has found evidence that a video surveillance system was added to a Chinese residential area ostensibly “to effectively deter crimes there.”... One ceremony in Rome to mark the opening of a new station was attended by Italian police officials in 2018, according to videos posted on Chinese websites, demonstrating the close ties between police forces in the two countries... Ireland has shut down the Chinese police station found on its territory, while the Netherlands, which has taken similar measures, has a probe underway, as does Spain."
Kenya refuses to release contracts for China debt - "The Kenyan government’s refusal to provide the Chinese loan contracts gives voice to the accusation that Chinese lenders use contracts to gain advantage over other creditors in developing countries. A report released last year that looked at 100 contracts issued from 2000 and 2020 between Chinese lenders and 24 developing countries, including 11 from Africa, found that Chinese contracts contain confidentiality clauses (pdf) that prevent borrowers from sharing details about the documents. The research, led by AidData, a US-based development finance research lab, found that the contracts had become more secretive over time, with all since 2014 having a confidentiality clause. Study co-author Scott Morris said the limitations make it difficult for debt renegotiation because such discussions depend on borrowing countries being able to be transparent on their external credit exposure."
Kenya Discloses Part of Secret Railway Contract With China - The New York Times - "Kenya’s government has disclosed some details of the loan agreement the country signed in 2014 with China to build a railway, a major step toward political accountability but one that could strain relations with Beijing, the country’s top financier of infrastructure projects... Since the $4.7 billion rail project, known as the Standard Gauge Railway, began five years ago, it has cast a long shadow over the East African nation. It was over budget by millions of dollars and became the center of multiple criminal investigations, saddling the economy with ever-growing debt and ending with judges declaring it illegal because it contravened the country’s procurement laws. Experts on China and Africa said the revelations were unprecedented, given that Chinese loan contracts were often shrouded in secrecy... the railway’s financier, Exim Bank of China, had the upper hand in the negotiations. China is Kenya’s top trading partner, and the African country owes more bilateral debt to China than to any other nation. The contract stipulated that any goods bought using proceeds from the railway would preferably be sourced from China. Any dispute that emerged from the agreement, the documents said, must be resolved through binding arbitration in China. The contract also could not be disclosed to any third parties without the financier’s consent, a move that, now completed, could strain relations between the two countries... the loan’s terms were costlier than expected, said Tony Watima, an economist based in Nairobi, the Kenyan capital. The loan’s interest rate was higher than what is typically found in a deal between two governments... The agreement also stipulated that if Kenya defaulted on any other external loan, the default clause on the railway loan would automatically kick in, forcing Kenya to repay the loan and all accrued interest immediately and giving China the right to cease further disbursements. “Despite it being negotiated as a government-to-government project where one expects a symbiotic relationship, all the risks were taken by the Kenyan taxpayer,” Mr. Watima said. “Whether the project pays for itself or defaults, the financiers are guaranteed their return.”... To make the railway profitable, the Kenyan authorities issued a directive that all incoming cargo at the Mombasa port be transported by train — a move that led to huge protests, multiple court cases and growing unemployment... observers said on Monday that Mr. Ruto’s government should publish the full contract in order to allow activists and the public to scrutinize the agreement. That would reveal what the authorities offered as a guarantee to get the loan, and may reveal whether the deal was padded by Kenyan officials and Chinese contractors, said Mr. van Staden, of the China Global South Project."
Wang Gungwu: Even if the West has lost its way, China may not be heir apparent - "The more nationalistic the Chinese people become, the less attractive their country will become.
From 2020.
