Victor Davis Hanson is Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is a regular commentator and a prolific commentator in print media. Here is an excerpt from his latest op-ed in which he castigates the Chinese Communists for their “bad behavior” after the Wuhan virus was first discovered:
Sometime in late November the Chinese Communist Party apparat was aware that the ingredients of some sort of an epidemic were brewing in Wuhan. Soon after, it was also clear to them that a new type of coronavirus was on the loose, a threat they might have taken more seriously given the similar Chinese origins of the prior toxic SARS coronavirus and the resources of a Level 4 virology lab nearby.
Yet the government initially hid all that knowledge from its own people in particular and in general from the world at large. Translated into American terms, that disingenuousness ensured that over 10,000 Chinese nationals and foreigners living in China flew every day on direct flights into the United States (Washington and California especially) from late November to the beginning of February, until the Trump travel ban of January 31.
All this laxity was also known to the Communist apparat in Beijing, which must have been amused when Trump was roundly damned by his liberal critics as a xenophobe and racist for finally daring to stop the influx on January 31 — the first major leader to enact such a total ban.
China will rue what it begat.
That is, it will come to appreciate fully that the supposed efficiency, ruthlessness, and autocracy of the Communist Party — what had so impressed foolish American journalists who once marveled at Beijing’s ability to enact by fiat liberal pet projects such as high-speed rail and solar industries — were China’s worst enemies, ensuring that the virus would spread and that China’s international reputation would be ruined.
There is much more in VDH’s excellent analysis. He was interviewed Wednesday night by Laura Ingraham and provided still more insight on the ChiComs’ actions, including their shameless propagandizing with the help of Western media and politicians. Ingraham began the segment with a video clip example of a Democrat political apparatchik praising China’s response to the virus:
(video clip of former Joe Biden chief-of-staff Ron Klain on CNN: “We have hospitals that are going to start to break this weekend … not weeks from now not months from now … in the next few days. It’s time for the words to be mashed at the same tempo of actually going things … as they did in China … they built hospitals in two or three days …”)
Ingraham: It’s amazing what slave labor will do for you. That was Ron Klain praising China for their response to the Wuhan virus. Victor Hanson and I have been talking about China for what, 20 years now, and nobody wanted to listen, but now they’re listening. What the press lauding China’s response, given China’s role in creating this disaster zone across the globe?
VDH: They have the most insidious and nefarious state-run media complex that I’ve ever seen, and we’re underestimating them. When you get lectures from the most non-diverse, intolerant, and racialist country in the world that we’re racist when they put a million people in camps [Uighurs] because of religious views they didn’t approve of, you know something is wrong. Or when you have the NBA in this country, or Michael Bloomberg, or Joe Biden talking about we’re being xenophobic, or we don’t appreciate how consensual China is, you know that the nexus is either they themselves or members of their families have business interests [with the Chinese]. We’ve got to wake up, and you’ve outlined the need to protect strategic industries … medical supplies and rare earths and semi-conductors … and we’ve got to do that carefully so they don’t cut it off right now … and that they don’t cut prices later to destroy them … But I would also ask why are our universities who have run up $1.6 trillion in student debt … why do they feel that they have to have 360,000 Chinese students as profit cash cows to subsidize their inefficient operations. I know that 99% of that 300,000-plus are fine students, but the 1% is what I’m worried about. They’re engaged in technological appropriation at best and espionage at worst. Why do we have to have 20,000 people going back and forth per day between China and the United States without any passport or healthcare or visa control? And remember, there were 500,000 Chinese nationals who came into Seattle, SFO, LAX, west coast airports between the time that the Chinese government knew that this was contagious and [the time that] the travel ban [was instituted].
And finally, one realist suggestion is that there used to be common wisdom in our bipartisan foreign policy going back to Henry Kissinger that China and Russia would not be better friends to one another than they are to us, and with this Mueller hysteria about Russia, we lost a realist triangulation card with Russian. And those countries in the world that have been terrified of China-Russia included right along the border … India … so we need to develop realist approaches to people that we might not otherwise want to be that close, and one of them is Russia, and normalize that relationship … closer relationships with India … and who has been a model citizen has been South Korea … Taiwan especially … and Japan. They have legitimate concerns about China, and we need to get closer relations with all of these countries.
Ingraham: We needed a Russian reset and instead, we got Mueller. … I love how the WHO, courtesy of China doesn’t allow Taiwan to be part of the whole WHO either. … China is in bed with the World Health Organization, and that’s part of the reallocation of medical supplies to Europe … they’re begging China for help, and they’re getting is, saying that little places like the Bahamas are getting help. China has a lot of money, still, and they make everything, so now they have the power over us that we never should have given them in the first place.
VDH: And they salt money to the elites of all these westernized countries, and then they have a wonderful propaganda [strategy], and it is that the poor victims and the identity politics that are twisted to accuse us of being racists due to our “inferior mentalities.” They’re exploiting this ruthlessly and shamelessly, and we’re falling for it. And somebody’s got to stand up and just say that we don’t care what you say, we’re not going to cease our criticism of the way you’ve treated the world and us in particular. We have to just ignore this propaganda, but it’s very effective, and it’s insidious. It’s all through our media.
End of the interview. Perhaps the two most important point made by Hanson are these:
1. The Chinese have co-opted Western politicians and media and thoroughly corrupted many in ways that continue to benefit ChiCom strategic interests. The Clinton, the Bidens, Diane Feinstein, and many others have literally been purchased by renminbi from the Chinese trade surplus with America. In short, our atrocious open trade policies have led to a sort of “political and cultural seppuku” here in the United States while the ChiComs have advanced their strategic goals without any real push-back.
2. Secondly, the bipartisan foreign policy first formulated in the 1960s, which implemented a counter-balancing triangular relationship among China, Russia, and the US, has now fallen apart – largely due to US domestic political interests tied to Point #1 above. Those same bought-and-paid for US politicians (and other US entities also purchased by the Chinese, such as Hollywood studios, corporate media shares, and Academia interests) were those who through that triangular relationship out the window in order to “get Trump,” who they perceived was a threat to their corrupt business dealings with China.
It is long past time that Americans awakened to the fact that the political class has been selling America to the Chinese for pennies on a dollar for decades, and the legacy media have been enabling that transfer, too.
The end.
