The West must unite against China

If China wasn’t a global power integrated in the world economy, the country would probably have to be labelled a pariah state.

In Xinjiang, more than one million Uyghurs have been forced into “re-education camps”.

The Canadians Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig are still arbitrarily stewing as hostages in some dungeon; Beijing’s response to the arrest of Huawei’s finance chief Meng Wanzhou in Vancouver.

Chinese disinformation campaigns have reached a new peak during the Corona crisis. The threatening posture in the South China Sea is not diminishing. And Hong Kong is losing the little freedom it had.

The dictum “one country, two systems” that was supposed to govern this cosmopolitan city is dead — in China, only the system of the communist ruling party counts. This is our Chinese “Rhineland moment,” writes the New York Times in reference to the 1936 occupation of the Rhineland.

Persecution, repression and violence — the Middle Kingdom is currently showing an ugly face. Under Xi, China has turned away from Deng Xiaoping’s principle of strategic modesty and patience (tao guang yang hui).

Instead, a new aggressive Rambo attitude is now being practiced in the global arena, which Chinese state media proudly call “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy. Beijing has thus managed to get bogged down in a number of conflicts with numerous countries in a very short time.

China is engaged in a trade and technology conflict with America, it has entered into a deadly border conflict with India, it has a territorial dispute with Japan and other Southeast Asian states, and it is in a clinch with Great Britain over Hong Kong.

The red mandarins do not tolerate criticism. In the last decade, Beijing has launched a wide array of sanctions and campaigns: against Norway because of the Nobel Prize for Liu Xiaobo (2010), against Japan because of the Senkaku/Diaoyu island dispute (2012), against Mongolia because of a visit of the Dalai Lama (2014), against the Philippines because of the conflict in the South China Sea (2014), against South Korea (2016), Canada (2019), Sweden (2020) and against Australia because of Australian demands for an independent investigation into the coronavirus outbreak (2020). There are also numerous…