China Is Investing Billions in Pakistan. Its Workers There Are Under Attack. - WSJ - "China is increasingly grappling with the consequences of projecting power around the world, including corruption, local resentment, political instability and violence... China has faced Western criticism that it is pursuing lopsided lending arrangements that drive developing nations into heavy debt without necessarily delivering the desired local economic benefits. But Beijing also has confronted significant risks, from defaults to political unrest that endangers Chinese assets and workers in borrowing countries. “The Chinese have to come to terms with the fact that these are unstable countries with fragile internal politics,” said Yun Sun, director of the China program at the Stimson Center, a Washington-based think tank. “If you are going to operate here, you are going to encounter these problems.”... Chinese businesses and workers in several countries where it is making investments have become favored targets. Chinese nationals are seen as wealthier than most locals and, in some cases, are perceived to be reaping too much of the economic benefits and job opportunities created by Beijing’s investments... The Oxus Society, a Washington-based think tank, counted about 160 incidents of civil unrest in Central Asia between 2018 and mid-2021 where China was the key issue. Beijing recognizes the rising threat to its workers in developing countries but doesn’t want to send in its army as it professes noninterference abroad, said Alessandro Arduino, author of “China’s Private Army: Protecting the New Silk Road.” Instead, China is deploying technology such as facial recognition and hiring more private Chinese security contractors... Prime Minister Mr. Sharif pledged to resume China’s Belt and Road program, after it stalled under his predecessor. Mr. Khan’s ministers questioned the value-for-money of power projects and whether bribes had been paid for some of the road-building—accusations angrily denied by Beijing. Pakistan’s province of Balochistan is home to the port of Gwadar, a focus of Beijing’s infrastructure program in the country. There are plans to add an airport. Only three ships call a week and 28 Chinese nationals, including two chefs, live there, said Zhang Baozhong, chairman of China Overseas Port Holding Company, which runs the port, part of the state-owned China Communications Construction Co. Ltd. Locals, who don’t have sufficient electricity and drinking water, say they haven’t benefited from the port. Hidayat ur Rehman Baloch, a religious cleric whose party swept local elections this year, led a yearslong and ultimately successful push to convince authorities to drop a plan to expel residents and bulldoze part of the town for a port expansion. “What does development mean?” he asked, adding that he holds the Pakistani government responsible for what he sees as the lack of local benefits from China’s investments. “We have no electricity, no healthcare available. We are thirsty.”"
This may be a turning point in China's history. The West must not miss it - "Across China, people are protesting. From Urumqi to Shanghai, from Wuhan to Beijing, from Guilin to Chengdu and beyond, we are witnessing the largest outpouring of protest in China since the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. There have been other protests in China in recent years. But this is different. This time the people are not simply demonstrating for labour rights or against the draconian Covid-19 lockdowns, though both may have been the spark. They are chanting “Xi Jinping step down! Communist Party step down!”, “We want freedom” and “We don’t want dictatorship, we want democracy”. A bit like a forest fire, the spark appears to have been lit initially by protests at the Zhengzhou factory belonging to Foxconn, a supplier to the world’s largest iPhone manufacturer Apple, over Covid restrictions last week. An actual fire in an apartment building in Urumqi, capital of China’s Xinjiang province – home to China’s predominantly Muslim Uyghur people – led to protests against Covid lockdowns in the city which spread nationwide... Lockdowns are not the primary source of discontent, but rather the last straw. For two decades, from the post-Tiananmen era in the early 1990s through to Xi Jinping’s elevation to the top leadership in 2012, the CCP had an unspoken deal with the Chinese people: in exchange for an economic boom which vastly increased people’s quality of life and a more limited but still noticeable relaxation of space for some degree of personal liberty, civil society, social freedoms, the CCP would hold on to its ‘legitimacy’ and continue to rule. Over the past decade, Xi has upended that, ushering in an era in which there has been a total crackdown on civil society, the destruction of whatever limited space existed for freedom of expression, the implementation of an Orwellian surveillance state and an assault on private enterprise. The CCP under Xi has reverted to a much more ideological Marxist-Leninist position, with complete intolerance of all dissent and a zealous dissemination of so-called ‘Xi Jinping Thought’, aimed at wiping out any heretical ideas about human rights, the rule of law, a free press, academic freedom or an independent judiciary. The physical removal of his predecessor Hu Jintao from the 20th National Party Congress in Beijing, in full view of the cameras, just as Xi secured for himself an unprecedented third term in the top job, is illustrative of the Stalinist state he is building. In its worst excesses, this repression has resulted in the persecution of the Uyghurs which is now increasingly recognised as a genocide, the dismantling of Hong Kong’s freedoms and autonomy in breach of an international treaty, continuing atrocities in Tibet, an intensification of persecution of Christians and Falun Gong practitioners and increased aggression towards Taiwan. It has also led to an ever-more aggressive foreign policy, epitomised both by the violent assault on peaceful Hong Kong protesters in Manchester by the Chinese Consul-General last month and Xi Jinping’s rebuke to Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau at the G20 in Bali this month. Many Chinese people are now showing, with immense courage, that they have had enough. The unspoken Faustian pact that existed between the population and the CCP under Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao has been torn up by Xi, and people are making clear they will not tolerate this any longer"
