"Chinese President Xi Jinping’s dictatorship is certainly thuggish," he wrote in his opinion piece published in  Project Syndicate.

Highlighting the situation in Xinjiang, Patten said: "Consider its policies in Xinjiang. Many international lawyers argue that the incarceration of over one million Muslim Uighurs, forced sterilization and abortion, and slave labor meet the UN definition of genocide. This wicked repression goes beyond thuggery."

He said the last thing the world should do is trust the Communist Party of China (CPC). 

Speaking on the COVID-19 pandemic issue, he said targeting Beijing: "The result is that the coronavirus has become a far greater menace than it otherwise would have been. This is the CPC’s coronavirus, not least because the party silenced brave Chinese doctors when they tried to blow the whistle on what was happening."

Attacking China on the issue of Hong Kong's autonomy, he said: "A third example of the CPC’s dishonesty is its full-frontal assault on Hong Kong’s autonomy, freedom, and rule of law. Hong Kong represents all those aspects of an open society that Chinese communists, despite their professed confidence in their own technological totalitarianism, regard as an existential threat to the surveillance state they have created."