What the commentators said

Forget Hong Kong and Huawei, said Stephen Bush in the New Statesman. It’s surely the persecution of the Uighurs that should be shaping our China policy. “Crimes against humanity are being committed and that is a far greater and more urgent crisis” than any potential threats to our cybersecurity. Beijing’s concerted campaign to eliminate this ethnic group is a “textbook” example of cultural genocide, agreed Ian Birrell in the I newspaper. The regime is holding a million Uighurs in barbaric “re-education” camps where they are forced to renounce their ethnic identity, and subjecting the rest to Orwellian levels of surveillance. Official records show that a campaign of enforced sterilisation and abortions has produced a huge drop in Uighur birth rates. US customs recently seized a shipment of 13 tons of products made from human hair taken from the inmates of these camps. Like it or not, we’re caught in a global struggle against President Xi Jinping’s “dystopian vision of autocratic totalitarianism”.

Tensions between China and the West, particularly the US, are rising by the day, said Iain Martin on Reaction.life. It’s raising the spectre of a new cold war – or something worse. The best Western democracies can do is work together to resist Beijing’s influence, and ensure they don’t fall behind China in the technology race. “Whereas the story of the last 30 years has been, primarily, about free trade, the era we are moving into is going to be mainly about freedom and the struggle to preserve it.” The dynamic may yet improve, said Simon Tisdall in The Guardian. Xi has arguably “overplayed his hand of late and may be forced to recalibrate”. China is in a stand-off with lots of countries right now, including India, Australia and the Philippines. Throw in the trade war with the US and the economic fallout from Covid-19, and it’s easy to imagine Xi “quietly rowing back a little”. A new president in the White House would also calm things down. With President Biden at the helm, there would still be tensions with Beijing, but “talk of a cold war would be likely to recede rapidly”.