TOM EATON | Ramaphosa’s admiration for China has a sinister ring to it

Cyril Ramaphosa says you should stop complaining about his omnishambles of a state and rather “be like China” and “never badmouth your country”. I say he should probably try to read a newspaper once a year.

Speaking at a group of innocent bystanders on the weekend, Ramaphosa claimed that some South Africans have “made it a sport to badmouth the country, to say all sorts of negative things”.

I don’t know about it having been made a sport, but I do agree with him that there are many people who regularly say negative things about the country he allegedly runs, including his own ministers of electricity and police and finance, his public protector, his auditor-general, various judges, economists, police commanders, head teachers, human rights organisations, hospital administrators and anyone who is served by Eskom.

But I digress. The point, here, is that Ramaphosa believes that people in China never criticise their government, and given that he would never lie to us on purpose, the only other possible explanation is that he is embarrassingly uninformed.

After all, if you’re going to stand up in public and tell people with a straight face that “every Chinese is a messenger for their country, they never badmouth their own country”, it can only be because you haven’t read anything about China for, well, ever.

Of course, I’m willing to give Ramaphosa the benefit of the doubt. I know he’s a busy man, and it’s hard to put information in your head before you tell your citizens to self-censor.

2020, for example, was a hellishly busy year for Ramaphosa, as he had to handle the Covid crisis, while also tricking some of us (mea culpa) into believing he was a good leader.

Of course, I’m willing to give Ramaphosa the benefit of the doubt. I know he’s a busy man, and it’s hard to put information in your head before you tell your citizens to self-censor.

Given the pressure he was under that year, I can totally understand how he missed the news about law professor Xu Zhangrun being arrested for criticising Xi Jinping, or the report about police plucking another professor out of his home after he criticised China’s Covid policy, or, indeed the one about investigative journalist Luo Changping disparaging a movie about China’s involvement in the Korean War and promptly getting arrested for having “infringed on the ... honour of the heroic martyrs”.

2021, likewise, was a tough year for Ramaphosa, what with the insurrection and overseeing the ANC’s worst result ever in a local government election. Perhaps that’s why he didn’t see the report about the five young Chinese people who published children’s books featuring a village full of sheep — a satire on Beijing’s control of Hong Kong — and who were duly arrested for being part of a “conspiracy to distribute seditious materials”.

To be fair, Ramaphosa’s schedule hasn’t really eased up since then — those taps aren’t going to applaud themselves — which is why I can even understand why he missed the news in April about human rights activists Ding Jiaxi and Xu Zhiyong getting sent to prison for 12 and 14 years respectively for “subversion of state power” after trials that happened behind closed doors and lasted one day.

And if Ramaphosa didn’t see that report, it’s very unlikely that he would have seen the one, a month later, about a Chinese woman who was arrested for expressive support for — checks level of totalitarian craziness — a joke, made by a comedian, about the Chinese military.

No, I don’t blame Ramaphosa for not knowing that Chinese do, in fact, sometimes criticise the state of their country.

As for his advice for us to be “more like China”, well, I hope the president explains exactly what he means once he’s caught up on his reading, and how many one-day trials he thinks might get the job done.