Chris Slee reviews a new collection of articles dealing with the oppression of the Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim minorities in China’s Xinjiang province.
Zelensky is now raging at NATO powers for refusing to intervene militarily against Russia, apparently having previously been given the impression that the US-centralized empire might risk its very existence defending its dear friends the Ukrainians from an invasion.
“Unfortunately, today there is a complete impression that it is time to give a funeral repast for something else: security guarantees and promises, determination of alliances, values that seem to be dead for someone,” Zelensky said Friday.
“All the people who will die starting from this day will also die because of you,” Ukraine’s president added. “Because of your weakness, because of your disunity.”
It must be hard, the process of learning that you were never actually a valued partner in western civilization’s fight for freedom and democracy. That you were always just one more sacrificial pawn on the imperial chessboard.
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New: Zelensky in late night address tonight slams NATO over ruling out no-fly zone. “This is the self-hypnosis of those who are weak, insecure inside, despite the fact they possess weapons many times stronger than we have," he said.
In a new article titled “U.S. and allies quietly prepare for a Ukrainian government-in-exile and a long insurgency“, The Washington Post reports that US officials anticipate Russia will reverse its early losses and successfully drive the Zelensky regime out of the country, after which “a long, bloody insurgency” is planned against the invaders backed by billions of dollars in US funding.
The US has a history of working to draw Moscow into gruelling, costly military quagmires which monopolize its military firepower while leaching it of blood and treasure. Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, author of US hegemonic manifesto The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, openly bragged about having lured Russia into its own Vietnam fighting the US-backed mujahideen in Afghanistan for a decade.
Just two years ago then-US Special Representative for Syria engagement said during a video event hosted by the Hudson Institute that his job was to make Syria “a quagmire for the Russians”.
So this isn’t something new or out of the blue, and what it means is that all the self-righteous posturing by the western political/media class about the need to pour weapons into Ukraine is not really about saving Ukrainian lives (only negotiating a ceasefire can do that), but about seizing this golden opportunity to hurt Russia’s geostrategic interests as much as possible. Ukraine on its own is powerless to stop Russia from taking Kyiv no matter how many weapons are sent, but those weapons can be used to fight a “long, bloody insurgency” after that happens which costs many more lives, keeps Moscow militarily preoccupied and hemorrhaging money, and ultimately hurts Putin’s popularity at home.
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The US government's strategy of creating and funding an insurgency gave birth to Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, and then did the same with ISIS in Syria.
Now Washington is going to repeat this with bloodthirsty neo-Nazis in Ukraine.
This by itself would do a great deal to advance US interests, but on top of that you’ve got the even greater benefit of manufacturing international consent for unprecedented acts of economic warfare against the entire nation of Russia, as well as killing Nord Stream 2 and rallying immense support for NATO and the imperial military/intelligence machine. The western world is now a united front against the Sauron-like menace of Vladimir Putin in much the same way it united against the threat of global terrorism after 9/11, and we’re probably only seeing the beginnings of the agendas this will be used to roll out.
We can expect these agendas to be used in an attempt to impoverish, undermine, agitate, and ultimately collapse and balkanize Russia, as the CIA and Washington swamp monsters have wanted to do since the fall of the Soviet Union. This would leave China standing alone without its nuclear superpower guard bear and much more vulnerable to imperial operations geared toward thwarting the emergence of a true multipolar world, a goal US imperialists have had in writing for three decades.
That’s a whole lot of potential benefit to the US empire just for losing Ukraine. Kind of like sacrificing a pawn to get the queen in chess.
I think a big part of why I and others wrongly underestimated the likelihood of a full-scale invasion of Ukraine was that the cost-to-benefit math never made sense; on paper Moscow stands so much more to lose by this action in the long term than it stood to gain. There was also a bit of an assumption that the empire would rather Russia not take Ukraine, preferring to gradually encroach with NATO salami slicing tactics than give up a useful client state on Russia’s border.
But chess is all about out-maneuvering your opponent to leave them nothing but bad options to choose from, and in the end leaving the king with no safe moves. The drivers of empire would have known that, as the late Justin Raimondo explained all the way back in 2014 for Antiwar, Putin could not afford to lose Ukraine to the west without losing crucial support in Russia. Combine that with increased attacks on Donbas separatists and the west’s adamant refusal to make even the most meaningless concessions like guaranteeing they wouldn’t add a nation to NATO who they had no intention of adding anyway, and you can understand if not support Putin’s drastic course of action.
If the US/NATO had the option of choosing between (1) ending the war in Ukraine tomorrow by assuring Russia Ukraine will never join NATO, or (2) having every Ukrainian die in a long war of resistance against Russia, they will pick (2).
No meaningful diplomatic effort is being made by Washington to end the violence. Ukrainian lives are being spent like pennies to facilitate the agenda of US planetary domination by whipping up international support for the strangulation of Russia while pouring vast fortunes into the military-industrial complex rather than taking even the tiniest step toward de-escalation, diplomacy and detente.
And it’s entirely possible that this was all planned years in advance.
Is it a coincidence that before this started we were bombarded with shrieking anti-Russia narratives for five years, all of which were initiated by secretive and unaccountable intelligence agencies and none of which have ever been substantiated with hard evidence? The discredited conspiracy theories that there was a Kremlin asset in the Oval Office had nothing to do with Ukraine. Neither did the plot hole–riddled and still completely unproven claim that Russian hackers intervened in the US election, or the baseless claim that St Petersburg trolls did the same. Neither did the claim that Russia was paying Taliban-linked fighters to kill US troops in Afghanistan, which was eventually walked back by the same intelligence cartel that made it.
All these hysterical anti-Russia narratives were shoved in everyone’s face day after day, year after year, with nothing really uniting them apart from the fact that they drove up general anxiety about Russia and that they were initiated by the US intelligence cartel. Even the empty Ukrainegate scandal which led to Trump’s unsuccessful impeachment was initiated by a CIA officer who just happened to be in the right place at the right time.
And while all those shrill narratives about a Putin puppet serving as America’s commander-in-chief were being aggressively hammered into public consciousness, Trump’s actual policies toward Moscow were extremely hawkish and aggressive. Beneath the narratives about Kremlin servitude, a new cold war was being dangerously escalated.
And now, lubricated years in advance by these mass-scale anti-Russia narratives, I’ve got western liberals in my social media notifications with blue and yellow profile pictures calling me a Russian propagandist and a Kremlin shill all day, every day. Because of that mass-scale propaganda campaign, we were paced to this point all the way from where we were at a few years ago when Obama was mocking Mitt Romney for his then-outlandish Russia hawkishness.
So we’re looking at increasingly aggressive confrontations between the US power alliance and the China-Russia bloc for the foreseeable future in a struggle which has already erupted in hot war and could easily get infinitely worse. All because a few manipulators in high places convinced the US establishment that global unipolar domination would be a good thing. Many of these unipolarist empire architects were involved in the murderous and influential Project for a New American Century (PNAC), whose founding members are now providing expert punditry on what should be done about the war in Ukraine.
The PNAC plan envisions a strategic confrontation with China, and a still greater permanent military presence in every corner of the world. The objective is not just power for its own sake but power to control the world’s natural resources and markets, power to privatize and deregulate the economies of every nation in the world, and power to hoist upon the backs of peoples everywhere — including North America — the blessings of an untrammeled global “free market.” The end goal is to ensure not merely the supremacy of global capitalism as such, but the supremacy of American global capitalism by preventing the emergence of any other potentially competing superpower.
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There is a temptation to engage China to further isolate Russia. This will not work. We are in a new cold war. China and Russia are allies. They're out to get us. The west needs to understand that we're out to get them too.
We should not have to live this way. We should not have to see the horrors of war inflicted upon humanity with the risk of total nuclear annihilation hanging over our heads every minute of every day, all for some dopey grand chessboard maneuverings of a few sociopaths who can’t just let humanity be.
There is no good reason why nations cannot simply collaborate with each other for everyone’s benefit. There is no good reason we should accept these omnicidal games of planetary conquest as inevitable, normal, or fine. If our minds weren’t so pervasively locked down by mass-scale psychological manipulation, there is no way we would stand for this madness.
I don’t know if the US will succeed in this grand strategic confrontation to prevent the rise of a multipolar world. From where I’m sitting it depends on which side of the conflict has more tricks up their sleeve, and that could easily be the emerging China-centralized alliance of which Russia is a key player. But I do think it’s far too early for anyone to declare that the US-led world order is over and a true multipolar world has solidified.
There are many moves on the chessboard still to be played.
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China criticizes NATO expansion, supports national sovereignty. It calls for both sides, Russia and Ukraine, to end the war. China restates its opposition to unilateral economic sanctions. The de-dollarization of China-Russia trade is about to increase. China is the world leader in transitioning to clean energy. The rate of urbanization slows down.
Chinese authorities have banned major religious activities in monasteries in and near Tibet’s regional capital Lhasa during the Lunar New Year, citing COVID-19 concerns. But critics call the move a further encroachment by China on Tibetan religion and national culture.
The ban announced in a Feb. 22 notice by Lhasa’s Ethnic and Religious Affairs Bureau comes ahead of a period of politically sensitive Tibetan anniversaries falling in March, when Chinese authorities regularly tighten security in Lhasa and other Tibetan areas of China, fearing protests against Beijing’s rule.
The order, a copy of which was seen by RFA, affects the Drepung, Sera, Ratreng, Sharbumpa, Sengling, Dakpo and the Tsuglakhang monasteries, sources in Tibet and in exile say. It also orders Tibetans to remain in their homes and avoid travel and gatherings during the Lunar New Year, called Losar, which began this year on March 3.
“The notice bars Tibetans from performing all the major religious activities that are usually observed ahead of and during the New Year,” said Ngawang Woebar, a former political prisoner now living in Dharamsala, India, the home of Tibet’s exile government the Central Tibetan Administration.
“The Chinese government used the need to control the spread of COVID-19 as an excuse during Losar last year, too,” Woebar said. “But in reality they are just making these moves as a precaution during the run-up to the March 10 anniversary” of a national uprising against Chinese rule, he added.
Speaking to RFA on Feb. 27, a Tibetan living in Lhasa said that Chinese security forces had already been deployed around the city.
“The Chinese government has sent large numbers of police to watch the movements of Tibetans in and around Lhasa city, and no one is allowed to visit the Dalai Lama’s Potala Palace or the Tsuglakhang for religious activities,” RFA’s source said, speaking on condition of anonymity for security reasons.
A month of anniversaries
On March 10, 1959, Tibetans in Lhasa rose up in protest of Beijing’s tightening political and military control of the formerly independent Tibet, sparking a rebellion in which thousands were killed and Tibet’s spiritual leader the Dalai Lama fled into exile in India.
And on March 14, 2008, a riot in Lhasa followed the suppression by Chinese police of four days of peaceful Tibetan protests and led to the destruction of Han Chinese shops in the city and deadly attacks on Han Chinese residents.
The riot sparked a wave of Tibetan demonstrations against Chinese rule that spread into Tibetan-populated regions of western Chinese provinces, and hundreds of Tibetans were detained, beaten or shot as Chinese security forces quelled the protests.
China maintains tight control over Tibet, and Tibetans living in Tibet frequently complain of discrimination and human rights abuses by Chinese authorities and policies they say are aimed at eradicating their national and cultural identity.
Translated by Tenzin Dickyi for RFA’s Tibetan Service. Written in English by Richard Finney.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Lobe Socktsang.
A flurry of recent newspaper articles have denounced what they describe as Chinese imperialism. Such texts are part of a new Cold War media blitz against China that simultaneously serves US imperialism by blessing it or denying that it exists.
This year, transgender star and People’s Liberation Army veteran Jin Xing announced the re-launch of her talk show. It aired from 2015 to 2017 as the most-watched show in China. With 100 million viewers, Jin was the world’s most popular trans celebrity. Her rise to fame foretells the Chinese people’s rise against transphobia. But in the U.S., trans people have suffered sharpening attacks. Last year broke records for trans murders and state-level anti-trans legislation. What does this difference tell us?
Chinese crews working on a government-ordered railway line are tunneling through a mountain sacred to Tibetan residents of Sichuan, using artillery fire to weaken the rock face and speed their work, Tibetan sources say.
The destruction of Asal Dzari mountain, located in the Toe township of Nyakchu county in the Kardze (in Chinese, Ganzi) Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, has now been under way for several months, according to sources in Tibet and in exile.
Tunnels being built through the mountain will help extend new rail lines connecting Nyakchu with the Tibetan regional capital Lhasa, a Tibetan living in the region told RFA, speaking on condition of anonymity for security reasons.
“The Chinese government has said that Asal Dzari mountain stands in the way of these two regions where they are building the railroads. Therefore, there are many tunneling projects being carried out around the mountain at the moment,” he said.
At the same time, the government is extracting valuable minerals from the mountain and harming the region’s fragile ecology, RFA’s source said. “However, it is unclear which minerals are being taken out, and local Tibetans are not allowed to go near the work sites,” he added.
Tibet has become an important source of minerals needed for China’s economic growth, and Chinese mining and infrastructure operations in Tibetan areas have led to widespread environmental damage, including the pollution of water sources for livestock and humans and the destruction of sacred sites, experts say.
Asal Dzari mountain is sacred to local Tibetans and contains many valuable mineral deposits, a Tibetan living in exile confirmed, citing sources in the area and speaking on condition of anonymity to protect his contacts.
“And the Chinese are now using artillery against the mountain to help extract its minerals, leaving local residents in immense difficulties and causing the death of some of their livestock,” he said.
Another railway now being built between Sichuan and central Tibet’s Nyingtri prefecture will boost tourism and trade along a previously unconnected southern route, but will also strengthen Beijing’s control over a disputed region bordering India, state media and other sources say.
The project is the second major railway to be built by China in Tibet after a northern line connecting Golmud in northwest China’s Qinghai province with Lhasa was completed in 2006. The line is the highest railway in the world.
Regional experts say that the Chinese rail lines, when completed, will tighten Beijing’s grip on Tibet, a formerly independent Himalayan country invade by China more than 70 years ago and governed by China’s ruling Communist Party ever since.
Translated by Tenzin Dickyi for RFA’s Tibetan Service. Written in English by Richard Finney.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Sangyal Kunchok.
David Von Drehle (Washington Post,2/15/22): “Xi…has reminded the world what a Chinese superpower really means—and why a strong alliance of democracies is necessary as an alternative.”
A flurry of recent newspaper articles have denounced what they describe as Chinese imperialism. Such texts are part of a new Cold War media blitz against China that simultaneously serves US imperialism by blessing it or denying that it exists.
Last month, the Washington Post (2/15/22) ran an opinion piece by David Von Drehle claiming that, “in a sense, the alliance of democracies” (by which he means the US and its partners) fell “into a fitful sleep” at the end of the Cold War. “What began as a happy dream of perpetual peace,” he contended, “changed in recent years to a nightmare,” featuring “Communist empire-building in China.”
The notion that there was a “happy dream of perpetual peace at the end of the Cold War” that only recently became a nightmare because of international bad guys like China suggests that Von Drehle himself has been not merely snoozing but comatose. Just as the Cold War ended, the American empire killed thousands of civilians in Iraq during Operation Desert Storm (FAIR.org, 10/28/21). US-led imperialism spent much of the rest of the decade prosecuting a war against the peoples of the former Yugoslavia, ultimately helping to take the country apart (Monthly Review, 10/07).
Before the tenth anniversary of the Soviet Union’s demise, the US was attacking Afghanistan (Jacobin, 9/11/21), and less than two years after that it was carrying out an invasion of Iraq that would kill hundreds of thousands of civilians (Jacobin, 6/19/14). That period, which Von Drehle regards as a favorable one in global affairs, was quite the “nightmare” for the millions on the wrong end of American bombs and bullets.
Perhaps the author is worried that China might start doing to other countries what the US routinely does, even though China has not, at any point in its modern history, committed an international crime comparable to any one of those that the US enacted in the years immediately after the Cold War—or in the years since, in countries like Libya (Jacobin, 9/2/13) and Syria (New York Times, 11/13/21; FAIR.org, 4/20/18; Electronic Intifada, 3/16/17).
