THE US IS ON A PATH TO WAR WITH CHINA
By K. J. Noh, Popular Resistance.
October 15, 2020 | EDUCATE!
Above photo: US media create fear campaign to antagonize China. Kyle
Lam/Bloomberg.
What Is To Be Done?
It was gripping , stunning testimony. Before congress, a 15 year old
volunteer nurse, Nayirah, struggled to compose her trembling voice, barely
holding back tears, as she testified that marauding soldiers had thrown
babies out of incubators in a hospital, leaving them to die on the floor.
Later, Amnesty International confirmed authoritatively that 312 babies had
been killed this way[i]. All the news agencies ran with the story, and the
country and congress were in a total uproar.
There was only one problem: it was completely, utterly, totally fraudulent.
It was engineered, perjured, coached testimony concocted by PR experts,
designed to manufacture consent for a US war on Iraq.
At the time, it was also crystal clear that the claims were absurdKuwait
had a population of less than 1.5 million at the time, and given its
birthrate, would have had a few hundred premature babies a year. Its
inconceivable that over 300 of them could have been clustered in a single
hospital on a single day.
Nevertheless, this was the story that was sold to the US people.
Representative John Porter stated, We have never heard
[such] a record of
inhumanity and brutality and sadism
I dont know how the people of the
civilized countries of this world can fail to do everything within their
power to remove this scourge from the face of the earth.
Not long afterward, the US went to war with Iraq. It would wage war again,
12 years later, doubling down with even more monstrous lies about WMD.
Today, we are facing a similar situation: the US is escalating rapidly
towards a shooting war with China, and similar absurd, astonishing, and
monstrous lies are being spread. In fact, the US is already engaged in
multi-domain hybrid warfare with China. This is warfare just below the
threshold of direct military engagement. On the ground this involves:
Economic Warfare: trade sanctions and tariff war, as well as technological
warfare: attempted seizure of Chinese companies (TikTok); attacks on Chinas
international 5G contracts; sanctions on the primary & secondary supply
chains of key sectors of Chinese industry (e.g. Huaweis semiconductor
supply chain); attacks on Ant Finances IPO.
Legal Warfare, or lawfare, including over 380 anti-China bills in
Congress, and 14 individual and state lawsuits against China for over $30
Trillion in Covid damages; the long arm legal kidnapping of Huaweis
executive
Diplomatic Warfare, including consulate shutdowns, harassment of diplomats,
breaching of diplomatic pouches and compounds, and calls for regime change.
Military Brinksmanship and posturing in the South China Sea, the East China
Sea, the Taiwan straits; complete encirclement of China with strategic
weapons, surveillance, and 400 offensive bases (The Pacific Pivot), the
use of airbases in Taiwan for military surveillance, and plans to station
intermediate range nuclear missiles all along Chinas periphery[ii].
Civil Subversion: color revolution, urban terror, destabilization &
delegitimation operations in Hong Kong (and other places where China has
interests), including millions of dollars of funneled for organization &
training, and encrypted communications infrastructure built to coordinate
anti-government activities.
Academic Warfare: through the FBIs China Initiative, every 10 hours a case
is opened against a Chinese student or researcher in the US (currently 2700
cases) and all Chinese students are considered potential non-traditional
collectors, spies involved in a thousand grains of sand collection
strategy.
Information Warfare: last but not least, we are seeing total Information
warfare.
The stories about so-called massive human rights abuses, Chinese
concentration camps, Chinese-made-and-released Covid, China has harmed
us economically, China has stolen its way to the top, China is
oppressing independent Hong Kong, are part of this information warfare.
This is mass propaganda to incite people to hate China irrationally and
unconditionally, to manufacture consent for war. The US military calls this
information warfare, the firehose of falsehoods and we are all being
drenched with these lies. This is necessary to justify war against an enemy
and to curtail any rational discussion or questioning.
Some of the questions that the public are kept from asking are:
Are these allegations supported by any facts?
Has China threatened us? Is the US at risk from China?
Is this war justifiable by any means? Is it legal?
Do the citizens of the US want to go to war? Could the US even fight, let
alone win a war with China?
A careful, reasoned approach to these questions, would lead one to say, No.
Before we try to play whack-a-mole with the blatant war propaganda, a more
useful and clarifying approach is to ask, why is the US telling these lies
to go to war?
For this, we have to look at history.
