You would have never known China was the biggest global threat to freedom if you watched the Democratic National Convention last week. The Republican National Convention, highlighted by Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng, made sure to rectify that.
The RNC has hit China over causing the global coronavirus pandemic, something for which New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo went out of his way to absolve it of on the opening night of the Democratic convention. Like other Republican speakers, though, Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn was one of the many to place blame squarely on the Chinese Communist Party.
But it was Chen who laid it out best. He fled China in 2012 after incurring the wrath of the CCP for exposing the horrors of its forced abortion and sterilization practices under the one-child policy. Those practices are particularly relevant once again, as the CCP has focused those evils on the Uighur Muslims that it has detained in concentration camps.
“The CCP is an enemy of humanity,” Chen said. “It is terrorizing its own people, and it is threatening the well-being of the world. The U.S. must use its values of freedom, democracy, and the rule of law to gather a coalition of other democracies to stop China’s aggression.”
He is exactly right. Aside from the atrocities being committed against its own people, the CCP has crushed the freedom of the people of Hong Kong as the rest of the world reeled from the global pandemic the CCP spread across the globe. It’s been threatening to do the same to Taiwan.
President Trump speaks with weak and, oftentimes, embarrassing rhetoric on Xi Jinping and the CCP. There’s no question about that. But the RNC shows that his administration has indeed mirrored the view of Chen. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has consistently pushed the administration’s aggressive stance on China.
Joe Biden’s record on China was already weak, and the DNC did nothing to contest that assessment. A party that is unwilling to hold the world’s biggest human rights abuser to account should have to answer for that every day or be relegated to being the minority party again until its leaders discover their consciences.
