A propaganda banner reads: “Create Happiness for the People”.

The CCP, the Chinese Criminal Party, is steeped in the communist traditions of criminal behaviour, as demonstrated in the chaos of this pandemic. There are many who are now admonishing the Chinese leadership over a growing range of practices and behaviours, rippling out from the dishonest handling of the virus outbreak. It’s about time. 

Yet many in the West still don’t get it. On Fox News the other day, there was one earnest politician — no doubt with good intentions — suggesting that if China wants to join the international community as a respectable state, it should be more transparent and cooperative. Nothing will coerce China to be transparent in any investigation into the coronavirus. 

Another commentator urged that ‘it is time’ for China to behave honestly, like other sovereign nations.  

If those immature, naive views reflect the general thinking and the policy advice given to Western governments, they need smarter advisors. China does not aspire to be part of the international fraternity of well-meaning nations. Chinese communist party leaders want China to tread on the toes of its neighbours and to be seen as a superpower that has eclipsed the United States as a financial, military, technological and social emperor. A global puppet master. It wants to be feared, to hold the rest of the world hostage to its agenda. It swaggers like a bully … because it is one. But now it is diminished and more exposed than ever. 

Yet with their begging bowl out, they claim to be a developing country when it suits, to be treated with concessional agreements, eg re higher carbon dioxide emissions and lower contributions to organisations like the WHO. That is dishonest, isn’t it? Their global propaganda effort undermines democracies with sleeper agents, loans that bind and bribes. They steal intellectual property. That is corrupt, isn’t it? As for human life, even their strictest controls has not been able to hide the inhumane treatment that passes for law enforcement in China, demonstrating just how little they value the lives of others — their own citizens.  

There has never been and never will be a communist regime that rules within the rule of law as we in the West understand it. Murder and lies, terror and theft are the weapons such regimes use to keep their citizens under control, their global intentions alive.  

What really drives communist regimes is the same dynamic that drives all of human nature: self-interest. The leadership of the party enjoys the luxuries and pleasures of life much as (or more than) the wealthiest of people in the free markets of the West.  

Communist China boasts of lifting millions out of poverty. But it is not lifting its people into personal liberty, with political agency. Why would it? It’s a one-party state.

The politics of communism is simple enough. Back in the cold war days, my father (as a consultant to the Brits) returned from meetings with Soviet leaders one day, shaking his head. He had expected discussions of policies about how to improve the lot of East Europeans, an ideological debate about the different systems – democracy v communism. “No. They are just thugs,” he told me. 

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