Brown has gravitas to write such a book. First, he is fluent in Mandarin (as well as learning Portuguese, Arabic, and French). Second, he has lived 13 years in China, currently in Shenzhen. He has also traveled to most of its regions. This served as a foundation for a political travelog Brown wrote, 44 Days Backpacking in China: The Middle Kingdom in the 21st Century, with the United States, Europe and the Fate of the World in Its Looking Glass.
In addition to his years of having lived in China, Brown's having grown up in Oklahoma and having graduated from Oklahoma State University has provided him an ringside seat from which to compare and analyze the imperialist war-making United States and the anti-imperialist rise of China, now in concert with Russia, described in rich, colloquial detail (e.g., Brown refers to the Chinese government as Baba Beijing; a colloquialism that I'd translate to as Big Daddy Beijing) in China Rising. I carried out an email interview with Jeff Brown to illuminate western media fabrications about China and to examine US political and military machinations against the next preeminent economic power, a socialist nation whose rise can be viewed as an ominous signal portending capitalism's demise, or at least its competitive equal.
© pluto press
Kim Petersen: First since you have years of experience in China. Whopper question to begin, yes, but as a lead-in could you sum up the major change(s) you've seen and what this bodes for the future of China and the world.
Jeff J. Brown: So, Kim, here is your whopper answer. China has never stopped adapting to what it needs to move forward, going back to liberation in 1949. During what I call the Mao Era (1949-1978), many reforms and measures were routinely implemented to move the people forward and improve their lives, although this is often ignored or denied in the West. During the Deng Era (1978-2012), this similar notion of "continual improvement" for the people changed gears and capitalist methods were integrated into China's economy to accumulate the wealth that the Communist Party of China (CPC) feels the country needs, to realize the Marxist transition from socialism to "rich" communism. Now we are in the Xi Era (2012-present) and the government, whom I affectionately call Baba Beijing, is taking steps to keep the Chinese constitution's goal of achieving a communist society and economy.
With such lofty goals as these, it is not surprising that China and its 1.4 billion citizens are in a constant state of evolution. We lived here 1990-1997 and came back in 2010, after a five-year hiatus in France and nine years in the US. It was a jaw dropping and awe inspiring experience to see what had happened in just 14 years. Not just the infrastructure and overall development of the country, but the parallel growth and sophistication of the people was and continues to be, for me, the greatest fascination. The Chinese are an incredibly resilient and adaptable people, which is a key reason that they possess the longest, continuously existing civilization in human history.
Since 1949, China has brought one billion citizens out of poverty and created the largest and fastest growing middle class in the world, now over 300 million and adding 10,000 citizens to this category, every day. In purchasing power parities (PPP), China surpassed the US, to become the world's #1 economy in 2014 and in PPP terms, will be 50% bigger than America's in only a year from now. In classic exchange rate terms, China will leap frog the US before 2020.
China's President Xi Jinping calls this the "new normal". But in reality, it's the "same old same old". Until 1872, when a colonized and plundered China finally fell from grace as the world's biggest economy, in the face of a rapacious, drug dealing, imperial United States and Western Europe, the Middle Kingdom was always the biggest country with the biggest economy, going back 5,000 years. How big? In 250 BC, the mighty Roman Empire had 4,000,000 subjects, while at the same time, the Chinese nation had 35,000,000, almost nine times as many.
Thanks to an anomalous, 500-year change of fortunes between the colonial, expansionist West and China, starting in the 15th century, until now, the European races can be forgiven if they think being masters of the world's 85% dark skinned people's and their natural resources has always been their divine right. But now, with China's freedom and independence from Western tyranny, starting in 1949, they are going to have to wrap their heads around getting back to China's "old normal", of being humanity's leader. As long as the CPC stays in power, and I think they will for 100 or more years, China will continue to claim economic supremacy on Planet Earth.
This is welcomed by the vast majority of humanity, since they are the ones who have been pillaged, raped and massacred by the West, for thousands of years, starting with Alexander the Great, in the 4th century BC. But China as the world's "big dragon" is also very positive for citizens of Eurangloland. Western wealth, all its monuments, museums, skyscrapers and broad boulevards, was and is being stolen from underdeveloped countries. It is all built on the blood and bones of at least a billion souls, who have been and are continuing to be slaughtered and exterminated by Eurangloland and Israel. Our standard of living is thanks to ongoing racism, colonialism, imperialism and war across the planet.
Not at all true for China. The Chinese have never been hegemonic, colonial, nor imperial. For thousands of years, the Chinese expanded their nation out to their natural borders. They had many opportunities and were centuries ahead in the technology department, to be an Asian Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Andrew Jackson or King Leopold II. However, it's just not in their cultural and political DNA to dominate and exploit other peoples - regardless of all the Western propaganda to the contrary.
You don't have to be a rocket scientist to see that the West's global empire of colonialism is starting to collapse. World War I and II were the clarion calls of decline and the hundreds of other wars and the violation, if not destruction of most of the planet's countries and their governments, since then and ongoing, are the harbingers of doom.
KP: Next the question of the Chinese political-economic system. The People's Republic of China is nominally Communist. There was no question of this while Chairman Mao Zedong set about modernizing the country. Leftist professor emeritus James Petras argues, however, that China has strayed from socialism and that a second revolution is under way in China that seeks to moralize capitalism. He cites Deng Xiaoping as stating to be rich is glorious. This is incorrect, and there is no record of Deng ever having said such. So the introduction to Petras' thesis is off to an inauspicious start.
Petras in a later article writes, "China's capitalist development was based on a triple alliance of national, foreign and state capitalists, all of whom depended on the widespread, massive corruption of state-party officials."
This was in 2015 when the tenure of current Chairman Xi Jinping was underway. One of his key planks is ridding the Chinese Communist Party of corruption. He sees the survival of the CCP as dependent on this. [See, e.g., Xi Jinping, The Governance of China (2014): location 352.] Xi has made clear that China is Marxist-Leninist in orientation but that it is in the earliest stages of socialism. Given that corruption has long existed and is not fully eradicated (if such is even possible), and given the growing number of Chinese billionaires, and given the high GINI coeffient what is your take on "socialism with Chinese characteristics"?
JB: There is a well-known stable of commercially successful "China experts", who have not had the same experiences as I have had over 13 years here, and continue to do so. They see a China that they imagine, or onto which they project their mythical Western ideals. These notions are cultivated among fifth columnist locals, chambers of commerce types, sinophobic, communism-hating expats and red baiting people back home. On the other side of the spectrum, it is being in a bubble of like-minded educators and intelligentsia, who reject China's adoption of capitalist tools to create the wealth that Marxism needs to evolve towards rich communism.
When they travel here, they move around in their five-star hotel bubbles and they get their information and ideas from this same colonial/imperial milieu, on the one hand, or communist idealists on the other. I should know, since I used to be a member of the first group, until returning to China in 2010. So, I can empathize. Coming back to China in 2010 was the beginning of a transformative journey, in the arc of my existence in this life.
Ninety-nine percent of Westerners cannot accept the fact that today, China is a communist country, economy and people. Until I researched and wrote 44 Days Backpacking in China: The Middle Kingdom in the 21st Century, with the United States, Europe and the Fate of the World in Its Looking Glass and then China Rising: Capitalist Roads, Socialist Destinations, I was among this huge majority. The experiences and knowledge I gained in China, since 2010, allowed me to deprogram the Western avalanche of Pavlovian propaganda about the evils of communism and socialism.
