Chinese dictator Xi Jinping met with various world leaders at the G20 summit in Bali, Indonesia, on Tuesday, prominently including Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of Australia and President Yoon Suk-yeol of South Korea.
Xi gave a speech to the G20 as a group in which he called for global unity and railed against the divisive and obsolete “Cold War” mentality. This could be translated as Xi telling the world to stop complaining about China’s technology theft, authoritarian politics, human rights abuses, forced labor practices, and the lamentable safety protocols at its virus laboratories.
Above all, Xi wanted the G20 to stop using economic sanctions as a means of enforcing Western human rights concepts on Xi’s tyrannical regime.
“We must firmly oppose the attempt to politicize food and energy issues or use them as tools and weapons, remove unilateral sanctions, and cancel restrictions on related science and technology cooperation,” Xi said.
“Facing various risks and challenges, we should pull together in times of trouble. Drawing ideological lines and promoting group politics and bloc confrontation will only divide the world and undermine global development and human advancement,” he said.
China does not seem to have much trouble with the concept of sanctions when it comes to using Chinese economic “sharp power” to force foreign governments and private corporations to bend to Beijing’s will.
One of the major targets for Chinese economic warfare over the past few years has been Australia, which enraged the tyrants of Beijing by insisting on a full investigation of the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak, and showing that “decoupling” from China to reduce its economic leverage is possible.
“Barley. Beef. Coal. Copper. Cotton. Gas. Lobster. Sugar. Timber. Wheat. Wine. Wool. All were suddenly subject to various tariff, dumping, hygiene and quality challenges. In essence, China stopped buying them,” Australia’s News.com recalled last year.
Xi met with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in Bali on Tuesday, his first meeting with an Australian head of state since he held formal discussions with Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull in 2016.
Albanese told reporters the meeting was cordial but not exactly warm and said there was little movement on the key disputes between the two countries, although he praised China for speaking up against Russia’s threat to use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine.
“I put forward the differences that we have on human rights issues, including Xinjiang. I put forward specifically, as well, the cases of Cheng Lei and Dr. Yang,” Albanese said.
Xinjiang, referred to by its inhabitants as East Turkistan, is the home of the Uyghur Muslims, a group China has ruthlessly oppressed with concentration camps, forced labor, all-encompassing surveillance, and reprogramming.
Cheng Lei is a Chinese-born Australian journalist, formerly an anchor for China’s state-run CGTN broadcast network, and a mother of two. She was abducted by Chinese police on vague charges in August 2020, her presence was ominously scrubbed from CGTN websites, and held without charges in deplorable conditions until February 2021.
In March 2021, Cheng was tried in secret for “illegally supplying state secrets overseas,” but the results of her trial have been kept secret. Her partner Nick Coyle, former head of the China-Australia Chamber of Commerce, has said she is allowed only minimal contact with the Australian consulate or her lawyer, and none at all with her family, aside from occasional written letters. Coyle also said recently her health is declining in captivity.
The doctor Albanese mentioned is Dr. Yang Hangjun, an Australian-Chinese writer arrested at an airport in 2019. As with Cheng, the Chinese government refuses to detail the charges against him. Some observers think Cheng was arrested because she filed reports critical of how the Chinese Communist Party handled the coronavirus pandemic, but there are few clues as to why Yang was detained.
China refused to allow Australian diplomats in the courtroom for Yang’s closed-door espionage trial in May 2021, an exclusion the Australian ambassador to China denounced as “deeply regrettable, concerning, and unsatisfactory.”
Australian officials accused China of placing Yang in “arbitrary detention.” Yang says he was tortured, and efforts were made to extract a false confession from him.
Xi did not discuss Cheng Lei or Yang Hangjun when meeting with Albanese at the G20, instead tersely lecturing Albanese about his past criticism of China.
“You have made a number of remarks on China-Australia relations on a number of occasions, and have repeatedly said that you will deal with China-Australia relations in a mature manner,” Xi said.
Albanese quipped afterward that his brief meeting with Xi, which lasted only 32 minutes, “ran overtime.”
Xi also held a summit with South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol on the sidelines of the G20 on Tuesday. Yoon’s biggest concern was reportedly securing more Chinese assistance to rein in North Korea’s nuclear weapons tests and menacing missile launches.
“China, North Korea’s biggest source of aid and its economic lifeline, is believed to have the greatest leverage over North Korea. But it is suspected of not fully enforcing U.N. sanctions on North Korea and of shipping clandestine assistance to help keep afloat its impoverished socialist ally, which it views as a bulwark against U.S. influence on the Korean Peninsula,” the Associated Press observed on Tuesday.
Yoon’s office released a statement on Tuesday that said Yoon believed China should adjust its stance on North Korea because Pyongyang has “recently escalated nuclear and missile threats by launching provocations with an unprecedented frequency.”
The South Korean presidential office did not say whether Yoon pressed this case on Xi with any urgency.
“I hope China will play a more active, constructive role as a member of the U.N. Security Council and a neighbor,” Yoon said, according to the statement from his administration.
Xi’s office merely said that he touted China’s “common interests” with South Korea, expressed his willingness to improve bilateral trade relations, and urged Yoon to “actively seek better relations with South Korea.”
China’s state-run Global Times did not mention North Korea at all in its account of the meeting between Xi and Yoon, instead focusing on how Seoul could profit from improving its relationship with Beijing – if only it can escape “pressure from the U.S. to form a technology alliance to contain China’s rise in the tech sphere.”
“If South Korea itself sets limits on the scope of cooperation with China and joins the small circles of some countries, it would be bad for its economic development and foreign trade,” Chinese Academy of International Trade and Economic Cooperation analyst Bai Ming sniffed to the Global Times.
According to Reuters, Xi’s meeting with Yoon lasted only 25 minutes – even shorter than the meeting Australian Prime Minister Albanese mocked for its chilly brevity.