Mark Steyn: China's removal of Tiananmen Square's Pillar of Shame is an attack on truth

Two years ago – late December 2019 – a Chinese doctor, Li Wenliang, was WeChatting on social media about what he called seven SARS cases at his hospital in Wuhan.

A few days later, he was ordered to the Wuhan Public Security Bureau and made to sign an official confession promising to cease spreading false rumours about coronaviruses.

The rumours were so false that a couple of days after his police interrogation Dr Li caught the totally falsely rumoured coronavirus and died a month later. He was thirty-four. And thus Chairman Xi’s blood-soaked regime embarked on the same strategy it used with SARS almost two decades earlier: Arrest anyone who tells the truth and lie to the world.

Domestic flights out of Wuhan were shut down, lest the likes of Dr Li infect Beijing and Shanghai, but international flights carried on, to Milan, to Seattle, to London… Because of China’s lies, over five million people are dead, and normal life in this country and many others has been on hold since March 2020.

Our public-health guys like to talk about Covid is a war, but, if it is, it’s a war the west is waging on its own people, while the fellows who unleashed this thing on the world have gotten away with the deaths of five, six, twelve, however many million people it’s offed by the time it’s done.

While the west chose to tank its own economy and paralyze itself, China under cover of Covid has been advancing its strategic goals: it’s threatened Taiwan; it’s trashed the “One Country, Two Systems” Hong Kong agreement, and big butch Boris Johnson has barely uttered a peep about it; China’s buying up Latin America, and Joe Biden is silent about it, possibly because of the Biden family’s extensive business relationship with Beijing.

As an independent panel has just found, the ChiComs are committing genocide against the Uighurs, and yet the Muslim world and all those Muslim lobby groups bleating about so-called Islamophobia in the west haven’t got a word to say about China’s ever-growing mound of Muslim corpses.

One Country, Two Systems: In mainland China, the Tiananmen Square massacre never happened; in formerly British Hong Kong, the university has a famous statue commemorating Tiananmen Square, the Pillar of Shame …oh, no, wait, the authorities have removed it.

One System, Two Countries: in one China the Uighurs get slaughtered and Hong Kongers lose their rights and scientists get disappeared if they tell the truth about Covid.

And in another China, in five weeks’ time, the world’s athletes will be flying in for the Winter Olympics as if it’s perfectly normal to be ice-dancing and curling and two-man luging to advance the prestige of Chairman Xi as his ugly dictatorship tightens its grip as the world’s dominant power.