Dear KAG: 20200325 Open Thread

It’s time for PDJT to invite the Dalai Lama for a State Visit to DC, with ALL the pomp and honors.
Fuck China’s leaders.
QUOTE:
“There is, alas, no shortage of people looking at this in the manner prescribed by the CPC. The infantile culture wars that have crippled the West—where preening troupes of virtue brandishers who cannot distinguish between the Chinese people and their tormenters parade themselves as enlightened tribunes of the oppressed—have also created a receptive audience for Beijing’s insidious spin. Xinhua, the Communist Party’s news agency that has a history of publishing hideously racist content, now feels comfortable trolling Washington in the language of a woke millennial—“Racism is not the right tool to cover your own incompetence”—because it knows that, rather than being laughed at, its laughable message will be amplified earnestly in the West. We are living through the phenomenon described by Susan Sontag as growing “stupid together”.
The very Western idea that the world should defer to Beijing’s sensibilities and delink this pandemic from its source and its causes is not anti-racist. If anything, subordinating discomfiting facts to the noble feelings of woke Westerners is itself a form of ethnocentricism because it effaces the experience of those who aren’t Western. To describe this malady as “Wuhan virus”, which the Chinese themselves do, is not to insult or to implicate ordinary Chinese people. It is to refuse to kneel before a regime that seeks to harry us into exculpating it.
China’s power to browbeat the world flows from the world’s dependency on China. The workhouses there don’t just manufacture the cheap goods that inundate the world’s markets. China has also been allowed to dominate almost every vital global supply chain and practically monopolise the supply of active pharmaceutical ingredients. Ninety-seven percent of all antibiotics consumed by Americans, for instance, are manufactured in China. In early March, Xinhua, speaking for the Chinese government, painted a lurid portrait of the apocalypse that would befall America if Beijing decided to impose a “strategic control over medical products and ban exports”. China, it warned, possessed the power to plunge America at the time of its choosing into an “ocean of the new corona viruses”. On Tuesday, Beijing decided to expel American journalists working for the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. The West is fractured. Italy now expresses gratitude to China for selling equipment its neighbours do not have. Serbia’s president pays tribute to “my brother and friend Xi Jinping”. Others will follow.
This disaster is a great clarifier. From London to Washington, it has exposed the malign incompetence of major Western governments. It has also shattered every supposition on which the ascent of China was premised. The liberal assumption that the West was more likely to influence China by making concessions to its rulers has proved to be a self-wounding fantasy. The West, it was claimed, was more likely to influence China by partnering with it—by creating a prominent position for it inside, rather than keeping it outside, global institutions. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the US locked itself into a self-wounding trade relationship with China. Advanced economies, underwriting Beijing’s rise by incinerating the jobs that supported their own working classes, scattered the seeds of explosive discontent at home to export material prosperity to a regime that converted it into crude power to wield against its own benefactors.
In the decades thereafter, far from shaping the Chinese state’s behaviour, it is the West that incrementally relinquished its own avowed values to appease Beijing. The CPC under President Xi is more repressive today than it was just a decade ago. It is Western authors who self-edit for the tawdry privilege of being published in China. It is Hollywood that modifies its films to placate the Chinese censors. Governments that never tire of puffing their chests at the Middle East’s tin pot tyrannies in the name of human rights now spurn the Dalai Lama for fear of offending China. And international agencies that happily hector others lose their voice when dealing with Beijing (notice the long weeks it took for WHO to declare a pandemic).
From Taiwan to Hong Kong and Tibet to the South China Sea, China expects the world to accept its paramountcy—but refuses to accord any deference to the interests of other nations. It sends thugs to beat up protesters in London, punishes Norway for awarding a Nobel Prize to a Chinese dissident, wages a relentless cyber war against the US, blocks water to downstream neighbours by aggressively damming rivers that flow from territories it has colonised, and endlessly bullies its neighbours. For those exposed to its rough edges, China is not a “peaceful” power. It is an expansionist imperium.”
https://thecritic.co.uk/the-coronavirus-cover-up/