Thread: The View, from China

Yes, an integral part of the contiguous Asian economic and security framework. A major beneficiary of the BRI encompassing several of the worlds economic whales (China, India & arguably Russia). The other whale, apart from perennially trying to cause mischief and destabilisation in some 'stan or other, is conspicuous mainly by it's absence. One to watch- Iran has had one of the worlds top performing stock markets over the last decade.

But of course, this is what they want you to believe-





So you do.

Originally Posted by sabang

The US and China are both hugely and unacceptably unequa

To remedy this both countries must engage in a cooperative effort and stop the endless series of provocations, accusations and complete lack of mutually beneficial dialog.

That would be very nice. I think this century, US foreign policy has been negatively influenced and impacted by Neo-con philosophy, which basically views the growth of any other major economy as a looming threat to it's 'unipolar hegemony' (which I personally believe is already a thing of the past). Well overdue to rid the Beltway of their pernicious influence imho. The Chinese foreign policy establishment could do with a bit less of their self pitying, underdog rhetoric too- your 'Century of Humiliation' is well over.

Fact is there are many opportunities in the emerging world- seize them, don't freeze them.

Cheering on a murderous theocracy because it has a good stock market.

FFS

Personally, I would short Iranian theocratic futures.

Most people can read a score card PH- need i say more?

John Menadue


Website | + posts

John Menadue is the Founder and Editor in Chief of Pearls and Irritations. He was formerly Secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet under Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser, Ambassador to Japan, Secretary of the Department of Immigration and CEO of Qantas.





As China grows and prospers many in the US want us to believe that China will follow the same path that the US itself pursued- global military aggression, the overthrow of numerous governments around the world and persecution of minorities at home.

But the record so far suggests that China is different.

As former US senior diplomat Chas Freeman in Brown Political Review of 14 March, 2022 put it, China does not have a Monroe Doctrine like the US and does not think and behave like the US.

There’s not much evidence of China wanting to replace us. They are displacing us in some spheres because they’re big and growing and successful. Do they want to take on our global dominion and hegemony role? No, but we assert that they do. We posit that China thinks and behaves like us: “We had Manifest Destiny and it took us across the Pacific to the Philippines. Therefore, China must have a Monroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny in mind.” This is wrong. Things don’t work like that. So I would argue that we have inhaled our own propaganda, and we are living in the appropriately stoned state that that produces. If we have sound policies, we can out-compete anyone. But we’re not looking at sound policies; we’re looking at pulling down our competitor.

Read Freeman’s full interview: The Foreign Service, Diplomacy, and the US-China Fight for Primacy: An Interview with Chas Freeman

The US’ record of aggression

‘Our dangerous ally’ has been addicted to war and violence at home and abroad for centuries. It sees war as a means of holding and if possible enhancing its power and authority. War and the threat of war have been continuing features of US policy.

Apart from brief isolationist periods, the US has been almost always at war.

For over two centuries, the US has subverted and overthrown numerous governments. It has a military and business complex – a state within a state – that depends on war for influence and enrichment. Many of its Generals are out of control with their fear mongering.

Michael Pascoe: Why the fearmongering about a China-US war is over the top

The US assumes a moral superiority it denies to others. It is blinded by its own self righteousness. It believes in its ‘exceptionalism’ – the ‘chosen people’ with a ‘manifest destiny’.

Often the US leadership looks quite unhinged. It even blamed the Russians for blowing up its own Nord Stream gas pipeline to Europe .

Seymour Hersh points out that ‘America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline’ At the time the White House said that blaming America ‘is false and a complete fiction’. The CIA said ‘this claim (of blaming America) is completely and utterly false’. This pattern of denial is commonplace with most Western media accepting the Washington view as holy writ. The NYT called the destruction of the Pipeline a ‘mystery’. And as usual Australian media then meekly followed along… nothing to see here!

