China, US score points in fight for moral supremacy

Beijing has blanketed its media with images of American cities aflame to counter criticism of its ­efforts to stamp out demonstrations in Hong Kong.

China is watching: New York police block protesters crossing the Manhattan Bridge from entering Manhattan on Tuesday night. Picture: AP

China is using the chaos in the US to counter criticism of Beijing’s ­efforts to stamp out demonstrations in Hong Kong, as its state media carries prominently images of the riots and Donald Trump’s threat of force against protesters.

“Why did the US have so many problems with the restrained and civilised way of law enforcement by the Hong Kong police but have no problem at all with threatening to shoot at and mobilising the ­National Guard against its domestic protesters?” foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said this week.

Beijing’s focus on the US unrest follows Washington’s criticism of China’s recent decision to impose a national-security law on Hong Kong, where an at-times aggressive police response last year failed to shut down large-scale democracy protests. The law authorises Beijing’s use of legal and enforcement measures that override the territory’s partial autonomy.

The move also came ahead of Thursday’s anniversary of Beijing’s bloody 1989 crackdown on protesters in Tiananmen Square, a date when Hong Kong for three decades has held demonstrations. City authorities prohibited a candlelight vigil this year.

Beijing has blanketed its domestic media with images of Minneapolis, Washington and other American cities aflame over the past week.

State broadcaster China Central Television’s Monday night newscast featured footage of demonstrators protesting against Mr Trump and, sometimes violently, police officers. “Many US citizens say that America’s racial discrimination is deep-rooted,” the presenter said.

State media has also given prominence to Mr Trump’s threat of a crackdown, with his tweeted warning that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts”.

“I can’t breathe,” Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying tweeted on Saturday, invoking the words of George Floyd before his death in police custody last week, which triggered the unrest.

Ms Hua’s statement was a pointed response to US State ­Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus, who had accused China in an earlier tweet of having “flagrantly broken its promise to the people of Hong Kong” by ­approving the plan to impose the new security law there.

On Friday, Mr Trump said he planned to revoke Hong Kong’s special status in response to China’s decision to pass the ­national-security law.

“If US politicians understood that if they encourage violence in another country, their words might backfire on them one day, they would probably ‘think twice’ before commenting again on the Hong Kong turmoil in the future,” the nationalist state-run tabloid Global Times declared on Sunday.

On Monday, Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily posted a graphic on China’s Twitter-like social-media platform Weibo, ­depicting a police officer dressed as the Statue of Liberty crushing a person’s neck. It was captioned “Under the weight of human rights”.

Many Chinese citizens took to Weibo to ridicule Ms Hua’s “I can’t breathe” post, writing: “I can’t tweet”, a reference to the fact that Twitter is blocked in China.

As of Tuesday, the hashtag “American riots” topped Chinese social media, with 1.9 billion views and more than 378,000 related posts. One of the top trending topics was “Trump asks to use overwhelming force”.

Chinese state media has long trained its coverage of the US on its social ills, said Fang Kecheng, an assistant professor of journalism at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. “The recent protests all over the US have been grist to China’s mills because they seem to challenge the legitimacy of the democratic system,” he said.

Professor Fang said while Beijing was highlighting Mr Trump’s threats of violence against US ­protesters to decry what it regards as American hypocrisy, the ­strategy could also awaken col­­lective memory of its own bloody history.

On the morning of June 4, 1989, Chinese tanks entered Tiananmen Square to clear out thousands of students who had gathered to demand more democracy.

China has struggled with its own racial tensions. In April, dozens of African countries summoned Chinese ambassadors to protest at the treatment of their citizens under pandemic controls in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou. Human-rights activists and Western leaders have also been critical of China’s treatment of its ethnic Muslim Uighur population in the restive Xinjiang region.

To activists such as Wilfred Chan, a New York-based writer on Hong Kong affairs, Washington and Beijing have been engaging in “transparently cynical attempts to use the protests in the other’s territory to score points in a geopolitical game”.

He pointed to the use of teargas, rubber bullets and arrests in Hong Kong and across the US, saying neither government had condemned the aggressive tactics against protesters on their own soil.

The Wall Street Journal