Why The US Is At War:
Culture shock: the challenge to supremacy
The earliest European travelers, were astonished to discover in China a
country, in many ways, far more advanced than the West: a rich, diverse,
multi-cultural civilization with sophisticated systems of governance, and
vibrant cities built with complex systems of planning and management. Above
all, they marveled at a harmonious multi-religious, multi-ethnic society,
free of sectarian strife, and an inclusive merit-based[iii] system of
political power that selected the most competent people to govern and rule,
regardless of creed, color, background, or religion[iv]. This contrasted
with the Western system of hereditary aristocratic rule within a society
torn apart regularly with religious strife. These ideas of diversity,
tolerance, inclusion, and earnednot inheritedprivilege, would strongly
influence the leaders of the Enlightenment, so much so that Western
philosophers such as Voltaire and Leibnitz believed that the Chinese had
perfected moral science, and that Chinese statecraft was the model for the
West to emulate, if it wanted to develop into an enlightened civilization.
These discoveries struck a hard blow at Christian and Western supremacy.
Western colonization was built on a foundational belief that the West was
more advanced, more evolvedcloser to Godthan the barbarous countries it
was invading, subjugating, exploiting, and destroying. It needed at least
the pretense of being more advanced to justify its colonial civilizing
mission. Reactionary thinkers like Herderwho had never visited
Chinalashed back rapidly by propagating a theory of the depravity of
Chinese: that China was an immoral land with no honor, an embalmed
mummy characterized by stagnation, in contrast with Western dynamism.
In addition, the Chinese system of meritocratic government was deeply
troubling to a West built on stratified class privilege. A civilization
without hereditary aristocrats was unfathomable and terrifying to the
Western ruling class. Montesquieu, (borrowing from Giovanni Botero) thus
concocted the trope that Chinas more egalitarian system had to be
despotic,despotic for him because it threatened the liberties
(aristocratic privileges) of his class. Hegel chiselled this canard into the
Western consciousness with an armchair theory of Oriental Despotism,
whereby the Chinese had failed to evolve due to inherent, characterological
flaws in its people and its political culture. Marx chimed in with the
Asiatic mode of production, and Weber and Wittfogel also reinforced it.
These allegations of despotismdespite being total distortions of Chinese
governancehave infused all Western discourses about China since.
Enter the Bandits
At the same time, embalmed Chinese inferiority notwithstanding, the West
craved the exquisite consumer goods of Chinatea, silk, porcelainand this
created huge trade imbalances. The Western response to balance the books
was narco-trafficking: smuggling in industrial amounts of opiumat its peak,
up to 9 million pounds a year. When China objected and opposed this on
sovereign and moral grounds and confiscated the drugs, war was declared.
Reparations were forced, concessions extracted, and the country plundered,
looted, and destroyed. In one show of force to the Chinese, the Summer
Palace of the Emperor was sacked by Lord Elgin, which Victor Hugo described
thus:
There was, in a corner of the world, a wonder of the world
All that can be
begotten of the imagination
was there
Build a dream, a dazzling cavern of
human fantasy with the face of a temple and palace
.This edifice, as
enormous as a city, had been built by the centuries
This wonder has
disappeared.
One day two bandits entered the Summer Palace. One plundered, the other
burned.
All the treasures of all our cathedrals put together could not equal this
formidable and splendid museum of the Orient. It contained not only
masterpieces of art, but masses of jewelry
One of the two victors filled his
pockets,..the other
filled his coffers. And back they came to Europe, arm in
arm, laughing away. Such is the story of the two bandits [England & France].
This violence, banditry, and racism, justified by the belief in the subhuman
nature of the Chinese, became normalized practice against the Chinese over
two centuries, and great American fortunesPerkins, Astor, Forbes, Cabot,
Delano (Roosevelt)and Ivy league institutions at Harvard, Yale, Princeton,
Columbia were built on this extraction and narco-trafficking. Hewing to the
belief that the Chinese were less than human, Drug Barons pushed opium that
addicted 10% of the population, essentially roofie-ing an entire nation
and stealing its wealth. Just as US Southern wealth had been built on the
decimation of black bodies through the slave trade, US East Coast wealth was
built on the destruction of Chinese bodies through the drug trade, in what
historian John K. Fairbank described as the most long-continued and
systematic international crime of modern times.
Dehumanization, humiliation, assault, theft, rape, colonization,
appropriationthese became the standard Western approach towards China and
the Chinese; the Chinese people were filthy yellow hordes, an inferior,
subhuman race, lacking agency, fit only to be colonized, exploited,
enslaved, lynched, erased, and wherever possible, extinguished through race
war. It would get worse.
Cold and Hot war: A Chinamans Chance
Inside US territory itself, the mythology of yellow periloriginally a
German colonial war tropebecame pervasive. Newspaper editor Horace
Greeley, argued that the Chinese were uncivilized, unclean, and filthy
beyond all conception, without any of the higher domestic or social
relations; lustful and sensual in their dispositions; every female is a
prostitute of the basest order. Greeley, a progressive (who employed a
young Marx as a reporter), was simply mouthing the platitudes of his day;
much worse than rhetoric was the routine violence. Prefiguring similar
present-day fears that Chinese were stealing jobs, wealth, or threatening
America, thousands of Chinese were massacred, lynched, set on fire, expelled
from their communities in the late 19th Century: in 1871, the LA Chinatown
massacre, in 1880, the Denver Yellow Peril pogrom, in 1885 Wyoming Rock
Springs massacre, the Issaquah Valley attack, the Arson of Seattles
Chinatown, the Tacoma riot, in 1886 the Seattle Riot of 1886, the Oregon
Hells Canyon massacre. A Chinamans chance became a common term: to be
Chinese was to be subject to sudden death at any time at the whim of white
people.
