Can’t Trust China, Xi A Thug: Hong Kong Ex-Governor

Asserting that China cannot be trusted, Britain’s last Hong Kong Governor Chris Patten has said that the coronavirus pandemic becomes a “greater menace” because of the Chinese government that silenced its brave doctors when they tried to blow the whistle on what was happening.

In an opinion piece in Project Syndicate, Patten highlighted the four examples of the Chinese leadership’s “duplicity and mendacity” to demonstrate that the world should not trust China.

Chinese President Xi Jinping’s dictatorship is certainly “thuggish” and adding that wicked repression of Uyghurs goes beyond “thuggery”, said Patten.

“Consider its policies in Xinjiang. Many international lawyers argue that the incarceration of over one million Muslim Uyghurs, forced sterilisation and abortion, and slave labour meet the UN definition of genocide. This wicked repression goes beyond thuggery,” he said.

First, Patten said, China-sourced COVID-19 pandemic, which has killed over one million people globally and destroyed jobs and livelihoods on a “horrendous scale” in recent months.

“The result is that the coronavirus has become a far greater menace than it otherwise would have been. This is the CPC’s (Chinese Communist Party) coronavirus, not least because the party silenced brave Chinese doctors when they tried to blow the whistle on what was happening,” he said.

According to Patten, former US President Barack Obama also can attest to Xi’s lack of trustworthiness. In September 2015, Xi assured Obama that China was not pursuing militarisation in and around the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea.

“But this was a pledge with Chinese communist characteristics: it was completely untrue. Satellite imagery released by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a US think tank, provides convincing evidence that the Chinese military has deployed large batteries of anti-aircraft guns on the islands. At the same time, the Chinese navy has rammed and sunk Vietnamese fishing vessels in these waters and tested new anti-aircraft carrier missiles there,” he added.

A third example of the CPC’s dishonesty is its full-frontal assault on Hong Kong’s autonomy, freedom, and rule of law, he asserted.

“Hong Kong represents all those aspects of an open society that Chinese communists, despite their professed confidence in their own technological totalitarianism, regard as an existential threat to the surveillance state they have created,” he stressed.

Finally, Patten underscored China’s sackful of broken trade and investment promises, which overturned both the letter and spirit of what CPC officials had previously pledged.

China’s “coercive commercial diplomacy” includes threats not to buy exports of countries whose governments have the courage to stand up to Xi, opined Patten.

“One thing is clear: the world cannot trust Xi’s dictatorship. The sooner we recognise this and act together, the sooner the Beijing bullies will have to behave better. The world will be safer and more prosperous for it,” he concluded. (ANI)