China

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blindpig
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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Tue Apr 13, 2021 11:28 am

Part 2

The War On China
JAN 2
WRITTEN BY IZAK NOVAK

3. The Single Largest Threat to U.S. Empire – The Belt and Road Initiative

With the consolidation of the domestic economy and establishment of linkages to the outside world, the PRC now has the task of looking outward and establishing an international base of support. Most importantly, China wants to break the encirclement of U.S. empire that I mentioned above. Only through the breakdown of U.S. hegemony and imperialism can China continue to move forward on its path of socialist construction. The Belt and Road Initiative, first announced by Xi Jinping in 2013, is the leading edge of this effort to establish trade and political linkages throughout Eurasia with Beijing at the center.

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is the most significant geoeconomic effort in history, a multi-decade $4-$8 trillion plan impacting 70% of humanity with the goal to develop productive forces throughout Eurasia and steadily erode U.S. power in the hemisphere. The significance of this effort cannot be overstated, as Henry Kissinger warned:

“China’s Belt and Road Initiative, in seeking to connect China to Central Asia and eventually to Europe will have the practical significance of shifting the world’s center of gravity from the Atlantic to the Pacific”26

The more that countries are able to stand on their own two feet economically and have access to their neighbors and China as a trading partner, the less power the U.S. has to impose its political will on countries through economic coercion.

The BRI will link Asia and ultimately Europe through ports, bridges, railways, green energy and trade. It will help historically overexploited countries fill development gaps and reduce or eliminate their reliance on the U.S. and the dollar. Perhaps most importantly, it will significantly reduce the effectiveness of one of U.S. imperialism’s favorite tools – economic sanctions. The more that countries are able to stand on their own two feet economically and have access to their neighbors and China as a trading partner, the less power the U.S. has to impose its political will on countries through economic coercion.

There are many elements to this plan, but essentially it involves both individual infrastructure and investment projects in other countries and the establishment of non-U.S. international institutions. Ironically, the historically negative legacy of U.S.-dominated institutions like the World Bank and IMF combined with U.S. aggression against countries that don’t conform to U.S. hegemony has encouraged even unlikely countries to participate in Chinese projects.

One very significant example of this is the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), an alternative to the World Bank and IMF that is centered on Beijing. Russia was one of the first countries to join as a full member in 2015, during a period in which U.S.-Russia relations were at a very low level and about to sink further following the 2016 election. The AIIB even includes27 many EU countries, Canada and otherwise staunch U.S. allies like India, Saudi Arabia and Australia. China is the largest voting bloc in the bank, followed by India, Russia, Germany, South Korea and Australia. The map of AIIB members is essentially a map of Eurasia, plus many other non-regional members (Green and dark blue are full members):

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Figure: AIIB Membership Map from Wikipedia28

China has in recent years moved aggressively to sign deals with countries like Pakistan and Iran on BRI projects and investment. Deals with Iran have been happening for years, totaling tens of billions of dollars in support29 – massive amounts considering the immense economic pressure Iran is under from U.S. sanctions.

The extent to which China and Iran are being linked is visible in the various infrastructure projects taking place. These include:

The New Silk Road freight train route which opened in 2016, linking Tehran to Urumqi in Western China’s Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. The freight route also connects Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. Transportation time for goods was reduced from 45-50 days by sea to 14-15 days. This rail line cuts directly through the “triangle of control” over Central and Western Asia where U.S. imperialism is heavily active.

*926 km railroad from Tehran to the eastern city of Mashhad. This electrified railway will be built by a Chinese SOE, China National Machinery Import and Export Corporation. It will cut the transportation time between cities in half and increase capacity.

*415 km high speed rail line between Tehran and Isfahan via Qom, being built by SOE China Railway Engineering Corp.

*263 km railway between Kermanshah and Khosravi, being built by SOE China Railway Construction Corp.

*Railway system connecting Tehran, Hamedan and Sanandaj being built by SOE China National Machinery Industry Corp.

Importantly, the New Silk Road freight train is not going to stop in Tehran. Plans are to have this rail system extend all the way into Europe. For the other projects, Iranians will gain greater economic connectivity between regions. All of this is happening while Iran is facing severe sanctions from the U.S.

Another key element of the BRI in Central Asia has been the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor or CPEC. CPEC is a cornerstone project of the BRI, with the most important element being the development of Gwadar Port in Balochistan Province. This port, made operational in 2016, is a critical element in bringing goods to and from the BRI network, potentially transforming Gwadar into a major regional economic hub. It also diversifies shipping routes from China, which is a key element in upending a potential U.S. blockade. While beyond the scope of this article, the peeling away of Pakistan from the U.S. is a major geopolitical victory for China. Remember that Operation Cyclone – the U.S.-led operation of aiding the Mujahideen against the USSR – was largely funneled through Pakistan’s intelligence agency the ISI.

Perhaps equally disturbing to U.S. empire is the willingness of otherwise close allies to participate in BRI projects. In March of 2019, Italy signed a variety deals with China as part of the BRI. Western media, especially in the U.S, immediately pounced on the news with CNBC declaring it will “only exacerbate tensions between Italy and its neighbors.”30 Reaction was overwhelmingly negative in U.S. media and political spheres in the U.S. and EU.

The U.S. has attempted to discredit the BRI, with commentators arguing that it is placing countries into a “debt trap”. Debt trap claims are not supported by the evidence we have, and is disputed even by bourgeois scholars. China’s debt cancellations have been well documented, including frequent cancellations to Africa and a large cancellation to Cuba. China frequently renegotiates credit with terms favorable to the borrower.

4. The Breakdown of the Bargain – Hybrid Warfare on China

American anxiety over China’s rise as regional and world power, particularly as an avowed communist power, takes us right back to Brzezinski. Not only is China a rival power in Eurasia (which “must be prevented”), it is a rapidly rising power with a system that seems impervious to economic crisis or political subversion. It is a system that is now expanding its reach through one of the most ambitious geopolitical projects in human history. How does the U.S. empire respond to this?

It’s difficult to pinpoint the exact start of the current war on China. While Obama’s infamous “Pivot to Asia” program in 2012 began to move chess pieces towards China, the U.S. and the PRC have never been allies or even friendly (I’m omitting for the sake of this article the long history of Western colonial oppression of China prior to the founding of the PRC). Even after the Three Communiques, the U.S. continued to sell billions of dollars worth of arms to Taiwan. This is a mainstay strategy of U.S. empire across all administrations, often referred to as the “Cross-Strait Balance of Power” which seeks to balance Taiwan against China.31 The U.S. maintained a 21-year embargo on China after the revolution, a tactic still used against Cuba to this day.32 We now know that the CIA was actively involved in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests via Operation Yellowbird33 and sources placed among protesters.34 Containing China has long been a key strategy of U.S. empire, including militarily. This strategy was laid out succinctly in a 1965 draft memo from Defense Secretary McNamara to President Johnson:

There are three fronts to a long-run effort to contain China (realizing that the USSR “contains” China on the north and northwest): (a) the Japan-Korea front; (b) the India–Pakistan front; and (c) the Southeast Asia front. Decisions to make great investments today in men, money and national honor in South Vietnam makes sense only in conjunction with continuing efforts of equivalent effectiveness in the rest of South east Asia and on the other two principal fronts. The trends in Asia are running in both directions—for as well as against our interests; there is no reason to be unduly pessimistic about our ability over the next decade or two to fashion alliances and combinations (involving especially Japan and India) which will keep China from achieving her objectives until her zeal wanes. The job, however—even if we can shift some responsibilities to some Asian countries—will continue to require American attention, money, and, from time to time unfortunately, lives.

Any decision to continue the program of bombing North Vietnam and any decision to deploy Phase II forces—involving as they do substantial loss of American lives, risks of further escalation, and greater investment of U.S. prestige—must be predicated on these premises as to our long-run interests in Asia.

This memo also lays bare the fact that U.S. military occupation in Japan and Korea and close ties to India and Pakistan have the same objective in mind. What is remarkable is how consistent this policy has been from the U.S. empire, despite its inability to topple the DPRK and its failure in Vietnam. Adding to the U.S. empire’s anxiety, China has been very successful in recent years at peeling away Pakistan from U.S. hegemony (as noted above). If McNamara believed in 1965 that China’s “zeal” would wane in 10-20 years, he would be seriously disturbed by the gains China has made since.

U.S. strategy against China today can be categorized as having three central pillars, forming the basis of the hybrid war:

*Containment: The U.S. is actively building alliances (India, Japan, Australia, SK) while intervening militarily and politically in neighboring countries (the “triangle of control) in order to pressure China’s geopolitical flanks.

*Balkanization: Through overt and likely covert subversion, the U.S. has sought to support separatist movements in China, particularly in Hong Kong, Xinjiang and Tibet. Xinjiang is of crucial importance to U.S. strategy given its central role in the Belt and Road Initiative.

*Economic Sabotage: Through restricting Chinese investment in the U.S., the targeting of specific firms and of course the trade war, efforts are underway to arrest the meteoric rise of China’s economy which is on track to eclipse the U.S. on numerous fronts.

Below I will highlight some of the major flashpoints in this hybrid war. Although these situations vary across place and time, one constant has been the trend towards a nearly unanimous anti-China sentiment across Western media. Becoming an anti-China reporter (sometimes referred to as “China watchers”) is now a major career path in U.S. journalism. There are reporters today whose entire careers have been built on presenting China in the worst possible light, frequently parroting CIA and State Department talking points as “reporting”. These “reporters” all share highly overlapping social circles, and some of the most virulent are members key U.S. foreign policy think tanks like the CFR. I have written about the peculiar Operation Mockingbird35-like careers of Melissa Chan36 and Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian.37

*2007 – Present: Quadrilateral Security Dialogue or “Quad” Alliance

In 2007, Japan formed an alliance between itself, Australia, India and the United States with the implied aim of containing China’s geopolitical influence. While the different parties of the alliance have denied that the target is China, Chinese officials immediately recognized the significance of the meeting and complained to each.38 In tandem with the initiation of the Quad, 2007 saw the expansion of the Malabar military exercises to include Japan, Australia and Singapore (it was originally a bilateral U.S.-India exercise dating back to 1992). The exercise was also held, for the first time, off the coast of Okinawa instead of the Indian Ocean – a not so subtle provocation towards China.39

Since the formation of the Quad, activity has varied year-to-year. Notable, Australia had backed out of the alliance in 2008 under Kevin Rudd. However, Australia would later return to the fold and in November of 2017 all parties met again. Between 2017 and 2019, activity increased dramatically with the Quad meeting five times.40

*2010-2012: CIA Network in China Exposed and Dismantled

The NYT reported that between 2010 and 2012, China “systematically dismantled CIA spying operations in the country” by killing or jailing at least a dozen sources. According to the report, the CIA “considers spying in China one of its top priorities.” The operation is said to have crippled CIA operations in the country for “years afterward.”41 This can be viewed as one of the major intelligence war developments between China and the U.S., and dovetails with the discovery of a massive CIA hacking operation in China.

2008-2019 (present?): Widespread CIA Hacking Operation Against Chinese Industries and Government

In March of 2020—lost amidst the media frenzy surrounding COVID-19—a well-known Chinese security firm Qihoo 360 announced that they uncovered a massive CIA hacking operation against China since at least 2008. In part thanks to the leak of the Vault 7 hacking tools, the security firm was able to identify CIA attacks against aviation, petroleum, and internet companies as well as scientific research institutions and government agencies.42 The security firm speculated on some potential objectives of this attack:

We speculate that in the past eleven years of infiltration attacks, CIA may have already grasped the most classified business information of China, even of many other countries in the world. It does not even rule out the possibility that now CIA is able to track down the real-time global flight status, passenger information, trade freight and other related information. If the guess is true, what unexpected things will CIA do if it has such confidential and important information? Get important figures‘ travel itinerary, and then pose political threats, or military suppression?

*2018 – Bloomberg’s “Big Hack” Article

In one of the most bizarre and blatant Operation Mockingbird style media operations I can think of, Bloomberg ran a totally baseless article in 2018 accusing China of implanting spy chips in the hardware of servers used by many major U.S. firms. The article was refuted by virtually everyone asked about it and it was never followed-up on, retracted or, to my knowledge, updated.43 One of the co-authors, Jordan Robertson has not tweeted since the article was published and it remains his “pinned tweet” as of 4/17/2020. It’s unclear what exactly happened with this story and it is one of the biggest mysteries in modern media and especially tech journalism. My speculation it was somehow a botched, planted hit-piece on China from the CIA or the information used to write the article was leaked by individuals without proper clearance. Either way, the fact that a major media outlet like Bloomberg was willing to publish a patently false article about China with massive implications if true is testament to the state of anti-China media operations.

*2014 – Present: U.S. Involvement in Hong Kong Protests

Since the 2014 “Occupy Central” protests and their return in the extremely violet outbursts of 2019, U.S. involvement in Hong Kong separatism has been documented by Chinese media and others. In a 2014 People’s Daily article, China accused Louisa Greve, then-VP of the National Endowment for Democracy or NED (infamous CIA front org), of meeting with protest leaders.44 Greve, unsurprisingly, is today a director of the “Uyghur Human Rights Project” – another NED-funded organization based in DC that is promoting Xinjiang separatism. Radio Free Asia and Voice of America (U.S. government propaganda outlets) openly bragged about their on-the-ground reporting on the HK protests and methods of evading censorship.45

During the 2019 outburst of protests in Hong Kong, CCTV published a photograph of U.S. diplomat Julie Eadeh meeting with protest leaders Joshua Wong and Nathan Law.46 U.S. interference in Hong Kong reached its peak with the 2019 passage of the so-called “Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act” which was first introduced in 2014. The act requires the U.S. to impose sanctions on officials engaged in alleged human rights abuses in HK and, among other things, reviewing favorable trade relations between the U.S. and HK.47

*2018 – Present: U.S. Subversion in Xinjiang

U.S.-based “Human Rights” organizations, the NED, U.S. politicians and U.S. media began a massive psychological operation targeting Xinjiang province in 2018. This operation began with claims from the World Uyghur Congress (a NED-sponsored org) that China was putting Muslims in “concentration camps.” These claims have since been thoroughly debunked, as the facilities in question were created as vocational centers and alternatives to outright imprisonment as part of China’s novel de-radicalization efforts in Xinjiang. A comprehensive document has been compiled debunking various claims made about Xinjiang HERE.

What U.S. media of course never mentions is that Xinjiang was the target of numerous terrorist attacks from the Al-Qaeda affiliated “Turkistan Islamic Party” in the 90’s, and that terror attacks continued through 201748 until China was forced to respond with a comprehensive de-radicalization campaign. There have been no known attacks since 2017.

It’s worth noting that the World Uyghur Congress, which received NED’s “2019 Democracy Award” had one of its predecessor organizations, World Uyghur Youth Congress, designated as a terrorist organization by China in 2003.49 In other words, the U.S. government is actively sponsoring an organization which China believes is affiliated with terrorists. As mentioned above, Xinjiang is a crucial target area for U.S. imperialism given its importance to the BRI and the link it provides China to the rest of Central, South and Western Asia (remember the train that runs directly from Urumqi in Xinjiang to Tehran?).

*2009 – Present: South China Sea and U.S. Navy Incursions

While the dispute around the South China Sea has been an international issue for a very long time, the U.S. has repeatedly inserted itself into the debate against China. The U.S. has obvious interest in seeing that China is not able to enforce its sovereignty claims in the South China Sea, given that U.S. Navy vessels from the West Coast and Pacific bases pass through the South China Sea to get to the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf.50 The aggressive posture of the U.S. in East Asia has led to numerous close calls.51,52,53

*2018 – Present: Technology War Against Huawei and ZTE

As part of the U.S. strategy to arrest China’s economic growth, it is targeting some of its highest value industries including the high tech sector. In August of 2018, the annual NDAA was signed including provisions banning the federal government from purchasing equipment from Huawei and ZTE. It also placed restrictions on Dahua Technology, Hytera and Hikvision.54 The reason given was for dubious “security” concerns. The intent of this action was clear: to drive a wedge between China’s most successful high tech companies and the rest of the world. Huawei is one of the largest smart phone companies in the world and a top Chinese company in several metrics. The situation escalated dramatically in 2018 when Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou was arrested in Canada at the behest of the U.S. She is charged with allegedly violating sanctions on Iran, among other charges.55

*2018 – Present: The U.S. Trade War on China

Perhaps the most telling sign of the breakdown of the bargain between U.S. capital and China is the trade war initiated by Trump in 2018. For the first time since China’s economic reforms, the U.S. government has moved to explicitly act on its complaints of China’s “unfair” systems. The important thing to know about the trade war is that what the U.S. is really complaining about is China’s socialist system. Almost all of the complaints the U.S. has put forward against China are mechanisms that China has used to strengthen its state sector: IP transfer, preferential treatment for SOEs, etc. This trade war is ultimately designed to pressure China into gutting their socialist system.

While a “phase one” deal has been reached between the U.S. and China, the actual implementation of that deal and further negotiations are uncertain. The second phase is supposed to deal with “structural issues” (read: the U.S. wants China to privatize and undo its socialist system) but so far we have not seen any movement in that direction. The COVID-19 crisis may put the brakes on the trade war and its negotiations for the foreseeable future.

The Democratic Party has done virtually nothing to oppose Trump’s trade war, and has instead merely asserted that the U.S. should be taking a “coalition” approach to “hold China accountable” for its “unfair trade practices.” Joe Biden explicitly said this about the phase one deal: “[It] won’t actually resolve the real issues at the heart of the dispute, including industrial subsidies, support for state-owned enterprises, cybertheft, and other predatory practices in trade and technology.”56 There is a cross-party consensus on waging economic war against China.

Conclusions and Looking Ahead

I hope this article provided a useful overview of the background and current situation facing China in the world today. What is clear to me is that the U.S. is feeling increasingly threatened by China’s rise and has concluded that the only way to slow it down is to employ the old Cold War tactics used against countries like the USSR, Cuba and the DPRK. The bargain between U.S. capital and China appears to be coming to a definitive end, and I see no indication that this situation will be resolved anytime soon. For the non-Chinese socialist movement, I hope this information provides a better understanding of the world we live in and China’s role. I hope that more socialists – even if they do not agree with the assessment that China is socialist – will come to view China’s rise as a decisive break with U.S. hegemony, something we have not seen since the USSR. China is the future, and the sooner we all educate ourselves on it the better we will be able to interact with China and its millions of communists. The non-Chinese left has a lot to learn from the experience of the PRC, both in its revolution and its post-revolution governance. I hope I have contributed to that understanding.

This article will be reviewed and re-visited as time goes on new developments unfold.

I would like to thank the many people who have helped me better understand China, socialism and geopolitics generally. There’s too many to list and I would feel bad leaving anyone out, but if you have ever shared materials with me or offered insight on China I’m forever in your debt. Finally of course I can only say thank you to all of the Chinese people and their comrades who have given the rest of the world hope for a better future.

https://www.qiaocollective.com/en/articles/war-on-china
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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Sat Apr 24, 2021 2:20 pm

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West-Backed Color Revolution a ‘Top Threat’ to China’s National, Political Security
April 22, 2021
By Yang Sheng and Chen Qingqing – Apr 15, 2021

The sixth National Security Education Day falls on Thursday, with the Chinese national security agency releasing a series of cases related to the threat against China’s political security. Experts on international intelligence and security said under the intensifying China-US competition, foreign hostile forces have increased efforts to target the political security of China rather than merely conducting regular espionage activities.

The law enforcement cases released by relevant national security agencies this year are different from the past, which specifically focus on the political security issue, including suspects who have colluded with foreign anti-China forces that try to subvert the state power. Some of them are related to the Hong Kong turmoil in 2019, which try to expand the Western-backed color revolution from the special administrative region to the mainland.

“When we talk about national security, people will normally think of foreign espionage activities that target China’s military and economic intelligence. But now many recent cases show that the internal and external anti-China forces are colluding with each other,” Li Wei, an expert on national security and anti-terrorism at the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations, told the Global Times.

“This shows that the foreign hostile forces are strengthening their efforts to promote ‘color revolution’, to damage the political security of our country,” Li said, stressing that this has become the primary national security challenge that China is facing at the moment.

Regular espionage activities targeting military and economic intelligence aim to help relevant countries in their negotiations or competition with China, “but the color revolution that directly targets our political security is trying to harm the stability and public order in our country, so it’s much more serious and destructive,” said a Chinese expert on international intelligence who asked for anonymity.

