China Did This — and Will Do Worse

While COVID-19 has wreaked havoc across the world, one of the things we can be thankful for is that it has exposed the true character of the dangerous red elephant in the room: the Chinese Communist regime. We live in a milieu in which those who decide to speak out about the corruption of the Chinese Government (CCP) are labelled as racists and xenophobes, hence  a reasonable dialogue is virtually impossible. The very fact that secular elitists were endlessly deriding President Trump for calling COVID-19 the ‘Chinese Virus’ is a case in point.

Before we go any further, let’s clarify that by ‘China,’ I am referring to the Chinese Communist Party, not the Chinese people. There is a clear difference, and this is critical.

As of today (April 4), there are now 1.1 million of Coronavirus worldwide. Countless Chinese citizens who have spoken out about China’s negligence in dealing with the virus have been imprisoned, some likely killed. If you’re interested in seeing the extent of their suppression of information, the see here, here, and here.

Stephen Lee Myers, of The New York Times, writes:

The central health authorities first learned about the outbreak not from the reporting system but after unknown whistle-blowers leaked two internal documents online.

The fact that the CCP knew about COVID-19 back in November 2019 is enough to reject the preposterous claim that there are currently ‘zero new cases’ in the virus’ origin, Wuhan. What’s more, while it is clear that the city is home to a CCP-owned virology lab, it’s not clear if this is where the virus originated, and whether it was indeed manufactured as a biological weapon. Regardless, China is exploiting the current state of international instability and insecurity to expand and advance its own objectives and power. This ought to be no surprise, since China’s international ambitions are simply an extension of its domestic policy — authoritarian control.

Mark Powell: Black swans and Beijing’s balderdash

Here are eight reasons why Australians need to wake up to the geopolitical threat that China poses to Australia’s national security and identity:

1. The nations of the world are dependent on China for pharmaceuticals

Most countries rely on China for the ingredients needed in pharmaceutical medicines. This is because China has fewer manufacturing regulations and, therefore, is able to produce chemical ingredients at much cheaper rates.

What’s more, some generic antibiotics are manufactured exclusively by the Chinese. Having control in such a pivotal area gives them a huge economic advantage and approximately 80 per cent of the market. According to Rosemary Gibson, author of “China Rx: Exposing the Risks of America’s Dependence on China for Medicine”:

If China turned off its international pharmaceutical supply chain then military hospitals and clinics would cease to function within months, if not days.

Holly Strom and Kenneth Schell, both past presidents of the California State Pharmacy Board, documented:

The FDA has identified roughly 20 drugs that are solely made in or derive their active pharmaceutical ingredients from China. The U.S. is partly reliant on Chinese raw ingredients for 370 medicines deemed “essential” by the World Health Organization. **According to one research study, the prices on pharmaceutical raw materials have grown by up to 50% since the outbreak began.

Despite the well-publicized threat, reliance on Chinese medications has only increased in recent years. According to a US government report released last year, U.S. imports of Chinese pharmaceutical materials grew by nearly one-quarter in 2017 on the prior year to nearly $4 billion.

2. China is severing our alliance with the US

Central to China’s expansive strategy is its desire to put a ‘wedge’ between Australia and the US, according to former Chinese diplomat, Chen Yonglin. In Silent Invasion, Yonglin writes:

Essentially, in accordance with their fixed strategic plans, the Communist Party of China had begun a structured effort to infiltrate Australia in a systematic way (p. 2).

One of the primary means by which China achieves this goal is by influencing Australia’s domestic elections. Up until two years ago, Chinese businesses were the largest donors to Australian political parties. This activity has since been muffled by Canberra’s ‘anti-foreign intervention laws,’ though still presents an obvious threat to Australia’s political stability and security.

The truth is, our alliance with the US is paramount at this point in time. Just consider the locations of US military bases in the Oceanic region shown in the map below:

Furthermore, in early 2019, China revealed an unprecedented class of hypersonic weapons that are capable of traveling thousands of kilometres in a short period of time. Considering that both US and Australian vessels and ports are at risk, there seems to be no better time to bolster our partnership with the US than right now.