I have drawn attention repeatedly to the risks we run in being “joined at the hip” to a country that is almost always at war. The facts are clear. The US has never had a decade without war. Since its founding in 1776, the US has been at war 93 per cent of the time. These wars have extended from its own hemisphere to the Pacific, to Europe and most recently to the Middle East. The US has launched 201 out of 248 armed conflicts since the end of World War II. In recent decades most of these wars have been unsuccessful. The US maintains 800 military bases or sites around the world, including in Australia. The US has in our region a massive deployment of hardware and troops in Japan, the Republic of Korea and Guam.

The US tried to change other countries’ governments 72 times during the Cold War. Many foreign leaders were assassinated. In the piece reproduced in this blog The fatal expense of US Imperialism, Professor Jeffrey Sachs said:

“The scale of US military operations is remarkable … The US has a long history of using covert and overt means to overthrow governments deemed to be unfriendly to the US … Historian John Coatsworth counts 41 cases of successful US-led regime change for an average of one government overthrow by the US every 28 months for centuries.”

The overthrow or interference in foreign governments is diverse, including Honduras, Guatemala, Iran, Haiti, Congo, Indonesia, Japan, Vietnam, Chile, Iraq, Afghanistan and most recently, Syria.

And this interference continued with the undermining of the pro-Russian government in Ukraine by the US-backed Maidan coup in 2014. Gorbachev and Reagan agreed that in allowing the reunification of Germany, NATO would not extend eastwards. But with US encouragement, NATO has now provocatively extended right up to the borders of Russia. Not surprisingly, Russia is resisting.

The US encouraged the recent “democratic” insurrection in Hong Kong. It almost succeeded. US hostility towards Hong Kong exposed for all to see.

See earlier comments of mine on ‘Our dangerous ally could drag us into war with China‘.

China’s record is different

China has not engaged in military activity outside its borders for 40 years. It does not project military power around the globe like the US. China does not have a Monroe Doctrine and shows no interest in one.

China has neither the intent nor the capability to attack Australia or the US for that matter. It does not have a history of military aggression beyond the defence of its own borders. It has only one foreign base in Djibouti, mainly for anti-piracy purposes.

Not surprisingly, China is determined that it must have the military capability to defend its homeland against the US and its allies.

The US would have hysterics if Chinese vessels patrolled off the Californian coast and the Florida Keys. Or if China had B-52 type aircraft based in Mexico!

The US has been responsible for the death and dislocation of tens of millions of people in the Middle East. But our White Man’s Media looks away from US aggression and violence but incessantly finds fault with China in every possible way. Anti China racism runs deep.

China has a large and diverse population in areas such as Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. It has land borders with fourteen other countries. Not surprisingly China focuses on domestic issues and the protection of its borders.

If China was an imperial power, it would have swallowed up defenceless Mongolia long ago, a democratic, mineral rich state on its border which is more than twice the size of Ukraine.

See comments by leading writers on China’s military intentions here. China has neither the intent nor the capability to attack us.

The US believes that China will act aggressively around the world as it has itself over centuries.

It parrots on about a Rules Based International Order but breaks or ignores the rules when it suits like the Law of the Sea, the invasion of Iraq and the occupation of Diego Garcia.

To avoid facing up to its failing society and economy the US wants to attack and cripple its competitor by goading China into war over Taiwan, a province of China.

In WW1, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan we tagged along as loyal colonials. It was almost risk free. There was no real threat to our homeland.

That has now changed as we have progressively ceded our sovereignty to the US. It began seriously with Julia Gillard agreeing to Marines in Darwin. That has been followed by Abbott’s Force Posture Agreement in 2014 and more recently B 52s in Tindal, the fusion of our RAN with the US in AUKUS to attack China, to say nothing of the ‘interoperability and interchangeability’ of much of Australian defence forces with the US.

Acting as a proxy and spear carrier for the US against China makes us a target for attack for the first time in our history.

