As China and the U.S. continue with their confrontation, I, as someone teaching Asian politics at a university in the U.S., always have to take on the responsibility to explain China’s diplomatic measures to my American colleagues, students, think tanks, and reporters. When being asked about the oppression of Uighurs at a pre-arranged reporters Q&A session during last week’s regular press conference, Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Hua Chunying took out a photo of the American black slaves she prepared in advance to confront the U.S. Her action has, shockingly, been enthusiastically shared among the deep blue and Han Kuo-yu fan group in Taiwan, saying China finally got one back. But sorry, having seen what Hua has done, the Americans have no idea what China was trying to say at all.

Has the U.S. oppressed black slaves in the past? Of course. But the Americans knew this was wrong and therefore fought a civil war 150 years ago to reflect on it. Afterward, the Americans worked hard on getting African-Americans the right to vote. The 1st-grade social studies textbook of my son’s public elementary school used three weeks to talk about the unfair treatments African-Americans suffered in the past. February each year is Black History Month, and many activities are being held across the U.S. in support of equal rights. Finally, an African-American was elected as president by the Americans in 2008. The progress of achieving equal rights is slow, and many indicators still show inequality among ethnic groups. The police violence towards African-Americans still exists, and the ratio of African-Americans in prison is still high. When an African-American died because he was unfairly treated by the police last year, there were large-scale protests all over the U.S. The victim’s family has since received over a million U.S. dollars compensation from the government and justice. It is the conscience of the Americans, who continue to introspect.

That’s why when China took out a black slave photo of 150 years ago (let’s not talk about what is wrong with this photo just yet) today, my colleague, totally confused, asked me what China wanted to say. Are the Chinese with conscience going into war to liberate Uighur slaves? Is China planning to give Uighurs the right to vote? When the Uighurs have been imprisoned, suffered from violence, and become forced laborers, will China allow all the Han Chinese to take to the streets to show support? If a Uighur unjustly died, would the Chinese government redress and offer a million U.S. dollars compensation? Does China plan to elect a Uighur as the country’s Chairman?

“None of that!” I answered my colleague. China wanted to express that the West had done such a thing in the past, so they have no right to condemn China. “But wait, what has the U.S. condemned China?” Is China doing “the same thing”? During the Qing dynasty, which was also 150 years ago, girls got their feet bound in China. The Chinese wrote eight-legged essays. There was racial segregation, 90% of Han Chinese were farmers of sharecropping, and most large families were slaves. How do we compare that with the U.S. back then? If we insist on applying this logic, are we saying what China doing in 2021 is no different from the slavery of the U.S. and the imperialism behind it in 1850?

Some public intellectuals who dare not openly support Chinese imperialism came out of the woodwork and said the West relied on black slaves to gain power, so China today has to do the same thing to become powerful. I won’t mention they admitted China has done a terrible thing (China has never admitted to having re-education camps until they were captured by satellite images). The point is, the U.S. no longer has any black slaves when it beat the Soviet Union 30 years ago and became the world’s no.1 During the cold war, the equal rights movement of ethnic minorities never stopped. The Cuban Missile Crisis happened only a year before Dr. King delivered a speech in Washington in 1963. So, should the Uighurs be allowed to make a speech in Tiananmen Square too?

The Soviet Union did a large-scale ethnic cleansing, ethnic deportations, and planned economy during the cold war, but still could not catch up on the U.S. In the end, even the space technology, in which the Soviet Union had invested all it had, had lost to the U.S. because of the assistance from a group of mathematics geniuses, who were African-American women, provided to NASA, as recorded in the film “Hidden Figures.”

When none of the argument could withstand the questioning, many Chinese netizens in Clubhouse decided to bring up the 2014 Kunming terrorist attack in recent days. They said they were afraid, so naturally, they supported locking up all Uighurs. It was wrong to target ordinary people in the terrorist attack, and it was a tragedy. But what has it got to do with the majority of Uighurs who have not committed any crime? Was it a proportionate act locking them all up? If we could blame a terrorist attack on a race, how about the offenders of the child sexual abuse case in RYB Education, who are Han Chinese? The person who initiated putting melamine in baby milk powder is Han Chinese (even a member of the CPPCC). Those who took part in the Yang Jia case where six policemen were killed are also Han Chinese. Should we lock up all Han Chinese to “re-educate” them?

Not killing innocent ordinary people is an important rule of the modern war even when two countries crossfire. Xinjiang and Beijing are not at war at all, but Beijing is still locking up people under ethnic and religious reasons, which caused the official birth rate of Uighur to drop a half since 2017. For the Hongkongers and Taiwanese, this is an obvious negative example.

A reporter friend of the Washington Post once told me that all the questions at the Chinese Foreign Ministry press conferences are pre-scripted. It is impossible to ask anything spontaneously. But even so, last month Hua Chunying still managed to become the laughing stock when she questioned publicly why Chinese people could not use Facebook (the post has since been deleted on the sly). Now she wrongly used black slaves as a comparison and embarrassed herself (because the Americans really do not know what she was trying to compare with). In the eyes of the Americans, it is not a wolf warrior diplomacy anymore, more like dumb and dumber diplomacy.

(Austin Wang Horng-en, assistant professor of Political Science, University of Nevada, Las Vegas)

Click here for Chinese version

We invite you to join the conversation by submitting columns to our opinion section: [email protected]

Apple Daily reserves the right to refuse, abridge, alter or edit guest opinion columns for accuracy, length, clarity, and style, and the right to withdraw and withhold columns based on the discretion of our editorial page editors.

The opinions of the writers do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editorial board.

---------------------------------

Apple Daily’s all-new English Edition is now available on the mobile app: bit.ly/2yMMfQE

To download the latest version,

iOS: bit.ly/AD_iOS

Android: bit.ly/AD_android

Or search Appledaily in App Store or Google Play