Technically, a color revolution is a “smarter measure” to help Western countries, especially the US, destabilize or overthrow a country, the expert said. “After the Iraq War, the US and its allies have been more reluctant to dispatch ground troops because direct military operation will cause casualties to their soldiers and other unpredictable costs. But using social media networks, NGOs, and ‘diplomats’ to mobilize, train, fund and organize local people against the government will cost less and is easier to create chaos.”

“We can see many similar cases in Syria, Libya, Venezuela, Ukraine and Belarus. The main actors in those countries are local people guided by Western proxies, and Western military forces normally serve as a supporting role, and sometimes they don’t even show up,” he said.

Chinese analysts said the US and its allies dare not directly launch military operations against nuclear-armed major powers, like China and Russia, or their neighboring countries. So after a series of ineffective approaches like the trade war, military pressure and propaganda stigmatization, the color revolution is being used a major tactic to disrupt China’s development, and it seems like is the last card that the US can play to stop China from realizing great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.

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April 15, 2021, marks the 6th National Security Education Day of China. Anti-spying is still the main topic of the day. Who could be a spy around you? How can you become a spy’s target? Check out this graphic to find out the answers:Infographic: Wu Tiantong/GT

More infiltration
In one case among the recently released law enforcement cases that aim to promote national security education, a student surnamed Tian who studied journalism at a university in North China’s Hebei Province has become a “cub reporter” in China working for a mainstream Western media. Tian established an anti-China website in 2018 and cooked up and spread a huge amount of disinformation and political rumors.

In April 2019, Tian was invited to visit a Western country, and has engaged with more than 20 hostile foreign groups and more than a dozen officials of the host country to receive direct instruction, which requires Tian to provide “evidence” that could be used to stigmatize China. Tian’s acts have seriously harmed China’s political security, and he was arrested in June 2019, according to information provided by state security agencies.

Li said this is a typical case of the US and Western anti-China forces infiltrating and inciting Chinese students and using them to serve the ideological warfare against China.

“Working for Western media outlets is not a problem, but if using the profession of a journalist as a cover to conduct activities to harm national security is a crime,” Li said, noting that not all employees in Western media outlets are spies, but there are some Western journalists backed by Western politicians and intelligence agencies.

In cooking-up rumors about “genocide” and “forced labor” in China’s Xinjiang, Western media are playing an important role, Li noted. “Just like this case, those ‘journalists’ are receiving funding and training in other countries, and implementing the tactic of anti-China politicians to destabilize China.”

On Wednesday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said at the routine press conference that in 2020, the US ambassador to Turkey met with the head of the local ETIM (East Turkestan Islamic Movement) branch.

The ETIM, or Turkistan Islamic Party, is an extremist, terrorist and separatist organization that challenges China’s sovereignty and stability in Xinjiang. The UN Security Council Al-Qaida Sanctions Committee has listed ETIM as a terrorist organization since 2002.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry played a video segment at the press conference, which showed Sibel Edmonds, a former FBI translator, revealing in a 2015 interview that “a lot of these people are taken out (from Xinjiang) by the Gladio operatives…they are trained, they are armed and then they are sent back.”

Putting things together, one cannot help but wonder, what did the US ambassador to Turkey talk about with the head of anti-China force? What is Operation Gladio? Does the US intend to cause trouble in Xinjiang?” Zhao said.

According to the released information, in the past, some arrested former senior officials in Xinjiang said they even colluded with foreign separatist forces to conduct or tolerate terrorist attacks in the region, and use textbooks with extremist content in local schools, which brought serious damage to the national unity and political security.

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Police officers perform a new goose step, the same style used by police and troops on the Chinese mainland, at the city’s police college before hoisting the Chinese national flag and HKSAR flag during an open day to celebrate the National Security Education Day in Hong Kong on Thursday. Photo: AFP

Hong Kong frontline
Hong Kong is another frontline of China’s national security and political security. Since the national security law for Hong Kong took effect in June 2020, foreign forces behind months-long anti-government riots in the city since June 2019 have begun to waver, given that offenders would face severe sentences — as high as life imprisonment. The law would also cut off “the invisible hands” behind the chaos caused by foreign troublemakers, experts said.

It’s not surprising to many that Western forces used Hong Kong’s open city status to incite color revolution through various channels, including media outlets, student unions, political parties and labor unions by funding, training, advising them or organizing illegal assemblies, protests and riots, all tactics that could be found in the 2019 turmoil.

The implementation of the national security law helped Hong Kong restore social order, plugging the loopholes in local security laws, Chris Tang Ping-keung, Commissioner of Police, told the Global Times on Wednesday, as the law has been functioning as an effective deterrence to those lawbreakers who endanger national security.

Since the implementation of the national security law for Hong Kong, 100 people have been arrested by the Hong Kong Police Force for suspected of endangering national security, Tang said.

Safeguarding national security is regarded as the top priority for the Commissioner of Police for 2021, which is also among the top four tasks for the HKPF. The police team will continue collecting and analyzing national security-related intelligence, investigating in criminal cases endangering national security and conducting intelligence-driven operations to prevent acts endangering the national security, Tang noted.

“The HKPF will also enhance cooperation with all institutions and stakeholders in safeguarding national security and earn more public trust and support,” he said.

To facilitate public participation in safeguarding national security, the HKPF national security department has launched a hotline for reporting relevant non-emergency cases since November 5, 2020.

Nasty acts will backfire
Apart from targeting Xinjiang and Hong Kong which are traditional geopolitical hotspots, foreign hostile forces are also keen to use issues like LGBT, feminism and environmentalism which are easy to stir heated discussions on social media via disinformation and rumors to create problems by instigating conflicts between specific groups in China, said the anonymous expert on international intelligence.

Fortunately, this kind of practice is unable to cause a significant impact or escalate into a massive color revolution, since with the modernization and development of China, the majority of Chinese netizens are able to discuss these issues with a mature and reasonable attitude, and legal civil organizations on LGBT or environment protection will distance themselves from hostile foreign intervention, the expert said.

“Those extremists backed by Western forces have been marginalized in our society and their illegal activities online and offline will be managed and controlled effectively by relevant law-enforcement agencies,” he noted.

Ironically, the US has found that some of its approaches to push color revolution worldwide could backfire, and the rise of Trumpism and intensifying Black Lives Matter movement and the Capitol Hill riot have seriously undermined its image and credibility when it tries to promote color revolutions in other countries, the expert said.

International cooperation
The Western-backed color revolution is a common threat faced by China and many countries including Russia, and countries in Central Asia, Middle East, Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America. So defending political security now also requires international cooperation, analysts said.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said at a press conference after his meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in March that the two countries will jointly oppose color revolutions and safeguard their national sovereignty and political security.

“Fighting color revolutions is an important task for China and Russia to not just protect themselves but also safeguard regional peace and stability. The two countries could cooperate on intelligence sharing, joint operations against Western illegal NGOs that would create disinformation to hype instability and cybersecurity,” Yang Jin, an expert at the Institute of Russian, Eastern European and Central Asian Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times.

Featured image: Photo: VCG

https://orinocotribune.com/west-backed- ... -security/
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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Tue Apr 27, 2021 12:34 pm

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China to the US: Western Rules are Not Universal Rules and ‘Democracy is not Coca-Cola’
April 25, 2021

China rejects attempts by the West to set its own standards as “universal” in the world, and asserts that 12% of the world’s people cannot decide for everyone.

“Some people in the US have repeatedly expressed their desire to strengthen ‘a rules-based international order.’ But the question is what are the rules, who established them, ” Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi questioned on Friday, April 23, during a videoconference with representatives of the US Council on Foreign Relations.

In his statement, Wang pointed out that Western countries that are seeking to set standards for the entire world comprise only 12% of the world’s population.

The top Chinese diplomat emphasized the need for countries to act within the framework of a world order based on international law, as the Asian giant is already doing.

Ironically pointing out that “democracy is not Coca-Cola, which promises the same taste everywhere in the world,” the Chinese top diplomat urged Washington to respect the path and system independently chosen by China.

In the same vein, he denounced US interference in China’s internal affairs “under the slogan of democracy and the protection of human rights.”

In fact, he called on Washington to adhere to the one-China principle when addressing Taiwan’s separatist ambitions, to stop meddling in Hong Kong affairs, and to stop fabricating lies about alleged human rights violations in Xinjiang.

In the opinion of the head of Chinese diplomacy, tensions between the world’s two leading economies will not abate if the United States does not accept the “peaceful rise” of China and does not recognize that Beijing “also has the right to seek development and a better life.”

In addition to the cases mentioned by Wang, the US and China have hot spots on issues such as trade, cybersecurity and technology.

Beijing considers that Washington is using its financial and military powers to pressure other countries, and opines that Washington’s abusive national security policies threaten the future of world trade.

Featured image: Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi. Photo courtesy of HispanTV.

(HispanTV)

Translation: Orinoco Tribune

https://orinocotribune.com/china-to-the ... coca-cola/

*****************************************************

Interview: CPC plays key role in China's social, economic development, says senior Venezuelan party official
By Yosley Carrero | Xinhua | Updated: 2021-04-27 07:36

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Adan Chavez, vice president of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), receives an interview with Xinhua in Havana, capital of Cuba, April 1, 2021. (Xinhua)

HAVANA, April 26 (Xinhua) -- The Communist Party of China (CPC) has been fundamental for the social and economic development achieved by China over the past decades, Adan Chavez, vice president of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), has said.

Speaking of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the CPC, Chavez, who is also Venezuelan ambassador to Cuba, told Xinhua that for the Chinese ruling party, "it has been 100 years of fruitful work, great victories, and huge progress for the happiness of the Chinese people and humanity."

Chavez, who visited China four times between 2017 and 2019, said that the strong leadership of the CPC and its leaders have played an essential role in eradicating absolute poverty across China and in the country's scientific development.

"We have witnessed how the Chinese people have rendered huge support for their government and the CPC while working together in keeping with principles of socialism with Chinese characteristics," he said.

Referring to the third volume of "Xi Jinping: The Governance of China," the senior Venezuelan party official said the book portrays steps to be taken to succeed in the construction of socialism and a new vision of the Chinese leadership.

He said that China is an inspiration for nations fighting for freedom and sovereignty, adding that the huge progress made by the Chinese people is a clear proof that socialism is an effective solution "to the problems affecting humanity."

The CPC is a pillar of the scientific and technological development made by China, and achievements attained by its people are not only a "role model for the rest of the world, but a symbol of hope," Chavez said.

Regarding the COVID-19 pandemic, he said that China, under the guidance of the CPC, has effectively managed the health emergency by putting people "at the very heart" of measures adopted to contain the spread of the virus nationwide.

"The Communist Party of China has strongly shown its determination to defend the fundamental principles of international relations between the peoples of the world," he told Xinhua.

"In addition," he added, "it has always been in line with the principle of self-determination, non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries, solidarity and respect for international law."

He said that "the role the CPC can continue to play is crucial for years to come" as a reference to other political parties and progressive movements across the world, highlighting the good relations between the CPC and the PSUV.

"The United Socialist Party of Venezuela aims to continue strengthening cooperation links and joint work with the CPC," he said.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20210 ... ba8c5.html

This is the nut of the failure of 'negotiations' between the US and China: the US insist that China dismantle socialism, claiming that it gives them unfair advantage against the capitalist West! Well, 'duh!', and then they complain of Chinese 'intransigence'. Whadda laugh, goes without saying that capitalists find being under the people's thumb disagreeable, anathema. It impinges upon the rich's freedom to do whatever the fuck they please, the original meaning of 'freedom' of the ancient Roman ruling class which the founding fuckheads so admired.

'Unfair', you say? I suppose the comparative body counts from the pandemic is illustrative....
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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Mon May 03, 2021 1:27 pm

In 2018 the US Was at War With Uyghur Terrorists. Now It Claims They Don’t Even Exist
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on MAY 2, 2021
Alan Macleod

Image

In the dying months of his administration, President Donald Trump removed from the United States terrorist list a little-known paramilitary organization called ETIM, an acronym that stands for either the East Turkestan Independence Movement or the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, depending on whom one asks. The group is also sometimes known as the [East] Turkestan Islamic Party (TIP or ETIP).

Explaining the decision, the State Department said that “ETIM was removed from the list because, for more than a decade, there has been no credible evidence that ETIM continues to exist.” The move was hailed by a wide range of Uyghur groups in the United States, who saw it as a step towards blocking China’s actions against Uyghurs in Xinjiang Province.

Yet the decision will have confused anyone with a long memory or who closely followed the War on Terror. Only two years previously, the U.S. was actively at war with the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, with Trump himself ordering an escalation of a bombing campaign against them.

In 2018, Major General James Hecker, the commander of NATO Air Command-Afghanistan, gave a press conference in which he noted that not only was ETIM real but they were working hand in hand with the Taliban and boasted that his forces were destroying their training bases, thereby reducing their terrorist activities both in the Afghanistan/Pakistan/China border region and inside China itself.

“Anybody that is an enemy of Afghanistan, we’re going to target them,” Brigadier General Lance Bunch told the The Washington Post, also announcing that “[w]e’ve got new authorities now that allow us to be able to . . . target the Taliban and the ETIM where they previously thought they were safe.”

Why then was the government suddenly insisting that ETIM/TIP did not exist? And who is this shadowy organization?

Who are the ETIM/TIP?

The East Turkestan Islamic Movement is a jihadist group led since 2003 by Abdul Haq al-Turkistani, a Xinjiang-born Uyghur. Its goal is to set up a Muslim-only ethnostate (East Turkestan) in Xinjiang. A dry and mountainous region at the western edge of China, Xinjiang is about the size of Alaska and is home to around 25 million people.

“This land is for Muslims alone,” Haq explains in an al-Qaeda PR film; “the mere presence of the disbelievers on this land should be a sufficient reason for Muslims to set out for jihad.” ETIM is still considered a terrorist organization by the United Nations, European Union, United Kingdom, and Russia, among others.

Unsurprisingly, the Chinese government also classifies it as such. When asked for comment, Wang Wenbin, a spokesman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told MintPress that “ETIM has long been engaging in terrorist and violent activities, causing heavy casualties and property losses, and posing serious threats to security and stability in China, the region and beyond.” Wenbin also criticized the U.S. “flip flop” on ETIM, something that, in his words, “once again exposes the current U.S. administration’s double standard on counter-terrorism and its repulsive practice of condoning terrorist groups as it sees fit.” MintPress also reached out to a range of Uyghur organizations for comment, but all declined to do so.

Some of the most high-profile of these attacks inside China, cited by Wenbin, were ETIM’s attempts to sabotage the 2008 Beijing Olympics by carrying out bomb attacks on host cities. Just before the games, ETIM released a video featuring a burning Olympic flag and warning all Muslims to stay away from the venues. There has also been a string of deadly attacks attributed to ETIM in which terrorists drive vehicles into crowds of pedestrians then proceed to carry out stabbing rampages.

Tweets ETIM

Tweets from a pro-ETIM account show the myriad enemies of the terror group, including American soldiers

In 2009, tensions between Uyghurs and ethnic Han Chinese spilled over into deadly riots in Xinjiang’s capital Urumqi, where nearly 200 people, mostly Han, were killed. As a result of the unrest, Beijing ordered a massive increase in surveillance and security across the region, flooding the province with cameras, armed police, and spies. To this day, it retains an extremely high-security presence.

Of course, the large majority of those killed by ETIM around the world have been non-Salafist Muslims, and considering ETIM to be representatives of the Uyghur population as a whole would be extremely misleading. In fact, the Uyghurs of Xinjiang have been caught in the crossfire between the ETIM and the Chinese government. To this day, the Afghan government also considers the group to be a serious threat to peace and security in Afghanistan.

Al-Qaeda, Taliban ties, Chinese target

ETIM units have trained and fought in what seems like virtually every single conflict involving Muslims over the past 20 years, but always with an eye to bringing their skills back home. A 2017 Associated Press exclusive titled “Uyghurs fighting in Syria take aim at China” found that at least 5,000 Xinjiang Uyghurs had traveled to Syria to train and fight alongside both al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. “We didn’t care how the fighting went or who Assad was,” one ETIM fighter told the AP; “We just wanted to learn how to use the weapons and then go back to China.” For many, Beijing’s crackdown on civil liberties in the wake of the Urumqi riots was the catalyst. “We’ll avenge our relatives being tortured in Chinese jail,” another fighter told the AP. A 2015 New York Times report also notes that one Chinese Muslim had been trained in Libya before going to Syria to fight against government forces.

The United Nations states that ETIM “has maintained close ties with the Taliban, Al-Qaida and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan.” Indeed, since 2005, ETIM leader Haq has been a member of al-Qaeda’s council of elders, a group of about two dozen individuals who control the organization’s direction. The UN notes that the ETIM’s major source of funding was Osama Bin Laden himself, who directly employed and paid Haq.

“The organization is clearly a part of al-Qaeda’s network — there is no real question about this fact. Al-Qaeda doesn’t hide its sponsorship of the TIP [ETIM]. And the TIP [ETIM] doesn’t hide its allegiance to al-Qaeda,” wrote Thomas Joscelyn, a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy, a hawkish think tank located in Washington. “But the Chinese Communist Party’s detestable policies in Xinjiang have led some democracy and human rights activists to downplay or dismiss the TIP’s overt jihadism,” he added.

In 2002, U.S. forces captured and detained 22 Uyghur militants at an ETIM camp in Afghanistan. They were sent to Guantanamo Bay prison camp in Cuba and were accused of traveling from China to join the ETIM jihad, something many admitted to. However, all insisted that they were uninterested in harming the United States and instead saw China as their major enemy. Considering them no direct threat to itself, the United States began releasing them to third countries and by 2013 all had been freed.

Uighur Syria

Image
A Uyghur fighter in Syria affiliated with ETIM is shown in an al-Qaeda propaganda video

The training camp was located in the Tora Bora Mountains of Afghanistan and run by Haq himself. U.S. intelligence actually concluded that many of the trainees acted as a “blocking force” for Bin Laden in 2001, when American forces came very close to capturing him. This allowed him to evade the U.S. for a further ten years. The U.S. carried out an assassination attempt on Haq in 2010, with media reporting that he had been killed by an unmanned drone. However, he was merely seriously injured and escaped with his life.

The State Department designated the ETIM as a terrorist group, adding them to its list in September 2002. At that point, the Bush administration had declared a war on terror, was battling the Taliban in Afghanistan and was about to invade Iraq. Furthermore, relations with China were good at the time and the Bush administration wished to secure Chinese co-operation or at least dampen Chinese resistance to its campaigns.

“Designating ETIM/TIP as a terrorist organization does seem appropriate,” Daniel Dumbrill — a Canadian YouTuber currently in Xinjiang, and an outspoken critic of U.S. policy towards China — told MintPress, adding:

I don’t believe they suddenly and abruptly cease to exist and I don’t believe the U.S. government believes this either. Even if they did, the Tamil Tigers have been inactive for over 10 years since their defeat, but they remain on the U.S. government list of terrorist organizations. Therefore, it doesn’t seem like clearing off inactive terror groups has ever been a matter of priority. There is of course, I believe, an ulterior motive to [their removal from the terrorist list].”

A fight for global supremacy

Today, however, relations with China have definitely soured. The country’s rapid economic rise has alarmed and preoccupied many planners in the West, who now see China as America’s “unparalleled priority” for the 21st century. President Trump placed sanctions on the country and attempted to block the growth of Chinese tech companies like Huawei, TikTok, and Xiaomi. Along with the trade war has come a war of words, with top brass in Washington suggesting that the new Cold War with Beijing will be less about tanks and missiles and more “kicking each other under the table.” Others have advised that the U.S. should wage a widespread culture war, including commissioning what they call “Taiwanese Tom Clancy novels” meant to demonize and demoralize China.

The prospect of a hot war cannot be overlooked, however. And U.S. actions are making the threat all the more likely. In 2013, the Obama administration announced a “Pivot to Asia,” meaning a draw-down from the Middle East and an escalation of tensions in the Pacific. Today, over 400 American military bases encircle China. American ships and aircraft continue to probe the Chinese coastline, testing their defenses. In July, U.S.S. Rafael Peralta sailed within 41 nautical miles of the coastal megacity of Shanghai. Earlier this year, the head of Strategic Command stated that there was a “very real possibility” of war against Beijing in the near future.

