Fox News is reporting that the People’s Republic of China is claiming that
it was forced to veto a United Nations vote on Syria because it was called before differences in the proposal were bridged, but denied playing spoiler and said it wants to see an end to violence there.
Forced. Poor babies. The resolution that the PRC (and Russia) chose to veto would have been a move toward ending nearly a year of Bashar Assad’s killing—to the tune of 5,400—of his own people since last March.
The PRC justifies itself by insisting that the resolution, as written, unduly pressured…the Syrian government. This is a strange, but strangely consistent, objection coming from a country with similar problems in Tibet, and in its Xinjiang province (which is populated with all those uppity Uighurs. Oh, yeah, and that also is the PRC’s largest natural gas-producing region). This also comes from a country that still maintains it has a right to conquer the Republic of China.
Liu Weimin, a spokesman for the PRC’s Foreign Ministry, insisted that that too-early Security Council vote was forced before suitable (Chinese diluting) amendments had been agreed. This, though, ignores the fact that the PRC never would have accepted a resolution that had actual teeth for ending the Syrian government’s butcherybloodshed. Just as it had consistently demanded watering down earlier versions of the resolution.
Liu also denied that the PRC was favoring Assad, in particular. Yet this is exactly the outcome of the Chinese veto.
The People’s Daily opined
The present situation in Syria is extremely complicated. To naively back one side, while attacking the other side, might look like bringing about a favorable turn, but is actually just laying up trouble ahead.
No. It’s not complicated at all. Either the PRC supports Assad and his behavior, or it does not. In the meantime, people are dying today. But that’s no trouble at all.
We don’t need to keep taking the PRC seriously on the political stage; we can ignore and bypass them—and we should ignore and bypass them, so long as they continue to side with bloody despotism.
These Chinese are not just on the wrong side of history—they’re on the wrong side of morality.