Defence Minister Marles is out of his depth in talking about safeguarding our sovereignty. He lacks any sense of curiosity. He has been on the Washington drip feed for too long.

He says that AUKUS ‘would boost Australia’s sovereignty’. Is he serious?

Both Albanese and Marles are following in the footsteps of Morrison and Dutton with it all choreographed by Washington.

Does the Cabinet or Caucus care about what they are doing?

https://johnmenadue.com/us-elites-be...the-us-itself/

Exposed: the US ‘atrocity fabrication’ industry demonising rival states

By Nury Vittachi
Feb 16, 2023


U.S. government bodies working with the western media created a massive “atrocity fabrication” industry to discredit China and other perceived enemies of the west, says a stunning new book to be published next month.

Horrific tales of torture and genocide were manufactured to be spread by the media in a technique developed by western powers over decades to demonise countries including Vietnam, Cuba, North Korea, China, and others, says Atrocity Fabrication and its Consequences: How Fake News Shapes World Order by A.B. Abrams, a geopolitical specialist and academic based in London.




This atrocity fabrications process has been used in numerous locations around the world over decades, but recently culminated in a dramatically fake genocide in Xinjiang – in which the allegedly genocided group, rather than disappearing, actually expanded faster than the population of the people alleged to be perpetrators.

The astonishing 500-page study by A. B. Abrams of the University of London shows exactly how the world has been misled by a series of deceptive techniques, developed over many years: and how what we read today is directly related to famously fraudulent news stories like the “weapons of mass destruction” and the machine-gunning of students at Tiananmen Square.

“Xinjiang’s Uyghur population were the latest Kuwaiti incubator babies, the latest American civilians killed in Cuban terrorist attacks, the latest Filipino civilians brutalised by the Huks or Syrian victims of their government’s chemical weapons,” Abrams writes. “They were Park Yeonmi forced to walk across three mountains and bury her father, Iraqi dissidents fed live into human shredders, students run over by tanks in Tiananmen Square, or Libyan women raped by Gaddafi’s black African mercenaries.

“What all these alleged victims had in common was that the crimes against them were never actually committed but were very widely publicised to build narratives which furthered Western foreign policy objectives.”

Abrams’ superb work will be published next month, but advance copies have been sent to the present writer and others. The book is described by top independent journalist Max Blumenthal as “a devas[at]tating exposé of the interventionist clique that has weaponised human rights in order to destabilise enemy nations and immiserate their populations”.

Fake news shapes global thinking

Abrams is a highly respected scholar, known for his superb research-led work into geopolitical relations, and his ability to see through the thick fog of media noise. In painstaking detail, with sources carefully cited, this new book tells precisely how the western world uses the media to shape global thinking by creating false narratives and weaponising concepts such as human rights to demonise rivals.

How does the atrocity fabrication technique work? Hostile people in “independent” human rights groups discreetly financed by the United States government fabricate stories of grotesque atrocities which are widely circulated by the world’s biggest media, including the BBC, Reuters and the New York Times.

Abrams traces the development of the atrocity fabrication technique over centuries right up to the present, but in this article, we’ll take a deeper look at one example: his analysis of the current narrative of “concentration camps” in China.

The north-western part of China painted as the site of a genocide. But it’s abundantly clear to everyone who visits Xinjiang or just sees the constant flow of videos from that community on Chinese TikTok that there has clearly been no such thing among the 13 million Uyghurs in northwestern China. Just like people everywhere, they post videos of themselves dancing, eating, partying, getting married, and so on.
Nobody could live such normal lives if a huge number of members of their community were being tortured and murdered in concentration camps. The narrative is clearly fake. So where did the horror stories come from?

“These claims relied overwhelmingly on U.S. government-funded anti-China groups dominated by hard[at]line Uyghur dissidents with Islamist or separatist positions such as the World Uyghur Congress, the Uyghur Human Rights and Democracy Foundation and the Uyghur American Association,” the book says.

