The Chinese diplomat

When you find out he’s not kidding

You used to ride on a chrome horse

with your diplomat

Who carried on his shoulder

a Siamese cat

Ain’t it hard when you discovered that He really wasn’t where it’s at After he took from you everything

he could steal. —Bob Dylan

IT’S RUMORED that Abraham Lincoln once said that little falsehoods can irritate, but once somebody crosses into big, overwhelming, ridiculous lies, he found them a bit funny.

That’s often the case, sure. But we get the feeling Wang Yi of the CCP and mainland China wasn’t trying to be amusing.

The Red Chinese have a foreign minister who has all the humor of a book of medicine. And a look like he’s taken most of the prescriptions inside. Mr. Foreign Minister Wang Yi was in Paris recently (the one in France) to rub elbows with other diplomats.

He was, of course, asked certain questions by Westerners that he’d never get asked back home. Chief among them being: Why is your government putting ethnic minorities in concentration camps and brutalizing them, even erasing their culture, in the Xinjiang area?

Why, the Chinese government is doing no such thing, the foreign minister assured without being assuring. Such a line, by Beijing’s top diplomat, was good for him and his career/name/next-of-kin.

You see, the concentration camps weren’t those at all. They were re-education camps. To give people, specifically Uighur Muslims, job skills. And by the way, they have all been released to do those jobs, which in a socialist workers’ paradise, all jobs are guranteed. To quote the foreign minister: “The rights of all trainees in the education and training program, though their minds have been encroached by terrorism and extremism, have been fully guaranteed,” he told a conference at the French Institute of Internal Relations, with a straight face. “Now all of them have graduated, there is no one in the education and training center now. They all have found jobs.”

It’s unbelievable what they can do in Red China these days. And we mean it.

All the trainees are out, their minds no longer encroached by extremism. Pay no mind to the million or so families who say they’ve not heard from their loved ones. And all those human rights outfits who say the camps are still full. Who are you going to believe, the Chinese Communist Party or your lying eyes?

But the Chinese take the long view. It’s an ancient culture. Once, when Chairman Mao’s own foreign minister was asked—by Henry Kissinger, it’s said— what he thought about the French Revolution these days, Zhou Enlai was said to have thought carefully, then replied: It’s too soon to tell. The comment may be apocryphal, but if it isn’t, it’s brilliant.

If the Red Chinese stall long enough, the West will stop asking questions about Xinjiang and the Uighur Muslims.

Eventually.