‘A semi-peripheral country’
Minqi Li (Monthly Review, 7–8/21): “China continues to have an exploited position in the global capitalist division of labor.”
Many academics who study Chinese foreign policy are reluctant to reduce China’s position in the world economy to that of “empire-building.” For example, Minqi Li of the University of Utah (Monthly Review, 7–8/21) writes:
The currently available evidence does not support the argument that China has become an imperialist country in the sense that China belongs to the privileged small minority that exploits the great majority of the world population. On the whole, China continues to have an exploited position in the global capitalist division of labor and transfers more surplus value to the core (historical imperialist countries) than it receives from the periphery. However, China’s per capita GDP has risen to levels substantially above the peripheral income levels and, in terms of international labor transfer flows, China has established exploitative relations with nearly half of the world population (including Africa, South Asia and parts of East Asia). Therefore, China is best considered a semi-peripheral country in the capitalist world system.
Claudio Katz (Life on the Left, 9/6/21), the Argentine academic, argues that China is a “potential” empire: It “appropriates surpluses from the underdeveloped economies,” but its approach to the military dimension of geopolitics has been to act defensively. He writes:
In contrast to the United States, England or France, China’s capitalists are not accustomed to calling on the political-military intervention of their state when they confront difficulties in their international business. They have no tradition of invasions or coups when confronted by countries that nationalize companies or suspend debt payment. No one knows how quickly the Chinese state will or will not adopt those imperialist habits.
Such level-headed analyses complicate Von Drehle’s simplistic assertions, which could be why he leaves them out of the conversation.
‘Imperialism on the march in the East’
Robert D. Kaplan (Wall Street Journal, 1/13/22): “Imperialism throughout history has often originated from a deep well of insecurity.”
In a Wall StreetJournal op-ed (1/13/22), Robert D. Kaplan described Western imperialism as a feature of the past, rather than a present reality, three times. “Intellectuals can’t stop denouncing the West for its legacy of imperialism,” the piece began. “But the imperialism on the march today is in the East.” He went on to claim that “unlike Western countries, which are busy apologizing for their former conquests, the Chinese…take pride in their imperial legacies.” The article ended with Kaplan’s assertion that “the American left should focus on where empire as an ideal truly endures, which isn’t in the West.”
Meanwhile, the US empire “truly endures” in the approximately 750 military bases it has in at least 80 countries (Al Jazeera, 9/10/21). China, by contrast, has just one overseas military base (Foreign Policy, 7/7/21).
A puerile cartoon accompanied Kaplan’s piece, and it too denied contemporary American imperialism: A pair of giant octopuses are standing on a chessboard shaking hands. One octopus is covered in the red and yellow stars of China’s flag, the other in Russian colors; they’re holding all of the chess pieces, while a much smaller Uncle Sam looks on without any. The United States, in other words, is a powerless bystander with no holdings in the imperial great game.
The US spends more on its military than any other country, accounting for 39% of all global military expenditure in 2020, and dramatically outpaces China in this regard, especially in per capita terms: In 2020, the US spent an estimated $778 billion on its armed forces, and China allocated an estimated $252 billion to its military (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 4/26/21)—$2,365 for each US citizen vs. $180 for each citizen of China.
Similarly, Washington and its Western allies’ grip on the global financial system demonstrates that Western imperialism is chugging along. The US dollar is the global reserve currency (Atlantic, 9/6/21), not the yuan. The US and its partners are in control of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank (Al Jazeera, 11/26/20)—rather consequential chess pieces—while China doesn’t dominate any institution of global economics or governance of similar magnitude. Amid these conditions, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Japan, Korea and the rich economies of Europe—most of which are “in the West”—have drained $152 trillion dollars from the Global South since 1960 (Al Jazeera, 5/6/21).
‘No longer the imperialism of the West’
Simon Tisdall (Guardian, 12/12/21): “It’s difficult to regard Xi…as anything other than a totalitarian control freak with imperial fantasies.”
Simon Tisdall of the Guardian (12/12/21) sounded a similar note in his article on “China’s New Age of Imperialism.” Like Kaplan, he referred to US imperialism in the past tense:
Imperialism, in all its awful forms, still poses a threat. But it is no longer the imperialism of the West, rightly execrated and self-condemned. Today’s threat emanates from the East. Just as objectionable, and potentially more dangerous, it’s the prospect of a totalitarian 21st-century Chinese global empire.
That Western imperialism is apparently “no longer” a threat will undoubtedly come as a relief to Afghans. Their country is on the brink of famine, with US sanctions effectively ensuring that Afghanistan can’t be fed (New York Times, 12/4/21):
Such widespread hunger is the most devastating sign of the economic crash that has crippled Afghanistan since the Taliban seized power. Practically overnight, billions of dollars in foreign aid that propped up the previous Western-backed government vanished and US sanctions on the Taliban isolated the country from the global financial system, paralyzing Afghan banks and impeding relief work by humanitarian organizations.
When Tisdall wasn’t erasing American attempts to starve millions of people, he was inflating alleged Chinese threats to America, writing:
US media reported last week that the port city of Bata in Equatorial Guinea could become China’s first Atlantic seaboard naval base—potentially putting warships and submarines within striking distance of America’s East Coast. It is said to be considering an island airbase in Kiribati that could in theory threaten Hawaii. Meanwhile, it continues to militarize atolls in the South China Sea.
Yet the US having bases that put it “within striking distance” of China isn’t just a theoretical possibility: The US military already has nearly 300 military bases spread across East Asia, with seven more in nearby Australia. In September, the US, Britain and Australia announced a new military alliance aimed at China, which will involve a further military buildup (Salon, 10/28/21).
Tisdall reduced the militarization of the South China Sea to a simplistic tale of a belligerent Chinese empire, rather than discussing these and other contexts, such as RIMPAC, a biennial US-led naval maneuver. RIMPAC is the world’s largest maritime exercise and functions as a show of force to China, which was disinvited from the festivities in 2018 (Washington Post, 8/17/20). Similarly, the US routinely sends naval ships through the South China Sea (CNN, 5/20/21), a move that antagonizes China about as much as Chinese vessels sailing through the Gulf of Mexico would upset the US.
Even though Tisdall repeatedly denied that American imperialism is ongoing, near the end of the article he acknowledged that the US has vastly more global power than China: “By key measures—the number of overseas bases, alliances, military strike-power—America still greatly outstrips China’s regime.” He then changed his earlier opposition to “imperialism, in all its awful forms,” asserting that the US “greatly outstrips” China “in terms of respect for human values and rights.”
Yet weeks before Tisdall’s article, UNICEF reported that 10,000 Yemeni children have been killed in the war on the country, which the UN calls the world’s worst humanitarian crisis and which the US fuels and has fueled from the start (In These Times, 11/22/21; Middle East Eye, 11/17/17). The US has likewise demonstrated its disrespect for “human values and rights” by using its control of the international financial system to levy sanctions against Venezuela that, according to an estimate from two US economists, killed approximately 40,000 Venezuelans between August 2017 and April 2019 (CEPR, 4/25/19). No contemporary Chinese foreign policy is responsible for nearly as much suffering.
‘Imperial geography’
To try to prove that China is the world’s foremost imperial threat, the coverage also points to China’s relations with Taiwan, and to its treatment of peoples living in Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong and Macau. This aspect of the argument is odd, in that imperialism, in its contemporary usage, tends to refer to international relations. For instance, Tisdall (Guardian, 12/12/21) says Chinese state repression of Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region, or of residents of Hong Kong, amount to Xi acting like “a latter-day Roman emperor,” a plank in the writer’s assertion that China has less “respect for human values and rights” than the US empire.
While there is evidence of significant human rights violations in both places, Tisdall provides no basis for believing that China has less of a claim to them than the US—or its close settler-colonial allies, such as Canada, Australia or New Zealand—does to Indigenous lands seized by European invaders from thousands of miles of way, or that China has done so in an even more brutal fashion.
Like Tisdall, Kaplan (Wall Street Journal, 1/13/22) calls Hong Kong and Macau part of China’s “imperial geography,” a peculiar way to describe two regions returned to China by Western imperial powers: Britain gave back Hong Kong in 1997, and Portugal did the same with Macau in 1999. The author also writes that Xinjiang and Tibet “represent colonial legacies of former Qing rule,” which is one way of saying that China has had authority over Xinjiang since the 18th century (BBC, 9/26/14). As for Tibet, Robert Barnett (NPR, 4/11/08), director of the modern Tibetan studies program at Columbia University, says that “Tibet has never been considered independent by major players on the world stage.”
Kaplan also points to Chinese saber-rattling against Taiwan. The latter has many of the trappings of a state, but only 13 countries regard it as an independent nation (New York Times, 12/10/21).
None of this is to suggest that China should resolve the Taiwan question militarily. Nor is to endorse Chinese policies in Macau, Hong Kong, Tibet or Xinjiang. The point is that authors like Tisdall and Kaplan are playing fast and loose with history and international law, and applying wildly unequal standards that cast China as an evil empire and the United States as alternately a benign empire or not an empire at all.
Longer-term trend
Atlantic (2/6/21): “The truth about the widely, perhaps willfully, misunderstood case of Hambantota Port is long overdue.”
These recent articles are part of a longer-term trend across much of the corporate media. Last summer, a Slate article (7/14/21) maintained:
Beijing is capable of perpetuating imperialism in its own right. One case in point is the Belt and Road Initiative, a massive program of investments and infrastructure projects abroad. Designed to overcome China’s own overproduction dilemma at a time of stagnating wages and inadequate domestic demand, it targets developing countries in the region with extraterritorial legal arrangements, debt-trap diplomacy and, unsurprisingly, environmental exploitation.
The authors aren’t the only ones in corporate media to make this claim about the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) (Washington Post, 8/27/18). While BRI can give China leverage over borrowers, there is academic research that calls into question whether BRI amounts to imperialism: For example, Deborah Brautigam and Meg Rithmire (Atlantic, 2/6/21), of Johns Hopkins University and Harvard, respectively, studied BRI and disputed the charge that it is a form of “modern-day colonialism.” “Chinese banks are willing to restructure the terms of existing loans and have never actually seized an asset from any country,” they noted.
In 2020, a Wall Street Journal op-ed (10/1/20) characterized BRI as “imperial overreach,” citing Africa and Latin America as examples. Justin Podur (FAIR.org, 1/31/22) recently demonstrated that there is no convincing analogy between China’s policies in Africa and those of European empires, and it’s equally rich for the leading US financial paper to accuse another country of imperialism in Latin America. Katz (Life on the Left, 9/6/21), noting the “overwhelming intrusion of the US embassies” in Latin America, points out that “China is miles away from any such encroachment”: “Profiting from the sale of manufactured goods and the purchase of raw materials is not the same as sending the Marines, training police and financing coups d’état.”
Two months before the Journal essay, a Newsweek article (8/31/20) claimed that
Xi is now openly promoting imperial-era views that the Chinese emperor had the right and obligation to rule tianxia, or “all under heaven,” thereby suggesting China should now be considered the world’s only sovereign state.
It would be remarkable if Xi said that China should rule “all under heaven,” or be the “world’s only sovereign state,” but the author provides no source to that effect, and I can find no evidence that Xi has. While US leaders don’t say that they think the United States should “be considered the world’s only sovereign state,” the power the US has secured for itself comes closer than that of anyone else. While Washington’s leaders don’t say that they think the United States should “be considered the world’s only sovereign state,” the power it has secured for itself brings the US government much closer to having that type of authority than any other state.
Instead of carefully considering the implications of China’s rise for the rest of the world, these articles have opted to whip up xenophobia against the country while also glossing over—if not outright cheering—US imperialism.
The United States is now in a state of war with Russia.
Every country in the NATO military alliance is providing billions in anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons to the Ukrainians (of course, every country in the NATO alliance is owned by the United States which has recently coughed up $850 million for the cause). Along with those weapons the alliance has nodded its approval to the world’s mercenaries to descend on Ukraine getting free passage into Western Ukraine and transit through countries who directly border Ukraine. Privatemilitary.org lists all the private military contractors who are likely exploring their options in Ukraine.
It is also great news for the West’s defense contractors who manufacture anti-tank/aircraft, small arms, landmines, grenades, artillery, radios; in short, billions in profits will be earned off the war in eastern Ukraine: there never seems to be a downside to their businesses.
With Russia, the world’s 11th largest economy, essentially cut off from the globalized world, the pain level for Russian citizens is sure to rise over time. But if there is any one people whose tolerance to pain is high, it’s the Russians. Their history shows as much. Still, one puzzling aspect of Russia’s peacekeeping operation — that would prolong a war, is its devoting so much effort to taking the two most populous cities in Ukraine: Kiev and Kharkov. It is those two places where mercenaries will alight inevitably prolonging Russia’s effort and its citizen’s economic difficulties. As I mentioned in a piece published at Counterpunch on February 4, Scenario for a War in Eastern Ukraine, the Grozny experience in Chechnya still must linger in the veterans of that epic siege and defense.
What’s Up with China?
So, what is China thinking? Their political-military leadership must surely be looking on the scene in Ukraine with great interest. A good guess would be that principals in the Peoples Liberation Army-Navy-Air Force are discussing military operations against Taiwan, which Beijing has always claimed as part of greater China.
Could there be a better time for a Chinese move on Taiwan? With the USA/NATO totally focused on Russia and Ukraine, they would be hard pressed to mount much resistance to Chinese military forces moving towards Taiwan. If the Chinese did this, how would the USA-NATO and Asian allies respond?
Taiwan is already afloat in high tech US weaponry: air defenses, aircraft, artillery. The USA has trained its military. Resupplying the island nation during conflict would be difficult by sea or air. US naval forces and those of Taiwan would likely be severely damaged by land based ballistic missiles.
Cutting China off from SWIFT and barring all USA-Western companies from doing business in China would be a disaster for the citizens of the USA-Europe who have no tolerance for economic pain. Corporations like Walmart and Boeing are so entrenched in the Chinese economy that they could not possibly extract themselves without massive US government financial support. Any and all companies doing business in China would sprint to the US government for cash to support exiting the country.
The USA would find itself in a two-front economic and military conflict with China and Russia for which it is unprepared. Tactical nuclear weapons would likely come into play.
It seems that it is time for the world’s elite and their citizens to watch and listen intently to The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara by Erol Morris. McNamara quotes Nikita Khrushchev speaking with John F. Kennedy’s administration during the Cuban Missile Crisis. His insight is ignored at the world’s peril:
We and you ought not to pull on the ends of a rope which you have tied the knots of war. Because the more the two of us pull, the tighter the knot will be tied. And then it will be necessary to cut that knot, and what that would mean is not for me to explain to you. I have participated in two wars and know that war ends when it has rolled through cities and villages, everywhere sowing death and destruction. For such is the logic of war. If people do not display wisdom, they will clash like blind moles and then mutual annihilation will commence.
Media
Military information support operations (MISO) are in full swing all over the mainstream media and the World Wide Web. Who to believe? It is getting tougher as alternate news sites like Sputnik News and RT News are being censored by the West. Any support aired by anyone on the West for the Russian position gets mauled and derided by pro-West pundits. For example, the US sponsored coup in Ukraine that overthrew an elected government there in 2014 no longer exists or does not matter. Nor does the long litany of US wars of aggression against — well, pick a nation: Guatemala, Iraq, Vietnam, etc., etc., etc.
One thing is for sure: self-censorship by Western media will only get more wicked.
The only way to form an opinion is to view as much from Russian and Western sources as is humanly possible. As examples, on one side is Newsfront, Southfront, Tass, Pravda.ru, Interfax News, Al Jazeera, and, on the other is the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, CBS, Center for Strategic and International Analysis. Apps like Telegram and Twitter sometimes contain commentary and footage from Ukrainian combat zones.
Relying on one source is not intelligent.
Dismal Horizon of the Future
Therefore, I ask myself, can the apocalypse be averted or mastered? As the concept of the Anthropocene implies, it is already too late. “They have planted the wind and will harvest the whirlwind,” the Bible says. The trends of environmental devastation, military destruction and social wreckage have now taken on an irreversible and self-feeding character; they tend to expand their effects and the tend to eliminate possible countermeasures. Brutality is more and more dominating social relations, and the economic machine of production is ruled more and more by inescapable automatisms. The Automaton and the Brute are the two separated forms of existence in our time: neuro-totalitarianisms and global civil war are the forms of life looming on the horizon of the future.
