HOSTED BY BRIAN BERLETIC. Historian and podcaster Carl Zha and international relations and security expert Mark Sleboda join the New Atlas again, this time to talk about Russian-Chinese history and whether or not there is any historical basis for the West’s current desire to see a new “Sino-Soviet” split.
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PETER MAN—I am from Hong Kong and have become a Canadian like Sana. I worked in the mainstream media in the early days of my career and actually built a national Chinese-language television station in Canada. That was a long time ago. When Hong Kong was handed back to China in 1997, I returned to my hometown to watch that historical event. I ended up getting a job in China and lived there for almost two decades. I have witnessed China’s rise and I can share one of my experiences in a few words. I was utterly shocked by the complete disregard for factual reporting of China by Western journalists.
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HE ZHAO—When a state has been under ceaseless and constant destabilisation campaigns from an exponentially richer and more powerful enemy that uses every opportunity at subversion, sabotage, colour revolution, funding extremists, arming opposition, regime change, and coup d’etats to destroy their government by any means necessary, this government implements defensive measures such as censorship of enemy-dominated global media, and censorship of political content in culture, which sometimes, without consideration of this history, seem unreasonably harsh.
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CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—US-led provocations and escalations against China are becoming a regular occurrence, both from the US itself and from its imperial assets like Australia and Taiwan. Yet according to the western political/media class, the urgent threat of our day is “Chinese aggression”. After the House of Representatives voted to approve the new Select Committee on China — a Republican initiative designed to increase internal pressure in the US government to ramp up the new cold war — the committee’s chairman Mike Gallagher put out a statement saying that it is “time to push back against the Chinese Communist Party’s aggression in bipartisan fashion.”
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Garland Nixon lucidly explains why though neither Russia nor China have proclaimed it openly and formally, there is a strong organic de facto alliance between the two leading Eurasian powers. A formal declaration of strategic unity would give the neocons a gift, says Garland, and that is to be delayed or prevented as long as possible. Meanwhile, the dynamics of the world continue to respond to the new realities on the ground: the economic and military growth of Russia and China, and lately also Iran; the drifting of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and India toward the Beijing/Moscow axis, and the hollowing out of the Western bloc’s military hardware as a result of the Ukraine adventure, which has shown the shallowness of the West in terms of industrial military production. In a few years, neither NATO nor the EU may exist at all, which would be a good thing for humanity.