What I learned is that not much has changed since the beginning of Chinese civilization. China was communist long before Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels made it a household term. With the human weakness of projecting one's self-inflated sense of superiority over Others (racism), Baba Beijing's adoption of market style tools to create wealth for it citizens is conflated as "aping capitalists". Every leader since Mao Zedong, up to Xi Jinping has been consistently clear about this. In accordance with Marxist theory,
We have to be rich before we can transition into pure, wealthy communism. We are not going to give up our hard fought socialist society to do so. Thus, we will use certain aspects of capitalism to get rich enough, so eventually, we can live in communist harmony. This is the definition of socialism with Chinese characteristics.How many "China experts" have read China's national constitution? Its latest version was guided by the West's favorite "free marketeer", Deng Xiaoping, in 1982. It is a defiant, principled, anti-capitalist, anti-colonial and anti-imperial manifesto, full of implied contempt for Eurangloland and everything it stands for.
The flag of the People's Republic of China has five gold stars on a red background. The solid red stands for communism stretching across the entire nation. The big gold star represents the CPC. The four smaller gold stars in the CPC's orbit stand for the working class, the agrarian class, the small business class and the big business class. During the Mao Era, workers and farmers were favored over the two entrepreneurial classes. After Mao, Deng and all subsequent leaders have promoted the last two classes back into China's economy, along with heavy support for urban workers and rural folk, to create the wealth needed for rich communism. Last year, China dramatically streamlined the business license process and millions were issued. The CPC loves its citizens' entrepreneurial spirit, with the employment and economic activity it generates for the masses.
On the ground here, every square centimeter of China is publicly owned. No one can own real estate, only private property. Every bank, insurance company, airline, railway, subway system, port, airport and all (toll) roads and highways belong to the people. All media, phone companies, water, gas, electricity and nuclear utilities are people-owned. Baba Beijing dominates over 100 key sectors of the economy, including chemicals, maritime shipping, agricultural commodities, precious metals, auto and truck manufacturing, steel, mining, construction, aerospace and avionics. The list goes on and on. Public real estate and massive state participation in key industries are what Marxists call "controlling the means of production". Yes, some of these state-owned enterprises have been put on the stock market. But read the fine print. The maximum level of private stock ownership is only 30% and consolidated control of those shares is prevented.
While there are tens of thousands of village and county level SOEs that could be more "efficient", from a Western capitalist's standpoint, they are a bedrock of social and economic stability for the hundreds of millions of citizens who live outside the major metropolitan centers. Baba Beijing is no fool. They are staying on the books, with tweaks, reforms and consolidation, so that Chinese society stays harmonious and overall, prosperous for the masses, or the little guys.
But the bigger the SOEs get, the more profitable and well run they become. Few Westerners know that China has the world's largest bank (ICBC) and three more in the Top Ten; two of the five biggest petroleum concerns, the largest railway corporation and some of the world's biggest airlines, steel, mining, auto manufacturers and on and on. In 2015, the ten largest people-owned Chinese businesses made a whopping +$200 billion combined after tax profits. These "communist" corporations are loaded with cash and they are on a buying spree around the world, ironically turning private, Western companies into publicly owned "red" businesses. Some of the deals are sector changing. ChemChina is in the final stages of buying the world's second biggest agriculture concern, Syngenta (after #1 Monsanto).
As you stated correctly, Kim, President Xi Jinping is making sure that Baba Beijing and the 1.4 billion citizens of this country live up to the spirit and vision of China's very inspiring national constitution, as well as the constitution of the Communist Party of China. This, in spite of the adoption of capitalist tools to expand the wealth of the country. He is the Western empire's worst nightmare and just what the doctor ordered, after a generation of sociocultural westernization.
As far as Mr. Petras' fatuous claim of "widespread, massive corruption of state-party officials", if this were true to the depth that he suggests, then how did China's economy grow almost 7% per annum, 1949-1978 and nearly 10% per year, since then? If true, how has Baba Beijing lifted a billion people out of poverty, created the largest and fastest growing middle class on the planet, not to mention recently, a new billionaire every week? If so, then why is Baba Beijing, for the last 15 years and continues to do so, garnering +80% public satisfaction levels, in polls conducted by Western companies like Gallup and Pew? Hands down, it is the world's most popular government among the world's citizens.
The relentless foghorn in the Western media about China's "massive" corruption is a classic propaganda strategy to deflect attention away from the fetid, venal swamps of personal, moral and financial turpitude that is oozing out of almost every corporation and political institution in Washington, New York, London, Paris, Brussels and, and, and...
Of course there is corruption here, as there is everywhere that sedentary civilization has existed for the last 8,000 years. In China, hundreds of thousands of government and business folk are being punished, from fines, to loss of jobs, to hard prison time and for the most felonious, executions. You don't want to be a corporate or political crook in China. Better to pillage and rape society in Eurangloland, where at the worst, you only have to pay a modest fine and not even apologize, while waving at all the suckers and chumps from your private jet or yacht.
As far as attacking poverty, it went out of fashion in the West with the Reagan/Thatcher neoliberal revolution, which rapidly spread over much of the world, except in communist countries, like China, Cuba, North Korea and Eritrea, and later in Latin America's ALBA group (Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our Americas). Every time President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang come back from a successful overseas diplomatic trip, both will invariably get on national TV, showing them visiting less developed areas of China and touting the socialist moral responsibility to redistribute the people's wealth to bring the most unfortunate of the economy to an adequate level of respectability and productivity. There are no other leaders in the G-20 who are even talking about eliminating poverty. And it's not just PR. Baba Beijing has earmarked ¥400 billion (about $65 billion) to make it happen, before 2020.
I have talked to a number of Chinese government officials and often the first thing they bring up is income inequality and the GINI index. They tell me that throughout the annals of history, no government can last long, if the wealth of a nation is not fairly shared by all. When China's GINI index hit 0.45 in 2012 (it was about 0.15 during the Mao Era), Baba Beijing was apoplectic and immediately began significant changes, with more progressive taxes, social benefits (rolling out universal health care and guaranteed retirement income) and people oriented infrastructure (rest homes, community centers, clinics, hospitals, low income housing). It has now fallen to about 0.42 and the goal is to make sure it goes below 0.40 and stays there. If going measures do not get there, China's formidable billionaire class can expect a big chunk to be taken out of the backsides. Xi Jinping even mentioned the GINI index in his keynote address for the G-20 summit September 4-5, warning that the current global level of 0.70 and climbing, bodes ill for the human race. Like poverty elimination, no other G-20 leaders ever mention the perils of a high GINI index, except Baba Beijing.
KP: One capitalist pitfall China has mostly avoided is neoliberalism. State-Owned-Enterprises remain a cornerstone of the Chinese economy ("... we must unswervingly consolidate and develop the public economy, persist in the leading role of public ownership, giving full play to the leading role of the state-owned economy, and incessantly increase its vitality, leveraging power and impact": See Xi, loc 1274.). As you point out, big Chinese banks are mainly state-owned (China Rising, p 199.); hence, there was no bail-out of private banks and shareholders in China. When seen in comparison to foreclosures against homeowners and the bail-out of private institutions in the USA, what does this say to you?
JB: Westerners hear what they want to hear, when Baba Beijing talks about structural reforms and supply side economics. They are deluded that it means privatizing real estate and selling off all the SOEs to Goldman Sachs at fire sale prices. As long as the CPC is in power, this will never happen. Reforms and policy will stay within the communist framework. Period.
