Recently the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal each published an article on the same topic, accusing Chinese dissidents of supporting Trump. The Wall Street Journal article also included a reference to the Epoch Times. The article is a rebuttal.
I. Trump Supporters Named by U.S. Publications
The New York Times article of November 19 was titled “Why Do Chinese Liberals Embrace American Conservatives? Chinese liberals supporting Trump?”) The article was written by Ian Johnson, an American China-informed activist. The Wall Street Journal article of November 22 was titled “Chinese Dissidents Back Trump’s Claims of Election Fraud, Some Influential Activists Who Support the President’s Policies on Beijing Want to Hold off on Recognizing Biden as the President-elect” (Chinese Dissidents Support Trump’s Claims of Election Fraud,. (Some influential activists who support the president’s policy toward Beijing want to delay recognition of Biden’s presidency), by Sha Hua, the paper’s Hong Kong correspondent, who, according to online sources, is of Asian descent, grew up in the industrial Ruhr area of western Germany, and was educated in the U.S. and England.
Ian Johnson’s article focuses on Trump supporters in China, mentioning Chi-Ying Lai, Sun Liping, Yuhua Guo, Fei-Long Tian, and others. Sha Hua’s article is about Trump supporters in the United States, and her critics include Chen Guangcheng, Fu Xiqiu, Wang Dan, and Ai Weiwei in Germany.
Both authors are obviously “politically correct” and their articles are written from the standpoint of “political correctness”. The current primary position of the “political correctness” camp is to bring down Trump by any means, including election fraud, but also to negate his policies.
Around the time of these two articles, Federal Election Commission Chairman Trey Trainor said on a television program on November 20 that the Trump campaign, through sworn testimony from credible witnesses and other evidence used in challenging state election results, was filing “legitimate charges” with the U.S. Supreme Court. Court. Given the level of testimony one has observed thus far, at this stage, one can expect hundreds of affidavit testimonies to be credible, and the other side does need to answer these questions. Traynor said, “Ultimately, what I’m saying is that these legitimate charges will be tried in a court of law.” He added, “We need to make this legal process work so that we can come to a valid conclusion about this election (so) that everyone thinks it was legitimate (to vote).”
However, Ian Johnson asserts in his article that Biden has defeated Trump, while Sha Hua writes flatly, “No evidence of widespread fraud has emerged in the general election (No evidence of widespread election fraud has emerged in the (the election)”. In their view, it seems that as long as the mouthpieces of “political correctness” shut down the voluminous revelations of fraudulent affidavits and professional analysis by statisticians, the results of the presidential election can only be judged by “political correctness.
Election Freedom and Freedom of Expression
Since both authors direct their criticism at so-called “Chinese dissidents,” it is important to point out the errors they make.
Sha Hua’s article makes the common sense mistake of conflating naturalized Chinese with non-naturalized Chinese permanent residents or students, and thus has no idea of the political rights of these two groups in the U.S. First, the voting freedom of Chinese Americans is inviolable. Although Sha Hua works for the U.S. media, she is not necessarily a U.S. citizen. However, she has studied in the United States and should understand the legal difference between U.S. citizenship and resident alien status, which is what she was when she came to the U.S. to study, without the right to vote.
The unnaturalized U.S. permanent residents whom Sha Hua refers to collectively as Chinese dissidents are either still Chinese citizens or stateless as a result of political persecution by the Chinese Communist Party, and their perspectives on U.S. issues may differ. While naturalized Chinese have sworn allegiance to the United States, Chinese Americans have the same voting rights as other Americans and have freedom of speech protected by the U.S. Constitution. Naturalized Chinese no longer legally belong to the Chinese, but to the Americans, and they, like other Americans, can support and criticize whomever they want, without being bound by “political correctness”; and they cannot be accused of supporting Trump’s position just because they were Chinese citizens before naturalization, which is contemptuous of American citizens’ right to vote freely.
