Free Speech, International

“A Very Attractive Model”: China Cracks Down on Reporters and Protesters Days After Praise from the WEF Founder

China has expanded its crackdown on protesters over the government’s authoritarian measures to control Covid, including arresting and beating a BBC reporter. The crackdown follows comments last week from World Economic Forum (WEF) founder Chair Klaus Schwab who declared China to be a “role model” in how to handle the virus.

Last week, Schwab told a Chinese media outlet in Bangkok, Thailand, that “the Chinese model is certainly a very attractive model for quite a number of countries.”

What Schwab calls “an attractive model” includes the denial of free speech and associational rights as well as brutal confinement conditions for millions. That approach also included the failure to promptly notify the world of the outbreak and the refusal to share information on the origins of Covid 19.

This was not the first such crackdown over China’s zero tolerance policies, which has include forced confinements and arrests.

Schwab is not alone. The Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz have swatted back critics of the Chinese crackdown and defended the regime as “choosing not to kill off millions of vulnerable people (as the US is doing).”

The Schwab statement is reminiscent of the article by Harvard Law School professor Jack Goldsmith and University of Arizona law professor Andrew Keane Woods declaring that “China was right” on the need for censorship of the Internet. They declared that “in the great debate of the past two decades about freedom versus control of the network, China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong.” (Recently, Professor Goldsmith insisted that I misrepresented the article and that he does not support censorship in any form, a position that I continue to question).

Schwab’s praise before the recent crackdown fulfills the stereotype of those who criticize globalist relativism in praising China for its economic power while ignoring human rights and environmental problems. Likewise, the zero tolerance policy is praised for its firm response to the pandemic without considering the cost in civil liberties.

For the students, reporters, and protesters being beaten in the streets of cities like Shanghai, the “attraction” clearly remains in the eye of the beholder.

 

76 thoughts on ““A Very Attractive Model”: China Cracks Down on Reporters and Protesters Days After Praise from the WEF Founder”

  1. I actually like this story.

    I hope the Chinese beat the living crap out of a few more BBC reporters and season the beatings with some folks from the NYT, WaPo, CNN, MSNBC, LA Times and a few others.

    Maybe that is what it will take for the Western ‘elites’ to realize that the Chinese system of government is evil. Slave labor and concentration camps haven’t gotten the message across. Beating the hell out of the ‘messengers’ and the self-appointed ‘gate keepers’ just might do it.

    We are awfully slow to wake up in the West. I think our governments are run by the same type of people Musk wisely fired from Twitter. That would explain a lot of the insanity. Can Musk buy the US Government? He might save us. Sorry, already sold to FTX and the rest.

  2. Zero covid policies are not just a threat to free speech. They cause the very public health crisis for which policy makers claim to be trying to prevent in the first place.

  3. November 25, 2022 World Economic Forum (WEF) Announces Creation of Orwellian ‘Global Coalition for Digital Safety’
    WEF partners with Big Tech and governments to police Internet, encourage ‘coordinated action’ against unauthorized voices deemed ‘harmful’ to collective psyche.

    https://leohohmann.com/2021/07/01/world-economic-forum-announces-creation-of-orwellian-global-coalition-for-digital-safety/

    The Vaccines, The Plunder, and the Arrival of the Great Reset!

    https://www.globalresearch.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/wef-reset.jpg

  4. Regardless of credentials, the only thing progressive about progressives is their stupidity.

    3. Progress is an unqualified, monotonic process. Unqualified in the sense that its characterization varies on a whim. Progressivism is a religious (i.e. behavioral protocol) philosophy based on this ambiguous conception: one step forward, two steps backward. Case-in-point: political congruence (“=”), Diversity [dogma] (i.e. color judgment, class-based bigotry), redistributive change, the wicked solution, and the Pro-Choice [ethical] religion.

  5. It’s difficult to be objective about the system you are living in — to make an objective comparison, you really have to step back. Just defining each system in terms of its starting point puts you in an endless recursion…they both reflect evolutions going back thousands of years. Is the Chinese system more 1) Confucian, 2) Communist, or
    3) capitalistic? It’s a blend of all 3. Is the US system more 1) Capitalistic, 2) Socialistic, or 3) Socratic-rationalist-pragmatic, 4) Christian?

    The comparison is only relevant to the extent there is voluntary uptake of each other’s plusses. Which way has cultural diffusion been flowing, east or west? What aspects of each are mutually viewed as desirable for the future? And, how will coping with a complex and daunting future test each system?