Every CEO, the boards of directors, VPs, department and division managers in China's SOEs are fire breathing members of the CPC and if they hope to keep their jobs, they have to run a tight ship, while remaining loyal to the national and Party constitutions. The vast majority have spent decades coming up through the ranks, starting at village, then county, provincial, regional and finally national level business management. President Xi Jinping, Premier Li Keqiang and the vast majority of China's upper level politicians came up the same way, but on the government side, not business. Sorry Wall Street, but China's managers are far and away superior, since their first goal is to help Baba Beijing maintain social stability and popular harmony. Profit is expected, but comes second. Western businesses don't have those kinds of weighty socioeconomic responsibilities. Let's be honest: their only goal is maximum profit and to hell with the human condition.
That's why China's banks are used to carrying more bad debt than in the West. Throwing someone on the street for being late in their mortgage payments is a desperate move. Struggling small and medium sized businesses aren't sold at bank auction just because they hit a rough patch. China's people-owned banks work with their clients to avoid, as long as possible, the social disruption of a foreclosed family home or small business. It happens all the time, but only as a last resort.
KP: A few weeks back, a Dane expressed her surprise to me at the number of homeless she encountered in Vancouver. My response was that capitalist Canada isn't China where poverty elimination is a national goal for 2020. Down south, 47 million Americans find themselves mired below the poverty line. Why is poverty elimination not a national goal or program in the USA? And why isn't the elimination of poverty in China greeted by banner headlines in the West — a rhetorical question given what we know about corporate media.
JB: There are no slums in China. There is a huge, 300 million floating population that moves from city to city for low level jobs, as construction, restaurant and sanitation workers. They lead a hard life on the road, living in temporary quarters, doing manual labor and not being settled. I have seen thousands of them and talked to a few. They are gainfully employed, not starving, nor are they undernourished, like so many millions now in Eurangloland. There are a handful of beggars, mostly handicapped, but given the population of China's cities, they are a zillionth of a percent. And then there are those now well-known 72 million Chinese who live in extreme poverty and who are targeted by Baba Beijing to be lifted out of their current fate by 2020.
Westerners don't like to hear it, but once one pierces the veil and looks objectively at reality back home and in China, the answer is obvious: China does not have the many social and economic cancers and terrible inequality like the West, because it is communist. Or, if it's easier for your readers to swallow, they can call it 'socialism with Chinese characteristics'. This country is working furiously to eliminate poverty in the next four years because it is communist.
KP: From the western corporate-state media we often hear about the denial of Tibetan self-determination along with condemnations of China for human-rights abuses. Indeed, all nations must be censured for human-rights violations. However, do Canada, Australia, Aotearoa, and the USA have any moral high ground from which to denounce China on human rights when these western countries exist through the genocide and sustained dispossession of their Original Peoples?
JB: China has many centuries of relations and governance with Tibet. Richard Nixon came to China in 1972, to recognize the People's Republic. Part of the agreement signed with Mao Zedong was that Tibet and Xinjiang are inalienable parts of the People's Republic. This isn't like Israelis, whose presence in Palestine was negligible-to-none for a thousand years, and then they invaded and stole Arab and Christian lands, via genocide and terrorism, under the collaborative, colonial eyes of Uncle Sam and Britain. China and Tibet have a common and often married history, going back a millennium or more. Texas, Corsica and Newfoundland, were nominally independent for brief periods in history, but came back to the national fold. The same is true of Tibet, Xinjiang and will be for Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao.
Western moral ground? This is a racist, rapacious, raping, plundering, pillaging, genocidal, war- and slave-mongering, environment-destroying, expansionist, colonial, imperial and deeply criminal civilization. It has and continues to gleefully slaughter at least 1,000,000,000 human brothers and sisters since 1492, all in the name of God and luxurious lucre. One billion is conservative. Dharampal, the great Indian intellectual, carefully studied historical and census records in what used to be colonial India. He calculated that the British caused the premature death of at least 1.5 billion people in the Indian subcontinent alone. The worldwide figure is probably twice that. But even a billion murdered outshines by several magnitudes all of the premature deaths caused by Russia, China, the Americas, Asia and Africa combined. Try to find these truths in any Western text- or reference books. The pathological silence of censorship is deafening, alongside its unctuous mythology.
Part 2: The economic resurrection of China
In Part 1, I interviewed Jeff Brown, author of 44 Days Backpacking in China and the recently published China Rising, to get a perspective from an American ex-pat who has lived in, deeply studied China, and learned Mandarin.
I am glad that Jeff Brown raised the 15th century voyages of Zheng He in Part 2. Zheng He was a Muslim Chinese admiral who navigated much of the world in colossal wooden treasure ships conducting trade and spreading news of a China that was then the world power. Following Zheng He's voyages, China would become influenced by Confucianism and become insular. Now China faces outward, and it is a trading power again.
China continues to expand its economy. What does China's economic resurrection mean for Indigenous peoples, trade deals, and sanctions against a socialist neighbor? Brown further presents a perspective on China's place in the world that differs from that related by monopoly media in the West.
Kim Petersen: Permit me to quibble. You wrote, "Texas, Corsica and Newfoundland, were nominally independent for brief periods in history, but came back to the national fold. The same is true of Tibet, Xinjiang and will be for Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao."
Hmmm... "nominally independent" sounds like western propaganda to me. Something like you are independent as long as you do as the colonizing entity directs. Mohawk Elder Kahentinetha Horn stated a moral imperative: "No nation has a right to denationalize another nation." Did Texas not achieve nominal independence based on denying the nationhood of Nermernuh (Comanche) in Comancheria, as well as the Apaches, Araphoes, Kiowas, and other Indigenous peoples? So which national fold did Texas return to? Newfoundland became nominally independent from Britain in 1949 when it joined Canada which was also nominally independent from Britain at that time, meaning that they were both part of British empire. In Newfoundland, the Beothuk did not survive the arrival of the White man; i.e., it was a 100 percent genocide. As for Hong Kong and Macao, they may not have been "severed" from mainland China, but they were British colonies. Xinjiang and Tibet are both populated by several ethnicities and have changed hands several times over the centuries. Taiwan, yes, I agree, it is part of PRC and should one day return to the national fold.
Jeff J. Brown: Point well taken, Kim. I suffer from the same Western propaganda as everybody else and can easily fall into its racist, imperial paradigm. You are right, the Americas have been home to its First Nations peoples, for at least 20,000-30,000 years. In 44 Days Backpacking in China, I wrote about the "Tibet-Pueblo Connection", which theorizes that American Natives have, at least in part, High Plateau, Tibetan ancestry. I concur with you that political entities like Texas and Hong Kong are extrusions from the West's colonial prism of conquest and exploitation.
So, let us imagine a rewritten world history, starting in the 15th century. We can close our eyes and see the Chinese landing in the New World, not the Europeans. In fact, a book about this has been written, 1421: The Year China Discovered America, by Gavin Menzies (2008). If true, then it reinforces my dreamy speculations and helps explain why the Chinese, if they did visit the Caribbean, left no anthropological traces of their time there.
Chinese Admiral Zheng He made seven voyages to Asia, Indonesia, Arabia and Africa, 1407-1421, a full three generations before Christopher Columbus' history changing voyage to the Bahamas and Hispaniola, in 1492. Zheng He's first voyage consisted of 317 ships, carrying 27,870 crew members. How significant is 27,870 voyagers? It represents half the total population of the city of London, in 1407! China's ships were titanic in size, up to 135m long, with 7-8 main masts and compartmentalized hulls and advanced rudders and rigging, whose innovations were centuries ahead of the West.