“These were all heavily funded by the U.S. Congress through the National Endowment for Democracy, which had been closely affiliated with the CIA since its foundation and tasked with carrying out overtly what the agency had formerly done alone and more covertly.”

The innocent are harmed

What is really shocking is that the fabricating of atrocities often leads to harm for the innocent: the Chinese community, for example, is unfairly demonised worldwide as cruel and barbarous, while blameless Uyghurs in China have been made unemployable for no fault of their own.

Ordinary individuals who speak out are also targeted. Jerry Grey, a retired London police officer, spent time in Xinjiang and wrote an honest description of life in the province, debunking Western media allegations of death camps. “This is absolute rubbish – there are not a million Uighurs in concentration camps, that is just total baloney,” he wrote.

Daniel Dumbrill, a brewer-turned-commentator, did something similar. “We’re expected to believe that the population of Uyghurs is being eradicated. It’s a ridiculous statement whether it is in a literal sense or even a cultural sense,” he said.

They and others like them were punished harshly. Many western reporters attacked these individuals as paid agents of Beijing, without a scrap of evidence. “The BBC, for one, equat[at]ed such questioning of the Western narrative with ‘spreading Communist Party disinformation’ and strongly implied the need for policing to restrict such expats’ reach on YouTube and other social media platforms,” Abrams says in the book.

Ironically, Grey and Dumbrill were telling the truth free of charge, while the journalists attacking them were collecting fat salaries for spreading “news reports” which were fabricated atrocities.

How the process began

It is fascinating to look back at how the process began in the case of the Xinjiang fabrications. The book notes that many countries had to find ways to deal with Islamist terrorists. (Most preferred not to follow the western response of invading the wrong country and causing large numbers of deaths.)

China’s efforts to deal with extremist Islamist terrorists were to implement deradicalisation programs, a route also chosen by Indonesia and France. However, western media and governments chose to present the Chinese version as unique. “The Chinese pro[at]gram saw a metanarrative created around it by Western NGOs and media outlets that was very far removed from any verifiable real[at]ity on the ground, and was based on highly dubious and in many cases entirely fabricated source materials,” Abrams says.

This misrepresentation of the facts was used to provide excuses to attack China on economic and other fronts. “As China emerged as an unprecedentedly potent challenger to Western power, this narrative sought to vilify and provide pretext for hostile actions against it,” Abrams writes.

Journalists were encouraged to print horrific reports about a massive network of Nazi-like death camps for the “genocide” of innocent victims, using stories from groups such as the Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders. The CHRD website presents itself as a group of Chinese individuals rising up within the Chinese nation; but in reality, it is actually based in the US and “is heavily funded by the U.S. Congress through the NED, re[at]ceiving approximately US$500,000 annually”, the book says. CHRD listed its address as the Washington D.C. office of Human Rights Watch, a similar group that weaponises human rights to attack China.

Recycled methods

How did they fool so many people so well? Practice and long experience. In particular, the west recycled the same atrocity fabrication techniques they had used to demonise North Korea against China—specifically “using emotional but highly inconsistent female defector testimonies”.

For example, the BBC and CNN for days made their top story the tale of Tursunay Ziawudun, presented as a concentration camp survivor with nightmarish stories. You can’t read the reports without feeling hate bubbling up for the Chinese.

But for anyone who makes the effort to dig deeper, a problem quickly emerges: she has been interviewed many times, and told very different stories every time, with the accounts becoming increasingly extreme. In 2017 and 2018 interviews, she described her time in the detention center thus: “To be honest, it wasn’t that bad. We had our phones. We had meals in the canteens. Other than being forced to stay there, everything was fine.” She also said: “I wasn’t beaten or abused. The hardest part was mental.”

