Bret Stephens
Jul 06, 2021 8:30 PM ET
For Beijing, the crack is that the regime is based on lying. It isn’t just the historical lies, such as Xi’s omission in his speech of any mention of the Great Chinese Famine, the Cultural Revolution and other atrocities in which Mao killed as many as 80 million of his own citizens. Nor is it merely the political lies, such as Beijing’s aggressive propaganda campaign to hide human-rights atrocities against the Uyghurs of Xinjiang.
The real problem with the lying is that a regime that lies nonstop to others eventually lies to itself as well. As The Times’s Steven Lee Myers and Chris Buckley reported last year, local health officials in Wuhan “withheld information about cases from the national reporting system” for fear of incurring the central government’s wrath. Beijing learned of the outbreak only from whistle-blowers putting documents online. Much the same goes for other aspects of Chinese governance, from its manufactured econ
BRET STEPHENS: China won t bury us, either
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Stephens: China won t bury us, either
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Synopsis
Beijing’s unconstrained behavior gives it the appearance of strength. It’s a cliche that China’s rise is “unstoppable,” much as Germany’s supposedly was a little over a century ago.
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Garry Kasparov has a pithy way of summing up the past 18 months of tribulation. “China gave us the virus,” the chess and human-rights champion told me over a recent breakfast. “And the free world gave us the vaccines.”
You don’t have to subscribe to the lab-leak theory of the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic to acknowledge this: Had it not been for the cover-up that Chinese officials tried to orchestrate in the critical early days of the crisis, there might have been a chance for the virus to be contained. Instead, China’s government began with lies and has kept lying ever since, at the expense of public health everywhere. They’ve also sold the world’s poorer countries on a vaccine that doesn’t work too well.
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