China’s Xi Jinping Clobbers U.S. With a New Book — His Own — on Human Rights

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

In a sign the Chinese Communist Party intends to intensify its global gaslighting efforts, President Xi Jinping, the world’s worst human rights offender, is publishing a book claiming leadership on human rights.

Directly thumbing its nose at America’s Summit for Democracy and diplomatic boycott of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics due to “ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang and other human rights abuses,” the Chinese-language People’s Daily is lauding the “Excerpts from Xi Jinping’s Discourses on Respect and Protection of Human Rights.”

The forthcoming book — a collection of quotations from reports, speeches, and letters — purports to showcase how Mr. Xi’s leadership has advanced Communist China’s pursuit of human rights.

The propaganda about the book follows a larger campaign straight out of “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” with Mr. Xi playing the part of Indiana Jones and democracy and totalitarianism being represented by the swiped golden idol and the bag of sand, respectively.

The first prong of the propaganda campaign commenced on December 5, when the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Chinese state press launched a series of rhetorical salvos spearheaded by a white paper titled, “The State of Democracy in the United States.”

Chinese state sources used this to lambast America’s notion of “one person, one vote,” calling the concept a lie. It derides America’s political system as “rule of the few over the many” and little more than “money politics.”

Communist China’s rhetoric all but pronounces American democracy dead, labeling the system “seriously sick” and suffering from a “trust crisis” in which minorities are denied the “chance to cast ballots.”

The second prong of the propaganda campaign arrived on December 7, in the form of a white paper heralding Communist China’s alternative form of democracy. The qualities of the Chinese system described, of course, fail to comport with the conventional dictionary definition of “democracy.”

“There is only one criterion for democratic governance,” reads the communist white paper, “that ordinary people enjoy the dividends of peace and development and live peaceful and happy lives.” The government report emphasizes “whole-process democracy,” which the Chinese party conveniently claims “is centered on governance rather than on elections.”

The party used an American advisor, Robert Lawrence Kuhn, to hawk China’s “whole-process democracy” on Chinese state media, saying it, “enables the Chinese people to broadly and continuously participate in the day-to-day political activities at all levels, including democratic elections, political consultation, decision-making and oversight.”

Naturally, such claims by Mr. Kuhn, a recipient of China’s “Friendship Medal” for foreigners, are almost as preposterous as Mr. Xi’s human rights claims. China does not enjoy democracy, and it lacks the fundamental elements required to manifest human rights, including the U.N. declaration.

Where there should be free speech, in China one finds protesters arrested for the chanting of slogans and travel bloggers imprisoned for “disrespectful” photos. Where a free press should exist, nothing can be found at all, Reporters Without Borders having just branded China “the world’s biggest captor of journalists.”

While China’s human rights violations know no bounds, under the hukou system the Communist Party curtails freedom of movement among its citizenry, binding them to live, work, and educate their children in the sole locality where they are registered.

The party seeks nothing less than to dominate all Chinese, even the unborn, with the most basic human function of reproduction defiled by forced sterilizations, and the forced family planning of the One-, Two-, and — as of May 2021 — Three-Child policies.

If the party is amenable to remembering what the Heritage Foundation calls history’s greatest mass murderer, Mao Zedong, as “70 percent right, 30 percent wrong,” Mr. Xi has no compunction about attempting to con the world into calling his totalitarianism “democracy” or promoting a book in which his crimes against humanity are championed as “human rights.”


The New York Sun

© 2024 The New York Sun Company, LLC. All rights reserved.

Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. The material on this site is protected by copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used.

The New York Sun

Sign in or  Create a free account

By continuing you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use