    Future challenges: Producing enough families and babies, educating youth to manage high-tech society, assuring bio-safe food and water supplies as the ecosphere becomes ever more polluted, avoiding catastrophic war, keeping its population healthy/living with fast-evolving pathogens, maintaining complex infrastructures, maintaining domestic tranquility and legal rights….these are just some.

    Which system offers better evolutionary mechanisms and adaptive speed? Which is more resilient in the face of crisis? Politically, which is better at deterring evasions of responsibility and sophisticated escapism? Which is better at planning realistically for the future? Which expends its time and energies wisely?

    1. Slavery & servitude is NEVER better than freedon & the OPPORTUNITY to work diligently enough to become wealthy! I’m relatively sure that the Chinese citizens, the Ughers, & the people who are having their organs harvested by the government for profit would choose freedom over communism. Never heard of anybody “escaping” freedom & capitalism for slavery & communism, but Joe Dementia has opened our borders for every lowlife in the world to come to our country, apparently not yours!!!

      1. You have a point there.
        From Hong Kong to China (dont forget that little incident called Tiananmen Square), thousands if not millions demanding freedom from their political oppressors.
        And some elites and not so elites want to bring that to America.
        Some bow down to them in the name of money. Those who speak out against oppression, a few sports figures come to mind, get punished.
        Note the current WH admin’s response to the protests in China . . .

    2. “. . . puts you in an endless recursion ”

      You sure do like to “muddy your waters, to make them appear deep.”

      It would have been a lot simpler, briefer, and more honest, if you had just written: “I support China’s dictatorship.”

  6. “China has expanded its crackdown on protesters over the government’s authoritarian measures to control Covid, including arresting and beating a BBC reporter.”

    Jonathan, are you sure this isn’t the part the WEF was endorsing?

  7. Klaus Schwab is a Bond villain come to life. Justin Trudeau is his Mini-Me.

  8. “This was not the first such crackdown over China’s zero tolerance policies, which has include forced confinements and arrests.”
    *****************************************
    China, like every other tyrannical system just sucks out loud – philosophically and practically. Everything they do other than delivering the mail (and maybe that, too) goes to forcing someone to bend to their will. I don’t need a scorecard to know that just like I don’t need a scorecard from the New Age Woke Dims to know what they are about. They’re bad; they’re consistently bad; and they need to fall — hard.

    As an ironic note, it’s pure justice if the Wuhan virus that the CCP unleased (wittingly or not) on all of us does them in. As I like to say: I love the part in the movie when the monster turns on its creator. Here’s the scene:

    “Hateful day when I received life!’ I exclaimed in agony. ‘Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust? God, in pity, made man beautiful and alluring, after his own image; but my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid even from the very resemlance. Satan had his companions, fellow-devils, to admire and encourage him; but I am solitary and abhorred.’ – Frankenstein”
    ~ Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

    Now that’s nice writing and a nice description of our tyrannical feinds … er … friends!!

  9. Seriously: if anyone thinks the WEF, WHO, the CDC, are anything but propaganda arms at this point check yourself. Do more research. The days of being content within American autonomy are over, at least for the present. You need to pay attention to the entire world if you want to make sense of what is happening in your country. I personally don’t think it’s too late, but a whole lot more of us are going to have to wake up.

  10. The collusion of Green with Red under Blue mandates leaves people feeling blue in an authoritarian State.

  11. Meanwhile, actor George Takei, aka Sulu attacks actor William Shatner, aka Capt. James T. Kirk as a “cantankerous old man”.

    George “Sulu” beamed downed to an ally way in Juarez, Mexico punking for pesos and engineering officer Scotty won’t beam Sulu back.

  12. CHINA CONTROLLED COVID

    Immediately prior to the 2020 election, and out of total desperation, after the realization of Real President Donald J. Trump’s inexorable landslide victory, or coronation, the global, Deep Deep State communists (liberals, progressives, socialists, democrats, RINOs, AINOs), released “China Flu, 2020” from the Wuhan Institute of Virology to destroy Trump’s prospects (It’s understandable why, out of utter confusion, Apparatchik Fauci, who didn’t get the memo, said, “Don’t wear masks,” out of one side of his mouth while saying, “Wear masks,” out of the other).

