China denies entry to Liberal MPs Andrew Hastie and James Paterson
Reminder, the Australian Liberal part is the major party of the Australian conservative coalition which holds government.
Government MPs issued statement on Friday night saying their planned China visit was off
Katharine Murphy Political editor @murpharoo
Fri 15 Nov 2019 20.11 AEDT Last modified on Fri 15 Nov 2019 20.18 AEDT
Andrew Hastie issued a joint statement with James Paterson which said they were ‘disappointed’ the ‘opportunity for dialogue now won’t occur’. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian
Liberal MPs Andrew Hastie and James Paterson say the Chinese government has rejected their plans to visit the country on a study tour next month because of objections about their “frankness about the Chinese Communist party”.
The two government MPs issued a short statement on Friday night saying the planned visit was off, and the organisers of the trip, China Matters, issued a separate statement confirming the Chinese embassy had informed them “that at this time Mr Hastie and Senator Paterson are not welcome on a China Matters study tour to Beijing”.
[...]
Hastie and Paterson have both been publicly critical about the Chinese regime, flagging human rights abuses against Uighurs in Xinjiang province and attempts to exert soft power in Australian universities.
Cancellation of the visit comes amid rising tensions in Hong Kong. Both the foreign affairs minister, Marise Payne, and the shadow foreign minister Penny Wong have expressed concerns about the escalating violence in the city, and have urged de-escalation.
British retailer Tesco halts work at Chinese factory over prison labor claim
"‘Absolutely No Mercy’: Leaked Files Expose How China Organized Mass Detentions of Muslim"
Stories as this bring memories of GWB's time when the daughter of the Iraq ambassador to the U.S. said she had seen Iraqi soldiers take babies from incubators in a Kuwait hospital. Y'all would remember that one turned out to be a total fabrication. Still, i'm taking this story at it's merits, for now.
“We are foreign prisoners in Shanghai Qingpu prison China," read a message reportedly found by a six-year-old girl in a Christmas card. "Forced to work against our will. Please help us..."
VIDEO -Girl discovers message in Christmas card from alleged forced labor worker
Dec. 23, 201901:24 Dec. 23, 2019, 2:39 AM AEDT / Updated Dec. 23, 2019, 9:57 AM AEDT
By Yuliya Talmazan
LONDON — A major British retailer is in hot water just days before Christmas after a customer reportedly found a desperate message inside one of its holiday cards claiming to be from prisoners in China forced to work against their will.
The company, Tesco, said Sunday that it had suspended the factory where the cards are produced and launched an immediate investigation.
“We abhor the use of prison labour and would never allow it in our supply chain," a spokesperson for the company said in a statement to NBC News.
"We were shocked by these allegations and immediately suspended the factory where these cards are produced and launched an investigation.”
The newspaper reported that the card, featuring a kitten in a Santa hat, also contained a message in capital letters: “We are foreign prisoners in Shanghai Qingpu prison China. Forced to work against our will. Please help us and notify human rights organisation.”
NBC News has not been able to independently verify the existence of the message.
The card reportedly also urged whoever opened it to contact "Mr. Peter Humphrey," without providing an explanation.
The newspaper said the girl's father googled the name and found a story about a former British journalist who had spent two years in jail in China — at the same Qingpu prison.
Humphrey then went on to break the story about the message for The Times.
Her father, Ben Widdicombe, said he was unsure of the veracity of the message but contacted Humphrey anyway.
"After some reflection we thought that if someone was genuinely desperate enough to write that card we should take it seriously," he told Sky News.
NBC News has reached out to Zheijiang Yunguang Printing, the company that Tesco said produced the card, for further comment, but had not heard back at the time of publication.
While the investigation into the incident is ongoing, Tesco has stopped selling the cards from the factory.
“We have a comprehensive auditing system in place and this supplier was independently audited as recently as last month and no evidence was found to suggest they had broken our rule banning the use of prison labour,” the spokesperson added.
“If a supplier breaches these rules, we will immediately and permanently de-list them.”
The grocery chain told NBC News they have not received any other complaints from customers regarding messages inside Christmas cards.
Tesco donates about $390,000 a year from the sale of the cards to British health charities.
