As seen in this Chinese government television clip, Beijing is arguing that the West is displaying racism towards China by pointing out that the coronavirus started there and that the initial response from the central government represented a failure to act on a timely basis. The broadcaster specifically attacks the concept of freedom of speech in the West, saying it should not exercised if it involves discrimination and racism. (The irony is that the Chinese are racists themselves as evidenced by their effort to wipe out the Uighur culture. None of us are free of some measure of racism.)
What’s going on here is that the Communist Party is desperate to re-establish control of the narrative and it is trying to do it on a global basis. It has spent billions of dollars and several years building up its media around the world–CGTN television has gone global, as has Xinhua, China Daily, and other organs. This shapes up as the ultimate test of the party’s effort to extend its clout and shape how the world perceives China. Was it the villain or the hero? The party has many decades of experience at propaganda and now it is ramping up a global “soft power” machine to support its goals.
The reason the party has to re-establish control of the narrative is that its grip on power could be at risk. Even if there are 90 million members of the party, they cannot retain control of a nation of 1.4 billion people if those people don’t grant some measure of legitimacy to them. No army could control them.
Moreoever, China’s position in the world is at stake. They have tried to position themselves as the heroes supporting globalization while the Americans retreat. But if one of the consequences of a global China is that we all get sick, the narrative no longer works. And Beijing’s vaunted BRI (One Belt, One Road initiative) involving trillions of dollars of investment could be at risk if countries decide they don’t want thousands of Chinese working on dams, bridges, harbors, railroads, etc.
So the party wil say anything, and do anything, to shape global perceptions. The perception they are pushing at the moment is that they have turned the corner on the virus through massive lockdowns and other severe methods. But having studied the Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward, the One Child Policy, Tiananmen, and other tragedies, I suspect that the central government is burying thousands of bodies in unmarked graves to make sure the publicly disclosed statistics head in the right direction. I have absolutely no proof of that. But it would be consistent with the party’s past behavior. As we Americans are now experiencing, there’s no real way to stop this virus. I suspect it still rages inside China as well as it is around the world.
