China

[blindpig]

USA CIA veteran hosting anti-China ‘Uyghur diaspora’ podcast funded by U.S. government
Posted Feb 09, 2022 by Ben Norton

Originally published: Multipolarista (February 8, 2022 )

The U.S. embassy in France is funding an anti-China podcast that purports to speak on behalf of the Uyghur Muslim community, but was in fact co-created and is co-hosted by a non-Uyghur CIA veteran.

WEghur Stories describes itself as “the first podcast entirely about the Uyghur diaspora,” and says it is “working to create a conversation within and about the global Uyghur diaspora.”

The co-creator, co-host, and producer of WEghur Stories, John Bair, describes himself on the podcast’s official website merely as an “American writer who specializes in helping other people tell their stories.”

But Bair is much more than that; he is a CIA veteran who specializes in information warfare.

It is not difficult to find ties between Bair and the notorious spy agency, which has organized anti-democratic coups d’etat around the world and has been complicit in targeted assassinations, torture, and drug trafficking.

Bair is a member of the board of directors of a Washington, DC-based advocacy group called Foreign Policy for America (FP4A).

The text of Bair’s biography on the FP4A website is completely different from his WEghur Stories bio, although both use the same photo.

The FP4A page reveals that Bair “is an alumnus of the CIA, where he served as an intelligence analyst, chief of staff, and public communications officer.” It adds that Bair “works at the intersection of national security and communications.”

The shady past of this co-host of a “Uyghur diaspora” podcast was first reported on Twitter by Arnaud Bertrand, a computer engineer and businessman who lives in Shanghai, China.

Bertrand was also quick to notice that the show is funded by the U.S. government.

The bottom of the WEghur Stories website discloses that this “podcast is made possible with support of the Embassy of the United States of America, France.”

The U.S. embassy in Brussels has likewise paid Facebook to post ads promoting the podcast.



The U.S. government has spent millions of dollars funding Uyghur secessionist groups in China’s western Xinjiang province, which is geostrategically located at the heart of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative, a massive global infrastructure program that Washington has desperately tried to disrupt.

Uyghur separatist organizations in the diaspora that admit to seeking the “fall of China” have also been bankrolled by the U.S. government’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a CIA cutout created by the Ronald Reagan administration.

In an effort to demonize and destabilize China, the U.S. government has accused China of supposedly committing “genocide” against the Uyghur minority–even while the State Department’s own lawyers concluded that “there was insufficient evidence to prove genocide,” Foreign Policy magazine reported.

@NEDemocracy
To further #humanrights & human dignity for all people in China, the National Endowment for Democracy has funded Uyghur groups since 2004. #NEDemocracy #HumanRightsDay https://ned.org/uyghur-human-rights-pol ... -grantees/

Intersectional imperialism: Using liberal feminist rhetoric to push U.S. foreign-policy interests against China

The WEghur Stories podcast reflects how U.S. government-sponsored groups and intelligence agencies are increasingly appropriating identity politics to advance Washington’s foreign-policy interests.

One of the most cynical examples of this strategy is an episode titled “Being Uyghur Women,” which exploits liberal feministic rhetoric to push anti-China propaganda.

This episode, which is co-hosted by Bair–the non-Uyghur white male CIA veteran–opens with a monologue on the importance of “empowering our women,” stating that “women should not be the entrusted and passive guardian of culture under the shadow of the male or state gaze.”

The episode condemns the government in Beijing as a violent patriarchal regime, declaring that, “In China, gender equality by engaging women in the workforce has never been achieved in any meaningful way,” and that Chinese women suffer from “rampant discrimination.”

Denouncing “the Chinese government’s brutality,” the episode proclaims, “We need to engage and critique patriarchy, stand tall against violence towards women and the queer community.”

“We should allow ourselves to be angry to grieve, and fight the Chinese state’s violence against us,” the podcast insists.

This rhetoric is very reminiscent of a recruitment advertisement the CIA published in 2021, in which an employee of the infamous spy agency proudly declared that she is an intersectional feminist.

In the video, the CIA agent describes herself in a poetic monologue as “intersectional,” a “woman of color,” and “a cis-gender millennial whose been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder.”

“I refuse to internalize misguided patriarchal ideas of what a woman can or should be,” the CIA officer proclaimed.


Art as a political weapon that advances U.S. foreign-policy interests

WEghur Stories is produced by a “multidisciplinary art lab” called The New Wild. Like the podcast, this company creates art that coincidentally coincides with U.S. foreign-policy interests.

Other projects produced by The New Wild include “Everybody Is Gone (Or, the Happiest Muslims in the World),” which the lab describes as “a large-scale art installation and performance whose process and outcomes are centered around offering reparative spaces to the Uyghur community, an ethnic Muslim minority group that is currently experiencing extreme oppression at the hands of the Chinese government.”

CIA veteran Bair served as director of communications for “Everybody Is Gone,” and The New Wild openly admits that the project “seeks to draw widespread public attention to the crisis, facilitate collective action to end it, and counteract the Chinese government’s objectives by providing a platform and resources for Uyghur art and culture to be preserved, perpetuated, and celebrated.”

In short, this art is a propaganda tool that explicitly aims to “counteract the Chinese government’s objectives” (and, by sheer coincidence, advances the U.S. government’s objectives in the process).

Another The New Wild production, called “Tear a Root from the Earth,” is a musical that tells the story of how the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in the 1980s hurt an Afghan family. The book for the dramatic work was written by John Bair, the CIA veteran.

The New Wild likewise produced a multimedia solo performance, “Letters From Home,” which focuses on “Cambodia suffering through the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge,” and “the hope inherent in immigration and the American dream.”

WEghur Stories and similar productions show how art and media can be repurposed to serve as a political weapon–one that just so happens to advance U.S. foreign-policy objectives.

https://mronline.org/2022/02/09/usa-cia ... overnment/

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I’ve spent months analyzing the BBC’s coverage of China.
2022/02/09 6 Minutes
The results are revealing

by Tom Fowdy


(c) Peter Macdiarmid / Getty Images

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) describes {1} itself as “the most trusted broadcaster in the world”. That’s quite a confident assertion to make about oneself. At first glance, such a label may seem appropriate to some. The BBC is, at least objectively speaking, a pioneering institution that shaped the world of modern reporting from the early 20th century onwards. It represents a style that is both authentic and classic, embodied by that formal British accent that is a hallmark of its reporting.

The BBC has undeniably been popular as a source of news, entertainment, and educational material for many around the world. Every other international broadcaster is, in some ways, a carbon copy of the principles and norms that the BBC established.

But that does not mean it is an institution without an agenda, however much it repeatedly seeks to deny this. Hiding behind its self-appointed reputation of impartiality, the BBC actually has a global mission to serve the goals of the British elite. It is a prolific, ideological, and aggressive foreign policy actor behind its elitist institutionalist culture, advocating an intellectual, moral, and value-based supremacy on behalf of the West.

This has never been more clearly demonstrated than with the broadcaster’s unrelenting role in waging a propaganda war against China, serving the purposes of its masters in Westminster and Washington. I have spent a long time analyzing all the BBC‘s output on China over the past few years – and the results are revealing, if not, sadly, surprising. It shows it to be an organization hellbent on fermenting geopolitical tensions, and calls into question the principles the BBC claims to base itself on, and exposes as a lie the historically entrenched reputation that it clings to.

A lingering attachment to Empire

The BBC claims to be an independent and impartial institution. However, an immediate look at its history and development show this isn’t true. The BBC‘s elitist outlook is inseparable from its origin as an institution which was set up to facilitate the British Empire, and used as a vehicle for the government’s messaging during a time where the British Empire itself was facing terminal decline in the 1950s.

The institution cannot be separated from the geopolitical precedents that shaped it, including World War Two and the Cold War. As Gary D Rawnsley explores in Radio Diplomacy and Propaganda: The BBC and VOA in International Politics (2016), a 1946 white paper on broadcasting set out that the BBC would be subject to jurisdiction by the Foreign Office over certain policies, countries of interest, languages of focus, and other objectives.

These constraints have always jarred with the BBC‘s stated principles, with the British establishment repeatedly putting pressure on it to fulfill the government’s narratives. A key historical turning point in this area was the 1956 Suez Crisis and the handling of anti-Western, left leaning nationalist movements in former imperial domains throughout the 1950s and 1960s. There is little doubt that the broadcaster is tied to the fulcrum of ideological struggle under a mantra described as the “lingering attachment to an empire”. In the following decades, the BBC would also strictly adhere to the British government’s line on the troubles in Northern Ireland, the Falklands War, and Iraq. While the BBC elevates itself over what is described as ‘state-affiliated media’ in other countries, as an ultimately superior institution for all intents and purposes, it is the same thing.

The (anti) China agenda

So it should come as no surprise that the BBC is not committed to impartial reporting on the matter of China, particularly as geopolitical tensions have increased over the past couple of years, but is actively peddling a narrative aimed at targeting the country in an aggressive fashion.

The broadcaster has been accused of this multiple times, not least by people in China, but dismisses these claims by asserting that it is impartial and that it has a monopoly over what constitutes the truth. To check on these claims, after years of frustration at what I see as often deliberately negative, unbalanced, and aggressive coverage, I decided to carry out extensive research of the BBC‘s output on China.

This research has involved taking an inventory of hundreds and thousands of BBC articles online across the scope of several years, and organizing the data into findings. What was discovered is that on certain controversial issues pertaining to China, the BBC has been absolutely relentless. In 2021, for example, the BBC published in English at least 51 articles on the Xinjiang autonomous region and the ‘Uyghur Genocide’, amounting to nearly one a week. Even more strikingly, they published more than 100 articles criticizing and attacking the National Security Law in Hong Kong. In both instances, the articles were not balanced at all, but almost all exclusively pushed one point of view. The BBC‘s bias is clear from a piece publicizing an Amnesty International report, which reads: ‘China has created {2} a dystopian hellscape in Xinjiang’. It’s worth noting that the BBC has amplified Amnesty reports against China on several occasions, but does not do this, for example, when it comes to Israel. More than 10% of the BBC‘s headlines on Xinjiang topics contained the word ‘genocide’, when there is no evidence that one is or has taken place there.

What is more revealing is how the Xinjiang related content was organized throughout the year, and the themes it covered. From January to March of 2021, the BBC frontloaded Xinjiang articles very aggressively in line with the Biden administration coming into office, and seemingly mirroring the build-up of coordinated sanctions with the UK, Canada, and the EU. This included such headlines as, ‘Their goal is to destroy {3} everyone: Uighur camp detainees allege systematic rape’ and ‘Uighurs {4}: ‘Credible case’ China carrying out genocide’. Many of these stories are atrocity focused and emotionally charged, with no counter argument offered. In the next quarter (April-June, 2021) the BBC changed tone and began frontloading forced labor stories, including ones which indiscriminately attacked many businesses on baseless claims. This also followed the Biden policy agenda at that time.

Then, inexplicably, Xinjiang dropped off the BBC‘s coverage altogether. There were no articles on the matter throughout July to October. In November, however, the topic reappeared and has since aggressively accelerated in scope, coinciding with the run-up to this month’s Winter Olympics in Beijing and Washington’s push for a diplomatic boycott of it. The BBC also ran 24 stories on the ‘missing’ Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai in the space of a few weeks, using the BBC Sport division to push {5} political messaging on this issue, as well as on Xinjiang. Whether by design or by choice, the BBC was complicit in coordinating coverage promoting an Olympics boycott.

The BBC‘s choice of experts on China over the past few years has also been highly problematic, with the broadcaster repeatedly citing partial sources often associated with US institutions, and failing to disclose their conflicts of interest. These include citations from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) {6}, a group funded by the US defense department and the arms industry, Victims of Communism researcher Adrian Zenz {7}, or on Hong Kong, the astroturfing dissident figures {8}, such as Jimmy Lai. If there is any particular group or organization that publishes a report critical of China, the BBC always gives it maximum publicity, while this platform is not offered on any other issue.

Whilst my research only scratches the surface of the BBC‘s anti-China agenda, it provides an important insight into what are unusual patterns and behaviors from the broadcaster in regards to the country. This encompasses: overreporting on certain topics; atrocity-driven emotional headlines and content with a slant to only one point of view; a total absence of the other side of the argument; a continual use of sources from agenda-driven institutions without disclosure or balance; identifiable patterns in the output of reporting that conveniently overlap with certain foreign policy developments or objectives of London and Washington; abuse of non-political mediums such as BBC Sport to push certain points.

There is a lot more analysis to be done on the BBC‘s partiality on all matters Chinese, but nonetheless if it wasn’t clear there was an agenda at play, it is now. The self-proclaimed ‘world’s most trusted broadcaster’ cannot be trusted at all.

Links:

{1} https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/world ... news-brand

{2} https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-57386625

{3} https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-55794071

{4} https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-55973215

{5} https://www.bbc.com/sport/basketball/59987418

{6} https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51697800

{7} https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-59456541

{8} https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-53718901

https://billtotten.wpcomstaging.com/202 ... -of-china/

BBC is the British bulldog of US imperialist propaganda. And it seems that when the MSM(including NPR) need to emphasis the heinous behavior of one of the declared 'enemies of democracy' they very often trot out some clown with a British or Australian accent because I guess some focus group has indicated that US citizens credit such funny speech with greater authenticity. I think this particularly true of NPR junkies who just can't get enough of Masterpiece Theater.


A slobbering reactionary just like his 'daddy'.

[blindpig]

Here’s why Soros’ attack on China is illogical and historically ignorant

Billionaire George Soros, the founder of the Open Society Foundations, gave a speech this week to the conservative Hoover Institution in which he compared China under President Xi Jinping to Nazi Germany and called for regime change in Beijing.

Soros said in his speech, “Xi Jinping has done his best to dismantle Deng Xiaoping’s achievements. He brought private companies under Deng under the control of the [CPC] and undermined the dynamism that used to characterize them.” He also said that Xi, unlike other Chinese leaders like Deng Xiaoping, is “a true believer in communism,” and added: “It is to be hoped that Xi Jinping may be replaced by someone less repressive at home and more peaceful abroad.”

Apart from the facts that this is a pretty bold attempt to interfere in China’s internal affairs and that it ignores the reality that Beijing’s government has a trust rating of 91% from its citizens, Soros’ assessment of what’s going on in the country is extraordinarily ignorant and, for the most part, just not true.

For starters, Xi is not undoing anything that Deng did with regards to China’s opening up and reform policies. In fact, Xi has only doubled down on such policies and every single one of Xi’s remarks on the subject emphasizes leaning into globalization and removing barriers to international trade. (See: Xi’s latest WEF speech).

For example, just this year the largest free-trade zone in the world, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RECP), a Chinese-led initiative in the Asia-Pacific region, was established. This zone encompasses some 30% of both the world’s population and GDP. Does that really sound like a society that is closing itself off?

The numbers also paint a clear picture. China’s General Administration of Customs (GAC) announced on January 14 that the country’s trade volume exceeded six trillion dollars for the first time in 2021. On top of this, foreign investment into the Chinese mainland expanded 14.9% year-on-year to a record high of 1.15 trillion yuan in 2021. In dollar terms, this increase was a 20.2% year-on-year increase to a total of 173.48 billion dollars.

Second, China’s dynamism is only increasing in the Xi era. By one crucial metric, the UN’s intellectual property agency has posted China as having the highest number of patents filed in the world since 2020.

Chinese telecom giants like Huawei and ZTE are lightyears ahead of their Western counterparts, and so much so that some US client states have to manufacture ‘national security threats’ to bar Chinese companies from public tenders. China’s State-owned China National Nuclear Corp (CNNC) just inked a deal with Argentina on Tuesday to build a reactor using China’s Hualong One technology, which is only the second time ever China has exported its nuclear technology and the first time it’s won a highly competitive contract.

In addition, China is already an unsung industry leader in e-commerce. Boasting the largest e-commerce sector in the world, larger than the US and EU combined, Chinese consumer spending is projected by Morgan Stanley to double to about $12.7 trillion by 2030. This would essentially put China’s consumer spending at current US consumer spending.

As the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic pushes more and more shopping online in the West, major companies like Meta, Walmart, and Amazon are simply lifting features from Chinese e-commerce that existed pre-pandemic to boost an increasingly online market. To quote a popular saying, “If you want to know what Amazon will do in two or three years, just look at what China’s doing now.”

Finally, to state the obvious, Deng Xiaoping was a committed communist. There’s no doubt about it. China’s reform and opening-up policies were not a backstep toward capitalism, rather they were instituted to address the stagnation that gripped the world at that time. The CPC made a strategic decision to open up to the Western world to develop its productive forces, namely new technologies and new skills to infuse into the labor force.

“In China, we intend to acquire advanced technology, science and management skills to serve our socialist production. And these things as such have no class character,” Deng was quoted as saying in 1984.

I believe that this final point is the root of many Westerners’ misperception of China, including what we see here from Soros. They believed at the time of China’s reform and opening-up that inflows of capital would essentially create a miniaturized version of capitalism with China, leading to the ending of Communist Party rule and ushering in a Western-style government.

However, no one in the CPC, including Deng, believed this would happen, or wanted it. To quote Deng again, when asked about this exact same scenario in 1980 by an Italian journalist:

“No matter to what degree China opens up to the outside world and admits foreign capital, its relative magnitude will be small and it can’t affect our system of socialist public ownership of the means of production.”

He continued, “Absorbing foreign capital and technology and even allowing foreigners to construct plants in China can only play a complementary role to our effort to develop the productive forces in a socialist society. Of course, this will bring some decadent capitalist influences into China. We are aware of this possibility; it’s nothing to be afraid of.”

Indeed, Deng’s prescriptions did come into play – and Xi, in my opinion, simply followed the same line. For example, when we read this quote about “some decadent capitalist influences” in China and how the CPC was not afraid of it, probably because they knew how to address it, this seems to be the entire basis for Xi’s sweeping anti-corruption campaign that also uprooted a CIA informant network.