Uyghur repression

It is in this context that the United States has begun to denounce China’s treatment of its Uyghur minority. Xinjiang has been under serious security measures for more than a decade, and the internment of Uyghurs has been going on since at least 2014. Yet the U.S. was largely silent about their treatment until recently. Today, the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy (NED) accuses China of imprisoning between one and three million Uyghur Muslims, describing it as a genocide. The NED has given nearly $9 million to Uyghur groups and has condemned what it sees as a “deafening silence in the Muslim world” about their plight.

Amnesty International has largely agreed, labeling what China calls re-education facilities, meant to deradicalize the population, as “detention camps for torture and brainwashing of anyone suspected of disloyalty.” Uyghurs have alleged that they have been forcibly sterilized, that their places of worship have been demolished, and that they were made to eat pork and separated from their families while interned.

Others have rejected this interpretation. Economist Jeffrey Sachs, head of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, recently wrote:

There are credible charges of human rights abuses against Uyghurs, but those do not per se constitute genocide. And we must understand the context of the Chinese crackdown in Xinjiang, which had essentially the same motivation as America’s foray into the Middle East and Central Asia after the September 2001 attacks: to stop the terrorism of militant Islamic groups.”

Dumbrill seemed to agree, noting that many Uyghurs in Xinjiang see the extremist jihadists as their primary worry, not government forces, of whom some Uyghurs speak fondly. “The police presence aside, people lead fairly ordinary lives here with the same kinds of hopes and dreams that people anywhere else would have as well,” he told MintPress, criticizing the foreign coverage.

Wenbin was, unsurprisingly, even more dismissive of the charges. “Western politicians and media are frantically spreading lies on Xinjiang,” he said, adding that “the allegation of ‘genocide’ is more than preposterous.”

The politics of terror

At the same time as it was delisting the East Turkestan Islamic Movement for apparently not existing, the Trump administration added Cuba to its list of state sponsors of terror. Without a hint of irony, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo pointed to the island’s “malign interference in Venezuela and the rest of the Western Hemisphere” as the reason for the designation. A report released last month by the Department of Health and Human Services outlined what such malign influence was: offering doctors and other medical teams to other needy countries during a global pandemic.

Yet the politics of the terror list has always been highly suspect. In an attempt to dampen worldwide support for his cause and shore up the Apartheid government, the Reagan administration placed South African leader Nelson Mandela on the terrorist list in 1988. Mandela was not pulled off it until 2008 — 14 years after he became president.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration also recently removed Sudan from the list of state sponsors of terror, in what was an openly transactional event. Sudan agreed to normalize relations with Israel and give the U.S. hundreds of millions of dollars. As usual, Trump was unable not to say the quiet part out loud: “GREAT news! New government of Sudan, which is making great progress, agreed to pay $335 MILLION to U.S. terror victims and families. Once deposited, I will lift Sudan from the State Sponsors of Terrorism list. At long last, JUSTICE for the American people and BIG step for Sudan,” he tweeted.

Ultimately, the drastic change in U.S. policy on the ETIM has nothing to do with the movement itself — which remains the same jihadist group linked to al-Qaeda, ISIS, and the Taliban — but rather to a changing American stance towards China. For years, the U.S. ignored human rights issues in Xinjiang, as China was seen as a useful workshop for American capitalism. But the PRC’s rapid rise has frightened many in Washington; hence the sudden fascination with the plight of the Uyghurs. The designation of the ETIM as a terrorist group was likely seen as getting in the way of longstanding U.S. attempts to provoke unrest in China. With China now in the crosshairs, the group has moved from being an adversary to being a potential asset. It appears that the government decided that insisting they no longer exist was an easier sell than pretending they are no longer a terrorist group.

While the change in status might seem inconsequential, it could be a harbinger of a dangerous future. The East Turkestan Islamic Movement was placed on the list because of the War on Terror. Now it has been taken off because of the coming war on China.

Feature photo | Graphic by Antonio Cabrera

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2021/05/ ... ven-exist/
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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Fri May 07, 2021 1:12 pm

Aiming At China U.S., UK Launch Ethnic Guerilla War On Myanmar
If you wonder what is happening in Myanmar there is no need to look further than these maps.

China needs oil but its sea main supply route through the Strait of Malacca is vulnerable.

Image

Pipelines through Pakistan and Myanmar provide for alternative routes.

Image

The pipe, road and rail lines through Myanmar are not only in China's best interest but also a great chance for Myanmar to further develop. They are in its national interest.

The U.S. and its allies are hostile to China. Threatening to cut its oil supplies is probably the most powerful tool in their box. Any alternative supply routes for China make this tool less powerful. The idea then is to prevent the possible use of these routes.

Since its foundation after World War II Myanmar was ruled, sometimes more sometimes less brutal, by its anti-colonial military.

The first U.S. plan to gain control over Myanmar was to install a 'democratic government' that would do its bidding. In 2010, under pressure of U.S. instigated color revolutions, the military conceded to allow a civilian government but kept much of its constitutional and economic power. In 2016 the U.S. preferred candidate Suu Kyi, the daughter of the former military leader and Father of the Nation Aung San, was installed at the head of a new government.

But Aung San Suu Kyi turned out to be a nationalist and soon failed in the eyes of the U.S. regime changers. She was as friendly with China as the military and was equally aggressive against Myanmar's many ethnic minorities. Her eventual fall out with the military was not over those issues. The military owns key industries in Myanmar and Aung San Suu Kyi, and the 'civil society' people behind her, wanted a place at that trough.

Elections in 2020, which excluded voting in many ethnic regions, brought overwhelming support for Aung San Suu Kyi. This alarmed the military as it feared that its main source of income would soon be endangered. On February 1 it launched a coup and put Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest.

This brought a new chance for the U.S. to intervene. It immediately re-activated the 77 'civil society' organizations in Myanmar which it is financing through the CIA offshoot National Endowment for Democracy. Protest were launched together with attacks on Chinese companies and property.

As I described it at at that time:

So this is evidently a color revolution effort against the military.

What is irritating with it is the speed with which it took off. Color revs usually require years of group building and leadership preparation. They need monetary and communication support as well as political directions from 'advisors' in 'western' embassies. Here it took only ten days to launch it.

In 2005 the Bush administration cultivated the Myanmar 'civil society' and Suu Kyi, who was then under house arrest. It popped up in the 'Saffron color revolution' in 2007 and with Cyclone Nargis in 2008 when the Bush administration tried to use Responsibility to Protect (R2P) nonsense to get a military foot on the ground.

But that all is a long time ago and after Suu Kyi had come to power there was no necessity to keep those efforts alive.

Then again - under Myanmar's 2008 constitution the military was still effectively in charge. Together with Suu Kyi's large win in the latest election there may have been an long planned 'western' attempt underway to finally unseat the military from its privileged position and to pull the country out of China's orbit.

But the chance for that eventually to happen is practically zero. Some 70% of Myanmar's population lives in rural areas. The protests occur only in the three big cities Yangon, Mandalay and Naypyitaw and are relatively small. The military is ruthless and will have no trouble to take the protesters down.

Whoever launched this nonsense should be held responsible for endangering those people.

As I predicted the protests, and the strikes the color revolution apparatus induced in form of a Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM), have since petered out:

Although Thiha didn’t want to abandon CDM, he also didn’t want to lose his job amid a tanking economy. After weighing it up for a few days, he decided to get back to work.
“I have a loan from a microfinance company that I need to repay and a family to support – a wife and a five-year-old daughter,” he said. “It wouldn’t be easy for me to get another job, particularly as I’d have to change my career.”

There were just a handful of staff present when he turned up at his branch on April 20, but the number grew each day; by the April 29 deadline, about 80 percent had returned, although they were not yet wearing their KBZ uniforms.

It’s a scene being repeated around the country, as tens of thousands of striking bank workers slowly get back to work.

This U.S. induced color revolution attempt against the military coup has failed.

Now it is time for plan B - the Syria model: "If we can't have it we will destroy it!"

A major Burmese ethnic rebel group has claimed to have shot down a helicopter belonging to the country’s military. The incident comes amid continuing protests against the recent coup that ousted Myanmar’s civilian government.
The Kachin Independence Army (KIA) said the helicopter had been shot down on Monday in Myanmar’s northernmost province of Kachin. The aircraft is said to have been destroyed after Myanmar’s military launched airstrikes against the rebels.
...
Footage circulating online shows the helicopter – likely a Mi-17 transport-assault aircraft – sustaining an apparent hit from a portable anti-aircraft missile launcher.

The Kachin (red) in the north east and the Karen (orange) in the south east have a long history of fighting against the Burman (dark violet) majority and for autonomy within Myanmar. During World War II Burma's National Army under Aung San fought on the side of Japan to kick the colonial power Britain out of Burma. Britain, which at that time also controlled India, used the Kachin and Karen to wage a guerilla war against Japan's Burmese proxy forces.

Image

Under the great Quad project to fight China those old ties have now been reactivated. Former Indian ambassador M.K. Bhadrakumar explains the project:

[T]he operative part hidden from view concentrated on the creation of a “government-in-exile” (a National Unity Government.) Alongside, Britain’s MI6 sought to bring together Myanmar’s main ethnic separatist guerrilla groups, encouraging them to take advantage of the chaos to open a second front.
Indeed, some degree of proximity has since developed between the Burman protesters in Yangon and Mandalay on one side and the non-Burman minority ethnic groups on the other side. Despite a history of mutual antipathy, they have a convergence today to bleed the military. It is an improbable coalition of Buddhists and Christians, but as an American analyst cautiously assesses, it is doable:
...
At any rate, by mid-April, the first major armed attack on the military took place by the Karen National Union, Myanmar’s oldest rebel group (which was originally created by the British colonial power as its proxy.) Such attacks have since become commonplace.

Today, the so-called National Unity Government announced its intention to establish a Federal Union Army — a military force of defectors from the security forces, rebel ethnic groups and volunteers. This would be a watershed transforming the anti-military agitation to an armed confrontation with the military. Myanmar is entering the crucial stage where Syria stood in 2011.

The Man Portable Air Defense (Manpad) missile used by the Kachin against a Myanmar army helicopter did not come out of nowhere.

It must have come from the MI6 or CIA through Myanmar's wide open borders with Quad member India. (Fielding provisions for the Karen near the Thai border are likely more complicate as the Thai military is itself under U.S. color revolution pressure and would not like to help with such efforts.)

There are more ethnic groups on both sides of the Indian border that can and will be used to wage a guerrilla war against Myanmar's military. With free supplies of modern weapons available to them they can create significant damage.

Meanwhile the Juan Guaido like exile 'National Unity Government' will be used to pretend that there is real opposition to the military government. The 'Federal Union Army' will be a copy of the 'Syrian National Army' - a lose assembly of mercenaries and diverse warlord groups. 'White Helmets' like propaganda organization will likely also soon appear.

The hope is to ignite a wide ranging civil war that will make any Chinese projects in Myanmar impossible to implement.

Bhadrakumar finds that the project is well coordinated:

The US Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke with his Indian counterpart S. Jaishankar not less than three times in as many months since the military takeover in Myanmar. To be sure, India’s cooperation is crucial for the success of the Anglo-American enterprise in Myanmar.

Myanmar figured prominently at the G7 foreign ministers’ meeting in London on May 3-5. Jaishankar travelled to London and met with Blinken. Neither side divulged details, but a Deutsche-Welle report flagged that “China was at the top of the agenda as the G7 foreign ministers discussed a range of human rights issues. Addressing the Myanmar coup and Russian aggression was also on the docket.”

It added that the G7 ministers watched a video from Myanmar’s National Unity Government to “update the ministers with the current situation on the ground.” The joint communique issued after the London meeting devotes much attention to Myanmar (paras 21-24). It expresses “solidarity” with the National Unity Government and issues call for comprehensive sanctions against the Myanmar military, including an arms embargo.

The birth pangs of insurgencies are never open to public view, as intelligence agencies get the actors into play. The Myanmar situation has reached that point. This is the first big bash of post-Brexit UK (“Global Britain”) on the world stage. As so often in modern history, London will lead from the rear.

Countermoves to the U.S. and UK plans will come from Russia and China. A week before the coup Russia's Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu had visited Myanmar. On March 27 Russia's deputy defense minister Alexander Fomin was present at the annual Armed Forces Day parade in Naypyidaw.

Russia has oil interests in Myanmar and sells weapons to its military. It is preventing any measures against Myanmar at the UN Security Council. In a sign that it knows what's at stake it has warned that sanctions against the military could lead to a full blown civil war.

China has so far stayed quiet on the issue. It will try to keep a low profile. Any open Chinese intervention is out of question but Chinese help may become important if or when Myanmar's government comes under financial stress.

It is sad to see that another little country, which wants nothing but to be left alone, will soon get destroyed in the 'western' attempt to keep China down. A proxy war between great powers no one but already rich people will benefit from.

Posted by b on May 6, 2021 at 16:44 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2021/05/a ... .html#more
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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Sat May 08, 2021 1:35 pm

Chinese governance style a viable alternative to West
chinadaily.com.cn | Updated: 2021-05-07 15:39


Image
Farmers promote and sell green tea via livestreaming in Songtao county, Guizhou province. [Photo by Long Yuanbin/for chinadaily.com.cn]

China's great capacity for governance exemplified by the management of the coronavirus pandemic has proved to be an unprecedented economic and social success, said Xulio Ríosin, director of the Observatory of Chinese Politics, in an opinion piece on May 4.

According to the article, the United States has experienced a significant 37 percentage point drop in trust across its institutions while at the opposite end of the scale, China has recorded a 27-point gain. When it comes to governance, one of the most important trust indicators, China leads the way. Edelman Trust Barometer found that 84 percent of people in China trust their government, the highest level worldwide and an eight percentage point increase on 2017.

Chinese public opinion is based on how government improves people's lives, the article argued. Through poverty alleviation, there has been a substantial improvement in the incomes (per capita income exceeded $10,000 compared to $150 in 1978) and public welfare of its citizens.

"If China has shown anything over the last five decades, it is the ability to evolve by diagnosing its problems, offering its own solutions and establishing rhythms adjusted to its own times," said Ríosin.

Western societies have been declining for years in terms of well-being, the author noted; corruption is rampant, inequality is deepening. Those who really hold power in the background are not those up for election. However, these Western countries are currently determined to demonize China because they believe that by doing this they can better protect themselves, while ignoring the well-being of the population or its indiscriminate repression.

"This 'distraction' could turn back on them if their own structural problems continue to worsen, leading to the loss of democratic quality at the hands of oligarchies with no interest in the common good," said Ríosin.

"In order to recover a purer sense of democracy, major reforms are required that limit the power of big capital and make the people key actors once again. Only when that happens and politics actually begins to improve lives can we regain confidence in politics again."

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20210 ... bc89b.html

Not the flaming polemics which we know and love but calm, reasoned and confident so as not to scare off the English language reader. I like it in the current circumstances, the pandemic having brought sharp focus that which is undeniable, like a cell phone video.
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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Sun May 09, 2021 1:46 pm

The Xinjiang genocide determination as agenda
Posted May 08, 2021 by Eds.

Originally published: The Transnational Foundation for Peace & Future Research, TFF, Lund, Sweden by Gordon Dumoulin, Jan Oberg and Thore Vestby (April 27, 2021) |
A Critical Analysis Of A Report By The Newlines Institute And The Raoul Wallenberg Center

On March 8, 2021, the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy in Washington published a report, The Uyghur Genocide: An Examination of China’s Breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention in cooperation with the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights in Montreal.

It states that

This report is the first independent expert application of the 1948 Genocide Convention to the ongoing treatment of the Uyghurs in China. It was undertaken by the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy, in cooperation with the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, in response to emerging accounts of serious and systematic atrocities in Xinjiang province, particularly directed against the Uyghurs, an ethnic minority, to ascertain whether the People’s Republic of China is in breach of the Genocide Convention under international law.

The Report–hereafter The Report–has been produced with the contributions of, and upon consultation with, numerous independent experts, including 33 who have agreed to be identified publicly, as it is stated.

The purpose of this TFF analysis is to examine the status of the Newlines Institute and the circle of scholars and others who have produced and contributed to it and their connections. It also takes a closer look at The Report’s methods and content as well as the sources on which The Report bases its extremely serious conclusion, namely that the Chinese state is responsible for committing genocide and violates the central provisions of the said Convention in its policies in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) intentionally.

TFF wants to make it very clear from the outset that we do not take a stand on whether or not what happens in Xinjiang is a genocide. As of principle, we would not state such an opinion unless we had also been on the ground in Xinjiang. The sole purpose is to examine what this first independent scholarly documentation–which was covered immediately by a wide range of Western mainstream media–is based on.

We first present the Executive Summary of our findings and then expand on a series of more specific themes and perspectives.

Executive summary
1. The Report and the two institutes behind it are not ”independent”, and the report does not present new materials. Co-produced with the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, it’s the product of cooperation among individuals from at least six, more or less inter-connected, interest groups, or milieus, which are more Near– than Non-governmental–namely:
Christian fundamentalism + hawkish conservative U.S. foreign policy circles + Muslim Brotherhood circles + extreme anti-Communism + pro-Israel lobby circles + the politicising human rights machinery (in which human rights concerns tend to serve various types of interventions by the United States of America).

For a report published by independent scholars from an independent institute, this is problematic.

2. The somewhat haphazardly edited Report may have been published to back up former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s ”determination” on January 19, 2021, that what goes in Xinjiang is an ongoing genocide. No evidence accompanied it. Pompeo is known, in his capacity of CIA director and in his own words (2019), to be proud that ”we lied, cheated and stole–we had entire training courses–and it reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.” (Watch him say that 29:15 into this conversation). Mike Pompeo is also known as a Conservative Christian who, while at the West Point Military Academy, was ”brought to Jesus Christ”, and he is known to be extremely critical of China.

3. The Report comes through as containing both fake or dubious but also, significantly and systematically, biased choices of sources and as deliberately leaving out fundamentally important perspectives, theories, concepts and facts.
For an institute that professes to be based on solid scholarship and values, this is problematic.

4. The Report appears–whether knowingly or intentionally or not–as supportive of hardline U.S. foreign policy and as exploiting human rights concerns to promote a confrontational policy vis-a-vis China.
It certainly does not conform to the values of mutual understanding and peace that the Newlines Institute states that it is based on.

5. The Report conveys propaganda in the specific sense of treating China as the subject of all evil but omitting that an understanding of China’s policies must also include its relations, including the conflictual relations it has with the U.S. China is seen as an independent variable and, therefore, The Report can not produce any comparative perspective. To put it crudely: If what China does in Xinjiang is a genocide, are there other actors/governments who should also be determined as pursuing genocidal policies? Or, how does the Chinese ”war on terror” inside Xinjiang and its human costs compare with the U.S.-led Global War On Terror, GWOT, and its human costs?

6. Given the problems we point out in this analysis, one must be deeply concerned about the Western mainstream media’s systematically uncritical reception and coverage of the Newlines-Wallenberg Report. They gave it immediate and prominent attention, but we have found none of the media checking the sources of The Report or questioning that it is an ”independent” institute and the ”first ’independent’ expert application of the 1948 Genocide Convention.”

What we have found in The Report makes us believe that if this is the highest-quality documentation of a genocide in Xinjiang available, one may seriously doubt whether what goes on in Xinjiang is a genocide. And, most likely, determining it as such will only have negative consequences for U.S.-China relations and even for the United States itself.

What we have also found is that The Report is a rather illustrative example of the discourse and interest circles that characterise what we call the MIMAC, the Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex–building and expanding on the concept used for the first time by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who called it a Military-Industrial Complex, MIC, in his farewell speech in 1961.

This TFF Report as PDF
“The Xinjiang Genocide Determination As Agenda”Download
The independence of the two organisations, their background and connections
The Newlines Institute
Newlines was founded as late as 2019 by Dr Ahmed Alwani and is an affiliate of FXUA, Fairfax University of America, which is a private, business-oriented higher education institution with personality links to business and various U.S. government institutions. Its founder and president is also Dr Alwani but he is not mentioned on the university’s second homepage above. The university has another homepage, however, where he is presented as its President.

Its corporate advisory council consist of, among others, Ken Logerwell who is also senior vice president of the National Security and Innovative Solutions (NSIS) that ”is an unrivaled problem-solving network that adapts to the emerging needs of those who serve in the defense of our national security. We are dedicated to the work of bringing together defense, academic and entrepreneurial innovators to solve national security problems in new ways.”