Canadian intelligence warned PM Trudeau that China covertly funded 2019 election candidates: Sources - "Canadian intelligence officials have warned Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that China has allegedly been targeting Canada with a vast campaign of foreign interference, which includes funding a clandestine network of at least 11 federal candidates running in the 2019 election... those efforts allegedly involve payments through intermediaries to candidates affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), placing agents into the offices of MPs in order to influence policy, seeking to co-opt and corrupt former Canadian officials to gain leverage in Ottawa, and mounting aggressive campaigns to punish Canadian politicians whom the People’s Republic of China (PRC) views as threats to its interests... the alleged interference points to weakness in Canada’s outdated espionage and counterintelligence laws, which sophisticated interference networks run by China, Russia and Iran are exploiting. Still, the 2022 intelligence asserts that China conducts more foreign interference than any other nation, and interference threats to Canada increased in 2015 when Chinese president Xi Jinping elevated the CCP’s so-called United Front influence networks abroad... In April 2021, a private members bill in the House of Commons called for a foreign influence registry, but it did not become law. Kenny Chiu, the B.C. Conservative MP who wrote the bill, was subsequently targeted by the CCP’s election interference network... he believes Chinese agents succeeded in smearing him as a racist in WeChat and Mandarin-language media reports. As the member from Steveston-Richmond, Chiu had advocated for transparent elections in Hong Kong, voted in favour of declaring China’s actions in Xinjiang a genocide, and tabled his April 2021 bill calling for a foreign influence registry. “So ahead of the 2021 election, I was given a distancing treatment by Chinese-language media. And during the campaign people were shutting the door in my face. The messages I was getting were, ‘Kenny Chiu is a racist. Kenny is Anti-Asian.’”... Turnisa Matsedik-Qira, a Uyghur-Canadian activist, said many in her community believe Chinese agents monitored and harassed them. She provided photos from her December 2021 Facebook posting that showed one alleged incident. In the post, Matsedik-Qira says she was protesting outside the Chinese Consulate in Vancouver when a van pulled up, and two men jumped out."
Chinese-Canadians ‘suffering in silence’ as China’s United Front reaches into Canada - "For the University of Toronto graduate, speaking about China’s politics came at a personal cost. She says her family has been harassed and called “anti-Chinese.” Even more stunning, for Lin, her mother in Vancouver, informed her that Chinese national security agents had questioned a family business colleague in China... Lin has come to the belief — through quiet conversations among trusted friends and colleagues — that most Chinese-Canadians are opposed to the Chinese Communist Party’s so-called “United Front” networks that seek to control immigrant groups. But in her words, many Chinese-heritage citizens worldwide are “suffering in silence and in isolation.”... “After I won Miss World Canada, I would run into Chinese in supermarkets in Scarborough. They would come up to me and tell me in secret, just in a very quiet voice, ‘what you are doing is brave.’”... Lin believes it is the Communist Party’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak, which has triggered an unprecedented moment of openness for the Chinese diaspora... Manthorpe said the United Front has been vastly increased under President Xi Jinping and seeks to control the Chinese diaspora and use community members — only on the basis of their Chinese ancestry — as foreign agents for Beijing’s strategic goals. But Manthorpe said the United Front diaspora control operations have only been successful “to a limited degree.” “It certainly hasn’t been very successful amongst the Canadians of Chinese heritage. I mean, the antipathy towards Beijing in Richmond, Scarborough, wherever, is huge and building,” Manthorpe said. And yet, Canada has largely failed in exposing United Front operations and protecting Chinese-Canadians from the pressure exerted on them... “The public voice of Canadian authorities is so crucially needed,” she said. “The fear to speak up (in the Chinese-Canadian community) is enlarged by the silence in the mainstream society. Because the Chinese Communist Party are so good at speaking into the race identity politics, that if you speak against China’s government, you are racist, or you are xenophobic. All the people that want to speak up, Chinese Canadians and around the world, they fear they are not being supported to speak up.”... Lin says through her personal struggles, she has learned a “secret” to share with Chinese-Canadians that have been pressured to fall in line by Beijing’s agents. “They fear strength,” Lin said. “They can’t bully everyone. We need to form a united front ourselves.”"
