My Take | Existential threat? It’s China that faces the prospect of annihilation

OK, I hope aspiring young reporters and journalism school students won’t be reading this column. That’s because I am going to say something I am not supposed to say out loud, but you would have been extremely naive if you ever thought hacks like us would do things otherwise.

Journalists rarely go out to get random quotes for their news reports; we get the quotes we want from people we think are most likely to say them to fit our story angle. That’s why we ask leading questions. If they won’t cooperate and give us the “right” quotes, we will just find someone else who will.

Of course, we are not the only ones who do that. Politicians feigning openness and transparency, such as those in the United States Congress, do that all the time with committee hearings by calling the right kind of witnesses. How do they select witnesses and extract the testimonies they want? Through the exercise of objectivity, impartiality, and balance? If you really think that, there is a guaranteed profit of a million-dollar investment I want to sell you. Just sign here please.

Take the latest hearing of the new House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee. The title was, “Combating the Generational Challenge of CCP Aggression.” One commentator has called it “the House launching a ‘cut China down to size’ committee”.

Led by committee members, witnesses did not disappoint. Republican Mike Gallagher, the committee’s chairman, opened with the following remarks. “We may call this a strategic competition, but it’s not a polite tennis match,” he said. “This is an existential struggle over what life will look like in the 21st century.”

So, Chinese-American relations have become a struggle for existence. Well, that’s good to know. Witnesses took the cue. That was the theme of the hearing, the existential threat of the Chinese Communist Party.