In this mailing:
- Soeren Kern: Coronavirus: China's Propaganda Campaign in Europe
- Giulio Meotti: The Vatican Surrenders to China
- Amir Taheri: The Coronavirus: Death of Globalization or a Rebirth?
by Soeren Kern • March 22, 2020 at 5:00 am
What remains unclear is if European publics, which are bearing the brunt of the suffering caused by the epidemic, will be as easily willing to overlook the malfeasance of Chinese officials. "This is a propaganda operation that hides various truths. The first and most important is that the culprit for this pandemic is the Chinese regime. It does not take any conspiracy theory to point it out." — Emilio Campmany, Libertad Digital, March 3, 2020. "China wants to take advantage of this calamity to wrest global leadership from the United States. It will be the communist country that makes us the most energetic medicines to fight the virus. It will discover the vaccine before anyone else and distribute it worldwide in record time. It will buy our assets and invest in our countries to rescue our economies. Ultimately, it will claim to be our savior." — Emilio Campmany, Libertad Digital, March 3, 2020.
On March 12, China sent to Italy a team of nine Chinese medical staff along with some 30 tons of equipment on a flight organized by the Chinese Red Cross. Pictured: Francesco Vaglia, medical director for infectious diseases of Spallanzani Hospital (right) speaks next to members of a delegation of Chinese doctors in Rome on March 14, 2020. (Photo by Andreas Solaro/AFP via Getty Images)
The Chinese government has been fast-tracking shipments of medical aid to Europe, which has become the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic that first emerged in the Chinese city of Wuhan. The largesse appears to be part of a public relations effort by Chinese President Xi Jinping and his Communist Party to deflect criticism over their responsibility for the deadly outbreak. Beijing's campaign as a global benefactor may deliver results in Europe, where pandering political leaders have long been notoriously fearful of antagonizing the European Union's second-largest trading partner. What remains unclear is if European publics, which are bearing the brunt of the suffering caused by the epidemic, will be as easily willing to overlook the malfeasance of Chinese officials.
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by Giulio Meotti • March 22, 2020 at 4:30 am
"A totalitarian regime doesn't compromise. They want complete surrender." — Cardinal Joseph Zen, retired Bishop of Hong Kong, thetablet.org, February 19, 2020. "They're giving the flock into the mouths of the wolves. It's an incredible betrayal". — Cardinal Joseph Zen, Reuters, September 20, 2018. "The pope doesn't know much about China. And he may have some sympathy for the Communists, because in South America, the Communists are good guys, they suffer for social justice. But not the [Chinese] Communists. They are persecutors. So the situation is, humanly speaking, hopeless for the Catholic Church: Because we can always expect the Communists to persecute the Church, but now [faithful Catholics] don't get any help from the Vatican. The Vatican is helping the government, surrendering, giving everything into their hands". — Cardinal Joseph Zen, catholiccitizens.org, February 16, 2020. The Soviet Union collapsed partly because the Vatican challenged it. Pope Benedict XVI saw the danger of China. "I believe that the fundamental ideological tendencies of Marxism have survived the fall of the political form they have had to date.... First of all, we must not forget that important countries are governed by Marxist parties: China, Vietnam, North Korea, Cuba". — Pope Benedict XVI, Humanitas.ci, May 5, 2005. The Vatican can still support dissidents such as Cardinal Zen and reject a dangerous appeasement with Beijing. If not, the Chinese regime will be able to obliterate and further enslave Christianity to consolidate the country's cruel dictatorship.
The Catholic Church in China is being "murdered" while the Roman Catholic Church stands idly by, wrote Cardinal Joseph Zen, the retired Bishop of Hong Kong, in an appeal he sent to the world's 223 cardinals. "A totalitarian regime doesn't compromise," he said. "They want complete surrender." (Photo by Anthony Wallace/AFP via Getty Images)
"Before anyone had heard of COVID-19, however, there was mounting concern about the intentions and brutality of the Chinese communist regime," wrote George Weigel, the distinguished US Catholic commentator.
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by Amir Taheri • March 22, 2020 at 4:00 am
China has contributed to almost two decades of low inflation and economic growth that has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in all continents. At the same time China has started to develop an appetite for playing big power. The European colonial powers of the Berlin Conference combined their quest for security abroad with democratization at home. In China today, we witness a different configuration. Regarding almost all its neighbors, with the possible exception of Pakistan, as unreliable if not hostile, China is, in fact, fomenting insecurity through its aggressive power projection. This aggressive option is highlighted with ambitious plans for developing a 19th century style blue-water naval power capable of challenging the United States in the Pacific and the Indian Ocean. China's feeling of insecurity abroad is combined with President Xi Jinping's increasingly authoritarian style at home. Chinese friends who had welcomed Xi's rise to power as a promise of liberalization now regret what they call "our childish illusions". [T]he optimism that we noted in our latest trip to the People's Republic in 2014 now seems a distant dream.
(Image source: iStock)
Is this the end of globalization? That is the question we were supposed to debate at a colloquium in Paris this week before we were all ordered by the government to "confine" ourselves to our dwellings at least for the next 15 days. The concept of globalization attained wide circulation when cheap goods made by cheap labor in China started to flood world markets from Tokyo to Timbuktu. Thus, if globalization is to end, it is only fair that it should also come to a close with a Chinese fanfare in the form of the coronavirus. Before globalization whatever happened in China reached the rest of the world as a distant echo. The Opium Wars, the black series of famines, the atrocities committed by various foreign occupiers, the civil war, the Korean War, the annexation of Tibet and East Turkestan, the deaths of millions of people under Mao Zedong were all perceived as exotic events in a remote fantasyland that affected the rest of the world only incidentally.
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