Secondly, Trump supporters in China or other countries, such as Li Zhiying, Sun Liping, Guo Yuhua, Tian Feilong, Ai Weiwei, etc., are not residents of the United States. Who is Ian Johnson to lecture foreigners in the New York Times about their attitudes toward Trump? Unless this author believes that the American “political correctness” has the right to control the speech of everyone in the world, and that all foreigners who do not conform to the “political correctness” position must be taught a lesson?
In fact, both articles make the big mistake of denying people freedom of thought and expression from the standpoint of “political correctness”. Supporting Trump is considered offensive to the “political correctness” and therefore must be criticized, which is exactly what the Communist Party does to suppress the ideas and values of people in authoritarian societies.
Sha Hua interviewed a number of influential Chinese in the United States prior to writing this article. Some of the interviewees offered to give written interviews only, and asked Sha Hua to send the interviewees the text of the interview before publishing the article so as to avoid quoting them out of context. The journalist’s reluctance to let the interviewee read the relevant passage in the draft journalist’s manuscript beforehand seems to be related to the journalist’s intention to use the interviewee’s words to criticize the interviewee.
Factional Mouthpieces and the Epoch Times
During the U.S. presidential election, many of the so-called “mainstream media” took the unanimous position of suppressing any news that was unfavorable to the Democratic Party. Some Biden supporters, both Chinese in the United States and Chinese in China, dismissed the New York Post, which reported on the Biden scandal, as “tabloid” and not to be read.
In a democracy, when we talk about the media, it is self-evident that we mean a free press. According to the generally accepted principles of journalism in the West, a free press must adhere to the ethics of factual, balanced reporting in order to perform the watchdog function of the Fourth Estate. The New York Post’s coverage of the Biden scandal is based on traditional journalistic principles. The New York Times, on the other hand, vowed in a letter to its subscribers three days after the 2016 presidential election that its publisher, Arthur Salzberg, Jr. would “rededicate himself to the essential journalistic mission of The New York Times. What’s a “return” without a “departure”? Has the New York Times really rededicated itself to the fundamental mission of journalism over the past four years? In fact, it rejected the basic mission of journalism and stubbornly transformed itself into a factional mouthpiece. The factional mouthpiece is clearly no longer part of the free press, and it does succeed, along with other mouthpieces, in convincing those who only watch the “mainstream media” that Trump is useless and that Biden’s election was justified. Many Chinese who grew up in China are well aware of the mouthpiece function of CCP publications and television stations, and they are better able to recognize it than Americans who have grown up with a free press. I once said on a television program that today’s New York Times is worse than China’s Southern Weekend from the 1990s to the first decade of this century. The Southern Weekend was institutionally a mouthpiece for the Chinese Communist Party, but it strove for the journalistic principles of a democratic society, and was warmly welcomed by Chinese readers because it tried to report as much as possible on foreign news that was unfavorable to the Chinese Communist Party, even though local negative news was suppressed. The current New York Times cannot do this, nor is it willing to break out of the cliché of being a partisan mouthpiece.
In a democracy, one media outlet does not usually comment on another media outlet as a whole, and Sha Hua oddly devotes a paragraph in the above article to the Epoch Times. She writes, “Falun Gong’s publications are heavily biased toward Trump, have spread extreme right-wing (QAnon) conspiracy theories, and have developed a readership by catering to Chinese immigrants; however, they have long created a news environment full of misinformation.” After the article was published, the Epoch Times sent a letter to the reporter, and she added after the above paragraph, “The Epoch Times says it provides fact-based, unbiased reporting and is an independent news publication in a Chinese environment.”
The Chinese Communist Party is extremely hostile to the Epoch Times, so why is Sha Hua also seriously dissatisfied with the Times? Perhaps her grievance, like that of other factional mouthpieces, is that the Chinese and English editions of the Epoch Times broke the mouthpiece system’s blackout of the truth and won the hearts of many American readers, causing both embarrassment and pain to the mouthpieces. “It also reflects her preference for a position similar to that of the Chinese Communist Party.
