Play hardball against China, Jimmy Lai tells US presidential hopefuls
蘋果日報 2020/10/01 13:31
Media tycoon and democracy activist Jimmy Lai expected that the U.S. will continue its strong stance against China whether Trump or Biden is elected, but Trump’s policy of reciprocity and realism may be more effective against the Chinese Communist Party.
“Biden projects his policy into an idealized world. All his promises paint a really wonderful world, but the reality is not there,” said Lai in his weekly Twitter live chat on Thursday.
“Even if Biden gets elected, he will also be idealizing the way how the CCP will work,” the Apple Daily founder continued. “Trump, on the other hand, does not idealize it but deals with reality instead. He doesn’t have the rhetoric or sophisticated thinking, but he knows that to deal with China, you have to play hardball.”
Hosted by Mark Clifford, former editor-in-chief of the South China Morning Post, the duo was joined by Michael Auslin, a contemporary Asia research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
“No one is completely fooled by the state of China and how it’s acting under Xi Jinping,” said Auslin. “What the world hasn’t seen in decades is the extinction of freedom in an advanced capitalist society. That’s the shock. It’s the speed with which the Hong Kong government eradicates freedom under the new national security law.”
“Hongkongers represent all of us,” Auslin stressed.
Auslin noted that under U.S. leadership, European countries concerned with the trajectory of China are joining hands and developing an Indo-Pacific strategy to better deal with the threat of the CCP. “We have been in an era of complacency, but that’s over.”
Lai agreed that the world is finally waking up to the threat of the CCP and allying against China.
“The pandemic is like a Pearl Harbor attack, not just on the U.S. but also on the world. It has woken up the world to look at China as a real issue they are facing. People realize their lives are being threatened because a very contrasting value is imposing its behavior on the world,” said Lai.
“Either we change China, or we will be changed by China,” Lai added.