A similar incident happened in 2012 .. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-45976946 , when a woman in Oregon found a plea for help from a Chinese prisoner hidden in a box of Halloween decorations.
In China’s Crackdown on Muslims, Children Have Not Been Spared
"‘Absolutely No Mercy’: Leaked Files Expose How China Organized Mass Detentions of Muslims "China’s Retort Over Its Mass Detentions: Praise From Russia and Saudi Arabia "Searching for truth in China's Uighur 're-education' camps"""
In so many things, even thoughts, the crunch is in the degree to which it is taken.
In Xinjiang the authorities have separated nearly half a million children from their families, aiming to instill loyalty to China and the Communist Party.
Children leaving school in Hotan, China, this month. Beijing has used schools in the city and across the region of Xinjiang to indoctrinate Uighur children. Giulia Marchi for The New York Times
By Amy Qin Dec. 28, 2019 Updated 12:37 p.m. ET
HOTAN, China — The first grader was a good student and beloved by her classmates, but she was inconsolable, and it was no mystery to her teacher why.
“The most heartbreaking thing is that the girl is often slumped over on the table alone and crying,” he wrote on his blog. “When I asked around, I learned that it was because she missed her mother.”
The mother, he noted, had been sent to a detention camp for Muslim ethnic minorities. The girl’s father had passed away, he added. But instead of letting other relatives raise her, the authorities put her in a state-run boarding school — one of hundreds of such facilities that have opened in China’s far western Xinjiang region.
As many as a million ethnic Uighurs, Kazakhs and others have been sent to internment camps and prisons in Xinjiang .. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/08/world/asia/china-uighur-muslim-detention-camp.html .. over the past three years, an indiscriminate clampdown aimed at weakening the population’s devotion to Islam. Even as these mass detentions have provoked global outrage, though, the Chinese government is pressing ahead with a parallel effort targeting the region’s children.
The party has presented the schools as a way to fight poverty, arguing that they make it easier for children to attend classes if their parents live or work in remote areas or are unable to care for them. And it is true that many rural families are eager to send their children to these schools, especially when they are older.
But the schools are also designed to assimilate and indoctrinate[Insert: as a number of non-government schools in our systems do] children at an early age, away from the influence of their families, according to the planning document, published in 2017. Students are often forced to enroll because the authorities have detained their parents and other relatives, ordered them to take jobs far from home or judged them unfit guardians.
The schools are off limits to outsiders and tightly guarded, and it is difficult to interview residents in Xinjiang without putting them at risk of arrest. But a troubling picture of these institutions emerges from interviews with Uighur parents living in exile and a review of documents published online, including procurement records, government notices, state media reports and the blogs of teachers in the schools.
A boarding middle school in Hotan. A government document says such schools immerse children in a Chinese-speaking environment away from the influence of religion. Giulia Marchi for The New York Times
State media and official documents describe education as a key component of President Xi Jinping’s campaign to wipe out extremist violence in Xinjiang, a ruthless and far-reaching effort that also includes the mass internment camps and sweeping surveillance measures. The idea is to use the boarding schools as incubators of a new generation of Uighurs who are secular and more loyal to both the party and the nation.
“The long-term strategy is to conquer, to captivate, to win over the young generation from the beginning,” said Adrian Zenz, a researcher at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington who has studied Chinese policies that break up Uighur families.
To carry out the assimilation campaign, the authorities in Xinjiang have recruited tens of thousands of teachers from across China, often Han Chinese, the nation’s dominant ethnic group. At the same time, prominent Uighur educators have been imprisoned and teachers have been warned they will be sent to the camps if they resist.
Thrust into a regimented environment and immersed in an unfamiliar culture, children in the boarding schools are only allowed visits with family once every week or two — a restriction intended to “break the impact of the religious atmosphere on children at home,” in the words of the 2017 policy document.
“The big difference in China is the scale and how systematic it is,” said Darren Byler, an anthropologist at the University of Colorado who studies Uighur culture and society.
Public discussion in China of the trauma inflicted on Uighur children by separating them from their families is rare. References on social media are usually quickly censored. Instead, the state-controlled news media focuses on the party’s goals in the region, where predominantly Muslim minorities make up more than half the population of 25 million.
