The Patriot Post® · America's 'Baizuo' Elitists

It’s no secret that everything the progressive Left embraces — from Critical Race Theory and open borders to the transgender agenda and the Cancel Culture to everything in between — is based on the self-aggrandizing notion that it owns the franchise on “superior” wisdom and morality. Those who disagree are not just wrong; they are bigots, deplorables, bitter clingers, irredeemables, supremacists, privileged etc., etc. ad nauseam. Yet there is one group of people that not only knows exactly who American progressives are but that won’t be the slightest bit intimidated by any blowback from them.

“Baizuo” is a derogatory term in Mandarin that refers to white leftist Western elites. It’s the Chinese version of “useful idiots,” and it has become increasingly popular among China’s netizens. Analysts attribute that popularity to the Chinese public’s resentment against what they view as a superiority complex that animates Western elites’ ideological agenda against China.

An article, “The curious rise of the ‘white left’ as a Chinese internet insult,” written in May 2017 by Zhang Chenchen, who has a PhD in political theory and science, gets to the heart of the criticisms. Zhang notes that Baizuo refers to people who “only care about topics such as immigration, minorities, LGBT and the environment” and who “have no sense of real problems in the real world.” Furthermore, they only advocate for peace and equality to “satisfy their own feelings of moral superiority” and are “obsessed with political correctness.”

Zhang further reveals the term “first became influential amidst the European refugee crisis, and [German Chancellor] Angela Merkel was the first western politician to be labelled as a Baizuo for her open-door refugee policy.” It was an accurate assessment. Merkel allowed more than one million “refugees” to enter Germany, and in short order, the nation endured a rape epidemic, a skyrocketing “migrant” crime wave, and a series of terror attacks that culminated in the 2016 Berlin Christmas market atrocity that killed 12 and injured 48, courtesy of Tunisian national Anis Amri, who came to Germany during the 2015 rush.

Today in America, we are neck deep in our very own “open door” refugee policy, driven by progressives’ own feelings of moral superiority that are so profoundly corrupt, the Biden administration is providing illegal aliens with hotel rooms while hundreds of thousands of homeless Americans languish in tent cities in Democrat-controlled cities throughout the nation.

In 2017, Global Times columnist Qu Qiuyan explained that Baizuo “is not limited to referring to the white liberal elites, as former US president Obama was considered as an advocate of Baizuo ideology.” Qu further notes that on a Chinese question-and-answer website, Zhihu, the question “why are well-educated elites in the West seen as naïve ‘white left’ in China?” received more than 400 answers. One user said it’s because leftist elites are those “who advocate inclusiveness and anti-discrimination but cannot tolerate different opinions,” while another asserted that elitists’ opinions are so shallow they tend to maintain social equality by embracing ideologies that run against the basic concept of equality.

As if on cue four years later, the Biden administration is instituting “equity” in lieu of equality. The “Executive ­Order on Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government” is all about abandoning meritocracy in favor of government-mandated equal outcomes for those who are deemed “marginalized.”

If that sounds familiar, it’s because Karl Marx wrote “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” in 1875, and that idea formed the basis of communist societies going forward. Societies that required massive levels of government coercion to enforce equity, even as the enforcers inevitably lived far better than those they were oppressing.

Yet far worse, equity will assure one outcome above all others: widespread mediocrity. As schools eliminate standardized testing and advanced placement classes, and businesses become entities that hire people based on the color of their skin and not the content of their character, there will be no incentive to work hard or aspire to excellence.

That institutionalized mediocrity would be wholly destructive to American society? For our Baizuo elitists, that is a far more preferable outcome than a meritocracy where “too many Asians” outpace other ethnic groups. That reality was made clear by Ivy League college admission “standards” such as those at Harvard that required Asians to produce higher SAT scores than other minorities to gain admission, or those at Yale where “race is the determinative factor in hundreds of admissions decisions each year,” as the DOJ stated last year.

Unfortunately, the Biden administration epitomizes mediocrity, and nothing made that clearer than the recent meeting between Chinese and American diplomats in Alaska, where China’s top diplomat, Yang Jiech, revealed the self-debilitating mediocrity of America’s new secretary of state, Tony Blinken. When Yang asserted that many Americans “actually have little confidence in the democracy of the United States, and they have various views regarding the government of the United States,” and that China doesn’t believe in “invading through the use of force, or to topple other regimes through various means, or to massacre the people of other countries, because all of those would only cause turmoil and instability in this world,” Blinken’s response bordered on sophomoric. “I have to tell you, what I’m hearing is very different from what you described,” he said. “I’m hearing deep satisfaction that the United States is back.”

Back from where? To what? Yang further noted that a nation that’s capitulated to Black Lives Matter, antifa, and other radicals is in no position to lecture China. And Blinken proved him right. Despite bringing up “deep concerns with actions by China, including in Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Taiwan, cyberattacks on the United States, economic coercion of our allies,” the coronavirus — along with the Chinese lies and stonewalling that facilitated its worldwide spread — wasn’t even part of the discussion.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson explains the enormity of that omission, noting that China’s stance with regard to the coronavirus “is a crime of enormous proportions.” What did Biden do about it? Carlson answered, “As one of his first acts as president of the United States, Biden signed an executive action ordering federal agencies to stop making reference to the pandemic by the ‘geographic location of its origin.’”

Columnist Roger Kimball was even more direct. “Joe Biden has been in office for just two months,” he writes. “Has any US president had such a disastrous opening chapter on the world stage? None that I can recall.”

The most frightening words of that assessment? “Opening chapter.” How much damage — some of which may be irreparable — America’s Baizuo elites precipitate going forward is anyone’s guess.