Tag Archives: China

Let’s Face it, China Is Its Own Worst Enemy Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy • Tags:

The Chinese regime sucks, but the Sinophobia that the US political class is ratcheting up is all a rhetorical smokescreen that has the effect of obscuring the real relationship between the US and China.

By Doug Bandow

The American Conservative

In hopes of winning reelection, President Donald Trump is launching a new Cold War against the People’s Republic of China. Still focused on trade, however, his heart does not appear to be in his campaign—in contrast to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who obviously enjoys launching rhetorical broadsides against Beijing. Pompeo also has been seeking allies willing to join a veritable economic war against China.

So far Pompeo has met with only indifferent success. The PRC’s economic reach makes countries reluctant to risk their relationship with China. Nations in East Asia, including allies such as Australia and South Korea, worry about security as well as economic ties. And no one has any confidence in a Washington administration that has leavened arbitrary incompetence with arrogant hypocrisy. If there is one U.S. president no one is inclined to follow, it is Donald Trump.

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Hong Kong Teachers Fired and Afraid as China Targets Liberal Thinkers Reply

by • Uncategorized • Tags: ,

What do American neo-Maoism and Chinese National Socialism have in common?

By Joyu Wang and Lucy Craymer

Wall Street Journal

HONG KONG—Teachers who backed antigovernment protests in the city—by taking to the streets or supporting the demonstrators on social media—are being reprimanded and, in some cases, fired as China’s Communist Party increasingly moves to stamp out dissent.

Many observers say they fear the tradition of liberal education and critical thinking in what has been a major world financial center will be supplanted by Chinese-style pro-government lessons and suppression of political discourse. Pressure has mounted since Beijing imposed a sweeping new national-security law here at the end of June following a year of protests.

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China’s worries about separatism run deep Reply

by • Anarchism/Anti-State, Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Secession • Tags:

Peter Zeihan has argued that China may eventually fracture due to its internal instability and fragmentation. If that were to happen, I would consider it to be a major victory for “pan-secessionism” as a revolutionary tactic, as was the overthrow of the USSR and its Eastern European satellites. In addition, the US empire would no longer be able to use the PRC as a whipping boy/bogeyman. As an anarchist, I am for the dissolution of large states everwhere: America, China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Brazil, Mexico, Nigeria…they all need to go. A world of microstates is not pure anarchy, but it is far more tolerable and manageable.

Analysis by James Griffiths, CNN

In a speech on the 150th anniversary of the birth of Sun Yat-sen — seen by many as modern China’s founding father — President Xi Jinping pledged to “resolutely oppose” any attempt to divide the country.

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Anti-China Rhetoric Is On The Rise. Is The US Right To Be Worried?- Bill Jones Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy • Tags: , ,

The Chinese have their problems but they’re being used by the US regime to deflect Americans’ attention from the fact that they’re being ruled by incompetent morons.

William Jones is the Washington Bureau Chief for the Executive Intelligence Review (EIR). He is also a Non-Resident Fellow of the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University. His articles have appeared in numerous Chinese publications.

China is monitoring employees’ brain waves and emotions — and the technology boosted one company’s profits by $315 million Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Economics/Class Relations, Police State/Civil Liberties, Science and Technology • Tags:

Keep in mind that China is a permanent member of the US-created UN Security Council, the World Trade Organization (which manages the global capitalist empire), and the G-20, which the Asian Development Bank has characterized as the steering committee of global capitalism. In other words, China is just a province in global capitalism and just another crime family with a seat on the Commission. The Sinophobia that the Repugnicans have adopted is a pseudo-populist rhetorical trick that is meant as a counterpart to the Democraps Russophobia, a distraction from ruling class shenanigans, and an attempt to capitalize on anti-Chinese sentiment generated by COVID-19. Don’t think for one minute that US oligarchs don’t enviously observe China’s techno-surveillance system and regard it as a prototype for their future ambitions.