3. The Chinese government is persecuting and killing Christians

Contrary to popular belief, the most persecuted ‘minority group’ in the world is not those who identify as LGBTQI. Rather, Christians are the most persecuted group. The only reason we don’t hear this is because the secular media is adamant that we only hear about the atrocities which they deem acceptable to broadcast. Besides those living in Muslim dictatorships, Christians are severely persecuted in Communist nations, such as China. In one of China’s major cities — Guangzhou — Chinese citizens can now be rewarded with up to 10,000 yuan ($1,500 USD) by the government for snitching those who practice ‘illegal religious activities’ — including meeting for house-churches. As Christianity Today posted back in 2017: 

The South China Morning Post (SCMP) reports that Communist Party of China (CPC) officials visited believers’ homes in Yugan county of Jiangxi province—where about 10 percent of the population is Christian. They urged residents to replace personal religious displays with posters of President Xi Jinping; more than 600 removed Christian symbols from their living rooms, and 453 hung portraits of the Communist leader, according to SCMP.

4. China is aggressively seeking to expand

By aggressive, I mean gradually strangling the economies of lesser nations until they either collapse or sell themselves to China. Just consider three of their most recent economic policies.

Belt-and-Road initiative: President Xi Jinping announced that China would launch its ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ back in 2013 in an attempt to bolster China’s economic dominance.

In 2015, the Northern Territory Government leased the Darwin Port to Chinese company — Landbridge — for a sum of $506 million. The most shocking revelation is not the amount of money paid, but the length of the lease — 99 years. There is no question that this strategic move is consistent with Belt and Road.

The initiative seeks to expand Chinese banks across the globe, create major Chinese-owned trade-routes, and undertake a number of mining and energy projects. Part of this strategy involves debt-trapping nations in an attempt to gain control over their assets, resources and territory.

China is debt-trapping Third-World nations: China has recently been under international fire for its corrupt practices with third-world nations. Essentially, Chinese banks and entities have been loaning money at low rates to nations whom they know will not be able to remunerate.

These nations — such as Venezuela, Fiji, Tonga, and Sri Lanka — have been forced to pay for their loans by giving strategic ports to China, allowing it to acquire land, establish military bases, and constructing Chinese airports. To consider the extent of this problem, consider what The Economist has to say:

China’s overseas lending [has] risen from almost nothing in 2000 to more than $700 billion [USD] today. It is the world’s largest official creditor, more than twice as big as the World Bank and IMF combined. Yet tracking the money is hard because of limited transparency in its disclosures.

Antarctica: According to the recent reports, China has expanded its Taishan Antarctic Base beyond its assigned boundaries, signalling the need for Australia to invest more in the surveillance of this region. As the University of Canterbury’s (NZ)Professor Anne-Marie Brady writes:

China is expanding its military and modernising its military and the Arctic and Antarctic have an important part to play in that.

Though China’s Antarctic bases have not shown signs of military expansion to date, little to no investment has been made by world governments to monitor their activity. For this reason, China’s presence stands as a moderate threat to Australia’s security.

Meanwhile, Western nations are enticed to offshore their manufacturing and development by the irresistibly lucrative offer of cheap labour and limited regulations. This is not to say that all the consequences of this economic partnership are deleterious, but that Australia has placed itself in an incredibly vulnerable economic and political position. We are sacrificing our national sovereignty and identity on the altar of short-term economic success.

5. China is crushing freedom of speech

 Like any Marxist state, China has no interest in the truth. As Martyn Iles writes,

For communists, there is no higher authority than the state. And when you’re in that situation, you wind up with a couple of things.

You wind up, firstly, with atheism as the preferred, if not the enforced, religion; and you wind up with a situation in which the state is no longer the servant of truth, but, as the ultimate authority, becomes an author of ‘truth.’ Freedom of speech and the free flow of information is naturally one of the greatest threats to a communist dictatorship. The Beijing regime censors, filters and controls the information of its citizens using the ‘Great Firewall of China.’