— Franco Berardi, Breathing: Chaos and Poetry, semiotext (e), MIT Press. 2018
The United States is now in a state of war with Russia.
Every country in the NATO military alliance is providing billions in anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons to the Ukrainians (of course, every country in the NATO alliance is owned by the United States which has recently coughed up $850 million for the cause). Along with those weapons the alliance has nodded its approval to the world’s mercenaries to descend on Ukraine getting free passage into Western Ukraine and transit through countries who directly border Ukraine. Privatemilitary.org lists all the private military contractors who are likely exploring their options in Ukraine.
It is also great news for the West’s defense contractors who manufacture anti-tank/aircraft, small arms, landmines, grenades, artillery, radios; in short, billions in profits will be earned off the war in eastern Ukraine: there never seems to be a downside to their businesses.
With Russia, the world’s 11th largest economy, essentially cut off from the globalized world, the pain level for Russian citizens is sure to rise over time. But if there is any one people whose tolerance to pain is high, it’s the Russians. Their history shows as much. Still, one puzzling aspect of Russia’s peacekeeping operation — that would prolong a war, is its devoting so much effort to taking the two most populous cities in Ukraine: Kiev and Kharkov. It is those two places where mercenaries will alight inevitably prolonging Russia’s effort and its citizen’s economic difficulties. As I mentioned in a piece published at Counterpunch on February 4, Scenario for a War in Eastern Ukraine, the Grozny experience in Chechnya still must linger in the veterans of that epic siege and defense.
What’s Up with China?
So, what is China thinking? Their political-military leadership must surely be looking on the scene in Ukraine with great interest. A good guess would be that principals in the Peoples Liberation Army-Navy-Air Force are discussing military operations against Taiwan, which Beijing has always claimed as part of greater China.
Could there be a better time for a Chinese move on Taiwan? With the USA/NATO totally focused on Russia and Ukraine, they would be hard pressed to mount much resistance to Chinese military forces moving towards Taiwan. If the Chinese did this, how would the USA-NATO and Asian allies respond?
Taiwan is already afloat in high tech US weaponry: air defenses, aircraft, artillery. The USA has trained its military. Resupplying the island nation during conflict would be difficult by sea or air. US naval forces and those of Taiwan would likely be severely damaged by land based ballistic missiles.
Cutting China off from SWIFT and barring all USA-Western companies from doing business in China would be a disaster for the citizens of the USA-Europe who have no tolerance for economic pain. Corporations like Walmart and Boeing are so entrenched in the Chinese economy that they could not possibly extract themselves without massive US government financial support. Any and all companies doing business in China would sprint to the US government for cash to support exiting the country.
The USA would find itself in a two-front economic and military conflict with China and Russia for which it is unprepared. Tactical nuclear weapons would likely come into play.
It seems that it is time for the world’s elite and their citizens to watch and listen intently to The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara by Erol Morris. McNamara quotes Nikita Khrushchev speaking with John F. Kennedy’s administration during the Cuban Missile Crisis. His insight is ignored at the world’s peril:
We and you ought not to pull on the ends of a rope which you have tied the knots of war. Because the more the two of us pull, the tighter the knot will be tied. And then it will be necessary to cut that knot, and what that would mean is not for me to explain to you. I have participated in two wars and know that war ends when it has rolled through cities and villages, everywhere sowing death and destruction. For such is the logic of war. If people do not display wisdom, they will clash like blind moles and then mutual annihilation will commence.
Media
Military information support operations (MISO) are in full swing all over the mainstream media and the World Wide Web. Who to believe? It is getting tougher as alternate news sites like Sputnik News and RT News are being censored by the West. Any support aired by anyone on the West for the Russian position gets mauled and derided by pro-West pundits. For example, the US sponsored coup in Ukraine that overthrew an elected government there in 2014 no longer exists or does not matter. Nor does the long litany of US wars of aggression against — well, pick a nation: Guatemala, Iraq, Vietnam, etc., etc., etc.
One thing is for sure: self-censorship by Western media will only get more wicked.
The only way to form an opinion is to view as much from Russian and Western sources as is humanly possible. As examples, on one side is Newsfront, Southfront, Tass, Pravda.ru, Interfax News, Al Jazeera, and, on the other is the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, CBS, Center for Strategic and International Analysis. Apps like Telegram and Twitter sometimes contain commentary and footage from Ukrainian combat zones.
Relying on one source is not intelligent.
Dismal Horizon of the Future
Therefore, I ask myself, can the apocalypse be averted or mastered? As the concept of the Anthropocene implies, it is already too late. “They have planted the wind and will harvest the whirlwind,” the Bible says. The trends of environmental devastation, military destruction and social wreckage have now taken on an irreversible and self-feeding character; they tend to expand their effects and the tend to eliminate possible countermeasures. Brutality is more and more dominating social relations, and the economic machine of production is ruled more and more by inescapable automatisms. The Automaton and the Brute are the two separated forms of existence in our time: neuro-totalitarianisms and global civil war are the forms of life looming on the horizon of the future.
— Franco Berardi, Breathing: Chaos and Poetry, semiotext (e), MIT Press. 2018
The US government in 2020 declared five Chinese media entities to be “not independent news organizations” but rather “effectively controlled by the [Chinese] government” (Politico, 2/18/20).
Most nations have some form of state media. These days, it’s pretty easy for Americans to access any number of foreign state media outlets, and many of them have journalists covering US affairs. Some of those journalists must register as “foreign agents” with the US government. But others don’t have to—a distinction that has more to do with geopolitics than with journalism.
The Trump administration mandated “five Chinese state-run media organizations to register their personnel and property with the US government”: Xinhua News Agency, China Global Television Network, China Radio International and the parent companies of the China Daily and People’s Daily newspapers (Politico, 2/18/20). The administration also “limited to 100 the number of Chinese citizens who may work in the United States” for those organizations (New York Times, 3/2/20).
The privately owned Hong Kong newspaper Sing Tao was forced to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act because it “is viewed as a pro-Beijing outlet” (South China Morning Post, 8/26/21). US state media organ Radio Free Asia (8/27/21) trumpeted the “foreign agent” designation for Sing Tao, quoting one Hong Kong journalist saying that it is “a fairly open secret that it is an underground CCP [Chinese Communist Party] organization.”
Russia’s RT registered in 2017, as US intelligence agencies claimed it “contributed to the Kremlin’s campaign to interfere with [the 2016] presidential election in favor” of Donald Trump (Reuters, 11/13/17). Qatari-owned Al Jazeera was forced to register (New York Times, 9/15/20) because content “designed to influence American perceptions of a domestic policy issue or a foreign nation’s activities or its leadership qualifies as ‘political activities,’” according to one US official. Relations between Qatar and the US are complex, as they had strained during the Trump administration (NBC,6/9/17) and have improved under President Joe Biden (NBC, 9/13/21), although the oil-rich nation is accused of funding Palestinian terror operations, adding to tensions (Washington Post, 12/15/20; Jerusalem Post, 2/17/22).
But other state-owned outlets, like the BBC, CBC and Deutsche Welle, do not register as foreign agents in the US. Clearly, the standard is that the “foreign agent” label applies when an outlet’s government owner has rocky relations with Washington. And for many press advocates, that’s causing problems.
Not just symbolic
The US government is proposing to spend half a billion dollars on “independent” anti-China media (American Prospect, 2/9/22).
The designation isn’t just symbolic: Through FARA enforcement, the government can keep a closer eye on these outlets’ activities. US state media network Voice of America (5/12/21) reported that CGTN “spent more than $50 million on its US operations last year, accounting for nearly 80% of total Chinese spending on influencing US public opinion and policy,” while China Daily “reported more than $3 million in spending last year, including expenses related to advertising in American newspapers.”
VoA called this a “propaganda spending spree,” as China wanted to “burnish its global image,” but even if that’s true, there’s plenty of evidence suggesting the US does the same thing. The US has looked to invest half a billion dollars into media organizations that counter the Chinese narrative (American Prospect, 2/9/22), causing the South China Morning Post (4/28/21) to scoff: “When the Chinese do it, it’s propaganda. When Washington does it, it’s ‘investing in our values.’” Xinhua (2/23/22) went further, saying that America’s move to fund journalism in Asia for political purposes makes the world “wonder how the self-styled ‘beacon of press freedom’ dares to openly manipulate media in an attempt to squeeze China out of what it calls a ‘Great Power Competition.’”
In a statement to the Department of Justice concerning the Foreign Agents Registration Act, the Committee to Protect Journalists (2/11/22) noted that not all state-owned media outlets are the same, but “the glaring difference in the way these media outlets are treated under FARA raises questions about the fairness of its implementation.” CPJ called for “the end of compelling media outlets to register, which impacts their operations and their ability to engage in journalism freely.”
It went on:
The inconsistent application of FARA has created the appearance that the act is a foreign policy tool, and has provided justification for foreign governments to use similar labeling against news organizations that receive funding from within the United States. Countries including Hungary, Israel, Russia and Ukraine have all cited the US use of FARA when they passed legislation requiring civil society organizations to register with the government.
Even the Council on Foreign Relations (8/24/20), which wields enormous pressure on US foreign policy and press coverage of foreign affairs, sees a problem, saying that “such tough measures against Chinese state media could backfire.” By using FARA against these outlets, the US government “potentially overstates the influence of China’s state media outlets, and rather than modeling an open society, it risks appearing as if it does not care about press freedom.”
Politicized applications
Forcing journalists with overseas ties to register is an “oppressive new law” (Guardian, 9/11/21)—when Moscow does it.
Indeed, the choice by these countries to register each other’s journalists is a part of a brewing media cold war. Russia acted in kind when it decided to list journalists working there as foreign agents (NPR, 7/31/21; Guardian, 9/11/21), and Russia added to its foreign agents list Bellingcat, which is highly critical of Russia, and the US-run Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which is specifically meant to counter Russian-government narratives in Eastern Europe (RFE/RL, 10/9/21).
The Chinese government showed its might during these escalating tensions when it expelled New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post journalists and “demanded that those outlets, as well as the Voice of America and Time magazine, provide the Chinese government with detailed information about their operations” (New York Times, 3/17/20). Both countries eventually eased “restrictions on access for journalists from each other’s countries” (Reuters, 11/16/21), but foreign reporters continue to complain of stifling working conditions in China (Wall Street Journal, 1/30/22; CNN, 1/31/22). China is ranked 177th on the Reporters Without Borders press freedom index, beating out North Korea, Eritrea and Turkmenistan.
Not all state broadcasters are the same, but even the venerated BBC, whose journalists do not have to register under FARA in the US, isn’t free from the idea that it works in the service of the state.
One study by Cardiff University researchers, looking at “BBC news coverage from 2007 and 2012, concluded that conservative opinions received more airtime than progressive ones” (The Week, 11/26/21). Journalist Peter Oborne (Guardian, 12/3/19) sees the BBC not as a partisan news agency, but as one that favors the state generally: “The BBC does not have a party political bias: It is biased towards the government of the day,” he said. And as one former BBC journalist put it, staffers at the broadcaster’s BBC Monitoring program, which collects and re-reports from global media, historically were “working for…the Ministry of Defense,” specifically for the purposes of foreign intelligence (Institute of Commonwealth Studies, 10/26/13).
This isn’t an argument for forcing the BBC to register under FARA. It is an argument that the application of FARA to foreign journalists is politicized and should be stopped, as it only makes it harder for all journalists to do their jobs.
China has launched military training on Hainan island, its most southerly province, a day after the U.S. 7th Fleet announced that one of its destroyers transited the Taiwan Strait.
The Hainan Maritime Safety Administration issued a navigation warning saying military training would take place from Sunday to Tuesday close to the sea and that entering the area within a six-mile radius was prohibited.
A navigation warning is a public advisory notice to mariners about changes to navigational aids and current marine activities or hazards including fishing zones and military exercises.
The warning did not specify what kind of military training but the provided coordinates indicated the location is near China’s Wenchang Rocket Launch Site.
On Saturday, the U.S. Navy 7th Fleet said in a statement that its Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Ralph Johnson was “conducting a routine Taiwan Strait transit.”
The statement said the transit was conducted “through international waters in accordance with international law” and “through a corridor in the Strait that is beyond the territorial sea of any coastal State.”
Before this and most recently, the USS Dewey made a similar transit on Jan. 22, 2022, and the USS Chaffe on Dec. 15, 2021. But those two ships did not turn on their automatic identification system (AIS), whereas the USS Ralph Johnson did, effectively advertizing its mission.
The 7th Fleet said the USS Ralph Johnson’s transit “demonstrates the United States’ commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific.”
A MH-60R helicopter during flight operations aboard guided-missile destroyer USS Ralph Johnson on Feb.14, 2022. Credit: U.S. Navy
Taiwan’s security
The move was heavily criticized by China. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Eastern Theater Command spokesman, Sr. Col. Shi Yi, was quoted by Chinese state media as saying that “such an action is provocative and aims to embolden Taiwan separatist forces.”
Shi also called the U.S. action “hypocritical and futile” and said the PLA tracked and monitored the destroyer’s movements.
China regards Taiwan as a renegade province and vows to take it back, by force if necessary.
While it’s not unusual for the U.S. navy to sail through the Taiwan Strait, Saturday’s mission took place against a tense international backdrop, as fighting intensifies in Ukraine after an invasion by Russian forces.
There has been speculation that China could exploit a situation in which Washington was preoccupied by Ukraine by taking action against Taiwan or in the South China Sea.
Beijing has rejected that suggestion, but the Ukraine conflict has at the very least highlighted the diplomatic gulf between Washington and Beijing, as China avoids direct criticism of Russia’s conduct.
The hawkish Chinese tabloid Global Times said “while the ongoing Ukraine-Russia tussle is intensifying, the U.S. military is attempting to demonstrate its capabilities to stir up trouble” in both Europe and Asia.
The same newspaper in an editorial last week warned Taiwan that the Ukrainian crisis proved that “Washington is not reliable” and there is only one option for the island’s future – “to achieve reunification with the mainland.”
The Taiwanese Ministry of National Defense on Monday said “in response to the development of the Ukrainian-Russian military conflict,” Taiwan’s army continues to “maintain a high degree of vigilance and closely monitors the military dynamics around the Taiwan Strait to ensure national security.”
One lesson that China can learn from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, according to Alexander Vuving, a professor with the Hawaii-based Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, is that a unilateral decision to take over a smaller country won’t be acceptable in modern times.
“I think China is not yet ready to launch an invasion of Taiwan,” Vuving said, adding: “But China will intensify its ‘testing’ action to test the capabilities and resolve of its opponents across the Taiwan Strait and in the South China Sea.”
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Staff.
This episode looks at the historic rapprochement between China and the United States when president Richard Nixon met Chairman Mao Zedong, the growing need for lithium, technological cooperation and competition between rural and urban China, the high cost of raising a child in China, and its declining birth rate.
State-owned defence prime China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) announced on 21 January that it is planning to build a larger prototype of its Caihong 10 (CH-10) fixed-wing vertical take-off and landing unmanned aerial vehicle (VTOL UAV) at its new automated manufacturing facility in the eastern Zhejiang Province. The company also noted that the […]
The Chinese media’s praise for a Han Chinese man as a “model philanthropist” helping minority students in northwestern China’s Xinjiang has outraged Uyghur activists who note that China has jailed numerous Uyghur philanthropists under a mass internment drive that has created many orphans.
Shen Jianjia of Tikes county in Ghulja (in Chinese, Yining) was lauded for helping 175 Uyghur, Kazakh, and Kyrgyz students live in his home for free during the past 30 years while they completed their schooling in an article published on Tengritagh (Tianshan), the official website of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) government.
The article describes Shen arriving back at his home on the evening of Feb. 15, China’s Lantern Festival, after celebrating the Lunar New Year in another part of the country. He and the four students, who live in his home while going to school, along with their parents gathered to celebrate the holiday with him.
With “wholehearted warmth Shen helped the children for many years with no regrets,” the article says.