Visiting a kindergarten near the frontier city of Kashgar this month, Chen Quanguo, the party’s top official in Xinjiang, urged teachers to ensure children learn to “love the party, love the motherland and love the people.”
Abdurahman Tohti, a Uighur living in Istanbul, saw his son in a video shared by a stranger on a Chinese social media platform. The New York Times
Indoctrinating Children
Abdurahman Tohti left Xinjiang and immigrated to Turkey in 2013, leaving behind cotton farming to sell used cars in Istanbul. But when his wife and two young children returned to China for a visit a few years ago, they disappeared.
He heard that his wife was sent to prison, like many Uighurs who have traveled abroad and returned to China. His parents were detained too. The fate of his children, though, was a mystery.
Then in January, he spotted his 4-year-old son in a video on Chinese social media that had apparently been recorded by a teacher. The boy seemed to be at a state-run boarding school and was speaking Chinese, a language his family did not use.
Mr. Tohti, 30, said he was excited to see the child, and relieved he was safe — but also gripped by desperation.
“What I fear the most,” he said, “is that the Chinese government is teaching him to hate his parents and Uighur culture.”
Beijing has sought for decades to suppress Uighur resistance to Chinese rule in Xinjiang, in part by using schools in the region to indoctrinate Uighur children. Until recently, though, the government had allowed most classes to be taught in the Uighur language, partly because of a shortage of Chinese-speaking teachers.
In December 2016, the party announced that the work of the region’s education bureau was entering a new phase .. https://china.huanqiu.com/article/9CaKrnJZuvi . Schools were to become an extension of the security drive in Xinjiang, with a new emphasis on the Chinese language, patriotism and loyalty to the party.
Without specifying Islam by name, the document characterized religion as a pernicious influence on children, and said having students live at school would “reduce the shock of going back and forth between learning science in the classroom and listening to scripture at home.”
By early 2017, the document said, nearly 40 percent of all middle-school and elementary-school age children in Xinjiang — or about 497,800 students — were boarding in schools. At the time, the government was ramping up efforts to open boarding schools and add dorms to schools, and more recent reports suggest the push is continuing.
Mahmutjan Niyaz, a Uighur businessman living in Istanbul, learned last year that his 5-year-old daughter was sent to a boarding school in Xinjiang after his relatives were detained. The New York Times
The government argues that teaching Chinese is critical to improving the economic prospects of minority children, and many Uighurs agree. But Uighur activists say the overall campaign amounts to an effort to erase what remains of their culture.
Several Uighurs living abroad said the government had put their children in boarding schools without their consent.
Mahmutjan Niyaz, 33, a Uighur businessman who moved to Istanbul in 2016, said his 5-year-old daughter was sent to one after his brother and sister-in-law, the girl’s guardians, were confined in an internment camp.
Other relatives could have cared for her but the authorities refused to let them. Now, Mr. Niyaz said, the school has changed the girl.
“Before, my daughter was playful and outgoing,” he said. “But after she went to the school, she looked very sad in the photos.”
The Kasipi Village Elementary School near Hotan was converted into a full-time boarding school last year, according to an online diary of a Chinese language teacher there. Giulia Marchi for The New York Times
‘Kindness Students’
In a dusty village near the ancient Silk Road city of Hotan in southern Xinjiang, nestled among fields of barren walnut trees and simple concrete homes, the elementary school stood out.
It was surrounded by a tall brick wall with two layers of barbed wire on top. Cameras were mounted on every corner. And at the entrance, a guard wearing a black helmet and a protective vest stood beside a metal detector.
It wasn’t always like this. Last year, officials converted the school in Kasipi village into a full-time boarding school.
Kang Jide, a Chinese language teacher at the school, described the frenzied process on his public blog on the Chinese social media platform WeChat: In just a few days, all the day students were transferred. Classrooms were rearranged. Bunk beds were set up. Then, 270 new children arrived, leaving the school with 430 boarders, each in the sixth grade or below.
Officials called them “kindness students,” referring to the party’s generosity in making special arrangements for their education.
