China

China seems likely to become a significant issue in this year's US election.  It's important to remember the grim reality behind the various narratives which will be constructed for domestic political reasons.

China today is a nightmarish fascist state.  China is committing de facto genocide against the Uyghur native population of Xinjiang, with over a million Uyghurs held in "re-education" camps, widespread forced sterilization of Uyghur women, and large-scale migration of ethnic Chinese into the territory.  China imposes internal surveillance, and restricts its people's access to information, to a degree almost no other state has managed.  China is destroying what remains of Hong Kong's freedom in brazen disregard of its 1997 commitments.  China is probably the most racist country in the world.  China is engaged in naked territorial expansionism and aggression in the South China Sea, encroaching on the rights of neighboring countries such as the Philippines.  China aims to absorb democratic Taiwan on the basis of shared ethnicity, language, and history, much as Hitler's regime laid claim to Austria.  China, not Trump's US, is the new Nazi Germany.  China's rise toward superpower status is an intolerable menace to the democracies of East Asia and the world in general, and will eventually need to be stopped at almost any cost.

As in the 1930s, there are appeasers at large among the leaders of other countries, people who for whatever reason prefer not to acknowledge the seriousness of the threat or the nature of the regime.  Foremost among them, in our own country, is of course Trump himself.  Whatever he's saying now, Trump previously kowtowed to the Chinese regime as he has done with so many other tyrant states.  In the early weeks of the covid-19 pandemic, Trump repeatedly praised the regime and took its shoddy lies at face value.

Fortunately Biden seems willing to be blunt about the issue:


The economic shock wrought by the pandemic seems to have awakened some other democracies to the madness of allowing themselves to become dependent on China.  The UK and Japan, for example, are already taking steps to lessen that dependence and bring critical production capacity back home.  We, too, will need leadership that can see the problem with clear eyes and act in our real national interest.  That can't be provided by a man whose positions shift around like a wind sock as political expediency dictates, and whose first instinct has always been to coddle dictators while sabotaging our relationships with fellow democratic nations.  Trump's utter failure to recognize and confront the covid-19 threat is closely paralleled by his similar failure with China.