It seems the idea that the “freedom to…lead a normal day-to-day life” requires freedom of speech and worship, and from a totalitarian government, was lost on the Yuan.
The columnist’s Communist Party-legitimizing assertion comes in the context of an article almost singularly devoted to cheerleading. It portrays a China that is open, thriving, and vibrant while the free world is largely closed — suffering from the coronavirus that the CCP covered up and helped spread.
Yuan does so without any honest scrutiny of China’s success in seeking to convert a calamity for which it is most responsible into a propaganda coup, and without questioning of the wisdom of America’s economy-crippling, socially-undermining, liberty-imperiling response. Such an article might have provided worthy insights to readers. Instead, it takes Communist China’s narrative at face value and then cherry-picks interview subjects to validate it.