China Deep Dive: Western democracies ‘blind’ to Beijing’s global ambition

This perspective is from Democracy Digest:

Western policy-makers’ belief in democratic inevitability “blinded observers to the Chinese Communist Party’s overriding objective of retaining and growing its power,” according to a new analysis.

“The mass internment of over one million ethnic Muslims in Xinjiang province demonstrates the CCP’s willingness to engage in gross human rights abuses, in a fashion so pervasive and widespread as to potentially implicate the government in crimes against humanity,” says the report from the US House of Representatives Intelligence Committee. “The U.S. must summon the moral courage to condemn these heinous crimes in the strongest terms and rally the world to join.”

U.S. intelligence agencies are failing to sufficiently understand and counter the national security threat posed by China, the Committee concludes, NBC reports:

The report, based on hundreds of hours of interviews with intelligence officers and thousands of analytic assessments, finds that the intelligence community must change how it does business — not only to improve its insights into China, but also to better address “the growing importance of interlocking non-military transnational threats, such as global health, economic security, and climate change.” The report recommends that spy agencies make better use of open source data, modernize hiring practices and re-orient spending priorities.

Read the full article here.