The Chinese Communist Party has shown the world that its “zero COVID” policies come at the cost of both the health and the freedom of its own citizens.
Democrats in America have also revealed their motivations to the world by not saying nor doing anything to support citizens in China protesting the CCP’s recent lockdowns. Democrats had their own “zero COVID” agenda here in America, so condemning the CCP’s actions would mean condemning their own.
Chinese state health officials announced recently that their lockdowns, the strictest in the world, would continue, a full three years since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. The human cost has been steep.
At least 10 residents of an apartment complex in China’s Xinjiang province recently lost their lives during a fire as a result of Xi Jinping’s lockdown.
Everything from mass transit to major industry to schools has been shut down in Guangzhou, China’s fifth-largest city with nearly 6 million people. In response, Chinese citizens are taking to the streets and chanting “Democracy and rule of law” and calling for Xi to step down. The CCP’s “zero COVID” policy, which includes testing, school closures, and forced quarantine, has led to mass starvation and an economic downturn.
Still, Xi’s inhumanity is shocking.
Since 2019, countless Chinese citizens have been forced to stay home for months at a time without access to reliable food supplies. Surveillance drones have been deployed to monitor neighborhoods, ready to arrest those who dare to go outside. China’s contact tracing program reflects an unprecedented effort by the government to use data to regulate citizens’ lives.
But the courage displayed by those protesting China’s COVID-19 tyranny is heartening. Lest Americans read about and watch these protests and think of “zero COVID” as something “over there,” recall that “zero COVID” is what animated Democrats and much of the media in the U.S. Recall that much of the media were extremely fast to dismiss the theory that COVID-19 came from a lab. Recall that much of the media regurgitated almost verbatim CCP propaganda by extolling their “zero COVID” response in major headlines. Meanwhile, the World Health Organization praised “the scale, the commitment of [China’s] epidemic response” and even thanked Xi for “taking extraordinary measures in the face of what’s an extraordinary challenge.”
The U.S. media’s promotion of China’s COVID-19 approach made sense given their cover for Democrats pushing a “zero COVID” agenda here. The White House tried unilaterally to subject nearly 100 million people to vaccine mandates and created a recruiting crisis at the Defense Department. Thanks to the social isolation caused by the lockdowns, restrictions, and media hysteria, alcoholism and drug-related deaths in the U.S. have reached new heights, as have depression and suicide ideation among youth. As a result of prolonged virtual “learning,” tens of millions of children have experienced learning loss so great they’ll likely never recover. And those who challenged Democrats’ “zero COVID” policies were censored by Big Tech companies acting at the behest of the Biden administration.
Democrats, who will have controlled both Congress and the White House for nearly two-thirds of the time that COVID-19 has been a pandemic, refuse to support the anti-lockdown protests in China for the same reason they refused to support the freedom of Americans to resist their own tyranny here. Republicans in Congress should defy the CCP, the Biden administration, and the media by standing in solidarity with the China protesters. They have made a resounding statement against autocrats everywhere.
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Rep. Jim Banks (IN-03) is a member of the House Armed Services Committee, an Afghanistan veteran and the current Chairman of the Republican Study Committee
