More than a decade ago, when I came from China to study in the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, two political terminologies deeply laid the seeds in my mind. One was the fantastic “human rights”, and another was the disgraceful “double standards”.
I still vividly remember my then-dean Kishore Mahbubani, an internationally renowned thinker and the former president of the United Nations Security Council, repeatedly shared his dedicated collections of the West’s double standards on human rights, including numerous cases from the Middle East, Asia, Latin American and Africa. In his opinion, the reason behind such double standards was that “the West will take a moral stand only when its fundamental interest is not involved.” That has, unfortunately, been the hard truth.
Today, I would like to add some new cases involving my homeland China to dean Mahbubani’s long list. The latest one is about two cartoons.
This November, China was asked by Australian prime minister Scott Morrison to formally apologise because of a digital illustration depicting a smiling Australian soldier slitting an Afghan child’s throat by a bloody knife. Actually, the cartoon was artistically created by a Chinese computer graphic artist based on an official report that Australian special forces unlawfully killed 39 civilians and prisoners in Afghanistan between 2009 to 2013.
Earlier this year in January when China was badly suffering from the Covid-19 outbreak, a Danish newspaper published a satirical cartoon of Chinese national flag with coronavirus-shaped symbols, but Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen defended that “we have freedom of expression in Denmark - also to draw”. In 2005, the paper’s another cartoon of Prophet Muhammad offended many Muslims. Western artists are entitled to have such freedom to draw freely, but others cannot?
The second case is about demonstrations. In 2019, a series of riots broke out in China’s special administrative region of Hong Kong, but the West deliberately turned a blind eye to the violent crimes committed by the rioters. Rather, the US passed the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act to support local separatists but condemn police officers of abusing power.
In comparison, although this year’s Black Lives Matter protests across the US were generally peaceful, President Donald Trump called those protestors “thugs”. Similarly, western politicians and media applied a totally different standard on anti-racism protests in London and demonstrations in Barcelona in support of Catalonian independence.
The third case is about terrorism. On March 1, 2014, a group of Uyghur separatists killed 31 innocent people and injured 143 inside China’s Kunming railway station. Shockingly, many Western media refused to identify the terrible event as a terrorist attack, while they frequently labelled terrorism on many minor attacks happened within their own nations.
While China’s experimental and innovative counter-terrorism practices in Xinjiang have been accused by the West as a means to oppress different opinions, some Western countries are, in fact, introducing similar measures.
For instance, the French cabinet recently approved the bill “supporting Republican principles” to tackle radical Islam. Anti-terrorism and de-radicalization are global challenges, but the West’s double standards on terrorism are damaging global efforts.
The West has applied double standards not only to China but also to many other non-western countries. If the US still believes “American exceptionalism”, how could we expect it to treat us equally based on a universal standard?
Double standards represent the West’s hegemony and arrogance, while human rights and democracy have been hypocritically used as an excuse to sell the West’s own agenda and advance its own interests.
The West was ever thought to be the beacon of human rights, but its deep-rooted and long-lasting ideology of double standards has continuously undermined its credibility. Instead of selectively preaching the belief that “everyone is equal”, it is better for the West to sincerely apply one single but fair standard to itself and the rest of the world first.