It is not clear why the Fairfax University of America has two homepages with different content and why one of the homepages presents a policy-making body, the Board of Trustees, that included Dr Alwani as President, which doesn’t exist on the other. Noteworthy is that three of its six members are also founders or in the leadership of the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT)–an organisation affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Newlines Institute set up an Uyghur Scholars Working Group in 2020. It tasked it with ”research and analysis on how best the U.S. government and its allies and partners can deal with Beijing’s efforts to erase Uyghur identity and culture.” So already before the present new report, the Institute had decided that that is what China does. A leading member of this group is Dr Adrian Zenz, whose central role in all this we shall return to.

The FXUA is a small college with about 150 students. According to its Wikipedia page, it has had problems with the quality standards of education; interestingly, the majority of the footnotes there deal with the Newlines/Wallenberg report findings, not the institute as such.

And who is Dr. Alwani who is–or perhaps has been–central in both organisations?

The Newlines Institute presents him this way,

Dr. Ahmed Alwani is the founder and president of Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy and its parent institution, Fairfax University of America (FXUA). He is a businessman based in northern Virginia with investments in the poultry, real estate, and education/training sectors.

So he is the founder of both, although he does not exist on the latest homepage of FXUA. The Newlines presentation of him lacks details. He is said to be driven by ”a desire to help improve the human condition,” and has also been on the advisory board the the U.S. military’s Africa Command and is connected with a series of other education institutes and investment firms.

His father, Taha Jabir al-Alwani, was a founding figure of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood and his death was announced by the above-mentioned IIIT–of which Dr Alwani is presently the Vice President.

The funding for the Newlines Institute–which was formerly (and still is) the Center for Global Policy, CGP–is provided by the FXUA but on its ”About” page it is emphasised that it is independent and also accepts research grants and donation but explicitly not ”from any foreign government or entity and is one of the few think tanks in Washington with no foreign or local agendas.” What this mention no foreign funding and of ”agendas” implies remains unexplained.

There is no explanation why Center for Global Policy changed to Newlines Institute; many of its videos and its Facebook page still use the CGP identity and only March 23 this year welcomed its visitors to the Newlines Institute.

The Newlines Institute is not an independent institute. And with the many changes of identity and relations indicated above, one must naturally wonder: What is it really?

Now to the co-publisher of The Report: The Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights

Here its own homepage, and here the Wikipedia entry. The Centre’s mission statement is a 7-page PDF. Still, you quickly gather what kind of human rights the Centre is engaged in: Holocaust remembrance, the struggle against anti-Semitism, human rights issues in Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela and no awareness-raising or campaigns concerning the human rights violations committed by Western countries and their allies. In short, the ”right” human rights issues of the U.S.

The Centre was founded in 2015 by an international human rights lawyer and former Canadian Minister of Justice, Irwin Cotler–Wikipedia and the homepage–who is also its Chair. Among his many connections, he is also a member of the heavily biased ”United Against Nuclear Iran” organisation. He is a defender of everything Israel and had no qualms about attacking distinguished professional colleagues like Richard Goldstone and Richard Falk who have been engaged in the plight of the Palestinian people.

Cotler is a staunch advocate of the Responsibility To Protect, R2P, and argued for it in Libya, criticised Canada for not intervening in Syria and nominated the terrorist-affiliated White Helmets for the Nobel Peace Prize. Already two weeks before The Report was published, he tried to press Canadian PM Trudeau to use the word ”genocide”, arguing that forced sterilizations and abortions and holding more than one million Uyghurs in what he called “concentration camps” violate the Convention.

You may read more about who Mr Cotler is in this well-documented critical analysis by Yves Engler in The Palestine Chronicle which also illustrates his close connections with Israel’s most powerful elites. Furthermore, Cotler’s daughter is a Knesset MP and his wife worked for and was a friend of then PM Menachim Begin. The Jewish Insider carried this interesting interview with Cotler himself on March 15, 2021.

While anyone is entitled to have political views, sym- and antipathies, they should be openly stated and not covered up by words like ”independent scholar.” Dr Cotler is clearly a very political human rights personality.

The sources and worldviews of The Report
The Report is presented in this video as based on consultation with fifty top and highest calibre experts in all relevant fields worldwide plus on ”looking at more than 10 000 testimonials of Uyghur witnesses and accounts from detainees.”

Yonah Diamond is The Report’s principal author. He is a prolific HR writer. On July 15, 2020, he co-authored an article in Foreign Policy and Genocide Watch, which, without indicating sources or evidence, revealed what the Newlines report has now stated 8 months later. Genocide Watch is founded and chaired by Dr Gregory Stanton, a former State Department official. It carries a Xinjiang Genocide Emergency Alert–Level 9: Extermination dated November 2020; this alert implies that the Uyghurs are already being ”exterminated”.

Revealing of Diamond’s political intentions is another article co-authored with Rayhan Asat in Foreign Policy of January 21, 2021, which argues that the U.S. must rethink its failed engagement policy and now ”confront the genocide in Xinjiang first.” (They start out with the story of Ekpar Asat, Rayhan Asat’s brother, who was a media entrepreneur, philanthropist and peacebuilder but is said to have been disappeared upon return from a visit to the U.S. in 2016 and not seen since–”one victim among millions of government atrocities that the United States have just designated a genocide”).

That was only two days after Pompeo’s statement. The political aims of the stated human rights concerns are obvious.

In the Newlines introductory video from March 31, Diamond (and other participants) emphasise how huge the material collected and analysed is. Still, none of the assertions made by the panellists is documented there. The references are just cited as facts. Furthermore, there is no discussion of methods, data sources or how The Report’s fact base was compiled and organised.

A central argument is brought forward by professor John Packer who states that the problem is that China argues that the issue of repression/genocide is an internal matter and that if that is accepted, how many other parts of international law shall we have to say goodbye to?

Another participant in the video discussion about The Report, Bethany Allen-Ebrahim, who worked with the China Cables project and is now a China reporter at Axios which published only negative reports about China to which she makes a substantial contribution. Although she lived four years in China and is fluent in the language, she comes through as a person who believes that China kind of doesn’t understand its own best.

All four participants in the discussion talk about China as if it was not a party to a conflict with the U.S. No one mentions U.S.-China policy and its increasingly confrontational character the last few years. Allen-Ebrahim uses phrases such as ”Chinese authoritarianism versus Western liberal democracies, human rights conventions that try to make the world a better place for everybody.”

The black, guilty China and the white innocent U.S./West seems to be a repeated underlying thought figure–a simplifying dichotomy hardly effective to convince you of independent or solid scholarship.

The choice, according to her, is human rights or money, and she believes that far too few stand up for the former. The CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, doesn’t understand the West, doesn’t understand that internment camps, in the eyes of democracies worldwide, is ”bad, the thing you just don’t do” and that it believes its own propaganda, she also claims. And, further, Xi Jinping has become so powerful that people are afraid, the leadership is in an echo chamber and believes that things have gone so well for so long that nothing can stop it and its ”endless insults” to a series of countries such as India and the United States.

Azeem Ibrahim, Newlines’ director of Special Initiatives and author of The Report’s foreword and also an adjunct professor at the U.S. Army War College, seems to believe that the Chinese believe–as he says–that perhaps if China wants Hong Kong, it will simply take it; if it wants Taiwan, it will simply take it and if it wants to it will also dominate the South China Sea.

In short, The Report omits every conflict analytical approach and treats China as a solitary actor driven by evil motives. While everybody–also scholars–have a right to personal opinions, the systematic value bias and China-negative attitudes held by all contributors makes one wonder how most of the authors and contributors were selected. Such uniform and systematic ”ideological” bias could very likely influence The Report’s choice of data and sources.

Finally, the CVs of the authors and contributors at the end of The Report largely omit mention of these extra-academic affiliations and political connections that are clear when you search a little deeper.

The content of The Report
Now to The Report itself, 55 pages where one notices that the above-mentioned Diamond is the principal author while Cotler, Stanton, Packer and 29 other ”independent experts” have been consulted and/or contributed directly and ”have agreed to be identified publicly.” Logically, that must mean that there have been scholars who did not want to have their names mentioned; that militates against normal, open academic norms (whereas one can understand that, say, Uyghur witnesses or victims, would not like to appear with their names).

All the contributors are Westerners or based in Western institutions, well over 20 from the U.S. and Canada, a couple in the UK and elsewhere. According to The Report, quite a few have government positions and are advocates of the Responsibility to Protect and/or interventionism. And many are related to Holocaust and genocide research and prevention.

The report lacks a systematic method of structuring main chapters and sub-chapters/sections and seems to have been put together hastily (see the strange Table of Content below)–perhaps in the short time between January 19, 2021, when Secretary-of-State, Mike Pompeo, announced that he had ”determined” that China had committed crimes against humanity and genocide and the publishing of The Report on March 8?


The various chapters back up the conclusions stated in the summary: that the independent scholars conclude that Chinese leadership is responsible for committing genocide; that the intent is to destroy the Uyghur group as such, in whole or in substantial part; that this intent is documented by deeds and words by the high-level leadership including President Xi Jinping himself. Then follows documentation of the methods whereby this intent is said to be realised such as mass internment, mass birth-prevention, killings, forcible transfer of children, etc.

The report carries 317 notes, so the authors have obviously wanted to back up their conclusions with open, available and checkable facts. Naturally, some sources are legal texts on genocide, the Vienna Convention, academic journals, UN documents and analyses of other genocides and, of course, the history of the Uyghurs. And there are references to other human rights reports, Amnesty’s and Human Rights Watch’s in particular.

More interesting is the analysis of: What are the main sources in The Report that are used to prove the genocide?

Interesting too? A glimpse behind the facade of Western China policies.

From page 17 you get the sense: The New York Times, The Guardian, BBC News, The Brookings Institution, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the (CIA-initiated) Jamestown Foundation, Financial Times, Associated Press, Wall Street Journal, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), The China Files, the Hudson Institute, the Bitter Winter magazine (for religious liberty and human rights in China), The New Yorker, Foreign Policy, the Journal of Political Risk, the Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP) and Radio Free Asia.

A couple of important sources indeed stand out.

The Xinjiang Victims Base that appears on an internet address called ”shahit.biz” is important because many of the victim statements in The Report are taken from it–for instance, Victim # 124 (“So many people died from the beatings and torture”). However, there is no ”About” accessible on “shahit.biz”, no information on the methods, the sources, how it was built or what it means that it contains lots of short videos–as also does the Uyghur Pulse YouTube Channel it links to–in which people present and state ”video testimonies for the victims of the slow but de facto genocide in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region.”

Homepages which are completely anonymous would normally be considered of no credibility or other value as a source of documentation–whether academic or political–and should have been left out.

The Journal of Political Risk, referred to a couple of times, covers political risk and opportunities. ”Local issues and their impact on the world are analyzed and presented from a neutral and unbiased perspective. The journal is published by Corr Analytics, an international political risk analysis and consulting firm.” Its publisher is Dr Anders Corr, who lists that he has worked for e.g. United States Army, United States Pacific Command (USPACOM), United States Special Operations Command Pacific (USSOCPAC), Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). And its editor is Neil Siviter, who currently studies for his MA in War Studies at King’s College London and has interned at the NATO Association and the government in Canada.

You get a sense of Dr Corr, in a lecture on YouTube for the Committee On The Present Danger: China, when he advocates 5 strategies to ”defeat the Chinese Communist Party”, one of them being to double the U.S. defence budget and get the allies to do likewise. (The Committee’s vice chairman, Frank Gaffney, argued right before Trump left The White House that Trump ”must declare the Chinese Communist Part a trans-national criminal group” (see The Committee’s members here).

Why these details? Because The Report refers to this Journal which carries an article by Dr Adrian Zenz to whom we shall soon return because of his central position in the entire issue. One must wonder whether Dr Zenz has chosen more or less extreme-political outlets for his research or his manuscripts have not passed peer-reviews of more relevant academic journals.

One more frequently used (22 times) source deserves special mention, namely Radio Free Asia. It presents itself as a ”private, nonprofit, multimedia news corporation” but these are dubious words. It is one of many U.S. government media outlets with an annual budget of U.S.$43 million, with 253 employees, headquartered in Washington D C and comes under the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM).

Like Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, it is engaged in promoting U.S. values and perspectives vis-a-vis adversaries. The USAGM has been haunted by political controversies and its origins harken back to CIA’s secret special operations in 1948.

This is not to imply that these sources all tell lies or exaggerate the brutality of events. Some may, some may not–we as authors have no way of knowing. The main point is that the sources used in The Report–literally without exceptions–tilt in the same politico-ideological, Near-governmental direction and that no sources have been used that could, to put it crudely, give a different perspective, critically examine the selected sources or otherwise look into the validity and reliability of the media stories presented which are standard methods in independent academic scholarship.

To summarize, the majority of sources on which The Report is based are Western, particular U.S.., mainstream media plus materials from organisations which, indisputably and without exception, are on a Sinophobic (”anti-China”) mission, see the world (and the China-U.S. relations) in black-and-white terms plus U.S. State Department/Pentagon-related individuals with attitudes promoting U.S. global dominance and intervention policies.

Whether intended or knowingly, or not–The Report and its attempt at documentation of genocide in Xinjiang are perfectly fit to be used for such U.S. policies rather than for a genuine human rights-only campaign and trustworthy advocacy. The Report contains no calls to action directed at human rights organisations; instead, some of its authors have tried to influence government policies directly.

The report does not attempt to distance itself from the elites behind those global dominance policies. It makes excellent use of them–either directly or indirectly (as the above personality connections have documented).

Now to the mentioned Dr Adrian Zenz (1974- ) who is stated everywhere as the expert on Xinjiang.

Dr Adrian Zenz–the world expert on Xinjiang who is guided by God

Zenz appears no less than 41 times through The Report’s 317 notes, most others once or twice. There can be no doubt that The Report’s documentation is based way more on his studies than on any other experts. So who is he?

Since October 2019, he is a Senior Fellow in China Studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC) in Washington, D.C. and here is a presentation of him in conjunction with a widely circulated article of his published in 2018 by the Jamestown Foundation of which he is stated to be an analyst. It was set up on the initiative of the CIA and remains an arch-conservative foundation with a board composed of corporate, business and investment people, former U.S. government officials, former CIA leaders and militaries and some experts on terrorism.

It does not seem obvious why a human rights report by Dr Zenz would end up being published by such an organisation (and, as mentioned above, Zens has published with other ”hawkish” outfits like the Corr Analytics) rather than in a scholarly journal or a document for a genuine human rights organisation.

The VOC was established by a unanimous act of the U.S. Congress and George. W. Bush was its honorary chairman 2003-2009, i.e. during the invasion and occupation of Iraq. VOC proudly states in its 2019 report that ”Since joining VOC, Dr Zenz has been mentioned over 240 times in over 120 media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and the BBC, and has conducted broadcast interviews with NPR, Bloomberg, and CNN, as well as top German newswires Deutsche Welle and Tagesschau”–that is, within just the three months.

It speaks volumes of the type of uniform expertise sought for by these media–something that is confirmed by the above presentation of media sources underlying The Report. One must wonder whether there were no other experts on human rights in Xinjiang than Dr Zenz? Did the media ever look for others? Did he just fit a particular purpose? Or do they simply not know the importance of diversity and objectivity?

The VOC–that has assets of about US$ 16 million–obviously works to outcompete the Nazi Holocaust when, on its front page, it states that ”Communism killed over 100 million. We’re telling their stories” and, according to Wikipedia, ”In April 2020, the organization announced they would be adding the global victims of the COVID-19 pandemic to their death toll of Communism, blaming the Chinese government for the outbreak and every death caused by it.” So much for its attitude to China.

Here’s the Wikipedia entry for Adrian Zenz. He’s a German anthropologist who used to work at the European School of Culture and Theology, which is related to the Columbia International University, a Bible College not to be confused with Columbia University. Dr Zenz is a born-again Christian and has stated that he feels that God has told him to pursue this research–17:00 minutes into this Washington Watch interview–on Chinese Muslims and other minority groups in China.

Zenz co-authored a book about the end times in 2012 with his father-in-law, Marlon L. Sias, titled Worthy to Escape: Why All Believers Will Not Be Raptured Before the Tribulation; on the book link, you will see that they are both learned men and that Adrian ”studies New Testament Greek besides teaching (at the time) and preaching at his local church.”

Here is a short January 2021 video interview in which Dr Zenz presents his views also on what the U.S. should do vis-a-vis China. And Jerry Grey, an Australian who has lived in China for 16 years, has written this portrait of Dr Zenz.

Dr Zenz has been criticised by critical media and investigative reporters. A particularly well-documented criticism has been produced by Gareth Porter and Max Blumenthal and published by The Grayzone carrying this subtitle ”U.S. State Department accusation of China ’genocide’ relied on data abuse and baseless claims by far-right ideologue” which displays what they call ”so much statistical malpractice.” Here are other Grayzone analyses related to the issue in general and Adrian Zenz in particular. Blumenthal explains his position here to the Chinese official Global Times.

Adrian Zenz–who seems to have visited China only once and as a tourist in 2007–has been strongly criticised by China and also by scholars at Xinjiang University (and here and here and here). At least one company in Xinjiang has sued Zenz because it believes that his research is false and rumour-based and therefore harmful to it–for which reason it demands that he apologises and pays compensation. The Chinese government has recently imposed sanctions on him, so he cannot enter China.

Naturally, there are reports and analyses which explain in different terms what is going on–some from their perspective inside China. One such example is Canadian beer brewery owner and Vlogger in Shenzhen, Daniel Dumbrill whom you may learn more about from this report by the South China Morning Post, SCMP. He has 148 000 subscribers to his YouTube Channel.

Professor Graham Perry’s homepage and this video also provide rather different facts, interpretations and perspectives.

It’s reasonable to assume that the criticism of Adrian Zenz, his methods, data collection, interpretations and conclusions–as well as his somewhat peculiar background and divine mandate–impacts considerably on The Report and its credibility. But we do not know why The Report’s authors have chosen him as their main witness instead of presenting different analyses and weighing them against each other.

The U.S. State Department doesn’t seem to know what it knows
As the last thing he did in office on January 19, 2021, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, ”determined” (here the official text) that what is going on in Xinjiang is a genocide. He also compared it to the Nazi Holocaust, thereby casting China and Xi Jinping in the role of Nazi Germany and Hitler.

However, ”the U.S. State Department’s Office of the Legal Advisor concluded earlier this year that China’s mass imprisonment and forced labor of ethnic Uighurs in Xinjiang amounts to crimes against humanity–but there was insufficient evidence to prove genocide. That placed the United States’ top diplomatic lawyers at odds with both the Trump and Biden administrations, according to three former and current U.S. officials”–writes Colum Lynch in Foreign Policy.

The Biden administration has reaffirmed Pompeo’s stance and backed off a recent claim Biden’s United Nations envoy pick, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, made in her confirmation hearing that the State Department, under the Biden administration, was conducting a review of the designation.

Here is what Linda Thomas-Greenfield had to say according to Reuters: ”The State Department is reviewing that now because all of the procedures were not followed,” Linda Thomas-Greenfield told the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

They’re looking to make sure that they are followed to ensure that that designation is held.

So State Department’s Office of the Legal Advisor is of the opinion that there was not enough evidence and there were procedural problems with designating Xinjiang a ”genocide”. But the Biden administration–and the interests behind The Report–have decided to cement the Trump Administration/Pompeo and Biden/Blinken Administration and ignore that legal advice: It is a genocide!

It deserves mention that China has officially stated that it would welcome a visit by the UN Human Rights Council to Xinjiang.

Does The Report convincingly prove that this is a genocide?
Does The Report prove that the designation/determination ”genocide” is valid according to the classical definition of genocide as a series of acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group? The words ”intent” and ”destroy” are essentially important here.

At four places, The Report mentions that Chinese officials have used expressions such as ”wipe them out completely–destroy them root and branch” and ”you need to kill them all” and ”break their lineage, break their roots, break their connections and break their origins” and ”eradicating tumours” and likening the mass internment camps to ”eradicating tumours”.

These expressions–which are ascribed to the CCP leadership–stem from one source, namely Austin Ramzy and Chris Buckley “Absolutely No Mercy’: Leaked Files Expose How China Organized Mass Detentions of Muslims” in New York Times, 16 Nov. 2019. Their report presents 403 pages of internal Chinese documents that have leaked.

How has this tremendously important leak happened?

The New York Times says that ”Though it is unclear how the documents were gathered and selected, the leak suggests greater discontent inside the party apparatus over the crackdown than previously known. The papers were brought to light by a member of the Chinese political establishment who requested anonymity and expressed hope that their disclosure would prevent party leaders, including Mr. Xi, from escaping culpability for the mass detentions.”

