CAITLIN JOHNSTONE
“China is preparing to kill Americans and we’ve got to prepare to defend ourselves,” empire propagandist Gordon Chang told Fox Business during an interview on Monday. Chang, who has famously spent more than two decades incorrectly predicting the imminent collapse of China, bizarrely made these comments while discussing a future attack on Taiwan. Taiwan is of course not the United States and any potential war between Taiwan and the mainland would be an inter-Chinese conflict that needn’t involve a single American, and Chang is most assuredly not part of any “we” who will ever be engaged in combat with the Chinese military under any circumstances. Chang frames his narrative as though China is menacing Americans in their homes, when in reality only the exact opposite is true: the US has been militarily encircling China for many years, and is rapidly accelerating its efforts to do so. Just the other day the Philippines announced the locations of four military bases the US will now have access to in its ongoing encirclement operation, most of them in the Northern provinces closest to China. Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp writes: “Three of the Philippine bases will be located in northern Philippine provinces, a move that angers China since they can be used as staging grounds for a fight over Taiwan. The US will be granted access to the Lal-lo Airport and the Naval Base Camilo Osias, which are both located in the northern Cagayan province. In the neighboring Isabela province, the US will gain access to Camp Melchor Dela Cruz. The US military will also be able to expand to Palawan, an island province in the South China Sea, disputed waters that are a major source of tensions between the US and China. The US will be granted access to Balabac Island, the southernmost island of Palawan. The new locations are on top of five bases the US currently has access to, bringing the total number of bases the US can rotate forces through in the Philippines to nine. The expansion in the Philippines is a significant step in the US effort to build up its military assets in the region to prepare for a future war with China.” So it’s very clear who the aggressor is here and who is preparing to attack whom. Imperial spinmeisters like Gordon Chang are just lying when they frame China’s militarizing to defend itself against undisguised US encirclement as China militarizing to attack Americans. Fun fact: US officials used to pretend China was crazy and paranoid for saying this encirclement was happening. In the 1995 book “Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II,” William Blum wrote the following: “In March 1966, Secretary of State Dean Rusk spoke before a congressional committee about American policy toward China. Mr. Rusk, it seems, was perplexed that “At times the Communist Chinese leaders seem to be obsessed with the notion that they are being threatened and encircled.” He spoke of China’s “imaginary, almost pathological, notion that the United States and other countries around its borders are seeking an opportunity to invade mainland China and destroy the Peiping Peking regime”. The Secretary then added: “How much Peiping’s ‘fear’ of the United States is genuine and how much it is artificially induced for domestic political purposes only the Chinese Communist leaders themselves know. I am convinced, however, that their desire to expel our influence and activity from the western Pacific and Southeast Asia is not motivated by fears that we are threatening them.” Another fun fact: thanks to a 2021 revelation by Daniel Ellsberg, we now know that the secretary of state’s comments about how crazy and paranoid China was for thinking the US wanted to attack it came just eight years after the US had seriously considered acting on plans it had drawn up to launch a nuclear strike on the Chinese mainland. Mainstream western imperialists of all stripes have long recognized that a hard conflict with China will be necessary at some point in the future if they’re to continue their domination of the world. In his 2005 book “Super patriot”, Michael Parenti wrote that the unipolarist neoconservative “PNAC” (Project for the New American Century) ideology that had by that point taken over US foreign policy was ultimately geared toward a future conflict with China: “The PNAC plan envisions a strategic confrontation with China, and a still greater permanent military presence in every corner of the world. The objective is not just power for its own sake but power to control the world’s natural resources and markets, power to privatize and deregulate the economies of every nation in the world, and power to hoist upon the backs of peoples everywhere including North America the blessings of an untrammeled global ‘free market.’ The end goal is to ensure not merely the supremacy of global capitalism as such, but the supremacy of American global capitalism by preventing the emergence of any other potentially competing superpower.” But you can see the twinkle of this looming conflict in the eyes of western imperialists long before any of this. In a 1902 interview (which was not published until 1966 a year after Churchill’s death), Churchill candidly voiced his support for partitioning China at some point in the future in order to preserve the dominance of the “Aryan stock” over “barbaric nations”: “The East is interesting, and to no one can it be more valuable and interesting than to anyone who comes from the West. I think we shall have to take the Chinese in hand and regulate them. I believe that as civilized nations become more powerful they will get more ruthless, and the time will come when the world will impatiently bear the existence of great barbaric nations who may at any time arm themselves and menace civilized nations. I believe in the ultimate partition of ChinaI mean ultimate. I hope we shall not have to do it in our day. The Aryan stock is bound to triumph.” The word “partition” here means breaking a nation up into smaller nations, i.e. balkanization. To this day we see western imperialists pushing for the partitioning of disobedient nations like Russia and Syria, and we still see this with China in the push to permanently amputate regions like Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Taiwan from Beijing. China’s sheer size, social cohesion and geostrategic location have long been recognized as a potential problem in the future for western imperialists who wish to ensure their ability to dominate and control, and now we’re seeing that all come to a head. Churchill said of a future confrontation with China “I hope we shall not have to do it in our day” because that confrontation has always been certain to be horrific, and today in the Atomic Age this is far more true than it was in 1902. And in fact we do not have to do it in our day, either. We don’t have to do it in any day. The only reason we’re being pushed toward a profoundly dangerous conflict with China is because it’s the only way for western imperialists to maintain their hegemonic control of this planet, but their hegemonic control of this planet has brought us to a point of endlessly escalating nuclear brinkmanship and looming ecosystemic collapse. It hasn’t exactly been working out great, is what I am saying. There’s no reason the west can’t simply accept the existence of other powers and stop trying to dominate everyone on earth. We have long been ruled by tyrants who continually push our world toward suffering and death in the name of securing more power and control, but we don’t need to accept their rule. They do not have a healthy vision for our species, and there are a whole lot more of us than there are of them. Their rule is done as soon as enough of us decide it is.