It should be obvious that racism against Chinese Americans, or Chinese in general, is as bad as racism against anyone else.
But that truth coexists with another: that the People’s Republic of China and its regime is America’s foremost foreign enemy, and Xi Jinping’s ambitions against us must find our resolve to defeat them.
This bears noting in light of the furor over President Trump’s decision to refer to the coronavirus as the “Chinese virus.” My opinion is that the virus should be referred to, in Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s chosen fashion, as the “Wuhan virus.” That descriptor correctly identifies the virus’s Chinese origin without connecting it to Chinese people or things unrelated to it — in other parts of China, in Hong Kong, in Taiwan, in Singapore, and worldwide.
Still, China must not escape its culpability for allowing a domestic epidemic to become a global pandemic. That matters now more than ever, in that Xi’s regime is trying to rewrite history and defame the United States. Indeed, China’s chief Western-focused propagandist, Zhao Lijian, has proudly and cheerfully taken to writing a false history of the original Wuhan breakout. The initial and obviously false denials of the regime’s culpability have since given way to Zhao’s insane claim that the U.S. Army actually started the outbreak. Like the Soviet KGB deceivers of old, the Chinese propagandists of 2020 have no shame.
Yet, the truth of Xi’s lies must not be viewed in a coronavirus microcosm. Because those lies speak to the darker reality of Xi’s underlying mission to subjugate America long after a vaccine arrives and coronavirus is a memory. Until we wake up to this broader reality, which is a particular need among the Democratic Party’s leadership, we’ll find ourselves slowly consumed by it.
Don’t believe me?
Then, consider what other things China is currently doing while it lies about the coronavirus.
It is advancing a territorial seizure campaign in the vein of 1920s-1930s imperial Japan. Flagrantly ignoring the rights of sovereign powers on the basis of maps that belong in a Monty Python sketch, China is seizing oceanic control. The ultimate objective: to leverage that sea control over multitrillion-dollar international trade routes in order to extract political submission from Indo-Pacific nations.
Intellectual property theft and market rigging form another element of Xi’s feudal-mercantilism agenda. Here, Xi says it is our responsibility to do all the development work and then give him the final product so that he can adapt it to spy on us. This will not change unless and until the Chinese Communist Party abandons its ambition of global domination. Hence why we must urgently expedite our abandonment of Chinese supply chains. Our developing relationships with nations such as Vietnam and India offer cause for optimism here.
All this said, the most exigent rationale for our resolve against China is the most basic: the regime’s nature, most clearly demonstrated in how Beijing lied and let its innocent citizens die, in how it forces others into slavery because they are Muslims, and in all the aforementioned things. Xi’s regime detests and is incompatible with individual freedom. In its own view, it must dominate or die. That is why, for example, it has shown such ferocity to Hongkongers marching for the basic rights they were promised when Beijing took over Hong Kong. The regime knows it cannot give an inch or it will show the world the weakness — really, the evil — of the ideas that underpin it.
This is the new Soviet Union. We must show the world that we are once again the better alternative.