I think the assumption that China’s reform and opening-up would naturally lead to regime change was stupid from the start and people like Soros are just salty that their spies got caught. They’re mad that China is no longer a sidecar to Western countries and is becoming a dominant geopolitical player in its own right.

https://socialistchina.us6.list-manage. ... e26e88604a

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Eileen Gu controversy exposes the importance of racial loyalty to the American empire

Eileen Gu is a world class skier who has already won her first gold medal in the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics at the age of 18. Gu was raised in San Francisco by a mixed-race family. Her mom, who she posts about often on social media, is Chinese. In 2019, Gu announced that she planned to represent the Chinese national team for the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Games. But it is only within the last few weeks as the Winter Olympics prepared to launch that her decision began to stir a considerable amount of controversy. Gu has been labeled an ungrateful “traitor” to the United States for supposedly spurning the opportunities offered to her in the “land of the free.”

The vitriol directed at Gu has come from all corners of U.S. society. Former Olympic skier Jen Hudak told the media that Gu “became the athlete she is because she grew up in the United States, where she had access to premier training grounds and coaching that, as a female, she might not have had in China.” Popular right-wing talk show host Tucker Carlson claimed that Gu “renounced” her citizenship and betrayed her own country by choosing to ski for China.


A report in The Economist framed Gu’s decision as an agonizing moment for the teenage phenom who finds herself split between two countries engaged in a “superpower rivalry.” No evidence for this claim was provided in the article. Corporate media commentary has repeatedly emphasized that Gu was “born in the USA” while social media users on the far right have openly called for the Olympic skier to leave the country for her act of betrayal.

The intense reaction to Gu comes amid a tireless U.S. effort to delegitimize China in the lead up to the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics. U.S. President Joe Biden announced a “diplomatic boycott” of the Games last December, a relatively meaningless gesture that saw more than dozen State Department officials apply for visas to travel to the Games shortly after the policy went into effect. A non-stop propaganda blitz helped pass the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act a few weeks later. The bill effectively sanctions U.S. corporations from doing business in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region by requiring proof that products imported from the region are not made from “forced labor.” These policy moves just skim the surface of the U.S.-led New Cold War on China and its many forms of aggression in the military, diplomatic, economic, and information realms.

As I penned in a previous column, fear is a critical component of the U.S.’s racist and imperialist attacks on China. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi summed up modern American fear of China when she warned U.S. athletes on the day of the opening ceremony not to speak out against China for fear that its “ruthless” government would seek reprisal. Pelosi’s characterization of China fits one side of casual racism’s double-edged sword. Fear of China’s supposedly unmatched ruthlessness is complimented by a ceaseless suspicion of China’s COVID-19 response, poverty alleviation program, and overall political and economic stability. China is all-powerful yet never successful; a menace to the “free world” but on a never-ending road to collapse.

The U.S.-led New Cold War is an imperialist project. At its core is a ceaseless effort to undermine and eventually overthrow China’s socialist economic and political system. More visible to the naked eye is the palpable fear expressed by Western capitalists of China’s economy surpassing the U.S. in GDP terms over the next half decade. War profiteers have benefitted immensely from the New Cold War. The U.S. military budget continues to grow, with special funds set aside for countering the so-called “China threat.”

Of course, the New Cold War is also a reflection of a long history of imperialist aggression toward China dating back to the Opium Wars of the mid-19th century. The Opium Wars carved up China and left the nation impoverished and weak. Western imperialists justified plunging China into a “century of humiliation” with Yellow Peril racism. The Chinese were routinely dehumanized and portrayed in Western media as sneaky thieves and rapists who deserved to be deported or worse. Yellow Peril justified the passage of racist immigration laws which increased the rate of exploitation and violently managed the flow of surplus labor migrating from China.

China and Chinese people were only useful to the West so long as they were weak and subservient. This all changed after the Chinese revolution of 1949 sent shockwaves throughout the Western capitalist world. U.S. officials lamented over “losing China” to communism. China was placed under sanctions from 1949-1971 by the United States and threatened with nuclear war more than once.

However, Cold War imperialist aggression was unsuccessful in destabilizing China. To paraphrase Mao Zedong, the Chinese people stood up in 1949 and are showing no signs of sitting back down to their former oppressors. China’s achievements in poverty alleviation, public health, renewable energy, high-technology, and a myriad of other fields have changed the course of history. A multipolar world is emerging where non-white, formerly colonized nations assert their self-determination in the midst of a declining imperialist order. China is leading the way.

Racial loyalty is an expression of both conscious and unconscious resentment toward these developments and plays a central role in the anger over Gu’s decision to represent China. To many in the United States, Gu has chosen the side of the “savages” and the “wretched of the earth.” She has rejected the United States as her white motherland. The overriding perception is that the U.S.’s superiority is as inherent as China’s supposed inferiority, making Gu’s decision a clear pledge of loyalty to a country inhabited by 1.4 billion non-white people and 90-plus million members of the Communist Party of China. In the eyes of her detractors, Eileen Gu is not just an ungrateful immigrant but an assault on American exceptionalism itself.

Such a view is entirely irrational once the blinders of racism are taken off. Gu is deeply connected to China on a personal and professional level. She is fluent in Mandarin and spends most summers in Beijing visiting loved ones. Gu is a Chinese citizen and has several Chinese sponsors. Her mother works for an investment firm in China.

In addition to her connections to China, it is obvious that Gu is developing her moral compass and views her actions as bigger than herself. She has been an outspoken advocate on issues of anti-Asian racism and gender equality. In her Instagram post announcing the decision to ski for China, Gu informed her audience that she hopes to “unite people, promote common understanding, create communication, and forge friendship between nations.”

This is a powerful message that demonstrates Gu is less interested in geopolitics as she is about using her platform to promote peace and mutual understanding.

Of course, racism is never about the facts. Racism makes people see things that are not there and create problems that do not exist. The reaction to Gu is a manifestation of the ongoing importance of racial loyalty to the American Empire. Americanism has always been synonymous with white imperialist power, both in identity terms and through politics. Those who are perceived to cross the boundaries of political whiteness are traitors to the empire’s civilizing mission to dominate, exploit, and plunder in the name of “freedom” and have crossed the line into enemy territory.

I personally identify with the attacks on Eileen Gu. Growing up as a Vietnamese-American of mixed race, I constantly felt that my racial loyalty to the empire was being tested by peers and institutions. Most people saw me as nothing but a “gook” or a “chink,” a target of imperialist wars of prior generations. The message from American society was clear as a young person: I could either put my head down and embrace the white American side of my family or face the threat of violence from white peers who took issue when I would speak up to their racist demagogy. When I would embrace my status as a subordinate and link with those of oppressed racial and national backgrounds, teachers would ask me why I chose to spend time with “knuckleheads” at the expense of my “potential.”

The U.S. is a racist society. No matter how “mixed-race” the U.S. becomes, white supremacy demands that the masses make political decisions based upon their loyalty to the American imperialist project. Racial loyalty subsumes class contradictions in a sea of confusion and directs political energy toward the destruction of an enemy “other.” Majorities of Americans Westerners have been convinced that China and its people are their enemies.

Eileen Gu has exposed how racial loyalty to the United States remains a prominent feature of a declining empire. Her positive message of peace and cooperation is viewed by many as an act of betrayal to her American citizenship—a euphemism for whiteness. White supremacy is inextricably bound with the Cold War 2.0. being led by the United States and its junior partners. Gu’s desire for common understanding among nations is unattainable unless white supremacy is confronted and thrown into the dustbin of history along with the system of imperialism that gave it birth.

https://socialistchina.org/2022/02/09/e ... an-empire/

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Eileen Gu doesn’t care what you think – and no one else should, either

We are pleased to republish this article by Ian Goodrum, originally published in China Daily on 9 February 2022, comprehensively exposing the stark hypocrisy of those criticising Eileen Gu (Gu Ailing) for choosing to compete for China in the Beijing Winter Olympics.

Since she was 15, Eileen Gu (Gu Ailing) has had a target on her back.

The US-born freestyle skier of Chinese heritage announced in 2019 she would be competing for the People’s Republic at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, a decision met with enthusiasm in China — for obvious reasons — but intense animosity on the other side of the Pacific. On social media, vile comments flooded in calling her every name under the sun. Gu was ungrateful, they said, and had spurned the country they felt was entitled to her labor.

That already venomous response shifted into overdrive this week, when Gu, now 18, won gold in women’s freeski big air. Her miraculous run included a career-first 1620 in competition, barely edging out her nearest opponent and sending her name into the stratosphere.

But it also meant even more scrutiny from an adversarial press, and the condemnations were quick. Major media outlets demanded to know the details of her nationality, and some of the bolder commentators went so far as to label her a turncoat or mercenary.

I’m afraid my initial reaction can’t be printed in a family newspaper. Regardless, I have no interest in mincing words here: These people are scum.

Gu’s connections to China should not be in doubt. Her mother, Gu Yan, is a first-generation immigrant; she introduced the younger Gu to skiing and nurtured her budding sports career. Eileen Gu is fluent in Mandarin and in pre-pandemic times made annual trips to Beijing. She may have been born and raised in the US, but has maintained a strong enough link to her mother’s homeland to consider herself both American and Chinese. This is in no way unusual, yet here we are reading incredulous reports about it.

One fact has gone deliberately unmentioned in most of these “just asking questions” articles and their bile-filled comment sections — if the situation were reversed and Gu were competing for the US, she would be hailed as a hero. There would be no end to columnists waxing poetic about how she struck a “brave blow” against the “dastardly Chinese”, or something to that effect. The hypocrisy would be stunning if it weren’t so tediously commonplace. Instead, they are treating her decision as an extraordinary snub, as if she owes her talent to the US by virtue of being born there.

Meanwhile in the land of reality, this sort of thing happens all the time. To illustrate, let me move to a sport I actually know a little something about: Soccer. For much of the 2010s, the US men’s national team was managed by German legend Jürgen Klinsmann. Under his stewardship, he and the team recruited a number of players who were born in Germany. This was possible in large part due to a continuing American military presence on German soil — which, to me, should be a much bigger moral outrage than anything getting dredged up about Gu — but that’s a whole other can of worms.

Several of these players, like Jermaine Jones and John Brooks, were called up by their birth country to play at the youth level. But eventually they chose to represent the US on the international stage. Was that practice made into a scandal by the corporate press? Were those players dubbed traitors? Did they have untold levels of scorn heaped upon them? No, of course not. Some groused, but most understood this is the way things are for international sport in an increasingly globalized, multicultural world.

These infantile attacks — made by people who could not begin to fathom her or anyone else’s inner life — have only served to vindicate her decision. With so many viciously branding her a sellout, what regrets could she possibly have? In China she has a staggering level of support that will only grow as the Games continue. In the US she faces slander and charges of betrayal, behavior that chillingly echoes atrocities from the not-so-distant past.

Accusations of “dual loyalty” were and are a common refrain in hate speech, most notably in the treatment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Those wounds have not even begun to heal, and they’re festering again thanks to a pandemic-fueled spike in hate crimes against Asians of all ethnicities.

These perceptions of Asians as a disloyal fifth column didn’t spontaneously emerge. The tenor of US rhetoric against China has shifted considerably in recent years, taking on more vulgar forms as it flows downward into the population at large. No longer is China portrayed as a friendly rival or competitor; in many circles it is now commonly perceived as a profound existential threat.

Heightening suspicion of Chinese nationals in academia and other fields is now a matter of policy, and the sole beat of high-profile reporters who delight in hyping up the threat of Chinese espionage on university campuses and in public life. The unspoken implication is clear: A Chinese spy is lurking around every corner, and you should be terrified. Naturally, these same figures feign shock and alarm when the logical conclusion of their worldviews rears its ugly head and ordinary people suffer for it.

At its core, this is a refusal to accept an athlete at the top of her game might genuinely have an attachment to her homeland and a sincere desire to represent it. The possibility isn’t even entertained; there must, simply must be some ulterior motive at play. We see this tactic used time and time again to discredit anyone who steps out of line — whether it’s Westerners with anything positive to say about China or the Chinese people themselves, who in independent polling regularly declare high levels of trust in their government.

This whole shameful affair shows the US’ much-ballyhooed belief in pluralism is nothing more than window dressing. Commitments to free expression are only valid, particularly for members of minority groups, so long as they align with the consensus spearheaded by Washington. After even the slightest diversion, any notions of agency go straight out the window. These attacks rob Gu of her very personhood. They reek of colonial paternalism.

Her reasons for making this choice are her own, and hers to share — or not share — when she sees fit. It’s not the business of you, me or anyone else to interrogate her motivations or engage in armchair psychoanalysis.

But if you still feel the need to throw a tantrum, by all means go ahead. I doubt she’ll hear you from the top of the podium.

https://socialistchina.org/2022/02/11/e ... ld-either/

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Understanding China’s latest guidelines for greening the Belt and Road

This important article from China Dialogue describes a new document issued by China’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment (MEE), Guidelines for ecological and environmental protection of foreign investment cooperation and construction projects. The authors describe the guidelines as “the most comprehensive document by any country regulator to guide environmental management of overseas projects”. Guidelines include adopting international standards or China’s stricter standards for environmental protection in host countries; actively cutting pollution of all kinds; strongly favouring clean energy; and reconsidering projects with high potential biodiversity costs. The authors note that these guidelines are not enforceable, but that they “send clear signals to China’s state-owned and private enterprises.” As such, they form an important milestone towards a Green Belt and Road.

This January, less than six months after publishing the “Green development guidelines for overseas investment and cooperation”, China’s ministries of commerce and of ecology and environment issued another set of recommendations with a similar name: “Guidelines for ecological and environmental protection of foreign investment cooperation and construction projects”.

How is this document different to last year’s? And how does it add value?

Simply put, the latest release reaffirms recommendations made in the earlier guidelines but has more focus on specific issues of environmental risk management throughout the whole lifecycle of Belt and Road projects. It provides more robust direction to manage environmental risks in specific sectors, such as energy, transport and mining.

It also reflects wider developments in recent months. Since the publication of last year’s guidelines, in July, China has made important commitments to support green overseas development. Notably, President Xi pledged China would no longer build new coal-fired power plants abroad, and would support green low-carbon energy in developing countries. In November, he further elaborated that China is exploring the establishment of an early warning and assessment system for overseas project risk.

These announcements underscored the need to further specify responsibilities of enterprises in addressing environmental risks when engaging overseas. Thus, the new guidelines further emphasise an important aspect of the 2021 guidelines: that it is no longer sufficient for Chinese enterprises operating abroad to abide by host-country environmental standards – particularly so if the host country has insufficient environmental regulation or law enforcement. Rather, where local regulations are insufficient, companies are encouraged to apply international or Chinese environmental rules and standards across the life of a project.

This is a critical development, and shows increasing ambition to raise standards. Under previous guidelines, including the 2013 “Guidelines for environmental protection in foreign investment and cooperation”, also jointly issued by the ministries of commerce and of ecology and environment, merely recommends application of host-country environmental regulations.

Also new in the 2022 guidelines is better guidance for environmental protection on pollution and climate, and most importantly on biodiversity conservation, with more concrete actions recommended on the protection and restoration of ecosystems, as well as avoidance of key biodiversity areas.

The latest guidelines call on both private and state-owned enterprises “to implement the concept of ecological civilisation” and to “promote the green and high-quality development of projects” in new overseas projects, reconstruction and expansion projects, as well as mergers and acquisitions.

What do the guidelines say, in more detail?
In its 25 articles, the 2022 guidelines describe how companies should integrate environmental considerations through a project’s life – from planning to construction, management and deconstruction, as well as in information disclosure.

Accordingly, enterprises are encouraged to:

adopt international standards or China’s stricter standards for environmental protection if they operate in host countries with weak environmental governance;

improve their internal environmental management systems with reference to international practices, and appoint dedicated personnel to be responsible for ecological protection;

engage consulting services that are familiar with domestic and foreign environmental law, and have the international capability to support environmental evaluations;

Enterprises are also encouraged to focus on reducing environmental risks in three areas:

on pollution, they should control and minimise emissions related to water, noise, dust, vibration and solid waste, as well as other pollutant discharges;

on climate, companies should “make a positive contribution to addressing climate change”, for example, by preferring low-carbon projects (in energy, for example) and in “green supply chain management and green procurement”;

on biodiversity, they should, among other things, conduct a targeted survey before constructing a project; if the results show high risks to biodiversity, they should reconsider the site.

The integration of these ecological considerations throughout a project, including the new stipulation to engage outside expertise to provide environmental impact assessments, align with many international good-practice standards for financing international projects.

Furthermore, the guidelines provide specific environmental risk management recommendations for four sectors:

Energy: enterprises should focus on clean and renewable energy projects; hydropower projects should reduce adverse impacts on aquatic biodiversity.

Petrochemicals: projects should focus on controlling pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, and environmental accident prevention.

Mining: enterprises should focus on pollution control measures and waste disposal.

Transportation: transport infrastructure projects should avoid nature reserves and important wildlife habitats.

These four sectors are most important to Chinese overseas investments and construction, particularly in the Belt and Road Initiative, where they account for about 70% of the project value.

How to apply the new guidelines?

Various Chinese organisations have developed handbooks to help integrate green development principles into the design and management of overseas projects.

The first is the Application Guide for Enterprises and Financial Institutions which was issued by the Belt and Road International Green Development Coalition (BRIGC) in October 2021. Chinese enterprises can use this as a supplementary support, particularly to the Green Development Guidance, also issued by the BRIGC in December 2020, which included a ‘traffic light system’ to help avoid and mitigate environmental impacts throughout a project’s life. The guide provides, for example, a number of checklists to evaluate a project’s environmental performance in three environmental dimensions: biodiversity, greenhouse gas emissions and pollution. It also provides clear support for financial institutions on how to evaluate environmental risks of a project and how to incentivise higher environmental standards to reduce these risks.

Another practical aid is the Guide for Key BRI Sectors: Highways and Railways, also issued by the BRIGC, in October 2021. Providing sector-specific guidance for transportation infrastructure, the guide proposes environmental impact assessment indicator systems for railway and highway projects. These cover site and route selection, ecological and environmental impact, risk prevention, solid waste treatment, information disclosure and public engagement.

A third is the Project Finance Mechanism Handbook, published in September 2021, supported by the British Embassy in Beijing and developed in cooperation with the International Institute of Green Finance of the Central University of Finance and Economics. This handbook highlights step-by-step how project developers, particularly Chinese project developers, can include international project development standards by integrating environmental considerations early and throughout a project’s life, thereby more easily attract financing from international banks.