Comment: We see this represented on the cover of 'Eastern Origins of Western Civilization', by John Hobson:
The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation, written by John M. Hobson in 2004, is a book that argues against the historical theory of the rise of the West after 1492 as a "virgin birth", but rather as a product of Western interactions with a more technically and socially advanced Eastern civilization.
Compare this to Columbus' "armada", which consisted of three Lilliputian ships, the biggest and best that Europe had at the time, and the largest of which was only 19m in length, while sporting three main masts. His three boats would have made good kitchen ships for Zheng He, carrying only a combined total crew of 90. For years, pirate Columbus had to beg from royal court to royal court, to finance his first 1492 voyage. This confirms the relative wealth and prosperity of Europe and China, in the 15th century.
© Getty ImagesA worker inspects a statue of Chinese ancient voyager Zheng He (1371-1435), preparing for the “Zheng He Ocean Voyages Exhibition & International Marine Expo” on July 6, 2005 in Shanghai, China.
Did Zheng He massacre local natives? No. Was genocide a policy (The Canary Island Model)? No. Did he cut off tongues, noses, ears, arms, heads and dismember helpless children and women? No. Did Zheng He send packs of ravenous dogs to chase down escaping natives, to be eaten alive? Burned at the stake? Slowly roasted alive over simmering coals? No. Did his Chinese sailors, business people and dignitaries burn, pillage and rape everything and everyone they could get their hands on? No. Did they steal local natural resources and enslave the masses? No.
In fact, local leaders were invited to send emissaries with the fleet, to sail back to China, for diplomacy and trade. Zheng He's people had the finest of Chinese goods and merchandise to trade with each country, as well as silver to buy local goods at negotiated prices.
For at least 3,000 years, China had the fabulous wealth, technology and military superiority to take over the world. But they didn't, unlike the West, which poured over Planet Earth, like an evil spawn, killing and enslaving billions of people and stealing trillions in natural resources. It's just not the way the Chinese look at the outside world, which definitively confirms President Xi Jinping's platform of "win-win" trade and development. Nothing has changed about the Chinese for millennia.
Comment: Interesting caveat to this revisionist history: over the course of its long history, China nevertheless went through cycles of contraction and expansion. The geographic China we know today is the result of the Mongol Yuan dynasty. The Mongols were the only 'foreigners' to successfully conquer and occupy China. Contrary to the myth that the Mongols 'destroyed everything they touched', they 'made China great again' before the Black Death ravaged the planet - China included - in the mid to late 14th century. The powerful 15th century China referred to above, with the world's largest navy and military, came after the Mongols were chased out. But post-Mongol China retained its enormous size and remained the economic powerhouse of the world trading system until the late 19th century.
© Rochester.eduThe voyages of Zheng He, who was one of the greatest admirals in history. Unlike all the marauding, 15th-17th century European pirates, whom we mythically call “explorers” and “settlers”, the Chinese traded goods, technology and diplomacy everywhere they sailed, not committing genocide, rape, slavery and theft.
Back in January, a Chinese trade official arrived in Canada with two demands: 1. Open up Canadian oil companies to direct ownership by the Chinese government. 2. Build a West Coast pipeline and tanker port so China can lock in access to the oil sands.Kai Nagata of the Dogwood Initiative put it more diplomatically in an article, noting China was negotiating for trade privileges sought by other countries. However, there has been no Malaysia bashing while its state-owned enterprise Petronas seeks to build a LNG terminal in northern BC (China is a junior partner in the venture). In fact it was welcomed by the BC government despite the science pointing to devastation of crucial salmon habitat. (See "Science, Industry, and Salmon"; "'Yes' to Wild Salmon; 'No' to BC Premier's Name Calling"; and "Original peoples, sovereignty, industry, and Salmon,") There is massive First Nation opposition to the pipelines.
With regard to this and the preceding question, does China not bear responsibility for acceding to the inherent rights and sensitivities of Original Peoples (China is a signatory to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples) when pursuing business in colonial-settler states?
JB: I am not familiar with the Dogwood Initiative, [I am working on an article examining Dogwood to be published soon -- Kim] but it sounds like they have a political agenda. It is just not Asian style in general, and Chinese culture, specifically, to make direct, pointed demands as described. As far as wanting to have access to Canada's natural resources, like other countries, this is only logical for the world's biggest economy and #1 manufacturer.
The fact that China appears to be discriminated against compared to Malaysia does not surprise me. Canada is a craven puppet of American empire, a full-fledged member of the NSA's Five Eyes spy program and a signatory to the US's manifestly anti-Chinese Trans-Pacific "Partnership" (TPP).
Former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper was a northern George W. Bush wannabe. Hopefully, new PM Justin Trudeau can exert some independence from the clutches of America's dictatorial empire and negotiate a free trade agreement with China.
KP: On page 454 of China Rising you wrote:
So, by all means, Xi feels entitled to his position of power. Just like every other political leader you can name. When you read/hear a character assassination piece on China's president, be sure to honestly ask yourself, How does this accusation compare to high powered western leaders?This is verging on a tu quoque argument, so I ask for elaboration because whether western leaders are as bad or worse than Xi does not speak well to leadership within Chinese "democracy." Wei Ling Chua, who wrote Democracy: What the West Can Learn from China (review), would state that rather than being entitled to his position of power that Xi earned that position. Asserts Chua:
In sharp contrast to the West, the Chinese culture is basically a corrective one. People who are able to make their way to the top of the leadership ladder in China are usually less individualistic with positive personal qualities. (location 546)
China’s Xi Jinping: A great leader for a great nation.
At the same time, we cannot overlook his background. His father, Xi Zhongxun, was one of Mao Zedong's right hand men and considered one of the towering figures in China's communist pantheon, whether his son ever became president or not. So, Xi's rise is both earned and entitled. A good Western parallel is Franklin D. Roosevelt. He came from a well-known patrician family with a celebrated name, but worked his way up the ladder to eventually become president. John F. Kennedy also comes to mind.
KP: On page 471 you wrote that the British Guardian had "journo-cohones." Given that Noam Chomsky has accused the Guardian of "extreme dishonesty," and given that Wikileaks, Julian Assange, Glenn Greenwald (yes, even Greenwald who broke the story of NSA spying via Edward Snowden while at the Guardian), Media Lens, and other progressives have been highly critical of the Guardian do you consider the "journo-cohones" of the Guardian to be an aberration or a defining characteristic?
JB: Kim, I blow hot and cold about the Guardian. Since writing China Rising, the winds are definitely deep frozen. In fact, for the last two years, I haven't even looked at its website. My daily consumption of 24-hour news cycle information comes from RT, Telesur and Press TV. Of course I read and research many other anti-imperial websites, writers and journalists (including you). I am an editor of The Greanville Post and I write articles for the The Saker.
KP: I found it interesting that you spoke to the Western disinformation campaign of a "massacre" having occurred at Tiananmen Square because I wrote a review of Wei Ling Chua's Tiananmen Square "Massacre"? that demolishes the western corporate-state media disinformation, much of it by citing western corporate media recantations of previously published accounts. And yet every lead up to 4 June, the Western media will trot out the disinformation again? Given the lies surrounding the sinking of the USS Maine, the phantom North Vietnamese missiles fired in the Gulf of Tonkin, Iraqi troops tearing babies out of incubators in Kuwait, the phantom WMDs in Iraq, that Muammar Gaddafi supplied Viagara to encourage mass rapes by his troops in Libya, that the Syrian government crossed Obama's red line with a sarin gas attack in Ghouta ... all concocted lies! Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice... You used the term 'sheeple' in your book, but how much are people to blame for a system that relies on propaganda and disinformation? What would Americans think if every 29 December foreign media began remembering the massacre at Wounded Knee ... a genuine American-perpetrated massacre.
