When a Free Society Becomes a Police State – Common Sense with Bari Weiss
Perhaps you read all of this and think the following: The Chinese Communist Party is terrible. We hear horrific stories out of China all the time. About how the CCP is carrying out a genocide against Uyghur Muslims and how it is staging videos of people pretending to be happy Uyghurs in an attempt to conceal the truth. About how it indoctrinates its people with censorship and propaganda. About how it disappears people. About how it uses cutting edge technology to spy on its own.
Why should a newspaper closure rank among such atrocities?
I asked that question to Mark Simon: The Chinese Communist Party has become an expansionist party. They are interested not only in China now, but in the things around China, he said. And the killing of Apple Daily is really the largest blow against Hong Kong as a Western civil society. Jimmy Lai put it this way in a 2019 interview: What we are fighting for is the first battle of the new cold war.
In other words: What happens in Beijing doesn t stay in Beijing.
Here I m not just thinking of of movie stars like John Cena groveling about calling Taiwan a country; or of NBA stars like Lebron James who claim the mantle of social justice but are go mute in the face of the world s greatest threat to human freedom; or of powerful brands like Apple and Nike that market themselves as progressive but rely on forced labor. (This past week, as Apple Daily shuttered, the CEO of Nike said: Nike is a brand that is of China and for China. )
I am also talking about the pandemic we re still living through. It was China that lied to the world about the nature of Covid-19. It was China that disappeared scientists who tried to blow the whistle early on. In other words: we don t need to live in mainland China to be affected by the policies and the decisions of the CCP.
If the CCP is willing to do that to the world, if it is willing to swallow up a city of more than 7 million people in broad daylight, crushing the free press, crushing dissent, and jailing journalists, you have to ask yourself: what or who will come next?
Amen.