How impactful will the new guidelines be?

As with the 2021 version, the guidelines are “soft law” and cannot be enforced in court. Nevertheless, they send two clear signals to China’s state-owned and private enterprises.

First, that Chinese regulators are increasingly aware of complex environmental concerns, both at home and abroad, and are actively addressing them. With emphasis coming from the Chinese government – including repeated speeches by President Xi – on the need to tackle climate change at home and to play a positive role in global climate and environmental governance, overseas trade and investment clearly must support that strategy.

Second, the new guidelines show a strong ability among China’s regulators to work with international partners to build consensus, and learn from international peers on green finance and environmental governance. The guidelines were underpinned by findings from the Green Development Guidance for BRI Projects, a report developed by a consortium of Chinese and international researchers (including the authors of the present article), as well as the Green Investment Principles for the Belt and Road Initiative. Also, senior research and political partnerships between China and international actors, such as the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development (CCICED), have generated much knowledge and ideas on how to improve Chinese environmental governance at home and abroad.

What are the next steps, ideally?

The latest guidelines are another important milestone towards greening China’s overseas projects and investments. They are – to our knowledge – the most comprehensive document by any country regulator to guide environmental management of overseas projects by either public or private companies. Such policy signals are more important to Chinese businesses, especially state-owned ones, which are more driven by top-down signals from government and state leaders, as compared to many western businesses, which are more influenced by bottom-up signals, such as financial markets, shareholders or civil society.

With these signals, Chinese enterprises have been enabled to quickly mothball or exit some of their “red” projects, as the recent announcement of the unavailability of a Chinese loan for the planned 700-megawatt Ugljevik III coal power plant in Bosnia shows.

Chinese enterprises have recently demonstrated a much greater interest in building internal environmental risk management capacity, while also increasingly working with environmental experts. For example, in two ESG (environmental, social and corporate governance) workshops co-organized by ClientEarth, BRIGC and the Institute for Finance and Sustainability, all of the largest financial institutions and multiple enterprises engaging in the Belt and Road Initiative participated and discussed recent issues and developments for ESG risk management.

As we wrote last time, we expect these greening trends in China’s overseas engagement to continue, for example through the provision of additional sector-specific guidance. In terms of further strengthening the greening of Chinese overseas finance, we see, in particular, an opportunity for improvement in environmental risk management. This could be achieved by offering clearer guidance on early risk-reduction mechanisms. These could include clear standards for environmental impact assessments, public participation in project development, and complaint or reporting systems that allow affected local stakeholders to raise any concerns directly to the financing institution.

We also see a significant opportunity to provide better standards for the disclosure of environmental information, as well as better guidance on climate change adaptation projects – both for enterprises and financial institutions. After all, it is not only enterprises, but also Chinese financial institutions that are critical levers in driving green development within China, and in greening the BRI. As they look to green their portfolios based on this new, emerging guidance, the whole Belt and Road may become greener.

https://socialistchina.org/2022/02/17/u ... -and-road/

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Are the Uighurs ‘slave labourers’?

We are pleased to republish this article by Dr Jenny Clegg, academic, author and veteran activist, originally published in the Morning Star. Jenny dissects the latest report on the situation in Xinjiang from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), whose funding by the US State Department, NATO, the British and Japanese governments, arms manufacturers and other dubious sources, utterly refutes its specious claim to be an “independent, non-partisan think tank”, with help from detailed analysis by CoWestPro Consultancy, which is also Australia-based. Jenny also advances the view that problems and shortcomings in China have to be viewed against its background as a developing country.

THE issue of Uighur forced labour is held up as a particularly pernicious abuse of human rights in China.

Prominent here has been the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (Aspi) 2020 report, Uyghurs For Sale, claiming that the Chinese government is orchestrating a forced Uighur labour programme.

Aspi counts the US Department of State, Nato, and a number of arms dealers among its largest donors — why an organisation oriented towards strategy and defence should take up the issue of forced labour is anybody’s guess.

Be that as it may, Aspi’s report has been used to support recent US legislation to ban goods made by Uighur labour. Now, with cries of “slave labour” from the likes of Tom Tugendhat leading the way, Britain may well follow suit with a similar Bill this year.

However Aspi’s charges have been brought into question by Jaq James, an independent international law advocate from the recently established Australia-based CoWestPro Consultancy, who subjects the allegations to a forensic legal-based examination.

Uyghurs For Sale draws on six case studies of factories employing Uighurs outside Xinjiang in other provinces, China’s practice of pairing less developed with wealthier provinces to aid development setting the context.

In fact, the policy is China’s way of upholding the UN’s right to work. At any rate, migration is a normal part of development: in China, there are some 300 million migrant workers.

Aspi’s allegations centre on applying the International Labour Organisation’s (ILO) 11 indicators for forced labour, but, as James points out, these are simply a guide to identifying possible signs of abuse for further investigation and do not amount to a legal definition, something Aspi fails to make sufficiently clear.

In many cases, James finds Aspi’s concerns to not fit well with the ILO criteria and where there appears to be a match, the Aspi case crumbles through bias, mistranslation of government documents, and sloppy methodology relying on hearsay and journalist testimony.

For example, Aspi says the existence of razor wire around the factories indicates restriction of movement.

But this of course is common practice around the world, not to keep workers in but to keep others out to protect expensive equipment: why should China be any different?

Some of the factories were found to be running night schools with classes for the young Uighur workers in Mandarin, vocational training and “patriotic education,” this covering policies and regulations as well as encouraging support for the Communist Party and government.

Aspi seems to view all these as forms of “cultural genocide” but as CoWestPro points out there is no legally defined such crime, nor any evidence presented by Aspi that these classes were damaging to Uighur self- or national identify.

Take the slogan “Tell stories of poverty alleviation; show deep gratitude to the party” — is this patriotic education or political indoctrination?

Again, Aspi takes issue with the naming of one night school, “Pomegranate Seed” referencing a Xi Jinping quote supposedly saying “every ethnic group must tightly bind together like the seeds of a pomegranate.”

But taking the quote in full: “All ethnic groups should understand each other, respect each other, tolerate each other, appreciate each other, learn from each other, help each other and hug each other tightly like seeds of a pomegranate, together” — there is surely nothing untoward here.

And what about the somewhat alarming “psychological dredging” office run by the local women’s federation at one of the factories?

For Aspi this is evidence of “monitoring of the Uyghur workers’ ‘ideological trends’ and ‘thoughts’ for the purposes of political indoctrination” evidently of such intensity as to violate human rights.

More accurately translated, this turns out to be a counselling office, a service provided by many large businesses and institutions around the world for their employees.

Then there is the case of the factory with an “emergency response action plan” run jointly by the management and the local government setting up a daily reporting system which explicitly says this is to control the “ideological trends of Xinjiang workers.”

As CoWestPro clarifies, the plan references an incident of rioting in Xinjiang in 2009 — a reaction to a violent clash between Han and Uighur workers in Guangdong which saw at least two Uighur workers killed and 118 people injured. The riots then resulted in 197 deaths and more than 1,700 people injured.

Seen in context, the plan was not so much about coercion or indoctrination but more a proactive step to prevent another such ethnic conflict and ensure the human right of safety at work.

As CoWestPro says: “If Aspi had a better solution to deal with ethnic tensions in the workplace, it should have said so.”

The plan also lists workplace facilities — the provision of a library, recreation room, sports facilities, video chatrooms, traditional Uighur halal meals — all of which Aspi fails to report, and, contrary to Aspi’s allegation that religious practices (unspecified) were banned, the celebration of Islamic festivals was also mentioned.

Of the 18 concerns raised by Aspi none were found by CoWestPro to survive close scrutiny.

The lead author of Uyghurs For Sale has even herself apparently acknowledged that “without adequate auditing access, it remains difficult to determine whether a factory [in China] uses forced labour or not.”

But despite domestic laws in China against it, forced labour does persist and not just among the Uighurs.

A developing country still, China really has a long way to go to improve working conditions and its legal infrastructure is in urgent need of modernisation.

Even where national laws are progressive, their application can be poor — through incompetence, ignorance as well as downright corruption at local levels.

However Aspi sees forced labour in essentially substandard working conditions and even innocuous daily doings such as taking showers or learning Mandarin.

The CoWestPro critique reveals the pitfalls in Western reporting on human rights abuses in China as mistranslation and failure to take account of context feed nebulous ideas of “cultural genocide”: “cadres” become “minders”; the “modern outlook” that young Uighur workers may gain as they mingle with people of different ethnicities in and out of the workplace becomes “ideological indoctrination.”

British practice keeps politics out of the workplace, but is it a violation of human rights for the Chinese Communist Party to call on the Chinese workers, including Uighurs, to express gratitude for their successes in alleviating poverty, tackling Covid, maintaining steady economic and social progress?

The CoWestPro paper is not intended as a whitewash — at least some of the allegations warrant further investigation — but what it does do is to present a convincing exposure of the Aspi report, with its sensationalising and twisting of facts, as a deliberate piece of disinformation designed to demonise the Chinese government and damage its reputation on the world stage.

The Aspi report in fact may well have brought the Uighurs significant economic hardship as the naming of suppliers has likely contributed to a loss of jobs.

Efforts to alleviate their poverty may have been set back by disruption of government worker training programmes, which incidentally all governments are required by the UN to provide, especially for young people, women, the disadvantaged and the marginalised.

The CoWestPro paper — and the issues it raises — deserves serious consideration within the labour movement: should the UN and ILO conventions be taken as setting a one-size-fits-all workplace standard or as a guide with room for flexibility in practice to accommodate differences of cultural and national conditions?

Rather than rushing to support bans and sanctions, better to offer advice on improving the labour and anti-discrimination laws and support China’s sustainable development in line now with its 14th five-year plan.

https://socialistchina.org/2022/02/14/a ... labourers/

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Huey P Newton: What I experienced in China was the sensation of freedom

Black Panther Party founder Huey P Newton was born 80 years ago, on 17 February 2022. In his memoir, Revolutionary Suicide, he reflects on visiting socialist China in September 1971. Away from the system of institutionalized racism and white supremacy that he had endured all his life in the US, in China he “felt absolutely free for the first time in my life”.

What I experienced in China was the sensation of freedom – as if a great weight had been lifted from my soul and I was able to be myself, without defence or pretence or the need for explanation. I felt absolutely free for the first time in my life – completely free among my fellow human beings. This experience of freedom had a profound effect on me, because it confirmed my belief that an oppressed people can be liberated if their leaders persevere in raising their consciousness and in struggling relentlessly against the oppressor.

Huey P Newton, Revolutionary Suicide (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, p348)

https://socialistchina.org/2022/02/18/h ... f-freedom/

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The Maoist ‘Exceptionalism’ at the Heart of China’s COVID Strategy
Posted Feb 19, 2022 by Daniel Alan Bey

Arguably the best known contemporary proponent of Chinese exceptionalism in the English-language is Martin Jacques, best known for his 2009 bestseller When China Rules the World, a tour-de-force in the repackaging of orientalist tropes for the 21st-century. By framing China as a historically and culturally unique “civilisational-state,” Jacques has spent the past decade or so reinforcing the idea that China is so radically different from most other entities in world history that the only possible way to possibly understand it is through an unabashed cultural relativism. This has lead him to conclude that China’s ability to successfully stamp out successive outbreaks of COVID-19 has been due to its cultural superiority, more specifically its Confucian traditions.

If there is such a thing as Chinese exceptionalism, however, a much better way to understand it might be through the actual, identifiable practices of the state. And this may have much less to do with the ideas of the Great Sage than the more immediate revolutionary legacy out of which the People’s Republic of China emerged. Back in 2007, Harvard scholar Elizabeth Perry described the Chinese model as a unique blend of “revolutionary authoritarianism.” She argued China is difficult to compare to other countries, including the former Soviet Union and the East Asian developmental states, due to the specific legacies bestowed by Mao-era techniques of mass mobilisation that were developed and harnessed during the struggle for independence and the early attempts at state building in the PRC.

For better or worse, the most well-known of these include land reform and collectivisation (1950-57), the Great Leap Forward (1958-9) and the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), and to a lesser extent the Anti-Confucius Campaign (1974-5) and the Campaign against Capitalist Roaders (1976). But there were many targeted campaigns that nonetheless relied on the mobilisation of large groups of people to eradicate disease, improve public hygiene, expand basic health services, improve literacy, wage ideological and class struggles and nurture a “revolutionary culture”. As Wen-hui Tsai explains, these were conceived “at the top of a power structure” while simultaneously “encouraging and promoting active participation by the masses in collective action, for the purpose of supporting a particular leader, policy or program”. For Perry, it is the ways in which the mobilizational techniques used in these campaigns have been adapted and employed throughout the reform-era that lies at the “heart of Chinese exceptionalism.”

Perry was writing in the aftermath of the 2002-4 SARS epidemic and there are clear differences in how China managed this earlier crisis compared to COVID-19. But for the most part, the distinctions appear to be more a question of state capacity than anything else. Like Hu Jintao before him, at the beginning of February 2020 President Xi Jinping framed epidemic control as a “people’s war” against the virus, an explicit reference to the struggle for survival against Japan. Similarly, it has been referred to as a “total war” (zongtizhan, 总体战), a “war of annihilation” (jianmie zhan, 歼灭战) and, according to one research paper, a war between the virus and mankind. To many observers, this may seem unnecessarily militaristic and possibly even melodramatic. But the framing has more than a superficial resemblance to how China would respond in the event of an actual military invasion. Back in 2010, Beijing introduced the National Defence Mobilisation Law, a wide-ranging set of prescriptions aimed at integrating the civil-military nexus into one cohesive whole, allowing for the rapid mobilisation of social, economic, civilian and military resources in the face of a crisis or outright conflict. The result, according to researchers at the Institute for the Study of War, has been to institutionalise the capacity of the state to engage in rapid, large-scale mobilisations in response to all kinds of threats. Official white papers for national defence in 2015 and 2019, as well as the 13th and 14th Five-Year Plans, underwrite this renewed emphasis on enhancing China’s large-scale mobilizational capacity.

This architecture has been fully unleashed since the beginning of the pandemic through a combination of centre-led “steerage,” grassroots participation and a society-wide approach to epidemic control. While the topdown manner of the strategy has been guided through the Central Leading Small Group for COVID-19, China’s distinctive neighbourhood committee system means communities at the grassroots have been mobilised nationwide since January 2020. The critical role of the latter in epidemic management cannot be understated, with state-media outlet Global Times describing them as the “vanguard” of virus control. Operating at a hyper-local level, neighbourhood committees are responsible for the day-to-day tasks that mitigate the virus’ spread: checking temperatures and travel codes in residential areas, educating local populations about new regulations, and enforcing them when necessary. The role of the system, introduced when the Communists came to power after 1949 and modelled on a much older one, languished during the early decades of reform. But it was given a reboot and heavily invested in as part of the “neighbourhood community building” (shequ jianshe, 邻里社区建设) program in the 2000s and has since become, in the words of Benjamin Read, the “root” of the Chinese state.

Another distinctive feature of China’s response to COVID-19 has been the use of militias (mínbīng, 民兵) by the People’s Liberation Army. Described by Elsa Kania and Ian Burns McCaslin as evidence of the “enduring relevance” of the “people’s war” tradition, these reserve forces can rapidly be deployed to assist the PLA in a wide range of combat and other operations, from logistics and emergency response to cyber warfare and naval missions. At the height of the pandemic in Wuhan, the PLA mobilised hundreds of thousands across China to guarantee supply chains, disinfect public spaces, mitigate the spread of the virus and boost the manufacturing and distribution of medical equipment. Equally important is the role of Party cells within and across the entire Chinese social order, from neighbourhoods and private businesses to many other economic and social organisations. Once activated through the nomenklatura system, in which each level of authority in a hierarchy executes orders issued from directly above it, the Party cells have been able to mobilise their respective units to meet and guarantee the demands of the centre whenever an outbreak has occurred. Their penetration throughout the social order, intensified over the past decade, has also had the crucial effect of enabling the system to overcome its long-term problem of bureaucratic fragmentation and inertia in its COVID response.

Finally, a considerable literature exists on how Chinese SOEs often serve political and social goals over strictly economic ones. This has made them powerful instruments in funnelling and allocating resources when and wherever has been needed throughout the pandemic, from medical supplies and manpower to the development of critical infrastructure such as the hospitals built at record speed in Wuhan. While many of the neighbourhood committees discussed above are staffed by local residents, a combination of volunteers, paid staff and retirees from SOEs have also been mobilised since January 2020 to make up for any shortages. In recent years, SOEs have been merged into larger and more powerful entities with the stated aim of boosting performance and economic competitiveness. While the West cries foul and accuses China of unfair practices, in light of their performance throughout the pandemic Beijing is doubling down on making SOEs “stronger, better and bigger”. Without them, it is difficult to imagine China’s mobilizational capacity being so effective. Strengthening SOEs is likely to feed into the state’s overall capacity to respond to threats, military or otherwise, by mobilising and directing human and non-human resources towards specific targets.

The language of people’s war in China’s pandemic response, so central to its revolutionary experience, may raise more than a few eyebrows in some quarters. But at the end of January 2020, the entire country quite literally went on a war footing. A set of directives issued in Wuhan at the time, for example, commanded local authorities to adopt the strictest possible “war-time” measures. When Beijing framed the virus as a people’s war, it was no linguistic sleight-of-hand but rather a precise descriptor of its national security state mobilising into action. There are many examples of China’s COVID-19 strategy that are clearly transferrable to other contexts, including the nitty gritty of epidemic management: mass-tests, contact tracing, quarantines, social distancing, masks and other forms of public hygiene, limits on public gatherings and so on. But there are nonetheless clear and fundamental idiosyncrasies, and it is difficult to imagine how the increasingly institutionalised mobilizational capacity of the Chinese state is replicable to other contexts. Only through a serious investigation into the lineages between the revolutionary and reform eras, as opposed to antiquated cultural explanations, can we begin to make sense of the distinct characteristics driving China’s pandemic response as well as those of the Chinese political system more broadly.

https://mronline.org/2022/02/19/the-mao ... -strategy/

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As U.S. Threatens War with Russia, Biden Administration Unveils Imperial Strategy for Indo-Pacific That Could Lead to War with China
By Jeremy Kuzmarov - February 19, 2022 2


President Biden at a virtual summit with China’s President Xi Jinping. [Source: axios.com]

Already threatening war with Russia, the White House this month has unveiled a new imperial grand strategy for the Indo-Pacific that raises the prospects of war with China.