JB: Well, that's just it, Kim, going back to my earlier mea culpa, above, Western propaganda is so ruthlessly effective, that its conditioning can last a lifetime. It's like a mental, recessive gene that keeps coming out and expressing itself, or what evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins famously termed "memes". I lived and worked in Africa, the Middle East and China, from 1980-1997, two of those years as a Peace Corps volunteer. Yet still, it wasn't until I came back to China with my family in 2010, to serendipitously create two sociocultural bookends, as it were, then traveling extensively and writing 44 Days Backpacking in China and China Rising, that I could finally start to claw the Western scales off my eyes.
It probably cost me some sales, but that is why the first section of China Rising covers three famous "terrorist acts", meticulously and thoroughly researched, to prove conclusively that they were perpetrated by our very own Western governments, with help from Israel's Mossad and Europe's Gladio armies. One cannot fully understand how the world works, how Eurangloland viciously controls its sheeple and the global zeitgeist, if one does not accept the fact that it is largely done via a continuous string of false flags. Western false flags are truly the cipher, the codebreaker, for transparently understanding modern geopolitical history, global current events and the real goals of Eurangloland's tireless efforts to control the rest of the world's peoples and their natural resources, into the 21st century.
I used to get frustrated by Westerners' unwillingness to look beyond the headlines of CNN, Fox, BBC, the New York Times and the Sunday Times. Knowing how brutally effective Western propaganda is, in brainwashing its masses, and by empathetically looking back at my life's arduous, geopolitical awakening, I now stay calm, nod my head, offer a few polite rejoinders and gently coax them to read my books!
KP: Recently, China's Foreign Ministry issued a statement condemning a nuclear test by the People's Democratic Republic of Korea. According to the statement, China seeks denuclearization on the Korean Peninsula, preventing nuclear proliferation, and maintaining peace and stability in Northeast Asia. Given that China is a nuclear power and signatory to the NPT and its Article VI (commitment to the goal of disarmament by the nuclear-weapon states), does its opposition not come across as self-righteous, self-serving, and discriminatory? And peculiar since China does not want the socialist North Korean government to fall allowing the US to creep up to its border on the Yalu River. Also since China was spurred to acquire the nuclear bomb for self-defense purposes, given that the US refuses a peace or non-aggression treaty with North Korea, does North Korea not have the same right to self-defense?
JB: Most Westerners don't know that the Korean War never ended. There has never been a jointly signed armistice, just a cessation in fighting. South Korea is the same size as Iceland or the American state of Indiana. Imagine having 30,000 Chinese troops in a similar sized area where your readers each live, armed to the teeth, likely harboring nuclear warheads and installing an antimissile shield, Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD), all justified because the country is divided in half. The Chinese troops are there to intimidate the enemy on the other side of the ceasefire line. Not only this, but China regularly and arbitrarily imposes cruel and vindictive economic and trade sanctions, causing much daily suffering among their neighbors across this border. This, while China bullies the rest of the world to not conduct any commerce or financing with the neighboring country, to keep it as isolated and miserable as possible.
Replace China with the United States and South Korea with your readers' little countries, and that is where North Korea finds itself. Now one can appreciate better how the North feels. As I explained in an article on China Rising Radio Sinoland, Mao Zedong's son died on the battlefield during the Korean War. China humiliated America, thoroughly defeating Uncle Sam, then tactically retreated back to the original 38th parallel line, having proved the point and thus keeping a communist brother-in-arms as a buffer against the West - the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK). China will never throw the DPRK to the Western dogs of war. I've even speculated that Baba Beijing keeps pushing the envelope and tightrope-walking a fine line with the North's nuclear program, as a way to drain valuable American military, espionage and financial resources from the South China Sea, and from the West's nonstop efforts to overthrow the Communist Party of China, much like the US did against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, in the 1980s.
North Korea would never launch a nuclear missile on South Korea or Japan, without Baba Beijing's OK, which means it will never happen, unless the upcoming Clinton administration desperately goes to hot war with China and Russia. Militarily neither China, nor Russia are terribly concerned about the THAAD missile shield, since they have developed weapons to overcome it. However, it does not preclude them from using the superfluous, multibillion dollar THAAD installation as a bargaining chip, in ongoing, behind-the-scenes negotiations.
I wish Baba Beijing would be more supportive of its fraternal, communist little brother, south of the Yalu River. My only conjecture is that it knows the West owns the global mainstream media, with its suffocating Washington-London-Paris consensus. Given that the West's demonization and ostracizing of North Korea is so complete, and the world is so brainwashed, China probably does not see much PR and diplomatic benefit from coming out fully backing North Korean President Kim Jong-un & Co., even though this support is happening 24-7 in practical, behind-the-scenes terms. Together, China and Russia have four rail lines connecting to North Korea. Regardless of Western imposed sanctions, is Uncle Sam going to be allowed to see what's in those kilometers of freight trains coming and going across the borders? And again, Baba Beijing can use its Western mainstream criticism of North Korea as a bargaining chip with Washington, as can Russia.
Maybe Xi Jinping and the CPC can take heart in the Philippines' President Rodrigo Duterte and his new, thoroughly anti-empire government and media campaign. He has just called off joint US-Filipino patrols in the South China Sea and demanded that the US military leave the southern, Muslim dominated island of Mindanao, which for decades has been dealing with the Abu Sayyef Group. Why? Because now the Philippines is coming out publicly to state the truth: (like Al-Qaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram, ad nauseam) Abu Sayyef is a US creation used to pull off "Muslim" false flags, like this month's bus station bombing in Davao, Duterte's hometown on Mindanao. This to demonize Islam and justify billions more spent on American arms and occupation, in order to "defeat" the same said American Abu Sayyef Group. That's the twisted perverseness, but lethal effectiveness of the West's false flags around the world. And this just in, as I go to press.
This is unprecedented among Western puppet states and shows Eurangloland for what it is: the global dictator wears no clothes. Just to make sure that the imperial monster is totally buck naked, maybe Baba Beijing should start following Duterte's lead and begin to fight the worldwide media war -- ugly. As Western false flags and phony color revolutions prove, the truth doesn't mean diddly squat, except for a small percentage of enlightened world citizens crying in the dark. It's all about perception. As any customer-based business will tell you, perception is reality.
On an individual level, symbolic acts of personal and political integrity can be the spark that ignites the fires of revolution. Rosa Parks refusing to sit in the back of the bus comes to mind, as do the raised, black-gloved fists of US athletes at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. Currently, the NFL's Colin Kaepernick's symbolic "taking a knee" during the national anthem and wearing a huge Afro have finally raised the recognition of police slaughtering poor, Black and Latino people like dogs, beyond the slums of America and into the living rooms of white citizens.
Like a 15th century of Sino-exploration in the Americas, let's dream just a little more, at the geopolitical level. Why don't China and Russia do ongoing Wikileaks releases on 9/11, Tiananmen Square, Ukraine, Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, MH17 and MH370, as well as on all the other bogus Western false flags around the world, for which their excellent spy agencies, China's Ministry of State Security (MSS) and Russia's FSB, surely have hard drives full of the down and dirty? Like an acid drip on the world's conscience, why don't China Daily, RT, Telesur and Press TV get together and agree to a coordinated media plan of action, to keep these revelations flowing through their 24-hour news cycles, day after day, week after week, month after month?
