I’m sorry. This is a time when I have to step up to the plate and admit I was wrong. Let’s give some background. I had looked at the way China was treated by the colonial powers in the 19th century insisting on the right to make them opium addicts, and the dismemberment of China by Japan, assisted by British arms in the 1920s and 1930s. I had seen that Chiang Kai-shek was a disaster and Mao was understandable. I felt that the demonization of Communist China by America was a bit overdone, but was worried about the Christian persecution. It seemed that the projected failure of the Communist economy was probably not going to happen, and that nobody in the United States knew what Communism was anyway. It was obvious that the Vietnam War was about independence from France and the US, not about dominos in the Far East and a Chinese conspiracy.
After Mao, China eased up. It had always been quite non-aggressive, living within its Wall, and it waited a hundred and fifty years to claim back Hong Kong which we had seized as part of our insistence on making them opium addicts. Then we realised that there were fifty million plus Christians in China and it seemed that there was quite a pluralist society there anyway.
Soon it became clear that vast numbers of western capitalist companies were co-operating with Chinese manufacturing using their much cheaper labour and materials. It seemed Capitalism could quite easily work with Communism. Indeed, the Chinese economy was talked of as the leading world economy and they were very good at making all kinds of things on which we sat or travelled. Of course, we blamed it for global warming because it was using vast amounts of energy making all the things which were shipped to us, but then China even began to address global warming.
Then, the present leader took a much more autocratic turn. His attitude to Hong Kong became more autocratic. There was an appalling treatment of Islamic minorities and a totalitarian clampdown on Christians which was sinister. Clearly Xi Jinping was ensconcing himself in power and building an autocratic state. These were serious problems, but even then I did not realise what an enemy China was.
I was critical of US rhetoric. I knew that the US military needed an “enemy” to justify their vast military expenditure, and also that the CIA had to exaggerate by fifty times the “dangers” of various regimes, because their salaries depended on it. I had seen through multiple US threats – the hyping up of Cuba, the USSR, Iraq, Iran, Libya, North Korea and many other regimes as threats to keep the US military busy, and now China was the new evil empire, even while it was filling our shops. More recently there was the scare around Huawei. They would control our mobile phone system and the world. I had just read Edward Snowdon’s book suggesting that the States was already doing that anyway through its technology companies, so took that with a pinch of salt, especially when experts said it was no great problem and two Conservative Government voted for the risk. It was probably just US rival companies funding a few MPs to make a stir.
So, of course, a complex picture of the most populous country on the globe emerged, but that was before Coronavirus, and when I recognized how dangerous China is, especially in the area of surveillance. I had seen the face recognition stuff and the mass detention, monitoring and control of the Uyghurs. Now there was the issue of China deliberately starting a pandemic. But do they know everything that is going on? I had not really faced the issue directly until at home I opened the cupboards and found china in every one of them, often queuing up to listen. It was in the living room, bedroom, and all over, different kinds, all listening. So, I’m stepping up to the plate…