In response, the Chinese hid themselves inside ghettoes where they could;
fled pogroms, arson, and mass lynchings, and kept their heads down, eating
bitter and trying to stay alive. Where they managed to settle down without
being killed, they were subjected to cultural erasure, economic blockade,
social isolation, a ban on owing property and businesses, and a proscription
on marrying and having children, in short, planned elimination.
A minor respite during WWII, when the US allied itself with the Chinese KMT
(Kuomintang) against the Japanese gave a small glimmer of reprieve, as local
leaders tried to establish breathing space, and the Japanese took on the
role of the bad Asians. This lasted until the Chinese communists liberated
themselves in 1949, and wrested back their own country. China has stood
up, Mao declared, igniting jubilation throughout the third world, and
sending shockwaves of horror through the colonial west. This arrant act of
self-liberation and self-determinationalong with the USs astonishment that
the monstrous KMT fascists they had courted and funded had been
trouncedunleased a hysterical new wave of Sinophobia during the McCarthy
era. High-ranking Congressional committees demanded Who lost China?as if
it had been theirsand purged the State Department of the moderate
China-hands, who had been sympathetic or informed about China and its
political institutions. A paroxysm of anti-China and anti-Asian hatred
would shiver and fester throughout the cold war, burning, stoking and
consuming itself through two hot wars (The Korean war and the Vietnam war),
counterinsurgencies (Malaya), politicide (Indonesia), and smoldering on
through the Nixon era, and crackling back alive to the flushed, red hot heat
of the current moment.
In a country built on settler-colonial racism, this violent, racist,
anti-China hatredone of the most enduring legacies and traditions of the
Westis the noxious Petri dish in which this propaganda for war is being
cultured and vectored.
To this day, these stereotypesideological templatesare readily applied,
for example, as regards Covid. In the Sinophobic Western press, Covid-19 is
allegedly caused by dirty Chinese eating habits, dishonest cover-up,
depraved indifference to life, despotic suppression of information, and
dangerous intent towards the west. In a word, the Chinese are dirty,
dishonest, depraved, despotic, and dangerous. Every day, these racist
slanders are plastered and repeated, ad nauseam and ad infinitum, in Western
outlets like The Guardian, The Washington Post, or The NY Times, and then
catapulted into orbit by Twitter and Facebook. White Supremacy and its
attendant anti-Asian fear and hatred are some of the oldest, most enduring,
most deep-rooted hatreds in the Western mind: underneath the shallow topsoil
of civility and liberal tolerance, it festers and simmers in angry, molten
layers of the subconscious, quick to erupt and flare up in white-hot
violence and rage at any perceived slight or challenge to white superiority;
and rapidly weaponized as political expediency requires.
Realpolitik: Opening And Closure:
Miraculously, during the 70s, a battered and bruised US, humbled from
defeats in the Vietnam war, and seeking a realpolitik to untangle the
quagmire, decided to open relations with China to counterbalance against
Soviet Union. Despite over a century of hatred, and the containment of the
Russians for being an Asiatic Race, the US normalized relations with
Chinese, and thus began a short, temporary, realist honeymoon, a brief
respite from this race-baiting and race hatred.
This idyll was not to last. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, two
things became readily apparent: 1) there was no further political need to
engage with China, since the primary reason (the threat of the Soviet Union)
had gone away, and 2) it was clear for anyone understanding history and
geography that China could become a challenger to the United States itself,
due to its size, capacity, and dynamism.
Thus the long, unabated, and persistent thread of anti-China hatred,
red-scare-yellow-peril-thinking, reinvigorated again with the persistent
white fragility about new challenges to supremacy, came back with a
vengeance. Despite continued engagement with China from the Nixon to the
Clinton era, Sinophobia remained a silent, underground political force with
a tremendous gravitational pull. Two groups were important in giving these
forces concrete shape and form.
The Empire Strikes Back: Yoda And His Jedis:
Andrew Marshall, who died last year in March, was often referred to as
Yoda. He was the Pentagons Oracle, directing its secretive internal
think tank, the Office of Net Assessment, for 42 years, and was top advisor
to 12 Secretaries of Defense. Originally part of an elite group of
econometric thinkers at RAND (Herman Strangelove Kahn, James Schlesinger,
Daniel Ellsberg, Albert Wohlstetter), they worked on game theoretic &
stochastic modeling of complex phenomena, and on how to strategize the
unthinkable and the insane: how to win at nuclear Armageddon.