Currently, only Press TV has the courage to report on false flags, and then only sparingly. RT?Telesur? China Daily? Gutless in this category. Countless other "progressive" and "liberal" news outlets and journalists are equally cowed. For the sake of Planet Earth, they need to go through the same arc of revelation that I have experienced, since being back in China in 2010. It's like all these principled, well-meaning anti-empire news agencies and journalists are waiting for the other shoe to drop, when they need to be like that Iraqi correspondent, Muntadhar al-Zaidi in 2007, targeting George W. Bush, and start hurling their footwear at the Princes of Power.
Comment: What good would it do to 'reveal' that 9/11 was an inside job? At this point, everyone has made up their mind about where they stand on it. Far better is to show that the US manages the terrorists it claims to be fighting against...
Eurangloland's owners are counting on this self-censorship, to maintain their dictatorship over humanity. Take away the West's main instrument of mass control - false flags - and like the Wizard of Oz hiding behind his billowing, vacuous bluff, it will be exposed as merely a hollow regime that deserves our derision and contempt.
Comment: There's another reason. The Western media machine is so well-oiled that any counter-narrative is automatically rejected as ridiculous, as if the person or institution stating it were saying, "Obama is a secret homosexual alien who is conspiring with Hitler - who never died, BTW - to create a fascist wold government. Oh and the world is flat." Just look at how much difficulty the Russians and Syrians have had these past months getting across the message that the U.S. is directly supporting al-Nusra and Daesh. Yeah, it's obvious to alternative news readers, and old news. But in the mainstream, it's still untouchable for the most part. It's a long, slow process, but until the Western media empire is destroyed, it will be a long, slow process to subvert it to the extent that RT, teleSUR, China Daily, etc. can state the truth plainly and still be taken seriously by enough people. Slow and steady wins the race. Somewhere along the way, RT learned this. They used to cover false-flag stuff, but dropped it a couple of years ago.
The CIA's post-JFK-assassination propaganda campaign to implant in the public's conscience that anyone who questions the government's official narrative is a "nut job conspiracy theorist", must top its list of successful mind control programs. Until afflicted governments and the alternative media pierce this "conspiracy theory" veil, exposing all these false flags and deflating the West's ersatz omnipotence, the world's oppressed will never have a chance to gain their liberation and live with social justice and equality. Until then, Eurangloland's owners will continue to freely mock, torment and exploit us.
False flags are not some theoretical abstraction. They are the raison d'être of our impotence and fear. Western false flags and all their affiliated color revolutions, government overthrows, assassinations, exterminations, genocide and war are the cudgel used to beat humanity into subservient humiliation. Every day the Sun comes up, Eurangloland defecates on the United Nations charter and the global stench is suffocating the human race. Expose Western false flags en masse, or we can continue to symbolically and collectively bend over and be sodomized into submission. That's a great way to look at false flags: being raped by The Man. Like abused women and bow-backed slaves, it's time to say, "No More!".
Part 3: China's Influence on World Stage
China's economic rise to the top has been impressive not because of year-on-year economic growth, not because of rising GDP numbers nor impressive PPP numbers but because of what it has meant for the hundreds of millions of Chinese people that have been pulled out of poverty since the 1980s. And the Communist Party of China (CPC) isn't finished; it has set a deadline of 2020 for the obliteration of poverty at home. This fact per se should be sufficient to give long pause to non-Chinese critics of China, especially when they compare China to their own backyards. China is still far from utopian, but its trajectory is transparent. The CPC remains steadfast in its stated commitment to the socialist path, and the success of its political economy has sanguine implications for the world's 99%. Thus state capitalists have resorted to confrontation in the military sphere. It is a fatuous maneuver and reeks of a desperation born of an economic slide. Nonetheless, China is no longer militarily weak, and it is partnered with the military power of Russia. Regardless, the CPC frequently iterates its dedication to peace.
Most consequential about the rise of China is what it augurs for the world's 99%.
This is the final part of the three-part interview with Jeff Brown (See Part 1 and Part 2). Jeff Brown is the author of China Rising and provides views not found in western monopoly media. In Part 3 we discuss China vis-à-vis other countries.
Kim Petersen: In China Rising, you point out the so-called 2014 Umbrella Revolution was a Georg Soros (the notorious National Endowment for Democracy) and US-financed "color revolution" meant to disrupt or overthrow existing authorities. That same year I had met a woman with luggage just outside Vancouver airport, and we struck up a conversation. She was a Hong Kong ex-pat, and she told me she had just returned from visiting family there. She mentioned that one young family member was participating in the Umbrella Revolution. When I proffered that it was CIA-financed, she laughed. She said her family member was only there because he was being paid well for being there. He also knew well the USA was behind it and didn't support the "revolution" but it was easy money. Many of the people, though, undoubtedly resented Beijing's role in selecting the chief executive for Hong Kong. But who selected the authorities in Hong Kong before the turnover from Britain? And how did Hong Kong ever come under British jurisdiction in the first place? Is this down the Memory Hole?
Jeff Brown: Kim, let's start with a very brief, and for once, unvarnished, honest history of Hong Kong. After the West landed in China for the first time, near Hong Kong, in 1514, maritime trade commenced. But it was very one-sided, in favor of the Chinese. Why? Because Europe had almost nothing the Chinese wanted to buy: itchy wool, technologically inferior muskets, superfluous coal and scratchy linens. Yet, China had everything that affluent, luxury seeking Europeans wanted: silken everything, clothing, furniture, artworks, jewelry, ceramics, porcelain, antiques and more. Because of this, relatively poor Europe had to pay rich China in silver ingots for all these highly sought after goods, thus creating a massive trade deficit in the Chinese's favor.
Western imperialists found just the thing to equalize this trade imbalance: pushing illegal drugs in the form of opium, and later morphine.
Comment: They did, but before that they 'discovered' America (while trying to find China, which, in their ignorance, they believed was still led by 'the Great Khan'!) and plundered its gold and silver to pay China for the goods it craved. Then, when precious metals became harder to extract, they settled on the diabolical scheme of paying with opium...
China refused to buy it, so it was smuggled into the country up and down the coast, by the ton. The drug pushers got caught in a huge drug bust in Hong Kong. In response, being the typical, avaricious, unscrupulous, thieving capitalists we all know so well, Europe and America decided to invoke a literal trade war, by attacking China militarily. These were called the Opium Wars, starting in 1839. Some claim this is actually the origin of the term "trade war".
Contrary to Western megalomania and myth-making, the Chinese at the time were not technologically inferior to the imperialists. In fact, every innovation and engineering marvel White Man had at the time, which was needed to plunder and pillage Earth's native lands and exterminate their peoples, came from China. This included moveable type, printing and paper; advanced navigational cartography and the compass; gunpowder, guns and cannons; high tech oceangoing boat hulls, sails, riggings and rudders. The difference was racist blood- and money-lust on the European side, versus inertia and complacency in the Middle Kingdom. Greed trumps apathy any day.
Eurangloland was never able to completely colonize and exterminate millions in China, like it did in every other part of the world. This, in spite of the fact that China was at its deepest nadir in history. So, White imperialists did the next best thing. They occupied key maritime ports, to control the flow of goods in and out of the country, mostly hundreds of thousands of tons of opium entering and tens of thousands of tons of silver ingots stolen back to Europe and America. These conduits of crime were euphemistically called "treaty ports" and "concessions", but they were in reality nothing more than glorified pirate operations dealing in illegal drugs. They included, from north to south, Dalian, Tianjin, Qingdao, Shanghai, Xiamen and the granddaddy at the top of the crime syndicate, Hong Kong.
