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The main Chinese dissident, artist and filmmaker Ai Weiwei, says that China’s influence has become so great that it cannot now be effectively stopped.
“The West really should have cared about China decades ago. Now it is a bit late, because the West has built its strong system in China and just cutting it off will do it a lot of harm. That’s why China is very arrogant.
Ai Weiwei has never skimped on words about China. “It is a police state,” he says.
The artist designed the famous Bird’s Nest stadium for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, but ran into serious trouble after speaking out against the Chinese government. Finally, in 2015, he left China to come to the West. He first lived in Berlin and last year he settled in Cambridge.
- Profile: Ai Weiwei
- Ai Weiwei: a changed man
Mr. Ai believes that China today uses its immense economic power to impose its political influence.
It is certainly true that China has become much more assertive in recent years.
Growing influence
Until about a decade ago, China presented a modest face to the world. The official motto of the government was: “Hide your light and wait for your moment.” The ministers insisted that China remains a developing country with much to learn from the West.
Then Xi Jinping came to power. He became general secretary of the Communist Party of China in 2012 and president the following year. He introduced a new tone. The old modesty faded and there was a different slogan: “Strive for achievements.”
In some ways, China remains a developing country, with 250 million people below the poverty line.
Yet it is already the world’s second-largest economy and is on track to overtake the United States over the next decade. China’s influence in the world is becoming increasingly obvious, at a time when America’s authority has visibly declined.
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Hu Xijin, editor of the Global Times, rejects any suggestion that China is an international bully
I have seen for myself the clear signs of China’s growing political strength and involvement around the world, from Greenland and the Caribbean to Peru and Argentina, and from South Africa and Zimbabwe to Pakistan and Mongolia.
The chairman of the British Parliament’s foreign affairs committee, Tom Tugendhat, recently accused China of pressuring Barbados to dismiss the Queen as its head of state.
Today, China has a significant presence practically all over the world. Any country that challenges its basic interests suffers from it.
When the Dalai Lama visited Downing Street, Anglo-Chinese relations froze. And recently, when the Speaker of the Parliament of the Czech Republic visited Taiwan, a senior diplomat warned that “the Chinese government and people will not sit idly by in the face of open provocation by the President of the Czech Senate and the anti-China forces behind it. him and must allow them to pay a very high price. “
Multiple separations
However, the outspoken and highly influential editor-in-chief of China’s Global Times newspaper, Hu Xijin, rejects any suggestion that China is an international bully.
“I want to ask you, when did China pressure any country to do something against its will? It is the United States that continues to apply sanctions in the world, especially economic sanctions against so many countries. Which country does it know that China has sanctioned?
“Have we ever sanctioned an entire country? Only on specific issues do we express our dissatisfaction, and only in reaction when our country has been openly offended.”
However, China is currently embroiled in angry clashes with a wide range of countries: Taiwan, Australia, Japan, Canada, India (with whom China recently fought a violent border skirmish), Britain, and, of course, the United States.
The language the Global Times uses can sometimes sound like the worst rhetoric of Mao Zedong’s old days.
Hu himself recently wrote an editorial describing Australia as “the gum under China’s boot.” When I asked him about this, he said that the current Australian government had repeatedly attacked and harassed China.
“I feel like they are like gum sticking to the sole of my shoe. I can’t shake it off. It’s not a pleasant sensation. I said it as an expression and it’s my right to comment.”
In hong kong
Hu is close to President Xi, and we can assume that he would not say these things unless he knew he had the backing of China’s top leaders. When I asked him his opinion on Hong Kong, he didn’t hold back.
“The Chinese government is not opposed to Hong Kong’s democracy and freedoms, including the right of the Hong Kong people to demonstrate peacefully in the streets.
“But the key is that they have to be peaceful … We support the even more determined use of force by the Hong Kong police against violent protests.
“If violent protesters threaten the life of the police, when they throw very sharp projectiles and throw gasoline bombs or Molotov cocktails at the police, I think the police should be able to use their weapons and should open fire.”
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Strong stuff, and if the Hong Kong police really started taking down the protesters, it would result in a huge international backlash.
Most foreign observers think that China’s aggressive behavior actually hides an underlying nervousness.
The Communist Party is not elected, so you have no way of knowing how much genuine support it has in China. You cannot be sure of surviving a serious crisis, for example a major economic collapse.
President Xi and his colleagues are haunted by the memory of how the former Soviet empire simply disappeared between 1989 and 1991, because it lacked the support of ordinary citizens.
Hu does not accept that a new Cold War has started. China’s dispute, he says, is basically with the United States. He points out that President Donald Trump’s attacks on China are closely related to the November 3 presidential election and his efforts to win them.
In fact, after the election, the atmosphere is likely to improve, whoever wins.
China is too big, too involved in everyone’s life, for the United States and its allies to remain in a permanent state of open hostility towards it.
But that just reinforces Ai’s warning: that it is now too late for the West to protect itself from China’s influence.