Throughout his long tenure at the inner sanctum, Marshall had two key
obsessions: US Military supremacy, first against the Soviet Union; then
after the fall of the USSR, against China: preventing Chinas rise to power.
Using a deft mixture of threat inflation (through recondite net
assessments & heterodox team B reviews), classified white papers, cryptic
pronouncements to the power elite, and the incessant cultivation of a cult
of loyalists, Marshall kept the Pentagons gravy train running on time,
while instilling in his followers a paranoid, long duree mindset of
endless and moving threat inflation.
Marshalls proteges, Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Cohen, Krepinevich,
Pillsbury, Herman Kahn, Richard Perle, Richard Armitage, Michael OHanlon,
and countless other neocon heavyweights were graduates of St. Andrews Prep
School, or the Church of St. Andrew, mentored into Marshalls world view
and strategies. These ideologues had suckled at the woozy philosophical
teat of Leo Strauss (imagining they were imbibing Plato, Hegel, or Kojeve)
and graduated from Ivy institutions funded from Chinese opium smuggling.
Marshall fed them solid food, C-rations, and the bloody red meat that cut
and sharpened their fangs for ideological and political battle.
In 1992, a fully teethed group of Marshalls neocon proteges penned the
Defense Guidance Planning (DPG) document that came to be known as the
Wolfowitz Doctrine. A preposterous, overweening document, embarrassing
upon leakage for its hubris, irrationality, and illegality, it was
immediately disavowed but not discarded. A few years later, it was redacted
and upgraded into the PNAC (The Project for a New American Century)s Mein
Kampf-like document, Rebuilding Americas Defenses. This was, in essence,
an unhinged plan for total world domination (unipolar global dominance) in
all domains of war (full spectrum dominance), unfettered by international
law or any sense of proportion, rationality, or morality. Borrowing from
the DPG its call for the unencumbered use of aggressive, pre-emptive war,
including the use of nuclear and biological warfare, it postulated a Pearl
Harbor-like incident to operationalize. Not long after, this doctrine
became realized under Rumsfeld and Cheney, bringing us the chaos, murder,
tragedy of Iraq and Afghanistan and the endless catastrophic wars of the
post-Bush years.
Contemporaneously, with the Soviet Union dissolved, and the US pressing NATO
right up against the flank of Russia, the US also began to cross-hatch the
contours of a containment strategy against an emerging China, the next
potential challenger to US global domination.
Marshall and his Jedis began explicit, long term countermoves. Even as the
Middle East continued to spiral into chaos, yet more wide-ranging and
ambitious plans were hatched against the Middle Kingdom. A strategy to
withdraw from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) was initially
floated (and later, with the blessing of the CFR, circulated, and eventually
implemented). Aggressive forward bases were planned in the early 2000s,
then built in East Asia, along the first island chain, placing deadly and
destabilizing strategic weaponry right up against Chinas throat and belly.
New alliances and strategies were drawn up, and old alliances reinforced and
rekindled, and a dangerously empire-nostalgic Japan was enabled in erasing
history and remilitarizing to the hilt as the spear tip against China.
Eventually, as all these pieces fell into place, Hillary Clinton would stage
the coming out party: the declaration in 2011, of the Pacific Pivot/Pivot
to Asia in Foreign Policy Magazine. Clintons debutante declaration was a
dog-whistle marvel of cant and obfuscation. A plan to move 60% of US
firepower to encircle and contain China through bases, weaponry, and
alliances, while engaging in multi-domain hybrid warfare, was sold as a
historical rebalancing. With the blessing of Obamas cabinet, Marshalls
China threat was finally getting policy primetime.
During this time, another of Andrews busy, brainy proteges, military
officer Andrew Krepinevich, started to work out the nuts and bolts of actual
war with China. Krepinevich, at the CSBA (Center for Strategic Budgetary
Assessment), under Marshalls guidance and funding, wrote out the details of
the war doctrine against China, AirSea Battlea China-directed counterpart
to the Soviet-era AirLand Battle involving decapitating and blinding
strikes deep into Chinese territory, and instantiating Marshalls
revolution in military affairs for US supremacy in the Western Pacific
theater of war. RAND and the CFR chimed in, rendering into granular and
global detail the strategies and order of battle.
