TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — Steve Yates, the current CEO of DC International Advisory, joined the show "American Thought Leaders" to discuss the significance of May 4 speech delivered in Mandarin by Deputy National Security Advisor Matthew Pottinger at the White House as well as developments in Asia amid the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic.
On the 101st anniversary of the May Fourth Movement, a massive student-led protest that began on May 4, 1919, Pottinger argued that China succeeds when it listens to the voices of average Chinese citizens.
Yates said, “Matt not only spoke in fluent Chinese linguistically, he spoke in fluent Chinese history.” He described the speech as “an amazing example of strategic communication.”
Concerning the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) handling of the Wuhan coronavirus, Yates said: “China’s government, either out of incompetence or malice, harmed the lives of many, many, many Chinese people and then allowed this to spread to the rest of the world,” which he noted has killed large numbers of people and negatively affected the global economy.
As blowback from the virus hits China, Beijing has been ramping up its propaganda machine to shift the focus away from the origins of the coronavirus and how the CCP mishandled things at the beginning of the outbreak.
Yates talked about how quickly the virus has caused the world to suddenly view China in a much more skeptical light. He also called into question the official Chinese numbers of infected, fatalities, and job losses due to COVID-19.
In Yates’ opinion, because so many Chinese families have been affected by the Wuhan virus, it will be much harder for the CCP to whitewash this part of history like it did with the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
He pointed out that despite issues such as the Tibetan struggle, Taiwan’s democratic success, the Hong Kong protests, the Uighur internment camps, or the treatment of the Catholic Church in China, it was not until this global pandemic that more Americans started paying attention to Beijing.
Yates touched on China’s continued lack of transparency and how it still refuses to let independent experts into the country to perform proper forensic analysis on how the coronavirus developed.
He then moved on to talk about how international organizations like the United Nations, the Human Rights Commission, and the WHO have failed in their fundamental missions to pursue security and human rights by allowing the CCP to wield so much influence in said groups.
Yates also discussed how Taiwan continues to be the biggest target of Chinese pressure in terms of cyberattacks, political warfare, economic warfare, and actual military hardware deployed against it. He also pointed out the lunacy of international groups and companies not even being able to mention the word “Taiwan” without risking upsetting China.
He ended the discussion by expressing hope that these developments, both around the world and within China itself, would finally lead to more discourse and debate in that country.