The China model aims for unprecedented totalitarianism. China employs millions to monitor the internet and media to observe and punish anything the regime doesn’t like, writes Fred McMahon.

As China and the United States escalate their trade talks (or trade war), China is carving a disturbing global role that goes well beyond trade malfeasance.

China has emerged as an old threat revived, the authoritarian seducer. The latest Human Freedom Index, published by Canada’s Fraser Institute, the U.S. Cato Institute and Germany’s Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom, shows that China uses all the seducer’s tools — charm, money, power, bribery, threats and violence.

China’s leaders, nationalistic media and acolytes around the world promote the repressive “China model” as a triumph to be adopted across the globe.

And Canada is a target. For example, wealthy developer Ted Jiancheng Zhou, with deep ties to the Chinese Communist Party, has become a major donor to Canadian politicians at all levels of government, raising security concerns about Chinese influence in Canadian politics.

Last year, President Xi Jinping declared that the world should adopt China’s “new type of political party system” and “the Chinese solution for tackling the problems facing mankind.” China’s media piled on damning the “chaos” of democracy and praising the Chinese model’s ability to solve “all sorts of problems.”

The “new” model has global fans. Canadian political scientist Daniel Bell, who has taught at top U.S. and Chinese universities, has argued that China’s repressive meritocracy often produces better results than democracy and freedom.

Yet the China model aims for unprecedented totalitarianism. China employs millions to monitor the internet and media. Digital cameras are everywhere, armed with increasingly sophisticated facial recognition tools to observe and punish anything the regime doesn’t like. Thousands of journalists, lawyers, dissidents and others have been tossed in jail.

Most disturbing is the social-credit system. It will monitor every aspect of an individual’s life and punish anything, no matter how trivial, the regime doesn’t like. Already, China has blocked 15 million citizens from train and airline trips. For those with low social-credit scores, “everywhere is limited and it is difficult to move,” the regime brags.

The suppression of Muslim Uighurs terrifies. About a million are interned in re-education concentration camps. Executions and torture appear plentiful.

China employs its great military, economic and seductive power to advance repression internationally. Its military, with a budget three-and-a-half times that of Russia’s, aggressively enforces China’s claim to virtually all the South China Sea, threatening economic freedom globally. The world’s most important trade routes pass through the sea.

https://www.thespec.com/opinion-story/9093421-china-is-the-ultimate-authoritarian-seducer/