Another of Andrews powerful proteges was Michael Pillsbury. A serious
operator, Pillsbury had assisted in the creation of the regime change
governmental NGO known as the NED, the weaponization of the Mujahideen in
Afghanistan, the implementation of politicide in Latin America (known as the
Reagan Doctrine), but most importantly, he was credited with initiating the
idea of the China card in 1973. Under the good offices of Marshall,
Pillsbury published a book called The Hundred Year Marathon , scripting a
fact-free document of paranoid threat inflation, racist scare-mongering, and
orientalist slander that is now standard China doctrine. In an alphabetic
royal flush of Sinophobes
(Lighthizer-Mnuchin-Navarro-OBrien-Pillsbury-Pompeo-Pence-Ross), Pillsbury
is now currently the most important China authority of Everything Under
the Heavens in the Trump Kingdom of Sinophobia.
China Syndrome: Blue team, Red Peril
As the original US reason for allying with Beijingto counterbalance
Moscowbecame moot, another group of China-bashers, far-right ideologues
with sharp axes to grind from the cold war also began to crawl out of the
cracks. Calling themselves the Blue team or Panda sluggers, they derided
the US panda-hugging business class who wanted continued engagement with
China, seeing China only as a mortal and irreconcilable communist threat.
During the Clinton administration, they formed a loose coalition, coming
together with funding under PNAC, using the Washington Times and Weekly
Standard as their platforms. Although the Blue Team had no official
members, published no formal policy statements, and had no officesinitially
meeting in a garage, then at the Tabard Inn on N Streetthey included key
Congress members and staff; think tankers, journalists, and lobbyists.
Among them, former CIA analyst William C. Triplet and congressional staffer
Edward Timperlake went on to write to a lurid series of conspiracy books
alleging quid-pro-quo between Clinton and China (Year of the Rat; Red Dragon
Rising). This was a bizarro world where Taiwanese lobbyists with Chinese
Mafia connections were acting as agents for the PRC government and
manipulating the White House. They also alleged Chinese theft of military
secrets, slave labor, the proliferation of WMD to Iran and other rogue
states, and insinuated that Clintons constructive engagement was
knowingly undermining the US for the benefit of the Chinese. These
allegations put into ink a conspiratorial mythology about a dangerous,
corrupt, and belligerent China, echoes that fed into an existing
subterranean current of paranoid lies about China.
These blue team members, cross-pollinating with Marshalls proteges, were
a rogues gallery of high-powered political operators: Michael Ledeen, Frank
Gaffney, Robert Kagan, Bill Kristol, Michael Pillsbury, Bill Gertz, Gary
Bauer, Peter Navarro, Elliot Abrams, Richard Scaiffe, John Bolton were among
those listed as members; Dana Rohrabacher, Tom DeLay, Nancy Pelosi, Robert
Byrd were also considered to be fellow travelers.
These people built powerful commissions and institutions focused on
attacking China, including the Congressional Executive Commission on China,
the US-China Security Review Commission. The Taiwan Security Enhancement Act
was also written at this time. In particular, the CECC appointed itself
watchdog of Chinese trade, technology, labor and human rights, saturating
Congress with an unending blue team litany of Chinese abuses.
The most virulent and extreme of all these China hawks was Frank Gaffney,
who recycled the alarmist cold war group, Committee on the Present Danger,
into the current Committee on the Present Danger: China, contending that
there is no hope of coexistence with China. Gaffneys ideology and
guiding principles coincide with official positions on China and key US
foreign policy; Secretary of State Mike Pompeos speech and actions on China
reflect his close affiliation and affinity with Gaffney.
What the Pivot is: the Geostrategics of China-bashing
Much of the blue teams ideology and theorizing followed pre-existing
currents of ideological posturing and hate-speech but have incorporated
sharper geopolitical and geo-economic dimensions.
Western history can be seen as having several inflection points: one was
1492, the advent of the Columbian Era. The Columbian era is the era of
sea-faring, sea-power-based Western colonial and imperial empires. The
demise of the Columbian era, was foreshadowed by an Oxford geographer in
1904 who put forth what is now known as the Heartland Theory. In a
nutshell, it is a land-based theory of power that predicts the end of
sea-based powers: Who rules East Europe (Eurasia) commands the Heartland;
who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; who rules the
World-Island commands the world. It also concluded, Were the
Chinese
to
conquer its territory [of the Russian Empire], they might
constitute the yellow peril to the worlds freedom. This maxim and the
anxiety it provoked was red-lined in Brezinskis Grand Chess game: No
Eurasian challenger should emerge that can dominate Eurasia and thus also
challenge U.S. global pre-eminence.
In 1992, Marshalls protégé, Paul Wolfowitz formulated the above strands
into a formal doctrine, in the above mentioned DPG (Defense Planning
guidance) document:
Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival
that
poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union
to
prevent any hostile power from dominating a region to generate global
power
The U.S. must
protect a new order that [convinces] potential
competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more
aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests. In non-defense
areas, we must
discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking
to overturn the established political and economic order. We must maintain
the mechanism for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a
larger regional or global role.