One student had been living in Shen’s house for seven years from when he began junior high school until he graduated from the local vocational and technical school, according to the report.
“We celebrated a happy Lantern Festival together,” Shen is quoted as saying in the article.
The retired People’s Liberation Army soldier who is now a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) official in Tikes county moved to Xinjiang with his parents and five siblings when he was two years old, according to the report.
In the past few years, he has received awards from the Chinese government for being an “ideological and moral building exemplar,” a “model of ethnic unity,” and a “philanthropist.”
Ilshat Hassan Kokbore, vice president of the executive committee of the World Uyghur Congress (WUC), expressed disgust at what he said was propaganda about the former soldier in Xinjiang.
“A Chinese colonialist PLA soldier helping native children of East Turkestan has appeared in the Chinese media while millions of native Uyghurs have been imprisoned in camps and prisons, and their children have been deprived of parental care and have become the subjects of Chinese colonial boarding schools which are called ‘kindergartens of angels’ and ‘schools of angels,’” he said.
East Turkestan is Uyghurs’ preferred name for the Xinjiang region.
Kokbore said that the Chinese government needs such propaganda to cover up its colonial policies and genocide of Uyghurs in Xinjiang in light of accusations of genocide and crimes against humanity by some members of the international community.
“Their goal is very obvious — to cover up the genocide they are committing and to show that the CCP and its government is the savior and helper of the native people and to tell the world that what they are doing is good instead of evil,” he said.
Tragic fate of Uyghur philanthropists
RFA has previously reported that authorities have arrested and imprisoned Uyghur philanthropists who had made significant contributions to education and helped children in Xinjiang, as part of the Chinese government’s campaign to wipe out Uyghur society and culture.
Many of them have been among the 1.8 million predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities believed to be held in a network of detention camps in Xinjiang since 2017. Beijing has said that the camps are vocational training centers and has denied widespread and documented allegations that it has mistreated Muslims living in Xinjiang.
Kokbore said that the story of Shen Jianjia contrasted wildly with the tragic fate of Uyghur philanthropists such as Nutay Haji and others who focused their work on helping Uyghur children and students.
Nurtay Hajim, a respected businessman who amassed a fortune through an international tourism and a shipping firm, financed the establishment and operations of the Nurtay Iskender School for Orphans in Ghulja. The school offered free accommodation, food, and education for Uyghur children whose parents had died or were imprisoned. He is believed to have received a lengthy prison sentence in 2018.
Another Uyghur philanthropist, Ablimit Hoshur Halis Haji, was taken into custody in Xinjiang’s capital Urumqi (Wulumuqi) in 2018 by a unit of the State Security forces known as the Guobao. His detention was said to be directly linked to his establishment in 1994 of the Halis Foundation, a charitable organization whose goal was to help elite Uyghur students attain higher education and financial aid for study abroad.
“Our philanthropists … who opened schools for the orphans, including Chinese orphans, and who had done many times better than this Chinese soldier, were imprisoned and turned into criminals by this Chinese regime,” Kokbore said. “This is all about covering up their crime of genocide.”
Kokbore condemned China’s veneration of Shen Jianjia, because he was a member of the PLA, which has been the “backbone of repression” in Xinjiang since the occupation of the region by the Chinese Communist Party after 1949.
“By choosing and praising a former Chinese People’s Liberation Army soldier, the Chinese colonialist government was trying to justify Chinese PLA’s crimes against Uyghurs,” he said.
Turghunjan Alawudun, director of WUC’s religious affairs committee, said that China’s story about Shen as a form of domestic propaganda aims to undermine Uyghurs’ religious beliefs, customs, and culture on and that the government does not respect the religious freedom of ethnic minority groups as it claims it does.
“This is another lie by the Chinese government by saying that China is helping the native children of the Kazakhs, the Kyrgyz, and the Uyghurs,” he said. “While they are committing genocide against Uyghurs, they are telling this lie of a Chinese soldier being an angel who helps the children.”
“With this propaganda, China is trying hard to speed up the assimilation of native children,” he added.
The example of the Chinese philanthropist “is an open example of the Chinese policy to exterminate the Muslim faith of such children,” he told RFA.
“Uyghur children eating at a home of a Chinese is against our belief system in Islam,” he said. “The average Uyghur parent is against letting their children eat at a non-Muslim Chinese home.”
Translated by the Uyghur service. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Mihriban.
Beijing on Thursday called for restraint following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but said the movement of troops wasn’t an invasion, and came against “a very complicated historical background.”
“China is closely monitoring the latest situation. We call on all sides to exercise restraint to prevent the situation from getting out of control,” Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told a regular news briefing in Beijing.
“This is perhaps a difference between China and you Westerners. We won’t go rushing to a conclusion,” she said, adding that countries’ “legitimate security concerns” should be addressed through dialogue.
The Russian attack comes weeks after Putin met with ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) general secretary Xi Jinping ahead of the Winter Olympics in Beijing, where the two sides signed a friendship pact aimed at countering U.S. global influence.
Russian forces invaded Ukraine by land, sea and air in the biggest attack by one state against another in Europe since World War II, sending missiles raining down on cities, with columns of troops seen crossing the border from Russia and Belarus, and landing from the Black and Azov seas.
Highways out of the country’s capital, Kyiv, were choked with traffic as people tried to flee the city amid the sounds of explosions, air raid sirens and gunfire.
“Russia treacherously attacked our state in the morning, as Nazi Germany did in the WW2 years,” Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said via Twitter on Thursday.
“Russia has embarked on a path of evil, but Ukraine is defending itself & won’t give up its freedom no matter what Moscow thinks,” he wrote, calling on Ukrainians to defend their country.
Putin said he had ordered “a special military operation” to prevent “genocide” in Ukraine – an accusation the West calls absurd propaganda.
“We will strive for the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine,” Putin said in a speech early on Thursday.
U.S. President Joe Biden has ruled out sending U.S. troops to defend Ukraine but he and other Western leaders promised tough financial sanctions.
‘Let Ukraine be a warning’
Many in China drew an immediate parallel with a putative Chinese invasion of the democratic island of Taiwan, which the CCP lays claim to, despite never having ruled the island of 23 million people.
“Hey, little Taiwan, are you watching?” Weibo user @Ling Ting is in hell but doesn’t forget the world wrote in a comment on a news report on the Russian military action. “Let Ukraine be a warning to you!”
“Taiwan is like, I have an American father and brothers in South Korea and Japan, so I can get military support. Hahahahahahahaha The U.S., South Korea and Japan will just offer sanctions,” @It’s right to like CN people wrote.
@Enthusiastic old citizen HK added: “I hope that the biggest surprise when I wake up tomorrow morning is the return of Taiwan [to the motherland].”
@Qi Bai Xiang North quipped that Taiwanese people will be learning China’s national anthem overnight, while @Liuyiming wrote: “We’re only going to show you this once, so take note, little Taiwan,” and @_alarm number 9527 said the invasion of Ukraine was “a blueprint for taking back Taiwan by force.”
“Little Taiwan is done for,” @Clover 555 concluded.
China’s state-controlled media has been ordered to use only news reports approved by the CCP’s central propaganda department, while social media platforms have been told to moderate comments to ensure that no anti-Russian content is posted.
“They can only use copy from the People’s Daily, Xinhua news agency or CCTV’s news broadcast,” former journalist Zhang Jiayi told RFA.
“Everyone, including celebrity accounts, social media pundits, scholars and the media have to follow official guidelines when expressing their opinions,” he said. “This will influence the judgement formed by the general public.”
“Russia is in the wrong because it has violated humanitarian principles, but the [Chinese government] wants to use this to show the Chinese people that they can do the same in Taiwan; that they can treat Taiwan the same way,” Zhang said.
‘Just a bargaining chip’
Faced with a chorus of commentary, the American Institute in Taiwan issued a statement seeking to reassure people that Washington’s commitment to supporting Taiwan remained unchanged.
Ye Yaoyuan, head of the Department of International Studies and Contemporary Linguistics at St. Thomas University in the United States, pointed out that China is playing a “two-handed” game, and is unlikely to seek to influence any actual restraint on the part of Russia.
“This conflict isn’t … something that China can act as mediator in,” Ye told RFA. “It’s just a bargaining chip [Beijing] can use to bring to the negotiating table with the U.S.”
Another senior media figure told RFA that the majority of people in China believe that the current conflict is the fault of the E.U. and the U.S.
“Official public statements … all say they want a peaceful solution, but the rhetoric will subtly change, to imply that Russia had its hand forced by Western countries,” the person said.
Chinese officials have been quick to fuel nationalistic sentiment in China, calling on Chinese people in Ukraine to identify themselves with bumper stickers on their cars, or with the Chinese national flag.
But an official who answered the phone at the Chinese embassy in Kyiv said no arrangements are currently in place for Chinese nationals who may need help.
“What danger?” the official said. “There aren’t any arrangements at the moment, and the embassy doesn’t have many rooms for Chinese citizens to stay in, not right now.”
An official who answered the consular assistance helpline number at the Chinese consulate in Odessa declined to comment when contacted by RFA on Thursday.
“I’m out right now, can’t talk on the phone,” the official said, before hanging up.
Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Qiao Long, Xiaoshan Huang, Chingman and Hwang Chun-mei.
Dolkun Isa, President of the World Uyghur Congress, was labelled a “terrorist” by the Chinese Embassy in Ireland on Monday. Photo: REUTERS/Denis Balibouse.
Eoghan Moloney in the Irish Independent of 22 February 2022 describes another case of undue pressure by the Chinese authorities on a nation that differs from their view on human rights. For other such behaviour, see my earlier post;
Ireland has been urged to “respect China’s sovereignty” and to “stop interfering in China’s internal affairs” after an Uyghur leader attended a meeting in the Department of Foreign Affairs on Monday.
Dolkun Isa, President of the World Uyghur Congress (WUC), urged Ireland to “take action on Uyghur genocide” when he met with UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Defenders Mary Lawlor and with officials from the Department of Foreign Affairs.
In response, the Chinese Embassy in Dublin said they “strongly condemn the anti-China separatist activities of the so-called ‘World Uyghur Congress’ in Ireland, and firmly oppose Irish government officials’ meeting with Dolkun Isa”.
The Embassy also accused “a few” Irish politicians of spreading “lies on Xinjiang and support for terrorist and separatist activities” and jumping “on the bandwagon of dirty political farce against China”.
The Chinese Embassy labelled the WUC as an “extremist organisation” and said its leader Dolkun Isa is a “terrorist” who is suspected of “organising and committing a series of violent terrorist activities and serious crimes in China”.
“The issues concerning Xinjiang are not about human rights, nationality or religion, but about fighting terrorism, separatism and religious extremism. The so-called “genocide”, “cultural extermination” or “forced labour” in Xinjiang, which are based on flat lies and disinformation, are political manipulations with hidden motives,” a statement from the Chinese Embassy said.
“We urge the Irish side to respect China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, and stop interfering in China’s internal affairs under the guise of “human rights”. For those Irish politicians who have jumped on the bandwagon of dirty political farce against China, we urge them to stop parroting disinformation,” the statement continued.
3Mins Read Shanghai’s Marvelous Foods has announced its Yeyo brand is now available in Aldi stores throughout China. The coconut yoghurt has been stocked both physically and for online distribution. The move comes as part of Aldi China’s new ‘healthy eating challenge’ designed to coincide with the Olympics’ popularity. The campaign is social media-based and looks to […]
JUST before the start of the Winter Olympics in Beijing, Presidents Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping issued a joint statement on international relations and on co-operation between China and Russia. It is a document of about 10 pages that comes at a time of great tensions with Nato over Ukraine and of a diplomatic boycott of the Winter Games. The text can be read as a plea for a new world order in which the US and its allies are no longer in charge, but in which the aim is to create a multipolar world, with respect for the sovereignty of countries.
Internet censors in China have ordered news outlets and social media accounts to avoid posting anything critical of Russia or favorable to NATO, after Russia began moving troops across the border into Ukraine, prompting a flurry of international sanctions against the country’s leaders.
“With immediate effect, regarding all Weibo posts about Ukraine: Horizon News to post first [on this topic], to be reposted by other major accounts,” a directive from the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s central propaganda department posted to Weibo ordered.
“No pro-Western posts, no posts critical of Russia. All initial copy to be reviewed by us [the CCP propaganda department] prior to posting,” the order, quoted by a video account linked to the Beijing News, said.
“Comments must be selectively moderated, and only appropriate comments must be published,” the order said. “Anyone publishing content will be deemed responsible for it, and genuine care must be taken. Each post much be watched for at least two days, and great care must be taken when handing over [to the incoming shift].”
The order, which was published by the China Digital Times, which curates and publishes similar directives under its “Ministry of Truth” column, said all topics should be confined to stories already published by Xinhua, the People’s Daily and CCTV.
Former Beijing News founding editor Cheng Yizhong confirmed the order was genuine.
“This is a multimedia account managed by the Beijing News … and it doesn’t just apply to them, but to other media as well,” Cheng said. “It’s always the case during a major international conflict that only opinions from Xinhua, CCTV and the People’s Daily may be published.”
“It’s one size fits all,” Cheng said.
Calls to the Beijing News rang unanswered during office hours onWednesday, with a request for an interview to a senior editor going unanswered at the time of writing. An employee who answered the phone at the central propaganda department said they couldn’t answer questions over the phone.
A senior Chinese journalist who requested anonymity said the directive is necessary because Chinese nationalists hold a number of grievances against Russia, including the claim that the country occupies “huge swathes” of Chinese territory.
Russian military trucks and buses are seen on the side of a road in Russia’s southern Rostov region, which borders the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, Feb. 23, 2022. Credit: AFP
Swift deletion of criticism
He said the propaganda directive was likely posted in error.
“Anti-Russian comments won’t get through on social media … even the comments will be cleaned up,” the journalist said. “The attitude of intellectuals hasn’t changed, but any criticism of Russia gets deleted from Weibo.”
He said Chinese investors generally avoid investing in Russia.
“Investors aren’t bullish about Russia at all, and they have all the information; they watch the markets,” he said. “You can make a lot of money by betting against Russia on investment markets; they think life there will get very miserable under sanctions, and this could even bring Putin down.”
Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying onWednesdayaccused the U.S. of “adding fuel to the fire” by sending weapons to Ukraine.
“Lately the US has been sending weapons to Ukraine, heightening tensions, creating panic and even hyping up the possibility of warfare,” Hua told a regular news briefing in Beijing, referring to the U.S. as the “culprit.”
“If someone keeps pouring oil on the flames while accusing others of not doing their best to put out the fire, such kind of behavior is clearly irresponsible and immoral,” Hua said.
Hua’s colleague Wang Wenbin said on Feb. 22 that “the legitimate security concerns of any country should be respected,” but called for dialogue and negotiation.
Foreign minister Wang Yi is known to be concerned about any eastward expansion of NATO, according to current affair commentator Guo Chonglun, but China has generally not been openly supportive of Russian incursions into Ukraine, nor its 2014 occupation of Crimea.
“China is facing a dilemma on this right now, because Putin has torn up the Minsk agreement, and forcibly separated [Moscow-backed Donetsk and Luhansk, or Donbas, from Ukraine],” Guo told RFA. “Yet China has yet to recognize Crimea as being part of Russia.”
Taiwan worries
Guo said “China is worried that in future, the U.S. might do the same to Taiwan,” in reference to the democratic island that has never been ruled by the CCP, nor formed part of the People’s Republic of China.
“Everyone is watching to see how China chooses its words … no country, not even an ally as close as Russia, should just destroy other people’s territorial integrity; that’s the crux of the matter,” Guo said.
Taiwan defense expert Shen Ming Shih agreed that Russia’s actions have a close bearing on Taiwan.
“If Russia is allowed to unilaterally recognize the independence of those two territories, then the U.S. could also recognize Taiwan as an independent, sovereign nation at some point in the future, should the CCP want to invade,” Shen told RFA.
“This is not a good thing for the CCP … currently, the U.S. neither recognizes Taiwan as an independent country, nor opposes its independence.”
While China and Russia are currently close allies, China will also be unwilling to set itself against the E.U. and NATO, as well as the U.S., Shen said.