However, the BBC newsroom shockingly chose not to tell its audience about these earlier interviews, presenting only a very different horror-movie-like story that mysteriously emerged after she had travelled to the United States as a guest of a NED-funded NGO. In the new version, she was “removed from the cells ‘every night’ and raped by masked Chinese men, and that she was tortured, gang-raped and had her genitals electrocuted”. Her cell mates “disappeared”.

Many of these “torture-porn” stories presented as news reports by the BBC and CNN were so extreme that even anti-China campaigners expressed discomfort, and tried to distance themselves. “You cannot write a news story claiming systematic rape based on three eyewitness ac[at]counts, not all of whom are reliable,” wrote Gene Bunin, who runs the Xinjiang Victims Database. “You just can’t and the BBC should know better. Take that from someone who’s been dealing with testimonies 24/7 for the past two years now.”

U.S. academic Ma Haiyun, a harsh critic of China’s government, admitted he could no longer even discuss whether the stories were true. “In the current political climate, if you publicly state that there is no genocide in Xinjiang, it will affect your reputation to the point where if I said this, half of my friends would cut me off,” he wrote. In other words, the truth could not even be mentioned, let alone investigated, even by anti-China campaigners.

Opposite of a prison

A common argument was that there must be a genocide in China, because why else would the Chinese refuse to allow anyone to enter the area? The western media followed the CIA-founded Radio Free Asia’s line in presenting Xinjiang as a giant prison, a locked-off place where people can’t enter. This was the opposite of the truth. More than 150 million tourists visit the region every year, mostly domestic visitors but with some foreigners, making it one of the world’s top tourist spots by number. Many stay in Uyghur-run hotels and make a point of eating Uyghur foods.

Worryingly, there were clearly cases in which the western media did not just report a false narrative, but seemed to actively enable the deception of their own audiences. Abrams noted how an image showing the details of Tursunay Ziawudun’s passport created a problem for the new narrative she was pushing. Instead of investigating this crucial discrepancy, CNN reporters covered it up by blurring the key part of the image.

Abrams’ book also notes the real story behind the image of a large group of men used by the Guardian and almost every other media outlet to present Uyghur concentration camp victims. But, as this writer pointed out two years ago, it really shows a 2017 group of people in a rehabilitation center gathering to listen to a Muslim speaker.

Serial deceiver rewarded

What about all those pictures on Twitter of Uyghurs being horrible harmed or mistreated? To find an answer to that, consider the case of the notorious Arslan Hidayat. This Australia-based individual’s standard technique was to take pictures of people in misery from anywhere he could find them and then re-label them as Uyghurs being tortured by Chinese, for mass diffusion on the internet. When confronted, he would admit that this type of falsification was common among activists such as himself—and then do the same trick again.

You would think that such a person would immediately have sacrificed all credibility. The opposite is true: he was quoted as a legitimate source by the BBC, the Guardian, CNN, AFP, Al-Jazeera, TRT WORLD, and numerous others. Today he has been rewarded for his skills in deception by being given a salaried position at Campaign for Uyghurs, one of many, er, “independent” anti-China propaganda groups.
Moral compass? What moral compass? Dear reader, keep turning the pages. It gets worse.

Harming, not helping

One of the most depressing reports in the book is what happened to Esquel Group, run by a popular family in Hong Kong. This company, one of the world’s most successful shirt makers, happily employed 400 Uyghur workers, and many so enjoyed working there that they become long term staff. It was the win-win situation that gives business people a good name.

Yet the company was unfairly put on a blacklist of “slave labor” firms by the US Commerce Department. This made exports difficult. “In response Esquel invited U.S. Commerce Department staff to visit the facilities in Xinjiang with free and open access but received no response,” Abrams writes. For Esquel staff, it was puzzling – it was as if their accusers didn’t want to know the truth.

“When it [Esquel] subsequently invited independent labour audit specialists to visit the facilities in Xinjiang and carry out unstructured interviews with randomly selected Uyghur workers, every instance found no evidence of the forced labour or coercion being alleged by Western sources,” Abrams writes.