This can be better understood by looking at a map:
This is a map of the world, drawn from a topologists eye. It shows
relationships, not distances or area. From this map you can note the
following things:
China has more borders than any other country in the world. This also gives
it the possibility of connecting with more countries than any other.
Blue lines/corridors are oceans: The top two thirds is the world island or
pivot stateit contains most of the worlds population, resources, and
wealth, and it can be connected as a single entity through overland routes
or short ocean hops.
The bottom is the Americas. It is topologically isolated from the world
island. As sea lane control becomes less important, it will also lose
prominence and relative power if the world island unifies. Its clear that
that unifying power will probably arise in China, whose overland paths using
high-speed rail, roads, pipelines, and ports can be easily built and
connected, in a new silk road.
The US needs to fracture the world island to maintain its global power. If
you color in the places where China is encircled, or where the US is waging
war/fracturing societies/creating chaos, this is exactly where the fault
lines of the global conflict are, and reveal what US strategy is.
Here is a second map:
CSBA: Shipping Lanes through the South China Sea.
The US has actually surrounded China with 400 military bases, bristling with
strategic and tactical weaponry. It also has war-gamed out Chinas key
vulnerability: the chokepoint of the South China Sea. War in the South China
Sea would disrupt $5.3 Trillion of Chinas external trade and 77% of Chinas
oil imports[i]. In this scenario, the US does not have to win a shooting
war with China in the South China Sea. The war just has to happen, and the
disruption to trade could crash Chinas economy. The map shows the shipping
lanes that would be disrupted.
Chinas first response to the US pivot and encirclement, especially in the
South China Seaits key chokepointwas to build defensive military
facilities along some of the islands, to deter US incursion and to raise the
cost of interference. Its other response, much more ambitious, was the Belt
& Road Initiative (BRI), which constitutes a long overland escape from the
encirclement, similar to its long march during its encirclement by the
fascist KMT. The BRI travels through SE Asia, then overland through Central
Asia, to the Mediterranean, and then Europe and Africa. In particular:
CMEC (China-Myanmar Economic Corridor) travels through Rakhine State
andexits to the Indian Ocean at Kyaukphyu port (bypassing the Strait of
Malacca).
CPEC (China-Pakistan Economic Corridor) to Gwadar port transits directly to
the Arabian Sea andthe Persian Gulf.
Xinjiang is the key overland route for BRI to exit China to Central Asia,
with Iran also a key node.
Djibouti at the horn of Africa is the entry node to Africa (the Sahel,
andthe South)
BRI as it does this, becomes the physical realization of Mackinders
heartland in Eurasiathe pivot state connecting the world island into
a single economic bloc, and raising China to the status of the key regional
power, exactly what Brezinski and Wolfowitz, sought to prevent.
Mercator Institute for China Studies: Belt and Road Initiative.
Mindful of this development, and aware of the rapidly ticking biological
clock on US power, the US is currently rapidly escalating hostilities in the
SCS, most recently with war games, U2 incursions, belligerent passages of
aircraft carriers, guided missile destroyers, submarines; Chinas response
has been to launch carrier killer missiles into the region.
Until recently, the US claimed that it was not an interested party to the
SCS, just that it was concerned about Freedom of Navigation. Now it is
openly taking about blockade and strangulation of China and outright piracy
against Chinese ships through media proxies.
It has also recently conducted drone war exercises for assaulting islands in
the South China Sea, with down-to-the-smallest detail precision and
preparation.
The US is also going directly after the BRI. It is sanctioning the Chinese
companies alleged to have done construction in the SCS (all the claimants
have done construction, including airfields; China is not unique). These
companies are also involved in construction of the BRI; for example, China
Communications Construction Company (CCCC) alone is reportedly involved 923
projects in 157 countries. This is an explicit attempt to dismantle the
BRI. Likewise, the another road of the BRI is the accompanying digital
silk road (communications-5G-blockchain infrastructure). This is yet
another of the reasons why Huawei has been targeted for destruction.
The US is also in the process of stationing intermediate range missiles all
across the SCS, and around the first island chain surrounding China, as well
as attempting to press gang South Korea into hosting them. This is yet
another layer of dangerous escalation, and very, very destabilizing.
Twilight of Capitalism
The final dimension to the US-China competition is economic: this is the
uncanny fact that Chinas Socialism with Chinese characteristics works and
outclasses Western neoliberal capitalism by leaps and bounds. In terms of
developing an economy, raising living standards, creating public wealth,
serving and meeting its peoples needs, and dealing with crises, China beats
the capitalist west hands down.
Even the Trump administration, even as they claimed that such a state-led
economy could never compete against the superior free-market economy of the
US, have insistently demanded that China dismantle their planned economy in
trade negotiations, because of its superior advantages over capitalism.
