The West Is Importing China’s Cultural Revolution

by J.B. Shurk, GATESTONE

• The founder of the World Economic Forum (WEF), Klaus Schwab, routinely applauds China’s surveillance State for its capacity to “nudge” citizens toward compliance. While China apologists turn a blind eye to the one-party communist State’s continuing genocides against Christians, Tibetans, Uyghurs, Falun Gong practitioners, and other minorities, they champion the machinery of China’s technocratic totalitarianism as a model for the rest of the world. It is deeply unsettling to see a destroyer of civilizations held up as the future for global civilization.

• Schwab’s influential organization seeks to recreate a Chinese system where a small group of elites bark orders and ordinary citizens dutifully obey.
• If the WEF were actually interested in projecting Enlightenment ideals, Western liberalism, and democratic norms throughout the globe, that unelected body of aristocrats would be doing everything in its power to convince Chinese leaders of the fundamental importance of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, private property, the rule of law, and respect for privacy. That they do no such thing suggests that the WEF’s loyalties are more aligned with the Chinese Communist Party’s mandarins than Schwab’s ideological followers are willing to advertise.
• Given how synchronized the Chinese Communist Party and the World Economic Forum continue to be, it appears that Schwab is more than willing to help China export its totalitarian police State across the globe.
• Excusing China’s totalitarianism and handing the communist nation the keys to enriching itself from lucrative global markets may well prove to have been the most consequential foreign policy error in centuries. Instead of bringing greater prosperity for Americans, as then President Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright promised at the time, normalizing trade relations with China has devastated the United States’ once robust industrial and manufacturing self-sufficiency, impoverished blue-collar workers across the country, and left ordinary Americans dependent upon an often hostile geopolitical foe for critical raw materials and finished products.
• Rather than providing a mechanism for “democratizing” a closed communist State, bringing the world’s economy to China’s doorstep has only hardened its iron-grip authoritarianism, encouraged its regional saber-rattling, expanded its capacity to inflict harm on ordinary Americans, and cemented its geopolitical clout.
• It has been more than 80 years since the death of U.K. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, and once again appeasement of brutal totalitarian regimes is back on the table — all in service to that oft-elusive promise of global peace.
• If then President George W. Bush had known in 2001 that America’s blue-collar workforce would be languishing today, that China would be killing tens of thousands of Americans each year with fentanyl while stealing American companies’ proprietary technology, and that global institutions such as the World Health Organization and World Economic Forum would be actively promoting the Chinese Communist Party’s technocratic surveillance State, perhaps he would not have been quite so eager to empower China through unfettered trade… Perhaps he would have acknowledged that China might well succeed in exporting its authoritarian philosophy around the world even more effectively than the United States exports freedom.
• China’s “Cultural Revolution” already destroyed one great civilization; perhaps the West should reject importing a cultural revolution of its own before it finally becomes too late.

China’s “Cultural Revolution” already destroyed one great civilization; perhaps the West should reject importing a cultural revolution of its own before it finally becomes too late. Pictured: A group of children reading Chairman Mao Zedong’s ‘Little Red Book’, assembled in front of a portrait of Mao during China’s Cultural Revolution, circa 1968. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)<
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Traditional Chinese culture, thousands of years old, is filled with beautiful Confucian philosophies, kinship rituals, artistic symbolism, mythologies, and regular devotion to family ancestors. To observe any of these ancient customs in person, however, it is Taiwan — not China — where a visitor must go. When mainland Chinese communists bulldozed over China’s rich heritage and Mao Zedong’s “Cultural Revolution” purged the “Four Olds” — old customs, culture, habits, and ideas — from Chinese society, Taiwan became the de facto last refuge for one of the world’s oldest great civilizations.

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