The government says children in Xinjiang’s boarding schools are taught better hygiene and etiquette as well as Chinese and science skills that will help them succeed in modern China.
“My heart suddenly melted after seeing the splendid heartfelt smiles on the faces of these left-behind children,” said a retired official visiting a boarding elementary school in Lop County near Hotan, according to a state media report .. http://xj.cnr.cn/2014xjfw/2014xjfwtj/20181203/t20181203_524438722.shtml . He added that the party had given them “an environment to be carefree, study happily, and grow healthy and strong.”
But Mr. Kang wrote that being separated from their families took a toll on the children. Some never received visits from relatives, or remained on campus during the holidays, even after most teachers left. And his pupils often begged to use his phone to call their parents.
“Sometimes, when they hear the voice on the other end of the call, the children will start crying and they hide in the corner because they don’t want me to see,” he wrote.
“It’s not just the children,” he added. “The parents on the other end also miss their children of course, so much so that it breaks their hearts and they’re trembling.”
The internment camps, which the government describes as job training centers, have cast a shadow even on students who are not boarders. Before the conversion of the school, Mr. Kang posted a photo of a letter that an 8-year-old girl had written to her father, who had been sent to a camp.
“Daddy, where are you?” the girl wrote in an uneven scrawl. “Daddy, why don’t you come back?”
“I’m sorry, Daddy,” she continued. “You must study hard too.”
Students in Hotan playing soccer in a schoolyard with a dormitory in the background. Giulia Marchi for The New York Times
Nevertheless, Mr. Kang was generally supportive of the schools. On his blog, he described teaching Uighur students as an opportunity to “water the flowers of the motherland.”
“Kindness students” receive more attention and resources than day students. Boarding schools are required to offer psychological counseling, for example, and in Kasipi, the children were given a set of supplies that included textbooks, clothes and a red Young Pioneer scarf.
Learning Chinese was the priority, Mr. Kang wrote, though students were also immersed in traditional Chinese culture, including classical poetry, and taught songs praising the party.
On a recent visit to the school, children in red and blue uniforms could be seen playing in a yard beside buildings marked “cafeteria” and “student dormitory.” At the entrance, school officials refused to answer questions.
Tighter security has become the norm at schools in Xinjiang. In Hotan alone, more than a million dollars has been allocated in the past three years to buy surveillance and security equipment for schools, including helmets, shields and spiked batons, according to procurement records. At the entrance to one elementary school, a facial recognition system had been installed.
Mr. Kang recently wrote on his blog that he had moved on to a new job teaching in northern Xinjiang. Reached by telephone there, he declined to be interviewed. But before hanging up, he said his students in Kasipi had made rapid progress in learning Chinese.
“Every day I feel very fulfilled,” he said.
A Uighur child doing his Chinese homework at a bus stop. The government says minority children will have better prospects if they are fluent in Chinese, but Uighur activists worry about losing their culture. Giulia Marchi for The New York Times
‘Engineers of the Human Soul’
To carry out its campaign, the party needed not only new schools but also an army of teachers, an overhaul of the curriculum — and political discipline. Teachers suspected of dissent were punished, and textbooks were rewritten to weed out material deemed subversive.
“Teachers are the engineers of the human soul,” the education bureau of Urumqi recently wrote in an open letter .. http://www.urumqi.gov.cn/fjbm/jyj/tzgg/417532.htm , deploying a phrase first used by Stalin to describe writers and other cultural workers.
The party launched an intensive effort to recruit teachers for Xinjiang from across China. Last year, nearly 90,000 were brought in, chosen partly for their political reliability, officials said at a news conference this year .. https://www.scio.gov.cn/xwfbh/gssxwfbh/xwfbh/xinjiang/Document/1654083/1654083.htm . The influx amounted to about a fifth of Xinjiang’s teachers last year, according to government data.
The new recruits, often ethnic Han, and the teachers they joined, mostly Uighurs, were both warned to toe the line. Those who opposed the Chinese-language policy or resisted the new curriculum were labeled “two-faced” and punished.
