The government of China sends pandas to other countries in order to encourage self-delusion. It is one of the pleasanter ways of getting sand thrown in your eyes.
No matter how bad the party-state may seem to be—what with the surveillance, the censorship, the indoctrination, the imprisonments, the transnational repression, the continuous muscling of other countries, the forced labor, the forced organ transplants, the tortures, the rapes, the murders, the genocide—the Chinese government can’t really be all that bad, can it? the willfully self-deluded are encouraged to ask—not if it’s also sharing these winsome creatures with all of us who are traveling on the road to the China-sponsored Shared Global Future…?
“Aw, pandas! Thanks, Chinese Communist Party.”
Mixed report
One of the non-spellbound is Greg Sheridan, foreign editor of The Australian, who expressed his skepticism on Sky News (“ ‘Totalitarian dictatorship’: China tries resetting to a ‘sweet and cuddly’ public image,” June 17, 2024). Although not entirely consistent in his statements, he was detectably more honest and straightforward in a recent TV interview than, say, the Australian prime minister.
Sheridan said that Chinese Premier Li Qiang’s diplomatic visit to Australia is about getting the public to think of the CCP as something “sweet and cuddly.”
“I’d give the Albanese government a mixed report…. Very importantly, saying we are in permanent strategic competition with China in the South Pacific,” he said.
On the other hand, “I think this big panda diplomacy visit is all about trying to reset China in the Australian public mind as a sweet and cuddly thing, whereas it’s not a sweet and cuddly thing. It’s a vicious, brutal totalitarian dictatorship.”
Sheridan chastised Prime Minister Albanese for either incompetence or cowardice in failing to firmly object to the way CCP diplomats harried an Australian-Chinese journalist, Cheng Lei, at a recent press conference. But this is only one example of what personnel of the Chinese embassy are chronically allowed to get away with.
Pusillanimity
“God alone knows why we allow so many Chinese diplomats to stay in this country,” Sheridan said.
“And it is a standing rebuke to the pusillanimity of Australian governments that they won’t restrict the Chinese embassy to behaving like an embassy. Which doesn’t include organizing busloads of demonstrators and doesn’t include manhandling Australian reporters in our own parliament.”
Also unmoved by panda diplomacy during the Chinese premier’s visit were the Australians who came out to protest against the totalitarian regime that Li Qiang serves.
Also see:
StopTheChinazis.org: “Can’t Resolve Australia–China Conflicts by ‘Better Communication’ ”
StopTheChinazis.org: Pro-CCP Protesters Attack Anti-CCP Protesters in San Francisco
