Even by the absurdly immoral standards of Chinese Communist Party propaganda, Beijing’s new counterterrorism advice to France is quite astonishing. The advice follows what happened on Friday when a jihadist sympathizer beheaded a French teacher over the teacher’s decision to show his class the Charlie Hebdo cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad.
Most of the world has reacted to this atrocious terrorist attack with statements of condemnation and support for the democratic value of free speech. Not China.
Instead, taking to the pages of its primary Western-focused propaganda outlet, the Global Times, the Chinese Communists offered an interesting suggestion on how France might better protect its citizens. Referencing the attack just outside Paris, the newspaper observed that China had already proven how to defeat violent Islamist extremism. Namely, by its vast network of concentration camps in Xinjiang province. You know, the same camps Beijing uses to imprison, sterilize, and reeducate Uighur Muslims and train them for use as servile labor in areas of China with worker shortages.
The Communists continue, the “tragedy in Paris makes clear that standing united against extremism is a long-term tough task. We must firmly persist in the current successful governance model.” Leaving no doubt that Beijing believes its counterterrorism strategy of brainwashing all Muslims everywhere is the way to go, the newspaper calls France to arms. “Eradicating extremism is a huge challenge of governance for all countries. China has proactively explored feasible ways [of eradicating terrorism] in its Xinjiang governance and generated positive outcomes.”
It’s truly ridiculous stuff.
China is not simply insisting that the abundant satellite imagery and witness testimony of its industrial disappearance campaign is false. It is saying that all its high-wired prisons and lamenting victims are simply misunderstood. That really, they are testaments to a beneficent Communist Party that seeks only to improve the lot and security of its most loved subjects. But not only that. Xi Jinping and his Communist Party apparatchiks truly seem to believe that France should follow their example. What else can we construe from the Global Times’s referencing of Paris in the context of its praise for China’s having “proactively explored feasible ways [of dealing with terrorist threats] … and generating positive outcomes”?
There’s a lesson for the world here. France faces a serious Islamist terrorist challenge and must address the grievances that underpin that challenge. But as a great democracy, France also recognizes that it cannot treat innocent people as enemies of the state. China? Not so much.
For China, anyone who does not always and happily offer a slobbering kiss of clown king Xi’s Communist ring is an enemy and a person to be treated as such. Democracies should be wary. Xi’s regime is genuinely proud it puts millions of innocent people in gulags. It is not a regime to be trusted.