By Tara Chan

Business Insider

  • Chinese businesses and the military are monitoring employees’ brain activity and emotions.
  • The “emotional surveillance technology” helps employers identify mood shifts so they can change break times, an employee’s task, or even send them home.
  • The technology reportedly increases productivity and profitability, with one company claiming its profits jumped by $315 million.
  • Emotional surveillance adds to a wide surveillance network of facial recognition and internet censorship across China.

Employees’ brain waves are reportedly being monitored in factories, state-owned enterprises, and the military across China.

The technology works by placing wireless sensors in employees’ caps or hats which, combined with artificial intelligence algorithms, spot incidents of workplace rage, anxiety, or sadness.

Employers use this “emotional surveillance technology” by then tweaking workflows, including employee placement and breaks, to increase productivity and profits.

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Should America Aspire To Be More Like China? 2

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Left and Right • Tags: , ,

A Marxist-Leninist commie-worshiper makes his case for Xi Jinping’s neo-Maoism. To Western leftists who want to live under state-communism, I always say join the military where you are guaranteed a job and all your basic needs (food, shelter, clothes, healthcare) are provided. Or if the military is not your thing, then go to jail or prison.

China is a source of serf labor for Western corporations, cheap loans for US debt financing, and, nowadays, a test market for state repression (e.g. the “social credit” system). Although I agree with him when he discusses the relationship between US imperialism and China. If you look at a map of where US military bases on located in Asia and in the Pacific, it’s obvious that the objective is to encircle the countries where the US does not already have a direct military presence (e.g. Russia, China, Iran, etc. the ones that are merely provinces in global capitalism and direct satellites of the Empire).

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The New New Cold War is Pretty Much the Old New Cold War 2

by • American Decline, Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Culture Wars/Current Controversies • Tags: , ,

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

Remember when the Russians were coming? It seems like just last week Vladimir Putin was whistling the Soviet National Anthem just around every corner of main street. After the colossal clusterfuck of Hillary 2016, you couldn’t swing a dead cat in a news room without hitting another crafty Kremlin conspiracy. Those shifty almond-eyed bastards were the secret sauce behind everything that gave neoliberals heartburn; MAGA, Black Lives Matter, Wikileaks, Bernie Bros, Jill Stein, Sasquatch, Tulsi Gabbard, Colin Kaepernick, the female orgasm. They were behind it all! Putin was everywhere, like Elvis Presley in a Mojo Nixon song, and he was always up to something new, some dastardly new conspiracy to corrupt our precious bodily fluids that only Rachel Maddow and six permanently anonymous intelligence experts could save us from. Donald Trump was constantly on the brink of impeachment for pissing on a Russian prostitute dressed as Abe Lincoln and wrapped in the Constitution or some such noise. It made sense in the moment, I swear it did! It was a new day in Imperial America, a whole new Cold War was upon us, and Adam Schiff would lead us to the promise land like a liberal Joe McCarthy on a gallant white stead.

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The Coming War on China Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy • Tags:

John Pilger’s new documentary.

Russiahate didn’t get saluted when the Deep State/neoliberal wing of the ruling class/new clerisy alliance ran it up the flagpole. Now the right-wing of the ruling class is countering with Chinahate, and the neoliberal Bidenists are moving “out-Chinahate” the Trumpians.

There’s not going to be a war between the US and China. The US ruling class views China as a source of cheap labor and cheap loans. They’re not going to give that up even if Chinahate is what they hope will be a convenient rhetorical trick.

And China is dependent on Western capital to such a degree that they can’t step but so far out of line.

The Coming War on China, from award winning journalist John Pilger, reveals what the news doesn’t – that the world’s greatest military power, the United States, and the world’s second economic power, China, both nuclear-armed, may well be on the road to war.

Nuclear war is not only imaginable, but planned. The greatest build-up of NATO military forces since the Second World War is under way on the western borders of Russia. On the other side of the world, the rise of China is viewed in Washington as a threat to American dominance.