Chinese Pride - "While it’s to be expected that many of a country’s citizens would seem to identify with its ruling party (especially if that country is an authoritarian one where citizens are deluged in propaganda and perceived disloyalty to the regime is punished), what’s more unusual is how many members of the Chinese diaspora seem to identify with the CCP (especially in Asia) – people who are not in fact Chinese citizens. Many overseas Chinese share propaganda from Chinese state media. They rave about the supposed superiority and benevolence of the CCP over other governments. They vaunt the ability of Chinese President Xi Jinping and the “meritocracy” of the Chinese system. They dispute accounts of the CCP’s repression and dismiss it as “Western media bias” – even when the news source isn’t actually Western (like Al Jazeera). They boast about a government that doesn’t represent them and which they’ve never lived under. It’s not obvious why. “The CCP lifted 800 million people out of poverty,” goes a common refrain, but, more likely, it was the Chinese people who lifted themselves out of poverty through their hard work and initiative. Witness, for example, how every Asian country where people who are ethnically and culturally Chinese comprise a large enough percentage of the population, (from Taiwan to Singapore to Malaysia) has seen similar prosperity... even in the Asian countries where the Chinese are a tiny minority, like Indonesia and the Philippines where they make up 1% of the population, they control a disproportionate share of the private economy (60% in the Philippines). The assertion that the Chinese system is a “meritocracy” is laughable to anyone who’s ever had to work closely with Chinese officials and scholars (as I have) – they’re ridiculously incompetent, and the system seems to reward patronage, sycophancy, loyalty to Party, and doctoring figures rather than ability. Then, of course, there’s the CCP’s dismal rights record and its repression of its own people; the very people you’d think overseas Chinese would care about... Malaysian Chinese are generally thought to heavily favor democracy... Yet many of them support the CCP. Sometimes the same people (and in many instances I’ve seen, the exact same people) who used to deride Malaysian state media as propaganda trash, uncritically eat up the stories from Chinese state media. The same people who used to criticize the Malaysian government when it imprisoned its critics make excuses for the CCP when it does the same. The same people who used to criticize the Malaysian government for cracking down on peaceful protests now call for the CCP to massacre the protestors in Hong Kong (even the peaceful ones) Tiananmen-style. The same people who hated the BN party for embezzling public money in the 1MDB corruption scandal cast no blame on the CCP for aiding and abetting it in its crimes and harboring one of the masterminds of the scheme. The same people who had no trouble distinguishing love for country from love for a ruling party in Malaysia seem to conflate the two in China. Why? Ask them and many will say such repression is necessary to prevent China from descending into chaos. Point out that they rejected the exact same rationale when it was used by the Malaysian government, and they’ll say China must be strong to avenge the century of humiliation inflicted on it by the Western imperialists, especially the extortion of Hong Kong by the British Empire. Ask them why national strength requires repression and they’ll say that anything the CCP does is justified because China is now powerful and no one can oppose it. Point out that, by the same token, they should have supported the British Empire taking Hong Kong because it was more powerful than China, and they’ll say that it’s “Because we’re also Chinese,” and that, whatever the case, at least Hong Kongers are now better off being ruled by fellow Chinese instead of by white men, even if they have less freedom as a result. Ask them why exactly it’s preferable to be oppressed by someone of your own ethnicity, and they’ll say it’s “Because we’re also Chinese!” And that seems to hit at the heart of the matter... it’s the pride at having the same skin color as the biggest bully on the block"
