Xi's xenophobia is killing people-to-people exchanges, Plus EU slaps Chinese EVs with tariffs up to 38.1% -- China Boss News 6.14.24

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What happened

The day US-China relations went further south should have been perfect for exploring Beishan Park, a lovely setting with a famous temple and scenic urban gardens in China's northeastern Jilin province.

The skies were mostly clear, and the weather was warm but not hot or muggy, which made it great for climbing the park's mountainous terrain and taking in the surroundings.

That's where David Zabner and three of his faculty colleagues from Cornell College in Iowa were leaving when he heard a startling scream, Zabner told Iowa Public Radio.

"I turned around to find a man brandishing a knife at me. I didn't immediately realize what was happening. I thought my coworkers had been pushed, and he, for some reason was trying to push me. And then I looked down at my shoulder and realized, I'm bleeding. I've been stabbed," Zabner recounted.

Video taken from Chinese social media showed several people, obviously foreign, speaking North American-accented English, as they lay covered in blood on the ground. One reached for his phone to call for help.

Why it matters

Castles in the sky

Police and paramedics arrived at the scene within 20 minutes.

Fortunately, none of the injuries were life-threatening. But, as news and video of the incident broke across global media headlines, Beijing remained silent.

An official response would take more than 24 hours—which doesn't sound like a lot - but it feels like a lifetime in the increasingly tense US-China relationship that many fear is on the brink of a military collision.

In a cursory, cool statement, which described the stabbings as "an isolated incident" akin to "a one-off," as Nikkei Asia staff described it, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian "told reporters that 'further investigation is still underway.'"

Then, he gripped the steering wheel of Beijing's narrative and propagandized it.

"China is widely considered one of the safest countries in the world. There are effective measures to protect the safety of all foreign nationals in China. This isolated incident will not affect the normal people-to-people exchanges between China and the U.S.," Lin said.

None of it was true, even though the ordinarily astute China analysts at CNN who relied on a "study" cited by the nationalist, tabloid Global Times, an infamous propagator of "questionable" news, agreed with the first assertion. Seriously?

Chinese propaganda does "widely" consider China "one of the safest countries in the world." But we could also point to regular poisonings and extraordinarily high incidences of domestic abuse, human trafficking of adults and children, rapes, predatory businesses that inflict massive suffering on the local population, rampant organized crime, and, yes, knife attacks - which have become more common through the years- though are very seldomly targeted at Westerners.

But ask other foreigners, like Japanese, African and Southeast Asian folks, how "safe" they feel in China.

I'd also point to China's poor record-keeping and heavy censorship of crime statistics. This is a universal public transparency issue, but nowhere is as opaque with a political leadership who so zealously veils uglier facts - save North Korea, perhaps - as China.

As for the claim that this particular attack is random - police said they arrested a man in his 50s who "was unemployed and down on his luck" - the xenophobic and anti-American forces that likely triggered it are a calculated feature of Xi Jinping's rhetoric and policies.

Holding the knife

In a strange twist of fate, the Beishan Park knife attack comes as China is openly seeking to increase its educational exchanges with the US.

"During a visit to the US in November, Chinese leader Xi Jinping announced the country would invite 50,000 young Americans to China on exchange and study programs in the next five years to foster personal ties between the two countries," CNN reported.

But the stabbings will come to signify how 'normal people-to-people exchanges' between ordinary Chinese and Americans, in academic and other areas, are increasingly impossible under Xi's dictatorship.

Politico China Watcher Phelim Kine and Stuart Lau discussed the "barriers" to Americans traveling to China in February. Chief among them is the US Department of State's updated travel advisory for the Mainland, Macau, and Hong Kong, which was issued to warn US citizens of the "arbitrary enforcement of local laws, including in relation to exit bans, and the risk of wrongful detentions."

But a series of new national security laws, including greatly expanded and vaguely defined rules on espionage, data protection, and the keeping of state secrets, makes compliance for law-abiding foreigners inconceivable.

Even so, the principal reason that ordinary business and cultural exchanges between Chinese and Americans will continue to dwindle - and quite possibly the wellspring of motive for the attacks on the Cornell College instructors - is Xi's aggressive campaign to scapegoat the country's ills on foreign adversaries, particularly the United States.

China has invariably witnessed more than a few xenophobic periods throughout its long history, but, in late March 2020, say Australian and UK scholars Lai-Ha Chan and Pak K. Lee, Beijing used its powerful hold on the media to turn up the volume on "a discourse of danger for the COVID pandemic, with the dominant discursive narratives full of xenophobic and nationalist language."

In their study, The Rise of Xenophobia and Nationalism in China Since the COVID Pandemic: Insights from Discourse Analysis, Chan and Lee explain how "[t]he discourse framed 'foreigners' as 'threats' to Chinese people's health, advocated that China should rely on home-made vaccines and medicines and, more importantly, argued that the Chinese Communist rule demonstrates 'institutional superiority' over Western governance."

Beijing liked the results it achieved so much that it kept pumping the discourse after zero-Covid ended.

In late 2022, for example, Beijing's top diplomats and Xi took "direct aim at Washington and its allies" for "cheating in global competition," Foreign Policy's chief China editor James Palmer then reported.

"Washington has become a convenient scapegoat for anything that doesn't go Beijing's way. Economy faltering? Xi claimed in his speech that Western countries, led by the United States, 'implemented all-round containment, encirclement, and suppression against us.' Pushback in the South China Sea? Washington has stirred up trouble. Is the public revolting against the elite? The United States must be behind so-called color revolutions," he wrote.

In March 2023, New Statesman's Katie Stallard noted that China's leader made an "uncharacteristically direct attack" on the US during the country's annual parliamentary session.

As Chinese state media dutifully broadcasted his words to a public anxious over the worsening economy, Xi told an audience of over 3,000 delegates inside the Great Hall of the People that "Western countries – led by the US – have implemented all-round containment, encirclement and suppression against us, bringing unprecedentedly severe challenges to our country's development."

He might have said, I'll hold the knife while you press.

It was only a matter of time before someone took him up on the offer.

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