China is taking US citizens hostage
The Telegraph, July 5, 2023
As we Americans celebrate our Independence Day – sorry ol’ Blighty – it’s good to count our blessings and take stock. We remain (for now) the wealthiest country by GDP in the world, followed by China, Japan, and Germany and the dollar is still the world’s reserve currency. As an American there are few countries I cannot visit carrying my blue passport with any sense of risk or danger.
Sadly, China – the world’s second wealthiest country – is moving into that category and I’m afraid I will not risk going there. On June 30, citing Chinese detentions of US citizens under vague anti-espionage laws, the Department of State website advised American citizens to “reconsider travel to Mainland China”, “to the Hong Kong SAR”, and “to the Macau SAR” due to “the arbitrary enforcement of local laws”. As our nation celebrates the Fourth of July, 200 US citizens are imprisoned in China, detained for suspicious or vague reasons.
It is the increasing manifestation of what some have called China’s “hostage diplomacy”. Donald Clarke, a professor at George Washington Law School indicates that “China views the holding of human hostages as an acceptable way to conduct diplomacy”. Famously, two prominent Canadians were detained for three years without charge by China – seemingly in response to Canada’s arrest of Chinese executive Meng Wanzhou. In 2020, a famous Australian anchor named Cheng Lei at CGTN (China Global TV Network) was detained under China’s state secrets laws – seemingly in response to a deterioration in relations between the two countries.
Whatever else you think about China, it is a tragedy for all countries that relations have come to this. Because it signals – along with the Great Firewall of China, the National Intelligence Law, Document 9 and ever-stricter control over China’s media and internet – the increasing isolation of the Chinese people; the end of their all-to-brief exposure to the rich multiplicity of thought in the world. The Party is building a wall around the nation and there are risks to those who go over it.
It signals a resurgence of a Maoist “cult of personality” system under one leader, Xi Jinping, in which “good thought” is distinguished from “bad thought”, and in which the latter is ruthlessly suppressed, be that in China or elsewhere.
And lest we forget these detentions are the tip of a much darker iceberg. The world should not forget the ongoing mass detention and oppression of an entire people, the Uyghur, the ethnically Turkic people of Xinjiang. The Uyghurs’ western region of China was conquered by Beijing under the Qing in the 17th century. And under China’s current approach towards criticism, I would be at risk if I went to China for writing these words in a British newspaper.
As I’ve written before, we are in the foothills of a new type of Cold War, not merely between the US and China, but between the Chinese Communist Party and those who dare criticize it: between the free and the unfree. For those of us who remember the end of the old Cold War, it is a day of reckoning.
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