Here’s what a real threat looks like
STILL we tremble in fear about Russia, which has no interest in us and in any case has an economy the size of Italy’s. Ministers feel free to say practically anything about President Putin, and blame Moscow for any crime that’s going.
How odd that they, and the panicking media, say so little about China, a real threat to the wellbeing of the planet. China’s sinister leader Xi Jinping, a welcome guest at Buckingham Palace, has just declared himself President for life, a fact which Chinese journalists have now been sacked for reporting too prominently.
His is a regime that maintains a prison-camp gulag, imposes the death penalty on untold thousands after secret, unfair trials, censors its media, and patrols the internet for dissent. It is also expanding aggressively in the tense South China Sea, building huge and menacing new military bases there.
It hates any kind of criticism. It kidnaps publishers in foreign countries who bring out books critical of its leadership. It is slowly but surely strangling free speech, independent courts and protest in Hong Kong, in defiance of its treaty obligations.
Even in Britain, I know of student societies who, if they dare to allow anti-Chinese speakers, find themselves mysteriously packed by proPeking Chinese students. Russia, by contrast, merely laughs at our attacks on it.
We, who posture about Russia, do nothing about China’s growing repression and real aggression. In fact it is even worse. We are silent about Hong Kong. We have allowed China to force us to drop longstanding support for Tibetan independence, and to stop holding high-level meetings with the Dalai Lama.
During President-for-life Xi Jinping’s state visit to Britain, itself an elaborate kowtow to Peking, our police also treated proTibetan protesters with astonishing harshness.
It is so much easier to screech about Russia, than to face or challenge a genuinely menacing superpower.