China, Aspiring World Power

"China remains, as it has these 3,000 years, one of the world's most important nationalities, but it retains the unseemly disadvantages of a totalitarian power."

"No one can believe a word the Chinese government says on any subject or a number that it publishes."

"Hundreds of millions of Chinese essentially still live as they did a thousand years ago, the whole country is debt-ridden, prominent citizens not infrequently just disappear, and the government is thoroughly corrupt by Western standards."

"In the same measure that China should not be underestimated, nor should it be blindly cited as giving any indication of the way forward in policy terms for other states."

Conrad Black, National Post

Chinese President Xi Jinping, meets with representatives of the aircraft carrier unit and the manufacturer at a naval port in Sanya, south China's Hainan province Li Gang/Xinhua News Agency/Getty Images

China, at one time in its past elevated to positions of power and influence in government and its civil service, individuals with outstanding intellectual achievements whose grasp of the elements of their special interests were recognized for their excellence and performative quality. It was merit and merit alone that qualified people for the positions they occupied. The wisdom of Chinese sages came from a place of experience and creative thought. 

It was a time before the ideological messages of totalitarian communism led its proponents to shed their pride in their heritage and the achievements of merit and intelligent reasoning. The creative arts and philosophical advances made by a once-great society were all sacrificed to the cutting block of shunning the old and bringing in the new. And with the 'Cultural Revolution' a great broom of mass sacrifice of humanity swept the stage clean for mass indoctrination.

The world now sees the results; a vast population living under a humanity- and human-rights-hostile regime of total command. Mind control, population control, control of adversarial proponents of human rights and liberties. The Chinese Communist Party heralds itself as having manipulated events to combat and conquer poverty and ignorance, raising its countless millions of indigent poor to a middle-class position.

Chinese aircraft carrier, Liaoning, arrives in Hong Kong waters ANTHONY WALLACE/AFP/AFP/Getty Images

Beijing lauds itself for becoming, through clever exploitation of the free world's willingness to trust that its openness to the vast world of communism that accommodated enterprise and capitalism under a veneer of open cooperation in trade and production, a world colossus of manufacturing and trade. Powerful enough that its cheap and abundant labour was able to shutter factories all over the world whose production, labour and transport costs resulted in consumer goods unmatched in scale and prominence.

Beijing's growing self-confidence in league with its contempt for open, democratic societies led to an inflation of its superiority complex to feed its hunger for greater global respect, a larger power base and a voracious territorial ambition. Its grasp for power and influence continues to surge. Its self-entitlement to great power status unabated, its long arms of espionage, military and commercial, continue unabated. 

The world now recognizes a China that several decades of accommodation has transformed immeasurably. A totalitarian government that exploits other nations' advances in science and technology, a government that victimizes its people into submission, a government that interferes in the internal affairs of other nations creating instability and hostility wherever it intrudes.

In this April 12, 2018, file photo released by Xinhua News Agency, Chinese President Xi Jinping, left, speaks after he reviewed the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) Navy fleet in the South China Sea. From Asia to Africa, London to Berlin, Chinese envoys have set off diplomatic firestorms with a combative defense whenever their country is accused of not acting quickly enough to stem the spread of the coronavirus pandemic.  Li Gang/Xinhua/AP