Ting-hui Lin, deputy secretary-general of the Taiwan International Law Society, said Putin is unlikely to be deterred, given the massive public approval ratings his 2014 invasion of Crimea garnered.
“Putin sees his task as restoring the former glory of the old, imperialist Russia,” Lin said. “He doesn’t want to invade Eastern Europe or the rest of Europe, or the U.S., or China; he wants to … shore up the stability of his regime at home.”
Lin said CCP leader Xi Jinping could use an invasion of Taiwan in a similar manner, and that the Ukraine crisis for Xi could be a test of U.S. resolve when it came to defending the island against a Chinese invasion.
Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Xiaoshan Huang, Chingman and Hsia Hsiao-hwa.
Pending French mediation, Putin-Biden talks, German distancing, Italian fears, Spanish uncertainties and opposition from the former Eastern bloc, as well as the regularly discredited deadlines of the improbable Russian invasions, the war always announced but never started has had its first outcome.
In a decision that displaced the Western chancelleries, Vladimir Putin signed the diplomatic protocol recognizing the independent republics of Lugansk and Donetsk. The recognition was immediately followed by the signing of a cooperation and mutual assistance agreement, which will imply a Russian military presence in defense of the two republics and, at the same time, a clear warning to Kiev and its self-interested supporters.
Thus ends the dirty war, the only one that was really being waged despite the fact that the international media system was hiding it: that is, the Ukrainian shooting practices on the civilian population of Donbass, which for years, have turned 4 million citizens into hostages of Kiev, with inhabitants becoming displaced, schools becoming targets, territory becoming cemetery. Until yesterday, this was the result of the recent offensive of the Ukrainian army in the Donbass, which tells better than a thousand lies what really happens on the border between Russia and Ukraine and who are the ones who really work tirelessly for the war.
Putin’s move opens an unprecedented political, diplomatic and military scenario. Political, because it initiates the Russian political counteroffensive, which has as its fundamental lever the security of its population and its borders. The recognition of the independent republics of the Donbass region now deprives Ukraine of a part of its territory, certainly; but it is a territory that had become independent since 2014, just like Crimea. Nothing strange, in fact: a people that feel Russian by historical, religious, political, linguistic and cultural belonging, has no desire to be incorporated into the model of the Third Reich dressed as McDonalds that governs Kiev thanks to a coup d’état.
Militarily and diplomatically it represents a double success for Moscow: it creates a buffer zone between Russia and Ukraine and further covers the border with Kiev and openly challenges Ukraine and the United States to continue the war against independent Donbass. It sets aside Ukrainian security as the only issue to be addressed in the geopolitical issue and puts the issue of Russian security back at the center of a possible political-diplomatic negotiation with the Western masters of Ukraine. Moreover, it leaves the future steps to be taken to diplomatic negotiations, suggesting that a possible Ukrainian military response against the Donbass could lead to a counter-offensive on a local scale that would also involve the ports of Mariupol and Odessa, strategic for Kiev.
Reactions
NATO’s response seems for the moment much more prudent than the threats made until yesterday. Politically, one would have to be very brazen not to accept the recognition of the two independent republics, given that in 1992 the entire West, under pressure from Germany, Austria, the Vatican and the United States, immediately recognized the Croatian and Bosnian secession from Yugoslavia and armed, financed and supported them politically and militarily against Serbia. It even went so far as to ethically and legally abhor the recognition of secession on ethnic grounds. It did the same thing years later with Kosovo, which seceded from Albania. It is not clear why in this case the principle of legitimate secession should not apply.
On the military level, as Ukraine is not (yet) a NATO country, the Russian counter-offensive does not allow invoking Article 5 of the Atlantic Pact. The EU, as usual, has no policy and is waiting to hear from the United States about what to do. With the exception of Borrell, (a modest mixture of Francoism and narcissism that the EU has chosen to represent itself internationally, thus gaining more scorn than it already deserved) the European comments that matter are geared to take advantage of Putin’s move, hoping that it will end with the acceptance of the state of affairs and the imposition of sanctions aimed only at the two independent republics. These sanctions have no real effect and only serve to save the already worn-out face of a NATO unable to unite even on the feasibility of Kiev’s accession to the Alliance, let alone respond to Moscow.
The idea that, above all, France, Germany and Italy are cultivating, in fact – and which is giving Washington serious headaches – is that beyond the generic declarations of unity, the most important part of the EU wants to restart a global negotiation between the West and Russia. A negotiation partly different from the one imagined until yesterday, because Putin’s movement has already set a clear line in the negotiations: we are able to operate in any scenario, be it peace or war; if the thought of threatening Moscow by targeting it with missile batteries becomes reality, it will be guaranteed by all means that they cannot be deployed.
What is needed, therefore, is a table that puts regional security policies back on the agenda, in the knowledge that a refusal to consider Russia’s security needs will only cause Moscow to proceed autonomously to defend them. This would put on the ground the issues that Europe wants to avoid at all costs; i.e., military. Putin, moreover, has already demonstrated throughout his presidential career, from Chechnya to Donbass to Georgia and Belarus, Kazakhstan and above all Syria, that he is not willing to be surrounded by NATO, nor to be threatened militarily. That in matters of national security it does not accept threats and does not hesitate to act quickly and effectively to defend Russian national interests.
The Russian political counteroffensive belies the heavy succession of shameful forecasts, completed with dates for imaginary Russian invasions, which have created a new and deep crack in the credibility of the United States and its British butlers who, after the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the Taliban responsible for the Twin Towers and the Syrian chemical weapons, are rightly entering the circle of ridicule.
Therefore, economic and financial sanctions to curb Russia’s growth is an indispensable objective. Laying further siege to Russia could provoke a reaction from Russia, leading to new international sanctions against Moscow. The result would be fantastic for the United States: it would weaken the trade relationship between Russia and Europe and, above all, block the implementation of the North Stream 2 gas pipeline.
Sanctions: who is threatening whom?
It is said that the Western sanctions that would follow an eventual “invasion” would be extremely harsh for Russia (which already suffers unfairly). There is no doubt that, in the short term, they would disrupt foreign investment and force Moscow first to retaliate and then to differentiate its import and export market. But while sanctions would be a big deal for the U.S., they would also be very damaging for the EU: for example, blocking the pipeline from coming on line would mean the EU giving up gas supplies at a limited price.
The EU imports about 40% of its gas needs from Russia), so a blockage of supplies would not so much be a threat to Moscow as to Brussels, because it would make the enforcement of Western sanctions against the Kremlin self-punishing. Moscow has already authorized the construction of a new pipeline through Mongolia that will carry Russian gas to China, which needs energy to sustain its growth.
For Europe, however, the scenario would be complicated. In the event of a further reduction in available gas, the price would rise to unacceptable levels for EU countries, which would be forced to proceed randomly and not with a common policy, given the different options. It is no coincidence that Draghi has already indicated that Italy will not adhere to sanctions affecting the energy sector. Even Germany, which has Russian gas as its main source of energy supply, would be forced to resort to coal, which would blow up all environmental constraints and would not provide a short-term solution to the problem.
Also on the financial level, although Moscow would find it difficult, structural problems would arise for Europe, given the exposure of several countries to Moscow (the EU’s fifth largest trading partner), amounting to 56 billion euros, which would obviously no longer be repayable. These debts would no longer be recoverable, and the repercussions for banks would be extremely serious. In return, since the U.S. exposure is minimal, the U.S. would have no problem in the short to medium term in disrupting financial flows with Russia.
In addition, there is the threat of Moscow withdrawing from the SWIFT financial transmission system (which links 11,000 banks in 200 countries). The decision would hurt Moscow, of course, but not to the point of paralyzing it, as it was prepared since 2014 for this scenario. Similarly, the inclusion of Russian banks on the “blacklist” would not have particularly serious effects for Moscow either.
Excluding Moscow from SWIFT would be the most classic boomerang, as it would provoke a series of chain reactions from countries hostile to the US that would risk turning the international economy into a clash of blocks. The first and most important consequence would be the acceleration of the “independent financial infrastructure” project decided by Moscow and Beijing and, given the weight and emergence of economies not aligned with Washington and Brussels, now intercontinental leaders of debt and certainly not of expansionary policies, the risk of a systemic implosion in the short term seems well founded.
The inescapable question is: is the West really ready for a reset that will also punish its interests harshly? To give even more strength and strategic perspective to the alliance between Beijing and Moscow? And all this for Ukraine and its Nazi government?
The question of what makes Indonesian art Indonesian is by no means a new one. When debates around national identity arose in the wake of the Indonesian National Revolution, the task of defining “ke-Indonesia-an” (“Indonesianness”) became inseparable from developments in the realm of arts and culture.
Perhaps the most notable outcome of such contentions was the writing of an art history that memorialised several male Indonesian painters as the father figures of modern Indonesian art. These included the European-educated painter Raden Saleh (1911-1990) and the self-taught painter Sindudarsono Sudjojono (1913-1986)—two artists who frequently vie for the title of Indonesia’s first modern painter in accounts of visual modernity in Indonesia.
The modern art canon which emerged thus was one based upon a rivalry between the colonial and anti-colonial; the foreign and the indigenous; the Dutch/Dutch-influenced male painter and the Indonesian male painter. Yet, as scholars now point out, such narratives leave little room for ethnic and/or gendered difference. How and where might, say, the experience of a Chinese-Indonesian woman artist be located in Indonesian art history?
In spite of contestations over the nationality status of Chinese-Indonesians, the Chinese ethnic minority has occupied crucial positions in Indonesia’s economic and cultural development. More recent works have sought to re-evaluate the contributions of the Chinese minority to Indonesian society, including their role in shaping ideas of what it meant—and looked like—to be a modern Indonesian, through studio and amateur photography, as well as the visually diverse works of art they produced in the early-to-mid twentieth century. These studies go a long way to dispelling the myth of Indonesia as a homogenous national entity, encouraging us to look for alternative perspectives and instances of cross-cultural exchange that trespass the boundaries of the nation-state. In their attempts to do so, however, they often still overlook or omit the gender factor, inadvertently upholding the masculinist standards that skew our understanding of modern Indonesian art. Thus, the question remains: where are the Chinese-Indonesian women?
Retracing and recovering their lost stories can be a difficult process. Very few women of Chinese descent are recorded in historical accounts of Indonesian modern art or in the collections and archives of Indonesian cultural institutions. Despite such obstacles, the importance of bringing to attention the forgotten stories and transnational experiences of women who held fluid cultural identities, however fragmentary, should not be overlooked. Not only are transnational women’s histories human histories after all, but their retelling also unveils the intersecting structures of patriarchy and nationalism that have for so long limited historical perspectives.
The difficulty of the process, and the elusiveness of women’s stories, means that it can feel remarkably fortuitous to come across their names in scholarship. My first encounter emerged from conversations with an academic mentor, who directed me toward the recently translated writings of a Chinese-Indonesian art critic, Oei Sian Yok (1926-2002). Between 1956 to 1961, Oei wrote hundreds of articles reviewing both international and Indonesian exhibitions for the Jakarta-based Star Weekly magazine, under the pseudonym Pembantu Seni Lukis Kita (Our Art Servant). At the time of publishing, the Chinese community in Indonesia faced discriminatory legislation that sought to address their ambiguous nationality status. Notably, the signing of the Sino-Indonesian Dual Nationality Treaty between China and Indonesia in 1955 forced Chinese Indonesians to choose to remain as citizens of just one country. In following years, the Chinese minority in Indonesia continued to suffer from repression and violence during the New Order era, which sought to efface all aspects of Chinese culture and language. Such a position of precarity can be discerned in Oei’s articles, which appeared to pave an alternative way of appraising art that overturned the binary antagonism between colonial and anti-colonial viewpoints. Contrary to the incendiary rhetoric of an Indonesia-centric, nationalist historiography of art, Oei wrote:
When we listen to foreigners talking about our own country, sometimes we don’t recognize what they say as something of our own anymore. They often hear or see something that we couldn’t perceive, because we have taken things around us for granted, as being ordinary; foreigners might rediscover things for us because they see with the “other eyes”.
Here in Oei’s writings, in which she acknowledges and affirms the contributions of “foreign eyes” to the Indonesian artistic imaginary, we glimpse a genealogy of transnational thinking in Indonesian art criticism. Implicit in her writings, is the provocation that the very idea of Indonesia as a modern nation has, and may very well continue to be, shaped by those who occupy ambiguous, transnational positions in the country—the internal “other”.
Portrait of Oei Sian Yok, photograph taken in 1953. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Not long after, I chanced upon an inconspicuous album of paintings titled Lukisan Tradisional Tiongkok Karya Chiang Yu Tie (The Traditional Chinese Paintings of the Artist Chiang Yu Tie) in the digital recesses of the University of Sydney’s library catalogue. Piecing together scattered fragments of information, gleaned from Indonesian language blog posts, and just one journal article, I came to know the Chinese Indonesian painter Chiang Yu Tie (1916-2000).
Born into a wealthy and politically conservative family in Zhejiang Province, China, Chiang went on to study European painting at the Xinxi State Academy of Painting in Chongqing despite her family’s disapproval, graduating in 1945. After falling ill three years later, Chiang migrated to Indonesia in 1948, where she eventually settled in Bandung as an art teacher and founded her own painting studio called RumahRumput.
Portrait of Chiang Yu Tie, photograph taken in 1980. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Like many of her contemporaries, Chiang’s paintings often feature Balinese landscapes and dancing Balinese women. The popularity of Bali as a subject matter amongst Chinese émigré artists in Southeast Asia speaks to their unique frame of mind, which encompassed a fascination for the exotic new world they now found themselves in, and a desire to express as authentically as possible this local reality, in an artistic language familiar to them. Oei attests to this endeavour to attain a true and faithful image of Bali, without its “make-up” (tanpa make-up):
In fact, there are two versions of Bali, one being the Bali that is known by travellers, with all its make-up, designed to show off to tourists…Then there is also a real and genuine Bali, which is often unknown to visitors, because it is difficult to find, and the road is narrow…
However authentic, this dualistic vision of Bali, distilled through the othering, touristic gaze of Chinese artists, would occupy an influential position in burgeoning national, and international, imaginaries of Bali, and more broadly, Indonesia.
Chiang Yu Tie, Balinese Girl, 1979, ink on paper, dimensions unknown. Private collection. Reproduced with permission from Teng Mu Yen, 2022.
In applying a feminist reading of Chiang’s works, however, we are invited to consider how the construction of a national imagination of Indonesia is also inflected by gendered difference. Are there, perhaps, alternative ways of cultivating a sense of Indonesian cultural identity that not only permits ethnic diversity, but also shifts away from the troubled and deeply gendered narratives of a singular artistic genius, or an exclusive chronology of “stylistically original”, representative works from (male) artists?
As we revisit Chiang’s works, we are offered an alternative point of view that defies rigid categories of colonial and anti-colonial time as well as patriarchal valuations of “good” art and “Indonesian” art in terms of originality, genius, and rivalry. In a painting titled, Kuda Lari (Galloping Horse), Chiang’s inscription quite literally poses a question to its viewers, reflecting on the constructed notion of artistic originality:
Day after day, two years have already passed…The new meets old. The old “horse” is elevated by a “mountain”. An artist is just a creator. Who knows, what do you think?
Chiang is likely to be referring to the idea of developing an individual art style through a discerning approach to imitation, which dates to Qing Dynasty China. Certainly, her chosen subject—a galloping horse—is one which bears a long lineage in Chinese art. In this sense, her work testifies to the presence of a Chinese line of thought in the history of Indonesian art. Viewed in hindsight, with a heightened mindfulness toward the exclusionary nature of canonical history, her paintings provide respite from totalising, gendered narratives of nationhood and post-colonial identity, offering an expanded definition of “the artist”, and who could lay claim to that title.
Chiang Yu Tie, Galloping Horse, 1970, ink on paper, dimensions unknown. Private collection. Reproduced with permission from Teng Mu Yen, 2022.