The New York Times report also states that ”The leaked papers consist of 24 documents, some of which contain duplicated material. They include nearly 200 pages of internal speeches by Mr. Xi and other leaders, and more than 150 pages of directives and reports on the surveillance and control of the Uighur population in Xinjiang. There are also references to plans to extend restrictions on Islam to other parts of China.”

So, if we understand it correctly: There was a member of the Chinese ”political establishment” who in 2019 leaked these documents in order to tie President Xi Jinping and other leaders of the CCP and China to the alleged crimes and debunk the official Chinese claims and explanations and, therefore, that person–who The Guardian also calls a ”political insider”–requested anonymity.

It remains unclear how a Chinese political establishment insider got 403 A4 pages over to The New York Times and how the editors checked the validity of those materials. For instance–did it receive these pages directly from the insider him- or herself or via a chain of couriers? If the latter, how did it check the identity and role of that insider and the authenticity of these pages before publication? Was the insider a person who had already defected to the US, or is s/he still in China and still part of its political establishment?

This point deserves emphasis for the fundamental reason that The Report bases its determination/conclusion/advocacy that this is a genocide for which the highest Chinese leadership is responsible exclusively on this New York Times-published batch of documents the background of which we readers cannot know.

Further, it’s worth noticing also that The Report states (p 3) that ”In 2014, China’s Head of State, President Xi Jinping, launched the ”People’s War on Terror” in XUAR, making the areas where Uyghurs constitute nearly 90% of the population the front line.” This formulation followed by the above-mentioned derogative/humiliating expressions could convey the impression that Xi Jinping was out to call all Uyghurs terrorists and therefore destroy them all, starting rationally in the areas where most of them live.

However, here is how BBC formulated it on May 23, 2014, when an attack in Urumqi killed 31 and wounded 90: ”During a visit to Xinjiang last month, President Xi Jinping promised greater integration and warned terrorists would be isolated “like rats scurrying across a street”. Xi Jinping is obviously talking specifically about Uyghur terrorists and not about all Uyghurs.

The question therefore is: If the Chinese leadership is targeting only what it calls terrorists–like Western countries also do in the GWOT–and not the Uyghur people as such, what is then left of the determination that this is genocide, i.e. the destruction of an ethnic group/nation ”in whole or in part”?

What about terrorism in Xinjiang and elsewhere?
The Report does another interesting thing: It plays down completely that there have been problems with terrorism in Xinjiang. It states that ”Similar restrictions multiplied in the early 2000s, during which time Chinese authorities began referring to Uyghur dissent more frequently as “terrorism,” despite an almost complete absence of terrorist attacks” (our italics). The source for this assertion is Sean Roberts, The War on the Uyghurs: China’s Internal Campaign against a Muslim Minority (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020) and Pablo A. Rodríguez-Merino, “Old ‘counter-revolution’, new ‘terrorism’: historicizing the framing of violence in Xinjiang by the Chinese state,” Central Asian Survey, Vol. 38, No. 1 (2019), 27-45.

Both of these publications are–from the outset–strongly critical of China’s Xinjiang policies and can be interpreted as plädoyers for the Uyghurs. Roberts who is undoubtedly a very capable researcher with lots of on-the-ground experience uses a particular definition of terrorism and the argument that to be called a terrorist is negative and traumatising. It is on the basis of this that he argues that there has been rather little terrorism in Xinjiang, although he does acknowledge (p 20 of his book) the 2009 Urumqi riots and other Uyghur-led acts of violence. On February 10, 2021, Roberts wrote an article in Foreign Affairs in support of Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo’s genocide statement–”but whatever the merits of the term [e.g. genocide and crimes against humanity], the evidence of the atrocities that China has committed against Uyghurs is undeniable.”

From a review of his book in Foreign Affairs, one understands that Roberts main thesis is that ”Harsh Chinese policies have provoked some reactive violence from Uighurs and have driven what is estimated to be tens of thousands of them to join jihadis in Syria. Roberts provides fascinating new details on that relatively marginal phenomenon, revealing that organized Uighur militancy is almost entirely illusory. Beijing’s policy of repressive assimilation has now reached such an intense stage that Roberts labels it ‘cultural genocide’.”

This is the type of documentation and interpretation the authors of The Report use–no further investigations of possible terrorism activity in Xinjiang over the last 20 or so years. Instead of doing research and also investigate, in all fairness, whether or not China also has a terrorism problem (as the U.S.-led world has had since 2001 and fought in the Global War On Terror, GWOT), the authors seem to simply compile sources that support what they want to prove–namely that China is repressing all Uyghurs because they are Uyghurs and not some because they are Uyghur terrorists.

If they had done their research–instead of ideological opinion-formation–they might have asked themselves: What has the U.S. government itself produced about terrorism in China/Xinjiang? They would then have come across ”Patterns of Global Terrorism 2001” Annual Report from the U.S. State Department and on page 16 found that Presidents George W. Bush and Jiang Zemin met in Shanghai in February 2002 (and other U.S.-China meetings took place in Washington, Beijing and Hong Kong) and that the two countries cooperated and coordinated their policies and concrete policies against terrorism with explicit reference to the terrorist activities of Uyghur groups in Xinjiang.

In this State Department analysis, we find that China is ”increasing its vigilance in Xinjiang, western China, where Uighur separatist groups have conducted violent attacks in recent years” and that ”Several press reports claimed that Uighurs trained and fought with Islamic groups in the former Soviet Union, including Chechnya. Two groups in particular are cause for concern: the East Turkestan Islamic Party (ETIP) and the East Turkestan Liberation Organization (or Sharki Turkestan Azatlik Tashkilati, known by the acronym SHAT). ETIP was founded in the early 1980s with the goal of establishing an independent state of Eastern Turkestan and advocates armed struggle. SHAT’s members have reportedly been involved in various bomb plots and shootouts. Uighurs were found fighting with al-Qaida in Afghanistan. We are aware of credible reports that some Uighurs who were trained by al-Qaida have returned to China.” (It also states that previous crackdowns by China has raised human rights concerns, without specifying which).

As a piquant detail, in 2006, American forces captured 22 Uyghur militants linked to al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan and imprisoned them for 5-7 years at Guantanamo and in 2018, Pentagon announced that it had bombed training centers of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) in Afghanistan. More about this extremist organization created by militant Uyghurs in Xinjiang and reportedly partly funded by Osama bin Laden at the time–here at the U.S. Council of Foreign Relations, an extremely important foreign policy organization that can hardly be accused of being anti-American or pro-Chinese. ETIM was listed by the U.S. Treasury in 2002 as a terrorist organisation (and taken off again in 2004). (The Council backgrounder also presents the Turkestan Islamic Party (TIP) that has taken credits for violent attacks in several Chinese cities and gives a background to the Uyghurs).

Readers may also find that e.g. retired Cabinet Secretary of the Government of India, B. Raman’s, 2002 analysis ”U.S. and Terrorism in Xinjiang” in the South Asia Analysis Group highlights the immensely complex web of Uyghur-related terrorism and how the U.S. and China cooperated on counter-terrorism. (U.S. State Department seems to have stopped publishing this world-covering terrorism reports after 9/11 or, rather, after the GWOT gained momentum and global terrorism increased).

Perhaps to the surprise of quite a few, the fact is–but not mentioned in The Report–that China has not denied that it is taking hard measures in Xinjiang. Here is a Reuters report concerning an official Chinese government document: ”Authorities in China have arrested almost 13,000 “terrorists” in Xinjiang since 2014…Since 2014, Xinjiang has “destroyed 1,588 violent and terrorist gangs, arrested 12,995 terrorists, seized 2,052 explosive devices, punished 30,645 people for 4,858 illegal religious activities, and confiscated 345,229 copies of illegal religious materials”, it added…It also gave a breakdown of 30 attacks since 1990, with the last one recorded in December 2016, saying 458 people had died and at least 2,540 were wounded as a consequence of attacks and other unrest.”

You may, of course, have decided that you trust nothing coming out of official China. But if you do, these are significant figures concerning the clampdown and repression in Xinjiang. But they are also small figures compared with the human and other costs of the U.S.-led GWOT, which, to take one of many dimensions, has displaced at least 37 million people according to the US-based Brown University’s Cost of War Project. If such a displacement among innocent civilians is not a serious human rights violation, it isn’t easy to see what it is.

To summarize this point, The Report leaves substantial materials about terrorist activities in Xinjiang untold. It thereby conveys the impression that China commits an ongoing genocide on the whole Uyghurs group of 10-12 million citizens. Above, we have only highlighted a few of very many sources on this. The fact is that Wikipedia’s entry on ”Terrorism in China” offers a much more sober, balanced and factual background to this essential issue.

The authors can hardly be ignorant about these facts. Still, they have chosen to omit them and every other source and discussion about possible reasons behind the–hard–clampdown by China on Uyghur terrorism/terrorists.

Summary
The Newlines/Wallenberg Report on Genocide in Xinjiang is not trustworthy
The Report is not ”independent” and does not present new materials. It’s the product of cooperation by at least six, more or less inter-connected, interest groups:
Christian fundamentalism + hawkish U.S. foreign policy + Muslim Brotherhood circles (Ahmed Alwani) + extreme anti-Communism + pro-Israel circles + the human rights political machinery (in favour of pro-war/humanitarian intervention). They are all Near-governmental rather than Non-governmental.
What combines them is a negative attitude, bordering on hatred, of Russia, Iran, China and a Sinophobic ideology (not only here but in many other earlier cases) on the one hand and pro-US world dominance/ interventionism (enemy image production) on the other.
In short, six overlapping interest groups sharing some fundamental values presented as human rights concerns.
The somewhat haphazardly edited Report may have been published to back up former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s ”determination” on January 19, 2021, that what goes in Xinjiang is an ongoing genocide carrying similarity with the Nazi Holocaust–the first time this word and that reference are being used. Pompeo is known to, in his capacity of CIA director and in his own words, be proud that ”we lied, cheated and stole–we had entire training courses–and it reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.” (Watch him say that 29:15 into this conversation). Mike Pompeo is also known as a Conservative Christian who, while at the West Point Military Academy, was ”brought to Jesus Christ”, and he is extremely critical of China.
The Report contains both fake and dubious data and a significant, systematically biased choice of sources. It deliberately disregards or omits fundamentally important perspectives, theories, concepts and facts. At least parts of it would hardly pass as a paper for an MA course; it leaves much to be desired in terms of academic rigour, methods, knowledge and evaluation of testing the validity and reliability of materials it makes use of. This is noteworthy because the Newlines Institute professes to differ from other think tanks in that ”Unlike most think tanks, we have established an institutional method for research and analysis.” The Report reveals no such method, whether ex- or implicitly.
The Report appears–whether knowingly or intentionally or not–as supportive of hardline U.S. foreign policy and as (mis)using human rights concerns to promote a confrontational policy vis-a-vis China. As shown above, a series of people connected with The Report have urged the U.S. government to take a much harder line with China to stop it from doing anything it pleases (as one of them states in the presentational video). Thus, The Report can reasonably be interpreted as pro-conflict, or pro-Cold War, ideology production that (mis)uses human rights arguments to promote hawkish policies. This is indeed a cause for serious concern because the Newlines Institute also maintains that it is guided by the 5 principles of Peace, Development, Community and Citizenship, Character and Stewardship. The Report is characterised, grosso modo, by the opposite.
It also states under ”About” that its purpose is ”to shape U.S. foreign policy based on a deep understanding of regional geopolitics and the value systems of those regions.”
The Report does not contain any geopolitical analysis and shows no understanding of the Chinese value system. Rather, it is systematically demonising.
The Report conveys propaganda in the specific sense of treating China as the subject of all evil but omitting that an understanding of China’s policies must also include its relations, including the conflicts to which China is a party to, such as that with the U.S. China is seen as an independent variable, and, therefore, The Report can not produce any comparative perspective. To put it crudely: If what China does in Xinjiang is a genocide, are there other governments who should also be determined as pursuing genocidal policies? How does the Chinese ”war on terror” inside Xinjiang and its human costs compare with the U.S.-led Global War On Terror and its human costs?
Of course, a human rights report can not deal with everything and all human rights issues. But since The Report and its associated interests find it urgently important to characterise China as genocidal, one would, per common sense, ask: How does the geopolitical actor who use that–extreme–term operate? And, does The Report function (of course in a small way) like a psycho-political projection that boosts an enemy image with the intention to legitimate one’s own, even more destructive, actions and policies?
Given the problems we have pointed out in this analysis, one must be deeply concerned about the Western mainstream media’s systematically uncritical reception of the Newlines/Wallenberg Report. We have found none checking the sources of The Report or questioning the attention-grabbing public relation for The Report that conveys that it is an ”independent” institute and the first-ever documentation, or proof, that China is responsible for genocide.
It should be the first duty of professional reporting to check and cross-check sources rather than–effortlessly–repeating what self-congratulatory press releases may state. Here some examples of the reporting by CNN, The Guardian, Aljazeera, the Danish Broadcasting Corporation, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and AFP devoid of scrutiny of any kind.
It is reasonable to hypothesise that the political narrative of genocide in Xinjiang will end up the way other significant narratives before it has–e.g. of the impending genocide on Kosovo-Albanians in Yugoslavia, the Afghan terrorists committing the crime of 9/11, Saddam’s nuclear weapons, Gaddafi’s planned mass murder in Benghazi, Iran’s almost-status as nuclear power (for about 25 years) and Bashar al-Assad as the only reason behind the violence in Syria–namely as psycho-political warfare, opinion deceptions, or lies, serving the purpose of Cold War politics, military intervention, resource grabbing or destructive wars.

Whatever the truth is about the determination of genocide in Xinjiang, accusations like these serve neither good West-China relation nor the U.S. itself. The question remains–and no one in the U.S. seems to have an answer: How do we build trust, win-win cooperation and peace with China? And if we are truly concerned, how do we convey those concerns in the most effective manner?

End notes–in lieu of conclusion
Because of the world’s fundamental interconnectedness, the increasingly Cold War-like relations between The West and China have negative consequences for both systems and for the rest of the world.

Of all conflicts in our world, The West/China conflict will influence the future world order more than any other conflict. It is therefore of utmost importance to analyse what the conflicting parties say and do–in particular when one or both take steps that tend to increase both the tension and the probability of future use of violence in some form. Such heightened tension will harm them both as well as the rest of us. It will also make concerted efforts to solve all the other problems facing humanity much more difficult.

If you accuse another country of committing an ongoing genocide, the world has a right to expect that the evidence is rock solid.

We’ve written this analysis to show that the empirical basis for accusing China of ’genocide’ is surprisingly weak and that The Report from the Newlines Institute and the Raoul Wallenberg Center–which professes to deliver the ultimate proof of genocide–rests on very selective materials that, when put together, invite further confrontational policies instead of cooperative problem-solving–not to mention Western comparisons or self-reflection concerning human rights.

The Report is politicised and reflects the interests of what we call the Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex, MIMAC. It contains serious flaws of investigation as well as a biased selection of sources and expertise. Furthermore, we have made the extremely serious observation that The Report has not been questioned or checked by any Western mainstream media. Despite its politicised, ideological characteristics and extremely serious accusation, it has simply been propagated.

Therefore, we do not believe that The Report is helpful from any rational perspective.

Furthermore, from a meta point of view, we do not believe in zero-sum or win-lose, but in that win-win is possible and should be tried for the common good of the West itself, China and the world. We also believe–perhaps unconventionally for Western scholarship–that multipolarity and respect for different culture’s different codes is desirable. In contrast, unipolarity based on universalising and imposing one’s own ideological norms and values upon other systems is counterproductive and undesirable.

We further believe that it is meaningful–also and particularly when in a conflict situation–to seek dialogue and cooperation rather than offence and confrontation. Cooperation does not build on similarity or common identities and goals. It can take place within the framework of unity/cooperation in diversity. It is clear that, at the moment, it is China that advocates cooperation and dialogue whereas the United States, in particular and the West in general, pursue negative and confrontational policies with a series of other countries and cultures–something indicated also by the U.S. alone having 600+ military facilities around the world and standing for more than 40% of the world’s military expenditures.

Multipolarity and mutually beneficial cooperation–as well as dialogue instead of demonisation–are conducive to violence-risk reduction and confidence-building. Accusations, sanctions, demonisation, name-calling and confrontational characterisations of the political systems and culture of other, by definition, cannot produce security, stability or peace. It closes down dialogue.

And the more this is done short-term, the less security, cooperation and peace there will be in the long-term.

• • •

APPENDIX
Materials critical to the genocide accusation/determination
Since there are so many sources that reach the masses with the genocide accusation, let’s point to a few that argue and document that there are reasons to question the ”determination” of genocide in Xinjiang–sources that do not deny the possibility that various types of involuntary re-education, interment and other human rights violations happen and sources which are not official Chinese resources and do not seem to be driven by any particular, political motive or agenda. And some sources who simply have a different understanding of China in general.

TFF does not endorse any of them or maintain, directly or indirectly, that they are closer to the truth. As of principle, we would not state such an opinion unless we had been on-the-ground in Xinjiang. Please see them as a reading and watching guide for the particularly interested readers.

We only provide the readers here of the opportunity to see other perspectives and we have found them during our own search and re-search and thought them useful also in illustrating what materials authors of The Report have chosen to not refer to or rely on.

Jerry Grey, Inconclusive conclusions lead to inadmissible evidence on Xinjiang and here and his story of living in China and bicycling in Xinjiang (video).

Maxime Vivas, The End of Uygur Fake News (in French)

Graham Perry on China and on Xinjiang

Daniel Dumbrill’s YouTube Channel

The Grayzone–Independent News and Investigative Journalism on Empire
With investigative analyst such as Max Blumenthal (editor-in-chief), Aron Maté, Gareth Porter, Ben Norton, Danny Haiphong, Ajit Singh and others.

Chas Freeman, veteran U.S. diplomat on Grayzone here and on The Transnational here.

The Qiao Collective–in general here and on Xinjiang here.

Carlos Martinez and the No Cold War Campaign, London.

Cyrus Janssen, U.S. expat, investor, his YouTube Channel.

Henry A. Kissinger–former Secretary of State and central in the US-China rapprochement 50 years ago, today warning that if the parties cannot find a basis for cooperative action, the world will slide into catastrophe comparable to World War I.

https://mronline.org/2021/05/08/the-xin ... as-agenda/
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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Thu May 13, 2021 12:21 pm

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May Newsletter

Qiao Collective
May 12

Eid Mubarak to all those observing!

In the U.S., Sinophobia emerges as the legislative leverage galvanizing national “progress.” Biden’s new American Jobs Plan, unveiled on March 31st, may seem like a much needed relief for public good, but its promise of rejuvenation is premised on a palpable anxiety and hawkish orientation toward China. Describing itself as “an investment in America that will...position the United States to out-compete China,” the American Jobs Plan makes clear that the $769 billion budget it proposes for public research and development is aimed at ensuring the U.S.’s competitive edge above what it recognizes as China’s enormous investments in public infrastructure and R&D.

Complementing the defensive posture of the American Jobs Plan is Biden’s April 9th request for Fiscal Year 2022 discretionary spending, which includes a much-discussed $715 billion to the Department of Defense under the prominent heading “Deter China.” Above the more pressing global challenges of climate change and vaccine rollout, the defense budget emphasizes “the need to counter the threat from China as the Department’s top challenge,” while discretionary spending requests for the State Department emphatically professes a desire to “reassert American leadership” to counter “malign influence from China, Russian, and other authoritarian states.” Meanwhile, on April 8th, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee released what committee chairman Sen. Bob Menendez describes as “a new comprehensive China legislation” entitled the “Strategic Competition Act of 2021.” At just under 300 pages, the Act adds more sanctions against Chinese officials who don’t tow the Washington line on Xinjiang, requests publication an ”intellectual property violators list” targeted at Chinese-owned firms and expands the authority of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) to scrutinize foreign capital to influence or access U.S. businesses and technology.

If the U.S.’s Cold War rivalry with the Communist Bloc incentivized the Democratic elite to assent to grassroots protests for civil rights reform, the U.S.-instigated rivalry with China today proves an equally effective incentive for Democratic and Republican elites alike to envision infrastructural renewal amid heightened domestic strife and continuing economic downturn. As if to prove that the U.S. ruling class can scarcely imagine national investment without invoking China as the bogeyman, the press release of the “Strategic Competition Act of 2021” boasts itself as the “first major proposal to bring Democrats and Republicans together in laying out a strategic approach towards Beijing—and assuring that the United States is positioned to complete with China across all dimensions of national and international power for decades to come.”