That is why if you know the true history of Hong Kong, it is laughable that some of its citizens think they should be an "independent country", because they have a "unique identity". In reality, that identity is fully founded on what is called "the world's longest running and biggest criminal enterprise in human history", i.e., the West forcing illegal opium and then morphine onto the Chinese people for 110 years. Hong Kong was the nerve center - ground zero - for the exploitation, addiction and humiliation of 25% (at that time, now about 20%) of humanity, for over a century. As far as Hong Kong is considered, it is a small archipelago of islands covering a little over 200km2, among many hundreds of others that grace China's 14,500km long maritime coastline. Other than the pox of historically being a Western drug hub until 1949, the notion that it merits any form of independence, from its millennial attachment to the Chinese nation, is delusional.
Under British dictatorship, the Chinese masses in Hong Kong were treated no differently than all the other black, brown, red, yellow and white (Irish) n****rs in Western colonies, like subhuman dirt. They were subjects and slaves, not citizens. They had no right to vote and no due process. They were tortured, beaten, raped, imprisoned and killed at imperial will. The 99% were too poor and downtrodden to own much, much less prosper. Ten billionaire, dynastic families own Hong Kong, thanks to the West installing them as local compradors, to keep the masses enslaved, and the riches flowing upward and outward. Even today, almost every Hong Kong dollar spent ends up in one of their bank accounts. Ironically, most of these family dynasties came from Mainland China.
Conditions were so exploitative and hopeless for the common Hongkonger that riots and strikes were routine. To try to diffuse the ticking time-bomb, starting only in the 1980s, tyrannical rule from London was softened to allow neighborhood councils to be elected. A nominal legislature has been around since 1843, but like in other Potemkin "Western democracies", it has always been and still is a ventriloquist dummy for Hong Kong's owners and elites, who are now very closely aligned with Baba Beijing. These are smart, hard-nosed capitalists. They know that any talk of Hong Kong's independence is fool's gold and against their core interest - profit.
The Basic Law was signed in 1997, renouncing England's 156-year dictatorial, colonial occupation of Hong Kong. Margaret Thatcher negotiated with Deng Xiaoping from a position of weakness, because of ongoing, often violent resistance against British colonial rule. The Brits were desperate to get out, because they knew they were hated by almost all Hongkongers, except fifth columnists and lackeys, who personally benefited from colonialism. Statesman Deng knew all this, of course, and he was not a guy you wanted to go to the mat with, on a bad hand. Baba Beijing got essentially everything it wanted, including a 50-year delay in dealing with Hong Kong's full inclusion back into the People's Republic, thus exonerating China for any unpleasantries, as the gradual transition transpired.
As far as the West's huge failure in trying to destabilize Hong Kong, with its bogus "Occupy Central/Umbrella Revolution" fiasco, it is a topic of conversation there, that the whole thing is a foreign managed scam. Last year, a member of the legislature wrote a newspaper article, stating that, to paraphrase, "it seems like the protesters go to work on the clock and stop on the clock". As you said in your question, Kim, that's because it's true. The vast majority are paid hacks and the millions to pay for it are flowing in from Western/CIA so-called "non" governmental organizations (NGOs).
With this color revolution completely falling flat on its face, Eurangloland has shifted its destabilization efforts. Now, those millions are being spent on local propaganda and bought stooge politicians, to promote all this preposterous "independence" and "local identity" psyops. It will never happen, but it does keep Baba Beijing ever-vigilant.
KP: By the way, an excellent book for those interested, is Drugging a Nation: The Story of China and the Opium Curse by Samuel Merwin — available free online.
A hypothetical for you, but I believe strongly grounded in an actuality. Imagine if a civil war broke out in the USA between capitalists and Communists and the capitalists (yes, capitalists are few in number, but I include the paid killers and the deluded underclass that align with capitalists in this grouping) began to rout the Communists. The Communists sensing defeat on the horizon boarded ships and escaped to Hawai'i. The capitalists were prevented from pursuing the Communists by the Chinese Navy. Hawaiians opposed the outsider Communists, but military superiority placed Communists in power. Sixty years later Hawai'i remained outside mainland US control and the Hawaiian people had grown used to their "independence." Would the elitists in the US ever recognize such "independence/self-determination"? Ignoring the fact that Hawai'i was stolen by the US treachery from Indigenous Hawaiians, I am sure you realize that this scenario bears a close resemblance to another "independent" island.
JB: Taiwan's native people undoubtedly came from the Mainland before 8,000BC, when it was not an island and still a part of the continent, like the Asians who migrated across the land bridge of the Bering Strait, into Alaska and southward, from about 25,000-10,000 years ago. Later, others came from Austronesia. Mainland China has written records of commercial and fishing relations going back many hundreds of years and since the 17th century, except for colonial Japanese exploitation, 1895-1945, Taiwan, or Formosa, as it was formerly called, has been a part of the Chinese nation. Like Hong Kong, you really have to jump through hoops of absurdity to suggest that Taiwan is somehow independent from the Chinese people. What is interesting is that to this day, Taiwan's KMT still officially claims to represent everyone on Mainland China, and that it is the legitimate leadership of the whole country. Conversely, Baba Beijing claims that Taiwan is an integral part of the motherland, and that it must and will return to the national fold. Your fans can just look at a map of East Asia and see how this arm wrestling match is going to end up, even if it takes decades or longer.
Taiwan is totally dependent on US protection, with their mutual defense treaty. Sooner than later, the US empire will falter, and with it, Taiwan's precarious "independence". But before then, Taiwan's growing economic dependence on the Mainland and China's growing competitive advantage against Taiwan's traditional sector killers - silicon chips, computers, components, etc. - is putting increasing pressure on the island's long-term viability. A good friend of mine just spent several weeks in Taiwan touring all over the island and he was shocked at how run down and undeveloped the place is, compared to China. He said it was like visiting China back in the 1970s. The calligraphy of reality is written on the walls of time for Taiwan.
KP: The mega trading block of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS) presents a potent challenge to an economic order controlled by the US, primarily targeted is US dollar supremacy. What does the coup in Brazil, where the president Dilma Rosseff of the somewhat leftist Workers' Party found herself impeached but having broken no law and the popular politician and former president Lula, also of the Workers' Party, is accused of corruption thus paving the way for a return to neoliberalism in Brazil under the presidency of Michel Temer also under a cloud of corruption. On page 259 of China Rising, you wrote, "Everybody knows that BRICS and NAM could decapitate this Western Hydra in a New York minute. All they have to do is collectively replacing their use of the US dollar as the world's reserve currency and stop using it for cross border settlement." You make the case that it would be quick, but given what is transpiring in Brazil, how easy is it? And what import does the political turmoil have for BRICS?
JB: It is a footnote of irony that the acronym BRIC was created by a Goldman Sachs economist, Jim O'Neill, in 2001. These countries sure took his concept to heart, especially China and Russia. They later added South Africa, to represent the Great Continent, thus BRICS.
I am always frustrated that countries like Russia and China, who obviously hate the West and everything it stands for, do not take more resolute countermeasures and rebuttals. But, diplomacy has always been more art than science. There is tremendous inertia to maintain the status quo. Diplomats and government administrators are by nature very methodical and conservative, except when a revolution or disaster forces them to act more forthrightly. Not to mention that Eurangloland does an excellent job of getting fifth columnists and imperial sycophants embedded in the halls of enemy power, even China, which helps explain Xi Jinping's ferocious efforts to clean out the Communist Party of corrupt elements, both venal and political.