Many of her retellings of wayang stories also offer a space in which a feminine sensibility may reside. In a work painted in 1979, titled Srikandi dalam sayembara panahan (Srikandi in an archery competition), Chiang depicts Srikandi, a character from Javanese wayang born as a male but later transformed into a female (although the gender transition is reversed in the Hindu epic Mahabharata), who has been retrospectively turned into an icon of feminism and women’s emancipation in Indonesia. An inscription in the upper left-hand side details the story of the heroine in first-person narration:
I used to be a student of archery. Now that I am skilled, let’s compete. If I should lose, I will become your concubine.
An English translation provided in the exhibition catalogue adds a final line: “…but if I were victorious, I would refuse to give [my] hand to thee.”
Chiang Yu Tie, Srikandi dalam sayembara panahan, 1979, ink on paper, dimensions unknown. Private collection. Reproduced with permission from Teng Mu Yen, 2022
Accompanied by defiant first-person inscriptions that seem to divulge the artist’s personal voice, Chiang’s selective renderings of wayang characters leave us to wonder about the hidden workings of women’s agency in the transmission of stories and images across time and space, outside of the established canon of Indonesian art history. This resistance against masculinised, nationalistic grand narratives is, in part, also generated as we connect with such works in the present-day. It is between Oei and Chiang’s practice in the twentieth century, and our patient, persistent attempts to revisit their works with an open-mindedness and receptivity, that we find capacity to dismantle those totalising narratives that so rigidly police our ideas of who can and should be a modern Indonesian artist, and what modern Indonesian art should look like.
Undoubtedly, more research is required to recover such stories and figures lost to canonical history—the translation of Oei’s work marks only a preliminary foray into the subject matter. Even so, the ripples of their impact can be gleaned today: in 2012, over a decade after her passing, 51 paintings by students, many women, taught by Chiang and her daughter, Teng Mu Yin, were exhibited by the Ikatan Wanita Pelukis Indonesia (Association of Indonesian Women Painters) in Bandung.
As the works of Chinese-Indonesian women artists and art critics are brought to light, they invite us to rethink the narratives and structure that have long been held up as part of an authoritative history. By making room for transnational and gendered experiences in the reading and writing of history, we may begin to uncover a far richer and multifaceted picture of Indonesian art and identity.
***
The author is grateful for support provided by the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre through its Residency scheme.
UN Security Council members China and Russia have continued to provide Myanmar’s military junta with weapons used to attack civilians a year after a coup deposed the elected government, a U.N. rights expert said Tuesday.
In a report to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, Tom Andrews called on the UN Security Council to impose a ban on transfers of arms that can be used against civilians in the Southeast Asian country.
“Despite the evidence of the military junta’s atrocity crimes being committed with impunity since launching a coup last year, UN Security Council members Russia and China continue to provide the Myanmar military junta with numerous fighter jets, armored vehicles, and in the case of Russia, the promise of further arms,” Andrews said in a statement.
“During this same period, Serbia has authorized rockets and artillery for export to the Myanmar military,” said the former U.S. Congressman, who serves as UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of Human Rights in Myanmar.
“It should be incontrovertible that weapons used to kill civilians should no longer be transferred to Myanmar. These transfers truly shock the conscience,” Andrews said.
“Stopping the junta’s atrocity crimes begins with blocking their access to weapons. The more the world delays, the more innocent people, including children, will die in Myanmar,” he added.
Noting that the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution last June calling got a halt to arms flows, Andrews called for the convening of an emergency Security Council session to pass a resolution to “at minimum, ban those arms transfers that the Myanmar military are known to use to attack and kill Myanmar civilians.”
The report, titled Enabling Atrocities: UN Member States’ Arms Transfers to the Myanmar Military, said China had transferred fighter jets, while Russia had supplied drones, two types of fighter jets, and two kinds of armored vehicles, Serbia had sold rockets and artillery shells to the Myanmar military.
While those three countries were the only ones found to have sold weapons to the junta since the Feb. 1, 2021 coup, the report said Belarus, Israel, India, Pakistan, South Korea, and Ukraine had also transferred arms to Myanmar in recent years.
Reuters news agency quoted China’s foreign ministry spokesperson, Wang Wenbin, as responding to the report by saying Beijing “has always advocated that all parties and factions should proceed in the long-term interests of the country” and “resolve contradictions through political dialogue.”
The junta has cracked down on its opponents through attacks on peaceful protesters, arrests, and beatings and killings. The military regime has also attacked opposition strongholds with helicopter gunships, fighter jets, and troops that burn villages they accuse of supporting anti-junta militias.
As of Tuesday, nearly 1,570 people had been killed since the coup and almost 12,300 arrested, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, a human rights organization based in Thailand.
Andrews in his report also called on UN members to work together to cut the junta’s revenue flows from oil and gas, timber and gemstones. The U.S. Britain and Canada have imposed trade sanctions on Myanmar junta figures and military-linked companies.
“If the revenues necessary to maintain such a military are reduced, the junta’s capacity to assault and terrorize the people of Myanmar will diminish,” Andrews said.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Paul Eckert.
Few events have been more politicized than the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics. New cold warriors and atrocity propagandists led by the United States did everything in their power to generate popular support for a full boycott of the Games. NED-backed organizations formed a coalition for the cause, the corporate media engaged in a full-scale “China bad” propaganda blitz, and the political establishment got busy crafting several pieces of legislation to respond to the so-called “China threat.” Their efforts failed. To save face, the U.S. implemented a non-consequential “diplomatic boycott” that found support from only a handful of junior partners in the West.
A war of words between Australia and China intensified Tuesday as Canberra accused Beijing of violating international law when a Chinese navy ship allegedly pointed a laser at an Australian surveillance airplane.
The two sides have provided their own versions of the incident that happened last Thursday in the Arafura Sea, within Australia’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ) off the north coast of the country.
Beijing has accused Australian forces of “provocative” behavior, and maintains that its navy acted professionally, although Canberra says the safety of the airplane plane crew was endangered.
In the latest statement released on Tuesday, the Australian Department of Defence said “at the time of the lasing incident, the RAAF (Royal Australian Air Force) P-8 was approximately 7.7 km from the PLA-N (People’s Republic of China Navy) vessel and was flying at an altitude of 457m.”
“The closest the P-8 flew to the PLA-N vessel was approximately 4 km,” the statement said, adding: “This is a standard flight profile for RAAF maritime patrol aircraft for a visual investigation of a surface vessel.”
“The aircraft was acting within international law at all times,” the statement said.
The ministry also released photos of Chinese warships that were present at the time, the guided-missile destroyer Hefei and the amphibious transport dock Jinggang Shan but did not say which ship the laser beams came from.
“This is the closest an attempt at military intimidation by China has gotten to our shores,” wrote John Blaxland, professor at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University, on The Conversation website.
“With the stakes rising, and an [federal] election looming, there is a need for issues like this to be handled firmly, but delicately,” he warned. National elections in Australia are due by May.
Three days earlier, in a media release, the Australian defense ministry condemned “unprofessional and unsafe military conduct” of the Chinese navy ship and said that these actions “could have endangered the safety and lives of the Australia defence force’s personnel.”
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison followed up by demanding China to explain the Chinese ship’s “dangerous” and “reckless” act.
In an interview on Monday, Morrison said: “It was dangerous, and at worst, it was intimidating and bullying.”
“So we’re expecting answers,” the prime minister said.
A file photo showing a Royal Australian Air Force P-8A Poseidon surveillance plane flying over the Indian Ocean during an exercise with the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson, Dec. 14, 2021. Credit: U.S. Navy
Provocative actions
Chinese officials quickly dismissed Australia’s accusations.
On Monday, a spokesman of the Chinese Ministry of National Defense accused the Australian surveillance aircraft of committing “malicious and provocative actions” by flying close to the PLA Navy vessel and planting sonar buoys in the water around it.
Sonar buoys, or sonobuoys, are small buoys that are often released from aircraft and used to collect acoustic data in the water.
Senior Col. Tan Kefei said Chinese ships “always maintained safe, standard and professional operations.”
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin meanwhile claimed that “the information released by the Australian side is untrue”.
Wang urged Australian authorities to “stop maliciously disseminating China-related disinformation,” to which the Australian defense ministry replied: “Australia does not engage in the spread of misinformation or disinformation.”
The ministry also said that the “use of sonobuoys for maritime surveillance is common practice,” however, “no sonobuoys were used prior to the PLA-N vessel directing its laser at the P-8A aircraft.”
Blaxland from the Australian National University said that the Chinese action seemed to be an escalation in assertive and adversarial behavior of the PLA Navy because the incident happened in uncontested waters within Australia’s EEZ.
“China may be seeking to send a message to Canberra that its naval patrols in the South China Sea are not welcome,” he said.
Not only the Australian navy, but navies from the U.S., U.K. and some other countries have been conducting so-called Freedom of Navigation Operations (FONOPS) in the seas in the Indo-Pacific region.
Laser pointing
Analysts say this is not the first time China has been accused of firing laser beams at foreign aircraft.
In February 2020, a Chinese military warship reportedly fired a laser at a U.S. Navy P-8 surveillance aircraft while it was flying over the Pacific Ocean. Chinese government denied the accusation, saying the P-8 was flying too low near its warships despite warnings.
In 2019, Australian navy helicopter pilots taking part in the Indo-Pacific Endeavour 2019 military exercise in the South China Sea said they were hit with laser beams from fishing boats suspected of being part of China’s maritime militia.
Industrial grade lasers are harmful and can cause blindness if shone into a person’s eyes.
Pointing a laser at someone can also have a psychological impact, as laser targeting often happens right before a firing of live munitions.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by RFA Staff.
When former and current ASIO chiefs feel impelled to contradict Peter Dutton’s war mongering, you know the wannabe Australian general has overstepped the mark. Pip Hinman argues that a khaki election campaign could swing it for the Coalition.
China has long been the home of a dynamic and multi-varied culture. Ancient Han Chinese built up an agrarian civilization centered on the Yellow River Basin and called their country the “Middle Kingdom,” with varying relations of conflict and cooperation with the nomadic and pastoral cultures surrounding them. Ancient Chinese pioneered a tolerant, inclusive, multi-faith, culturally diverse society. Muslim and Jewish communities have existed there for over one thousand years, for example. People of any ethnicity were allowed to serve as government officials by passing exams, under a meritocratic civil service exam system that continued for over a millennium, up until the beginning of the 20th century.
Their tradition of tolerance and diversity extends to the current era. 55 distinct, minority ethnicities are officially recognized, and benefit from affirmative action-like programs in education and employment. Until recently, they were exempt from the one-child policy. There are well over 100 languages spoken. American tourists to China discover that the foods to sample go far beyond the Peking, Sichuan, and Cantonese cuisine that they are familiar with. The rich variety of clothing and food encountered by a tourist walking down the street in Beijing easily rivals that of New York.
Sadly, however, the long-standing and well-documented history of racism against the Chinese appears to have greatly intensified recently, both in terms of the actions of the last three U.S. presidents (Obama, Trump, and Biden) as well as in terms of the opinions and behavior of the public in Western countries. This latter type of racism is undoubtedly more or less the result of overt brainwashing. There is both fear and loathing of China and Chinese people, and of other East Asian peoples. Anti-Asian hate crimes, hate speech, etc. inside the U.S. are at epidemic levels. The economic success of the People’s Republic of China and the Obama administration’s “Pivot to Asia” campaign have only worsened our ubiquitous Sinophobia, which goes back to the late 19th-century and early 20th-century Yellow Peril propaganda.
With that in mind, it might be instructive for Americans to consider how Chinese might view us and to review a rough chronological account of some of the major events in our history with the peoples of China.
Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) states, “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person,” and Article 21 begins, “Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.” Let’s consider in what ways the people of our country and our government have repeatedly violated in China the human-rights principles that are behind those two articles.
1894-95, the First Sino-Japanese War. This was not the first violation, but it is a convenient place to start. Through this act of violence, the Empire of Japan acquired Taiwan and the Liaodong Peninsula. U.S. Secretary of State John W. Foster advised the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912) and helped to draft the Treaty of Shimonoseki after the war, putting the U.S. stamp of approval on this thievery. In this way, the U.S. helped the Empire of Japan establish itself right in the heart of China. The First Sino-Japanese War, like all wars, was a violation of the right to life. Below I attach the label “Article 3” to such violations, borrowing this concept from the UDHR as a useful category. It was also a violation of the right of people to participate in government, which is Article 21 of the UDHR. In retrospect, one can say that the principles behind Article 3 and Article 21 were violated many times—by the Empire of Japan, and by the U.S. and other Western powers.
1905. Under the Taft–Katsura Agreement we gave Korea to the Empire of Japan in exchange for the Philippines. This paved the way for the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05) that got the Empire of Japan its “sphere of influence” over Korea and eventually facilitated their annexation of the country in 1910. Surely many Chinese remembered that a ruler of this country had twice aimed to conquer China by invading Korea (during the years 1592–98).
1919. Treaty of Versailles. The Treaty violated Chinese people’s right to “take part in the government” of their country, first and foremost the right of the people of the Shandong Peninsula. (Article 21). The Treaty of Versailles was a huge betrayal for Chinese since China had backed up the Allied Triple Entente (Russia, France, and the UK plus Ireland) in World War I (1914-18). What did they get for all their sacrifices, which included 140,000 manual laborers sent to help the British and French on the Western Front? The Western powers handed the Shandong Peninsula to the Empire of Japan. (Shandong had been a colony of Germany before that). This sparked the May Fourth Movement, a sociopolitical movement that laid the groundwork for Chinese nationalism. “China’s failure to secure any gains at Versailles prompted the May 4th Movement and can be seen as a key juncture in the long and winding road from empire to nation-state,” writes Alex Calvo and Bao Qiaoni. The injustice of the Treaty of Versailles is just one example of how Chinese nationalism is not wholly the fault of the peoples of China, and how the successors of the Western powers then (who were in this case the U.S., the British Empire, France, and Italy) and Japan must take responsibility for it.
1937-72. During the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45), the Chinese Communist Revolution (1945-49, AKA, the War of Liberation), and after 1949, Washington backed up the Guomindang (i.e., the “Chinese Nationalist Party,” aka, Kuomintang or KMT). The U.S. was supposed to be fighting the Empire of Japan, not getting involved in China’s civil war. The Guomindang were not “freely chosen representatives” who were chosen by the people of China; they were one political party competing for dominance. China was up against the Empire of Japan, which, by that time, was a fully modernized military machine, and China needed Washington’s help, but we only helped one side, the Guomindang. The Guomindang leaders in turn, most prominently Chiang Kai-shek, helped themselves. (Article 21).
They saved up much or most of the financial resources and weapons they got from the U.S. for the big battle that they knew would come as soon as the Empire was defeated. They spent some of their resources fighting against the people of their own country. At least as early as 1937, the U.S. was financially supporting Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek). He and his Guomindang (Chinese Nationalist Party) wasted a lot of energy fighting against his own people rather than against the Empire of Japan.
China held back the Empire of Japan on their own from 1937 to 1941, which was before the Allies (with the exception of the Soviet Union) declared war on the Empire. But the peoples of China never received any thanks for that valiant struggle from the U.S. Between 25 million and 35 million people in China perished as a result of the War. Once the Chinese overcame the Empire of Japan, with U.S. help, in 1945, the struggle between the two parties exploded into a full-blown civil war as everyone expected. The Chinese Communist Party battled the Guomindang, and despite the Guomindang receiving generous support—the U.S. provided Jiang with almost $3 billion in aid and large supplies of arms throughout WWII—the Communists overcame the Guomindang in 1949.
U.S. histories always say that hostilities between the Guomindang and the Communists were put on hold during the War (1937-45), but this is not true. In fact, this support for Jiang Jieshi and his Guomindang was one of the reasons why Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. (See Paul L. Atwood, War and Empire: The American Way of Life [Pluto, 2010], Chapter 9). In other words, our involvement did not start on “December 7th, 1941,” the day that Roosevelt said would “live in infamy.” We were already involved, giving the Guomindang extra ammunition against the Empire of Japan, and we were, objectively speaking, helping them fight against the Communist Party of China. Jiang Jieshi was always presented to Americans as the hero, when in the end, it was mainly the Communists who held back the Empire of Japan until the U.S. joined the war in 1941. Jiang’s party, the Guomindang, had been known as slaughterers of communists since at least the Shanghai Massacre of 1927 and the subsequent White Terror years, so the U.S. government knew exactly with whom they were partnering all during these years 1937-72.
