An industrial behemoth with a sensitive side

Communist China is just so sensitive. Though it is an industrial behemoth with 1.4 billion people and blessed with a mercantile impulse that is off the charts, it clearly keeps a teenage diary. Often hurt, it lashes out. As do we all but not just in the office break room.

I added “communist” to remind readers how increasingly authoritarian China has become. We used to think of China de-communizing after finding capitalism just so skippingly joyful. In fact, the opposite was happening.

Xi Jinping, a harsh man, has made himself the general secretary of the Communist Party of China for life; there is no real reason to refer to him as president. The current ideology is Xi Jinping Thought.

This may be the source of China’s parade of hurt feelings. Xi, like Mao, is personally humiliated by failure and instructs the nation to express those emotions. After China’s recent flooding catastrophe, American and German reporters were confronted by angry crowds in Zhengzhou accusing them of “rumour mongering” and slandering China.

The instructions came from the top. Xi is embarrassed. Blame foreigners. The floods continue. What floods? There are no floods!

Humans don’t recover from history. In many ways, China is still Mao’s Red Guard nation, with its oppressed citizens easily frightened into turning en masse against constructed individual hate figures. Chinese citizens deserve better than this atrocious government.

The historian Jung Chang says Mao killed 70 million of his own people. You’d think any Chinese leader would be beyond shame. But when Meng Wanzhou, Huawei nepotism’s darling, was taken into Canadian custody at U.S. request, China combusted.

It kidnapped two Canadians, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, and keeps them in appalling prison conditions. We’d expect that of Putin, who’d poison, or Trump, who’d send a missile strike, or Uzbekistan, which has boiled its prisoners, but China? Has it given up striving for respectability?

China seethes at any mention of its Uyghur concentration camps, rather than lying and claiming they were closing them down anyway. They don’t like being compared to Nazis. The shoe fits. It hurts them.

It is equally sensitive about Taiwan, the Japanese flag, its Olympic medal count, the wisdom of its mega-dams, its low birth rate, you name it, they’re hurt.

Worst of all, it will not allow forensic study of how COVID-19 appeared in Wuhan. Without candour, dark suspicions will live forever.

So China is desperately seeking new allies, the latest of which is the Taliban. The publicity photos are excruciating, suits vs. beards, with red spots that look like bloodstains.

Emotionally sensitive nations circle the planet. Russia is extremely sensitive. It has much to be sensitive about. Hairless Vladimir Putin posing seminude on a horse? Is this the Russian equivalent of a Canadian’s huge urban pickup truck or of Americans armed, unmasked, and unvaccinated?

I am currently trying to assemble fabulous three-layer jelly moulds that look like St. Basil’s in Red Square; American men are trying to grow them on their faces.

India is sensitive about its imagined grandeur, which is why a nation that can’t even vaccinate its own people has a space program. India and Pakistan are sensitive in their intense rivalry; whatever climate catastrophes overtake them, their hatred will not fade.

The Arab nations blow money like fantastic fountains, sensitive about their inability to create livable nations in the sand. Intense heat will make them unliveable. I suppose sensitivity is easily replaced by terror.

Israel is sensitive about the word “apartheid.” I would be, too. But Ben and Jerry’s decision to stop selling ice cream in the occupied territories got all the attention. That must hurt.

Poland is sensitive about Second World War death camps, insisting they be called Nazi rather than Polish. I’d let it be. Every protest just reminds people about accusations of historic Polish antisemitism.

Canadians don’t like being called “boring” when in fact this is our greatest strength. We don’t get angry enough? You think that’s bad?

Albertans are hypersensitive about being considered rubes — but look at the rube Ontario elected — which is why Alberta Premier Jason Kenney posed with a city pickup truck, a Globe columnist having mocked the tin beasts. Kenney’s pickup was, naturally, empty.

Norway is a great big hypocrite but it’s not a bit sensitive about it. It made its money mountain extracting oil that helped destroy our communal climate and now wants to build large-scale carbon recapture.

On the bright side, the Scandinavians understand the devastation wrought by misogyny and work hard at repair. I ask myself which nation is most brutal toward women — Saudi Arabia, Nicaragua, Hungary, Nigeria, Poland, Pakistan, the U.S. — but that’s not the problem.

The problem is that none of these countries are sensitive about this, not at all.

I may be wrong about international tender feelings because I take a foreigner’s view. But perhaps foreigners are best placed to judge.

Nobody ever understands their own family, so why should we ask the locals to scrape the bowl of their own national sensitivities? Let me do it for you. You’re welcome.