As the world bats for democracy, China lobbies against

Latest US sanctions on China, North Korea and Myanmar are a commendable punitive action against nations that wilfully suppress the will and freedom of their peoples. These nations simply cannot go about perpetrating human rights abuses with impunity.

The US, on Friday, 10 December, imposed sweeping human rights-tied sanctions on a host of people and entities from China, Myanmar, North Korea and Bangladesh, and added Chinese artificial intelligence company SenseTime Group to an investment blacklist.

Canada and the UK followed suit in imposing sanctions related to human rights abuses in Myanmar, while Washington also imposed the first new sanctions on North Korea, under President Joe Biden’s administration, and targeted Myanmar military entities, among others, in action marking Human Rights Day.

China’s embassy in Washington denigrated the US sanctions as “serious interference in China’s internal affairs” and a “severe violation of basic norms governing international relations.”

The US sanctions come after four allies, the US, the UK, Canada and Australia decided to diplomatically boycott the Winter Olympics in Beijing scheduled for February 2022.

Beijing will be the first Olympic boycott led by Western governments since Moscow in 1980, when the US withdrew its athletes, following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

“The US and Australia will pay a price for their erroneous actions. You may wait and see,” said Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin.

“The US, UK, Australia and Canada use the Olympic platform for political manipulation,” said Wenbin. The Chinese government came out especially strongly against Australia by excoriating it as a US crony. Australia announced its boycott a day after the US.

“Australia always has excuses to find fault with China,” said Wang. “In fact, no one would care whether they come or not. It also fully lays bare the fact that the Australian government has been so blindly following a certain country. China deplores and firmly opposes the act of the Australian side.”

Australia, in fact, has been dealing with China’s economic coercion with remarkable intrepidity. China is Australia’s largest export market for goods and services, and accounts for almost a third of Australia’s exports. Over the past year- and-a-half, Beijing has rolled out tariffs and other trade actions against Australian export sectors including barley, wine, beef, seafood and coal. China blames Australia for the breakdown in relations, while Australia has accused China of political motivations behind the trade cuts.

The backlash from Western allies comes in times when China is increasingly trying to undermine democracy, and put forward an alternate view. Last week, on December 9 and 10, US President Joe Biden hosted his administration’s most high-profile efforts to promote democratic norms with the US Democracy Summit that featured virtual meetings involving representatives of 100 governments, along with civil society groups and journalists.

At the Summit, Biden warned that democratic rights and norms were in decline around the world, including in the US. “This is an urgent matter on all our parts, in my view, because the data we’re seeing is largely pointing in the wrong direction,” he said.

China, that was not invited to the Democracy Summit, but breakaway Taiwan had been, has been lobbying against the convention for over a month. It pressured countries like India and Pakistan to boycott the summit. India attended, while Pakistan didn’t. Russia, that also criticised the summit, was not invited. While China lauded EU nation Hungary, that was not invited, for its adhering to the principle of `non-interference’. Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson, Lijian Zhao said on Twitter about Pakistan’s absence: `Pakistan declined to attend the democracy summit. A real iron brother!’

China was especially outraged that Taiwan was invited to the Summit. Chinese President Xi Jingping perceives the existence of an independent Taiwan, as a contravention to his `One China’ dream and of making his nation the apex power in the world today and in future. He has not stopped short of implying, recently, that China would take Taiwan forcibly.

The Taiwan Relations Act, does not bind the US to defend Taiwan. It propounds that the US will provide Taiwan with the capacity to defend itself. Over the past decade, the US has announced more than $20 billion in arms sales to Taiwan.

China sees democratic Taiwan as a breakaway province. But Taiwan perceives itself as a sovereign state, with its own constitution, military, and elected leaders.

As for the Democracy Summit, Russian and Chinese ambassadors to Washington, in fact, published a joint commentary denouncing the Biden administration for adopting a divisive “cold-war mentality”, and claiming that their authoritarian states were simply other models of democracy.

Both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Xi have all but ensconced themselves as presidents of their respective countries for life, regardless of the will of their people.

The Chinese foreign ministry had this to say about the summit: “Democracy has long become a ‘weapon of mass destruction’ used by the US to interfere in other countries.” It also accused the US of having “instigated ‘colour revolutions” overseas. The ministry also claimed the summit was organised by the US to “draw lines of ideological prejudice, instrumentalise and weaponise democracy… (and) incite division and confrontation.”

Instead, Beijing vowed to “resolutely resist and oppose all kinds of pseudo-democracies”.

Ahead of the summit, China ramped up a propaganda blitz criticising US democracy as corrupt and a failure. Instead, it touted its own version of “whole-process people’s democracy” in a white paper released last week .

China has gone increasingly authoritarian under Xi Jinping. It has installed despotic apparatchiks all over the Chinese state, particularly in Tibet and Xinjiang, where human rights abuses are common. Over the past few years, China has incessantly oppressed freedom of expression in Tibet, Xinjiang and Hong Kong under the guise of “anti-separatism”, “anti-extremism” and “counter-terrorism”.In Xinjiang, since 2017, an estimated one million or more Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other predominantly Muslim peoples were arbitrarily detained without trial and subjected to political indoctrination and forced cultural assimilation in “transformation-through-education” centres. Despite having initially denied the existence of these camps, authorities later described them as “vocational training” centres. Nevertheless, satellite imagery indicated that an increasing number of camps continued to be built over the years.

It is China’s agenda to obfuscate the truth, as it compellingly marks its influence all over the world. Flourishing democracies will need to do more than a few sanctions and diplomatic boycotts to counter Chinese rivalry to freedom and liberty, today and in future. It will take a series of blitzkreigs in checking Chinese ascendancy among lesser countries to stop the evil Communist regime in its tracks. People all over the world, and of every country, need to have the right to determine for themselves who governs them. Despotism, tyranny and authoritarianism should have no place in the modern world.