When China’s “wolf warrior” diplomats huff and puff and denounce their critics, it all comes across to Western ears as just so much shrill hypocrisy. After all – China, lambasting America for human rights abuses? China, calling other countries “thin-skinned” and “hysterical”?
Much of it is certainly calculated righteous indignation from the propaganda makers of the Chinese Communist Party. But for ordinary Mainland Chinese, at least some of it may reflect genuine bewilderment.
China, the only major economy with positive growth this year, is apparently shocked to discover that the developed world, instead of admiring its rapid recovery, judges that it handled the coronavirus epidemic poorly and views it much more negatively now than in the past, a 14-country survey shows.
“Unfavorable opinion has soared over the past year,” the Pew Research Center reported of its survey. The 14 countries spanned the world, from Canada in the north to Australia in the south, including most of the world’s richest countries.
In each country, a majority holds an unfavorable opinion of China. And in nine – Australia, the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United States, South Korea, Spain and Canada – negative views have reached their highest points since Pew began polling on this topic more than a decade ago.
One explanation for China’s negative image, offered by the nationalistic tabloid Global Times, is “sour grapes.”
It’s hard for those of us with at least a theoretically free press to grasp just how thoroughly regimented opinion, from the highest to the lowest, really is in China. A Chinese friend once told me that he was astonished, on moving to Australia, to read different accounts of the Tiananmen Square massacre. “We were told that the students attacked the army,” he said.
Similarly, in his book Tombstone, Yang Jisheng recounts how tightly information is controlled in the Communist nation. Even at the height of the worst famine in human history, few people had any idea that anything was going on more than a “local shortage”. Frank Dikötter’s The Tragedy of Liberation also recounts how many of the ordinary Chinese being sent to fight, or stripped bare to pay for, the Korean War were even unsure whether “Korea” was a place or a person.
So, when the CCP’s propaganda sheet bleats about “sour grapes”, many Chinese will almost certainly believe it.
A more likely one is that China’s chickens have come home to roost. In January, after Wuhan was stricken, quite a few countries responded to China’s appeal for help by sending face masks and other supplies. Beijing asked them not to publicize their donations so that it would not lose face.
In other words, China pillaged the rest of the world and tried to keep it secret.
But not much later, the virus spread beyond China’s borders and countries that had sent aid to China themselves faced critical shortages. Beijing then relished the role of benefactor, sending — in many cases selling — needed supplies, some of which were defective.
China asked recipients to express public gratitude, grating on certain countries.
But it’s not just the Wuhan virus. Unease about China has been growing, in many countries, for years.
There is another factor at work, and that has to do with something China is highly sensitive about: human rights.
It is no coincidence that 13 of the 14 countries — South Korea being the exception — were among those that harshly criticized China in the United Nations debate on human rights earlier this month.
Many have recent, first-hand experience of what China is like. In Australia, 81 percent now hold negative views, compared to 57 percent last year.
Australia’s treatment by China is familiar to BFD readers. But Australia is not the only country in China’s sights. China is also holding two Canadians virtually incognito, in retaliation for Canada’s arrest of a Huawei executive.
In Canada, the Chinese ambassador, Cong Peiwu, last week warned against granting asylum to Hong Kong activists. He said that if Canada cared about the 300,000 Canadian passport holders in the city, it should support a national security law imposed by Beijing. Cong denied he was making a threat[…]
The United States, too, has received warnings from China. On Saturday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Beijing has told Washington that it might detain Americans in response to trials of Chinese military-affiliated scholars.
The abduction of foreign nationals is an extension of what Beijing has done toward ethnic Chinese.
From ethnic Chinese foreign citizens, to China’s own most famous movie stars and entrepreneurs, the CCP has had no qualms about “disappearing” people for months on end, with no explanation.
This type of behavior is what Chinese leaders publicly condemn. Six years ago on Oct. 24, United Nations Day, China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, called for defending the international rule of law, rejecting what he called the law of the jungle, “where the strong do what they want and the weak suffer what they must.”
Japan Times
Like most Asian countries, “saving face” is a big deal for China. Maybe China’s theatrics will save face at home. But if it thinks that behaving like an hysterical, hypocritical bully is the way to save face on the international stage, Beijing needs to think again.
It may come as a shock to the CCP, but China is not the world.
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