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Steven Mosher, author of Bully of Asia — a book that contends that the Chinese Communist Party under President Xi Jinping seeks to “continuously expand its power to achieve [global] hegemony” — recently reached out to four of his friends in China to learn why they are protesting COVID lockdowns there. The answers he got are revealing. They show that, for at least some Chinese citizens, the protests are about more than the CCP’s draconian COVID restrictions — they are about freedom and ending the dictatorial rule of the CCP.
The protests and the brutal crackdown by Chinese authorities also show why the CCP is so intent on reunifying Taiwan with the mainland. Taiwan is an island of freedom-loving Chinese people. Taiwan shows that Chinese people can have both political freedom and economic well-being. The example of Taiwan puts the lie to the CCP’s narrative that their citizens are content to sacrifice freedom for a better standard of living. And it puts the lie to those Western observers, political leaders, and businessmen who continue to push “engagement” with the criminal regime that rules China in the hope that economic interdependence will result in political liberalization.
China’s COVID crackdown is made possible by what authors Josh Chin and Liza Lin call the “surveillance state” in their new book with that title.
They describe a high-tech surveillance apparatus that uses digital technology as a weapon of repression. The regime uses ubiquitous cameras, facial recognition software, biometric data collection, algorithmic controls, artificial intelligence, and internet filtering firewalls to observe, control, and, when needed, repress the Chinese people.
