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“The nightmare? If the Soviet Union had come up with the recipe for China. Then we would never have been free.” At the turn of the millennium, a Czech relative looked back at the decade that has passed since the fall of the wall. Then, when many still believed that casino capitalism leads to democratic values, she poured milk into the cup:
“The West would not lift a finger.”
Watching grim prophecies come true is never fun. But 30 years after the end of the Cold War and the Tiananmen Square Massacre, the wind has changed. And China’s ambitions raise questions about how we will one day see the rights that postwar Western generations have taken for granted.
It is determined by how we defend them now.
The EU, a great power that likes to preach humanism, exports its external borders to African dictatorships and has slavery on its conscience. Are we better than China, which operates in the same region? We may give you a lower economic return. Because while Hong Kong’s freedom is being squeezed, its global financial center shows no crisis. On the contrary. Mainland China? The banknote press works hard in the ethnic cleansing Xinjiang. The result of the US campaign against the telecommunications company Huawei? A dozen of the 170 countries that use the products have banned them.
Why this surprise? China represents three times more world trade than the Soviet Union in 1959: it is the largest trading partner of 64 countries compared to the United States 38. If someone wonders why we do not isolate a nation that runs concentration camps.
With a whip, a carrot and an imitation of the global structures of the Western world, China has created a platform to spread its version.
The stakes may not have been clear due to the media’s obsession with Donald Trump. While his tweets fed the headlines, China injected unmarked bills into corrupt regimes. Viktor Orbán expelled a liberal university from Budapest and is now building the EU’s first Chinese campus.
READ MORE: Review: “Nomadland” is a poem by Chloé Zhao
The fact that today’s superpowers are linked in ways that Richard Nixon could only dream of when he landed with Mao in 1972 affects, materially and culturally. Like Hollywood somersaults to enter the lucrative Chinese market. Ahead of the release of Oscar-nominated “Nomadland” (Swedish premiere last week), an interview with director Chloé Zhao was clean in an American film magazine without critical comment from Beijing. And the Communist Party propaganda magazine Global Times complained about the Hong Kong documentary “Do Not Split”: If you win an Oscar, it hurts the emotions and can mean “big losses.”
The Global Times also shows that they have an ear for public debate and responds to criticism of China by saying it is racism and “white supremacy.” An effective check, not unlike Moscow’s insidious engagement with African Americans in the 1970s, which I felt after a text defending images of dictator Xi Jinping in a Stockholm restaurant (GP 10/13/20).
READ MORE: It is not racism with images of the dictator of China
China is pleased to show its growing military power, especially in the immediate area. But don’t underestimate how far the economic threats and values-based rhetoric go. With the Swedish-Chinese editor Gui Minhai jailed since 2015 and the director of the National China Knowledge Center, Björn Jerdén, just added to the Beijing sanctions list, the news magazine Fokus chooses to invite panel discussions. Question: if the cold relations between the countries are due to Sweden denying Huawei’s 5G license. Sponsor? Huawei.
If after World War II it was the United States that exported the American dream, we are in 2021 in the period before something else. With a whip, a carrot and an imitation of the global structures of the Western world, China has created a platform to spread its version.
It is not certain that our children will consider it a nightmare in 30 years.
Read more from Hynek Pallas:
READ MORE: More inclusion, but the Academy of Oscars for China is increasing
READ MORE: Review: “The Development of the Storm” by Andreas Malm
READ MORE: Review: “China’s Good War” by Rana Mitter
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