Across the world U.S. imperialism sinks its teeth. U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken revived the G7 (EU, UK, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States) call to protect U.S. hegemony and take an aggressive stance on China under the guide of protecting a “rules based order.” It begs the question: whose rules based order? The U.S.’s quiet assent to Japan’s plans to release nuclear-contaminated waste water from Fukushima into the Pacific, amidst criticism from Korea, China, Fiji, and beyond speaks to who this “rules based” system truly works for.

After unleashing sanctions against four Chinese officials, the European Commission has suspended efforts to ratify the Comprehensive Agreement on Investment (CAI) with China. Though the agreement, which has been in negotiations since 2013, promised much-needed access to the Chinese market for the EU’s faltering economy, the European Parliament’s rigid adherence to the U.S. imperial party line promises no end in sight for this multilateral deal. Now, greedy European eyes once again look toward India as a potential client state, fanning inter-continental tension within Asia.

In the Pacific, the Australian government has been hysterically beating the U.S. war drum against China. In an April 15th keynote delivered to India’s premier geopolitical conference, the Raisina Dialogue, Australian Prime Minister Morrison stated that Australia was seeking to build “a strategic balance that favors freedom”—a scarcely coded call to arms in support of sustained U.S. hegemony. Against this backdrop of heightened tensions, Home Affairs secretary Michael Pezzullo penned an essay for Murdoch media suggesting Australia may “send off, yet again, our warriors to fight the nation’s wars,” heavily insinuating Taiwan as the most likely next flashpoint.

**************************************************

Anti-China Hysteria Drives Record 2021 U.S. Defense Spending
JUL 24 2020

WRITTEN BY QIAO COLLECTIVE

Under the cover of an imagined ‘China threat,’ Washington continues to devote bottomless funding to endless war and militarization while neglecting its own people.

Anti-China hysteria has emerged as the central ‘threat’ designed to justify endless U.S. military spending and adventurism in the Asia-Pacific.

The 2021 Department of Defense spending bill has become contested terrain for a progressive wing of Democrats seeking to curtail endless military spending and a Republican-led bipartisan coalition focused on increasing spending to “stay competitive” with ostensible threats from Russia and China.

On July 21, the House passed its version of the Fiscal Year 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), with an increase in stipulated defense spending from 2020’s $738 billion to a $740 billion package for 2021. The Senate followed on July 23.

A proposed amendment, raised by Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) in the House and Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in the Senate, called for a modest ten percent decrease in military spending to fund social programs. Pocan and Jayapal called for Congress to break from its hawkish orthodoxy of “rubber-stamping a skyrocketing Pentagon budget” while slashing social expenditures. For reference: in 2019, the United States spent more money on its military than the next nine countries combined.

The modest progressive amendment was overwhelmed in both chambers by the force of Sinophobia, anti-China hawkishness, and a New Cold War mentality that has bipartisan power in Washington.

Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) decried the amendment, tweeting: “Russia, China & Iran would be thrilled!” Similarly, Rep. Steve Womack proudly announced his vote to authorize the record defense budget, calling it an “investment to counter adversaries like China.”


For others, merely rubber-stamping another massive military budget wasn’t enough to prove their anti-China credentials. Rep. Michael Waltz (R-FL) pushed into the bill an amendment that would cut Defense Department funding to universities that house Confucius Institutes or the Chinese Thousand Talent Program—initiatives Waltz claim “have given mainland China’s Communist regime the freedom to take full advantage of our academic openness and steal it.” Not to be outdone, Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO.) called for the Chinese-owned social media app TikTok to be banned from government devices.

Senator Mitt Romney launched similar anti-China attacks on the Sanders amendment in the Senate. While Sanders implored colleagues to “invest in our people here at home” as they struggle with evictions, homelessness, and unemployment exacerbated by the U.S. government’s botched COVID-19 pandemic response, Romney erroneously warned that China matches U.S. spending on military procurement (as of 2019, China’s annual military expenditures totaled $178 billion to the U.S.’s $658 billion). He painted a grim picture of the future under the Communist Party of China’s supposed plan for world domination:
“They intend to put us way in the headlights. Can you imagine the consequences, when a nation that does not believe in human rights, with only one party...when they have the overwhelming military force in the world. That’s where we’re headed.”
—Senator Mitt Romney
The hypocrisy of massive military spending against an imagined China threat while the U.S. roils through its unsolved COVID-19 crisis, refusing spending opportunities to support testing, or emergency stipends, is hard to ignore. A progressive coalition supporting the amendment noted that in 2019, the Center for Disease control budget of $7 billion was less than one percent of the Pentagon budget. Under the cover of the “China threat,” Congress continues to devote bottomless funding to endless war and militarization while neglecting its own people.


The China “containment” program, a recurring archetype in U.S. military strategy in Asia for at least a half-century, once again plays a central role in the fight over 2021’s military spending. A recently released budgetary wish list from the Indo-Pacific Command titled “REGAIN THE ADVANTAGE” seeks to solidify U.S. military hegemony in Asia and the Pacific under the pretenses of an “aggressive” China. The imperialist demand to retain an “asymmetric advantage” against China is in direct opposition to the struggles against U.S. militarism led by the people of Ryukyu (Okinawa), Guam, Hawai‘i (where the U.S. plans to host an international “war games” convening in August), and beyond—all lands on which the plan called for an expansion of missile, radar, and precision-strike networks.
The hypocrisy of massive military spending against an imagined China threat while the U.S. roils through its unsolved COVID-19 crisis is hard to ignore.
Senator Senator Jim Inhofe (R - OK) cited the Indo-Pacific strategy in his justification for the massive military budget, calling the region “our priority, especially as China expands its reach and influence.”

The invented narrative of Chinese aggression and expansionism—in direct contradiction to China’s foreign policy doctrine of multilateral cooperation towards a “shared future for humankind”—has justified the U.S.’s reorientation of U.S. military strategy for the past decade. In 2019, the Department of Defense designated the Pacific its “priority theater.” However, as early as 2012, President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had showed their hand, shifting the majority of U.S. military firepower to the Asia-Pacific region and seeking to curtail China’s role in regional trade and security organizations through the so-called “pivot to Asia.” This longer history of military build-up vis a vis China speaks to the fact that the New Cold War strategy has long been a bipartisan effort. In fact, while Republicans led the charge to destroy the House effort, the vote failed in a resounding 93-324 vote, with 139 Democrats joining 185 Republicans in voting no to the ten percent budget cut.

The COVID-19 crisis has demonstrated once again the violent contradictions of neoliberalism: the frailty of the state social welfare is matched only by the ostentatious might of the state’s repressive apparatuses: military, police, and prisons. Cutting a $740 billion check to the military while people across the U.S.—disproportionately Black, indigenous, and immigrant communities—are devastated by the COVID-19 reveals the impossibility of justice and equity at home so long as the priority of the ruling class lies in endless war abroad.
Cutting a $740 billion check to the military while people across the U.S.—disproportionately Black, indigenous, and immigrant communities—are devastated by the COVID-19 reveals the impossibility of justice and equity at home so long as the priority of the ruling class lies in endless war abroad.

The anti-China doctrine has become the cornerstone of the U.S. military agenda, and is likely to define its geopolitical strategy over the next decade. Where China has committed itself to a “peaceful rise” forged in Third World commitments to non-intervention, self-determination, and win-win cooperation first articulated at Bandung in 1955, the U.S. clings to a zero sum vision of inevitable “great power competition.”

The anti-war movement and all so-called progressive movements must understand that resisting the unilateral escalation towards conflict with China is in the interests of domestic fights for a fair wage, affordable housing, health care, and other progressive efforts that could be sponsored many times over through a defunded Pentagon budget. Unfortunately, too many on the left have taken to repeating State Department arguments re: the China ‘threat,’ choosing to “denounce both sides” and uncritically repeat hawkish narratives of supposed Chinese aspirations for hegemony, facts be damned. Those who do so only add fuel to the fire of Sinophobia and perpetual war, and their chauvinism and opportunism ultimately undermines their supposedly progressive commitments.

Since the end of World War II, the United States has justified its de facto military occupation of the world by invoking various enemies. From the Soviet Union to the Viet Cong, the DPRK to the Taliban, various geopolitical foils have proven invaluable as bogeymen to justify several decades of proxy wars, invasions, and occupations the world over. Now, the war machine has pivoted towards China as the cornerstone of its military narrative strategy.

As the narrative crux of its global military occupation, resisting the ‘China threat’ narrative is fundamental to all struggles for peace and an end to U.S. imperialism.

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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Thu May 27, 2021 4:35 pm

All the questions socialists have about China but were too afraid to ask
Posted byEditorial Team
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Alexander Norton interviews Keith Lamb on how China’s self-proclaimed socialist system measures up to the expectations of a Western socialist expat from Scotland who has lived through almost two decades of drastic change in the world’s emerging superpower

In the 1990s and 2000s conventional Western wisdom was that China had long abandoned socialism. But by 2018, when president Xi Jinping lauded Marx as the greatest thinker of modern times at the closing speech of a 2-week celebration of his 200th anniversary and reaffirmed China’s commitment to his vision of communism, many on the left – and the right – were willing to take him seriously. I sat down to long-term expat Keith Lamb, a socialist from Scotland and commentator for the CGTN news agency, for an informal interview on life in China, its political system, its contradictions and its vision for the world.

What lead you to move to China in 2004? How do you support yourself out there, and where?

I finished at Glasgow University really wanted to continue studying. Learning a language seemed like a good thing and Chinese I considered the hardest so I chose that. I chose China not only because of the difficulty of the language but also because I saw it was developing and I really knew so little of the place. In 2004 my plan was to go over and work for a couple of years or two, master the language and then go somewhere else. I supported myself originally through teaching.

I was in a few places Shijiazhuang, Nanjing, Beijing but for most of the time in Xiamen, and life just took over. I opened up a Brazilian Jiujitsu school in Xiamen which I started as a socialist project. We taught students for free and if they wanted to donate money they could. The school ended up turning into a business, but it will never make anyone rich – it’s more of a very serious hobby.

Are you ‘free’ to have this conversation? In the West we are given the impression that all conversations are closely monitored, and critics of the government found out and punished. Are you allowed to say what you are aren’t allowed to talk about?

You can talk about anything you want – I’ve never found that to be a problem. In many ways I find it’s actually more free because they don’t have political correctness in the way we do in the UK. Publishing something in a paper though — that’s another thing. There is all sorts of talk online. Everyone says conversations get deleted, but I’ve seen loads of slagging-off online — so far nothing I’ve said has been deleted, but I have had my comments deleted a few times before in the West on the Guardian no less. I’m not saying it’s not a thing, obviously censorship does take place. Certain websites are blocked in China.

Topics themselves aren’t banned, it’s more how or where you talk about them. For example, in many universities and schools there will be a clause in the contract not to proselytize or talk about independence issues such as Tibet and Taiwan. Talking outside of class privately is not a problem. I have met large numbers of Americans who are in China for the purpose of converting people to Christianity.

And they aren’t sent to re-education camps?

No, they are not sent to re-education camps. They’re usually well received because many Chinese people want to learn English and the missionaries tend to be very patient. But strictly speaking if they have signed a contract, usually there will be a clause not to do missionary work.

Were you politicised before you came to China?

I was. But I didn’t know much about China back in 2004 —I had the same general opinions that the left has today. Typical “enlightened Westerner” complex that I knew better than the Chinese themselves. Sort of thing Westerners get after reading a book like Wild Swans. I assumed the people were unhappy with their government and I assumed support for the CCP was due to brainwashing or at least their closed media.

I think a lot of socialists in the West are idealists; they transpose their vision of socialism and how it should be achieved onto others – it’s another form of Western domination. Because often Western socialists really have very little idea of the contradictions in China that are vastly different to the ones they have in their countries. Having said that, it’s not that I don’t think we shouldn’t criticise it’s just that rarely do I find it comes from a place of understanding.

So the Western narrative goes something like this:

‘Mao was a true believer, even more so than Stalin, and in his final years he tried to jump straight to a purer, classless communism, unleashing chaos with his Cultural Revolution to avoid the slide back to the market he saw was coming. It was a disaster and the pro-market side regained control, creating the modern-day, hyper-capitalist country, with the Communist Party in charge only to maintain their control and avoid the sticky end leaders like Ceaușescu came to.’

What is the Chinese version of this narrative? Is some or any of it accepted?

Well the Chinese version isn’t so dissimilar. They judge Mao as being 2/3 right and 1/3 wrong. They see the mistakes he made as being part of the revolutionary process. But of course they recognise the good things too like the eradication of basic diseases, literacy, industrialisation. This Maoist vs Market is a bit of a false debate – it forgets history.

In terms of the pro-market system they have today it’s a method used for building the economy. It’s solved a lot of problems such as Chinese citizens demand for consumer products and lifted millions of people out of poverty – which is quite unlike other large states in the developing world who have followed market policies for years and remain stagnated in poverty; clearly you can’t say it’s a turn to capitalism without any qualification. Indonesia and the Philippines come to mind, both of which I’ve visited. Now if the criticism is that the government did this to hold onto power – well any government that wants to hold onto power should make improvements to the country. It’s a bit of a tautological argument.

With China of course the majority of the surplus leaves the country. You can see this prominently in the profit of an iPhone – only 3% stays in China – but what remains is used to develop the country. Many of the state-owned companies left are largely monopoly industries and they have been used to direct development, whereas it’s the industries which work better under market conditions have been privatised.

Of course here lies the problem of liberal democracy. In the UK we’ve seen the forces of capital just rob us of our national industries and the profits then privatized. The free media under Thatcher launched a huge PR campaign directed against the British citizens to convince us that this was the right thing to do, all the while destroying those industries from the inside. This was anti-democratic and yet it was achieved through liberal democracy.
A private media in the hands of the few works time and time again to negate socialists and when a country does vote in socialists such as in Venezuela they are sanctioned by the US, there’s a capital strike or worse – there are machinations to bring in a right-wing dictator if the government can’t be toppled.

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Keith Lamb’s classroom, 2005

Does the everyday person understand or accept all this? Will they tell you – ‘in the 60s we fought as Red Guards and questioned even the authority of the lowly school teacher for having a capitalist mentality, but after Mao we accepted we need to make China the cheapest place to produce everything from steering wheels to children’s toys – to build up the resources for socialism tomorrow?’

Well they understand the politics I outlined above. They’ve fought the US twice in Korea and Vietnam so they are all too aware of the geopolitical and historical situation. In terms of the turn to market they accept it as a necessary dynamic. For many there is a lot of pressure, long working hours etc. But it is sold to them as an epoch rather than the end of history.

Up until about 2012 I was sceptical myself. For example, Deng said first they would develop the East of China – this happened but developing the West? That didn’t seem to be happening (and it was hardly profitable to do so either). So myself like many Western Marxists believed perhaps China was just another neoliberal state.

From about 2012 (maybe much before actually) I saw some amazing changes in the West of China. One example I can think of is Yinchuan, a city in the West. It was dirt poor when I used to go – shacks everywhere, people obviously unable to take a regular shower, poor infrastructure. In 2012 the city it had transformed itself: the slums were gone, the place was clean, the people were clean. I travelled right across the West of China and Yinchuan wasn’t the exception. I had to conclude that indeed the CCP had kept to their promise

“For many there is a lot of pressure – long working hours. But it is sold to them as an epoch rather than the end of history.” How is it sold to them?

In their education, in their textbooks, they learn about Marx and “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” In Xi’s speeches, in the news – their socialist goals are not a secret, it’s discussed openly; they are given very concrete dates for 5 year plans, 10 year plans, 20 year plans. 2020 was the year they expected extreme poverty to be wiped out. If you asked me could this have been done in 2012, despite the progress I saw, I would have said no. But they achieved it on month ahead of schedule in November. 2030 is the year they expect to achieve a generally moderately wealthy society – maybe a level like Greece or Portugal.

In 2020 the alleviation of extreme poverty was a big topic. A friend of mine in the grassroots of the CCP who was a PE teacher at the first college I worked at was sent to the countryside to help. Cadres have been sent to villages to look at specific causes and methods for dealing with poverty. This really deals less with the workers and more with the peasants. Factory workers may not be rich but also they are not considered in the band of extreme poverty by Chinese standards. Often poverty alleviation has come through building roads to out of the way places. At times new housing has been built. Whereas 2030 is more about building a basic welfare state.

Can you talk a little about what you know of the Uyghur situation?

I first went to Xinjiang in 2016 – before that the only Uyghurs I met were street sellers and my students. The street sellers were unhappy with the CCP and some expressed desires for independence. They were always quite poor though, from southern Xinjiang.

From about 2014 suddenly there were large amounts of students arriving in Western China and I had many Uyghur students. Of course first thing after class I talked to them about was the situation in Xinjiang. To my surprise they did not have the same views as the street vendors. They were distinctly Uyghur, with their own language and obviously very proud of their identity, but mainly pro-China.

That led me to go there in 2016 to look for myself. What I found was a divided society. I travelled to several towns. Surprisingly to me, there were many Uyghurs that supported the Chinese state.

I had a taxi ride in a small town in Xinjiang and the taxi driver was very anti Han Chinese (not that there were many in this town). I asked him about the police as they were all Uyghurs. He answered that they were the dogs of the Han and they’d throw you in jail for waving a Xinjiang independence flag. It seemed strange to me that they could have Uyghur police – imagine if the police force in the North of Ireland during the Troubles were Catholics.

Then the taxi stopped and I arrived at the station. A Uyghur policeman asked to see my passport. I mentioned to him that he could pass for European he laughed and said to me “We’re Chinese too though.” I had another ride in the capital of Xinjiang where I offended a Uyghur taxi driver by complementing his mandarin – he thought it was belittling. So the situation in Xinjiang is complex. There is definitely support for independence but as I’ve seen it also has an Islamist drive behind it.

I’ve spoken to Uyghur girls who are empowered by being part of a larger Chinese state. They certainly don’t want to be part of a Caliphate and they even felt their parent’s restrictions on who they could marry was an intrusion into their freedom. Part of the problem was that people in the far West of Xinjiang felt they were being left behind, but as I saw there is a lot of development taking place now.

Of course there are ethnic tensions that are extremely complex, and there were the terrorist attacks at Kunming train station. I have a Han friend who lives in the capital of Xinjiang who told me that the Uyghurs went on the rampage killing hundreds of Han Chinese. He also said that they were getting a cash reward from a terrorist group for each killing. But when the Han rose up on the second night to get revenge the army closed the city down to protect the Uyghur communities. These are his words.

Of course, no doubt people are concerned of claims of 3 million in what is made out to be concentration camps, which are basically ridiculous claims. Considering there are only about 10 million Uyghurs in China and they have the highest birth rate we’re being asked to believe pretty much every adult of working age is in a camp. If this was the case there would be a considerable refugee crisis on China’s border.

I think those who believe the ridiculous figures need to remind themselves of what we did to Iraq based on claims of false weapons of mass destruction. We ended up with the Labour Party taking part in the biggest imperial crime of the 21st century. The propaganda machine is in full swing again now. Even the US Uyghur activist Rushan Abbas turned out to be a translator interrogating Uyghur prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

Now to say there isn’t a genocide or concentration camps doesn’t mean to say Xinjiang is all fine and dandy. It would seem based on the research I’ve seen, about 100,000 people had to go to de-radicalisation centers which also taught attendees vocational skills. Now is this ideal? Absolutely not but it’s certainly better than Western war on terrorism which has led to millions of deaths – and an increase in terrorist attacks.

We also have to keep in mind that terrorist attacks in Xinjiang, being next to Afghanistan, were far worse than anything we’ve seen in the West. Ultimately, certain forces in the West would like to turn Xinjiang into another Iraq or Afghanistan – at the very least the aim is to demonise China to justify any future conflict.

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Keith Lamb teaching Brazilian Jujitsu

From a trade union organiser friend:

Recently a popular documentary was aired on Netflix entitled “American Factory”. It featured a Chinese company who had taken over a Detroit windscreen factory and which was engaging in low wages, shoddy work practices and intense union busting. The managers presiding over this system were brought to China where they admired the system of long working hours and lack of breaks and holidays for the workers who were filmed picking up broken glass with their bare hands. The local Communist Party branch was chaired by the brother of the billionaire capitalist who owned both factories.
When a system actively promotes and empowers the exploitation of workers on a global basis can it truly be called socialist?


Good question. And it highlights the contradictions in China well. Firstly, in China there are a lot of good laws that aren’t always as strictly enforced as they should be. Some shoddy labour practices can be seen as a learning curve, others are due to the logic of capital accumulation. As is union busting (remember there are no independent trade unions in China).