    Just as they recently allied at the 27th Conference of the Parties, “COP27,” to form a united, global, communist front against phantom anthropogenic “climate change,” globalists, communists (liberal, progressives, socialists, democrats, RINOs, AINOs), China, and the Deep Deep State “Swamp” allied to steal the 2020 election from the completely effective, successful and unbeatable Real President Donald J. Trump.

    Indeed, the communists have been stealing elections since Karl Marx’s “earnest of the epoch” leading America toward the “RECONSTRUCTION of a social world,” “Crazy Abe” Lincoln, illegally and unconstitutionally left a 3-million-man-foreign-standing army-cum-voters on U.S. soil in 1863, and LBJ said in 1963, “I’ll have those ——s voting democrat for 200 years” as he opened the illegal immigration floodgates from Mexico and all four corners of the earth (Americans are now down to 76% of the population and falling). Globalist communists (liberals, progressives, socialists, democrats, RINOs, AINOs) have stolen the young minds in public schools, the culture, the treasury, the elections and the entire nation.

    Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, Adams, Franklin, Jay, Hancock, Mason et al.

    What, Me Worry?

  13. Professor Turley,

    You are misquoting the interview. The question was not about China’s handling of the virus, but about China’s path more generally to modernization. He is being interviewed by Chinese state tv, and accordingly he qualifies his remarks by stating that each country should evaluate for itself the most appropriate model. Many East Asian countries have successfully used a state centered model that liberalized after reaching economic development goals. South Korea and Taiwan are prime examples of East Asian Newly Industrialized Countries (NICs) that adopted this model. Schwab’s answer could apply as easily to China as South Korea/Taiwan, which is to say it is a political response without much substance. This response, given his figurehead role and the purpose of the interview at AIPAC were therefore perfectly appropriate.

    2. “You are misquoting the interview.”
      You can read, but you cannot think.

      The “model” Schwab praises is unlimited government, government control of everything (i.e., a dictatorship). That bloody “model” drives China’s “handling of the virus.”

      1. That is simply not true. Prior to Xi, China was liberalizing its state-owned economy. Between 1996 and 2001, 30 million workers were laid off by State-Owned Enterprises in China as it pushed further towards further opening and privatizing its economy.

        But, Xi changed the country’s direction when he rose to power in 2012. Initially he favored restructuring the state-owned enterprises to attract foreign private investment, but in 2015, when the Chinese market suffered, he switched to a state-led model.

        Schwab refers to 40 years of Chinese development. 40 is much greater than 6 (2022-2015). Therefore, he is NOT referring only to China’s last 6 years of state-led growth but painting a much broader brush in comparing it to the China of Mao and Deng Xiaoping.

        I am happy to discuss this with you further, but please respond with what you think 40 years of development means, if you have anything to suggest the above is not a fair characterization.

        2. I do not think that China’s idea of its manifest destiny has changed in 40 years.

        3. “I am happy to discuss this with you further . . .”

          I have no interest in debating the merits of dictators butchering their own people.

          I understand, though, why some have a desire to deflect from that fact.

  14. There’s this common thread with people like Schwab, Soros and Gates and I don’t believe it’s for the good of Americans?

  16. “The Chinese model is certainly a very attractive model for quite a number of countries.”

  17. Yes, there are those who think the China model is a good idea.
    They are also the ones who want to be at the center of control.

    Watch this closely.

    1. It’s creeping in here, in the good old USA. Just look at Joe Bidens DC gulag and his political prisoners, amongst other things.

      1. What bears watching is the fact so many people are pushing back against the CCP.

        Take that with the number of people here in the US that refused to get one of the COVID shots, I think that is rather telling.

        1. I think the left needs to look at what is happening in China. There is a point when people start to react and once they start, it is hard to stop. I am not saying Americans will revolt at this point, but they might become more aggressive everywhere.

  18. Their greed for power will not be stopped by such petty things as individual freedom. And that’s why Americans will keep their guns. The founders were very wise indeed.

    1. That’s only if Americans can hold some semblance of a check on the goals of thw prog/left. Once we lose that ability, the Bill of Rights will be meaningless.

  19. When we have reached the stage of human development that a cynical megalomaniac like schwab can influence our condition, we have lost the race – the human race – and we are now just brain-dead automatons.

  20. Lefties like the authoritarian model, because they think that they will be the ones censoring and punishing.

    That is what Robespierre thought too, until he was sitting in the tumbril, crying.

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