EDITOR, The Tribune.

At the recent celebrations for the centennial anniversary of the Communist Party of China attended by 70,000 people and watched by fellow Chinese all over the world, General Secretary Xi Jinping confidently announced that China has fulfilled its first centenary goal of turning China into a moderately prosperous society by putting an end to absolute poverty. This is a historic achievement for a century-old party, who was born in the throes of a semi-colonial and semi-feudal society.

General Secretary Xi also used the occasion to reiterate China’s commitment to peaceful development and to promote world peace and global development, and uphold the international order.

China’s peaceful rise is probably one of the most transformative events of the 21st century. It is the first time in hundreds of years for a non-Western country to achieve near-par development with the West, but only at a much faster rate and much larger scale, and through means of trade and economic cooperation, rather than war, colonization and plunder.

While most people in the world recognize and welcome China’s progress, there are some in the West who see it as a threat to Western predominance in international affairs. Too accustomed to Western superiority, they cannot accept China going its own way and being successful at the same time.

Some of the worst forms of this mis-perception of China manifested itself in a continuous and dogged campaign to depict China in a negative light in international discourse. In the past few years, such a campaign of slander has reached feverish pitch bordering on paranoia, as can be seen in such horrendous accusations against China as “genocide” in Xinjiang. It is astonishing how short some people’s memory is. They know what genocide is, and aboriginals in different parts of the world experienced it first-hand.

Employing familiar divide-and-rule tactics, these people have found a way to make an issue out of areas on the outer edges of China either inhabited by ethnic minorities or having a colonial history, such as Xinjiang in China’s northwest, Tibet in southwest, Taiwan in the east and Hong Kong in the south, to fabricate and play up different stories about China. This is seen by many in China as a pathetic attempt to hold China down and prevent its rise, which will never succeed.

As General Secretary Xi Jinping pointed out, China has embarked on a new journey of pursuing its second centenary goal of realizing full socialist modernization by the centenary of the People’s Republic in 2049, and the country has entered an irreversible historical process of rejuvenation.

China’s rise has so far been and will continue to be a story of not only rising prosperity for its own people but also of opportunities shared with countries all over the world through mutually beneficial cooperation and assistance.

In the just concluded session of the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, more than 90 countries in the world made statements supporting China and opposing the politicization of human rights. This shows the weight of global public opinion.

Those in the West agitating for confrontation need to be aware of a self-fulfilling prophesy: make China an adversary, and it would become one. This is a recipe for a lose-lose scenario. Partnership and solidarity would be an infinitely better option.

YIN HAIGANG

Chinese Embassy spokesperson

Nassau,

July 15, 2021