The ongoing U.S. protests demanding racial equality are “ramped-up culture wars” leading to “dangerous extremes,” according to an editorial in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) propaganda newspaper Global Times published on Friday.
The article’s author, identified as “a New York-based journalist,” claimed that Chinese observers of the ongoing protest movement in the U.S., which started in response to the police killing of Minnesota resident George Floyd last month, have watched on in disbelief at how the protests have evolved from calling out racial inequality into something altogether “radical”:
Events – including a series of firings and forced apologies in the news media and academia – have startled many Chinese in the U.S. who thought that freedom of speech is being infringed upon.
In China, the notion of “freedom of speech” is nonexistent under the repressive CCP regime. Last month, a Chinese constitutional scholar and human rights lawyer was abducted from his home in the middle of the night and detained by CCP security forces for days after he wrote an open letter demanding free speech in China.
The Global Times editorial then claimed that the ongoing protests have evolved into an overly “zealous” movement that has effectively stripped Americans of their right to remain silent on political issues.
“[The black community and the left] are also too ready to shoot the ‘racism’ bullet at anyone who dares to say anything they don’t like, or dares to reveal their doubts, hesitations, or confusions about the movement,” the article argues.
As an example, the author offers the account of a “Chinese-American high school student” who “recently suffered a verbal pummeling simply because she didn’t say anything [about the recent U.S. protests], according to a [Chinese messaging app] WeChat post written by her mother that went viral.” The author continues:
Based on the mother’s account, her daughter, who was the president of the Asian students association at the school, had been working hard to build bridges between different ethnic groups. But during the recent protests, because she didn’t sign on the petitions students initiated in social media to support the Black Lives Matter movement, she was singled out and cyber bullied.
According to the author, the girl’s mother wrote an article in response to her daughter’s bullying titled “Do We Have the Right to Keep Silent,” which reads, in part, “In a society built on principles of equality, democracy, and law and order, if keeping silent is considered a crime, I doubt how many different voices it can accommodate.”
Responding to the mother’s quote, the Global Times author writes, “This could be the Achilles’ heel of this movement. When the real racists are well shielded by their indifference to the cries of protesters, those who are sympathetic are bleeding from the wounds left by the steamroller of anti-racism.”