China’s government is like something out of ‘1984’
The Chinese communist government increasingly poses an existential threat not just to its own 1.4 billion citizens but to the world at large.
China is currently in a dangerously chaotic state. And why not, when a premodern authoritarian society leaps wildly into the brave new world of high-tech science in a single generation?
The Chinese technological revolution is overseen by an Orwellian dictatorship. Predictably, the Chinese Communist Party has not developed the social, political or cultural infrastructure to ensure that its sophisticated industrial and biological research does not go rogue and become destructive to itself and to the billions of people who are on the importing end of Chinese products and protocols.
Central party officials run the government, military, media and universities collectively in a manner reminiscent of the science-fiction Borg organism of “Star Trek,” which was a horde of robot-like entities all under the control of a central mind.
Thirty years ago, American pundits began gushing over China’s sudden leap from horse-drawn power to solar, wind and nuclear energy. The Chinese communist government wowed Westerners. It created from nothing high-speed rail, solar farms, shiny new airports and gleaming new high-density apartment buildings.
Western-trained Chinese scientists soon were conducting sophisticated medical and scientific research. And they often did so rapidly, without the prying regulators, nosy elected officials and bothersome citizen lawsuits that often burden American and European scientists.
To make China instantly rich and modern, the communist hierarchy — the same government that once caused the deaths of some 60 million innocents under Mao Zedong — ignored property rights. It crushed individual freedom. But the world is learning that China does not just move mountains for new dams or bulldoze ancient neighborhoods that stand in the path of high-speed rail. It also hid the outbreak and the mysterious origins of the deadly coronavirus from its own people and the rest of the planet as well — a more dangerous replay of its earlier effort to mask the spread of the SARS virus. The result was that thousands of unknowing carriers spread the viral plague while the government covered up its epidemic proportions.
China, of course, does not wish to have either its products or citizens quarantined from other countries. But the Chinese government will not allow foreign scientists to enter its country to collaborate on containing the coronavirus and developing a vaccine.
It is hard to believe that in 2020, the world’s largest and secondwealthiest county, which boasts of high-tech consumer products and gleaming cities, has imprisoned in “reeducation camps” more than 1 million Uighur Muslims in the manner that Hitler, Stalin and Mao once relocated “undesirable” populations.
China seems confident that it will soon rule the world, given its huge population, massive trade surpluses, vast cash reserves and industries that produce so many of the world’s electronic devices, pharmaceuticals and consumer goods.
For a year, the Chinese government has battled massive street demonstrations for democracy in Hong Kong. Beijing cynically assumes that Western nations don’t care.
Beijing was right. Few Western companies complain that Chinese society is surveilled, regulated and controlled in a nightmarish fashion that George Orwell once predicted in his dystopian novel “1984.”
The truth about President Trump’s decision to call China to account over its systematic abuse of international trade norms is not that Trump’s policy is reckless or ill- considered. It’s that at this late date, the reckoning might prove too little, too late.