Pentagon Obsession: China, China, China
by Pepe Escobar (cross-posted with Strategic Culture)
[dropcap]C[/dropcap]hinese nuclear bombers. Chinese hypersonic missiles. Chinese carrier killer missiles. Chinese cyberattacks. Chinese anti-satellite weaponry. Chinese militarization of the South China Sea. Chinese Huawei spying.
So many Chinese “malign intentions”. And we’re not even talking about Russia.
Few people around the world are aware that the Pentagon for the moment is led by a mere “acting” Defense Secretary, Patrick Shanahan.
That did not prevent “acting” Secretary to shine in the red carpet when presenting the Trump administration’s 2020 Pentagon budget proposal – at $718 billion – to the Senate Armed Services Committee: the top US national security threat is, in his own (repeated) words, “China, China, China”.
“Acting” Shanahan has been in charge since Jim “Mad Dog” Mattis – the original butcher of Fallujah in 2004 – resigned last December. His former employer happened to be Boeing. The Pentagon’s inspector general is still investigating whether Shanahan was in fact acting as a no holds barred Boeing commercial asset whenever he met the Pentagon top brass.
![](https://www.greanvillepost.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/chinese-cruiser-type_055_launch_2.jpg)
China's type 055 destroyer (classified as cruiser by the Americans) displaces over 13,000 tons, and has the heaviest missile load of any post Cold War warship.
That, of course, fits the classic Beltway “revolving door” pattern. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, a Washington-based group, actually filed a complaint around the fact that “acting” Shanahan blasted Lockheed Martin, Boeing’s competitor, in every top-level Pentagon meeting.
Shanahan told the Senate, “China is aggressively modernizing its military, systematically stealing science and technology, and seeking military advantage through a strategy of military-civil fusion.”
That includes Beijing’s development of a nuclear-capable long-range bomber that, according to Shanahan, will put it on the same level as the US and Russia as the only global powers controlling air-, sea- and land-based nuclear weapons.
It’s essential to remember that Mattis and Shanahan are the main authors of the National Defense Strategy adopted by the Trump administration which accuses China of striving for “Indo-Pacific regional hegemony in the near-term and displacement of the United States to achieve global pre-eminence in the future.”
Now compare it with
Col. Larry Wilkerson’s view; the whole Pentagon show is all about offense while Russia and China are always emphasizing defense.
Fighting the Trojan Horse
Even more enlightening is to directly compare the Pentagon approach with the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces under its chief, Gen. Valeriy Gerasimov.
Gerasimov identified “the US and its allies” as engaged in permanent war of all types, including “preparation for ‘global strike’, ‘multi-domain battle’, [and the] use of the technology of ‘color revolutions’ and ‘soft power’. Their goal is the elimination of the statehood of undesirable countries, undermining their sovereignty, changing the legitimately elected public authorities. Thus it was in Iraq, in Libya and in Ukraine. Now similar actions are observed in Venezuela.”
So there it is, graphically explained: Venezuela, geostrategically, is as important to Moscow as Syria and Ukraine.
Gerasimov also detailed how, “the Pentagon has begun to develop a fundamentally new strategy of warfare, which has been dubbed the ‘Trojan Horse’. Its essence lies in the active use of the ‘protest potential of the fifth column’ in order to destabilize the situation with simultaneous strikes by precision-guided weapons on the most important targets.”
Then the clincher; “The Russian Federation is ready to oppose every one of these strategies. In recent years, military scientists, together with the General Staff, have developed conceptual approaches to neutralize the aggressive actions of potential opponents. The field of research of military strategy is armed struggle, its strategic level. With the emergence of new areas of confrontation in modern conflicts, methods of struggle are increasingly shifting towards the integrated application of political, economic, information and other non-military measures, implemented with the support of military force.”
Call it Russia’s response to Made in USA Hybrid War. With the major incentive of being a value for money operation; after all the Russian General Staff, unlike the Pentagon, is not in the business, for all practical purposes, of stealing trillions of dollars from taxpayers for several decades.
There’s no question the Chinese leadership, not exactly adept at state of the art Hybrid War techniques, is studying the Russian military strategies in excruciating detail.
Of course this is all intrinsically linked to Putin’s leadership. Last month, in Moscow, Rostislav Ishchenko, arguably the top Russian analyst of the Ukraine saga, explained it to me in detail:
“Putin does not ‘take over the elites’ or ‘guide the nation.’ His genius lies in an acute intuitive sense of the strategic needs of the nation (which creates a strong feedback and causes absolute trust of the absolute majority of the people), but most importantly, he is a master of political compromise, understanding the importance of maintaining peace between different social, economic, and political groups within the country, to ensure its stability, prosperity, and international authority. Given that foreign policy is always a continuation of domestic policy, we can clearly trace his desire for compromise in Russian international activity.”
“Putin, Ishchenko added, “does not try to suppress the opponents even in those cases when Russia is unconditionally stronger and the result of the confrontation will clearly be in her favor. Putin understands that both the loser and the winner lose in the confrontation. Therefore, he always offers a compromise for a long time, almost to the last opportunity, even to those who clearly do not deserve it, moving to other solutions only after the opponent has clearly crossed all possible red lines and can pose a threat to the vital interests of Russia. An agreement based on consideration of each other’s interests is always stronger than any short-term ‘victories’, which tomorrow will result in the need to reaffirm their status of the winner again and again. It seems to me that Putin understands this well. Hence the effectiveness of his actions. You can also take a look at his team. These are professionals who adhere to a variety of ideological views (or do not adhere to any). The main thing is that they perform their work qualitatively. The ability to manage such a team is another of its undoubted advantages. After all, these are all ambitious people who are aware of their professionalism and are able to defend their opinion, which is not always the same for everyone. Nevertheless, they work as a single mechanism and achieve really great results.”