Washington was so satisfied with the work of Jiang Jieshi, after he had bided his time and wasted their money during the War, that they continued to prop up his government in Taiwan for decades afterwards (again violating the rights of Chinese people expressed in Article 21). “Chiang’s [Jiang Jieshi’s] nationalist army hoarded US aid monies, arms and material to such a degree that President Truman wrote that ‘the Chiangs, the Kungs and the Soongs (were) all thieves ‘having stolen some $750 million dollars of US funds’.” But the river of U.S. cash kept flowing to Taiwan.
1945-present. The U.S. has violated the Chinese right to “security of person” by threatening nuclear war against China for the last several decades (not to mention the threat to the rest of the world through the possibility of “nuclear winter.” This is a violation of Article 3 since we have a right to security of person, i.e., the right to not be threatened with violence). There were U.S. nukes on the Korean Peninsula from 1958 to 1991, threatening China and other states. The U.S. is the state that introduced the problem of “The Bomb” to the world, and we are the only country who has actually dropped one on a city. Actually twice. We are, therefore, a real, credible threat to people around the world.
1945-78. During this period the U.S. blocked reconciliation between Tokyo and Beijing. This international tension resulted in less security for Chinese. (Article 3). On 12 August 1978 the two countries concluded a formal Treaty of Peace and Friendship. Now the People’s Republic of China is economically strong, but if they had been at peace during the years 1945-78 with the neighbor that had attacked them twice (during the First and Second Sino-Japanese Wars), they would have enjoyed much more security.
1949-53. The U.S. prosecuted the Korean War, leading to the death of 900,000 Chinese soldiers and 1.5 million Chinese civilians. (See Bruce Cumings, The Korean War, 2010, Chapter 1. This was a violation of Article 3).
1954-55, the First Taiwan Strait Crisis. Washington aided the Guomindang against the Communists. Hundreds of Chinese were killed (Articles 3 and 21).
1958, the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis. Washington again aided the Guomindang again, and this battle resulted again in the deaths of hundreds of Chinese (Articles 3 and 21). Besides threatening the lives of Chinese, this “crisis” was also a nuclear crisis, according to Daniel Ellsberg. It almost resulted in a nuclear war with China.
1989, Western reporting on the Tiananmen Square protests. It is no coincidence that many tens of thousands of students and workers marched on Tiananmen Square the day before the funeral of Hu Yaobang (1915-89). Having been born into a poor peasant family, he was largely self-schooled. In the 1980s he had attempted to reform government in ways that were popular with workers and students, and immediately after his death they demanded that the government reassess his legacy. The protests began within an hour after he died on 15 April 1989. Western media have painted this as a student movement demanding Western-style, liberal, capitalist democracy, when actually the working class of China were deeply involved. “In Beijing, after the declaration of martial law, workers took to the streets, built barricades, and fraternized with advancing soldiers, effectively stopping them from reaching the city center. While students and intellectuals who spoke English did talk in abstract terms about ‘democracy,’ workers were primarily concerned with economic problems that were being exacerbated by market reforms introduced by the government, which they saw as the result of an undemocratic bureaucracy.” (See Working Class History: Everyday Acts of Resistance and Rebellion [PM Press, 2020], p. 82-83). The false history of this movement promoted by Western journalists lent power to capitalism and took it away from democracy (Article 21).
2000. Women who hoped to bring about a 21st century free from war organized what they called a “People’s Tribunal.” According to the Women’s Active Museum in Tokyo, the Tribunal “represented an effort by global civil society to break the cycle of impunity that perpetuates wartime sexual violence.” After that event, U.S. government officials would have known, or easily been able to find out about the crimes of sexual violence that Japanese committed against Chinese women up until 1945 through their system of “comfort women” stations. They could have demanded justice for the victims, which would have brought greater “security of person” to women in China and everywhere. There were already international laws against sex trafficking long before the time of the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal in 1946, so the “comfort women” atrocity could have been prosecuted then. By the year 2000 it was clear that the U.S. had no excuse to not seek justice. The U.S. stand was made clear when Obama coerced South Korea and Japan to make a deal on the issue without involving the voices of the women themselves. They did this for the sake of “American strategic interests.” (Ignoring this history violates the principle of “security of person” in Article 3).
Even Jiang Jieshi could have thoroughly investigated the “comfort women” crimes in China but chose not to do so. (See Chapter 8 of Peipei Chu’s Chinese Comfort Women: Testimonies from Imperial Japan’s Sex Slaves, Oxford UP, 2014). One day, when those crimes are prosecuted, Chinese women, women in Okinawa/Ryukyu and in other islands of Japan (who are threatened constantly by military personnel from U.S. bases), and even women in the U.S. will be able to walk down the street feeling a little more secure. If and when they are violently attacked by a man, that attack will be recognized as a crime for which they can realistically seek justice.
2001-21. Destabilizing Afghanistan through our war there. This reduced security for people in China, which shares a border with Afghanistan (Article 3). Now they have to worry about Afghanistan becoming a “safe haven for militant groups targeting China.”
2010-present. iPhone manufacturing. We all know that U.S. corporations exploit Chinese workers, and many of us have heard that iPhones are made in sweatshops in China. We who have bought iPhones have voted to keep this system going. At “Foxconn City” (the Longhua factory complex) there were “18 reported suicide attempts that year alone and 14 confirmed deaths. Twenty more workers were talked down by Foxconn officials.” At one time, the complex of factories employed 450,000 workers. Some Americans might say, “That’s on the government of China, for their not protecting their workers, for their poor labor laws,” and argue that the problem is not our responsibility, but every time we buy an iPhone, we are communicating to businessmen in China and around the world that we want this exploitation to continue. Every purchase is a vote. One could argue that suicides are a violation of Article 3 and that extreme exploitation of workers and regularly logging 12-hour shifts is not good for democracy and the right to “take part in the government” of one’s country.
2014-present. Washington twisted the arm of South Korea to install THAAD (the U.S.-made “Terminal High Altitude Aerial Defense” missile defense system) on the Korean Peninsula, complete with radar that enables Washington to see deep into China. It had been announced by 2014 and it was deployed in 2017. This is viewed as a threat to the lives of Chinese, as it surely must be, and it accelerates the arms race in East Asia. (Article 3).
2021. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo accused China of carrying out genocide against Muslim Uighurs and other minority groups in the western region of Xinjiang. This has been debunked by The GrayZone in multiple reports and analyses. This big lie could easily lead to the violation of Article 3 as Washington continues to use it to build support for a war against China.
Conclusion
Even this short sketch of U.S. human rights violations above may be sufficient to conclude that our country has been a major violator of the rights of people in China, if not the number-one violator there during the last 127 years, and that we have not been good “neighbors.” (We could imagine the Pacific Rim as one very large “neighborhood”). Therefore, in terms of the moral standing of our country, neither the U.S. government nor American intellectuals are in a position to lecture China or the Chinese on their human rights record.
We who are U.S. civilians are not “in” East Asia, but our government stations many tens of thousands of soldiers and other military personnel on bases surrounding China, most obviously on the many bases of Okinawa (at least 31 bases), Japan (a dozen or so), and South Korea (15 or a few dozen, depending on how you count), not to mention the thousands of sailors on the aircraft carriers, destroyers, submarines, etc., that constantly prowl the seas around China, or the personnel at the highly secretive “Naval Support Facility” of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. The U.S. is a country that has yet to acknowledged for our many crimes. From their perspective, the U.S. is a hostile nation and a constant threat.
Beijing, on the other hand, has sought harmony at every stage in their dealings with Americans (although it is generally much more assertive than our submissive “client state” Japan). Confucianism defines ideals for both the family and for government, and social harmony is one of the main goals of Confucianism. It comes as no surprise, then, that China was the first nuke-have nation to propose and pledge a no-first-use policy, stating that they would not “be the first to use nuclear weapons at any time or under any circumstances.” China and the U.S. are very different societies, but with full awareness of the wrongs that the U.S. has committed against Chinese, isn’t it about time that we live and let live? Rather than pointing our death-and-destruction war machine at Asia, why don’t we “pivot to peace”?
The 49th session of the UN Human Rights Council, from 28 February – 1 April 2022, will consider issues including the protection of human rights defenders, freedom of religion or belief, protection and promotion of human rights while countering terrorism, the right to food and adequate housing, among others. It will also present an opportunity to address grave human rights situations in States including Nicaragua, Venezuela, China, Syria, South Sudan, Sri Lanka, Iran, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Myanmar, Eritrea, among many others. Here’s an overview of some of the key issues on the agenda. The ISHR has issued again its excellent Guide to the upcoming session and I have extracted from it the issues most directly related to human rights defenders:
Protection of human rights defenders
On 11 March 2022, the UN Special Rapporteur will present her report on the work of human rights defenders to address corruption. At the 49th session of the HRC, Norway will present a thematic resolution on human rights defenders in conflict and post-conflict situations. A group of NGOs have produced a list of 25 recommendations related to key concerns that should be addressed in the resolution. These include recommendations related to the removal of legislation that impinges upon the ability of defenders to do their work, including counter-terrorism legislation; the development of protection measures that take into account the specific needs of particular groups of defenders and the precarious nature of their situation in conflict and post-conflict contexts, and specific measures to support human rights defenders in such contexts, including in regard to the provision of cloud-based solutions for storage of documentation, flexible and reliable funding and swift responses in the case of the need for relocation of human rights defenders and their families. ISHR joins these calls and to impress upon the Council the need for a strong commitment to acknowledging and taking action to protect human rights defenders working in such contexts. In addition, we call on all UN members to monitor and report on their implementation of the resolution in a comprehensive way, sharing updates on challenges faced and progress made during relevant UN dialogues and debates.
Reprisals
Reports of cases of intimidation and reprisal against those cooperating or seeking to cooperate with the UN not only continue, but grow. Intimidation and reprisals violate the rights of the individuals concerned, they constitute violations of international human rights law and undermine the UN human rights system.
The UN has taken some action towards addressing this critical issue including:
an annual report by the Secretary General;
a dedicated dialogue under item 5 to take place every September;
The appointment of the UN Assistant Secretary General on Human Rights as the Senior Official on addressing reprisals.
Despite this, ISHR remains deeply concerned about reprisals against civil society actors who try to engage with UN mechanisms, and consistent in its calls for all States and the Council to do more to address the situation. See also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/tag/reprisals/
During the 48th session, the Council adopted a resolution on reprisals. The text was adopted by consensus for the first time since 2009 and invites the UN Secretary General to submit his annual report on reprisals and intimidation to the UN General Assembly. Once again the resolution listed key trends including that acts of intimidation and reprisals can signal patterns, increasing self-censorship, and the use of national security arguments and counter-terrorism strategies by States as justification for blocking access to the UN. The resolution also acknowledged the specific risks to individuals in vulnerable situations or belonging to marginalised groups, and called on the UN to implement gender-responsive policies to end reprisals. The Council called on States to combat impunity by conducting prompt, impartial and independent investigations and ensuring accountability for all acts of intimidation or reprisal, both online and offline, by condemning all such acts publicly, providing access to effective remedies for victims, and preventing any recurrence.
Item 5 of the Human Rights Council’s agenda provides a key opportunity for States to raise concerns about specific cases of reprisals, and for governments involved in existing cases to provide an update to the Council on any investigation or action taken toward accountability to be carried out. The President should also update the Council on actions taken by the President and Bureau to follow up on cases and promote accountability under this item.
Other thematic debates
At this 49th session, the Council will discuss a range of topics in depth through dedicated debates with mandate holders. The debates with mandate holders include:
The Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights
The Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief
The Special Rapporteur on torture
The Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy
In addition, the Council will hold dedicated debates on the rights of specific groups including the Special Rapporteur on minority issues
In addition, the Council will hold dedicated debates on interrelation of human rights and human rights thematic issues including:
The Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights while countering terrorism
The Special Rapporteur on human rights and the environment
Burundi: The Commission of Inquiry on Burundi (CoI) concluded its work at the 48th HRC session in October 2021 while a new resolution establishing a mandate of UN Special Rapporteur on Burundi was adopted, resolution 48/16. The resolution tasks the mandate with monitoring the human rights situation in the country, making recommendations for its improvement, and reporting to the Human Rights Council. While the Special Rapporteur will be unable to continue the entirety of the investigative work carried out by the CoI, they will “collect, examine and assess” information on human rights developments. Ahead of HRC48 more than 40 organisations, including ISHR, urged the Council to continue its scrutiny and further work towards justice and accountability in Burundi. See also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2021/07/03/germain-rukuki-burundi-human-rights-defender-out-of-jail/
The UN Human Rights Office (OHCHR) will ensure that evidence collected by the CoI is “consolidated, preserved, accessible and usable in support of ongoing and future accountability efforts” including efforts to hold Burundian officials responsible for atrocities in front of the International Criminal Court (ICC). The Burundian government should resume its engagement with the Council and grant the Special Rapporteur, who will be appointed in March 2022, access to the country for an official visit.
France: Following an urgent call by ISHR and the Comité Adama, UN experts sent two communications to the French government on 15 and 26 November 2021 asking for measures to ensure that human rights defenders, including people of African descent, enjoy a safe environment in which to carry out their legitimate work for human rights and justice. The lack of investigation in the case of Adama Traoré’s death and the judicial harassment against his sister Assa Traoré for her activism is a sign of broader systemic racism against Black people in policing and criminal justice in France.
ISHR urges the HRC to continue its scrutiny and calls on France to ensure a prompt, transparent, and impartial investigation into the case of Adama Traoré; end the judicial harassment of Assa Traoré for her activism; accept the requests of the UN Special Rapporteur on Racism and the Working Group on People of African Descent to visit the country; end impunity for police violence; and ensure truly free and impartial investigations into the death or injury of anyone at the hands of the police, especially people of African descent.
Egypt: The joint statement delivered by States in March 2021 at the 46th session of the HRC played a critical role in securing the conditional release of several human rights defenders and journalists arbitrarily detained throughout 2021 and 2022. Regrettably, these releases do not reflect any significant change in Egypt’s systematic attacks on civic space and human rights defenders, including arbitrary detention, torture, ill-treatment, enforced disappearances and criminalisation of the exercise of the rights to freedom of expression, association, assembly or public participation. On 3 February 2022, 175 parliamentarians from across Europe urged the HRC to establish a “long overdue monitoring and reporting mechanism on Egypt”. ISHR joined more than 100 NGOs from around the world in urging the HRC to create a monitoring and reporting mechanism on the ever-deteriorating human rights situation in Egypt. Continued, sustained and coordinated action on Egypt at the HRC is more necessary than ever. The HRC should follow up on the 2021 State joint statement and heed the calls of civil society and parliamentarians. See also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2022/01/11/the-arabic-network-for-human-rights-information-has-shut-down/
Nicaragua: A year after Council resolution 46/2, civil society reporting indicates no meaningful action has been taken by Nicaragua to implement any of the Council’s recommendations to the government. Instead, it has deepened its crackdown on human rights defenders and any form of dissent, and further closed civil society space ahead of the November 2021 electoral process. The government’s absolute disregard for cooperation with international and regional mechanisms, including the treaty bodies, is an additional sign that the government does not intend to revert course on the country’s human rights crisis. ISHR, jointly with the Colectivo 18/2, urges the Human Rights Council to establish an independent mechanism to investigate grave human rights violations since April 2018 in Nicaragua, as well as their root causes. The mechanism should verify alleged grave violations, identify perpetrators, and preserve evidence, with a view to long-term accountability processes. See also my post of today: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2022/02/21/nicaragua-death-in-detention-and-sham-trial/
Saudi Arabia: According to ALQST’s 2021 annual report, for a short time in early 2021, intense global pressure on Saudi Arabia’s leaders to improve their dismal human rights record resulted in some minor reforms and concessions, yet, when the pressure eased, the Saudi authorities resumed their habitual pattern of abuses with renewed intensity. A number of high-profile women human rights defenders and prisoners of conscience were conditionally released, but they remain under severe restrictions which means that while they are released, they are not yet free. Saudi authorities continue to crackdown on freedom of expression and hand down lengthy prison sentences to human rights defenders. Saudi Arabia is sensitive regarding its reputation and susceptible to international pressure.