Teachers were urged to express their loyalty .. http://www.sohu.com/a/250189401_99910015 , and the public was urged to keep an eye on them. A sign outside a kindergarten in Hotan invited parents to report teachers who made “irresponsible remarks” or participated in unauthorized religious worship.
Officials in Xinjiang also spent two years inspecting and revising hundreds of textbooks and other teaching material, according to the 2017 policy document.
Some who helped the party write and edit the old textbooks ended up in prison, including Yalqun Rozi, a prominent scholar and literary critic who helped compile a set of textbooks on Uighur literature that were used for more than a decade.
Mr. Rozi was charged with attempted subversion and sentenced to 15 years in prison last year, according to his son, Kamaltürk Yalqun. Several other members of the committee that compiled the textbooks were arrested too, he said.
“Instead of welcoming the cultural diversity of Uighurs, China labeled it a malignant tumor,” said Mr. Yalqun, who lives in Philadelphia.
There is evidence that some Uighur children have been sent to boarding schools far from their homes.
Kalbinur Tursun, 36, entrusted five of her children to relatives when she left Xinjiang to give birth in Istanbul but has been unable to contact them for several years.
Last year, she saw her daughter Ayshe, then 6, in a video circulating on Chinese social media. It had been posted by a user who appeared to be a teacher at a school in Hotan — more than 300 miles away from their home in Kashgar.
“My children are so young, they just need their mother and father,” Ms. Tursun said, expressing concern about how the authorities were raising them. “I fear they will think that I’m the enemy — that they won’t accept me and will hate me.”
Kalbinur Tursun, right, at her tailor shop in Istanbul this month. The New York Times
"‘Absolutely No Mercy’: Leaked Files Expose How China Organized Mass Detentions of Muslims "China’s Retort Over Its Mass Detentions: Praise From Russia and Saudi Arabia "Searching for truth in China's Uighur 're-education' camps"/b]""
The coronavirus pandemic has turned a conscious uncoupling into a messy breakup.
By Orville Schell April 3, 2020, 1:05 AM
Justin Metz for Foreign Policy
Washington’s policy of engagement toward Beijing has been embraced, with a few bumps along the way, by eight successive U.S. presidents—an incredible record of continuity. The approach was born in 1972, when the fervently anti-communist President Richard Nixon and his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, set off for Beijing to make a game-changing proposal: The United States and China should end their decades-long hostility by allying against the Soviet Union. As Nixon declared to Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, whose hand former U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had refused to shake at a Geneva conference in 1954, “If our two people are enemies, the future of this world we share together is dark indeed.” He went on to insist that the two countries had “common interests” that transcended their differences and that “while we cannot close the gulf between us, we can try to bridge it so that we may be able to talk across it.” He ended grandiloquently: “The world watches … to see what we will do.”
The world is watching again, but most are expecting a very different outcome. Two giant powers that once seemed to be moving closer together are now tearing themselves away from each other—propelled by both politics and the impact of the global spread of the coronavirus. Decoupling was already underway, pushed by both Chinese President Xi Jinping’s rigid ideology and U.S. President Donald Trump’s nationalism. But as each country tries to blame the other for the coronavirus crisis, as the world becomes starkly aware of supply chains and their vulnerability, and as the global order shifts tectonically, China and the United States are moving further and further apart.
==========
Until Trump came to power, the world took Washington’s lead by expanding cooperation with China, especially in the years following Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, when Deng Xiaoping committed his country to a bold new agenda of “reform and opening to the outside world.” Advocates of engagement hoped that this new policy would goad China into aligning itself with the existing liberal democratic rules-based world order so that over time it would also become more convergent with the interests of the United States.
- Convinced of the seductive power of democracy and lulled by the promise of a seemingly ineluctable historical arc that bent toward greater openness, freedom, and justice, Americans tended to view the prospect of such convergence as almost inevitable. -
Convinced of the seductive power of democracy and lulled by the promise of a seemingly ineluctable historical arc that bent toward greater openness, freedom, and justice, Americans tended to view the prospect of such convergence as almost inevitable. After all, if China wanted to participate fully in the global marketplace, it had no choice but to play by the existing rules—and after the end of the Cold War, that meant America’s rules. So certain did the likelihood of greater convergence seem that there was even talk of a so-called “Chimerica” or forming a “Group of Two.” These promises of a less contentious future allowed differences between China’s values and political systems and those of the democratic world to be downplayed. Proponents of engagement with China emphasized its future evolution under the tonic effects of its putative economic reforms and cautioned that a tougher U.S. policy would only harm the country’s reformers.
