Marsha Blackburn: “it is interesting to hear my colleagues talk about China and COVID and our response. I think many of us looked at 2019…”

“it is interesting to hear my colleagues talk about China and COVID and our response. I think many of us looked at 2019 and felt like that was really a significant year for U.S.-China relations. It marked the 40th anniversary of bilateral diplomatic relations between Washington and Beijing, and we also finalized a phase 1 trade deal. This led many of us to being optimistic, but remember that 2019 also marked the 70th anniversary of Chairman Mao's ascension to the chairmanship of the Chinese Communist Party and the 30th anniversary of the massacre at Tiananmen Square. When you start asking questions about that history and how it has informed the decisions of current Chinese leadership, the capitalist facade that has been so carefully constructed by the propagandists in Beijing starts to peel away, and it starts to crack. After decades of espionage, military aggression, and horrific political violence inflicted on their own people, many here in Washington have grown numb to Chinese hostility. They kind of expect or accept that is the way they are going to act. That is the only explanation I could come up with for the shock that rippled through this town when we discovered that the Chinese Communist Party spent 51 days muzzling the doctors, lawyers, and journalists who desperately tried to warn the rest of the world about the growing threat from the novel coronavirus. Our relationship with China has reached a tipping point.…”