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I recently watched One Child Nation, a documentary by Nanfu Wang about China’s one-child policy. It’s known to everyone that China, a communist country since the 1950s, has subjected its population to the miseries of a completely state-controlled economy. The total death toll of the Great Famine is diluted, despite the obvious truth that millions perished to the mass starvation and disease of the 19th century; however, the stories affect.
One Child Nation portrays an inhumane policy, executed with inhumane measures, ultimately resulting in inhumane and barbaric consequences. The harassing tactics that prevented households from having a second child are nothing compared to the forced abortions and sterilizations–in addition to the demolitions of homes and massive trafficking of children–that women endured at the hands of criminals. The stories are terrifying.
Newborns were abandoned in the streets. Women ran away, naked, from doctors who were going perform unwanted abortions. Mothers sold their daughters, even though they loved them. All this happened under a very cruel policy that intruded on the privacy and freedom of families. That was and is China: a totalitarian state that controls every aspect of its citizens’ lives. Sadly, this is an brutal reality in which every life is subject to the will and whims of the Communist Party.
Apparently, nobody cares. China is a global problem because its human rights violations transcend its borders. For instance, China violated a treaty with the U.K. over its attempt to gain control of Hong Kong, once one of the freest–and, consequently, prosperous–regions of the world; It persecutes, mutilates, and murders the Uyghurs; China steals intellectual property globally; It attacks U.S. allies and seizes sovereign land to build military bases, and ultimately stealing secret intel from the U.S., without consequences. The communist regime also supports dictatorships and genocidal governments, such as the socialist regime of Venezuela. And continues to gain regional influence in Latin America through absurd loans.
Notwithstanding China’s atrocious record, it has gotten away with causing the COVID-19 global pandemic that continues to take hundreds of thousands of lives.
China is perhaps the greatest threat facing the West and our freedoms in the U.S. because it continues to get away with massive crimes both globally and nationally. As China continues to grow its economic power and diplomatic influence present, the U.S. looks fragile and weak.
The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial board outstandingly wrote that “after the Trump years, Beijing wants a return to the policy of Obama accommodation to China’s global advances.”
“The biggest test [today] will be China, which is growing in confidence that it has the strategic advantage over a declining America” wrote The Wall Street Journal. “The thinking of the powers in Beijing today is not unlike that of the Soviet Union in the 1970s when American decline was in vogue and the Communists sought to advance around the world. Except China today has far more economic strength.”
The Chinese regime knows that the United States under Joe Biden is fragile. This is frightening because a weak America directly results in a stronger China, and a strong China is not in the interest of anyone who really appreciates and enjoys freedom.
With Hong Kong, we saw a sign of the Communist Party’s will. Thousands of Hong Kongers have been arrested while others have fled into exile. Friends of mine have been imprisoned for being sympathetic to the democratic cause. These close friends truly love Hong Kong, yet they are not able to return to their country. It was a prosperous region, with a completely encouraging and model future. It is no more. The world has lost Hong Kong and no one is doing anything.
It must be said that no one has ever done a thing. Not when China kills or imprisons Uyghurs, steals intellectual property, lies or allows the spread of the virus that plunged the West into an unprecedented economic crisis (China was the only economy, worldwide, to grow in times of pandemic). Not when it starved its population to death. Not when it forced families to have abortions, brutally sterilized women, demolished their homes or allowed the illegal trafficking of abandoned girls as part of one of the cruelest and most inhumane policies ever implemented by mankind.
At the first bilateral meeting between the Biden administration and China in Anchorage, US Secretary of State Blinken was full of praise and emphasized the hospitality of the United States. Meanwhile, the Communist Party’s man for foreign affairs, Yang Jiechi, strongly criticized the United States and emphasized what he saw as the superiority of “Chinese-style democracy”. His words, against the West’s greatest power, were scathing.
The tone is a representation of the atmosphere between the two powers. One, emboldened, is stomping its feet in the face of the other’s decline. Unfortunately, we depend on the latter. China goes unpunished. And from what seems obvious, things will stay that way.
Orlando Avendaño is the co-editor-in-chief of El American. He is a Venezuelan journalist and has studies in the History of Venezuela. He is the author of the book Days of submission // Orlando Avendaño es el co-editor en Jefe de El American. Es periodista venezolano y cuenta con estudios en Historia de Venezuela. Es autor del libro Días de sumisión.