FROM EIR DAILY ALERT
A Soros Hand in New Anti-China Propaganda Piece
Feb. 5, 2018 (EIRNS)—Today, the Berlin-based MERICS (Mercator Institute of China Studies) and the New York-based Global Public Policy Institute (GPPI) published a new book attacking European cooperation with China under the theme Authoritarian Advance: Responding to China’s Growing Political Influence in Europe.
It fits that a board member of the GPPI is the son of George Soros, running his Alexander Soros Foundation to campaign for environmentalism and human rights around the world. Alexander Soros proudly reports in that mid-June 2016 he had hosted Barack Obama in his New York home, and had spoken with him the week before.
“China’s rapidly increasing political influencing efforts in Europe and the self-confident promotion of its authoritarian ideals pose a significant challenge to liberal democracy as well as Europe’s values and interests,”
the report warns.
“While Beijing’s efforts have received much less scrutiny than the efforts of Putin’s Russia, Europe neglects China’s increasing influence at its own peril. Drawing on its economic strength and a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) [sic] apparatus that is geared towards strategically building stocks of influence across the globe, Beijing’s political influencing efforts in Europe are bound to be much more consequential in the medium- to long-term future than those of the Kremlin....
“Political elites within the European Union (EU) and in the European neighborhood have started to embrace Chinese rhetoric and interests, including where they contradict national and/or European interests,”
the report complains.
“EU unity has suffered from Chinese divide-and-rule tactics, especially where the protection and projection of liberal values and human rights are concerned. Beijing also benefits from the ‘services’ of willing enablers among European political and professional classes who are happy to promote Chinese values and interests.”
The report claims that
“from the perspective of liberal democracies, all areas of interaction with China are potentially problematic and deserve scrutiny. After all, China’s political model is based on an authoritarian regime intent on strengthening a deeply illiberal surveillance state at home while also exporting—or at least trying to popularize—its political and economic development model abroad. Thus, today, all areas of Europe’s interaction with China have strong political undertones.”
The report contains a clear “regime change” aspect, calling on the Europeans to keep contact with anti-CPC Chinese expats in Europe and to pro-liberal individuals in “Chinese media, universities and think tanks,” while drawing a strict line against China’s advances in Europe at the same time. More European integration would help to prevent things like China’s development of the 16+1 development projects with Central and Eastern European countries in the future, the report claims.
