How Team Trump’s flaws are undermining efforts to call out China’s misconduct

Don’t expect Beijing to roll over when it is collared with the same leash it puts on diplomats posted to China. Conflating one-upmanship and reciprocity as readily as US President Donald Trump portrays America’s Covid-19 disaster as a public health policy success, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian announced on Friday that US diplomats in China will face new restrictions, in retaliation for those that US State Secretary Mike Pompeo recently imposed on Chinese diplomats in the US.

The lack of reciprocity that has always been the case was reinforced last week with the news that People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, refused to run an editorial penned by US Ambassador Terry Branstad. According to the newspaper, Branstad’s piece was “seriously inconsistent with the facts”. True to form, however, these arbiters of truth didn’t indicate which details needed correcting.

This is all playing out as the world pays greater attention to Beijing’s treatment of pan-democrats in Hong Kong, and of Tibetans, Uygurs, Mongolians and anyone else not fitting in with an obedient Han Chinese monoculture interested only in economic security.

As Beijing continues its construction of a totalitarian surveillance state, its enemies in Washington must be scratching their heads. With the Chinese government unleashing such a dystopian beast, why isn’t the Chinese population rising in resistance? And why would US allies and China’s neighbours need convincing and cajoling to join Washington’s effort to curb Beijing’s ambitions on the technological front, and others?

Let’s first look at the US election. Trump and his party think that law, order and rising stock prices will satisfy enough Americans to keep them in power for a second term. If stability and economic gains are reason enough for Americans to look past the Trump administration’s flaws, why would this not be the case for Chinese?