On the other hand it is these practices that pulled in foreign capital and technology which Chinese development is built on. Of course I’m not defending it wholesale but – and this may sound callous – I’d rather the workers sweat to build socialism than die on the battlefield.

And no, I don’t think this can be called socialism now – and the Chinese recognise this contradiction well; they don’t say they are in the stage of socialism either. They call it the primary stage of socialism: basically, markets being guided by the state to build up the industrial and technological base.

For sure though, the long hours and exploitative labour pales in comparison to that of say the early days of British industrialisation, and certainly, China’s labour force is in a better state than say its neighbour India. Of course, these sort of practices could and can undermine the goodwill of the workers and it could undermine the values of socialism as well as undermine the revolution.

Mao first of all went for a policy called “new democracy” – similar to Lenin’s New Economic Period. It is a return to two-step theory building socialism through the exploitative practices of the market first – if a country was already developed then this would be unnecessary. The CCP do feel they well-explored other methods though.

Xi has been seen as an unexpected and sudden return to Marxism – is that fair?

People listen and read Xi’s speeches where he declares himself a true believer in Marxism-Leninism. If there were any worries that China was leaving the socialist path he has dispelled them in the minds of the people through fighting corruption, putting poverty alleviation into practice as well as emphasizing the superiority of Marxism-Leninism politically and theoretically.

I think before Xi the problem of corruption within the party had become so gross that if action wasn’t swiftly taken then perhaps the CCP could have fallen. If you ask Chinese people if corruption has decreased the overwhelming answer is yes. Is it a “a sudden return to Marxism?” Perhaps, but maybe Xi’s actions and speeches could be viewed as emanating from a CCP which at the current historical juncture is more confident in expressing what it always thought. Like I said, Marxism is taught in schools and always was.

Many would ask: isn’t there a danger in promoting Marx and Lenin with such a huge industrialised proletariat?
Of course. So the party has to always deliver. There is no release valve of an election.
They support the government because their lives have improved rapidly: if your government put out a plan that said “by 2030 your living conditions will be similar to Portugal” and they had already delivered on their previous promises then it would seem crazy to rock the boat.

What’s the situation for healthcare, education, working conditions, housing and social mobility? How would you compare it to the British welfare state?

Education – university education is very cheap. China has had the largest expansion in education in the world. I was teaching students at university whose parents were factory workers or peasants. This was common: all classes and all backgrounds prioritise education.

In the UK there is a sort of anti-intellectualism or disdain for education from elements of the working class and underclass which I’ve never seen in China.

Social mobility – well like I said, a peasant going from a farm to an office is quite a leap. The best schools and universities are public, not private; although yes, the rich can send their kids abroad to study and they can give their children a better education , private tutors. There are also programs attached to some unis which are basically for richer students who didn’t get the best grades to enter.

Poor students get grants and scholarships and fees are relatively cheap. They also live in dormitories with 4-8 people so this keeps costs down.

Rent is relatively cheap but housing is far too expensive to buy now. This is a big problem that China needs to tackle. It seems this is being tackled by keeping house prices stable while raising wages.

The healthcare system needs an overhaul. This is a huge problem: they basically went the way of US healthcare and now it’s generally admitted that this was a mistake.

The two main pressing domestic problems I think need to be sorted out in China are healthcare and housing. If both of these could be resolved by 2030 or greatly improved I would say China is on track. These are huge unacceptable problems – and there isn’t any debate that they are in China. It’s more a logistics and engineering problem than anyone arguing against reform from the right.

Is there such a thing as a Chinese council house?

There is subsidised housing – though here’s the thing talking about China as a monolith: in general each region has its own system. This is a point not well recognized by the West. Local government has a lot more power than some might think. I would say state housing is still negligible. Well actually… I say that but with some jobs you get given a place to live – if you work there for life it’s not unusual for them to let you have it in retirement.

I’m really talking about my own experiences teaching at universities, most places provided a place to live for teachers. For those who hadn’t bought a house they could live in the accommodation provided by the university, usually with no rent and in my experience a subsidy on electricity and water to the extent that there was no bill. I’ve seen retired teachers living in campus accommodation too. But basically the Chinese are now wrapped up in owning a private house.

When things are ‘unacceptable’ though, what happens? How do people go about changing things? Can they? Are there examples?

There are demonstrations, they can petition the local party, there are mechanisms for complaining – labour bureaus. I made a complaint about my welfare payments not being paid by my university once. I didn’t even realise the form I filled in was going to go to court. I had already left the country on the day of the trial so I didn’t even attend – and the court ruled in my favour.

I’ve seen housing protests in the street. In one block of flats who had a dispute with the housing developer they all hung out slogans. I saw a very emotional demonstration outside a hospital by a man who said a doctor’s incompetence had killed his wife and baby in childbirth… it was very upsetting. The police came along, I thought to shut him down. They were forceful but allowed him to continue to protest, just not in the middle of the street where he was blocking traffic.

Of course our Western systems provide more room to make noise. Conversely less progress seems to be made. It’s a real catch 22; coming back to the UK in 2020 I see no visible change from 2004 except more homeless people and shuttered-up shops. On the other hand China is constantly transforming itself. For me that’s the most exciting thing.

If I thought China’s development would stop and, for example, the health system would not change, housing would not improve etc. then I think that the people would have every right to be negative about the future. However, the fact that change has been so rapid and decisive in China – the word “unprecedented” sums it up – means one can’t look at how China is today and judge it on how it will be tomorrow.

This is the problem I feel coming back to the West. It’s fine to criticise China but there just isn’t any other example of a country that has lifted millions of people out of poverty in such a short time. I get very frustrated about the West coming to the Chinese people as some sort of saviour… When China was weak they hardly came as the saviour then. And this history is what informs many Chinese citizens if you talk to them.

What about the description of China as ‘national dictatorship’ – one run in the interest of the nation, via the CCP, but simply with the aim of improving the nation, rather than achieving a socialist or even classless society?


Can they not both happen? Reading their description of the path to communism, they believe it can’t take place soon. One condition they place on communism is having a means of production that vastly outperforms what they have now – a huge jump in technology – and various social and economic contradictions need to be resolved which we’ve spoken about.

There’s a stress in Chinese socialism that they are not utopian socialists but that they’re following the principles of scientific socialism as something to be built. They do say their aim is a classless society – but this is also linked with Chinese thought too: a just society is ‘harmonious’ – so doesn’t have the class divides we have now. In terms of just augmenting national strength I can’t predict the future but I think there are key differences to China’s rise that separate it from the West.

Firstly is the CCP’s historical outlook. They draw a lot on history for their lessons. Looking at colonialism and neo-colonialism they see these forces as not only having a negative impact on them but also being outdated. Much is made of challenging hegemonism – having one state that rules over others, e.g. the British Empire or the US now. They see that as being self-destructive in the end – an immoral world system that cannot last.

A lot is made of the Belt and Road Initiative being way for China to exploit others, for example – so let’s unpack what this is. Essentially this is a lot of infrastructure development across central Asia and Africa, investment into these undeveloped regions.

Now how did China rise – how has it augmented its state power? Through building its infrastructure. So it plans to do the same across central Asia and Africa. This is a very different philosophy to the Washington Consensus of privatization and Nato bombing. China builds bridges – America bombs them.

The development through the capitalist mode of production has barely started for Africa, or South America and much of Central Asia; until their infrastructure is built up, they too will find it hard to resist outside forces.

Of course there will be challenges along the way. The railway being built to Malaysia was put off by the government who said the loan’s terms were too high. The press leapt on this to show how China was being a predatory lender – but what happened? The deal was renegotiated.

Now I’m not saying China will never be a bad actor or there won’t be shady things happening, but who else is providing such a vision for the world? The West has been predominant for hundreds of years. Africa is still in a mess.

Surely the measure is the USSR, with regards to helping the anti-colonial struggle and then postcolonial states? Where is China’s Cuba? Indeed – where is their support for rebels and socialists worldwide, either guerrilla movements or socialist states?

I know China gives a lot of support to Venezuela and has good relations with Cuba and North Korea. As to guerrilla struggles, well this is on the back burner – China has chosen a different path, one that seeks to work with global capital. Of course it’s a dangerous one. Just as China can use capital for its own ends there always remains the danger that China can be co-opted by capital. This is the essence of Xi’s anti-corruption drive. The other argument of course is he’s just purging his rivals. China has a policy of non-interference – whether it always follows this is another matter.

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Chinese street, 2005

What confuses me is that whilst obviously China has the right to oppose its enemies, to intervene etc. – it seems completely against say, giving a socialist party in a small country the financial support to win (by the bullet or the ballot).

I think for China they see development as their priority. Imagine if they were actively funding the Communist Party in the Philippines in their civil war… more American troops would arrive to encircle it. I think China is really caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. But one thing China has is patience. I don’t think China wants to engage in foreign wars. Peaceful rise is essential. I think the ideal of peace and harmony is very ingrained in the Chinese psyche.

The Chinese have gone through so much turbulence they really don’t want war. Also they already feel threatened by the US which has bases surrounding China. The US holds naval drills to block of the Straits of Malacca – it’s obvious who their intended for

In my analysis – I think there is a necessary contradiction within Chinese socialism. It goes like this: having seen the tremendous political and military force the colonial powers can bring into play China’s only option is peaceful rise, especially in this world of nuclear weapons. Now the necessary contradiction for the CCP to work with world capital is that the CCP must always be seen to be working for both capital and socialism. It can never be clear. It must always seem to the socialists in the country that it is using capitalism for socialist destinations. Likewise, for global capital the CCP must always appear that it is using socialism (it’s philosophy) as a cloak for integrating itself within the capitalist world system. The destination and the means must always appear contested. Both can be right.

Another important distinction between how the Chinese see their development to a socialist system is that it’s not just based on principles, but just as the capitalist means of production was vastly better than the feudal one the socialist means of production should be much better than the capitalist one – again, highly dependent on technology. This means of production should then be good enough to defend the state against foreign states such as the US. Of course if the Chinese created socialism with a means of production far better than present day advanced capitalist economies it would be foolish for them not to adopt such systems.

China’s location is a vastly underestimated factor. Often Westerners believe the rise of China will lead to just another USA, but the conditions are so different: the US is protected to the east and West by oceans and shares two borders with compliant or poor states birthed from European culture. Then look at China, in the middle of Russia, Korea, Pakistan, and India – they all have nukes and Japan and South Korea could go nuclear too, central Asia is unstable, and they are already surrounded by US troops. There is very little option for China but to rise peacefully.

Also China is the longest continuous civilisation on Earth, and its culture reflects that; the US is by comparison a recent and violent intervention into the territory it occupies and I think perhaps that is what drives its continued violent, warlike character.

In the West we have this optimistic concept of ‘fully automated luxury communism’ — in short, where a machine takes our job, we still get products or pay, rather than unemployment: a leisure society. To my mind only the Chinese state has the level of technology and political power to achieve this.

China has been at the forefront of these technologies and there are been layoffs due to mechanisation – so the acquisition of technology is heavily tied in with achieving a future communism. This weighed heavily on Deng’s mind when he opened up China. And like I said their concept of communism is utterly tied to technological development.

Personally I see China’s priority with automation should be one where, as they become unneeded, manual workers are retrained to higher and higher skill sets – creating more scientists, doctors and so on. If there is too much unemployment for too long they will have to do something, because they can’t use the Western narrative that it’s a natural phenomenon because they proclaim a socialist society – and unemployment also threatens stability. If China is currently a country with a socialist government but a highly capitalist economy, it fundamentally cannot allow for unemployment, so yes, its response to automation is likely to be far more progressive than in the West.

How broadly accepted is the state’s plan of achieving a socialist society by 2050? What that will mean for the nation’s billionaires?

I would say the plan is by and large supported by the vast majority of the population because the CCP is widely supported by the population as PEW surveys and my own experiences support.

In terms of the nation’s billionaires, and class contradictions in general, they will likely still persist. We have to take into account that socialism in 2050 if achieved will only be considered the start of a socialist epoch. Chinese Marxists discussing the transition to communism, which Xi Jinping himself states will signal the end of class, usually talk of a socialist transition lasting anywhere between 100-500 years.

The power of capital and its contribution to building socialism is usually underestimated by Western socialists. In contrast the CCP places a lot of importance on working with its bourgeoisie. The four small stars on the Chinese national flag represent the bourgeoisie, petit bourgeoisie, workers and peasants united by the CCP, represented by the large star who together work for achieving socialism.

We’ve all seen socialist states lagging due to being upended through a capital strike. The trick is how to prevent the bourgeoisie from seeking a counter revolution or disseminating their own class interests. One way is to prevent them occupying the heights of political power and disseminating their class interests through dominating the media as is permitted in liberal societies.

Then capital has to be co-opted which it generally is at the upper heights of the economy. For example, all monopoly industries are state owned. The bourgeoisie are also allowed to keep much of their profits though capital flight is highly discouraged. The Chinese petit bourgeoisie is provided with a very open market probably much more so than in the West.

While the U.S represents the interests of monopolies and private banking interests, China seeks to fully implement the dynamism of the market. For example, in the West, and much of the rest of the world, there is one Youtube while in China there are numerous competitors. Large banks are rightly state owned in China while private banks in the West get paid out with taxpayers money.

Ironically then the US, for all its talk about capitalism and the free market, seems more inclined towards a type of monopoly or neo-feudal capitalism where the rich are bailed out and the dynamism of capital is curtailed. In contrast, the CCP drive their market to be more competitive which I see leading to greater technological innovation and laying the foundations for a future socialist epoch.

Ultimately, though what I see happening under a socialist epoch, indeed must happen, is that it as a social-economic epoch must become vastly more productive than the current epoch. The transition to greater democratisation of the means of production then, can’t come about only through moral command – rather it has to come about because it makes economic and social sense. That is to say the socialist epoch will lead to more rapid economic and technological progress precisely because there is a greater democratisation of the means of production.

A small example of socialist type conditions coming about in league with capital is the rise of the shared bikes phenomenon in China. It led to many who just used a bike for city travel ditching their bikes because private ownership became a burden. This sharing came about through technological innovation and I hope schemes like this continue in the future with technology like driverless cars which can in turn be used to make ownership inconvenient because servicing property takes time away from things that bring real value to the economy. This of course is one’s time used to be creative and innovate. The CCP are pushing full steam ahead with automation, AI, 5G and even 6G which will allow workers to leave the factories and switch their labour to creative uses which in turn drives on the technological progress needed to furnish a socialist means of production.

Eventually though, with technological progress, a level of freedom has to come about where even possessing and commanding capital becomes a burden because firstly it takes time away from the human creative process as well as the time needed to develop the self and secondly – it won’t improve the quality of one’s life.

Of course, China’s march towards socialism will be contested and nothing can be taken for granted. China is challenged by Western elites who would like them to implement liberal democracy for the purpose of solidifying the power of national and transnational monopoly capital. The CCP will always have to be vigilant for corruption within the party and foreign aggression – including that of propaganda campaigns. I think those who believe in socialism in the West have a duty to understand China beyond the Western-mediated image presented to us. Only by understanding China from their own perspective, based on their own conditions and aware of our own failings can we ever offer advice and criticism to China that won’t sound patronising at best and ignorant at worst.

Alexander Nortion, is the Deputy Features Editor at the Morning Star — www.morningstaronline.co.uk.


Keith Lamb, holds an MSc degree in Contemporary Chinese Studies — his primary research interests are China’s international relations. He is a regular contributor to www.cgtn.com.

https://challenge-magazine.org/2021/05/ ... id-to-ask/
In my analysis – I think there is a necessary contradiction within Chinese socialism. It goes like this: having seen the tremendous political and military force the colonial powers can bring into play China’s only option is peaceful rise, especially in this world of nuclear weapons. Now the necessary contradiction for the CCP to work with world capital is that the CCP must always be seen to be working for both capital and socialism. It can never be clear. It must always seem to the socialists in the country that it is using capitalism for socialist destinations. Likewise, for global capital the CCP must always appear that it is using socialism (it’s philosophy) as a cloak for integrating itself within the capitalist world system. The destination and the means must always appear contested. Both can be right.
This is what confuses most Western leftists. Thing is, they fail to understand that the Chinese ain't 'talking' to them. They are irrelevant to Chinese policy Perhaps if the Western Left had some substance they might be considered in Chinese messaging.
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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Fri Jun 25, 2021 1:19 pm

The left must resolutely oppose the US-led New Cold War on China

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Volunteers see off medics from Yunnan after completing their mission in Wuhan, on March 18, 2020. Photo by Chen Liang

Since the launch of Obama’s ‘Pivot to Asia’ in 2012, the US has prioritised China containment over all other foreign policy commitments. This includes steadily increasing its presence in the South China Sea and encouraging China’s neighbours in their various territorial claims. Obama also initiated an expansion of US military, diplomatic and economic cooperation with other countries in the region. The overarching strategic goal of the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) was to isolate China and to draw East and Southeast Asia back into the US economic – and ideological – orbit.

The Trump administration, while dropping the TPP due to its domestic unpopularity, escalated the Pivot in other respects: launching a trade war in January 2018, imposing a ban on Huawei, attempting to ban TikTok and WeChat, spreading conspiracy theories about the origins of Covid-19, and turning ‘decoupling’ into a buzzword. Anti-China propaganda became – and has remained – pervasive in the West.

Alongside the economic and information warfare, there has been a rising militarisation of the Pacific and a deepening of a ‘China encirclement’ strategy that goes back to the arrival of the US Navy’s Seventh Fleet in the Taiwan Straits in 1950, just a few months after the establishment of the People’s Republic. Recent years have witnessed ever more frequent US naval operations in the South China Sea; increased weapons sales to Taiwan; the encouraging of Japan’s re-armament; the deployment of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) anti-ballistic missile defence system in South Korea and Guam; the establishment of a US marine base in northern Australia; and the bulking up of the Indo-Pacific Command.

Wars hot and cold, new and old
The term ‘Cold War’ was originally coined by US financier Bernard Baruch in 1947 to describe the increasingly tense post-war relationship between the capitalist world and the socialist world. ‘Let us not be deceived; we are today in the midst of a Cold War. Our enemies are to be found abroad and at home. Let us never forget this: Our unrest is the heart of their success.’ The term ‘came to signal an American concept of warfare against the Soviet Union: aggressive containment without a state of war.’ (Odd Arne Westad. The Global Cold War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)

Historians in the West typically regard the Cold War as an elaborate ideological struggle between two superpowers with comparable motivations – a ‘clash of civilisations’ in which the capitalists and communists slugged it out for supremacy. Such an interpretation ignores the fundamental class struggle dynamics at play. The Soviets hoped to avoid a return to hostilities following the shared Allied victory in World War II; rather they consistently proposed a system of ‘peaceful coexistence’ in which they – and other countries – would enjoy the right to build the society of their own choosing, without the constant threat of war. Vladimir Shubin, former head of the Africa section of the international department of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, writes that

the ‘Cold War’ was not part of our political vocabulary; in fact the term was used in a strictly negative sense… For us the global struggle was not a battle between the two ‘superpowers’ assisted by their ‘satellites’ and ‘proxies’, but a united fight of the world's progressive forces against imperialism. (V. G. Shubin. The Hot ‘Cold War’. London: Pluto Press, 2008, p. 3)

‘A man is judged by the company he keeps’, goes the saying. During the Cold War period, the Soviet Union’s allies included the people of Vietnam and Korea fighting against imperialist domination; the people of South Africa, Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, Guinea Bissau, Algeria and elsewhere, fighting against colonialism and apartheid; and the people of Cuba, Grenada, Chile, Nicaragua and elsewhere, fighting for the right to construct socialist societies.

The US and its allies fought a very different kind of Cold War: a global hybrid war against socialism and non-alignment. President Truman said fairly bluntly in 1947 that the Cold War was ‘designed to foster a world environment in which the American system can survive and flourish.’ (R.L. Walli. U.S. Foreign Policy of Interventionism. Social Scientist 4, no. 6 (1976): 41-48) The essence of the Cold War was thus a protracted struggle by the US and its allies to protect the long-term viability of the imperialist world system – and, by corollary, weaken the global socialist and anti-imperialist movement. And this war was not always very cold. From Vietnam to Angola to Chile, the Cold War wrought horrifying death and destruction.