The new strategy starts by repeating familiar clichés about America’s supposed humanitarian intentions in Southeast Asia and role in providing the security that “allowed regional democracies to flourish,” while ritualistically condemning Chinese aggression “spanning the entire globe.”

According to the report,

…from the economic coercion of Australia to the conflict along the Lines of Actual control with India to the growing pressure on Taiwan and bullying of neighbors in the East and South China Seas, our allies and partners in the region bear much of the cost of the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC’s) harmful behavior. In the process, the PRC is also undermining human rights and international law, including freedom of navigation, as well as other principles that have brought stability and prosperity to the Indo-Pacific.


[Source: Voltaire.net]

The U.S. mission over the next decade, as outlined in the report, is to stymie the PRC’s efforts to “transform the rules and norms that have benefitted the Indo-Pacific and the world.” The way to achieve this goal is to a) support a strong India—considered an engine of regional development—as a “partner in a positivist regional vision;” b) fortify the anti-China Quad alliance between the U.S., India, Japan and Australia—which the U.S. has promised to deliver nuclear powered submarines to; c) increase support for Taiwan’s self-defense and d) push for North Korea’s denuclearization while extending coordination with South Korea and Japan to respond to North Korea’s alleged provocations.


India’s Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, Japan’s Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi, Japan’s Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, Australia’s Foreign Minister Marise Payne and U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo pose for photographs before a Quad Indo-Pacific meeting at the prime minister’s office in Tokyo on 6 October, 2020. [Source: theaseanpost.com]

The U.S. also plans to a) promote democracy in Burma; b) expand U.S. embassies including in the Pacific Islands; c) enforce a rules-based approach in the maritime domain and promote a free press; d) deepen relationships with allies such as South Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mongolia, New Zealand, Singapore, and Vietnam, and e) encourage Japan and South Korea to strengthen their ties with one another.

Pacific Deterrence Initiative

At the heart of the Biden administration’s strategy is a vow that the U.S. will “increase the scope of its military exercises and operations” in the Indo-Pacific, build greater maritime capacity, “deploy more advanced warfighting capabilities,” bolster cyber warfare, artificial intelligence and regional undersea capabilities, and work with Congress to fund the Pacific Deterrence Initiative (PDI).


An MQ-9 Sea Guardian drone flies over the U.S. Navy’s littoral combat ship Coronado during a drill in the Pacific Ocean. [Source: defensenews.com]

Signed by President Biden in December, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) has provisioned a whopping $7.1 billion for the PDI, whose aim is to ensure that U.S. military forces “have everything they need to compete, fight, and win in the Indo-Pacific,” according to Senators Jack Reed (D-RI) and James Inhofe (R-OK)[1], top ranking members of the Senate Armed Services Committee who first promoted the PDI in Congress.


A U.S. MH-60R Seahawk helicopter takes off from the flight deck of the USS Shiloh guided-missile cruiser in the Philippine Sea. [Source: asia.nikkei.com]

Everything they need includes a new Aegis missile facility on Guam that would assist in naval operations. The PDI also calls for stationing offensive missiles, previously banned by the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, along a string of densely populated islands that includes Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines.


[Source: pncguam.com]

In addition, the PDI aims to: a) develop and launch space-based radars linked to the Aegis missile system in Guam and another system on the island of Palau, b) develop “discreet intelligence surveillance” capacities, and c) improve training ranges and joint exercises with Allies in the Pacific.


Missile defense assets the U.S. currently has deployed in the Western Pacific. [Source: thedrive.com]

The drive.com reported that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been employing contractor-owned and operated aircraft in recent years to conduct overwater surveillance missions in the Pacific, which the PDI will further enable an expansion of.


C-130 Hercules touches down on airfield in Palau, part of a network of U.S. military facilities in the Pacific islands. [Source: thedrive.com]

Reductio ad Absurdium

The absurdity of the White House’s Indo-Pacific Strategy is evident in the fact that the U.S. already outspends China on the military by at least three times.

China is considered an aggressor—on a global scale—when it has only one international military base—which it acquired in 2017 in Djibouti in response to a major U.S. military facility there—and has not invaded another country since 1979 when it invaded Vietnam.


[Source: chappatte.com]

The U.S. has at least 750 overseas military bases, including 23 in Japan alone—and has invaded at least a dozen countries since 1979, killing countless civilians in that time.


Figure 3 from U.S. PIVOT POLICY TOWARDS ASIA-PACIFIC: IMPLICATIONS FOR THE REGION AND BANGLADESH | Semantic Scholar
[Source: semanticscholar.com]

In Southeast Asia, the U.S. waged aggressive wars in Korea and Vietnam that killed millions of civilians during the Cold War, and fought covert dirty wars in Laos, Philippines, Cambodia, and Indonesia that killed many more.


Uncle Sam—a great source of peace and security in the Far East! [Source: nytimes.com]

The condemnation of China’s “bullying behavior” in the South China Seas ignores the fact that China’s efforts to reclaim the Spratley and Paracel and Diaoyu Islands (Senkakus to Japanese)—which the U.S. claimed the right to defend under the U.S.-Japan treaty of Mutual Cooperation—are legitimate.

The islands were effectively stolen from China as booty of Japan’s victory in the 1895 Sino-Japanese War.[2] Japan has further spurned two Chinese offers—in 1990 and 2006—to jointly develop the resources of the islands which potentially include oil and gas.[3]


[Source: apjjf.org]

China in the report is blamed for economic coercion directed against Australia for levying tariffs—which the U.S. has done to China. China’s grievances against Australia were very real—interference in China’s internal affairs in Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Taiwan and its spearheading a crusade against China in international forum.

China is also blamed for border skirmishes with India, though China does not recognize the boundary between the two countries that was drawn up by a British colonial official Henry McMahon after signing a treaty with Tibet in 1915 that China had rejected.


Sir Henry McMahon [Source: irishtimes.com]


[Source: thewire.in]

India is presented in the report as a great partner for the U.S. and progressive nation compared to China, when the New York Times has reported on the incitement of Hindu violence by Prime Minister Narendra Modi towards Muslims and erosion of human rights under his rule.


[Source: youtube.com]

The silence on India’s human rights abuses—extending to its mistreatment of Muslims in occupied Kashmir—and playing up of China’s abuses towards Muslims in Xinjiang points to a clear double standard that undermines any moral imperative behind U.S. foreign policy in the Indo-Pacific.


Indian Muslims holding candles and posters as they participate in a protest against the mob lynching of Tabrez Ansari in lynching of Tabraz Ansari in Jharkhand state, in Ahmedabad on June 27, 2019. [Source: time.com].

The Tragedy of U.S. China policy

The greatest tragedy of U.S. policy is that China has never been antagonistic to the U.S.

Premier Xi Jinping in 2015 proposed a win-wing strategy in which both the U.S. and China accommodate one another’s interests and pursue common development along with their own interests as nation-states.


Then U.S. Vice President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping display shirts with a message given to them by students at the International Studies Learning School in Southgate, outside of Los Angeles, on 17 February, 2012. [Source: iseas.edu.sg]

Charles Freeman Jr, a thirty-year veteran of the diplomatic corps who served as an interpreter for Richard Nixon’s historical visit to China in 1972, told me several years ago that the U.S. policy of a military buildup, or Asia Pivot policy, first enacted by Barack Obama, was misdirected because it “provided a military response to an economic problem.”

The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) was focused more on internal security, the defense of the Chinese homeland against neighbors with a history of invading, and on countering the powerful U.S. naval and air forces constantly mapping and probing its coastal defenses.

“A better response to China’s economic rise,” Freeman said, “would have been to try and leverage China’s prosperity to our own,” and “build better supply chains,” which he said, “corporate America was already attempting to do.”

The Obama administration could have also “worked to settle competing claims to islands on the South China seas and negotiated on a united basis with China.” Instead, it undertook “provocative measures,” including “mock attack runs on Chinese installations,” which were “not much appreciated by the Chinese,” and led to Chinese counter-measures that included sending ships off the coast of Hawaii and Guam.”[4]


[Source:jafriedel.files.wordpress.com]
Little has changed in the Biden era, except that the scale of U.S. provocations has now increased, along with the dangers of World War III breaking out.

The domestic political climate has become even more Sinophobic—with the media having used the Beijing Olympics as another opportunity to rail against China and its supposed evil.

_________________________

1.Not surprisingly, both Inhofe and Reed have been lavishly funded by aerospace and defense industries, along with oil and gas in Inhofe’s case. Reed has been a strong champion of drones, having received generous financial backing from leading drone-maker, General Atomics. ↑

2.Jeremy Kuzmarov, Obama’s Unending Wars: Fronting the Foreign Policy of the Permanent Warfare State (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2019), 200; Han Yi-Shaw, “The Inconvenient Truth Behind the the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands,” The New York Times, September 19, 2012, https://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/ ... islands/In his biography Koga Tatsushiro, the first Japanese citizen to lease the islands from the Meiji government, attributed Japan’s possession of the islands to “the gallant military victory of our Imperial forces.”

3.Ivy Lee and Fang Ming, “Deconstructing Japan’s Claims of Sovereignty Over the Diaoyu Islands,” The Asia Pacific Journal, December 30, 2012, https://apjjf.org/2012/10/53/Ivy-Lee/3877/article.html ↑

4.Kuzmarov, Obama’s Unending Wars, 201, 202. ↑

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2022/0 ... ith-china/

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Mitigating global food waste: Does China provide lessons?
Originally published: CGTN (China Global TV Network) by Alexander Ayertey Odonkor (February 14, 2022 ) | - Posted Feb 24, 2022

Editor’s note: Alexander Ayertey Odonkor is an economic consultant, chartered financial analyst and chartered economist with an in-depth understanding of the economic landscape of countries in Asia and Africa. The article reflects the author’s opinions and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

The Chinese government has been firm and proactive in addressing the issue of food wastage in the country. The adoption of pertinent measures such as the Clean Plate Campaign spearheaded by President Xi Jinping, an initiative which seeks to mitigate food wastage and promote food security, and the passing of the anti-food waste law in 2021 at the session of the National People’s Congress (NPC) Standing Committee are all germane actions that indicate the Chinese government’s unflinching dedication to curb food waste in the country. But one may ask, why should China’s approach to addressing food waste be of interest to the rest of the world?

Apart from the fact that China’s food system offers lessons that could improve policy-making in both high and low-income countries, the world’s most populous country is also one of the world’s major producers of food despite having less cultivated land. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, China feeds one-fifth of the world’s entire population with less than 10 percent of the world’s arable land. As the world’s leading producer of cereals, eggs, fruits, fishery products, poultry and meat, China’s contribution to reducing food waste has a significant impact on global food security. By limiting food waste, China is not only saving more food from destruction but also reducing pressure on the country’s agricultural resources and the environment (conserving water, land and biodiversity and minimizing greenhouse gas emissions) which is supporting sustainable development. Even though China has more than enough food saved for its citizenry, the opening up of the country’s agriculture sector to the rest of the world means that more than 140 countries are benefiting from China’s cooperation in this field.

Clearly, China’s contribution to reducing food waste is central to achieving the global goal of zero hunger and protecting the environment, but the important question is: Has the rest of the world considered addressing food wastage as a pressing need? In fact, the exact scale of global food waste and its social, economic and environmental impact has not been fully realized mainly because researchers have relied on extrapolation of data from a small number of countries, usually using old data–few governments have robust data on food waste, a condition that abates efforts in the fight against global food wastage.

The Food Waste Index Report 2021, the United Nations Environment Program’s maiden report that seeks to address this challenge to support of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN-SDGs), provides the most comprehensive data on global food wastage–while only 17 countries have high-quality data on food waste that is compatible with SDGs, China is one of the two countries in Asia that made this list.

Besides, according to a report (2021) from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, almost 2.37 billion people did not have access to adequate food in 2020. This represents an increase of 320 million over 2019. Again, about 811 million people worldwide experienced hunger in 2020, an increase of 161 million over the previous year. Certainly, the world is not making progress towards ending hunger, achieving food security and improving nutrition by 2030.

Obviously, the worst is yet to come if the world continues on this trajectory, particularly as the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbates social, environmental and economic impact of food wastage. This deplorable condition calls for the immediate adoption of practical and effective measures on all fronts, understanding that this challenge requires concerted efforts, leveraging the expertise and experiences of countries making significant progress in this area to address global food wastage.

Central to mitigating food wastage is the adoption of innovative green technologies, and this approach provides several benefits: reduces food waste, improves food security, limits pollution, minimizes pressure on land and water resources and protects the climate, and all these gains support sustainable development. These technological tools could be used to provide adequate data on food wastage. In addition to this solution, it is imperative for policymakers to draw lessons from countries that have made significant progress in using innovative green technologies to reduce food waste. For example, during China’s 13th Five-Year Plan period (2016-2020), about 13 million tonnes of food was saved per year after production–a significant contribution to limiting food waste and improving global food security.

Admittedly, this achievement could not have been realized without the widespread usage of innovative green technologies which are strengthened by food waste education programs propagated across the length and breadth of the country. Similarly, governments and relevant stakeholders around the world could reduce food waste significantly by enhancing the adoption of technologies such as active packaging, solar-powered cold storage facilities etc, combined with food waste education programs, the Internet of Things and mobile applications to provide innovative and sustainable solutions to mitigate global food waste.

https://mronline.org/2022/02/24/mitigat ... e-lessons/

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nti-China propaganda is often spread by those who call themselves leftists but who are in fact liberal imperialists.

I like Dave Zirin. I really do. Zirin is one of the few journalists who analyzes sports from a leftist perspective. His work generally brings a refreshing take on the ways race and class impact one of the most widely consumed areas of popular culture. This article is not a polemic of Zirin’s body of work but rather a demonstration of a troubling trend.

With that said, Zirin and his colleague Jules Boykoff at The Nation have repeatedly demonstrated what I call the China Exception on the American Left. The China Exception is the tendency for even principled left activists and journalists to make critical concessions to the U.S. establishment on the question of China. Those who commit to the China Exception repeat the subtle yet dangerous aspects of the U.S.’s New Cold War propaganda while claiming to be opposed to a “hot war” with China. The conclusion is always that China is bad and doesn’t deserve solidarity from the American Left—not even in the form of concrete opposition to U.S. aggression.

Zirin and Boykoff first applied the China Exception rule to their coverage of the Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai at the end of last year. They penned two article s that regurgitated sensationalist corporate media talking points without any further investigation.

I also wrote about another key example of the China Exception in The Nation magazine, this time written by David Klion. Klion painted leftists opposed to the New Cold War with a broadly negative brush and elevated voices like Bernie Sanders’ foreign policy advisor Matt Duss who openly endorsed an act of war, economic sanctions, against China. So-called human rights violations were the sole measure of leftist politics and zero attention in the article was given to the U.S.’s aggressive policies toward China.

At first glance, Zirin and Boykoff’s’ most recent take on China and the Winter Olympics is less hostile than the typical anti-China screed. The authors make fair points about the bipartisan attack on Eileen Gu and the role of the mainstream media such as NBC’s coverage of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics in fueling anti-Asian racism. They rightfully conclude that accusing China of “sports washing” is hypocritical given the massive profits that NBC is set to accumulate over the next two decades of monopolized Olympic coverage.

Still, Zirin and Boykoff fall into the China Exception trap in several important areas. First, the authors claim that politics on China in the U.S. are driven by “campism.” Either you are anti-China or you are pro-China. Zirin and Boykoff state that “for some,” the concern about China and the Olympics transcends the two camps and isn’t centered on anti-China sentiment.

However, Zirin and Boykoff fail to specify who exactly makes up the “some” in their analysis. We are just supposed to believe that non-“campist” leftists exist and are primarily concerned about building solidarity with oppressed groups in China. The only citation provided to readers is an Al Jazeera article covering the Uyghur Tribunal, a U.K. based mock trial organized by a consortium of U.S.-backed human rights organizations that alleges a genocide has taken place in China’s Western province of Xinjiang.

The Uyghur Tribunal’s principal sponsor is the World Uyghur Congress (WOC). The World Uyghur Congress is heavily financed by the National Endowment for Democracy, a CIA-spin off which receives millions in Congressional funds to fuel unrest in nations targeted for regime change around the world. The WOC received more than $400,000 from the NED in 2020 alone .

Statements at the Uyghur Tribunal were taken from far right “scholar” for the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, Adrian Zenz , and Wang Leizhan , an alleged former police officer in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous region who changed his name for a CNN interview four months later to further spread inflammatory and unverifiable stories of human rights abuses.

None of these inconsistencies appear in Zirin and Boykoff ‘s article. Instead, NBC anchor Mike Tirico is said to have spoken “inconvenient truths.” NBC is credited with addressing the “human-rights elephant in the room.” The authors then pivot to say that this is hardly a “brave” act given the widespread “pyre” of anti-China sentiment in the United States. Tirico and NBC may be correct in pointing out China’s alleged human rights abuses, but they aren’t brave for doing so.

This unnecessary and simply false concession to imperialism aligns with the China Exception thesis. The number one job of a journalist is not to repeat mainstream media narratives but to thoroughly investigate the truth behind them. It isn’t “campism” to acknowledge that claims of “genocide” in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region are dubious at best and outright lies at worst. The problems with the claims go far beyond biased sources such as the World Uyghur Congress which have been linked to the U.S. national security state.

Whatever one thinks of China’s policy in Xinjiang, it can hardly be considered a genocide. The Uyghur population has increased by more than a quarter since 2010 . Life expectancy has more than doubled since 1949 . Many social indicators for Uyghurs are similar to that of the general population in mainland China . Extreme poverty was eliminated in Xinjiang in November 2020.