A remarkable consensus began to form on the topic of U.S.-China cooperation, one that transcended ideological boundaries within the United States. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter, described as America’s first “human rights president,” ignored China’s manifold rights abuses and not only welcomed Deng to the White House but restored formal diplomatic relations with great fanfare. In 1989, President George H.W. Bush bent over backward to preserve friendly relations after the Tiananmen Square massacre by twice dispatching National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft to Beijing to beseech Deng not to let the hard-won U.S.-China relationship languish.
When the Soviet Union imploded in 1991 and engagement needed another rationale, President Bill Clinton galloped into the breech. After promising not to “coddle tyrants, from Baghdad to Beijing,” and chastising his predecessor for conducting “business as usual with those who murdered freedom in Tiananmen Square,” he ended up embracing Chinese President Jiang Zemin, lobbying to extend “most favored nation” status to Beijing, and even helping to usher it into the World Trade Organization. Clinton was the first U.S. president to name this new policy “comprehensive engagement.” His hope was that once China got the needle of capitalism in its arm, democracy would follow.
- But China derived the largest benefit: Engagement neutralized the United States as an adversary at a time when it was most beneficial to Beijing. -
President Barack Obama continued to pursue this promise, trying to breathe new life into the relationship by having Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reassure Beijing that his administration would not allow sensitive questions like human rights to interfere with cooperation on climate change and economic crisis.
U.S. corporations and consumers both profited from these policies, even as the country was forced to compromise some of its democratic principles and tolerate a growing trade deficit. But China derived the largest benefit: Engagement neutralized the United States as an adversary at a time when it was most beneficial to Beijing. During those 30-plus years, China emerged out of its revolutionary cocoon, developed its fragile economy, laid down its modern infrastructure, and became an important part of global institutions. In a sheltered environment, one in which it was relieved of the threat of war with another big power or even serious hostility, China not only survived but thrived.
==========
With Xi’s 2012 enthronement, however, the chemistry of this critical bilateral relationship began to change. Xi replaced his predecessor’s slogan of “peaceful rise” with his more belligerent “China Dream” and “China rejuvenation.” These ideas laid out a grand vision of a far more assertive and influential Chinese government at home and abroad. But Xi’s implacable assertiveness in foreign policy and his expanding domestic authoritarianism soon began alienating the United States as well as many other lesser trade partners, which found themselves caught in increasingly unequal, and sometimes even abusive, relationships they could not afford to vacate.
Xi’s ambitious new vision of a more aggressive and less repentant China produced a host of reckless policies: He occupied and then militarized the South China Sea; turned a generation of Hong Kongers against Beijing by gratuitously eroding the high level of autonomy they had been promised in 1997; antagonized Japan over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands, which the country had long administered in the East China Sea; rattled sabers at Taiwan so artlessly he alienated even the once reliably pro-Beijing Kuomintang party; and essentially turned Xinjiang into a giant detention camp.
The result has been not only tenser diplomatic relations with Washington, a trade war, and a decoupling of elements of the two powers’ economies but a dangerous fraying of the fabric of transnational civil society cooperation and even a disruption of cultural exchanges. Put together, Xi provided Washington with all the ammunition it needed to reformulate its once forgiving stance. The result has been a far more unaccommodating official posture supported by one of the most unanticipated coalitions in U.S. politics: a united congressional front of Republicans and Democrats who agree on little else. Without the catalytic element of Chinese political reform still in the mix, it is hard to imagine a Sino-American convergence regaining credibility anytime soon in the United States. And with divergence replacing convergence, engagement makes no sense.
- Xi’s initial inability to manage the crisis has undermined both his air of personal invincibility and the most important wellspring of the Chinese Communist Party’s political legitimacy—namely, economic growth. -
But what was Xi’s logic in implementing policies that rendered engagement so unworkable when they were working so well? What moved him to so alienate the United States when he did not need to? There are, of course, myriad specific rationales, but Xi has never articulated an overarching explanation that speaks to China’s actual national self-interest. The most plausible might be the simplest: Muscular nationalism and overt projections of power often play well at home among those ginned up on national pride.