A new enemy in a new century
The US won the Cold War by default when the Soviet Union ceased to exist on 31 December 1991. The USSR’s dissolution was not accompanied by the promised ‘peace dividend’. Rather, the removal of the Soviet Union as a bulwark against imperialist hegemony meant the launch of a new era of NATO expansionism and war; an untrammelled and invigorated US-led militarism, which has thought nothing of destroying Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria. Martin Jacques writes that the Soviet collapse ‘greatly enhanced America’s pre-eminent position, eliminating its main adversary and resulting in the countries of the former Soviet bloc opening their markets and turning in many cases to the US for aid and support. Never before, not even in the heyday of the British Empire, had a nation’s power enjoyed such a wide reach.’ The US’s global position ‘seemed unassailable, and at the turn of the millennium terms like “hyperpower” and “unipolarity” were coined to describe what appeared to be a new and unique form of power.’ (Martin Jacques. When China Rules the World. 2. ed. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2012, p. 1)

Along with expanding the US’s sphere of economic and political influence into the former socialist countries, strategists developed a new obsession: maintaining the new single-superpower status quo and forestalling the rise of any potential geopolitical challenger. These aims are captured in rather stark terms in the Wolfowitz Doctrine, the Defence Planning Guidance for 1994–99 led by then-Deputy Secretary for Defence Paul Wolfowitz: ‘Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union… Our strategy must now refocus on precluding the emergence of any potential future global competitor.’

The adoption of the Pivot to Asia reflects a consensus in US ruling circles that the ‘future global competitor’ in question is China. This in turn reflects China’s emergence as the principal driver of global economic growth and the corresponding rise in its influence. China containment is now blossoming into a multifaceted hybrid war – ‘a combination of unconventional and conventional means using a range of state and non-state actors that run across the spectrum of social and political life.’ (Vijay Prashad. Washington Bullets. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020, p. 118) The picture Jude Woodward paints of the original Cold War bears a chilling resemblance to the current state of US-China relations:

The USSR was variously surrounded by a tightening iron noose of US military alliances, forward bases, border interventions, cruise missiles and naval exercises. Economically it was shut out of international trade organisations, subjected to bans and boycotts and excluded from collaboration on scientific and technological developments. It was diplomatically isolated, excluded from the G7 group of major economies and awarded an international pariah status. It was designated as uniquely undemocratic. Any opponents of this ‘Cold War’ and accompanying nuclear arms race were stigmatised as disloyal apologists, closet ‘reds’ or spies and subjected to McCarthyite witch-hunts. (Jude Woodward. The US vs China: Asia’s New Cold War? Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017, p. 31)

The techniques of the original Cold War have been updated and adapted for a new enemy in a new century, but the political essence is the same. The US and its allies still seek to maintain the overall stability and long-term viability of the imperialist world system. This system is under threat from China, which is coalescing forces throughout the world in support of a new, multipolar world order; by definition a negation of the US hegemonist project for military and economic control of the planet. Thus, much like the original Cold War, the New Cold War is a sustained conflict, initiated and led by the US, between the forces of imperialism, hegemony and unipolarity on the one hand, and the forces of socialism, sovereignty and multipolarity on the other.

Why now?
Much is made of the ‘China threat’, which forms the basis of a new McCarthyism in the West. This threat is real enough, albeit not in the sense it’s used by bourgeois politicians and journalists. China does not seek to rule the world, nor does it seek to ‘undermine democracy worldwide’. It is however increasingly challenging the established imperialist world order – economically, strategically and ideologically.

To the extent that China’s extraordinary growth was driven by low-cost, low-margin, low-tech, large-scale manufacturing within US-led supply chains – and to the extent that the abundant supply of cheap, competent and well-educated Chinese labour has made a lot of Americans very rich – the US cautiously tolerated China’s emergence from generalised poverty. Politically, the US administration under Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger hypothesised that, by reaching out to China, they could increase US pressure on the Soviet Union and entrench the Sino-Soviet split. From the time of Nixon’s 1972 Beijing visit onwards, the two countries managed to build a mutually beneficial relationship, albeit one rife with complexities, contradictions and the ever-present possibility of confrontation.

But China’s long-term strategy was not aimed at permanently playing a subservient role in a globalised economy dominated by the US. As Yang Weimin, a senior economist in the Chinese government, said in 2018 discussing the nascent trade war: ‘You can't let China only make t-shirts while the US does high-tech. That is unreasonable.’ (Bob Davis and Lingling Wei. Superpower Showdown. New York: Harper Business, 2020, p. 241)

China’s economic structure gives the Communist Party of China (CPC) government various powerful levers for directing production. In particular, the publicly-owned banks, the dominance of state-owned enterprises in the ‘commanding heights’ of industry, and the enforcement of a strict set of regulations on private business have allowed the government to steadily rise up the global value chain and construct an advanced economy. ‘China is the only authentically emergent country’, wrote Samir Amin. Chinese scientific research is increasingly world-class. China is the biggest trading partner of most countries in the world, and has become a major source of investment in developing countries. It’s leading the way in the battle against climate breakdown – the sort of thing the West expects to dominate, that feeds into a pervasive (albeit largely subconscious) assumption that the predominantly white nations of Western Europe and North America are fundamentally more ‘civilised’ and ‘enlightened’ than the rest of the world.

If China’s progress were occurring within a framework of US-led imperialism, if US finance capital were able to exercise meaningful control over the process, it would be less of a problem. Japan, Germany, and South Korea have all become significant players in the global economy in the post-war era, but since their rise has occurred within the boundaries of the imperialist world system, it hasn’t provoked any strategic crisis in Washington. These countries largely play by the US’s rules, and are to a greater or lesser degree militarily and politically beholden to the US.

As a non-white country – a country that consistently aligns itself and identifies with the Global South, a country with a Communist Party government, a country that rejects the neoliberal consensus, a country where the capitalist class does not dictate policy – China represents a substantial threat in the battle of ideas. China’s unprecedented increase in economic strength and geopolitical influence has provoked a renewed resolve in the US ruling class to ‘contain’ China; to apply the methods of Cold War against it in order to limit its rise and to secure a ‘New American Century’.

Trump to Biden – plus ça change
Barack Obama was explicit that the purpose of his ‘pivot’ was to preserve US hegemony: ‘We have to make sure America writes the rules of the global economy… Because if we don’t write the rules for trade around the world – guess what – China will.’ Nevertheless, Obama’s overall anti-China strategy was accompanied by some level of sensible cooperation with Beijing, particularly around environmental issues – the Paris Climate Agreement came about in no small part due to the coordination between the US and China.

The Trump administration maintained Obama’s overall anti-China stance but dropped the sophistication and cooperation. Trump came to power with a promise to stop China ‘raping’ the US economy. Key members of his top team included such fanatical China hawks as Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, Stephen Bannon, Robert Lighthizer and Peter Navarro. Their approach was characterised by threats, bluster, blackmail, demagoguery and racism.

Trump insisted that China – aided and abetted by previous US governments – was the cause of all the US’s economic problems. China’s trade imbalance with the US was ‘the greatest theft ever perpetrated by anyone or any country in the history of the world’. (Cited in Peter Frankopan. The New Silk Roads. London, England: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018, p. 112) The decline of US manufacturing was attributed to Chinese currency undervaluation rather than to the ruthlessness and decrepitude of neoliberal capitalism. (Singaporean academic and former diplomat Kishore Mahbubani noted wryly that, rather than blaming China for everything, living standards in the US might improve ‘if America stopped fighting unnecessary foreign wars and used its resources to improve the well-being of its people.’) (Kishore Mahbubani. Has China Won? New York: Public Affairs, 2020, p. 263)

The Trump team initiated a trade war, imposing increasingly heavy tariffs on Chinese imports. Essentially they wanted China to agree to buy hundreds of billions’ worth of US produce that it didn’t need; end state subsidies to key industries; allow US companies unrestricted access to Chinese markets while accepting tariffs on Chinese exports; and stop negotiating technology transfer deals with US companies. Alongside this attempt at a new round of unequal treaties, they moved to protect the US domination of hi-tech industry, imposing a ban on Huawei and seeking to ban popular Chinese mobile apps TikTok and WeChat.

Trump and Pompeo generated mass hostility towards China by engaging in flagrant racism, most notably blaming the coronavirus pandemic on China and referring to it as ‘kung flu’ or ‘the China virus’. Meanwhile the White House revived the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (‘the Quad’), a strategic alliance of the US, Japan, Australia and India, widely understood to be an instrument of China containment. Mike Pompeo confirmed that the objective for the Quad was to become an ‘Asian NATO’.

With Joe Biden’s victory in the presidential elections, many hoped for an easing of tensions between the US and China. Five months into the Biden presidency, such hopes have to all intents and purposes been dashed. The New Cold War has become an invariant of a declining US capitalism determined to hold on to global hegemony via whatever means it can muster. Hostility towards China is a consensus, bipartisan position in the US. Biden has made his view abundantly clear, stating that ‘China has an overall goal to become the leading country in the world, the wealthiest country in the world and the most powerful country in the world; that’s not going to happen on my watch.’

There are of course some tactical differences between Trump and Biden when it comes to Pacific strategy. Trump tended towards a unilateralist position, demanding that allies in Japan and Europe fall in line behind the US. Biden is attempting to construct a more consensual alliance among traditional US partners, albeit within the framework of ‘restored American leadership.’

One of the Biden team’s first acts following the election was to start undermining the EU-China investment deal. Having failed to prevent the deal being signed, the US coordinated with the EU, Canada and UK to impose a set of sanctions on China over its alleged human rights abuses in Xinjiang, with Secretary of State Antony Blinken talking up ‘our ongoing commitment to working multilaterally to advance respect for human rights’. When China then imposed reciprocal sanctions, the EU decided (at the State Department’s urging) that it would ‘freeze’ the deal.

There is little sign that the trade war will be dialled down, in spite of the fact that it has manifestly failed in its stated aim of restoring US manufacturing greatness – a failure Biden himself noted on the campaign trail last summer. Biden has repeated Trump’s talking points about China’s ‘coercive and unfair’ trade practices and its ‘abuses of the international system.’

There is also a basic continuity at the military level, with the new US administration heavily promoting the ‘Quad’ alliance and, according to the Chinese Ministry of Defence, significantly increasing the US military presence and surveillance in the Pacific.

If nothing else, Joe Biden has dialled down the racist rhetoric a few notches, but this hasn’t stopped him resurrecting the racist lab-leak conspiracy theory, studiously ignoring the report carried out by the World Health Organization (the UN agency with the appropriate competence and mandate) and calling on Western intelligence services to conduct their own investigation. As Danny Haiphong notes, this is the behaviour of ‘a Democrat with Trumpian Characteristics on China.’

No winners
A crucial difference between the original Cold War and the current one is that the US is very unlikely to ‘win’ the New Cold War. Compared to the Soviet Union in the 1980s, China is much stronger economically, much more integrated into the global economy, and frankly has much stronger leadership and a more coherent vision for the future of socialism.

Soviet GDP never exceeded 40 percent of US GDP, but China will surpass the US in absolute GDP terms in the next couple of years. China has been able to avoid an arms race, and has not been involved in direct military confrontation with the imperialist powers – having made a strategic choice to prioritise the strengthening and defence of its own revolution over taking a leading role in the promotion of global revolution. Meanwhile its deep integration into global value chains, and the fact that it is the largest trading partner of the majority of the world’s countries, mean that stability in China is crucial for the global economy. As such, in economic terms, even the capitalist world has a clear vested interest in the People’s Republic of China not collapsing.

The recently-signed Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership puts China at the centre of the largest trade bloc in history, comprising 30 percent of the world’s population (it includes Australia, Brunei, Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Japan, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, and Vietnam). China is not in any meaningful risk of becoming economically isolated.

‘Decoupling’ from China would be highly detrimental to the US economy, as it would mean losing access to a Chinese market of 1.4 billion people and increasing the production cost of a vast array of commodities. Tariffs on Chinese goods have a direct and immediate impact on US businesses that rely on these products (most are intermediate goods, used in the production process for consumer goods). Even Foreign Affairs magazine, published by the Council on Foreign Relations, has described the trade war as ‘unwinnable’, noting that ‘tariffs have hit US consumers harder than their Chinese counterparts.’

The US will also likely be unsuccessful in its attempt to deny China access to markets and components it needs to further upgrade its economy. As Peter Frankopan has observed: ‘If, as seems likely, necessity is the mother of invention, then it may well prove that attempts to strangle technological developments by starving other states of components and knowledge will only serve to accelerate them.’ (Frankopan, op cit, p. 176)

The outlook for the New Cold Warriors is not promising. China is not internationally isolated, is not suffering economic stagnation, and is not facing a crisis of legitimacy. The Chinese government enjoys enormous popularity at home, the result of ever-improving living standards at all levels of society. Wages are rising, social welfare is improving. According to an extensive study conducted by the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, 93 percent of Chinese people are satisfied with their central government.

The chances of China suffering the fate of the USSR are therefore vanishingly small, and the New Cold War is doomed to failure. But it can do plenty of damage along the way. Cold War tensions can easily develop into violent confrontation. As noted above, millions of people in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean experienced the Cold War as being decidedly hot. And history indicates that the US and its allies are not above using military means in order to maintain their ‘sphere of influence’ intact.

Meanwhile climate change presents an unprecedented global threat. If humanity is to avoid triggering any of the several planetary tipping points, it will have to address its environmental challenges with the utmost coordination and cooperation. Mahbubani puts it pithily: ‘If climate change makes the planet progressively uninhabitable, both American and Chinese citizens will be fellow passengers on a sinking ship.’ (Mahbubani, op cit, p. 264) Much the same logic applies to the major public health threats faced by humanity: pandemics and microbial resistance. China has consistently raised its voice in favour of such cooperation. For example foreign minister Wang Yi says that, ‘as the world’s largest developing country and the largest developed country, both [China and the US] bear a major responsibility for world peace and development.’ Contrast this with Joe Biden, who says that the US is ‘in competition with China’ to ‘win the 21st century.’

At an economic and cultural level, Cold War will mean a reduced global division of labour, reduced productivity, reduced learning, reduced cross-pollination of knowledge and ideas. In terms of geopolitics, it threatens to slow down and complicate the process of creating a more multipolar and democratic system of international relations.

Neither Washington nor Beijing?
It seems that every Cold War must have its own ‘third camp’ in the Western left. During the original Cold War, in particular in Britain, a significant proportion of the socialist movement rallied behind the slogan Neither Washington nor Moscow, withholding their support from a Soviet Union they considered to be state capitalist and/or imperialist. These forces called for workers in the imperialist countries to reject alignment with the ruling classes in Washington or Moscow, and instead to join ‘the camp of proletarian internationalism, of the socialist revolution, of the struggle for the emancipation of all the oppressed.’

A few decades later, this slogan has been resurrected as Neither Washington nor Beijing, with China taking the place of the Soviet Union as the evil ‘social imperialist’ power to be opposed. Presenting the New Cold War as an inter-imperialist conflict means that a number of prominent organisations and individuals on the left are failing to take an effective anti-war position. If China is ‘an emerging imperialist power’; if ‘socialists should side with workers — not the Chinese or American ruling class’; such socialists are unlikely to take a strong position against the rising US-led militarisation of the Pacific, or the China containment strategy, or economic ‘decoupling’, or against the varied forms of hybrid warfare being leveraged against China by the US and its allies.

Particularly under the Biden administration, phoney human rights allegations form a centrepiece of the attack on China. These allegations are being used to attempt to cut China out of global value chains, to disrupt the Belt and Road Initiative, to diplomatically isolate China and to generate anti-China sentiment worldwide. Unfortunately, much of the Western left – even if it has a stated position of opposing Cold War – is parroting this slander unquestioningly. The Socialist Party for example is only too willing to repeat absurd tropes about China’s construction of a ‘police state’ in Xinjiang. The Socialist Workers Party repeats the lie that ‘one million are locked up in internment camps’ and that what the CPC government is perpetrating in Xinjiang is a ‘racist horror.’ Counterfire offers uncritical support for violent, Western-backed ‘pro-democracy protestors’ in Hong Kong. (For those wishing to research these issues, Qiao Collective have done an excellent job of consolidating resources on both Hong Kong and Xinjiang.)

The situation is reminiscent of the Western left’s failure to effectively oppose the NATO war on Libya. In theory, these pseudo-socialist groups claimed to be against bombing (with a few dishonourable exceptions that supported the No Fly Zone), yet they simultaneously echoed idiotic and unsubstantiated claims about the Gaddafi government which were clearly designed to build public support for war. When NATO bombed the ‘rebels’ to victory in August 2011, Counterfire declared that ‘the Gaddafi regime was a brutal dictatorship and it deserved to be overthrown just as much as that of Ben Ali’s in Tunisia or Mubarak’s in Egypt.’ Similarly, the Western left largely failed to build an effective movement against the war in Syria, instead participating in the propaganda campaign against the Syrian government.

The anti-China propaganda is having an impact, particularly in the imperialist heartlands. In the US, it has produced ‘a bipartisan consensus in Washington towards getting tough with China that is now extending to the broader public.’ Anti-China sentiment is at an all-time high, to the point where it is fomenting a rise in anti-Asian racism – tragically exemplified by the Atlanta massacre in March. For the left to echo imperialist propaganda against China in the context of a burgeoning Cold War is to comprehensively abdicate its most basic responsibilities in the global struggle against imperialism.

Unite to oppose the US-led New Cold War on China
The original Cold War was waged by the US and its allies not just against the Soviet Union but against the forces of socialism and national sovereignty worldwide. It was a protracted and multifaceted struggle to ensure the preservation of an imperialist status quo. The same is true of the New Cold War. It’s being waged by the US and its allies not just against China but the entire Global South, against the very notion of multipolarity, against the possibility of a democratic system of international relations and the end of hegemony.

China is a strong and increasingly consistent supporter of multipolarity – an international order in which there are multiple centres of power, creating an equilibrium that increases the costs of war and conflict, and promotes peaceful cooperation and integration. British academic Jenny Clegg, who has written the canonical book on China’s multipolar strategy, writes:

A multipolar world involves a pattern of multiple centres of power, all with a certain capacity to influence world affairs, shaping a negotiated order. Multipolarisation involves not only readjustments in the relations between the major powers with the growing role of Europe and Japan but also the rise of developing countries, their regional associations such as ASEAN, the African Union, the South American communities as well as the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, and their international organisations such as the G77 and the non-aligned movement (NAM). The rising forces of the Third World in fact play the key role in multipolarisation, with the support of the world’s other progressive forces and states, to provide the basis for a genuine multilateralism coordinated through the United Nations. (Jenny Clegg. China’s Global Strategy. New York: Pluto Press, 2009, p. 13)

Multipolarity provides a path for the defeat of modern imperialism; it involves weakening the forces of polarisation of wealth and power; it deprives the imperialist bloc of its power to determine the fate of the rest of the world through military action, sanctions and destabilisation.

Because it enhances the sovereignty of the non-imperialist countries, it also by corollary helps to create appropriate conditions for those countries to pursue socialist experiments. Thus Samir Amin: ‘Multipolarity will provide the framework for the possible and necessary overcoming of capitalism.’ (Samir Amin. Beyond US Hegemony? New York: Zed Books, 2006, p. 149) Or as Xi Jinping rather poetically put it in Moscow in 2013:

All countries, irrespective of size, strength and wealth, are equal. The right of the people to independently choose their development paths should be respected, interference in the internal affairs of other countries opposed, and international fairness and justice maintained. Only the wearer of the shoes knows if they fit or not. Only the people can best tell if the development path they have chosen for their country suits or not.

Real-world examples of the benefits of multipolarity can be seen in the various ‘21st century socialist’ experiments in Latin America, all of which have benefitted from sustained Chinese support.

Such a situation is precisely what the US ruling class is trying to avoid. This is the most powerful driver of the New Cold War. The imperialist powers – particularly the US, but generally supported by Canada, Britain, Western Europe and Japan – seek to maintain a unipolar status quo which provides maximum benefit to the US (with some crumbs to its allies) at the expense of the rest of the world. China by contrast is leading the construction of a multipolar world in which each country can choose its own development path and all countries are free to build mutually beneficial relations.

Those that oppose imperialism must therefore resolutely and consistently oppose the US-led New Cold War in all its manifold forms. To sit on the fence would be to uphold the imperialist status quo.

Carlos Martinez is an author and political activist from London. His first book, The End of the Beginning: Lessons of the Soviet Collapse, was published in 2019 by LeftWord Books. His writing can be found at invent-the-future.org. He is also co-founder of the No Cold War campaign and co-editor of the Friends of Socialist China website.

https://www.ebb-magazine.com/essays/the ... r-on-china
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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