Furthermore, we have to remember that countries outside of the West have different philosophical perspectives. Buddhism originated in India and is widespread across Asia, including Eastern Siberia. Life, relations and diplomacy are more elliptical, cyclical, holistic and long term. Some anti-imperialists like Paul Craig Roberts are screaming bloody murder about Russia's continued attempts to work with Eurangloland, in spite of being betrayed again and again. It is easy to forget that yes, the western one-fourth of Russia is Caucasian, Slavic and Orthodox. But, it becomes more Asian and Buddhism-influenced moving eastward. Even Orthodox Christians have a much different philosophical bent than Catholicism, Protestantism and Judaism. Russia's Minister of Defense, Sergey Shoygu is a Tuvan Buddhist. He doesn't think like Ashton Carter, America's Secretary of War, thank goodness. I do not need to remind your readers that the last two great world wars were started in the West, not in the Buddhist East, allowing for the fact that Japan's military had been taken over by an atypically racist, martial Shinto Buddhist sect.
As well, why should Russia and China start a worldwide depression and most likely a world war, by overthrowing empire's Bretton Woods, post-World War II financial architecture, when they, very Buddhist-like, are slowly winning, anyway? BRICS is a recognized entity. It has its own financing via its New Development Bank (vs. the World Bank) and its own emergency loan fund (vs. the IMF). It really just started doing business this year. They are meeting, collaborating and planning, all outside the house of imperial horrors. BRICS is also giving each member country and its leaders a platform to help shape domestic and international opinion. When South African President Zuma lays a broadside against colonialism, at a BRICS summit, is has more media reach, at least outside the Great Western Firewall, than if he were just holding a press conference on his own.
In my recent interviews with Godfree Roberts, he really does a good job of spelling out this Eastern-tortoise-versus-the-Western-hare dynamic. Definitely worth listening to.
India's ruling local elite never left after independence, those compradors who helped maintain Britain's genocidal, capitalist dictatorship there for 300 years. Brazil (as in all of Latin America) is very similar. The elite were and still are mostly European bloodlines, who lord it over the darker skinned Natives and former slaves. South Africa is a young country and whether the right or wrong decision, Nelson Mandela did not overthrow the existing internal capitalist order, so that like Brazil and India, local elites still own the country.
Kim, it is unfortunate that Eurangloland is clawing back again in Venezuela, Brazil and Argentina. Let's not be linear Westerners, but rather elliptical, holistic orientalists. "Eastern" Russia and China are in a fight for humanity's consciousness, social justice and freedoms. It is a long, drawn out, millennial struggle of Good vs. Evil, a pan-global duel worthy of a Star Wars movie. Battles will be won and lost. In the end, may the Light vanquish the Dark Side.
Comment: One pragmatic reason why China can't just ditch the dollar overnight is because its economy, like everyone else's, is 'plugged into' the US-led 'Western Order'. A mad dash to 'break away' risks creating chaos in China too. In any event, China has shown no signs of wanting to unnecessarily 'punish' the US in the process of shaping a new order. At the level of diplomacy, certainly, it routinely expresses a wish for 'Eurangloland' to join it on its quest. We don't think this is feasible given the 'pathocracy' the US has become, but both Russia and China appear determined to leave an olive branch extended to the US until the last.
KP: China has resolutely refrained from warring for several decades now. Xi Jinping is also adamant that peace is the path China wishes to tread. While not involved in actual combat, China is becoming involved. For example, China has sent advisors to help the government in Syria and is taking a more active role to fight ISIS. China has also iterated its support for Palestinian statehood with a capital in East Jerusalem. Can the world expect further assertion of China on the world stage?
JB: I think so, Kim. China already has a military base in Djibouti, to protect its maritime shipping industry from pirates leaving and entering the Red Sea.
Comment: That's just China copying Eurangloland's narrative for having bases there; the real reason is to protect Chinese shipping through the Red Sea chokepoints.
China already has one of the larger contingents in the United Nations Peacekeeping Forces, 2,639 People's Liberation Army personnel, compared to America's 68, Britain's 337 and France's 867. China not only puts lives on the line. It is the #2 financial contributor for UN peacekeeping and #3 in overall UN budget expenses. China just contributed $100 million more, to help with all the NATO-caused refugee crises around the world. China and Russia routinely veto imperial motions on the UN Security Council, versus the three-headed, racist Hydra of America, Britain and France.
Like you, Kim, I'd like to see China and Russia do more for the genocidal, Zionist extermination of Palestinians. I suspect they realize that as long as America can keep its Bretton Woods dictatorship suspended in thin air, NATO can keep paying for Israel to be their imperial centurion in the Middle East. Israel will implode when Western empire collapses.
KP: A chunk of China Rising is devoted to Western perfidy. You pooh pooh the "official" 9-11 narrative, you detail a history of false-flags; you relate the violent lawlessness of the US throughout history up to the present. Today Russia and China find themselves ringed by US military bases, hardly an act that conveys friendship and cordiality. Nonetheless, you write Putin and Xi are "increasingly frustrating Western imperialism..." (p. 370) Do China and Russia represent an alternative to the full-spectrum dominance sought by US militarists? And how likely do you see an increased drifting of countries from the unipolarism of the US axis toward Russia-China? And what would this mean for socialism versus capitalism?
JB: It's already happening, Kim. Look at ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America), the anti-capitalist alliance in Latin America, and its even bigger anti-imperial bloc, CELAC (Community of Latin American and Caribbean States). The venerable Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) just held its global summit in Western-besieged Venezuela. Russia has its CSTO (Collective Security Treaty Organization) and China has its SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization). In my recent book, China Rising, I present a comparative chart of Western institutions and what China has created to counter each and every one of them. The list is long and encouraging, but behind the Great Western Firewall, you would never know it.
But Satan never sleeps, does he, Kim? He still has 1,000 military installations implanted like suppurating canker sores across the planet (I was shocked to just learn there are seventy in Latin America alone). The racist imperial devil is still working overtime to dominate our only home, exterminate the world's dark skinned peoples and expropriate their natural and human resources. It is my fervent dream to see Eurangloland's diabolical vortex of racism + capitalism, colonialism, empire, false-flags, war + subterfuge, and fascism be shattered on the noble ideals and principles of the Charter of the United Nations and its Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But I am 62 and thinking like a Chinese or Russian, I may very well not live to see that day happen. But it will. It must. It is humanity's destiny to gain a just and equitable life for the 99%, and to live on a sustainable, habitable Planet Earth. Some call it socialism, others call it communism. Fill in the blank. Whatever the name, on with the good fight!
Jeff Brown can be reached at China Rising, jeff@brownlanglois.com, Facebook, Twitter and Wechat/Whatsapp: +86-18618144837.
Mind control can work.
It can work well.
It will work well.
It has worked well.
All that is needed is an extremely rigid, tight set of rules and regulations (heavy punishments for some and extravagant rewards for others) and a big HUGE mega-computer that keeps the time ticking, ticking, ticking....ticking; and the numbers clicking, clicking, clicking.....clicking.
Oh, and: Powerful leadership. Very powerful iconic totalitarian leadership that is 'above all others' and will do everything necessary and vital to stay in control.
PLEASE CONTRIBUTE YOUR DOLLARS AND YOUR SENSE TO MIND CONTROL. IT IS THE PAST, IT IS THE PRESENT AND IT IS THE FUTURE.
WITHOUT MIND CONTROL, THERE IS NO HOPE.
THANK YOU.
ned, out