That Zirin and Boykoff claim Tirico spoke “inconvenient truths” when no such thing occurred is a byproduct of the China Exception mentality. Adherents of the China Exception generally dismiss or conveniently omit the political agenda behind U.S. claims of human rights abuses in China. However, the agenda is not difficult to discern. The U.S. has made a number of aggressive policy maneuvers based on dubious claims of Chinese wrongdoing in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. This includes economic sanctions on China’s solar industry and the newly passed Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act , a virtual blockade on all imports from the region.

These policies hurt ordinary Uyghur workers, the very people Zirin and Boykoff claim to support. They also fuel the anti-China racism that Zirin and Boykoff claim to oppose. And they worsen relations between the U.S. and China, further exacerbating the “campism” which Zirin and Boykoff cite as an unfortunate barrier to a “better politics.”

The term “campism” is a euphemism for the slogan, “neither Washington nor Beijing.” This slogan is widely accepted among the American Left and is a critical feature of the China Exception. Zirin and Boykoff assert that the condition of Chinese workers, women, and ethnic minorities is reason enough not to stand with China’s government. They forget, as many American Leftists do, that the conditions of the Chinese people are for the Chinese people to resolve. The concept of self-determination is rejected entirely, which helps explain why neither Zirin, Boykoff, nor The Nation has yet to take a firm stance against U.S. imperialist aggression toward China.

Zirin and Boykoff’s article leaves readers with more questions than answers. Here are mine: is it “campism” to give attention to the fact that Western studies have found China’s government possess a public satisfaction rating above 90 percent ? Is it “campism” to acknowledge China’s successful poverty alleviation program and COVID-19 response? Is it “campism” to conclude that China’s geopolitical influence is defined by cooperation and solidarity? After all, China exports COVID-19 vaccines and infrastructure development instead of the U.S. trademark of bombs and sanctions.

“Neither Washington nor Beijing” is a clear expression of the U.S.-led New Cold War. The slogan simply doesn’t apply to any other context. Would Zirin and company make a false equivalency between the Palestinian resistance and the Israeli settler state? Or the United States and Afghanistan? The answer is no. The China Exception and its “Neither Washington nor Beijing” slogan assume that China’s growing economic and political influence makes it an equally villainous player on the world stage. Solidarity is thus only warranted when those on the receiving end are weak and in no position to threaten U.S. hegemony.

The best way for progressives and Leftists to express solidarity with the Chinese people is by respecting their sovereignty. This requires shifting political analysis away from sensationalist and dubious human rights claims to the verifiable imperialist aggression waged by the United States against China in the Asia Pacific. Maybe Zirin and Boykoff will heed the call and reverse course. However, given their recent work, this seems unlikely. It is therefore imperative that we confront the China Exception tendency by placing the requisite pressure on the American Left to stand on the right side of history.

This article originally appeared in the author’s blog on Substack.

https://www.blackagendareport.com/ameri ... dave-zirin

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https://socialistchina.org/2022/02/23/h ... integrity/

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Edgar Snow, and why his legacy is so important today

We’re pleased to republish this essay about Edgar Snow, written by Andy Boreham, a China-based journalist who works for Shanghai Daily and runs the Reports on China YouTube channel. Andy describes how Snow’s classic book Red Star Over China continues to inspire him to report factually and to counter the ubiquitous misrepresentation of China.

The vast majority of Western mainstream media reportage on China is negative and unbalanced, presenting China to the world as a dangerous, dirty dystopia, where 1.4 billion live terrible lives under the control of the “violent” Communist Party of China.

Of course, this is far from the reality. But any attempt to get the truth out about China, especially by foreigners living here, is often met with derision, accusations of CPC funding, and claims of brainwashing. Western media have also begun going out of their way to discredit foreigners who dare to say anything positive about China, with special reports where they twist facts and stain reputations.

But, believe it or not, this is nothing new …

On this day exactly 50 years ago, American journalist Edgar Snow passed away at the age of 66. Unfortunately he died just a week before then US President Richard Nixon made his famous 1972 visit to China and would never get to see the normalization of relations between the two nations.

That historic visit was made possible, in part, thanks to Snow’s famous 1937 book, “Red Star Over China,” a book that shows the world, for the first time, the reality of China’s revolution, the Communist Party of China, and its leader, Chairman Mao Zedong.

Snow, too, was attacked and tarnished by Western media, accused of being pressured by the Communists to paint a romanticized image of the revolution. Some even blamed him for the eventual success of the CPC in 1949.

So why was his work so important, and why is it still so important today?

I first began appreciating “Red Star Over China” while I was studying my master’s degree in Chinese culture at Fudan University and interning at Shanghai Daily. It was when I started writing and making short documentaries there full time, though, that I really started to see how important Snow and his book were, and still are today.

Snow was born in 1905 in Kansas City, Missouri, USA. He first arrived in China in 1928, ultimately spending 13 years here working as a journalist and writer.

His big break would come in 1936, when Snow had the opportunity of a lifetime: to travel deep inside Communist territory to cover the other side of China’s civil war.

China was controlled by the Kuomintang at that time, making it hard for journalists to produce balanced stories about what was happening. For many years, only the KMT’s account was heard around the world.

Yan’an in China’s Shaanxi Province served as the base of the Communist Party of China during the civil war. Nobody in the outside world had contact with the revolutionaries, and there was literally a decade-long blackout of first-hand information in international media from behind the lines.

That is until Snow risked his life crossing battle lines into what the world believed to be extremely dangerous “Red Territory” in 1936 and met with Chairman Mao and other leaders. In the end, Snow lived there for around three months, ultimately publishing his account in “Red Star Over China,” which was an instant bestseller.

The book opened the eyes of millions around the world to the other side of the war, becoming important reading for two US Presidents and contributing to the normalization of relations between China and the US, starting with Nixon’s visit in 1972.

“Red Star Over China” told the story of the CPC members from their point of view, in their own words, without being taken over by editorializing or bias on the part of Snow himself, a technique popular in Western news reports on China in 1936, and still popular today in 2022.

So why is a book that was published 85 years ago, by a man who died 50 years ago, still so important today? For many, it’s because “Red Star Over China” is an increasingly rare situation where Westerners have represented China fully and fairly, allowing the world to see behind the dramatic headlines and biased copy. For his work, Snow is still remembered in China to this day as a symbol of international friendship, a sign that we can get along for the greater good.

For me personally, “Red Star Over China” serves as inspiration – something that helps me keep pushing forward in my work to battle misrepresentations of China, to try and help the world see real China stories again, like Snow managed to achieve back in 1937.

I used to feel quite alone when I was attacked online for daring to tell the world that they’ve got it wrong about this huge and complicated country, whether it’s been in my visits to Wuhan or reporting on the floods in Zhengzhou or whatever else. But after being invited to speak in Yan’an – the “red capital” where Snow wrote his book some 85 years ago – at an event about keeping his legacy alive today, I found I’m truly not alone.

As a columnist and filmmaker in China today, I’m determined to keep Snow’s legacy alive through my own work, and to keep helping more and more people see the China I see every day.

https://socialistchina.org/2022/02/21/e ... ant-today/

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China claims the US is the real threat to the world


China said that of the 248 armed conflicts that took place between 1945 and 2001 in the world, 201 were initiated by the US | Photo: EFE
Published 27 February 2022

China charged that more than 80 percent of recent international armed conflicts were started by the US.

In the context of the special military operation that Russia is deploying in Ukraine, the Chinese embassy in Moscow recalled on Saturday that the United States (USA) is "the real threat to the world."

The Chinese representation denounced on its Twitter social network account that more than 80 percent of the armed conflicts registered from the middle of the last century to the beginning of this century were started by the North American country.

"Of the 248 armed conflicts that occurred between 1945 and 2001 in 153 regions of the world, 201 were initiated by the United States, which represents 81 percent of the total number," the diplomatic mission listed.



"Never forget who is the real threat to the world," the Chinese embassy said.

He stated that the government of US President Joe Biden is "to blame for the current tensions around Ukraine", because it fueled the flame, "while accusing others of not doing everything possible to put out the fire.



Last Friday, Russia's permanent representative to the UN, Vasili Nebenzia, in the framework of a debate within the Security Council, asked his American counterpart, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, not to give moral lessons on "invasions".

"It is certainly difficult for us to compete with the United States in terms of the number of invasions of our neighbors," he said. "I will refrain from listing the aggressions that the United States has committed in its history. But does it have to give us moral lessons?"

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/china-de ... -0003.html

Google Translator

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China issues report on US human rights violations
Xinhua | Updated: 2022-02-28 16:10


Demonstrators are arrested during a protest against the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the United States, May 31, 2020. [Photo/Xinhua]
BEIJING - China's State Council Information Office on Monday issued the Report on Human Rights Violations in the United States in 2021.

The report said the human rights situation in the United States, which has notorious records, worsened in 2021. Its political manipulation led to a sharp surge in COVID-19 deaths while shooting deaths in the country hit a new record.

Fake democracy trampled on people's political rights and violent law enforcement made life harder for migrants and refugees in the United States, it said.

The report also highlighted the country's growing discrimination against ethnic minority groups, especially people of Asian descent.

Unilateral US actions created new humanitarian crises across the globe, it added.

Full text: The Report on Human Rights Violations in the United States in 2021:

The Report on Human Rights Violations in the United States in 2021

The State Council Information Office of the People's Republic of China

February 2022

Contents

FOREWORD

I. A HEAVY PRICE FOR US EPIDEMIC PREVENTION AND CONTROL

II. ENTRENCHED VIOLENT THINKING THREATENS LIVES

III. PLAYING WITH FAKE DEMOCRACY TRAMPLES ON POLITICAL RIGHTS

IV. INDULGING IN RACIAL DISCRIMINATION EXACERBATES SOCIAL INJUSTICE

V. CREATING A MIGRANT CRISIS AGAINST HUMANITY

VI. ABUSE OF FORCE AND SANCTIONS VIOLATES HUMAN RIGHTS IN OTHER COUNTRIES

FOREWORD

The human rights situation in the United States, which has notorious records, worsened in 2021. Political manipulation led to a sharp surge in COVID-19 deaths; Shooting deaths hit a new record; Fake democracy trampled on people's political rights; Violent law enforcement made life harder for migrants and refugees; Discrimination against ethnic minority groups, especially Asians, intensified. In the meantime, unilateral US actions created new humanitarian crises across the globe.

-- The United States has the world's highest number of COVID-19 cases and deaths, with 34.51 million confirmed cases and 480,000 fatalities, which far surpassed the numbers in 2020. Average life expectancy fell by 1.13 years, the biggest drop since the Second World War.

-- Public security situation in the United States deteriorated and violent crimes remained prevalent. There were 693 mass shootings in 2021, up 10.1 percent from 2020. More than 44,000 people were killed in gun violence.

-- More than 420 bills with provisions that restrict voting access have been introduced in 49 US states. Only 7 percent of young Americans view the country as a "healthy democracy," while public trust in the government has fallen to almost historical low since 1958.

-- Around 81 percent of Asian American adults said violence against Asian communities is rising. Hate crimes against Asians in the New York City jumped 361 percent from 2020. Fifty-nine percent of Americans said ethnic minority groups do not have equal job opportunities.

-- In fiscal year 2021, the United States detained more than 1.7 million migrants at its southern border, including 45,000 children. Violent law enforcement claimed 557 lives, the highest number since 1998, which more than doubled that of the previous fiscal year.

-- A US drone strike during its withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan killed 10 members of an Afghan family, including seven children, among which the youngest was only two years old. The United States still held 39 detainees at the Guantanamo prison.

Fernand de Varennes, a special rapporteur on minority issues of the United Nations, said the US legal system of human rights protection is incomplete and outdated, which has led to growing inequality.

As for the US malpractice in creating human rights crises in other countries in the name of human rights, Stephen Walt, a professor of international relations at Harvard University, said "Americans must first fix what has gone wrong at home and rethink how they deal with the rest of the world."

In 2021, the US public persona of "human rights defender" was totally debunked as the so-called "Summit for Democracy" under the guise of safeguarding human rights became a farce. At the 48th session of the United Nations Human Rights Council, many countries blasted the United States for being the "biggest destroyer" of human rights in the world and urged the country to address its own severe human rights violations.

I. A HEAVY PRICE FOR US EPIDEMIC PREVENTION AND CONTROL

Despite having world's most advanced medical equipment and technology, the United States has the biggest number of COVID-19 infections and deaths globally. The US government never rethinks its response measures and still lacks effective anti-epidemic plans. Instead, it stoked the origins-tracing of COVID-19, and has been keen on passing the buck, shifting the blame and political manipulation.

Disregard for people's rights to life and health. Since the outbreak of COVID-19 in the United States, the epidemic prevention and control has been highly politicized, which has become a tool and a bargaining chip for Republicans and Democrats to attack, reject and confront each other. US politicians focused only on their political gains in disregard of people's lives and health. The federal and local governments went their own way and constrained each other, which has not only made it very difficult to integrate and coordinate the management of medical resources, but also made people disoriented about epidemic prevention and control policies. And thus various anti-intellectual words and deeds that reject science and common sense have become prevalent. Misled by political manipulation, some Americans refused to wear masks, and even launched an anti-vaccine movement, which accelerated the spread of COVID-19. By the end of 2021, nearly 30 percent of Americans still had not been vaccinated, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The Associated Press (AP) reported on Dec 19, 2021 that US hospitals were overwhelmed as COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations caused by infections among the unvaccinated continued to surge. States, local governments and the public "have now been left out on their own," American news website Vox said on Jan 2, 2021. According to data from Johns Hopkins University, by late February 2022, the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the United States had exceeded 78 million and the death toll surpassed 940,000. Its number of COVID-19 deaths recorded in 2021 has far surpassed the total for 2020. According to the analysis by researchers at the University of Southern California and Princeton University, the deaths caused by COVID-19 have reduced overall life expectancy by 1.13 years, the biggest drop since the Second World War. Life expectancy was estimated to fall by 2.10 years among African Americans and 3.05 years among Latinos, while the decline was 0.68 years among whites. The US government's unscientific, unequal and irresponsible epidemic prevention and control conducts have seriously undermined its people's rights to life and health. The New York Times reported on Nov 18, 2021 that the pandemic has proved to be a nearly two-year stress test that the United States "flunked," and that the American people's trust in their government has been "bankrupt."

People's mental health deteriorated due to the uncontrolled outbreak. A study published in The Lancet Regional Health -- Americas in October 2021 found 32.8 percent of US adults experienced "elevated depressive symptoms" in 2021, compared to 27.8 percent in the early 2020 months of the pandemic and 8.5 percent before the pandemic. According to a public opinion poll, more than a third of Americans aged between 13 and 56 said the pandemic is a significant source of stress in their lives. The poll finds teens and young adults have faced some of the heaviest struggles as they come of age during a time of extreme turmoil, the AP reported on Dec 6, 2021. US Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy was cited by The Los Angeles Time as saying on Dec 9, 2021 that the number of suspected suicide attempts in 2021 was 51 percent higher among adolescent girls compared to the same period in 2019.

The number of the homeless is staggering. The Washington Post reported on Dec 7, 2021 that "homelessness is one of the United States' greatest current challenges, no matter the region." The AP reported on Sept 9, 2021 that the number of people without permanent shelter in Rhode Island had increased by more than 85 percent since January 2021. According to a report by the group Advocates for Children, more than 100,000 New York City schoolchildren were homeless at some point during the 2020-2021 school year. The total number of homeless students during the school year represented nearly one-tenth of the city's public school system. Some students had to live in cars, parks or abandoned buildings. The New York Times reported on Dec 19, 2021 that in San Francisco one of every 100 residents was homeless.

The elderly' rights to life are flagrantly violated. US politicians have followed the natural law of "selecting the superior and eliminating the inferior," declaring that "the elderly could sacrifice for the country" and that "the national economy is more important than the lives of the elderly." The US CDC said that the vast majority of US COVID-19 deaths have been among people aged 65 or older. According to Stat News, an American health-oriented news website, more than half a million elderly people in the United States have died from COVID-19, accounting for four-fifths of all fatalities. According to a report by Claudia Mahler, the United Nations independent expert on older people, on July 21, 2020, discrimination in the delivery of health care services, insufficient prioritization of nursing homes in responses to the virus, and lockdowns left older people more vulnerable to neglect or abuse. And there was "a significant undercount of nursing home deaths" in the United States during the pandemic.

Serious damage to the global anti-pandemic cooperation. Washington vigorously pursues "America First," not only withholding anti-epidemic materials from other countries, but also prohibiting the export of domestic medical materials and buying out the production capacity of drugs that may be used to treat COVID-19 patients. The United States has repeatedly coerced the WHO, interfering and dragging down global anti-pandemic cooperation.

The United States has engaged in "vaccine nationalism," pushing some underdeveloped countries and regions into a desperate situation of having no vaccines to administer.

Since March 2021, the United States has thrown away at least 15 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine, significantly more than many poor countries have prepared for their whole populations, according to NBC News on Sept 1, 2021.

"It's really tragic that we have a situation where vaccines are being wasted while lots of African countries have not had even 5 percent of their populations vaccinated," said Sharifah Sekalala, an associate professor of global health law at England's University of Warwick.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa also slammed rich countries over their hoarding of vaccines, adding that "they are just giving us the crumbs from their table. The greed they demonstrated was disappointing."

The Biden administration is still pursuing US interests in ways that are detrimental to the interests of the rest of the world, commented an article on the website of the US Foreign Policy magazine.

II. ENTRENCHED VIOLENT THINKING THREATENS LIVES

The United States has consistently had one of the highest rates of violent crimes in the world. Gun control measures have been stagnant and gun violence has been rife. The police are discriminatory in law enforcement, killing innocent people and causing public anger. Law enforcement officers commit crimes with impunity, and judicial injustice has been widely criticized. Wrongful and unjust cases continue to exist without being corrected and compensated effectively. Prison inmates are abused, and domestic violence as well as youth violence has increased significantly. The American people live in fear of lack of security.

Deterioration of social order has accelerated the proliferation of guns. The United States is the country with the largest number of privately owned guns in the world. The US public have lost confidence in the government's social security governance and felt extremely insecure, which drives many to purchase guns to protect themselves.

The Small Arms Survey (SAS) researchers estimate that Americans own 393 million of the 857 million civilian guns available, which is around 46 percent of the world's civilian gun cache.

