Comment
Douglas Murray
This year will be memorable for many reasons. Just one is that 2020 was the year in which the world saw the true menace of Communist China.
Ever since the fall of Communism in Russia and Eastern Europe, Western companies and governments assumed that China would follow a similar path.
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The country would liberalise, open up its economy and slowly become like everybody else. That turned out to be exactly wrong.
China became rich but it did not become free. And in 2020 the world realised what that meant. The red dragon turned out not to be a mythical beast.
We saw the CCP brutally suppress the people of Hong Kong.
Further afield we saw China spark a pandemic that spread across the globe and wrecked all the globe’s economies.
Communist-run China is not a normal country
We saw the CCP try and escape blame for the virus. And now as we leave 2020 only one economy in the world is actually growing: China’s.
It is a disgraceful situation to be in. But at least the nature of the regime is now clear for the world to see.
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All through this year the CCP’s habit of lying and cover-up has become clearer. As has its threatening behaviour.
When the Australian government asked for an inquiry into the origins of the Coronavirus the Chinese authorities responded by threatening and insulting Australia. Communist-run China is not a normal country.
But at least the world is starting to focus its attention on the regime.
For years the communists have stolen intellectual property and got away with it. Finally people are starting to question this mass-theft.
Fifteen years ago I published a report exposing China’s buying up of Western influence by infiltrating our universities.
Finally this year that story has become a scandal, with Cambridge and other universities rightly exposed for their naivety and greed.
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There is no limit to their deceits
Every day we see the regime’s behaviour more clearly. Just this week the director of GCHQ – Jeremy Fleming – announced that cyber attacks on the UK have hit an all-time high.
One of the foreign powers which has attempted to exploit the pandemic with attempted hacks of hospitals and vaccine suppliers is guess who? China.
On the same day General Sir Patrick Sanders, Commander of UK Strategic Command described China as ‘the greatest strategic threat facing this country.’
He detailed how China and other rogue states and criminals had been deliberately aiming to take advantage of the Covid situation to target our country. After a problem that China gave us!
And there is no limit to their deceits. This week intelligence experts in the UK have also warned of China using honey trap spy networks of beautiful women to steal secrets from our country.
The warning comes after a scandal in the USA where left-wing Congressman Eric Swalwell was discovered to have had a relationship with a woman called Christine Fang who is suspected of being a Chinese spy.
This comes after questions have been raised about the millions of dollars that Hunter Biden – son of the incoming US president – made from Chinese businesses in recent years.
In Britain the Chinese state and major firms (often effectively the same thing) have been buying up our politicians for years.
Prominent politicians from the Blair and Cameron governments in particular have been involved in deeply questionable financial dealings with China. Leading UK businessmen lobbied for the Chinese communications firm Huawei to provide part of the UK’s 5-G network - a move that was only reversed earlier this year.
But we know that China likes to buy up our more corrupt, if not cheap, western politicians.
A reminder that they may be sending in women to bed them is just another reminder of the lengths the Communists will go to.
Perhaps they will continue to get away with this.
Perhaps they will get away with the hacking, the spying, the bedding, bribing and threatening.
Or perhaps they won’t.
The only way they will be is if the nations of the world organise and turn on Beijing, as they should have done many years ago.
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They world should treat the country as the rogue power that it is. If China wants to join the community of nations it can do so.
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But it cannot be allowed to threaten the world’s democracies, shut down the world’s economies and steal from people it has impoverished and insulted.
China thinks it can get away with 2020. Over the next year we must make sure they don’t.