China: ‘The U.S. Is the Real Thanos’ When It Comes to International Coercion

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) groped for a Western popular culture metaphor to attack the United States on Monday and settled on Thanos, the purple alien warlord of Marvel Comics and the Avengers movies.

According to Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying, the United States is the “real Thanos” when it comes to international “influence, interference, and coercion.”

The context for Hua’s outburst was a speech given by Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs David Stilwell to a video conference organized by the Hoover Institution and Stanford University. Stilwell spoke about “how the Chinese Communist Party challenges the free and open nature of democratic societies.”

Stilwell said the CCP is “highly capable, ambitious, and hostile to our basic political principles: democracy, openness, and individual dignity.”

After speaking at length about the political and economic challenges posed by hostile China, Stilwell talked about how the CCP is “using its foreign engagements to influence, interfere, and coerce” — the part of his speech that caused the Chinese Foreign Ministry to Hulk out, to continue with Marvel Comics metaphors:

The awareness is disturbing and even shocking for many people, because for decades the United States and other countries forged links with China based on the optimistic, good-faith expectation that shared prosperity and trust would result from our diplomacy, trade and investment, and media, academic, and people-to-people exchanges. The sad and dangerous reality, however, is that the Chinese Communist Party has chosen to weaponize these engagements. It uses them as channels for malign purposes. 

Beijing officials claim to seek “win-win” exchanges. They claim to practice “non-interference” in other countries’ affairs. In reality, however, their conduct is systematically predatory and hegemonic. The Chinese Communist Party wants control, or at least veto power, over public discourse and political decisions the world over.  

This is what guides its foreign interference activities — what Beijing calls “United Front work,” and we can better understand as political warfare.  

In September, Republican lawmakers characterized the United Front Work Department as China’s “political warfare operation,” an umbrella group in charge of everything from inserting Chinese propaganda into Western newspapers to coordinating influence operations and recruiting programs at foreign universities.

“The CCP has taken advantage of our open society for far too long. We need to fight back,” Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) declared, his Spider-sense tingling.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced last week that the National Association for China’s Peaceful Unification (NACUP), controlled by the United Front Work Department, has been designated as a foreign mission of the People’s Republic of China. Pompeo said many other Chinese organizations are under scrutiny for “seeking to spread Beijing’s malign influence in the United States.”

China’s state-run Global Times denounced Stilwell’s speech as a “feverish smear” of China’s “normal exchange activities in other countries” and complained about the U.S. cracking down on Chinese media, China’s “Operation Fox Hunt” (a program of systematic harassment against dissident Chinese living abroad, portrayed as an “anti-corruption” initiative) and the Confucius Institute, the Chinese government-controlled cultural and linguistic program on U.S. college campuses.

Hua brought up Thanos during a stream of angry Twitter posts directed at Stilwell:

“No one is better at influence, interference and coercion than the US,” Hua wrote on Twitter. “In all the areas that Mr. Stilwell mentioned in his speech, the US is the real Thanos.” 

Thanos, is a well-known fictional supervillain who appears in US comic books published by Marvel Comics. The creator of Thanos, Jim Starlin, said in June that US President Donald Trump is “worse than Thanos,” as Trump declared himself “the president of law and order” amid violent social movements across the US. 

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“The US is really good at implementing the ‘Attack China’ strategy, but really bad at facing up to the reality and handling the COVID-19 pandemic,” Hua said, pointing to US’ failure in protecting its own people’s health. 

Thanos would seem a risky choice of comic-book character for China to hurl at the United States. He is not a democratically-elected leader, but an authoritarian tyrant-for-life, much like Chinese dictator Xi Jinping. The movie version of Thanos was obsessed with overpopulation, which would make him sympathetic to China’s old forced abortion policies. He would applaud diseases like the coronavirus as a good start toward eliminating excess life, although he would deem the mortality rate of the Wuhan virus far too low to achieve his purposes.

The original comic-book version of Thanos had a much different motivation that hews closer to the common psychological interpretation of the Greek mythology from which his name is derived. Of course, the CCP knows or cares about none of these details; it settled on Thanos as a pop-culture bludgeon against Stilwell because the creator of the comic-book villain said something that was useful to Chinese Communist propagandists.

“If the U.S. is truly democratic, why does it ignore the voice of the majority of its people and watch over 230,000 Americans die from Covid-19 without taking effective measures? If the U.S. is truly free, why did George Floyd cry ‘I can’t breathe’? Why is Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ still a dream?” Hua wrote.

Hua concluded by saying Stilwell was foolish to hope that the United States might help freedom flourish in China: “How could the U.S. daydream about changing a major country like China, which has nearly 5 times the size of its population and 20 times the length of its history?”

Another Global Times editorial on Monday hammered the U.S. and Europe for their handling of the Wuhan coronavirus, urging them to inflict more economy-killing lockdowns on their populations without delay and praising Democrat challenger Joe Biden as more lockdown-friendly:

Joe Biden and the Democrats have repeatedly criticized the current administration and echoed the assertions of scientists. But this is happening in an American political system of division. The criticism in this context has further politicized their domestic epidemic response issues, making it more like a campaign effort rather than a choice between right and wrong.

The two groups of American elites have opposite beliefs on how to deal with the epidemic. One group advocates opening the economy and opposing face covering, while the other stresses the importance of fighting the epidemic, and calls for wearing masks. Such a difference has nothing to do with the gap in their cognitive level, but is based on their party affiliation. 

Whether or not US anti-virus policy should be adjusted is not determined by the objective situation of the epidemic, or by scientists. Rather, it is a “political decision” that depends on the outcome of the election. It is not too much to describe the situation as unbelievable.

“It is hoped that after the election, no matter who wins the race, political disruption over the virus fight will come to an end in the U.S. It is also hoped that scientific thought will take center stage to battle the epidemic, and help achieve global cooperation in containing the pandemic,” the Global Times concluded.