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President Biden, in full mood of marking “red lines” against Russia and Ukraine in a virtual meeting with Vladimir Putin, does not forget the importance of boycotting China’s Winter Olympic Games.
It’s a diplomatic boycott only, so says Madame Jen Psaki, White House press secretary. Nevertheless, she and Biden are wishing the US sport-participants best of luck and they will support them throughout. So, they say. US athletes are allowed to part take in the games. It’s the US diplomacy that is held back. It’s a hypocrisy that only Washington – and perhaps Brussels as EU and NATO headquarters – can muster. Now Australia has also joined the nefarious club. See this.
Do they seriously hope the rest of the world will follow suit, because they want to be “with” the US and not be perceived as “against” the Big Empire?
Perhaps some will, indeed, be copy-cats. Fear is the name of the game, be it for Covid or political sanctions. Western humanity is trembling from fear. So much fear, that the thought process has literally stopped functioning according to logic, even by the tyrants themselves.
Ms. Psaki explained the boycott as a response to “Beijing’s human rights violations”, adding what she calls “genocide and crimes against humanity”. She was of course referring to the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), a landlocked autonomous region of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), by surface the largest single territory of China, located in the northwest of the country, close to Central Asia.
It is well possible that the Press Secretary doesn’t know what she is talking about, but is just repeating the current narrative.
There is a set of standard accusations that are regularly being launched against China, with no substance at all. This is one of them. See this “Xinjiang in My Eyes”: Debunking the Lies and Anti-China Propaganda Focusing on China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.
Suffice it to say that the Xinjiang region is a pivotal point for the famous Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), connecting China with Europe via Central Asia, as well as with the Indian Ocean.
Washington sees China, and especially the BRI, as an economic threat on their perceived supremacy, therefore does everything to denigrate China, and especially the Xinjiang region, where about 12 million Uyghurs live, mostly Muslims, out of a total population of 26 million.
What is not said by Washington, is that the CIA and other US secret services recruit Uyghur Muslims, train them and send them to the Middle East to fight the Jihad, mostly in Syria, but also in Iraq. If and when they return, they were trained to create havoc and instability in Xinjiang. The Chinese Government is re-educating them for reintegration in the Uyghur society of the Xinjiang region.
The other area of China on which Washington and its western allies like to attack Beijing, is Taiwan, a Chinese territory. When the Kuomintang, the Chinese Nationalist Party, lost the civil war against Chairman Mao’s Communist Party in 1949, they fled to the island of Taiwan which they occupied ever since. However, Taiwan is part of China. In October 1971, the UN General Assembly passed a Resolution that stopped recognizing Taiwan as China and, instead, decided the PRC would represent China, implying that Taiwan was part of the Peoples Republic of China. It looks like the US have stayed back in history, still looking at Taiwan as an independent country and their ally.
As President Xi has mentioned on several occasions, Taiwan will be integrated into the PRC in a peaceful way. Outside interferences, like by the United States and some of their European allies, have no place in these negotiations. It is a Chinese internal affair. Just imagine, China getting involved and taking sides in US internal affairs. Unimaginable!
What also seems to escape most western powers, still fond of the “freedom seeking” US of A, is the Unites States abysmal human rights record. It is so unabashed and shameful, the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, as well as Guantanamo in Cuba, are well known as America’s torture chambers, where human rights do not exist.
And these are just two out of some 100 plus US prison camps where human rights are not only trampled by military boots, but where in most cases they are openly abolished. Torture is the name of the game. Only an extreme hypocrite could accuse any other country of human rights abuse.
Earlier this week, Beijing announced stern countermeasures in case the US will indeed implement their “diplomatic” boycott of the Chinese Olympic Winter Games.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Zhao Lijian, said that China would see such a move as outright political provocation. However, he did not offer any details as to how China might respond to the “diplomatic boycott”. He also said that after the virtual summit last month between Presidents Xi and Biden, no American diplomats, nor the President were invited to the Olympic Games. This means, without saying so, the “boycott” is a mere US public relations farce.
Western supporters of the move hope to draw falsely negative attention to China’s human rights record. Even American athletes may be “trained” to openly accuse the Chinese human rights record, reproaching them of Uyghur tortures, although they have no clue what they are talking about, because they would simply parrot messages, without knowing what they are actually saying.
In fact, most countries expected to toe the line given by Biden, don’t know the truth, or they do know the truth but are keen to stick to their hypocrite master’s lies.
So, Beijing has a number of avenues to “boycott” the US back – as in “Build Back Better”. For example, by trade sanctions. Mainland China and Taiwan are the largest producers of semi-conductors used in modern cars. If China holds back on producing and / or supplying semi-conductors, the entire western car industry comes to a halt. Supply shortages, due to Covid-caused delivery-chain interruptions, are already affecting the Japanese and South Korean car industry. Currently, the Toyota car production is basically at a standstill.
The west also depends 70% to 90% on medical equipment (70%) and medication (up to 90%) on China. With a ferocious pandemic being sold to the people in the west, a pandemic that by reducing the human immune system, will create all kinds of diseases that require regular medication, shortages of medication may be problematic. A supply chain interruption may trigger not only consternation, but outright disaster.
Is it possible that Biden and his top advisors do not understand what China’s countermeasures could mean to a US car industry that is already largely outsourced? Let alone to the health sector, plagued by a western manufactured disease that is currently “ravaging the west”, and is depending badly on Chinese made medication.
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Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he has worked for over 30 years on water and environment around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020)
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is also is a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.