But what could be done? For all its talk of “rules-based order”, the western government-media machine ignores even the most basic concepts of right and wrong.
Other companies, seeing cases like this, simply stop hiring Uyghurs. When companies are punished for doing the right thing, firms take fright. Western media and government are literally making Uyghurs unemployable while pretending to help them.

Other visitors react differently


Numerous middle eastern and Asian countries have sent envoys to Xinjiang and come away satisfied by what they have seen. Nepalese ambassador Leela Mani Paudyal noted after her visit: “The vocational education and training centres in Xinjiang are not ‘concentration camps’ as described by some Western media, but schools to help those in[at]fluenced by extreme thoughts to

Atrocity fabrications hurt East and West

In the long run, it is very clear that the atrocity fabrications of the west are harmful and divisive to everyone, whether the narratives are focused on Xinjiang, Tibet, or in other parts of the world. Western governments and media have put so much time and energy into their overblown atrocity tales that it will be difficult for them to backtrack to more moderate positions. As a result, it is inevitable that there be a sharp drop in trust levels for western governments and media.

“The significant investment the west’s information networks have put behind the Xinjiang fabrication, including assets such as Human Rights Watch, the BBC and RFA, means that pressing this narrative too far, and limited international receptivity to it, may well erode Western international credibility when commenting on humanitarian issues beyond a point of no return.”

Some might say that the mainstream media’s reputation is already beyond repair. Time will tell.

Abrams’ excellent book will be out in March. It is highly recommended and can be purchased below:
Amazon AU
Amazon US
Amazon UK

https://johnmenadue.com/exposed-the-...ising-enemies/

Originally Posted by sabang

Excellent Article

No it's not, it's just more shit propaganda from some snivelling chinky brown noser who writes for China Daily.

How thick are you?

I am sure intelligent readers are quite capable of reading, digesting, and deciding for themselves 'arry- they certainly aren't going to be deterred by the bitter rant of some lowbrow. In fact I would think the opposite. Excellent article, and I look forward to the forthcoming book it reviews.

Originally Posted by sabang

I am sure intelligent readers are quite capable of reading, digesting, and deciding for themselves 'arry- they certainly aren't going to be deterred by the bitter rant of some obsequious chinky brown noser

FTFY.

The forum intellectuals are in fine form this morning.

Originally Posted by sabang

The forum intellectuals are in fine form this morning.

A slightly retarded protozoan must appear intellectual from your viewpoint.

Probably trying to work out how to avoid being arrested again.

A billionaire Chinese dealmaker has gone missing, plunging one of the country’s top investment banks into turmoil.
Bao Fan, the founder and executive director of China Renaissance, is a major figure in the Chinese tech industry and has played an important role in the emergence of a string of large domestic internet startups.

Shares in China Renaissance slumped after the bank announced to the Hong Kong stock exchange on Thursday that it had been unable to contact Bao, without giving further details.
The stock plunged 50% at one point after the statement, before clawing back to about 30% down.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/17/chinese-billionaire-tech-banker-bao-fan-goes-missing

He has been living in Tokyo.

Attempts to bully China only higlight US impotence in this regard, and resulted in a diplomatic slapdown- so pretty stoopid imo. India too.

Originally Posted by sabang

Attempts to bully China only higlight US impotence in this regard, and resulted in a diplomatic slapdown- so pretty stoopid imo. India too.

Yeah, they are unflappable

Oh, why do you rub in Americas recent self imposed humiliation? They spent millions of dollars of taxpayers money shooting down an unpropelled Chinese weather balloon, and three US owned hobby balloons with Sidewinder missiles.

And got the ol' chinkies in a right snit.

Worth every dollar.

Laughter sounds the same in Chinese.

Originally Posted by sabang

Laughter sounds the same in Chinese.

Their constant whining and snivelling is unique though.