Hayward: China Says Evangelicals Have ‘Kidnapped’ the Trump Administration

In the course of its days-long sputtering tirade against U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for daring to criticize the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Chinese state media on Tuesday blasted Pompeo’s Christianity and claimed the entire Trump administration has been “kidnapped” by Evangelicals.

The CCP is deeply antithetical to religion since its believers are more likely to question the authority of the Communist hierarchy, hold their rulers to higher moral standards, and get funny ideas about individual rights bequeathed to all human beings by a power more exalted than the state. In China, religious believers routinely suffer appalling persecution, from the CCP’s endless war against “unlicensed” Christian churches to its concentration camps for Uyghur Muslims.

From that perspective, the Chinese state-run Global Times decided that one of the biggest problems with Pompeo is that he is one of those sinister Christian fundamentalists, and his narrow little religious mind is stuffed full of arrogant white supremacist ideas:

Many evangelical Christians tend to believe that America is a land chosen by God. Jonathan Edwards, an evangelist and one of the dominant figures in the 18th century, once said that “The latter-day glory is probably to begin in America.”

Under such circumstances, it is almost impossible for US politicians like Pompeo to believe the CPC-led China. They regard China as a completely different kind, or a rival of the US. In fact, since Trump took office, US policies toward China have been kidnapped by their deep-rooted religious beliefs.

What’s more, Pompeo and his like firmly believe that the Western civilization dominates global civilization. This being the case, the rise of China, a so-called different civilization, has been regarded as a challenge to Western civilization. As US political scientist and academic Samuel P. Huntington posited in his book Clash of Civilizations, “the rise of China is the potential source of a big intercivilizational war of core states.”

The CCP likes to drag Huntington, who died in 2008 and can no longer defend his “clash of civilizations” thesis, out of his tomb for a thumping every now and then because he supposedly provided a veneer of intellectual cover to the Trump Administration’s brutish xenophobic hatred of noble China. 

Since Communist propagandists are too lazy to actually read Huntington’s book, and mostly base their propaganda on American media criticism of people in President Donald Trump’s orbit who quote it, they are amusingly unaware that Huntington’s ideas are actually quite close to the CCP’s standard excuses for why Western standards of political freedom and human rights should not apply to China. The Chinese government is the world’s loudest exponent of the idea that Western ideas of liberty and dignity are not applicable to Chinese culture.

The Global Times wound up with the latest recitation of the CCP’s prime talking point that Westerns only criticize China for the coronavirus because they are embarrassed by how the CCP supposedly handled the pandemic much better than they did. 

Then it was over to China Daily to repeat the same tedious list of talking points:

Unfortunately, the country’s top diplomat has not been using his growing media presence to promote the much-needed cooperation to contain the virus in the US and beyond. Instead he has taken every opportunity to bad-mouth China and the World Health Organization.

There is no lack of China-bashers on the other side of the Pacific, but Pompeo seems intent on being their cheerleader.

Scientists from different countries say the virus is from the wild, but Pompeo insists it originated from a pathology laboratory in Wuhan. Without any evidence to back this up, he needs a fabrication to help the notion gain some traction – hence, an incentive, the insistence China is obliged to compensate for the damage caused by the pandemic.

And in a bid to show the US is also willing to give, and not just trying to take as is its wont, Pompeo has reiterated the pledge of his boss that the US will provide $100 million to help China and other countries affected by the pandemic. Yet so far there has been nothing coming China’s way. Instead, it is China that has been extending what support it can to the US, being the main provider of surgical masks, ventilators and other essential medical and life necessities to the US, which — “oops” — Pompeo somehow forgets to mention.

With no sign the administration is getting the pandemic under control at home, to make China a scapegoat is the only straw it can clutch at to try and hide its ineptness, and so deflect the storm of public censure.

The big takeaway from these fulminating editorials is that the CCP is getting very nervous about the growing worldwide push for a more thorough investigation of the origins of the coronavirus.

As Secretary of State Pompeo said on Wednesday, dozens of intelligence operations across the Western world are trying to peer through the veil of secrets and lies the CCP has constructed around Wuhan, not only to definitively establish the scope of Chinese negligence in unleashing the pandemic, but because studying the origins of the virus is crucial to controlling it and preventing the next pandemic.

“We’re all trying to figure out the right answer. We’re all trying to get to clarity. There are different levels of certainty assessed at different places. That’s highly appropriate,” Pompeo said, when asked about variances between intelligence estimates. The truly inappropriate thing is that China’s mendacity makes it necessary for all those analysts to guess at what happened in Wuhan.