Here’s a short list of websites and applications that are blocked in China:

According to Freedom House:

The CCP’s Central Propaganda Department, government agencies, and private companies employ hundreds of thousands or even millions of people to monitor, censor, and manipulate online content. Material on a range of issues is systematically censored, with the most censored topics in 2017 involving breaking news related to health and safety, media censorship, official wrongdoing, foreign affairs, the reputation of the party or officials, or civil society activism.

Internationally, Beijing has censored and monitored communications on its government-subsidized platforms, social media applications, and has repeatedly interfered with international news outlets. For example, consider WeChat, which has over a billion daily users and has been time and time again criticised for its censorship and manipulation of information. If you want a first-hand look at the sort of information-suppression and ideological control that the CCP exerts over its citizens, just read WeChat’s ‘Terms and Conditions.’

You can summarise the terms like this: (1) Don’t speak a word against the Chinese Government. (2) Don’t practice a religion that is inconsistent with the religion of Marxist atheism. Do either (1) or (2) you will be prosecuted.

While encroaching on the personal data of citizens is not unique to China — as we saw with the whole Facebook debacle — the uniqueness of the Chinese situation is that we’re dealing with government-subsidized and run platforms — not private entities. The reality is, the Chinese government is not only using these platforms to monitor its own citizens, but also to actively monitor anyone using its platforms.

6. Australia’s domestic security is being sacrificed for money

Time and time again, Australia’s national security is being exchanged for short-term economic gains. ANU’s Professor Rory Medcalf sums it up like this:

Essentially, Beijing wants from its commercial partners the same deal that it has with its own people — economic benefits in return for acquiescence on politics and security.

The chief way China influences Australia is through economic means — control of data, assets, ports, and trade. China seeks to generate in Australia a sense of economic dependence, in order that Australia would appease China’s decision to expand into the South-East Asia sea. This is also true on the domestic front. Former Labor senator Sam Dastyari perfectly embodied this aspect when he resigned from the upper house in 2018 in response to revelations that he was too closely involved with China and its operatives.

While the lucrative promise of Chinese investment and political bargaining remains alluring, the price Australia will pay in a loss of national security and identity may be far greater than we realise.

7. Human-rights violations in China

 Though limited data is available on the extent of violations, it is clear China continues to persist in abusing numerous basic human rights. We’ve already look at the abuses of freedom of speech, privacy, and freedom of religion, so let’s focus on three more key areas of violation.

Torture: Torture remains commonplace as a way of dealing with political dissidents, religious groups, and criminals. For instance, one of the most abused people in China are the Uighur people — Turkish living in China. According to The Guardian, more than a million Uighur people are currently in Chinese detention centres where they are being abused and used for forced labour. In the camps, rape is used as a mechanism for ‘re-education,’ sometimes so brutally that the women are killed or left in a critical condition.

Forced Abortion: China still advocates for population control, and this is manifest in its ‘two-child policy.’ According to the Lozier Institute, if parents in China exceed the permitted limit of two children — and cannot pay the fine for their ‘crime’ — they are forced by the authorities to abort the child.

Breeding List: The Handmaids Tale is no longer a myth! But it isn’t a fundamentalist Christian nation propagating the dystopian narrative, as Margaret Atwood predicted, but rather the Communist nation of China. The Guardian reports:

An open database in China contains the personal information of more than 1.8 million women [who are capable of bearing children], including their phone numbers, addresses, and something called “BreedReady” status, according to a researcher.

While many continue to mock those troubled by Chinese expansion, it is clear these concerns are legitimate — we must not take warnings of China’s rise as ‘fear mongering.’ It is in China’s best interest that those who seek to expose the corruption and devastation caused by the CCP are attacked. When Beijing’s critics are assailed, their critics are doing China’s job for them.

COVID-19 has done nothing but expose the faulty foundations upon which Australia’s relationship with China is built. If Australia desires to preserve its national identity and security, we must address the elephant in the room and stand firm against the Orwellian dystopia. The way forward is to further invest in our partnership with the United States and prioritise bolstering our national and international defences. Short-term economic gains with China are not worth the ideological and political suffocation that will come as a result.