COVID-19: China's 'Chernobyl moment'

24 April 2020, National Post

A few months ago, the likelihood of the Chinese experiencing such a moment was less than nil. Now, much has changed.

Is the coronavirus pandemic China’s “Chernobyl moment”? A cruel and callous cover-up that will mean the beginning of the end for the Communist Party of China (CPC), as Chernobyl did for the Soviet Union in 1986?

Perhaps, though China’s communist regime is much stronger today than its Soviet counterpart was in 1986, partly because of the widespread international support it receives.

What the world can offer to the long-suffering citizens of China is an “evil empire” moment, a clarifying moral stand against a regime that commits gravely wicked abuses against its own people, including: forcing them into concentration camps, forced labour and organ harvesting; trampling on all the fundamental freedoms listed in our Charter of Rights and Freedoms as the norm, not the exception; having a destabilizing influence in international trade; threatening the security of its neighbours; and being responsible for the spread of this global pandemic.

The Chernobyl moment was suggested in an open letter written “to Chinese citizens and friends of China at home and abroad” earlier this month. Signed by a list of credible voices that speak up for international human rights, including our distinguished former attorney general Irwin Cotler, the letter asserts that “the current global crisis has been caused by the regime so many of you have been tolerating or supporting for decades.”

After it was published, Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer and several Conservative MPs added their signatures.

“The roots of the pandemic are in a cover-up by CCP authorities in Wuhan, Hubei province,” the open letter argues. “Under the influence of the CCP the World Health Organization first downplayed the pandemic.”

The Soviet Chernobyl moment came three years after U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s “evil empire” speech, which was, at the time, ridiculed by the international diplomatic establishment. Yet when the liberation of Europe from the Soviet empire followed six years later, and the Soviet Union ceased to exist two years after that, the courageous dissidents behind the Iron Curtain revealed that the forthright condemnation of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” was a critical turning point.

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