China unleashed a global pandemic on the world by hiding the severity of the Coronavirus by colluding with the World Health Organisation and its minion Dr. Tedros. Millions of people have been infected around the world and thousands have died ever since the virus spread out of mainland China.
The countries all around the globe went on their knees seemingly by the threat of virus but the vile authoritarian regime of China thought this as a golden opportunity to stamp its authority over the world.
However, the strategy has backfired and it is China which has come out as the biggest loser in the last few months over the global map. A quick look at the events that transpired in the last few months will give you a fair idea that China has received a slap on every front.
The myth of Military superiority busted
The myth of China having a superior military might was busted after the Galwan valley incident. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of China was made to eat humble pie in Ladakh where Prime Minister Narendra Modi gave a free hand to the Indian Army’s battle-hardened soldiers to deal with the wussies of PLA.
“This face-off has demonstrated that Ladakh isn’t the South China Sea where the Chinese would be able to unilaterally change the status quo,” a senior official in South Block had said after the incident.
While the martyrdom of Indian Army soldiers was widely reported as they were given respect and proper state burials, no detail was brought out in the public memory about the fate of PLA soldiers by Chinese authorities.
As a result, Weibo, a similar microblogging platform like Twitter with millions of Chinese users started seeing an outrage as the Chinese citizens demanded to know about the soldiers that have died.
Some US intelligence reports quoted that there were 35 PLA fatalities while a senior Chinese official couple of days ago claimed that 108 PLA troops had succumbed to the injuries inflicted by the superior Indian soldiers.
The Chinese propaganda machinery which usually works smoothly to counter any anti-China statement had a meltdown in the aftermath of Galwan.
The mouth-pieces of Beijing came up with bizarre excuses as to why the Chinese authorities were not releasing the number.
The Digital surgical strike on China
After India undertook a digital surgical strike upon China and its ambitions of creating a digital silk route by banning 59 Chinese apps including the video platform/espionage app TikTok, other allies of India are looking to emulate the same feat.
It is now being reported that the United States of America and the down under country of Australia will also ban the controversial app owned by the Chinese tech-giant ByteDance group.
TikTok had clocked over two billion downloads in the first six months of 2020 with a major chunk of it coming from India.
While India didn’t contribute significantly to TikTok’s revenues, the banning of the app if enforced in the USA could prove catastrophic for the company and inadvertently wreck CCP’s plan to create an espionage net around the world.
The global hegemony China wanted to create in the digital sphere is now being challenged as countries are beginning to stand up to it. India has shown the way and the rest are taking a cue from it.
The USA, Donald Trump, and Mike Pompeo
The United States of America (USA) is constantly at the tails of China and has proven as one of the Achilles heel for Xi Jinping’s regime. Reported by TFI earlier, Mike Pompeo recently said that the US was pulling its troops from Europe to send it to the South-China Sea and Indo-Pacific region to counter the threat of Chinese.
“The actions of the Chinese Communist Party meant there were “threats to India” and countries such as Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and the South China Sea. The US military is “postured appropriately” to meet these “challenges of our time”, Mike Pompeo had said in a virtual summit.
Trump and Pompeo have single-handedly brought the fortunes of Huawei down the drain. Huawei, the largest Chinese technology giant with annual revenue of more than 120 billion dollars, has been forced to said that its “survival” is at stake after the USA’s semiconductor (chip) export restrictions on the company.
“We will now work hard to figure out how to survive,” Guo Ping, rotating chairman, at Huawei’s annual analyst conference had iterated.
After making the UK shed the espionage franchise of Huawei, the Trump administration has convinced another European nation viz. France to dump Huawei. The European nation has quietly started to phase out Huawei.
Trump has also given an ultimatum to the de facto leader of EU, Angela Merkel that she also give up Huawei, otherwise the repercussions could be costly.
Furthermore, the Trump administration is in the middle of revoking Hong Kong’s special trade status after Beijing passed the highly controversial National Security Law, which is aimed at culling the autonomy and freedom of Hongkongers.
BRI and its tumultuous fate
Projects under its ambitious Belt and Roads Initiative (BRI) are being shelved or in many cases being forced to stop.
China has got another jolt out of the blue as a Kenyan appellate court has passed a judgment against the USD 3.2 billion Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) project between Kenya government and the China Road and Bridge Corporation (CRBC), calling the contract ‘illegal’.
The newly built Chinese railway line, from the port city of Mombasa to the capital, Nairobi, however, has shot up the cost of transportation by 50 percent. China built the railway line under its ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
Countries changing FDI rules to counter hostile Chinese takeover
The countries have been quick to gauge the ominous Chinese motives and have started addressing the chinks in the armor of their legislations.
Many European countries including Italy, Spain, and Germany have tightened their FDI rules in the light of recent events to prevent a hostile takeover of their companies by Chinese firms.
The down-under country of Australia has changed its foreign investment rules which gives greater approval powers to the Foreign Investment Review Board (FIRB) to curtail opportunistic takeovers of struggling businesses amid increasing national security risk.
Even India has altered its FDI norms saying all the investments will have to go down the government route after alarm bells went ringing when news of the People’s Bank of China acquiring 1.01 percent stake in India’s lending major, the Housing Development Finance Corporation (HDFC) went bust.
No free pass for China from any country
China had a free pass throughout its neighbourhood as no country stood up to Chinese bullying. But the last couple of months has been a different ballgame all together for the authoritarian Xi Jinping regime.
As India gave a humiliating blow to Chinese attempts to intrude into the Galwan valley, many smaller nations like Vietnam, Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, which rarely respond to China’s bullying, are now speaking up against Beijing.
In the 36th ASEAN summit held in Hanoi, Vietnam, The Southeast Asian nations came together to remind China that any further misadventure will be dealt with an iron fist.
India’s tough stand against the bully has encouraged countries like Vietnam, Philippines, which have been benign so far, to send a tough message to China.
Taiwan has been blocking China’s dredging activities in the South China Sea and scurrying off its fighter jets that tried to intrude in its air-space. The chip-wars have also begun with China and things aren’t looking any rosier on that front either.
All these incidents prove that China has been pinned down badly by the countries around the globe and if it doesn’t get its act right, then this only is the beginning. Much greater obstacles are in the store for China and it won’t be a pretty sight for the red-authoritarian regime.