But such indulgences are a luxury that can end up being costly in times of crisis. And the unexpected arrival of the coronavirus pandemic has been just such a moment. Xi’s initial inability to manage the crisis has undermined both his air of personal invincibility and the most important wellspring of the Chinese Communist Party’s political legitimacy—namely, economic growth. The initial numbers out of China for the January-February period show a 20.5 percent drop in consumption and a 13.5 percent drop in manufacturing year on year. Even as the country struggles back to its feet, markets in the rest of the world are going into lockdown.
==========
Despite Chinese efforts to reclaim the crisis as a global propaganda victory—aided by the botched handling of the outbreak in the United States—the domestic blow dealt may be a mortal one, not to the party-state regime but to Xi himself, who has staked his credibility on the handling of the crisis. Unfortunately, the pandemic may also end up being the final coup de grâce of the relatively stable relationship China once enjoyed with the United States.
The Obama administration had already started reappraising the wisdom of trying to unilaterally keep engagement functional when along came Trump and his posse of China hawks (such as Peter Navarro, Steve Bannon, and Michael Pillsbury) who had long warned that an increasingly aggressive, autocratic, and well-armed China was both inevitable and a threat to U.S. national interests.
Then, just as a debate over decoupling from China’s supply chains got rolling, the coronavirus reared its head. As airlines canceled flights, trade shows were postponed, tourism screeched to a halt, investment flows dried up, exports and imports plummeted, and high-tech exchanges were truncated, the debate was ripped out of the hands of policy wonks and thrust into the hands of the gods. By decoupling the United States and China almost overnight, the pandemic has mooted the debate and provided Trump and his hawks with exactly the kind of cosmic sanction they needed to put a final stake through the heart of engagement—and perhaps even the whole notion of globalization as a positive force.
Yet most Americans continue to want globalization of some form—but perhaps with China playing far less of a dominant role. Now that U.S. businesses have turned skeptical of the old style of engagement, that policy has lost its last boosters. Even before the coronavirus crisis, companies made more aware of the risk of having all their eggs in one basket by the trade war were diversifying manufacturing away from China and toward other developing economies like Vietnam. The pandemic may only accelerate that process.
The U.S. military, churches, media, think tanks, civil society, and even academia have since seen a sudden dearth of engagement advocates as old contacts and possibilities have been cut off. The U.S.-China relationship has found itself left floating in a gravity-free environment in which both Xi and Trump, because of their mishandling of the viral challenge, are struggling to find their feet.
To be sure, if the virus is temporarily contained in China, as recent statistics on new cases seem to suggest, Xi may claim victory at home. And if U.S. efforts to control the outbreak under Trump’s leadership continue to flounder, it will only add to Xi’s luster. But Xi has still suffered major reputational damage, especially facing criticism for suppressing the alarms raised by medical professionals in China that could have prevented the virus from spreading. Nor does it help him that U.S. leaders from Trump to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are determined to name it the “Chinese virus” to put responsibility where they say it belongs—and to distract from their own failures.
Win or lose, however, the pandemic has given Xi an excuse to both road-test and extend myriad new mechanisms of party and state control. New color-coded apps that designate who can move where, temperature-checking police scanners, new kinds of mass mobilization tactics, and digital censorship tools will allow the state to intrude even further into Chinese life in the future.
If the battle against the virus spins out of control again as he rushes workers back to assembly lines to rescue China’s economy, Xi will most certainly claim that the threats to the country’s survival and nationhood have now escalated to such a high threat level that an even more centralized, powerful, intolerant, and controlling government is the only way forward. Whatever happens to China’s epidemic, Beijing is likely to emerge from its viral trauma more autocratic, more pugnacious, and more inclined toward conflict with the liberal democratic rules-based order that many Americans still wistfully imagine their country commands.
This article appears in the Spring 2020 print issue.
Orville Schell is the Arthur Ross director of Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations.
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