Sudan: On 5 November 2021, the Human Rights Council held a special session to address the ongoing situation in the Republic of Sudan and mandated an Expert on human rights in Sudan to monitor and report on the situation until the restoration of its civilian-led Government. The HRC must extend the reporting mandate of the Expert as the human rights situation is deteriorating. The military is closing the civic space for women’s rights groups and women human rights defenders, including by stigmatising women’s rights groups as terrorists or drug abusers. The recent arrests of women human rights defenders are part of a systemic attack against WHRDs in Sudan. The military and security forces are using social media and traditional media to defame women protesters. Women’s rights groups and WHRDs are facing a new wave of attacks that include framing charges to prolong the detention of WHRDs and defame the women’s rights movement. The military reinstated the authorities of the former regime’s security forces in December 2021 in the emergency order number 3. The new emergency order gave Sudanese security complete impunity and protection from accountability for any form of violations on duty. Sudanese security forces have a well-documented history of sexual abuse and torture of women detainees. WHRDs in detention are at risk of maltreatment, torture, and sexual violence.
Venezuela is back under the microscope with updates from the Office of the High Commissioner and from the Council’s fact-finding mission on the country both scheduled for 17th March. Attention on the human rights situation in the country follows hot on the heels of the Universal Periodic Review of Venezuela that took place at the end of January. The Council session is taking place at a time that Venezuelan civil society continues facing restrictions and attacks on their work. The head of human rights organisation, Fundaredes, has now been arbitrarily detained for 224 days. The Council session is an opportunity for States to express concern about the restrictions on civil society, and to enquire about the implementation of prior recommendations made to Venezuela by both OHCHR and the Mission. Despite being a Council member, Venezuela has yet to allow the Council’s own fact-finding mission access to the country, something the Council as a whole should denounce.
The High Commissioner will provide an oral update to the Council on 7 March. The Council will consider updates, reports on and is expected to consider resolutions addressing a range of country situations, in some instances involving the renewal of the relevant expert mandates. These include:
Oral update and interactive dialogue with the Special Rapporteur on Eritrea
Oral update and interactive dialogue with the High Commissioner on the Tigray region of Ethiopia
Interactive Dialogue on the High Commissioner’s written update on Sri Lanka
Interactive dialogue on the High Commissioner’s report on Nicaragua
Interactive dialogue on the High Commissioner’s report on Afghanistan
Interactive Dialogue on the High Commissioner’s report on ensuring accountability and justice in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem
Oral updates and interactive dialogues with the High Commissioner and fact-finding mission on Venezuela
Oral update bv the High Commissioner and interactive Dialogue with the Special Rapporteur on the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea
Enhanced Interactive Dialogue on the OHCHR’s report on Belarus
Interactive Dialogue on the High Commissioner’s report, enhanced interactive dialogue on the Secretary-General’s report, and interactive dialogue on the Special Rapporteur’s report on Myanmar
Interactive Dialogue on the Special Rapporteur’s report on Iran
Interactive Dialogue on the Commission of Inquiry’s report on Syria
Interactive Dialogue on the Special Rapporteur’s report on the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967
Interactive Dialogues on the High Commissioner’s report and Commission on Human Rights’ report on South Sudan
Interactive Dialogue with the High Commissioner on Ukraine
High-level Interactive Dialogue with the Independent Expert on Central African Republic
Oral updates and enhanced interactive dialogue with the High Commissioner and the team of international experts on the Democratic Republic of the Congo
Oral update by the Special Rapporteur on Cambodia
Interactive Dialogue on the Independent Expert’s report on Mali
Interactive Dialogue on the fact-finding mission’s report on Libya
Appointment of mandate holders
The President of the Human Rights Council will propose candidates for the following mandates:
Three members of the Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (one from the Pacific, one from Central and South America and the Caribbean, and one from Central and Eastern Europe, the Russian Federation, Central Asia and Transcaucasia);
The Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights in the context of climate change;
The Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan;
The Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Burundi;
The Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967;
A member of the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, from Western European and other States;
A member of the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, from Asia-Pacific States;
A member of the Working Group on the issue of human rights and transnational corporations and other business enterprises, from Asia-Pacific States;
A member of the Working Group on the use of mercenaries as a means of violating human rights and impeding the exercise of the right of peoples to self-determination, from Latin American and Caribbean States (an unforeseen vacancy that has arisen due to a resignation).
Resolutions to be presented to the Council’s 49th session
At the organisational meeting on 14 February the following resolutions were announced (States leading the resolution in brackets):
Human rights of persons belonging to minorities (Austria, Mexico, Slovenia)
Combating intolerance, negative stereotyping and stigmatization of, and discrimination, incitement to violence and violence against, persons based on religion or belief (Pakistan on behalf of the OIC)
Human rights situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and the obligation to ensure accountability and justice (Pakistan on behalf of the OIC)
Cultural rights (Cuba)
The negative impact of unilateral coercive measures on the enjoyment of human rights (Azerbaijan on behalf of NAM)
Right to work (Egypt, Greece, Indonesia, Mexico, Romania)
Situation of human rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran – mandate renewal (Iceland, Moldova, North Macedonia, UK)
Rights of the child (GRULAC and EU)
Human rights defenders (Norway)
Adequate housing as a component of the right to an adequate standard of living, and the right to non-discrimination in this context (Germany, Brazil, Finland, Namibia)
Situation of human rights in the Syrian Arab Republic – mandate renewal (France, Germany, Italy, Jordan, Kuwait, Netherlands, Qatar, Turkey, UK, USA)
Situation of human rights in South Sudan – mandate renewal (Albania, Norway, USA, UK)
Mandate of the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism – mandate renewal (Mexico)
Prevention of genocide (Armenia)
Situation of human rights in Belarus – mandate renewal (EU)
Situation of human rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK)- mandate renewal (EU)
Situation of human rights in Myanmar – mandate renewal (EU)
Freedom of religion or belief (EU)
Technical assistance and capacity-building for Mali in the field of human rights (Africa Group)
Technical assistance and capacity-building for South Sudan (Africa Group)
Role of states in countering the negative impact of disinformation on human rights (Ukraine)
During this session, the Council will adopt the UPR working group reports on Myanmar, Greece, Suriname, Samoa, Hungary, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Papua New Guinea, Tajikistan, United Republic of Tanzania, Eswatini, Antigua and Barbuda, Trinidad and Tobago, Thailand and Ireland.
During each Council session, panel discussions are held to provide member States and NGOs with opportunities to hear from subject-matter experts and raise questions. 7 panel discussions and 1 thematic meeting are scheduled for this upcoming session:
“This is not going to be a war of Ukraine and Russia. This is going to be a European war, a full-fledged war.” So spoke Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky just days after berating the U.S. for beating the drums of war.
It is not hard to imagine how Zelensky’s words must have fallen on those European ears that were attentive. His warning surely conjured up images of World War II when tens of millions of Europeans and Russians perished.
Zelensky’s words echoed those of Philippine’s President Rodrigo Duterte on the other side of the world at the Eastern edge of the great Eurasian land mass: “When elephants fight, it is the grass that gets trampled flat.” We can be sure that Duterte, like Zelensky, had in mind WWII which also consumed tens of millions of lives in East Asia.
The United States is stoking tensions in both Europe and East Asia, with Ukraine and Taiwan as the current flashpoints on the doorsteps of Russia and China which are the targeted nations. Let us be clear at the outset. As we shall see, the endpoint of this process is not for the U.S. to do battle with Russia or China but to watch China and Russia fight it out with the neighbors to the ruin of both sides. The US is to “lead from behind’ – as safely and remotely as can be arranged.
To make sense of this and react properly, we must be very clear-eyed about the goal of the U.S. Neither Russia nor China has attacked or even threatened the U.S. Nor are they in a position to do so – unless one believes that either is ready to embark on a suicidal nuclear war.
Why should the U.S. Elite and its media pour out a steady stream of anti-China and anti-Russia invective? Why the steady eastward march of NATO since the end of the first Cold War? The goal of the U.S. is crystal clear – it regards itself as the Exceptional Nation and entitled to be the number one power on the planet, eclipsing all others.
This goal is most explicitly stated in the well-known Wolfowitz Doctrine drawn shortly after the end of the first Cold War in 1992. It proclaimed that the U.S.’s “first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet union or elsewhere….” It stated that no regional power must be allowed to emerge with the power and resources “sufficient to generate global power.” It stated frankly “we must maintain the mechanism for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global power.” (Emphasis, jw)
The Wolfowitz Doctrine is but the latest in a series of such proclamations that have proclaimed global domination as the goal of U.S. foreign policy since 1941 the year before the U.S. entered WWII. This lineage is documented clearly in the book by the Quicny Institute’s Stephen Wertheim “Tomorrow, The World: The Birth of US Global Supremacy.”
Let us consider China first and then Russia, the foremost target of the U.S., first. China’s economy is number one in terms of PPP-GDP according to the IMF and has been since November, 2014. It is growing faster than the U.S. economy and shows no signs of slowing down. In a sense China has already won by this metric since economic power is the ultimate basis of all power.
But what about a military defeat of China? Can the U.S. with its present vastly superior armed forces bring that about? The historian, Alfred McCoy, answers that question in the way most do these days, with a clear “no”:
The most volatile flashpoint in Beijing’s grand strategy for breaking Washington’s geopolitical grip over Eurasia lies in the contested waters between China’s coast and the Pacific littoral, which the Chinese call “the first island chain.
But China’s clear advantage in any struggle over that first Pacific island chain is simply distance. …The tyranny of distance, in other words, means that the U.S. loss of that first island chain, along with its axial anchor on Eurasia’s Pacific littoral, should only be a matter of time.
Certainly the U.S. Elite recognizes this problem. Do they have a solution?
Moreover, that is not the end of the “problem” for the U.S. There are other powerful countries, like Japan, or rapidly rising economies in East Asia, easily the most dynamic economic region in the world. These too will become peer competitors, and in the case of Japan, it already has been a competitor both before WWII and during the 1980s.
If we hop over to the Western edge of Eurasia, we see that the U.S. has a similar “problem” when it comes to Russia. Here too the U.S. cannot defeat Russia in a conventional conflict nor have U.S. sanctions been able to bring it down. How can the U.S. surmount this obstacle? And as in the case of East Asia the U.S. faces another economic competitor, Germany, or more accurately, the EU, with Germany at its core. How is the U.S. to deal with this dual threat?
One clue comes in the response of Joe Biden to both the tension over Taiwan and that over Ukraine. Biden has said repeatedly that he will not send U.S. combat troops to fight Russia over Ukraine or to fight China over Taiwan. But it will send materiel and weapons and also “advisors.” And here too the U.S. has other peer competitors most notably Germany which has been the target of U.S. tariffs. The economist Michael Hudson puts it succinctly in a penetrating essay, “America’s real adversaries are its European and other allies: The U.S. aim is to keep them from trading with China and Russia.”
Such “difficulties for the U.S. were solved once before – in WWII. One way of looking at WWII is that it was a combination of two great regional wars, one in East Asia and one in Europe. In Europe the U.S. was minimally involved as Russia, the core of the USSR, battled it out with Germany, sustaining great damage to life and economy. Both Germany and Russia were economic basket cases when the war was over, two countries lying in ruins.
The US provided weapons and materiel to Russia but was minimally involved militarily, only entering late in the game. The same happened in East Asia with Japan in the role of Germany and China in the role of Russia. Both Japan and China were devastated in the same way as were Russia and Europe. This was not an unconscious strategy on the part of the United States. As Harry Truman, then a Senator, declared in 1941: “If we see that Germany is winning the war, we ought to help Russia; and if that Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany, and in that way let them kill as many as possible.. . ”
At the end of it all the U.S. emerged as the most powerful economic and military power on the planet. McCoy spells it out:
Like all past imperial hegemons, U.S. global power has similarly rested on geopolitical dominance over Eurasia, now home to 70% of the world’s population and productivity. After the Axis alliance of Germany, Italy, and Japan failed to conquer that vast land mass, the Allied victory in World War II allowed Washington, as historian John Darwin put it, to build its “colossal imperium… on an unprecedented scale,” becoming the first power in history to control the strategic axial points “at both ends of Eurasia.
As a critical first step, the U.S. formed the NATO alliance in 1949, establishing major military installations in Germany and naval bases in Italy to ensure control of the western side of Eurasia. After its defeat of Japan, as the new overlord of the world’s largest ocean, the Pacific, Washington dictated the terms of four key mutual-defense pacts in the region with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Australia and so acquired a vast range of military bases along the Pacific littoral that would secure the eastern end of Eurasia. To tie the two axial ends of that vast land mass into a strategic perimeter, Washington ringed the continent’s southern rim with successive chains of steel, including three navy fleets, hundreds of combat aircraft, and most recently, a string of 60 drone bases stretching from Sicily to the Pacific island of Guam.
The U.S. was able to become the dominant power on the planet because all peer competitors were left in ruins by the two great regional wars in Europe and East Asia, wars which are grouped under the heading of WWII.
If Europe is plunged into a war of Russia against the EU powers with the U.S. “leading from behind,” with material and weapons, who will benefit? And if East Asia is plunged into a war of China against Japan and whatever allies it can drum up, with the U.S. “leading from behind,” who will benefit?
It is pretty clear that such a replay of WWII will benefit the U.S. In WWII while Eurasia suffered tens of millions of deaths, the US suffered about 400,000 – a terrible toll certainly but nothing like that seen in Eurasia. And with the economies and territories of Eurasia, East and West, in ruins, the U.S. will emerge on top, in the catbird seat, and able to dictate terms to the world. WWII redux.
But what about the danger of nuclear war growing out of such conflicts? The U.S. has a history of nuclear “brinksmanship,” going back to the earliest post-WWII days. It is a country that has shown itself willing to risk nuclear holocaust.
Are there U.S. policy makers criminal enough to see this policy of provocation through to the end? I will leave that to the reader to answer.
The Peoples of East and West Eurasia are the ones who will suffer most in this scenario. And they are the ones who can stop the madness by living peacefully with Russia and China rather than serving as cannon fodder for the U.S. There are clear signs of dissent from the European “allies” of the U.S., especially Germany but the influence of the U.S. remains powerful. Germany and many other countries are after all occupied by tens of thousands of U.S. troops, their media heavily influenced by the U.S. and with the organization that commands European troops, NATO, under U.S. command. Which way will it go?
In East Asia the situation is the same. Japan is the key but the hatred of China among the Elite is intense. Will the Japanese people and the other peoples of East Asia be able to put the brakes on the drive to war?
Some say that a two-front conflict like this is U.S. overreach. But certainly, if war is raging on or near the territories of both Russia and China, there is little likelihood that one can aid the other.
Given the power of modern weaponry, this impending world war will be much more damaging than WWII by far. The criminality that is on the way to unleashing it is almost beyond comprehension.
Gay skier finishes eighth in the men’s freeski halfpipe final
After revealing message, Kenworthy criticises IOC
The British freestyle skier Gus Kenworthy, an advocate for LGBTQ+ rights, said on Saturday the International Olympic Committee should take a host nation’s stance on human rights issues into consideration when awarding the Games.
Rights groups have long criticised the IOC’s choice of Beijing as 2022 host and several countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom, mounted diplomatic boycotts to protest against China’s treatment of its minority Muslim Uyghur population, which the US deems to be genocide. China denies allegations of human rights abuses.
Sadly, however, the long-standing and well-documented history of racism against the Chinese appears to have greatly intensified recently, both in terms of the actions of the last three U.S. presidents (Obama, Trump, and Biden) as well as in terms of the opinions and behavior of the public in Western countries. This latter type of racism is undoubtedly more or less the result of overt brainwashing. There is both fear and loathing of China and Chinese people, and of other East Asian peoples. Anti-Asian hate crimes, hate speech, etc. inside the U.S. are at epidemic levels. The economic success of the People’s Republic of China and the Obama administration’s “Pivot to Asia” campaign have only worsened our ubiquitous Sinophobia, which goes back to the late 19th-century and early 20th-century Yellow Peril propaganda. 
