The day before yesterday, Tuesday, current U.S. President Joe Biden, in an interview on CNN’s “Town Hall” program, warned that China would pay the price for human rights abuses in Xinjiang and Hong Kong, among other issues, regarding China’s handling of the Muslim minority.
This is what most of the mainstream media reported. They quoted Biden as saying this at the Time.
China, which has come under global criticism for detaining minority Uighurs in re-Education camps and other human rights abuses, “will face consequences, and he (meaning Xi Jinping) knows it.”
Biden was quoted as saying that the U.S. will once again establish itself as a courageous voice for human rights around the world, working with the international community to commit China to upholding human rights.
The appearance on CNN’s “Town Hall” was the first official trip Biden has attended since taking office on Jan. 20 of this year. At the event, he said, “China is trying very hard to be a global leader, but if they want to get that title, they have to earn the trust of other countries.”
Biden tried to explain to the American public why China’s leaders are taking tough controls on issues like human rights.
Here’s what he said.
If you know a little bit of Chinese history, (you know) that China has always been a victim of the outside world when it is not unified internally. Xi Jinping particularly emphasized this point, and his central principle is that there must be unified, strict control over China, and he used this to rationalize those policies of theirs. I explained to him that it would be very difficult for the president of the United States to sit in the presidency if he didn’t express American values. So my approach would not be to speak out against what he’s doing in Hong Kong, what he’s doing to the Uighurs, and what he’s doing in Taiwan to force a one-China Policy. He understands that. Every country has its cultural norms, and their leaders will follow their own.
This quote was not explained or reported in detail in mainstream media reports. The Voice of America reported that the quote drew a lot of criticism from conservative social media.
The reason for the criticism is simple. I honestly don’t fully understand what Biden was trying to say when he said that. But they sounded like a justification for Xi Jinping and the Chinese leadership: because China was bullied by foreign countries before, it is now okay to violate human rights.
I remember also an interview with Yu Maochun, an advisor to former Secretary of State Pompeo, with Epoch Times a few days ago, and he specifically mentioned this issue. He said that the Chinese Communist Party‘s strategy of threatening the United States is to ask the United States not to interfere in the regime’s “internal affairs” including Hong Kong, Tibet, Xinjiang, etc., calling it the “red line.
The Chinese authorities warned Biden that “these issues concern China’s core interests and national dignity and touch the national feelings of 1.4 billion Chinese people, and should not be touched, otherwise they will only cause serious damage to Sino-U.S. relations and U.S. interests.”
He believes that what the CCP really means is that “we are going to put one million Uighurs in concentration camps, we are going to torture them and suppress their freedom,” and “you in the international community …… are not allowed to say a word of protest. Otherwise you are disrespecting us.”
But, according to Yu Maochun, “this is only a ‘red line’ for the Chinese Communist Party, not a red line based on international law.”
Apparently, Biden’s remarks to CNN were basically about being careful not to step on the CCP’s red lines, because those are “cultural norms.” That’s a particularly elegant and culturally normative statement.
A netizen commented on social media that what you call “cultural norms” we call “genocide.
I know an American who studied in China and got his master’s and PhD in history, and when he talked to me about China, especially about Chinese realpolitik, he said something similar to Biden. The idea is that because China was once bullied by the West, there is now a special emphasis on ideological unity and on exercising complete and total control over society. He agreed that there was a reasonable element to this.
So I asked him which country in the world had not been bullied by foreign countries? He thought for a while and replied that there were really very few. We laughed together.
Chinese people especially like to talk about history, and China is probably the country with the longest recorded history of letters in the world. But using what happened in history to justify present misconduct is actually very problematic. Because as I asked the American, in fact every country in this world has been bullied by foreign countries, so they are all justified in violating human rights? Then the progress of human civilization can’t be talked about at all.
Take the United States, for example.
In the middle of 1814, the British Army and Royal Navy entered the territory of the United States in two ways. The deputy commander of the Royal Fleet named Cockburn, with the British army, attacked Washington DC on August 24 and killed the White House.
At that time, U.S. President Madison had long fled Washington, D.C., and he sent someone to inform the president’s wife to evacuate. But when the president’s wife was notified, the British army was only three kilometers away from the White House. The president’s wife quickly organized the servants to pack valuable things, try not to leave the British, but also to move some paintings and antiques away.
The British army killed the White House, instructed the White House servants to open the wine cellar, drank the President’s wine, and then a fire burned the White House, burned with a lot of fuel into it, to ensure that it can burn until the next day.
We all know that the American Civil War in the 1860s, as we all know, was fought between the South and the North, and the goal was slavery. But there were a lot of foreign powers behind the South at the time, including Great Britain, including France, including Spain, and including a lot of small Indian tribes in the Midwest at the time.
So some historians believe that the South could not have had the determination to fight the North without the support of European countries. 600,000 people died in the American Civil War. The population of the United States was about 30 million at that time, and the Civil War killed more people than both World Wars. Under foreign powers, 2% of the U.S. population was wiped out. A great shame, right?
The burning of the White House and the American Civil War were actually the same era as the Opium Wars. By CCP logic, does the US also have the right to do all the xenophobic and human rights violations?
The same goes for Britain. Before the rise of the British Empire, it was harassed and oppressed by Spain, and so was France, bullied by Britain and Germany. Germany was even more so. Before the unification of Germany, it was more oppressed by Britain and France, and Britain took every means to prevent the unification of Germany.
So you see Hitler’s book “Mein Kampf”, which has a lot of accusations against Britain, the Germans industrialized quickly, but was restricted and oppressed by the British financial capital, and could not get the colonial market, so they had to resist, and then there were two world wars.
Japan is also, we all know the black ship incident, in 1853 the United States Navy several ships sailed to Tokyo Bay, had to ask The Japanese to open the gates, or else the shelling of the royal Family. That’s why Japan had the Meiji Restoration, but it was still looked down upon by the Europeans, and the Chinese and Koreans also looked down upon Japan, calling them Little Japan and being ostracized.
Russia was even more so, having been a slave to the Mongols for over two hundred years. Other, Turkey, Iran, Arabia, which country is either once glorious, and later by foreign countries, that is, imperialism to beat down. So, according to the reasoning of the Chinese Communist Party, all people are qualified to practice uncivilized systems and policies only.
We don’t deny that every country is different, so there will be different traditions and cultures, but the direction of human civilization is actually very clear, which is based on tolerance and equality, not only between countries, but more importantly, between individuals and individuals, between races, all need to be equal.
When Biden, or other foreigners talk about Chinese history and about understanding why China has the extreme policies it has now, it does not mean that the inhumane practices of the Chinese Communist Party are justified.
This should be especially sobering for the Chinese, because the future of man can only go in the direction of civilization and progress. That method of finding a few reasons to justify oneself in a haphazard manner cannot be effective. In fact, everything they say is just an excuse. The actual goal is still profit, whether it is Xinjiang or Tibet, or for Hong Kong or Taiwan, the Chinese Communist Party’s goal is power and control, to maximize their own interests.
In the past, they used communism as a pretext, and the areas that suffered included many other countries, such as the countries of Southeast Asia. Later that policy failed and communism became nationalism, but the essence is the same, a self-interest aim. This policy is destined to fail in the end, no matter what banner is used under whatever guise, and no matter whether it is external or internal.
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