There are 120 guns for every 100 Americans, according to the SAS. No other nation has more civilian guns than people.

Everytown for Gun Safety also reported on Dec 21, 2021 that over 15 million guns were sold through October.

"Ghost guns," which are assembled from parts purchased by individuals online, are even more proliferating.

According to a report by The New York Times website on Nov 20, 2021, over the past 18 months, ghost guns had accounted for 25 to 50 percent of firearms recovered at crime scenes.

By the beginning of October last year, the San Diego Police Department had recovered almost 400 ghost guns, about doubling the total for all of 2020 with nearly three months to go in the year.

It also reported that since January 2016, about 25,000 privately made firearms had been confiscated by local and federal law enforcement agencies nationwide.

Gun violence seriously endangers people's lives. The United States has the worst gun violence in the world. According to statistics released on Jan 5, 2022 by the Gun Violence Archive website, the number of fatalities from shootings in the United States rose from 39,558 in 2019 to 43,643 in 2020, and further to 44,816 in 2021. In 2021, there were 693 mass shootings in the United States, up 10.1 percent from 2020.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported on Oct 5, 2021 that children and teens in the United States are 15 times more likely to die from gunfire than their peers in 31 other high-income countries combined, quoting data from the Children's Defense Fund.

At least 30 shootings occurred on US campuses during the school season from Aug 1 to Sept 15, 2021, killing at least five people and injuring 23, the highest number on record.

A total of 1,229 teens aged 12 to 17 were killed and 3,373 injured in shootings in the United States in 2021. On Nov 30, 2021, four students were killed in a mass shooting at a Michigan high school by a 15-year-old suspect who used the same gun that his father bought on Black Friday.

CNN reported on Nov 26, 2021 that Jason R. Silva, an assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at William Paterson University, said that the United States is the only developed country where mass shootings have happened every single year for the past 20 years.

Shooting incidents have caused a large number of casualties and posed a major threat to public safety. According to an April 2021 Pew Research Center survey, 48 percent of Americans see gun violence as a very big problem in the country today.

Police brutality tramples human life. According to data compiled by Mapping Police Violence, at least 1,124 people died in 2021 due to US police violence. The majority of killings occurred during non-violent offenses or when there was no crime at all.

The USA TODAY website reported on June 21, 2021 that police in the United States fatally shoot about 1,000 people a year. Police have fatally shot more than 6,300 people since 2015, but only 91 officers have been arrested, or just 1 percent of those involved.

The USA TODAY website reported on July 8, 2021 that a poll showed that just 22 percent of Americans believe that the US police treat all Americans equally.

Racial and ethnic groups are often subjected to unfair justice. The USA TODAY website reported on July 15, 2021 that a 20-year-old African-American man in Minnesota, Daunte Wright, was shot and killed by police after being pulled over outside Minneapolis for an expired license plate. Wright's death was one of a string of incidents in which African-Americans were pulled over for traffic violations and killed innocently.

A study of 20 million traffic stops in North Carolina over more than a decade shows that African American drivers are twice as likely as white drivers to be pulled over by police.

The USA TODAY website reported on May 24, 2021 that within a year of the death of George Floyd, who died after an officer knelt on his neck for nine minutes, enforcement killed hundreds of people of ethnic minorities in the United States.

According to the report, since the year 2000, there have been over 470 murders at the hands of law enforcement in Minnesota. Only one police officer was convicted in the history of Minnesota and that was a minority man that killed a white woman.

The Christian Science Monitor website reported on Nov 23, 2021 that the Urban Institute found that homicides with a white perpetrator and a black victim are ten times more likely to be ruled justified than cases with a black perpetrator and a white victim.

Human rights violations by prison staff are commonplace. The United States has the highest incarceration rate and the highest number of incarcerated people in the world. An Associated Press investigation has found that the US federal Bureau of Prisons is a hotbed of graft, corruption and abuse.

CTV News reported on Nov 14, 2021 that crimes committed by federal prison staff in the United States are not uncommon. Since 2019, more than 100 US federal prison staff members have been arrested and convicted of sexual abuse, murder and other offenses.

Prisoners held in US private prisons are at risk of being abused. The UN News reported on Feb 4, 2021 that in 2019, there were about 116,000 US prisoners held in privately operated facilities, representing about 7 percent of all state prisoners and 16 percent of federal prisoners, quoting data from the US Bureau of Justice Statistics.

On April 20, 2021, nine UN experts, including the UN Human Rights Council Working Group of Experts of People of African Descent, the Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, the Independent Expert on the Enjoyment of all Human Rights by Older Persons, the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Physical and Mental Health, issued a joint statement condemning US human rights violations against Mumia Abu-Jamal, a prisoner of African descent.

The statement said Abu-Jamal, who has been in prison for 40 years, was a social activist and journalist. The 67-year-old suffers from a number of diseases including chronic heart disease, liver cirrhosis and high blood pressure. In February 2021, he was diagnosed with COVID-19. While receiving treatment for heart failure in late February, he was handcuffed to his hospital bed for four days; and when he was hospitalized again in early April for surgery, his family, lawyers and others were denied access to him.

The statement calls on the US government to comply with its international human rights obligations, take urgent measures to protect Abu-Jamal's life and dignity, immediately stop the practice of withholding information, and allow outside visits to monitor his human rights situation.

It also calls on the US government to take all necessary measures to protect the lives of all detainees, especially the elderly and disabled prisoners who are disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 outbreak.

The credibility of the US judicial system is in tatters. According to statistics released by the US National Registry of Exoneration on Jan 11, 2022, 2,933 people have been wrongly convicted in the United States since 1989, with a combined 25,600 years of wrongly imposed prison sentences. However, 14 US states lack legal provisions related to compensation for wrongful convictions.

The BBC reported on Nov 23, 2021, that Kevin Strickland, 62, had maintained his innocence since his arrest at the age of 18. He was wrongly convicted of third-degree murder in June 1979, only to be found not guilty in 2021 before being imprisoned for more than 42 years, the longest wrongful imprisonment in Missouri history. But under the state's law, he is unlikely to receive any financial compensation.

The USA Today website reported on July 8, 2021, that a survey showed that only 17 percent of Americans believe the US criminal justice system treats everyone fairly.

III. PLAYING WITH FAKE DEMOCRACY TRAMPLES ON POLITICAL RIGHTS

Political donations bring about transfers of interests after elections, political polarization further intensifies antagonism and division in the US society, and legislation and gerrymander restricting voting eligibility have become tools for parties to suppress the public opinion. The operation of the US political system is moving away from the public will and social demands, the right of the majority of the public to participate in politics is essentially deprived of, and international confidence in the US democratic system continues to decline.

The American-style democracy has descended to a game of transferring interests. Money politics become increasingly rampant in the United States, which makes politicians more neglectful of people's interests and demands.

Noam Chomsky, a political commentator and social activist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has pointed out that there is a positive correlation between Americans' wealth and their influence on policy-making, and for about 70 percent on the income-wealth scale, they have no influence on policy whatsoever and are effectively disenfranchised. Ray La Raja, professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, noted in an article for The Atlantic that America's current system is democratic only in form, not in substance, as the nominating process is vulnerable to manipulation by plutocrats, celebrities, media figures and activists, while many presidential-primary voters mistakenly back candidates who do not reflect their views.

According to The Guardian on Jan 7, 2021, candidates spent 14 billion US dollars alone on advertising for the 2020 US president election cycle. The US Consumer News and Business Channel (CNBC) reported on April 15, 2021 that Wall Street executives, their employees and trade associations invested at least 2.9 billion US dollars into political initiatives during the 2020 election cycle. The US media outlet Politico said on Nov 17, 2021 that a secret-money group "doled out" 410 million US dollars in 2020 to the Democratic Party, aiding the latter's efforts to win back control of the Senate.

In the 2020 presidential election, US pharmaceutical companies made huge political donations to both parties, and the Democratic administration, after taking office, invested an enormous sum of money back to the companies involved, with Moderna alone earning profit of nearly 1 billion US dollars. The federal government then funneled interests directly to pharmaceutical companies by purchasing large quantities of COVID-19 vaccines, resulting in massive hoarding and waste of vaccines in the United States. The US government gave pharmaceutical companies a free hand in pricing COVID-19 vaccines, leading to continuous increases in vaccine prices. The Financial Times reported that Pfizer raised the price of its COVID-19 vaccine for the European Union from 15.5 euros to 19.5 euros, and the price of a Moderna jab increased to 25.5 euros from 19 euros. However, the production cost of a Moderna dose is estimated to be less than 3 US dollars.

Political polarization leads to an increasingly divided US society. The election chaos in the United States has further intensified political polarization and continues to tear the society apart. On the afternoon of Jan 6, 2021, prompted by the incitement and manipulation of extreme politicians, tens of thousands of Americans who rejected the 2020 presidential election result flooded to Washington, D.C., and a large number of demonstrators forced their way into the Capitol building and clashed with police, leaving five dead and more than 140 injured. The constitutional process to affirm the presidential election result was interrupted. A Brookings online article in May 2021 indicated that though all 50 states certified the 2020 election results, 77 percent of Republican voters still questioned the legitimacy of the elected president due to allegations of electoral fraud, a phenomenon that happened for the first time in nearly 100 years.

Changes of government did not reduce or remove the political polarization in the United States. The American people are becoming more incompatible with each other over such issues as pandemic prevention and control, race relations, abortion rights and gun control, while the political struggle between Democrats and Republicans over infrastructure construction, social welfare bills, government debt ceiling and other legislation related to the economy and people's livelihood have become more intense, and the Congress has been nearly dysfunctional. A Republican leader even went so far as to deliver a record 8.5-hour speech in the Congress to block and delay a vote on a Democratic-proposed bill.

The Pew Research Center reported on Oct 13, 2021 that the United States was regarded as the most politically polarized country in a survey involving 17 advanced economies, as 90 percent of the American respondents said there are at least strong conflicts between those who support different parties, and about six-in-ten thought their fellow citizens disagree not only over policies, but also over basic facts.

Confrontations between political parties restrain and harm electors' right to vote. In order to win elections, Republicans and Democrats used legislation and gerrymander as well as other tactics to aggressively prevent voters who do not favor them from casting a ballot. In 2021, 49 states in the United States introduced more than 420 bills that would restrict voting. These bills either reduced the amount of time voters have to request or mail in a ballot, restricted the availability of drop-off locations, imposed stricter signature requirements for mail-in voting, or enacted new and stricter voter-ID requirements, which made mail-in voting and early voting harder and built barriers for the elderly, disabled, minorities and other groups to exercise their voting rights. NBC News reported on March 8, 2021 that the state of Georgia was pushing dozens of restrictive voting bills targeting African American voters. Voting rights experts and civil rights groups have argued that "the movement adds up to a national assault that would push voters of color out of the electorate."

Gerrymander has become a tool to suppress the political influence of minority voters. The Democratic and Republican parties exploit their political clout in each state to increase the chances of winning by redrawing congressional districts, often at the expense of the rights of minorities.

CNBC reported on Aug 13, 2021 that the practice of redrawing congressional districts often targets voters of color and the gerrymandering in Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania alone gave Republicans 16 to 17 more congressional seats. Daily newspaper the Chicago Tribune reported on Sept 3, 2021 that Illinois' redistricting aimed to keep Democrats in control of the state legislature for at least a decade. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) reported on Nov 30, 2021 that the redrawn congressional districts for Ohio give Republicans an unconstitutional partisan advantage, with which the Republicans can anticipate winning 67 percent to 80 percent of the congressional seats -- even though they are only likely to obtain about 55 percent of the vote.

The Los Angeles Times reported on Dec 8, 2021 that although Texas has seen a significant increase of the number of people of color, its new redistricting plan intentionally diminished the power of Latino and African American voters. Latino Texans make up nearly 40 percent of the population, but just seven of the 38 congressional districts are predominantly Latino. Texas is home to the largest African American population in the country, but not one of the 38 congressional districts in the state is predominantly black. In a survey of the American public on the fairness of congressional districting, only 16 percent of the surveyed thought that congressional districts would be re-drawn fairly in their states.

The international community's confidence in US democracy continues to decline. A national poll of America's 18- to 29-year-olds released on Dec 1, 2021 by the Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School showed that only 7 percent of the surveyed viewed the United States as a "healthy democracy," and 52 percent believed that the American democracy is either "in trouble" or "failing." Data released by the Pew Research Center in May 2021 indicated that the American public trust in the government neared a historic low since 1958, as only 2 percent of Americans said they can trust the US government to do what is right "just about always," and only 22 percent said they can trust the government to do what is right "most of the time."

In an opinion published on June 12, 2021, The Washington Post said that in the past few years the world has been horrified by the chaos, dysfunction and insanity of American democracy, which was seen by US allies as a shattered and washed-up has-been. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said what happened on the Capital Hill was "disgraceful." German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said the Capitol riot was "the result of lies and more lies, of divisiveness and contempt for democracy, of hatred and incitement -- even from the very highest level." A research has showed that just 14 percent of Germans and fewer than 10 percent citizens in New Zealand saw American democracy as a desirable model for other countries.

Despite the fact that the US democracy is proved to be a complete failure and its global image is badly damaged, the US government held the so-called "Leaders' Summit for Democracy" in a high profile, politicizing democracy and using it as a tool to form cliques and force other countries to take sides, in an attempt to split the world. The so-called "Leaders' Summit for Democracy" is in essence a summit that undermines global democracy, and has been widely criticized and condemned by the international community.

French political scientist Dominique Moisi said that it is always difficult to preach what one does so badly itself. USA Today, The New York Times, and other American media have also commented that American democracy is "falling apart" and the United States must first address its own failings, and that critics questioned "whether the United States could be an effective advocate for democracy amid problems at home."

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IV. INDULGING IN RACIAL DISCRIMINATION EXACERBATES SOCIAL INJUSTICE

The "virus" of deeply-entrenched racism in the United States is spreading along with the novel coronavirus, with anti-Asian hate crimes happening frequently, discrimination against Muslim communities increasing steadily, and racial persecution of indigenous populations still remaining, which has led to an even widening racial economic divide and growing racial inequality.

Asian Americans face increasingly severe discrimination and violent attacks. As a result of US politicians' manipulation over racial issue, the number of attacks targeting Asian Americans has drastically increased. According to a report published on Nov 18, 2021 by the national coalition Stop Asian American and Pacific Islander Hate, from March 19, 2020 to Sept 30, 2021, a total of 10,370 hate incidents against Asian American and Pacific Islander people were reported to the organization, and a majority of the incidents took place in spaces open to the public like public streets and businesses.

Statistics released by the New York Police Department on Dec 8, 2021 showed that anti-Asian hate crimes in the city rose by 361 percent from that of 2020. According to a report of The Washington Post on April 22, 2021, a Pew Research Center survey found that 81 percent of Asian adults said violence against the group was rising. The New York Times commented that "no vaccine for racism." It said that Asian New Yorkers live in fear of attacks, and the psychological effects of anti-Asian violence have scarred Asian communities in the United States. US broadcaster NPR reported on Oct 22, 2021 that one in four Asian Americans feared that members of their household would be attacked or threatened because of their race or ethnicity.

On March 16, 2021, 21-year-old Robert Aaron Long, a white male, launched gun attacks at three Asian-owned spas in Atlanta, killing eight people. Six of them are Asian women.

The deadly shooting epitomizes an escalation of discrimination and violent attacks against Asian-Americans in the country in recent years, sparking unprecedented anger and fear. Thousands of Asians and people of other ethic groups took to the streets in massive "Stop Asian Hate" rallies and marches.

On Jan 28, 2021, an 84-year-old man from Thailand was deliberately knocked down to the ground and then died in San Francisco.

On April 23, 2021, Ma Yaopan, a 61-year-old Chinese man, was attacked from behind and fell to the ground on a street in New York. He then was repeatedly kicked in the head, which caused facial fractures. After eight months in a coma, he eventually died in hospital.

On Nov 17, 2021, three Chinese high school students were violently assaulted on a subway train on their way home from school in Philadelphia. "It was clear that they were picked on because they were Asian," said a local police officer.

On April 3, 2021, a report of The New York Times documented more than 110 anti-Asian incidents in the past year with clear evidence of racial hatred. "Over the last year, in an unrelenting series of episodes with clear racial animus, people of Asian descent have been pushed, beaten, kicked, spit on and called slurs. Homes and businesses have been vandalized," said the report. That was just a tip of the iceberg of racist attacks on Asians in the United States.

BBC reported on July 22, 2021 that being regarded as a "permanent alien" is a painful experience shared by many Asian Americans, and under the combined effect of xenophobia and anti-communism, the US government has been suspicious of Chinese scientists for more than half a century.

Since the implementation of the so-called "China Initiative" in November 2018, Chinese scientists have frequently been subjected to gratuitous harassment, monitoring and crackdown by the US government. Vile and absurd acts of the US law enforcement authorities have been constantly exposed by the media.

The New York Times on Nov 29, 2021 reported on its website that about 2,000 academics at institutions including Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley and Princeton University have signed an open letter, expressing concerns that the initiative unduly targets researchers of Chinese descent.

The Yale Daily News reported on Dec 9, 2021 that nearly 100 Yale professors have jointly published an open letter condemning the China Initiative, saying that it is invasive and discriminatory, disproportionately targets researchers of Chinese origin, and poses threats to scientific inquiry and academic freedom. They called for an end to the initiative.

According to an investigation by MIT Technology Review, a majority of cases under the initiative have had charges dismissed or are largely inactive.

Several Asian-American civil rights groups in the United States said that investigation against Chinese under the initiative would lead to "discrimination and stigmatization."

Xi Xiaoxing, a Chinese scientist victimized by the initiative, said the current situation of scientists of Chinese origin is similar to that of Japanese-Americans sent to internment camps during World War II, almost like a return to the McCarthy era.

On July 28, 2021, Foreign Affairs published an article titled Rivalry Without Racism on its website, saying that "US foreign-policy makers' consistent overexaggeration of China's threat to the United States" is a vital element of the recent surge in anti-Asian incidents. Demonizing China leads to the demonization of Asians in the country, and "until policymakers stop using China as a punching bag for all of the United States' woes, Asian Americans will continue to be at risk," said the article.

