Now where is all this going? The Chinese Government continues to clamp down on and put significant limits on the Freedom of its citizens.
An Emboldened China No Longer Cares What Its Critics Think
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/14/world/china-detentions-canadians-human-rights.html?module=inlineBEIJING — Two Canadians detained in an apparent act of prosecutorial retaliation. A prominent pastor, an internationally renowned Chinese photographer and China’s top international police officer all held by the authorities. Hundreds of thousands of Muslims in the western region of Xinjiang locked up in camps for mass indoctrination.
These and the detentions of many others — including billionaires, lawyers, even the American children of a Chinese fugitive — suggest that the ruling Communist Party no longer cares much about the risk to its international stature posed by harsh actions against its opponents.
Already there are signs that this hard-line approach might be costing China support overseas, alienating even the moderate voices in the United States and elsewhere who have for decades argued that engaging the Chinese leadership is vastly preferable to confronting it.
“It undermines the work of those who have tried to be neutral,” said Kerry Brown, a professor at King’s College, London, and author of a 2016 biography of China’s leader, “C.E.O., China: The Rise of Xi Jinping.”
“All sorts of people — academics, business people and others — will be wary now: ‘This can happen to anyone.’ It creates a corrosive sense of doubt.”
China’s ruling Communist Party has never shown much forbearance for those it views as critics and it has long bristled at international criticism of its actions — its treatment of Tibet, say, or the bloody crackdown on protesters on Tiananmen Square in 1989. Even so, there was a time when internal qualms about international blowback restrained its behavior, or at least factored into the public defense of its actions.
That political calculus has now clearly shifted.
In all of the cases cited above, China has dismissed widespread international opprobrium. And it has fought back. In the state media, in diplomatic channels and in international organizations like the United Nations Human Rights Council, the Chinese have accused critics of interfering in its internal affairs or wielding double standards to check a rising economic, diplomatic and military power.
Observers say the timing of the investigation into the two Canadians this week suggested it was retaliation for the arrest in Canada of Meng Wanzhou, a senior executive of Huawei, the Chinese tech company that American prosecutors have accused of committing bank fraud.
