Chinese Media: White Supremacy Having ‘Resurgence’ in U.S.

The People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the ruling Chinese Communist Party, declared America in the throes of a racism crisis on Tuesday, asserting, “in recent years, white supremacy in the U.S. has shown a resurgence trend [sic].”

China has one of the world’s most abhorrent records on the treatment of minorities within its border. Beijing is believed to be running over 1,000 concentration camps designed to eradicate people of Uyghur, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and other majority-Muslim ethnicities. Both within and outside of the concentration camps, Uyghur women have testified to being forced to undergo abortions and sterilization or having their children killed if already born — suggesting a systematic genocide campaign.

Foreigners who are not of Han Chinese ethnicity have also reported extreme racist abuses under the Communist Party. Among the most notorious examples of this were reports surfacing this spring of discrimination against Africans, mostly of Nigerian background, residing in Guangzhou. Restaurants in the city posted signs banning black-skinned people from entering; landlords evicted African tenants without warning or explanation. Africans in the city complained of not being allowed out of their homes or being put under extreme surveillance if sleeping on the street after being evicted.

The Communist Party blamed foreigners for the spread of the Chinese coronavirus — which originated in central Wuhan, China — prompting the wave of racist discrimination. It then blamed “misunderstandings” for the widespread racism in Guangzhou.

Despite China’s record on race issues, its propaganda arms regularly accuse the United States of alleged poor treatment of racial and ethnic minorities, often citing American leftists making similar complaints. The article published in the People’s Daily on Tuesday opened citing Derrick Bell, an American professor specializing in critical race theory.

“Facts have repeatedly proved the argument made by Derek [sic] Bell, an American critical race theorist, that racism is a permanent part of the American landscape,” the People’s Daily reported. “In recent years, white supremacy in the U.S. has shown a resurgence trend. Since the beginning of this year, about 500 incidents of white supremacists attacking anti-racism protesters have taken place in the country.”

The propaganda outlet did not clearly cite any source for the alleged 500 incidents.

Bell, who became the subject of much media coverage in 2012 after footage surfaced of President Barack Obama giving him a hug while a student at Harvard Law School, has repeatedly written of racism against black people in America as insurmountable, an argument now common in Chinese state propaganda outlets.

“Black people will never gain full equality in this country,” Bell wrote in his 1992 book Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism. “Even those herculean efforts we hail as successful will produce no more than temporary ‘peaks of progress,’ short-lived victories that slide into irrelevance as racial patterns adapt in ways that maintain white dominance.”

Elsewhere in Tuesday’s article, the Communist Party media vehicle quotes “a research” [sic] from the liberal Brookings Institute think tank affirming on racism in America, “bad apples come from rotten trees,” suggesting America is irreparably rotten.

“Centuries of racist policy, both explicit and implicit, have left black Americans in the dust, physically, emotionally and economically, said an article published by Time magazine,” the People’s Daily argued. “The U.S. society is riddled with chaos and uncertainty, and its structural problems accumulated over the years cannot be resolved overnight.”

Chinese state propaganda regularly refers to democracy in America as “chaos,” contrasting it with the “harmony” of China’s totalitarian system. As China bans all political disagreements with those in power, in public, all Chinese people agree politically, resulting in alleged “harmony.” Chinese state newspapers decry freedom of expression, elections, and other cornerstones of democracy as agents of “chaos.”

Accusing America of grave race-based human rights abuses has also become a regular tactic of Chinese state media. In June, for example, the Global Times, China’s most belligerent English-language propaganda outlet, urged Beijing to pass a “George Floyd Human Rights Bill” sanctioning American officials in response to the Minnesota man’s death. The Times made the suggestion in response to sanctions on Chinese officials for running the Uyghur concentration camps.

The Chinese Communist Party has taken its campaign against alleged racism in America to the United Nations, where it will receive a seat on the Human Rights Council in January despite being the world’s largest manager of concentration camps to exterminate ethnic minorities.

In November, China used its position at the United Nations to condemn the United States and order its government to “root out systematic racism, address widespread police brutality, and combat discrimination against African- and Asian-Americans.” America faced its “universal periodic review” — a process all U.N. members go through regularly — in 2020.

In attempting to connect with black people nationwide, the Chinese communist regime has repeatedly veered into racism itself. In 2018, the Chinese government aired a stage skit during its Lunar New Year special that featured Chinese actors in blackface in an attempt to connect with African viewers, prompting global outrage. More recently, in September, the state news agency Xinhua published a political cartoon it claimed was a scathing critique of police racism in America. The cartoon depicted two police officers chasing a black man and referring to him as “blackie,” which prompted accusations of racism towards the cartoonist, not American law enforcement officers.