It may be of little consolation or help to Hong Kongers – who continue to endure a living nightmare – but 2020 will be looked back upon as the year the rest of the world woke up to the grim reality of the Chinese Communist Party(CCP)’s ways.

The CCP’s disregard for human rights was already on display through much of 2019, thanks to Hong Kong’s protests and the systematic mass incarceration of Uyghurs and ethnic minorities in East Turkestan. Xi Jinping’s aggressive rhetoric on Hong Kong further turned governments and public opinion against the CCP.

Hong Kong is a city that has long lived with and fought against the omnipresent threat of CCP influence, a place people crawled over barbed wire and swam through rivers to escape persecution, and where freedom of expression and critical thought is cherished. But as the protests in Hong Kong subsided late in 2019, as brutal police suppression and arrests took their toll, it was the outbreak of a strange pneumonia in Wuhan that helped keep the party’s dysfunction part of the news cycle and soon caused anger towards China to reach unprecedented levels.

The widespread impact of Coronavirus ensured that people who had little interest in Hong Kong’s fight for freedom were now acutely aware of the CCP’s treachery. An initial cover-up not only allowed the virus to leave China and wreak havoc on the rest of the world, the CCP propagandists followed this with more baseless lies and conspiracies, while Xi reacted angrily to calls for an independent enquiry into the origins of the virus, refusing to fully cooperate with international authorities.

The results of a Pew Research Center survey in October highlighted the dramatic downward shift in attitudes towards China and in particular its handling of the initial stages of the outbreak.

The survey covered 14 developed countries with advanced economies and found an overwhelming shift to negative attitudes towards China.

Across the 14 countries surveyed, a median of 73 per cent of people held negative views of China, and in many of those nations there was a significant year-on-year jump.

Negative views of China hit a 12-year high in nine of the countries surveyed and a third or more of people in eight of those countries held “very unfavorable” views. In the United Kingdom (35%) and Australia (45%) the number of people holding very unfavorable views more than doubled in the space of a year.

Xi also suffered a public relations blow in the western world as faith in his leadership plummeted to historic lows. Across the countries surveyed, 78% said they do not have the confidence in him to do the right thing in world affairs. That disapproval rating was still better than Donald Trump fared: but he hasn’t yet successfully emulated Xi and declared himself an undemocratically elected leader for life. As much as many Hong Kongers fear a Joe Biden presidency, the Democrats – along with the other elected representatives from the countries surveyed, all of them democracies – will take note of the results and act accordingly. In an era of polarization and populism, the issue of foreign relations on China strikes a rare bipartisan chord.

Despite the unpopularity, Xi and his “wolf-warrior” diplomats are more concerned with seeming strong domestically in the face of criticism and the rhetoric has been ramped up to absurd new levels of aggression. That creates a recipe for more of the same: China clearly lacks the desire or ability to salvage any semblance of credibility.

The western media scrutiny on the CCP has increased as an appetite for information grows.

As 2020 ends, it isn’t just news bulletins about Hong Kong protests or Uyghurs making the news, it is stories on China’s attempts at economic coercion in Australia or exposés on its commercial overfishing being widely read or watched, stories that would have been niche and garnered little attention in industry-specific publications two years ago are now commonplace. This was the year the CCP toxicity went mainstream.

Awareness raised during the 2019 protests mean that discussions around National Security Law are more nuanced. Politicians in exile are given a platform to speak.

Given the rising tide of public sentiment against China – plus the political pressure, media scrutiny and the CCP’s doubling down on its tone-deaf rhetoric – it is even less likely China could salvage its image in 2021, even if it did care.

Hong Kong’s protesters can take credit for throwing the spotlight on the CCP – bringing attention to not only Hong Kong’s fight for autonomy, but the plight of the Uyghur people and other ethnic minorities in East Turkestan – yet it remains to be seen whether or not the awareness helps.

Sadly, a focus on the mishandling of the early stages of Coronavirus and other CCP actions may have relegated Hong Kong’s predicament to just another black mark on the long list of China’s misdeeds.

The Hong Kong protesters, including children and the elderly, terrorized by the police on the streets of Hong Kong have often been described as the canary in the coal mine.

Hong Kong’s brave protesters and journalists should be proud of the way they took the story to the world with a spirit of self-determination and boundless creativity. But of course the point of the analogy is that the canary – more sensitive to poisons in the air, just as Hong Kongers have always known the true nature of the CCP – perishes to spare others the same fate.

The treatment of Hong Kong’s protesters was an early warning to the rest of the world of CCP aggression, dysfunction and overreach, but it would be a tragedy if foreign governments, having been made aware of the threat it faces, was to turn away and let Hong Kong die.

(Michael Cox is a journalist and Hong Kong permanent resident currently based in Australia. He has previously written for the South China Morning Post, The Age (Melbourne) and Australian Associated Press.)

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