Discrimination and attacks against Muslims are on the rise. Bloomberg reported on Sept 9, 2021 that over the past two decades since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, discrimination against Muslim Americans has surged.

The Associated Press reported on Sept 9, 2021 that a poll found 53 percent of Americans have unfavorable views toward Islam.

In a 2021 report, the Council on American-Islamic Relations said it receives more complaints of bullying and Islamophobic rhetoric every year. A report published by the council's California chapter on Oct 28, 2021 showed that more than half of the students surveyed across California said they do not feel safe at school because they are bullied for their Muslim heritage. That's the highest percentage the California chapter has documented since the survey started in 2013.

A survey released on Oct 29, 2021 by the Othering and Belonging Institute in University of California, Berkeley, found that 67.5 percent of the Muslim participants had experienced Islamophobia-related harms and that 93.7 percent of the respondents said they had been impacted by Islamophobia emotionally or physically.

The aborigines have long suffered cruel racial persecution. The United States has a long and dark history of violating the rights of indigenous people, including Indians, who have experienced bloody massacres, brutal expulsions and cultural genocide.

An article titled "The United States Must Reckon With Its Own Genocides" published on the website of Foreign Policy on Oct 11, 2021 noted that over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, more than 350 indigenous boarding schools were funded by the US government, which aimed to culturally assimilate indigenous children by forcibly separating them from their families and communities to distant residential facilities.

Until the 1970s, hundreds of thousands of indigenous children had been uprooted from their homes and many had been abused to death in those boarding schools where their American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian identities, languages, and beliefs were forcibly suppressed.

The United States is not just morally, but also legally responsible for the crime of genocide against its own people, said the article.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Navajo Nation, the Cherokee Nation, the Sioux Nation and other Native Americans have struggled with disease and poverty, which, however, has all been systematically ignored. The Navajo Nation, which stretches across Arizona, Utah and New Mexico, was once among the areas with the highest rates of COVID-19 infection across the country.

The Guardian reported on April 24, 2020 that early data indicated dramatically disproportionate rates of COVID-19 infection and death of Native Americans. Among about 80 percent of US state health departments that have released some racial demographic data on the impact of the coronavirus, almost half of them did not explicitly include Native Americans in their breakdowns and instead categorized them under the label "other." "We are a small population of people because of genocide," said Abigail Echo-Hawk, chief research officer of Seattle Indian Health Board. "If you eliminate us in the data, we don't exist."

Russian news network RT reported on Jan 8, 2022 that since the 1950s, among more than 1,000 clandestine nuclear tests the US government has conducted, 928 took place on lands of the Shoshone Aboriginal tribe, leaving 620,000 tons of radioactive dust. The amount of radioactive dust is nearly 48 times that of the nuclear explosion in Hiroshima, Japan in 1945. According to Ian Zabarte of the Shoshone Nation, more than 1,000 people of the Shoshone Aboriginal tribe have died directly from the nuclear explosion, and many people have consequently suffered from cancer.

The economic divide between races continues to widen. There has been a long-term and systematic economic inequality between ethnic minority groups and the white population in the United States, which is manifested in various aspects such as employment and entrepreneurship, wages, and financial loans.

USA Today reported on April 7, 2021 that, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 48 percent of the Asian community's estimated 615,000 unemployed were without work for six months-plus through the first quarter of 2021. The figure surpassed the portion of long-term unemployed among jobless workers of other ethnic groups.

Alexandra Suh, executive director of the Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance in Los Angeles, said that Asians in the United States have been racialized, steered toward jobs and industries like catering, laundries and domestic work, nursing and personal care, which are devalued, underpaid and impacted hardest during the pandemic.

On July 30, 2021, USA Today reported on its website that a new Gallup poll showed that 59 percent Americans do not believe racial minorities have equal job opportunities.

The Hill reported on its website on Sept 11, 2021 that 27 percent of minority-owned small businesses remained closed, much higher than White-owned small businesses. White-owned startups are seven times more likely to obtain loans than Black-owned ones during their founding year. Throughout the pandemic, businesses owned by people of color did not receive equitable access to federal aid, being hit harder economically.

CNN reported on July 15, 2021 that around 17 percent of African American households lack basic financial services compared to 3 percent of white households.

On Dec 15, 2021, the Los Angeles Times reported on its website that despite representing 19 percent of the US population, Hispanic families hold just 2 percent of the nation's total wealth. The median net worth of white families is more than five times greater than Hispanic families.

Structural flaws in its system have led to increasing racial inequality in the United States. On Nov 22, 2021, UN Special Rapporteur on minority issues Fernand de Varennes said at the end of a 14-day visit to the United States that when it comes to human rights and minorities, the United States is a nation "where support for slavery led to one of the world's most brutal civil wars, where racial segregation persisted late into the 20th century, and where indigenous peoples' experiences have for centuries been one of dispossession, brutality and even genocide."

With a legal system that is structurally set up to advantage and forgive those who are wealthier, while penalizing those who are poorer, particularly minorities, minorities such as African Americans and Latino Americans in particular are crushed into a generational cycle of poverty, de Varennes said.

V. CREATING A MIGRANT CRISIS AGAINST HUMANITY

The US government has often interfered in other countries' internal affairs by wielding the club of "human rights." However, the policy of separating migrant children from their families has severely endangered the migrants' lives, dignity, freedom and other human rights. The migrant and refugee crisis has even been used as an instrument for American partisan attacks and political strife. Constant government policy changes and police brutality adds to the sufferings of the migrants who have already been subject to extended custody, cruel torture, forced labor and many other inhumane treatments.

Asylum seekers are subject to police brutality. In 2021, the humanitarian crisis continued to intensify as the southern border of the United States saw an increasing inflow of migrants, and border enforcement officers used increasingly violent means to expel or prevent asylum seekers from entering the country.

Data released by US Border Patrol shows that in fiscal year 2021, as many as 557 migrants died on the southern border of the United States, more than double the previous fiscal year, hitting the highest number since records began in 1998. Media reports say this does not reflect the dire situation on the US southern border and "the real number of migrant deaths may be greater."

The USA Today website reported on Nov 29, 2021 that from January to November 2021, there have been more than 7,647 publicly reported cases of murder, rape, torture, kidnapping and other violent assaults against asylum seekers.

In September 2021, more than 15,000 asylum seekers from Haiti crowded under a bridge in the Texas border town of Del Rio, sleeping in squalid tents or dirt in the sweltering heat, and surrounded by trash under dire living conditions. US border patrol authorities brutalized the asylum seekers, with patrols on horseback, brandishing horsewhips and charging towards the crowds to expel them into the river. The footage of the scene immediately sparked outrage when they were released.

CNN commented that this scene is reminiscent of the dark era in American history when slave patrols were used to control black slaves. The New York Times commented that "there were the outrageous images of agents on horseback herding the migrants like cattle" and the US government in general always seems to say the right things on racial issues, but too often their deeds come up short when measured against their talk.

Facing a flood of criticism, the US government soon forcibly deported thousands of asylum seekers back to Haiti, most of whom had not lived there for nearly a decade since the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.

On Oct 25, 2021, the UN Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism and the Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent issued a statement, condemning the systematic and mass deportation of Haitian refugees and migrants by the United States without assessing the individuals' situation was a violation of international law, "the mass deportations seemingly continue a history of racialized exclusion of Black Haitian migrants and refugees at US ports of entry."

Dissatisfied with the US government's inhumane handling of Haitian migrants and refugees, Daniel Footie, the US special envoy for Haiti, resigned in anger after just two months in office.

Immigrant children face prolonged detention and abuse. "And while Biden has officially ended Trump's policy of 'family separation,' his use of Title 42 has created family separation 2.0," USA Today website reported on Nov 29, 2021. It forced many minors to separate from their parents.

"There are more than 5,000 unaccompanied children in US Customs and Border Protection custody," CNN reported on April 23, 2021. Many of them have been staying in custody for longer than the 72-hour limit set by federal law, it added.

"A stash of redacted documents released to the human rights group (Human Rights Watch) after six years of legal tussles uncover more than 160 cases of misconduct and abuse by leading government agencies, notably Customs and Border Protection and US Border Patrol," The Guardian reported on Oct 11, 2021. "The papers record events between 2016 and 2021 that range from child sexual assault to enforced hunger, threats of rape and brutal detention conditions."

Conditions in private detention facilities where migrants are held are poor. Most of the detention facilities in the United States are built and operated by private companies. In order to reduce operating costs and maximize profits, private companies generally build in accordance with the minimum standards contracted with the government, resulting in poor detention facilities and a harsh internal environment. A lack of supervision has led to chaotic management of the detention facilities and repeated violations of human rights, while detainees suffered varying degrees of physical and mental health damage.

US authorities detained more than 1.7 million migrants along the Mexico border during the 2021 fiscal year that ended in September.

Among them, up to 80 percent are held in private detention facilities, including 45,000 children.

"Conditions were deteriorating inside the 'emergency intake' shelter erected in the harsh desert of Fort Bliss (Texas)," reported the El Paso Times on June 25, 2021.

"There were nearly 5,000 children there, and some 1,500 children are still being held at the troubled site, where conditions in 'jam-packed' tents resembled 'a stockyard,' were 'traumatizing' and risky for the children's health and safety, according to half a dozen current and former workers, volunteers and civil servants, as well as internal emails obtained by the El Paso Times.

Many immigrants are victims of human trafficking and forced labor in the United States. Tighter US immigration policies, combined with weak supervision at home, have exacerbated human smuggling and labor trafficking targeting immigrants.

A report by AP on Dec 10, 2021 said that for years, immigrants who smuggled into the US have been forced to work long hours on farms, living in filthy, overcrowded trailers, lacking food and clean drinking water, and facing threats of violence from regulators. The workers' IDs and travel documents were withheld, which limits their ability to seek help to escape their predicament.

A human trafficking indictment released on Nov 22, 2021 on the website of US Department of Justice documents that dozens of workers from Mexico and Central American countries have been smuggled to farms in the southern part of the state of Georgia, where they were illegally imprisoned under inhumane conditions as contract agricultural laborers, becoming victims of US modern-day slavery.

After being cheated into farms with the promise of an hourly salary of 12 US dollars, they were required to dig onions with their bare hands, paid 20 cents for each bucket harvested, and threatened with guns and violence to keep them in line. At least two of the workers died as a result of workplace conditions and one suffered from multiple sexual assault.

The New York Times website reported on Nov 11, 2021 that hundreds of workers from India were lured to New Jersey, Atlanta, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles etc. with the promise of fair pay and good hours, but instead they had nearly no time off from work that was grueling and frequently dangerous, moving stones that weighed several tons and facing health risks from exposure to harmful dust and chemicals. The workers were confined to their living quarters and had their passports confiscated, and were also threatened with retaliation, said the report.

Exclusion of immigrants becomes more and more extreme. The immigration policy, that is wavering, inconsistent and often disregards human rights, is the main cause of border crisis and immigrants' tragedy. The situation reflects that the policy is deeply affected by extreme xenophobia. According to an article published by Washington Post on Aug 22 last year, with domestic debates in the US over immigration increasingly driven by racialized resentment, anti-immigrant sentiment and entangled with domestic political battles, US policymakers are more inclined to use techniques like force and coercion when resettling refugees. According to another article on Washington Post published on Oct 20 last year, more than 1.7 million immigrants were detained by the US Border Patrol along the southern border during the 2021 fiscal year, soaring to the highest level since 1986. The US government hopes to deter illegal border crossing through tough law enforcement, which has made it more difficult for illegal immigrants to enter the country, resulting in them being forced to cross more dangerous areas. The situation in turn creates a larger humanitarian crisis.

VI. ABUSE OF FORCE AND SANCTIONS VIOLATES HUMAN RIGHTS IN OTHER COUNTRIES

The US has always pursued hegemonism, unilateralism and interventionism. The country frequently uses force, resulting in a large number of civilian casualties. Its abusive use of unilateral sanctions has caused humanitarian crises, challenging justice with hegemony, trampling on righteousness with self-interest, and wantonly violating human rights in other countries. It has become the biggest obstacle and destroyer of the sound development of the international human rights cause.

The website of USA Today commented on Aug 26, 2021 that the US withdrawal from Afghanistan was a total disaster. Tragedies like the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and Vietnam show that Washington has a history of ignoring basic humanitarianism for its own selfish ends.

In the chaos at Kabul airport, a US C-17 transport plane forcibly took off regardless of the safety of Afghan civilians, with someone crushed to death in wheel well while the plane retracting landing gear, and others falling to their deaths from the air.

Even in the last minutes of the frantic evacuation, US army's air strikes caused heavy civilian casualties. However, the US Defense Department publicly said that no US military personnel would be punished for the deaths of civilians in drone strikes.

The US war on terror has killed millions of people. Since the 21st century, the United States has launched a series of global foreign military operations in the name of anti-terrorism, resulting in nearly one million deaths. The website of USA Today reported on Feb 25, 2021 that the so-called anti-terrorism war launched by the United States in the past 20 years has claimed the lives of more than 929,000 people, according to the "costs of war" study by Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs of Brown University. The 20-year US military operations in Afghanistan have killed 174,000 people, including more than 30,000 civilians, and injured more than 60,000 people. The New York Times reported on Dec 18, 2021 that investigation found that more than 50,000 US airstrikes in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan were reckless and poorly targeted, killing tens of thousands of civilians. The military has been concealing the number of casualties, and the actual number of civilian deaths is much higher than the military's published figures. The most obvious case is the US airstrike on the Syrian hamlet of Tokhar in 2016. The military claimed that about seven to 24 civilians "intermixed with the fighters" might have died, but the US military actually attacked private houses and more than 120 innocent civilians were killed.

The ongoing war and instability have made nearly a third of the Afghan population refugees. A total of 3.5 million Afghans have been displaced by the conflict, and nearly 23 million face extreme hunger, including 3.2 million children under the age of five. When the United States withdrew its troops from Afghanistan, it immediately froze billions of dollars in foreign exchange reserves at the Afghan central Bank, causing the Afghan economy to be on the brink of collapse and making life worse for the people. According to an assessment by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Food Program which was released November 2021, only 5 percent of Afghans receive enough food on a daily basis. The New York Times reported that US national defense contractors were the real winners in the "war on terror" and that the United States' 20 years in Afghanistan "really built not a country but more than 500 military bases and the personal wealth of those who supplied them." Only about 12 percent of the reconstruction aid the United States provided from 2020 to 2021 actually went to the Afghan government, with most of the rest going to American companies like Lewis Berger. The Gulf Today website of the United Arab Emirates published an article titled "How the United States Destroyed Iraq" on Dec 19, 2021, saying that inadequate food supply and inflation have left Iraqis chronically hungry. As a result of the damage to power plants and water treatment facilities caused by US bombings, the number of people suffering from diarrhoeal diseases was four times higher than pre-war level. The lack of medicine and medical equipment has left Iraq's health system in crisis, with the poor, children, widows, the elderly and other most vulnerable groups suffering the most.

Unilateral sanctions affect negatively people of other countries. Alena Douhan, UN Special Rapporteur on Negative Impact of Unilateral Coercive Measures on Human Rights, highlighted the sanctions' devastating impact on all of Venezuela's population, as well as on their enjoyment of human rights. The US sanctions on Iran's oil sector have resulted in Iran's inability to import sufficient medical supplies, affecting the Iranians' right to life and health. The US embargoes against Syria have severely affected the Syrian people's enjoyment of economic, social, and cultural rights. On June 23, 2021, the UN General Assembly voted in favor of a resolution for the 29th consecutive year to call on the United States to end embargo on Cuba and start dialogue to improve bilateral ties with the country. Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez said the United States continues to impose the embargo and sanctions against Cuba in the face of COVID-19, causing huge losses to the Cuban economy and society, and the Cuban people are suffering from the harm caused by this extremely inhumane act. Economic embargo is a massive, flagrant and unacceptable violation of the human rights of the Cuban people and "like the virus, the blockade asphyxiates and kills, it must stop," he added.

The Guantanamo Bay prison has been the scene of repeated torture scandals. On Feb 23, 2021, a group of 16 UN experts said many of the remaining detainees are vulnerable and now elderly individuals whose physical and mental integrity has been compromised by unending deprivation of freedom and related physical and psychological torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. The experts, including the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights while countering terrorism, the Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, and the Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, are part of the Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council. CBS News reported on Oct 29, 2021 that the United States still holds 39 people at Guantanamo Bay. Majid Khan, a former detainee there, publicly revealed for the first time the torture he suffered, including being beaten, given forced enemas, sexually assaulted, starved, and deprived of sleep. "I thought I was going to die," he said, "I would beg them to stop." He said he was suspended naked from a ceiling beam for long periods, doused repeatedly with ice water to keep him awake for days. He described having his head held under water to the point of near drowning.

The independent panel of experts on human rights appointed by the UN Human Rights Council issued a statement on Jan 10, 2022, saying that two decades of practicing arbitrary detention without trial accompanied by torture or ill treatment violates international human right laws, and is a "stain on the US government's commitment to the rule of law." Despite forceful, repeated and unequivocal condemnation of the operation of this horrific detention and prison complex, the United States continues to detain persons many of whom have never been charged with any crime, the experts said. The experts urged the US to close the Guantanamo Bay prison. They also called for reparations to be made for tortured and arbitrarily detained prisoners, and for those who authorized and engaged in torture to be held accountable, as required under international law.

https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202202/ ... 89588.html

[blindpig]

China media goads Russia to use CIPS over SWIFT

Researchers in state media say China’s Cross-border Interbank Payment System can help Russia survive Western SWIFT sanctions
By JEFF PAO
MARCH 1, 2022

Russia can use China’s Cross-border Interbank Payment System (CIPS) for its international trade after its major banks were removed from the US dollar-based SWIFT payment system in response to the Ukraine war, according to Chinese state media reports.

Several Chinese researchers were quoted by Xinhua and the Communist Youth League Central Committee’s website as saying Russia would not be seriously hurt by the Western world’s SWIFT ban as it had developed its own payment system – the System for Transfer of Financial Messages (SPFS) – since the Crimea crisis in 2014.

They said CIPS together with SPFS would continue to grow and become an important global interbank payment system.


