Name: 2020 was the year the West woke up to China's threat
Brand: telegraph.co.uk
SKU: telegraph-co-uk-464
Availability: OnlineOnly

critic

2020 was the year the West woke up to China's threat

preview

Whatever 2021 is going to be, there is no doubt what 2020 was. It was the year of China. In China’s self-estimation the year that just passed could be seen as a success. That is certainly how President Xi’s New Year address came across. 2020 was one big Communist success story.At the beginning of last year, China was losing an increasingly bitter trade war with the United States being waged by the first US president in recent times to recognise China as a serious, unfriendly competitor. President Trump’s insights may have been basic but they were also accurate and long-held. No one could accuse the president of being purely cynical in his China policy. As far back as 2000 (in a book called The America We Deserve), the man then best known as a businessman and reality TV host wrote: “Our biggest long-term challenge will be China. Though we have the upper hand, we’re way too eager to please the Chinese. We see them as a potential market … even at the expense of our own national interests.”He was right and, once he was in the Oval Office, Trump acted on that insight. He warned that unfair competition from China was a disadvantage to American workers and that the free trade arrangements that Joe Biden and others had spear-headed over recent decades had been at the expense of American jobs. China was finally facing a rival that had its number.Then the coronavirus hit. A virus that the Communist Party that rules China had known about for months before it bothered to allow the rest of the world in on the fact. Among much else, in the early months of 2020, China allowed flights to leave the country but not to fly within it. And as the world started to question just how this virus had come out, the Chinese authorities did everything they could to ensure the world never knew.They disappeared scientists and others who could have helped. Just this week they jailed a journalist looking into the virus. The CCP even threatened countries like Australia whose governments asked for an international inquiry into the roots of the virus. And as the world’s economies closed down, China found itself at an advantage. It was able to shut down its populations in a way that countries ruled by the consent of their peoples could never do.In similar fashion it was able to reopen faster. As President Xi boasted in his New Year’s message: “China is the first major economy worldwide to achieve positive growth, and its GDP in 2020 is expected to step up to a new level.” Indeed. While the US, UK and every other major economy saw a vast fall in GDP and soaring government borrowing, China appeared to be coming out of 2020 with growth upwards of 2 per cent. And that wasn’t the only benefit the CCP enjoyed from 2020.The prospects for Donald Trump’s re-election relied on a simple formula (as one of his closest aides told me in 2019): the US economy needed to continue to grow and the US needed to not get into any foreign wars. Trump was true to his word on not getting the US entangled in any more failing foreign adventures. But once Covid landed and he was forced to shut down the country, the American economy hit the doldrums. Whether or not that was the main reason for Trump’s failure to win the election in November, it was certainly a contributing factor. In 2016 Trump had promised the American voters that they would be tired of winning. In November 2020 he had to concede that the US economy had had the worst year in recent history. The fact that it was someone else’s fault ended up being an ineffective excuse.So the CCP enters 2021 with a growing economy, its primary challenger exiting the White House and a new team entering it led by a man – Joe Biden – who has not only but whose own family members appear to have been compromised by enriching themselves at Beijing’s trough. In many ways 2020 was a good year for China. It acted unusually, for sure. But it won.And yet. The virus which emerged from Wuhan – whether from a laboratory or a wet-market we may never know – also had a contrary effect. For suddenly the world became interested in China in a way that it had not previously been. This new-found interest turned up a lot of odious practices that Beijing had previously been able to get away with.There was nothing new about China’s mistreatment of the Uighur minority. For years the world had known – and brave dissidents from China had tried to make sure the world knew – that the Chinese authorities had been rounding up and “re-educating” hundreds of thousands of Chinese Muslims. Increasingly the policy looked like nothing so much as a remake of the concentration camp systems that the world’s worst regimes had instituted in the 20th century. Here the CCP was in the 21st century, doing exactly the same thing. And yet the world did not much appear to care.In 2020 the world began to care, because an increasing number of people began to know about it. Pictures and footage that had been released before suddenly gained a new life. Videos of horrors that the Chinese authorities didn’t want the world to know about became more and more widely known. So it was in 2020 with everything else that China did.For years the Chinese authorities had been squeezing with an ever-tightening noose. Some brave voices objected. Some Western allies expressed solidarity. But Hong Kong was a niche issue until 2020. Then, as the CCP tightened the noose once more, the world – led by Britain – began to object. Perhaps it even began to understand. For in 2020 the world could see that Hong Kong was not an oddity but a glimpse into a potential future. For wherever the CCP increases its power, there freedom and democracy diminish and finally disappear.It wasn’t only places that Beijing continued to view as its possessions, but countries that are noble and independent powers themselves which began to feel China’s wrath. Until 2020 it would have been unprecedented for Chinese officials and state organs to be as openly threatening to a free democracy as they were in 2020 to our allies in Australia. As Beijing’s goons online and off threatened the presumptuous Australians for daring to ask where the economy-shutting virus had come from, the world could see that the CCP was not simply interested in its own territorial issues. It was interested in an expansionist and ultimately a globally dominant position, in which countries like Australia – and Britain – are brought to heel wherever and whenever they are seen to have “stepped out of line”.Early last decade, when the UK government of David Cameron and George Osborne kowtowed to Beijing, the public didn’t seem to understand the poison that Britain was drinking. Like every other country we looked to China for its money and its investment opportunities, and we recognised that even if the bill for these things had to be paid in some other currency then the payment would not be due for another day. Some are still taking that stance. The EU just signed a trade deal with China and seems remarkably reluctant to criticise a country whose gold it needs.Of course the question of what to do looms large. At present the young “woke” generation have yet to find the bravery to confront any “oppression” that they cannot invent at home. Perhaps that will soon change. Perhaps the world’s economies will finally recognise that China has been undercutting everyone, dishonestly and with bad intent, for too long. Some multinational action against the country and a certain disentangling from its supply chains would be one good thing to come from the year that is past.So 2020 was China’s year, certainly. But it was also the year that the rest of the world had an opportunity to realise what an unpleasant entity we have been willing to deal with in the CCP. Not too late, perhaps. But certainly not a moment too soon.Related TopicsThe Telegraph values your comments but kindly requests all posts are on topic, constructive and respectful. Please review our.You need to be a subscriber to join the conversation. Find out more.Show commentsAdvertisementRelated TopicsWe rely on advertising to help fund our award-winning journalism.We urge you to turn off your ad blocker for The Telegraph website so that you can continue to access our quality content in the future.Thank you for your support.Need help?Visit ourpage.Close

Whatever 2021 is going to be, there is no doubt what 2020 was. It was the year of China. In China’s self-estimation the year that just passed could be seen as a success. That is certainly how President Xi’s New Year address came across. 2020 was one big Communist success story.At the beginning of last year, China was losing an increasingly bitter trade war with the United States being waged by the first US president in recent times to recognise China as a serious, unfriendly competitor. President Trump’s insights may have been basic but they were also accurate and long-held. No one could...

public

Douglas Murray

Think ahead with the latest news, comment, analysis and video. Subscribe here: https://telegraph.co.uk/customer/subscribe

2020 was the year the West woke up to China's threat

No article scores yet.

CRITIC REVIEWS

PUBLIC REVIEWS