The Unmade Case against China

This week China’s commerce minister, Zhong Shan, issued a broadside against the United States in the ongoing trade war. “The U.S. side has provoked economic and trade frictions against us and violated the principles of the WTO. It is typical of unilateralism and protectionism,” Zhong said, “We have to uphold our warrior spirit in firmly defending national and people’s interests in defending the multilateral trading system.”

Do you see that? China is pretending to be the friend of free trade and against “unilateralism.” This is a bit of propaganda that has reaped rewards before. There have been points in the last couple of years when Western journalists, anxious to signal their disdain for Trump, crowned Xi Jinping “the leader of the free world.” Thankfully, this period of ignorance is ending.

China’s protectionist measures—  and we should include their currency manipulation and penchant for fraud among them — are extreme compared with the United States or Europe. China’s commitment to multilateralism is non-existent. Ask any of its neighbors.

On most measures of freedom, China is going backward. Political repression has increased in recent years. And religious oppression of Uyghurs and Kazakhs in the Xinxiang province is staggering in its scale and brutality; 1 million Muslims are estimated to be subjected to internment and indoctrination camps. It’s difficult to watch a recent BBC documentary on these camps. Filmmakers were allowed to see one of the more humane-seeming camps, in which Muslims are being trained out of their “extremist thoughts,” forbidden to pray and read scripture, and made to sing and dance to patriotic songs, as if they were about to be featured in China’s version of North Korea’s Arirang games. Hong Kong has been roiled by protests against the policies set in Beijing.

The Trump administration should be using the bully pulpit to humiliate China on more than a dozen major issues: political repression, religious oppression, pollution, massive accounting fraud, intellectual-property theft, the trade in fentanyl, suborning telecom companies to spy on European customers, the slow reneging on promises to Hong Kong. This is the great gun that hasn’t gone off in the trade war.
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