Chapter 3 Towards International Isolation and Conflict (3)

The outbreak of the Occupy Central Movement in Hong Kong in 2014 and the anti-Send-China Movement in 2019 were both suppressed by the Chinese government. 2020 saw the introduction of the Hong Kong National Security Law by the Chinese National People’s Congress and the amendment of the Hong Kong electoral system in 2021. The “one country, two systems” in the Sino-British Joint Declaration and the Hong Kong Basic Law have been abolished de facto. After the DPP took power in 2016, Tsai refused to recognize the “1992 Consensus” and accepted “one country, two systems.” Xi Jinping resorted to forceful coercion, with military aircraft and warships frequently disturbing Taiwan. On July 1, 2021, Xi Jinping vowed to resolve the Taiwan issue and to achieve the complete reunification of the motherland at the Communist Party’s Centennial Conference. He called the recovery of Taiwan “a historical task to which the Chinese Communist Party is firmly committed”.
 
The human rights issues of Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and Taiwan are red lines of sovereignty. Still, they contradict the universal value of “human rights over sovereignty,” making it difficult to ease China’s international relations with the West.

6. Coronavirus Outbreak
 
In early December 2019, the Coronavirus began to spread in Wuhan. The Chinese government tried to cover up the epidemic, admonishing eight “whistleblowers,” including Dr. Li Wenliang. But the move to seal off the city did not go through any legal process and was left to Xi Jinping’s sole discretion. The extreme and barbaric closure of the city has caused a serious disaster in life and increased the suffering of the people of Wuhan. Nearly 200 million people have been infected and over 4 million have died worldwide.
 
In March 2020, Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian tweeted dumping the source of the Coronavirus on U.S. military personnel attending the World Military Games in Wuhan in October 2019.

In early 2021, the World Health Organization, under international pressure, organized a team of experts to investigate Wuhan . The investigation report released in March largely ruled out the possibility of a leak from the Wuhan Virus Institute. However, the conclusion has been widely questioned due to China’s refusal to provide raw data on early cases. WHO Director-General Tan Desai has now repeatedly and publicly called on China to cooperate with the second traceability investigation and release the initial case data.

In the nine years of Xi Jinping’s rule, China’s diplomacy has faced a great dilemma, unprecedented since the founding of the PRC, especially after establishing diplomatic relations between China and the United States. First and foremost, U.S.- China relations have reached an intractable impasse. There is now an unprecedented consensus between the two parties in the United States, left-center-right figures, and pro-Chinese and anti-Chinese factions, unanimously advocating a containment strategy against China’s development and expansion in the world. The Biden administration has formed an International Democratic Alliance to address the Chinese challenge jointly.
 
According to an independent scholar Rong Jian, the root of China’s diplomatic woes lies in the fact that Xi Jinping’s diplomacy has abandoned Deng Xiaoping’s 27-word policy of “observe calmly, hold your ground, deal with the situation calmly, hide your light, keep low key, and never take the lead”. Xi has adopted an ideologically oriented diplomatic line. He has pointed out that the overall root of China’s ideological diplomacy is its ideological bias against U.S. diplomacy. China has long established the United States as the general representative of hostile forces overseas from a specific ideology. By using North Korea, Syria, Iran, and Russia as friends and confronting Japan, China has drawn the line entirely against the United States: seeing America’s enemies as friends and America’s friends as enemies. The essence of China’s ideological diplomacy is China’s values diplomacy. The core of these values is that communism must be achieved, socialism must win over capitalism, China must lead the reorganization of the world order and China must replace the United States as the new leading country in the world.