To counter this, President Obama announced a ‘pivot to Asia’, which meant that almost two-thirds of all US naval forces would be transferred to Asia and the Pacific, their weapons aimed at China. A policy which has been taken up by his successor Donald Trump, who during his election campaign said “We can’t continue to allow China to rape our country and that’s what they’re doing”.

Filmed on five possible front-lines across Asia and the Pacific over two years, the story is told in chapters that connect a secret and ‘forgotten’ past to the rapacious actions of great power today and to a resistance, of which little is known in the West.

‘Put on a mask and shut up’: China’s undiplomatic diplomats hit back at critics Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy • Tags:

Score one for the Chinese on this one.

By Shashank Bengali and Alice Su
Los Angeles Times
a man wearing a suit and tie: Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian takes a question at the daily media briefing in Beijing on April 8, 2020.
BEIJING — The newscast blares from a television set in a Beijing apartment, carrying through an open window and echoing across the compound. The refrain is the same every evening: praise for China’s handling of the coronavirus, dire scenes from foreign hospitals and condemnations of the United States.
The tone is often withering. Last week, U.S. Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo was declared “the public enemy of humanity.” A few nights later, the anchor feigned sympathy for Americans, who she said were left to die while their government railed against China.

Fear and Loathing in Coronaville Volume 7: What Rough Beast Slouches Towards Washington and Beijing? Reply

by • American Decline, Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Electoralism/Democratism, Environment, Health and Medicine, Police State/Civil Liberties, Science and Technology • Tags: , , ,

Check out Part 1, Part 2, Part 3,  Part 4,  Part 5, and Part 6.

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

As the smoke slowly settles on the bucolic hills of my farmland community and many others, the Coronavirus nightmare may be far from over but the worst of it appears to be in the rearview mirror of the pickup. The worst also appears to be far less horrific than the self-appointed television experts had predicted, at least in the parts of the country already skeptical of such institutions, further dredging the chasm of trust between us simpleton country folk and the metropolitan slumlords who always seem to know better. Maybe if we had taken a page from Sweden and displayed a little more trust in our citizenry… Nah, never mind such strategically fruitless distractions. Never mind the swelling police state behind the curtain. The important thing now is who do we blame? What monster of the week do we scapegoat to keep people from asking the annoying questions about transparent democracy and honest journalism?

After a good zeitgeist rattling catastrophe, America, like all propaganda-weaned state-subsistent sheople, loves a good boogeyman to blame for a complicated mess. The right in this country, now represented by not one, but two rapists headlining both major parties thanks in part to Coronavirus, has stuck to the tried and true strategy of blaming the filthy foreigner. Clearly, bark Jurassic candidates Trump and Biden on opposing commercials, this plague was brought to us by that fearsome red dragon clothed in the sun called China. Aha! Communism, an oldie but a goodie. And these syphilitic oligarchs aren’t without a grain of truth, however blunt they may have rendered it with their nursing home grade racism. This thing did creep out of a city with a Biosafety Level 4 laboratory. The kind built curiously with US funding to keep up with Uncle Sam’s post-anthrax lust for black death. But ‘the brown guy did it!’ still feels more than a little played out in this day and age, like some white suburban bluebeard in Salt Lake City wailing that the Dominican drifter is responsible for the blood on his Brigham Young sweater.

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China’s Tech Totalitarianism Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Police State/Civil Liberties, Science and Technology • Tags: ,

One reason I can’t really go for all the Chinahate we see today is that China is merely a test market for the kind of system the overlords of the empire want for the entire world, i.e. serf labor, techno-fascist surveillance, and labor camps for those who dissent. Hating on China merely for being a backward society ruled by dumbasses is kind of like hating on Arkansas.

And I like John Stossel, even if he’s a Koch shill.

If China really does have coronavirus under control, the dictators will claim their creepy “social credit score” system helped.

How Should The Left Think About China? Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy • Tags:

A couple of Jacobin Magazine-style “democratic socialists” engage in a torturous discussion of what the “progressive” rather than “reactionary” view of China should be, and why China is generally bad as opposed to Cuba, which is supposedly generally good.