This was not supposed to be: Clintonite Panda Huggers had always
justified, hubristically, that their engagement with China would result in
Chinas liberalization and total transformationthe inevitable, inexorable
result of engaging with a superior Western political ideology and economic
system. They also insisted that if China continued as it had with its
planned economy and autocratic ways in a modern era, it would simply fail:
it would end up like the Soviet Union or North Koreait had no choice but to
become more Western, more neoliberal, more capitalist. But a funny thing
happened on the way to the market.
China built a system that has brought 850+ Million people out of poverty in
few short decades, is slated to end extreme poverty this year, and that has
already surpassed the US in PPP economy size and healthy life expectancy.
Chinas thriving, effective Central governmentwith a 93.1% approval
ratebreaks all Western conceptions of development, governance, legitimacy,
and of course, superiority.
With 80% of its top leadership scientists or engineers, China also outranks
the US in patents filed, top scientific papers published, and is a world
leader in fields such as AI, Robotics, Quantum Computing, 5G, highspeed
rail, advanced industrial production, next generation IT, materials science,
and sustainable energy development, low-carbon eco-cities, and
reforestation. It has also pledged to go carbon neutral by 2060,
essentially giving the world an outside chance to still beat global
warmingdespite being a historical carbon creditor. With its scientific
leadership, whole-of-society public health strategies, and its valuing of
every human life, it has also shown that it can organize to defeat a mass
pandemic in weeksand by overriding capitalist markets whenever and wherever
it sees fit.
Meanwhile the US still struggles with the largest number of cases and deaths
from Covida death rate 200 times that of Chinasand is incapable of
preventing Covid among its own top leadership. To boot, first in 2008, and
then in 2020, the US neoliberal capitalist economy was shown up to be a
jacked-up deck of cards, rescued only by massive Chinese debt-purchasing and
endless printing of fiat money.
In contrast, China has demonstrated that it has developed an alternative,
non-Western, non-capitalist model of developmentwithout war, invasion,
colonization, slavery, regime change, primitive accumulationthat the world
can emulate and follow.
Once you realize that, you understand why the US ruling classes are so
desperate to erase China and its example: China offers a threatening
alternative model of development that is non-capitalist, non-Western, and
non-colonial. As such, it undermines the wests neocolonial domination of
the third world and its debt-trap-based forced underdevelopment,
subservience, and expropriation. It also offers a model of state-led
ecological development. All this signals new possibilities of hope and
transformation for the world. The ruling classes in the west will go to war
to prevent this.
Where Does This All End?
Despite Chinas assurances that it does not want war, hot or cold, that it
seeks win-win cooperation and co-existence with all countries, and that it
disdains hegemony, the US is continually escalating, provoking, and
threatening China, even as it dismantles off-ramps, channels of
communication and global institutions for cooperation and de-escalation.
The conclusion to draw is hard, but obvious: if things continue as they
have, this can only lead to direct military confrontation and kinetic war.
The Democratic ticket as it stands, just as it silences the demands for
viable reform and change by the Sandernistas, BLM, Me Too, also ignores the
non-interventionist, peace-demanding wishes of the majority of the people,
and their demands for a better system and less violent foreign policy. It
doubles down on racism, sexism, capitalism, and militarism.
Bidens doctrine toward China, if he is elected, will be a continuation of
this noxious arc of history and planning. The think tank advising Biden on
foreign policy, CNAS, a near-rhyming clone to PNAC, has grandfathered in
most of existing anti-China doctrine, and has mapped out in obsessive
detail, the next steps of a highly destructive and dangerous strategy of
confrontation with China. The key difference is that it will unite
countries more skillfully against China, pivot away from Trumps
neomercantilism towards a more globalist approach, and likely implement
some revised version of the TPP, the 12 nation economic bloc against China.
Here are some key points to understand:
Escalation to war is bipartisan: there is no lesser evil here. The racist,
capitalist, imperial ruling classes cannot and will not tolerate a rising or
equal China in a multi-polar world. They would rather see the end of the
world than an end to Capitalism or White Supremacy.
One subset of this group believes that they can actually win a war against
China, or at the very least force its subjugation to the US. This submission
will not happen, given the actual balance of forces and Chinese
determination to resist.
US wants global supremacy but if the ruling class cant have ordered
supremacy, they are not averse to global disintegration and chaos. Proteges
of Hayek and Leo Strauss, they thrive on revolutionary disorder. One
fallback model of US supremacy is to plunge the rest of the world back into
the dark ages through hybrid warfarewhile the US controls the key systems
of communication, information, surveillance, finance, rent extraction, along
with the corridors of maritime transport.
There is a third group of elite hawks who are millenarian Christians.
Although a minority, they hold powerful positions. These believe in the
salvation and rapture of the faithful as existing contradictions are
heightened into Armageddon. These are religious zealots with no brakes or
constraints on their appetite for war.
