The malign influence of the Xi Jinping regime in China, the world’s 'most populous dictatorship', ranged far beyond Hong Kong in 2020, a report released by an American watchdog organisation has revealed. It also listed Tibet and Syria as two of the least free places in the world.
In its 'Freedom in the World 2021' annual assessment released Wednesday, the Washington-based Freedom House said that Beijing ramped up its global disinformation and censorship campaign to counter the fallout from its cover-up of the initial coronavirus outbreak, which severely hampered a rapid global response in the pandemic’s early days.
"Its efforts also featured increased meddling in the domestic political discourse of foreign democracies, as well as transnational extensions of rights abuses common in mainland China. The Chinese regime has gained clout in multilateral institutions such as the UN Human Rights Council, which the United States abandoned in 2018, as Beijing pushed a vision of so-called noninterference that allows abuses of democratic principles and human rights standards to go unpunished while the formation of autocratic alliances is promoted," the report mentioned.
It comes a day after The Foreign Correspondents' Club of China (FCCC) in its annual report detailed how the Chinese authorities sought to restrict reporting on the coronavirus pandemic and used "all arms of state power" to harass and intimidate journalists as country's propaganda machine struggled to regain control of the narrative around this public health disaster.
According to Freedom House, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), faced with the danger that its authoritarian system would be blamed for covering up and thus exacerbating the Covid-19 pandemic, worked hard to convert the risk into an opportunity to exert influence.
It also said that Beijing provided medical supplies to countries that were hit hard by the virus, but it often portrayed sales as donations and orchestrated propaganda events with economically dependent recipient governments.
"Throughout the year, the CCP touted its own authoritarian methods for controlling the contagion, comparing them favorably with democracies like the United States while studiously ignoring the countries that succeeded without resorting to major abuses, most notably Taiwan. This type of spin has the potential to convince many people that China’s censorship and repression are a recipe for effective governance rather than blunt tools for entrenching political power," says the report.
The American organisation went beyond the pandemic to expose how the Chinese government's export of antidemocratic tactics, financial coercion, and physical intimidation have led to an erosion of democratic institutions and human rights protections in numerous countries.
"The campaign has been supplemented by the regime’s moves to promote its agenda at the United Nations, in diplomatic channels, and through worldwide propaganda that aims to systematically alter global norms. Other authoritarian states have joined China in these efforts, even as key democracies abandoned allies and their own values in foreign policy matters."
It said that even the world’s most egregious violations, such as the large-scale forced sterilization of Uighur women, are not met with a well-coordinated response or punishment.
"The government continued in 2020 to aggressively pursue policies—including large-scale resettlement, work-transfer programs, forced sterilizations, and mass internment—that are altering the demography of ethnic minority regions, especially Xinjiang, Tibet, and Inner Mongolia. Further evidence emerged during the year of the government’s systematic program of forced sterilizations of Uighur and other Muslim women in Xinjiang, particularly those with two or more children."
Labeling the Chinese government and the CCP as "notoriously opaque", the report said that the outbreak of Covid-19 at the beginning of 2020 provided justification for the acceleration of existing programs to track, surveil, and control the behavior of citizens through new mobile-phone applications and other technologies.
"Using draconian methods, the government was largely successful in containing the virus after the initial outbreak in Hubei Province, with fewer than 4,800 deaths reported by the World Health Organization at year’s end. However, the CCP leadership worked to suppress independent sources of information and criticism about its early cover-up and mishandling of the contagion, punishing whistleblowers and citizen journalists and promoting disinformation that deflected blame for the pandemic to other countries."
