Editor’s Note for Tuesday, March 22, 2022

My thoughts today:

“The ‘international community’ you always hear about” is a meme that has been going round the internet recently. It’s a world map that only shows Anglophone and Western countries, plus Japan. Wolf warrior Chinese diplomats and state media workers have tweeted it with enthusiasm in the last week, as a commentary on Western criticism of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Similarly, many critics have pointed out the contrast between the sympathy in Western media and political discourse for white Ukrainians fleeing war compared to Anglophone obliviousness to Ethiopian, Yemeni, Iraqi, Syrian, Afghani, and Palestinian refugees.

But the cries of “hypocrisy!” are not exactly on the mark. In her diary from Ukraine, former Beijing resident, veteran foreign correspondent, and war reporter Lindsey Hilsum writes:

Some people say the attention paid to this war is disproportionate compared to, say, Syria, or Israel and Palestine. So how do we judge the significance of a conflict? There should be no hierarchy of sympathy: suffering is indivisible. An injured Ukrainian child is no different to an injured Palestinian child. But journalists have to consider the geostrategic and historical implications of a conflict as well as the human cost.

This war will have unintended and terrible consequences — like 9/11, which led to the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, which in turn spawned further conflicts. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is not just an unprovoked attack on a sovereign country; it pits Russia, a nuclear power, against NATO, the most heavily armed alliance in history…the potential for a wider and even more devastating war remains alarming.

Nonetheless: However much sense that argument makes, there are many in the Global South who won’t see past Western hypocrisy about the relative value of human lives in different countries. These people will be very sympathetic to China’s views of the war in Ukraine.

For more on this, see our story today by Cobus van Staden of the China-Africa Project, summarized below, or in full on our website here.

Our word of the day is international community (国际社会 guójì shèhuì).