All of our energy in this country is internal. The great racial tragedy of our age is not the genocide being carried out against Uighur Muslims in West China but the continued existence of beloved syrup and football mascots. The villains are not the pusillanimous collaborators at Disney and the NBA, but American senators who dare to suggest that the lives of people in Hong Kong matter more than box office receipts and profits from exhibition games and the sale of merchandise in a country in whose law the concept of racial discrimination does not even exist. On the one hand, China is literally enslaving the people of Eritrea as I write this; on the other hand, the bad orange man over here said “kung flu.” Only one of these countries’ leaders is generally represented in domestic media as an authoritarian monster.
China’s leaders understand the American propensity to make every crisis an empty exercise in tone-policing. They know how to exploit our genuinely human impulses, which they not only do not share but reject as the height of folly. They also recognize that vast swathes of our political and educational establishment accept ideological commitments such as free trade that happen to benefit China as if they were undeniable scientific conclusions about the necessary conditions for decent human life.
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