The Chinese Communist Party’s ghoulish determination to squeeze political points out of the Uvalde, Texas, mass shooting continued on Monday and Tuesday with back-to-back editorials claiming the confused police response demonstrated the “systemic failure” of American democracy — and, in an odd ideological bank shot, systemic racism.
China’s state-run Global Times was utterly delighted with the devastating investigative committee report released Sunday that found almost 400 law enforcement officers converged on Robb Elementary School during the May 24 shooting, but due to “systemic failures” and “egregiously poor decision-making,” it was nearly an hour before anyone intervened against the killer.
The Global Times touted the report as evidence the entire American system is coming down, in part because Americans have the right to keep and bear arms — an attribute that makes it very difficult to march them into concentration camps, as China does to racial minorities.
“The so-called systemic failures are, in fact, the consequences of Washington’s systemic problems, including the inability to institute gun control and end institutional racism,” the Global Times pontificated. There was no apparent racial motive to the Uvalde shooting or the police response.
“The U.S. is a country that suffers significantly from gun proliferation,” the editorial continued. “A 2018 report shows that U.S. civilians own almost 400 million guns, more than the whole U.S. population of that year. Against such a backdrop, U.S. police officers have to worry about possible gun violence from others, especially what they see as suspects. Therefore, they are highly likely to use guns when they feel such threats.”
The Global Times also accused American cops of being “highly likely to use guns” when they feel like shooting black people for no good reason:
In contrast to the poor U.S. law enforcement shown in the Uvalde mass shooting, the country’s law enforcement officers have excessive use of force against racial and ethnic minorities, especially African Americans. For example, Jayland Walker, a 25-year-old black man, was killed last month at the hands of police in Ohio, with a preliminary autopsy report finding at least 46 gunshot wounds and 26 bullets in his body.
From George Floyd to Jayland Walker, all these cases highlight the systemic racism entrenched in U.S. law enforcement. A U.S. report released in May revealed that African Americans as a community are at least four times more likely to be killed by gunshots than the total U.S. population and 12 times more likely than white people.
“In the face of out-of-control gun violence and unsolvable, deep-seated problems in U.S. governance, it is doubtful that the U.S. law enforcement officers can still protect people in the country,” the Chinese Communist paper concluded.
The Global Times decided to hammer the same points in a similar editorial on Tuesday, which argued American police lack the discipline, civic spirit, and backing of a strong central government that supposedly make Chinese police into more effective agents of a superior system:
Wei Nanzhi, a research fellow at the American Institute from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, told the Global Times on Monday that behind the police inaction in Uvalde, and in some occasions excessive law enforcement, is the same logic that leads law enforcers to put self-protection on top of everything.
The self-protection is both in personal safety sense — choosing not to confront a mass shooter holding unclear arms; and in legal sense — blaming ineffective leadership and coordination in mission to shun personal duties in a mission, Wei elaborated.
Zhang Tengjun, deputy director of the Department for Asia-Pacific Studies at the China Institute of International Studies, noted US police are also deterred by the rampant gun violence, and the professional training and upgrading equipment did not ensure a reliable and capable police force.
After dragging out — and massively oversimplifying — the case of Jayland Walker to score the same political points again, the second Global Times editorial tried claiming that Sunday’s example in Indiana of lawfully armed good-guy-with-a-gun Elisjsha Dicken stopping a mass shooter was also proof that American democracy is inferior to Chinese fascism.
The Chinese editorialists drifted away from this point before they finished making it, but the implication was that Dicken’s heroic actions made the police look ineffectual again and that America’s “social inequality” means the police only bother to protect people with “wealth and capital.”
That seems like a difficult argument to make over a shootout that began in the food court of a shopping mall, which might be why the communist propagandists quickly lost interest in it. Instead, they went back to systemic institutional failure and racism, with a bit of analysis that reads like a Mad Lib filled out from CNN’s home page:
Systemic failures in law enforcement were prominent in the Uvalde case, but Zhang described it as “tip of the iceberg” if compared to U.S.’ overall systemic failure, including the legislation dragged by partisan politics, the judiciary plagued by conservatism and administration whose policies are usually inconsistent and unsustainable.
The essence of U.S.’ rampant gun violence is deep economic, political, social and racial problems broke out in an intense manner, but the U.S. system is not mediating or addressing the problems, Zhang said, citing the frequent Black Lives Matter protests and the recent Supreme Court ruling over abortion right as two typical examples.
The Global Times wrapped up by citing Chinese “experts” who accused America’s “ruling elites” of urging the public to vent its “anger from inflation, economic slowdown, and social divisions” with violence against one another, to distract from noticing “the deep failure of the U.S. system.”
The Chinese system, on the other hand, efficiently arrests doctors for the crime of trying to warn the world about deadly pandemics before the Communist Party is prepared to admit they exist.
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