WHO cares...? Global Hegemony and China's Long March Through the Institutions

In the latter 1920s, a foundational thinker of Western Marxism lay incarcerated in an Italian prison cell. Much as we’re told now by cheery memes not to ‘waste’ lockdown and learn a new language or stage an opera with sockpuppets, Antonio Gramsci used his time inside to reflect on the state of the stalling International Communist movement. The result was the Prison Notebooks, which identified cultural hegemony as the main obstacle to be surmounted; that bourgeois value systems would have to be displaced by revolutionary ones across society’s institutions, to establish strength in a ‘war of position’ before a ‘war of manoeuvre’ was viable. In the 1960s, the German activist Rudi Dutschke took up the baton, calling for a “long march through the institutions”, as a tribute to Chairman Mao’s bloody Long March during the Chinese Civil War. Anyone who has been to a British university has probably encountered the practice of this theory, whether unconsciously or by design.

                                                    

                                                                                 Comrade Noodles & Comrade Pasta



Decades in power have not inoculated China’s Communists from the need for radical reviewing of the situation. In 1999, two People’s Liberation Army colonels, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, set out to tackle the hard facts of US geopolitical hegemony. The diagnosis was that the People’s Republic had no hope of displacing the States as top military power, and the cure, as laid out in their book, known in English as Unrestricted Warfare, was to aggressively sap away at American predominance by any means other than direct military ones. This could include striving for economic hegemony; cyberattacks on financial, transportation and communication networks; even terrorism. We have undeniably witnessed the former two in the subsequent decades; the third remains the stuff of macho-lit novels.


But there is one method laid out in the book that is not only undoubtedly being enacted but pertains urgently to our current crisis. The Internet watched agape at a now-notorious interview of the assistant director-general of the World Health Organisation, Dr Bruce Aylward, who executes a painfully obvious ducking of a question about revisiting Taiwan’s discontinued membership of the WHO asked by Hong Kong journalist Yvonne Tong. If you haven’t seen it, forget “Did you threaten to overrule him?”, this raises the bar in calamitous political avoidance.


The uninitiated will be wondering what on earth is going on. What business would an international health body have ‘carrying water’ for the CCP? The heirs to Mao have gone Gramsci on steroids, embarking on their own Long March through the world’s institutions, posting their comrades into key leadership positions, with demonstrable impact on policy. The first significant conquest was the United Nations Department of Economic & Social Affairs (DESA) as long ago as 2007, now headed by Liu Zhenmin, former Vice-Minister of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Chinese dominance of DESA is now treated as an established fact: “DESA is a Chinese enterprise,” says one European diplomat. “Everybody knows it and everybody accepts it.” But since 2013 and the initiation of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a vastly ambitious infrastructure network across Asia, Europe and Africa, the CCP has gained the ear of the highest ranks of the UN. In May 2017 Secretary General Antonio Guterres praised BRI as having “immense potential” in expanding market access for “countries yearning to become more integrated with the global economy.” The following June, his deputy Amina Mohammed announced that “We must work to take advantage of one of the world’s largest infrastructure initiatives.” At the UN, social and economic development is now seen as ‘China’s thing’, despite a major plank of BRI resting on a ruthless brand of ‘debt diplomacy’ towards lesser developed nations.


The next scalp was the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) of which Dr Fang Liu became the first female general secretary in 2015. This milestone for women’s empowerment was a disaster for Taiwan who were denied a seat at the body’s assembly in 2016. This bore bitter fruit this year as China’s exported covid-19 crisis ravaged East Asia, as well-meaning people calling for Taiwan’s temporary representation at ICAO meetings in view of the severity of the crisis were ignored, and dozens of their accounts blocked on Twitter, including Taiwanese-American Asia analyst Jessica Drun.


In telecommunications, also in 2015, Houlin Zhao became Secretary General of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). He has used his post to defend the controversial Chinese network Huawei from American concerns about espionage, dismissing them as stemming from a “loser’s attitude”. Any last remaining doubters that Huawei is hand-in-glove with the Communist regime should check out the report they jointly delivered with China’s fully state-run telecoms companies China Unicom and China Telecomm, along with the country’s Ministry of Industry & Information Technology (MIIT) advocating a radical overhaul to online infrastructure. It criticises the current global Internet network as “unstable” and “vastly insufficient”, recommending the Chinese-controlled ITU “shoulder the responsibility of a top-down design for the future network”. Quelle surprise.


In international law enforcement, we had Meng Hongwei as head of Interpol since 2016. That is, until September 2018, when he disappeared. After almost a fortnight and an official demand from Interpol for the whereabouts of their president, Beijing revealed Meng was being indicted for ‘corruption’ as well as the truly Orwellian offence of an “insistence on doing things in his own way”.


But the UN stubbornly refused to wake up and smell the bat soup. Not just at the higher echelons, as you’d expect from the reality-immune waxworks that head up that organisation, but at member state level. A vote last June made China’s vice foreign minister for agriculture head of the UN Food & Agriculture Organisation (FAO) by 108 votes to 12. This fiasco spurred the US to drum up a more coordinated effort to prevent the CCP-approved candidate taking leadership of the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO).


But one of the silver linings of the very, very dark cloud of covid-19 is that the world is now following the Americans in waking up to Chinese entryism. For many the Awkward  Aylward interview was the tip of a hitherto-unseen iceberg - the cost of the WHO’s mercenary slavishness to the Communist Party line. The warning they received as early as December 31^st that the coronavirus was transmitting between humans was ignored on the basis that it came from – you guessed it – Taiwan. Weeks later, the WHO parroted the CCP’s claim that there was no human-to-human transmission of the virus. “An opportunity to raise the alert level both in China and the wider world was lost,” the Taiwanese vice-president said regretfully.


The Republic of China’s exemplary response to the ‘CCP virus’ has been cold-shouldered by the WHO in favour of the People’s Republic of China’s, which was, as outlined on this site by Dominique Samuels, oppressively sluggish then appallingly brutal. Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has had nothing but praise: “Its actions actually helped prevent the spread of coronavirus to other countries.” Tedros’ native Ethiopia, by the way, owes half of its considerable foreign debt to China.


But there is an awakening to this unpleasant reality. There is now a petition calling on Tedros to resign, garnering more than 741,000 signatures. Even our government – which now has deeply personal reasons to be sceptical of Chinese global influence – is showing promising signs of ditching its baffling Huawei fudge-box.


We mustn’t be complacent about this. The CCP still has a great many weapons in its arsenal, and there are serious commentators who believe it will emerge stronger, not weaker, from this global crisis of its making. But rather we must seize the opportunity, double down and ensure that Communist China is seen for what it is, not a business partner or humanitarian saviour but as an enemy. Then we can worry about those pesky universities.