China’s costly drive to erase extreme poverty (2)

In response to Lily Lee’s query, my impression is that the NYT as well as much of the rest of the media and political establishment in the US has been awakened to what the CCP is about. Just a few years ago a NYT editorial could go along with the CCP’s racist labelling of the entire Uyghur people as ‘terrorists’. Now, they would not do that, in particular as their own reporters have been filing long series of blow by blow reports, thus filling in not just the public, but their own editors, too, on the enormity of the mass atrocities perpetrated by the CCP over the last several years since 2017; on the trampling of the freedom of speech (on Corona, etc,), and so on. But the NYT will still try to produce “objective” reports, and these efforts can sometimes seem awkward.

Also, in the US as elsewhere, there are large pockets of committed China lobbyists and “friends”, not least the Walmarts and such businesses (Apple and some others are said to have lobbied strenuously against forced labor legislation, just recently), and the Kissinger style “China experts” who right now must be struggling behind the scenes, to try to influence the incoming new administration.

Also, many US universities are seemingly hopelessly mired in webs of what they call “Chinese engagement” (mainly a cover for Chinese money inflow), which commit them to silence: No matter how activist and outspoken they otherwise are, in condemning other injustices, they’re silent no matter how many Chinese or Uyghur academics and colleagues are disappeared, tortured, jailed or executed. For example, my university instantly issued a condemnation of the NZ lone rightwing gunman incident some time ago, but it says absolutely nothing — zero — about the ongoing genocidal persecution of millions in Xinjiang …

Magnus Fiskesjö <nf42@cornell.edu>
Cornell University

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