China should be viewed as a backwater province in global capitalism, whose only purpose is to provide cheap labor and cheap loans to the US, and which would collapse if US capital ever left China. Other than that, China is just another authoritarian state that needs to be overthrown. A New Non-Aligned Movement should support all forms of resistance in China, as the pan-anarchist/pan-secessionist paradigm could easily be applied to places China, India, Pakistan, Russia, etc. because as anarchists we are opposed to states everywhere but other than that the geopolitical focus should be on the Anglo-American-Zionist-Wahhabist empire.

Tucker shreds former McKinsey partner over China’s human rights violations Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy • Tags: ,

I generally don’t agree with Tucker Carlson’s Sinophobia. Yes, China is probably as close to being an actual “fascist” regime of any country in the world today in the sense of being a one-party state, with a cult of personality built around the leader, a state-directed system of “crony capitalism,” and a statist-collectivist ethos that appeals to national chauvinism and ancient cultural traditions as the self-legitimating ideology of the ruling class. (I would consider the DPRK to be more Stalinist than fascist, and Saudi Arabia to merely be a classic medieval regime).

But China is only a backwater province in global capitalism. China’s massive population is the only thing that makes China significant as an economic player. Only about 12% of China’s territory is arable land, and China’s relationship to the US is merely to provide cheap loans to the US government and cheap labor to US corporations. Historically, China has gone through periods of expansion and contraction, and its present period of expansion will eventually implode.

Yes, China is also involved in significant economic expansion throughout the Global South, but China’s xenophobia will prevent China from being successful imperialists. A successful long-standing imperialist empire must necessarily maintain a certain degree of cosmopolitanism (like Rome, Britain, or America). Yes, I am in favor of an anarchist/anti-imperialist revolution in China, but North America (“the belly of the beast”) still where the action is when it comes to anti-imperialist struggle.

U.S. Warships Enter South China Sea Hot Spot as Tensions With China Escalate Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Military • Tags:

Is the right-wing of the ruling class using the current situation to pick a fight with China? China has very limited naval power and poses no conventional military threat to the US.

By Hannah Beech

New York Times

American warships have sailed into disputed waters in the South China Sea, according to military analysts, heightening a standoff in the waterway and sharpening the rivalry between the United States and China, even as much of the world is in lockdown because of the coronavirus.

The America, an amphibious assault ship, and the Bunker Hill, a guided missile cruiser, entered contested waters off Malaysia. At the same time, a Chinese government ship in the area has for days been tailing a Malaysian state oil company ship carrying out exploratory drilling. Chinese and Australian warships have also powered into nearby waters, according to the defense experts.

Despite working to control a pandemic that spread from China earlier this year, Beijing has not reduced its activities in the South China Sea, a strategic waterway through which one-third of global shipping flows. Instead, the Chinese government’s yearslong pattern of assertiveness has only intensified, military analysts said.

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Media, Dems unable to admit WHO has big China problem Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Health and Medicine • Tags: ,

As I have said before, China and Russia merely represent the leading factions within the global capitalist-financier empire (see Antony Sutton from the right or Hardt and Negri from the left). Their role within the empire is that of rebellious provinces in relation to the dominant American-Atlanticist-Zionist-Wahhabi axis that extends from Eastern Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean to the Pacific Rim. They assume the same positions on an international level that individual US states assume on the domestic level. Just as California has latched on to the Democrats and Texas has latched on to the Republicans, China has also attached itself to the Democrats, while Russia has placed its bet on the Republicans.

The Russiahate and Chinahate (and Iranhate and Syriahate) that even many supposed political dissidents in the West, and particularly the US, get into is misplaced. The other supposed “major powers” are merely provincial authorities while the “rogue states” are merely glorified international street gangs.

It’s true that US unipolar hegemony is starting to recede but, as Peter Zeihan has pointed out, the emerging multipolar world will be dominated by France, Turkey, Argentina, and Japan, not Russia or China.