Chinese state media jumped on the weekend’s mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, with gusto, touting it as evidence that America is the “source of white terrorism,” a world-threatening problem the U.S. government is supposedly covering up by “focusing instead on marshaling allies” against friendly nations like Russia and China.
On Sunday, China’s state-run Global Times crowed that America’s alleged disintegration into a white supremacist bloodbath demonstrates the superiority of Chinese Communist authoritarianism at maintaining social order:
From the 2017 Las Vegas shooting in which a 64-year-old white man from Mesquite, Nevada opened fire on the crowd attending the Route 91 Harvest music festival on the Las Vegas Strip in Nevada to the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings in which the gunman killed eight people, six of whom were Asian woman, white terrorism has been prevailing on the US soil. The US had been engaged in overseas anti-terrorism for 20 years, but now the country has become the source of white terrorism. The loss of American life in places which witnessed gun violence by the white is symptomatic of the effects of white nationalist terrorism. Gun violence-featured white terrorism has always been accompanied by deeply embedded racial woes, which highlight the complexities of the issue.
Xu Liang, an associate professor at the School of International Relations at Beijing International Studies University, told the Global Times that the demonstrations held by people of color against white people reflect their dissatisfaction with the income gap and the unfair social and economic status, while gun violence of whites against other races is a negative response to it. The two sentiments have become entangled and formed a vicious circle.
Nonetheless, no matter gun control or racial issues, the US government has adopted a lukewarm attitude instead of striving to address either of them. For the US government, the thing that prompts a gunman to pull the trigger is racial hate, rather than the gun itself. A government that wants the benefits from both arms dealers and voters’ ballots will only end up talking big while acting little.
The editorial went on to hector the United States for its commitment to the Second Amendment and gun rights — which, of course, are anathema to genocidal dictatorships like China that prefer their citizens to be disarmed and servile. In China, racial minorities are easily herded into concentration camps for re-education or disposal.
Another Sunday editorial at the Global Times quoted Communist “observers” who said that, instead of addressing “deep-rooted problems” like “neo-Nazi and white supremacist terrorism,” the U.S. government is scapegoating China and Russia to “score political points.”
“But eventually, the U.S. failure to put the brakes on its most prominent domestic problems will take the country off the moral high ground when it comes to criticizing other countries in the name of ‘human rights’ issues, and that conniving with the rising white supremacist terrorism will eventually backfire against the country,” the Global Times whined, getting to the heart of China’s opportunistic use of crime stories to argue the West is hypocritical when it lectures the Xi regime about human rights.
“The U.S. attacks other countries saying the human rights issue is a political one, caused by a ‘problematic’ political system that cannot ensure procedural justice. When it comes to the Americans’ own human rights issues, especially those of African Americans and Asians, they attribute it to a social problem, and that’s the American discourse,” said a Chinese “expert” quoted by the Global Times.
The second editorial claimed America has been captured by white supremacists and has become a racist menace to world peace:
The rise of white supremacy, widening racial divides and growing inequality are deep-rooted problems that have long poisoned US society, said experts. Similarly to the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to high inflation, rising prices and surging deaths, those problems are becoming more and more prominent, and has fueled other crises such as racial tensions and gun violence.
Under the Trump administration, which brought white supremacy to an unprecedented height, racism in the US, which had been walled up out of “political correctness,” expanded greatly. “The fact is that racial hatred within the US, including hatred against Asians after the pandemic, has been constantly on the rise. It’s hard to say whether Biden has done a better job than his predecessor,” Xin Qiang, deputy director of the Center for American Studies at Fudan University, told the Global Times on Sunday.
The Global Times threw in a little bonus for China’s fellow homicidal dictatorship, Russia, by citing the Buffalo shooter’s use of a symbol favored by Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov Battalion. This supposedly justifies Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s savage attack on Ukraine to “de-Nazify” it, at a cost of countless Ukrainian lives.
“However, as the U.S. firmly supports Ukraine during the Russia-Ukraine crisis, no mainstream U.S. media has singled out the link,” the Chinese Communist paper sniffed.