War, if it happens, could rapidly turn nuclear. The US no longer has
overmatch in conventional weapons, and no longer subscribes to deterrence.
Instead, its declaratory policy allows nuclear weapons to be used against
significant non-nuclear strategic attacks[i]. Since the 2002 Nuclear
Posture Review, the US has explicitly prepared for nuclear war with China,
and threatens intolerable damage in response to non-nuclear or nuclear
aggression.[ii] The Chinese have disavowed nuclear first striketheir
nuclear capacity is currently minimal and purely defensivebut in case of
war the US military could easily resort to the use of low-yield nuclear
weapons[iii] or even decapitating nuclear first strikes to overcome its
conventional weaknesses. Chinas deterrence would then have to shift to
hair trigger, launch on warning. This means that war could rapidly
escalate to large scale nuclear strikes, which many scientists predict would
result in nuclear winter, dooming most forms of organic life on the planet.
Modern democracies require constant media manipulation and propaganda, to
manufacture consent for war. As a result, we are living in time of total
deceit, as Orwell put it: Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is
represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal
maniac
Political language
is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder
respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. William
Casey, CIA director summarized this succinctly: Well know when our
disinformation program is complete when everything the American public
believes is false.[iv]
What Then, Is To Be Done?
Our work is cut out for us: In war, the first casuality is truth. Our
task is to prevent the first casualty, challenge the lies; the second, to
organize and work for peace.
Think Critically:
As we approach elections, the possibility of an October surprise increases.
Remember:
Information war precedes, justifies, and enables kinetic war, therefore you
must think critically and defensively; do not take anything attacking China
at face value.
Evaluate everything for a) source b) logic, sense, rationality c) bracket &
evaluate emotional triggers or trigger words d) look at
counter-evidence/arguments
Make your own judgments, draw your own conclusions: seek truth from facts
Dont Be Fooled by the engineering of truthiness:
Stories and lies seem credible when they are 1) repeated incessantly 2)
resemble pre-existing stories (especially ones that are projected from our
own disowned flaws), 3) have some tiny grain of plausibility mixed in 4)
seem coherent or manufacture coherence through multiple sources, and 5) tug
at your heartstrings:
This means that we have to:
Watch out for memes and repetition: watch out for stories are seem
self-replicating, self-distributing, repetitive, and create an echo chamber:
this makes them seem real and convincing even when they are lies. Even
debunked stories serve as compost for more lies. Remember also that US
social media is handmaiden to the war machinethe worst is Twitter[v]it
promotes war propaganda and routinely purges counter-narratives.
Distinguish the coherence and validation of a story that has multiple
sources of verification from planted-and-echo-chambered-stories (for
example, anything about China connected to WUC (World Uighur
Congress)-Adrian ZenzASPI-Nathan Ruser-nexus; the
Lausan-Jacobin-Nation-DemocracyNow-tendency; or The
Guardian-NYTimes-Washington Post-CFR-cabal or other combinations thereof).
Outlets like these are not channels of independent verification, they are
often a set of single sourced memes skillfully distributed out and repeated
through different channels, part of the fire hose[vi] strategy of war
propaganda.
Watch out for emotional trigger words: genocide, slavery, concentration
camp,trafficking, sterilization, theft/IP theft, espionage, cyber
warfare, attributed without any proof. These are trigger words designed to
bypass critical evaluation, appealing to your emotions: fear, pity, and
outrage.
Watch out for projection and gaslighting: the US has a long history of slave
and prison slave labor[vii], of third world debt-traps, of
mistreating/torturing/killing muslims, of genociding indigenous peoples, of
mass incarceration, of police brutality, of cultural genocide, mass
sterilization, medical testing without consent[viii]. If you see these
words or allegations alleged against China, especially in a context where it
makes no sense, evaluate[ix] whether it seems real because there is actual
proof, or because it is a convenient projection of the US/Wests own
disowned violence, criminality, and brutality.
Speak up and simply call out the propaganda for what it is: lies to enable
war and war-profiteering. But dont get trapped in the weeds of
debunkingthey will spread a 1000 new lies before youve refuted a single
one: dont expect to counter the firehose of falsehood with the squirt gun
of truth; cut it off at the root.
Do not allow yourself to be silenced. Be prepared to be criticized as a
human rights denier. Not having truth on their side, this is what the
worst human rights abusers will always resort to: shut the f*ck up [or
else]. Dont be intimated, and dont let them silence you. Make your voice
heard!
Last but not least, organize! Despair is not an option! The following are
good places to start:
https://peacepivot.org/
https://www.codepink.org/china
https://www.nocoldwar.org/
https://www.popularresistance.org/tag/china/
This article was written with gratitude for the memory and inspiration of
Kevin Zeese, a tireless fighter for truth, peace, and justice. Many thanks
also to John Pilger for his kind feedback and encouragement.