The Dangers of “Political Correctness”
In the U.S. presidential election, the series of actions taken by the “political correctness” faction to bring down Trump have seriously impacted the foundations of the United States, namely democracy, the rule of law and the constitutional rights of citizens. When the election fraud in many states deprived voters of the right to free elections, when the mouthpiece media blocked the truth to deprive the freedom of the press, when the education sector marginalized and suppressed people who did not agree with the concept of “political correctness”, suppressing the freedom of thought and expression, when the U.S. General Services Administration director was harassed, threatened and abused by the Democratic Party, when the Democratic Congressman As we begin to discuss the establishment of a blacklist of Trump’s supporters for retaliation, we see that the shadow of political tyranny has already appeared on American soil. From this point of view, the presidential election is no longer a matter of personal victory or defeat for the candidates, but rather a showdown between American democracy and the rule of law versus “political correctness,” the outcome of which will determine whether the basic framework of the American political system will be shaken in the future, and whether the open borders, open drugs, etc. that the Democratic Party claims to be preparing to introduce after Biden’s ascension to power will be shaken. The measures are a threat to the stability of American society.
In my article “The True Face of Political Correctness” published on this website on August 10 of this year, I wrote that the ideological background of “political correctness” is very dubious and closely related to the various schools of neo-Marxism imported from Europe. Both old and new versions of Marxism assert that class antagonism and social conflict are inevitable, and therefore the ideological basis of the “politically correct” view is nothing more than a new version of the class struggle advocated by Marx and the Communist Party. If this popular view of “political correctness” is compatible with a democratic system, it cannot be called “politically correct;” if it adheres to the label “politically correct,” it is implicitly compatible with a democratic system. It is the essence of the incompatibility between institutions and natural human rights. In fact, the concept of “political correctness” is a reaction against democracy, freedom, and the rule of law to the dictatorship of thought and the regulation of speech and behavior.
The American “political correctness” is characterized by the fact that their own views and positions are the only “politically correct” ones, and any other people who question their positions or views, especially their political leaders, obviously have the right to be “politically correct. It is suspected of being “politically incorrect”. Although these people are numerous in educational, media, and cultural institutions, when they get together to “certify” each other, they seem to forget the basic question of who has awarded them the “laurels” of “correctness. “? If one amuses oneself behind closed doors by proclaiming that one is “always right” and that others do not care to speak out, but if one makes one’s self-proclaimed “political correctness” the standard by which things and people in the United States and around the world are judged, and blames those who disagree with one’s views, is one not A violation of the constitutionally protected freedom of thought and expression in a democratic society of those they accuse?
At present, moral, ethical, and political divisions between the two generations of parents and children in American families due to differences in values are a common phenomenon, and not limited to Chinese families. The root cause is that the entire education system in the United States is severely leftist and the political authoritarianism of the slogan “political correctness” is seriously distorting the formation of values in American youth. Sociological theories suggest that the natural formation of values occurs mainly during the elementary through high school years, when parents, teachers, and peers coexist. But never in the history of the United States have these three forces been pitted against each other because of political differences, which is the main reason for the political division of the family.
The U.S. Constitution has never given any political party or any social group the power to determine what views are “politically correct. If a certain segment of American society has given itself such power, it is not “progressivism” in a democracy, but rather the implantation of an ideological dictatorship, very similar to the ideological transformation of the Communist regime. Once the ideological dictatorship of “political correctness” is implicitly accepted by society, and the younger generation has to be “brainwashed” by a single ideology in school, a democracy loses its freedom of thought, and the democracy may degenerate into a political dictatorship of a group of people. i.e., a communist-style social dictatorship.
The authors of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal articles were very unhappy with the Chinese in America and some of the Chinese activists in China, and were eager to write critical articles because of their intolerable comments during the U.S. presidential campaign. “The revelations are more bone-deep related. Like the Cuban immigrants in Florida who strongly supported Trump, these Chinese Trump supporters have a deep knowledge of Communist culture that makes them highly wary of any similar version in the United States. Such vigilance may only be possessed by those who have experienced the Communist dictatorship firsthand; most native-born Americans may not have the insight to spot the similarities between the words and actions of the “politically correct” and the Communist dictatorship. The authors of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal articles think that finding a few of their own peers among the Chinese will prove the fallacy of Tengchuan, but they underestimate the political perspective and insight of the “politically correct” resisters.
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