Some Chinese commentators speculated Russia would be able to survive the recent round of sanctions imposed by the West over the Ukraine issue as it was not holding a lot of US dollar assets, but mainly gold, oil and foreign currency.

European countries would also be hit by the SWIFT ban as the cost for them to buy Russia’s energy would increase, they said.

On Saturday, the European Commission announced it was committed to ensuring that selected Russian banks were removed from SWIFT as it supported the Ukrainian people to resist Russia’s invasion.

It said the decision would disconnect the targeted Russian banks from the international financial system and harm their ability to operate globally. The commission also said it would impose restrictive measures to prevent the Russian Central Bank from deploying its international reserves in ways that undermine the impact of global sanctions.

On Monday, Chinese state media described the SWIFT ban on Russian banks as a “financial nuclear weapon,” but they added that the ban would create new opportunities for CIPS.

Tan Yaling, director of China Forex Investment Research Institute, was quoted as saying in a Xinhua report that due to the close trading relationship between Russia and Europe, the SWIFT ban was a double-edged sword as it would hurt both sides.

Tian Dewen, the deputy director of the Institute of European Studies of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said many European countries relied heavily on SWIFT to purchase Russian energy and they would be affected by the SWIFT ban on Russian banks.

Yang Xiyu, a researcher at the China Institute of International Studies, said in an article published by the Communist Youth League Central Committee that in the short run Russia would be able to survive the SWIFT ban as it had established its own cross-border payment system since the Crimea crisis in 2014 and started “de-dollarization” in 2018.

Yang said the SWIFT ban was a protracted war between Russia and the US and Europe, and that they would suffer from inflationary pressure as they could not buy cheap energy from Russia.

Xinhua said Russia held only $5.43 billion of US government bonds and less than $1 billion of US stocks and corporate bonds at the end of 2021.


According to the website of the yuan-based payment system, CIPS (phase 1) was launched in October 2015. There were 19 commercial banks in mainland China in the first batch of direct participants and 176 indirect participants from more than 50 countries and regions over six continents.


Swift code bank logo is displayed on an iPhone 6s on top of Euro banknotes in this picture illustration made in Zenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina, January 26, 2016. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/File Photo
The SWIFT logo on an iPhone on top of Euro banknotes. Photo: Reuters / Dado Ruvic
Beijing said CIPS was a milestone in financial market infrastructure development in China, marking major progress in the building of a modern payment system that supports both domestic and cross-border payments of renminbi and accelerates the currency’s internationalization.

In May 2018, CIPS (phase 2), which supported more features including intra-day renminbi settlements for overseas participants and their local customers, was made fully operational. On Monday, CIPS completed 15,225 cross-border transactions involving 463.97 billion yuan ($73.4 billion).

Last year, the total business volume of CIPS amounted to 79.6 trillion yuan, up 75% from 2020.

At present, CIPS has 75 direct participants and 1,205 indirect participants. In Europe, the system’s direct participants are in London, Frankfurt, Zurich, Paris, Luxembourg, Hungary and Russia. Russia’s SPFS, on the other hand, has 400 users and covers foreign banks from countries such as China, Cuba, Belarus, Tajikistan and Kazakhstan.


In comparison, SWIFT is now used by 11,000 financial institutions across 200 countries or regions, including nearly 600 Chinese banks.

Due to the SWIFT ban, the Central Bank of Russia on Monday raised its benchmark interest rates to an unprecedented 20% from 9.5%, aiming to support the ruble, which depreciated about 30% on the same day. It also ordered companies to sell 80% of their foreign currency revenues.

The SWIFT ban did not mean Russia would not be able to continue its international trade and clearance as SPFS or CIPS could be a new choice, Dong Xiaopeng, deputy editor-in-chief of China’s Securities Daily, wrote in a commentary.


b]Since Iran’s central bank and financial institutions were cut off from SWIFT in late 2018, Iran lost half its income from oil exports and 30% of its external trade, he said.

However, a new payment system called the Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges (Instex) was set up in January 2019 to facilitate transactions between Europe and Iran to avoid breaking US sanctions, he said.

“In terms of inclusiveness and adaptability, CIPS is comparable to SWIFT,” Dong said. “Of course, CIPS and SPFS systems are still smaller than SWIFT in terms of the number of participants and users, but over the long run, it is not impossible that the duo or one of them will grow into an important regional or even global infrastructure with considerable influence.”

Dong added that Russia could also use currency swap tools to settle its external trade without SWIFT, although such a method was complex.

https://asiatimes.com/2022/03/china-med ... ver-swift/

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Beijing, Moscow to continue normal trade cooperation, says Chinese foreign ministry

It was stated that China and Russia will continue normal trade cooperation for mutual respect, equality and mutual benefit

BEIJING, March 1. /TASS/. China and Russia will continue normal mutually beneficial trade cooperation, China’s Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Wang Wenbin told a briefing on Tuesday when asked whether sanctions slapped on Russia would trigger the growth of Russia’s demand for Chinese imports, as well as increase the role of yuan in bilateral trade.

"We have repeatedly revealed our position. We believe that sanctions have never been an efficient way of solving issues," the diplomat said, adding that "the Chinese side has always opposed any illegal unilateral sanctions."

"China and Russia will continue normal trade cooperation for mutual respect, equality and mutual benefit," he noted.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said on February 24 that in response to a request by the heads of the Donbass republics he had made a decision to carry out a special military operation. The Russian leader stressed that Moscow had no plans of occupying Ukrainian territories. Western countries responded to the actions of the Russian authorities by slapping sanctions against physical and legal entities.

https://tass.com/economy/1414497

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US planning new round of anti-Xinjiang propaganda, sources say

By MO JINGXI | chinadaily.com.cn | Updated: 2022-03-02 10:07


The United States government is "upgrading and reshaping" its production line of rumors about Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, in its latest effort to create the pretext for a new round of sanctions and pressure on China, sources familiar with the matter told China Daily.

The sources said multiple US departments are coordinating efforts to formulate Xinjiang-related propaganda strategies in order to spread negative information about the region in an organized way.

The specific measures include encouraging US academic institutions, think tanks and non-governmental organizations to constantly fabricate so-called research reports about Xinjiang and publish related books. The US government will provide suggestions and advice for this end, sources said.

The US Agency for Global Media networks, which include VOA, will be instructed to produce news reports as well as "propaganda materials" about "genocide" and "forced labor" in Xinjiang in dozens of languages, China Daily was told. In the meanwhile, the USAGM will coordinate the media networks in US allied countries to reprint and push such "products".

According to the sources, the US networking will also participate in the production line of Xinjiang rumors through weakening and even blocking true information about Xinjiang released by the Chinese side while providing technical assistance for anti-China forces to spread false information related to the region. Such efforts will also be financially supported by the US government, sources said.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20220 ... 89bef.html

[blindpig]

Russian Firms Rush To Open Accounts At Chinese Banks
BY TYLER DURDEN
THURSDAY, MAR 03, 2022 - 07:20 PM

As US and European sanctions make life increasingly difficult for Russian businesses, one Chinese bank claims it has seen a surge in requests from Russian firms trying to open new bank accounts, according to an anonymous source quoted by Reuters.

It's the latest example of a phenomenon first described by Credit Suisse's Zoltan Poszar, who warned during a recent interview with Bloomberg that sanctions against Russia- along with the ban of most Russian banks from SWIFT - could lead to greater reliance on the Chinese yuan by Russian companies. As we said, China's yuan, which presently accounts for just 2.7% of world reserves, is one option for anxious reserve managers in Moscow or elsewhere.

"Over the past few days, 200-300 companies have approached us, wanting to open new accounts," the person, who works at the Moscow branch of a Chinese state bank and has direct knowledge of its operations, told Reuters.

The source added that most of the firms looking to open an account with their bank do a lot of business with China.

He declined to be named or have his bank identified as he is not authorized to speak with media.

It was not clear how widespread Russian demand for new accounts at Chinese banks was, but the banker source told Reuters many of the companies seeking new accounts do business with China and that he expected yuan transactions by such firms to increase.

Still, it's a sign that Russian Central Bank will likely need to keep more reserves denominated in the Chinese yuan.

China has repeatedly voiced opposition to the sanctions, calling them ineffective and insisting it will maintain normal economic and trade exchanges with Russia.

A number of Chinese state banks operate in Moscow, including Industrial & Commercial Bank of China, Agricultural Bank of China, Bank of China and China Construction Bank. Although none of these banks agreed to speak with Reuters.

Another Chinese businessman with strong ties to Russia had this to say: "It's pretty simple logic. If you cannot use U.S. dollars, or euros, and US and Europe stop selling you many products, you have no other options but to turn to China. The trend is inevitable."

And as Reuters concludes: he willingness of emerging market giants such as China to sustain business relations with Moscow is indicative of a "deep rift over what the western press has described as Europe's biggest crisis since WWII.

Ultimately, this trend promises to chip away at the dollar's dominance in global trade.

That's not to say that the devaluing of the ruble hasn't created problems: many Chinese firms are trying to delay delivery to avoid potential losses on their ruble holdings.

"Companies will be switching to yuan-rouble business but in any case things will become two, three or four times more expensive for Russians because the exchange rate between the yuan and rouble is also changing," said Konstantin Popov, a Russian entrepreneur in Shanghai.

Shen said Russian demand for Chinese goods will nevertheless grow in the long term. "The key is to solve trade settlement issues" in the face of sanctions, he said.

Still, it's expected that Russian demand for Chinese products will only grow from here. Russia's central bank has already hiked its benchmark interest rate to 20% to try and protect the ruble, which hit a record low of 106 to the dollar yesterday.

https://www.zerohedge.com/economics/rus ... le-tumbles

Sometimes even capitalists understand a little about capitalism.

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

Russia Said It's Pushing Ahead with Building a Massive Natural-Gas Pipeline to China

Russia is pushing ahead with plans to build a massive pipeline carrying natural gas to China as Western sanctions strangle its economy.

Gazprom, the Kremlin-controlled energy giant, said that it had signed a contract to perform design and survey work as part of the construction of the Soyuz Vostok gas pipeline. Gazprom said the proposed pipeline would deliver up to 50 billion cubic meters, or 1.8 trillion cubic feet, of Russian natural gas each year to China via Mongolia.

Bloomberg reported that if plans for the pipeline were to go through, it could be Gazprom's biggest-ever deal with China.

China is Russia's biggest trade partner for exports and imports, and it bought a third of Russia's crude-oil exports in 2020, Reuters reported, adding that China supplies Russia with products like phones, toys, and clothing.

Business Insider

Source: www.businessinsider.com

http://infobrics.org/post/35266/

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

Gold will soar as China seeks US dollar alternatives

‘Nuclear’ sanctions on Russia threaten long-term dollar dominance as China has more geopolitical incentive to ditch the greenback
By DAVID P. GOLDMAN MARCH 2, 2022

China is looking for alternatives to the US dollar as a reserve currency after Western nations froze the foreign assets of Russia’s central bank last week, former IMF chief economist Kenneth Rogoff told media on March 1.

The seizure of Russian sovereign assets has no precedent in postwar history, and sets a precedent for similar action against China in the event of hostilities over Taiwan.

“It's an absolutely radical measure to try to freeze assets at a major central bank. It's a break-the-glass moment,” said Rogoff, now a professor at Harvard University.

“It's a major thing,” Rogoff added. “I mean, if you want to look at the long-run picture of dollar dominance in the global economy, believe me, China's looking at this. They have, I don't know, US$3 trillion in dollar reserves.

(more, pay wall)

https://asiatimes.com/2022/03/gold-will ... ernatives/

Unintended consequences?

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NATO allies in Asia-Pacific resort to war-mongering and militarism

From participating in US-imposed sanctions to funding ammunition and embarking on a wave of militarism, NATO’s warmongering has its allies in the Asia-Pacific region contributing to escalating the situation in the Ukraine war

March 03, 2022 by Anish R


An anti-nuclear protest in Japan in 2011 in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear accident. Japanese politicians from the ruling LDP are using the Ukraine crisis to push for nuclear weapons sharing with the US. (Photo: Flickr/ Matthias Lambrecht)

Despite calls from social movements in the Asia-Pacific for peace and negotiations, allies of the United States and NATO in the region have jumped headfirst into militarism and war-mongering driven by an anti-Russia position. According to local reports, as of Tuesday, March 1, at least 70 Japanese nationals have requested to be armed volunteers for Ukraine in the war against Russia.

These requests are the latest in the series of pro-NATO warmongering actions that are sweeping countries in the region who are long-standing allies of the US. It also comes in response to the Ukrainian government calling for funding and mercenary support in the ongoing war, along with those with professional experience in medical care, IT, communication and fire-fighting.

The Ukrainian embassy in Tokyo has acknowledged these requests but is yet to respond to them. Nevertheless, while acknowledging these requests, it added that candidates “must have experience in Japan’s Self-Defence Forces (JSDF) or have undergone specialized training.”

Of the 70 Japanese who are ready to volunteer as mercenaries, 50 have formerly served in the JSDF and two have served in the French Foreign Legions. The Japanese government has strongly warned its citizens against traveling to Ukraine “regardless of the purpose,” and also reminded the Ukrainian embassy publicly that Japanese citizens in Ukraine have been given an evacuation advisory.

Regardless of the public stand by the Japanese government on the participation of their citizens as mercenaries, the ruling conservative party seems set to take advantage of the growing anti-Russia sentiments.

Japan has already placed sanctions on Russian central banks, participated in the SWIFT ban against Russia, and even offered Ukraine USD 200 million in loans and “humanitarian assistance” on top of close to USD 17 million in donations from Japanese citizens responding to the Ukrainian embassy’s call for aid.

Senior members of the Japanese government and the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) are also calling for a debate on the country’s long-running non-nuclear weapons stand. The three “non-nuclear principles” that prevent Japan from producing, possessing or allowing nuclear weapons in the country is at the center of this debate.

Former LDP prime minister Shinzo Abe was among the first to call for a debate on a nuclear-sharing agreement with the US, adding that discussing the supposed “reality about how the world’s safety is protected” is not taboo.

For long, public memories of Japan’s militaristic and imperialist legacy in the region and that of the Second World War have kept such calls to change the non-nuclear policy at bay. But successive LDP governments since Abe’s term have openly declared their intent to alter the pacifist and non-nuclear constitution.

Article 9 of the Japanese constitution, a legacy of the post-World War reorganization of the country, explicitly renounces the sovereign right to declare war or use threat of force to settle international disputes. It also prevents the Japanese state from maintaining full-fledged armed forces and other “war potential,” along with de-recognizing the right of belligerence of the state.

A controversial 2015 amendment under Abe now allows the country to send material military aid to allied nations in the event of a war. The step was widely criticized and was met with massive protests. But, with the growing anti-Russian sentiment and massive protests over the military action in Ukraine, nationalists and right-wing groups have found a new lease of life.

Japan is only the latest in the recent slew of governments in the Asia-Pacific region which have jumped into the crisis. Australia announced on Tuesday, March 1, that it would commit AUD 70 million (USD 51.25 million) to fund ammunition for Ukraine in addition to AUD 35 million (USD 25.6 million) for humanitarian assistance.

Australian prime minister Scott Morrison has also declared that a majority of the weapons bought will be in the lethal category, like missiles, in “partnership with NATO.” This comes despite multiple calls from movements within Australia, such as the Sydney Stop The War Coalition and the Independent and Peaceful Australia Network, opposing any further warmongering and for Australia to stay out of the conflict.

“The Australian government has used its new military alliance, AUKUS, to echo the US and British governments who are playing a provocative role in Europe — talking up war, decrying diplomacy as appeasement and escalating arms supplies and military deployments to Eastern Europe,” said Sydney Stop The War Coalition in their statement responding to the Russian military action.

“Prime Minister Scott Morrison will try and use Russia’s invasion to justify ramping up Australian militarism, including in the region, with China as enemy number one.”

NATO’s war-mongering has dragged along even nations like South Korea and Singapore, who, while maintaining close ties with US-NATO, have often kept themselves out of European conflicts owing largely to geopolitical considerations.

South Korea announced its participation in the SWIFT ban against Russia, along with an export ban on electronics, semiconductors, computers, information and communications, etc. It also announced humanitarian aid of USD 10 million. Singapore also imposed an export ban on strategic items along with sanctions on Russian banks.

In South Korea, the military action by Russia has assumed significance in domestic politics as the country is set to hold general elections on March 9. Presidential candidate Yoon Suk-yeol from the conservative and pro-US opposition People Power Party has already begun using the incident to attack president Moon Jae-in’s proposed “end of war” agreement with North Korea.

Yoon argued that “a peace document pursued by Moon which has little meaning unless it was backed by a strong military preparedness.” The stated military preparedness as per Yoon comes with pushing the country back strongly within the US camp, increasing the frequency of joint military drills with the US, and strengthening missile systems with US help, among other things.

Yoon has already called on US president Joe Biden to increase the deployment of THAAD anti-ballistic missile systems in the country. These proposed measures, along with an aggressive position against North Korea amid rising tension, has been among his key campaign promises for the upcoming elections.

Yoon’s contender Lee Jae-myung of the pro-peace ruling Democratic Party has criticized his position and called him a warmonger. “The policy of shooting down enemy missiles could lead to war,” said Lee. “We need a policy that gains peace without such perilous confrontation.”

Is China the target?

A good part of these policies also coincide with the increasing attempts by the US to stoke tensions in the region against China. A testament to this is that both the liberal and the right-wing sections in the US are making claims that an invasion of Taiwan by China is on the cards.

Former US president Donald Trump, whose government had heightened trade tensions with China, has already claimed that “Taiwan is next.” The Biden administration has sent a delegation led by the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen to visit Taiwan.

Trump-era US secretary of state Mike Pompeo also visited president Tsai Ing-wen who leads the rump Republic of China in Taiwan. She has recently attracted condemnation from China for her expressed support to secessionist tendencies in the disputed island.

In an extremely provocative move last week on February 26, within days of the Russian action in Ukraine, US warship USS Ralph Johnson sailed through the Taiwan Strait. China protested strongly against these provocations by the US. “The will of the Chinese people to defend our country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity is immovable,” said Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin in response to the recent visits. “Whoever the United States sends to show support for Taiwan is bound to fail.”

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2022/03/03/ ... ilitarism/