China is clearly feeling the heat on all fronts as it steps up its propaganda war in the wake of the Chinese virus pandemic. Many have wondered if the Chinese virus pandemic will be China’s “Chernobyl” moment: a disaster so monstrous and so damaging to the rest of the world that even a totalitarian communist state cannot fight back the tide of anger and opprobrium both from within and from around the world.
While there are worries that China will snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, the very scale of its propaganda efforts belie how worried the Xi regime is. Domestically, the regime is spreading ridiculous conspiracy theories that few outside China take seriously. Not that that matters: denied free access to information, Chinese citizens are more likely to swallow the lies and give the regime a pass.
Internationally, it’s a different story. Countries from the US to Britain to Australia are more and more voicing their anger at China for the havoc wreaked by its lies.
On another important front in this rapidly chilling cold war, the West is taking the fight up to the Beijing bullies.
American and Australian warships have come together in the South China Sea for joint drills, as China continued to aggressively assert its claim of owning the entire area.
China’s aim in the Pacific is to turn the ocean into a Chinese lake – dismantling 80 years of U.S. blue-water hegemony – and to encircle Taiwan in order to bully the island nation into submitting to the communist boot heel. To that end, Beijing has been asserting sovereignty over atolls and islands – even if it has to build them from scratch – and trying to deny passage to its rivals.
To date, the communists have largely been allowed to get away with it. Barack Obama disastrously scaled down American naval power (in 2012, he openly sneered at Mitt Romney’s worry that degrading its blue-water fleet was a strategic disaster waiting to happen). Donald Trump has pledged the biggest navy build-up since Reagan.
In concert with Australia, he is challenging China’s Pacific expansion.
“Their combined operations started with force integration training and maneuvering exercises between Parramatta and Bunker Hill,” the statement said.
The joint drills of the two navies included integrated live fire exercises, coordinated helicopter operations, small boat force protection drills, command and control integration and maneuverability.
USS America, the flagship of the America Expeditionary Strike Group, appeared to be playing the role of USS Theodore Roosevelt, which is currently out of action in the South China Sea after it was sidelined by a coronavirus outbreak that sickened dozens of US sailors aboard the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.
A separate statement from the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit said the USS America conducted flight operations with its F-35B Lightning II fighter aircraft.
The US Navy did not reveal the exact location of the warships, but open sources online indicated that they were close to Malaysian waters, where a Chinese government survey ship, Haiyang Dizhi 8 escorted by China Coast Guard vessels, have been tagging Malaysia’s state oil company Petronas as it conducts exploratory drilling.
The United States has accused Beijing of taking advantage of the coronavirus pandemic to establish full military presence in the South China Sea and control sea lanes.
This is a long-overdue challenge to China’s territorial acquisitiveness and its increasingly aggressive stance. The exercises follow similar Australian navy exercises with India, another state challenging China’s rise, in April last year.
What remains to be seen is, first, just how far China is willing to engage in brinkmanship. It is notably trying to browbeat Australia, unleashing a diplomatic and soft-power war against the smaller partner of the alliance.
Second is just how many actors will continue to play the role of Beijing’s useful idiots. In 2015, the Northern Territory government was allowed to grant a 99-year lease on the strategically-vital Port of Darwin to a Chinese company (which is to say, to the Chinese Communist Party). In Victoria, socialist premier Daniel Andrews has insisted on signing up to Beijing’s notorious Belt and Road Initiative. Public service bureaucracies, the academy and business are thoroughly infested with panda-huggers, sycophants blinded by ideology, money, or both.
In the Pacific, tinpot panjandrums are also grasping for Chinese money.
The Australian government’s pushback against China’s “silent invasion” is being white-anted at every turn.
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