Watch out for Yoda’s hordes
To expect the same from the US industrial-military-surveillance complex would be idle.
In fact, “acting” Shanahan’s deputy, Under Secretary David Trachtenberg, doubled down when addressing the Senate Armed Services Committee; he said that Washington will not relinquish its self-attributed right for a nuclear first strike.
In his own words; “A ‘no-first use’ policy would erode US allies’ belief that they are protected.” As if all US allies were begging in unison to be “defended” by US nuclear bombs. In true “war is peace” mode, this Orwellian state of affairs is justified under the Pentagonese notion of “constructive ambiguity”.
The 2018 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) exhibits a long list of causes that may detonate a US nuclear first strike – including a worryingly vague attack on “allied or partner civilian infrastructure”. Even a clumsy false flag, for instance in the South China Sea, could lead to such a stand off.
All of the above is in fact directly linked to the death of Yoda.
Yoda is of course RAND asset Andrew Marshall, who was the director of the nefarious Office of Net Assessment at the Pentagon from 1973 to 2015.
Predictably, scores of Atlanticist think tanks are celebrating Yoda as the winner in devising the new rollback US “strategy” against China.
![](https://www.greanvillepost.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/chineseNuclearBomberPLAAF_Xian_HY-6_Li_Pang.jpg)
China's nuclear bomber is based on Russia's TU-160 design. Although China is rearming and modernising her arsenal as fast as possible, she still trelies on her Russian partner to provide the real miltary deterrent.
Yoda did groom scores of analysts across the whole spectrum of the industrial-military-surveilance complex – including think tanks, universities and mainstream media.
So in the end Yoda did body-slam Bismarckian Henry Kissinger – who remains alive, sort of (if Marshall was Yoda, would Kissinger be Darth Vader?) Kissinger always advised containment in relation to China, disguised as what he termed “co-evolution”.
Yoda finished off not only Kissinger but also the Obama administration’s wobbly and ill-defined “pivot to Asia”. Yoda preached hardcore confrontation with China. There’s no question that even beyond the grave, he’ll continue to rule over his warmongering Beltway hordes.
China – and Macron’s U-Turn
![](https://www.greanvillepost.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Macron-pensive.jpg)
In his zeal of becoming Europe’s new king, Macron also called on all EU members not to go their own way with China, but to jointly negotiate with China “new deals” under the BRI. A joint EU to be strong and equal to the economic and trade behemoth, China. Indeed, solidarity is always ‘good’- but Europe is the last bit of Mother Earth’s territory that has ever shown any solidarity and cohesion among her neighbors and co-members of this illustrious non-union club, called the European Union.
Yet, surprise-surprise! On President Xi’s next stop, Paris, coming from Italy, Macron rolled out the red carpet for the Chinese President and, according to RT, went on to sign billions worth of new contracts with the Asian leader. If this looked like a Macron U-turn, it was a Macron U-turn. As an afterthought he invited German Chancellor, Madame Merkel and EU President Junker to Paris for a photo-Op under the Arc de Triomphe – just to make sure his about-face was not to be misinterpreted.
![](https://www.greanvillepost.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Boeing-737Max-an-aerolineas-argentinas-boeing-737-max-8-is-seen-on-the-tarmac-of-ezeiza-airport-on-the-outskirts-of-buenos-aires-1-1-350x197.jpg)
Boeing's greed and the stunning corruption of the US political system allowing the airlines to "regulate themselves" brought on the latest 737 Max disaster. Now Airbus is eating their lunch.
President Xi also signed a multi-billion-euro deal – may be as much as € 30billion – for some 300 passenger jets from Airbus. Though Airbus is a European venture, its main manufacturing plants are in France. This is an especially hard blow to Boeing, after the company’s 737 MAX disasters. Weakening Boeing is also weakening an important US military contractor.
As was to be expected, Washington didn’t like Italy’s moving closer to the East by signing several BRI contracts, and even less so, while the EU, represented by Jean-Claude Juncker, Angela Merkel, Germany and Emmanuel Macron, France, were welcoming President Xi today in Paris. Showing a little sympathy to friend Trump, Merkel observed to Reuters, “We, as Europeans, want to play an active part and that must lead to certain reciprocity and we are still wrangling over that a bit.” – Showing Washington that not all is lost will surely give the empire a grain of hope.
Exactly 6 years ago, President Xi Jinping launched the BRI, the most ambitious and largest economic development project in recent history. On President Xi’s second state visit to Germany in March 2014, he specifically offered Madame Merkel to become (at that time) the westernmost link for the BRI. But Madame Merkel just snubbed the proposal and let it go. She was too close to Washington, and, who knows, maybe received marching orders from Obama and his handlers, to leave her fingers from tightening relations with China.
As the Chinese are not pushy, Mr. Xi went home and pursued this massive project further. Within the next 30 years at least, it will build multi-trillions of Chinese Yuans-worth of infrastructure, interconnected research and education centers, industrial development, facilitate cultural exchange – it will build bridges among people. The BRI is so important that the Chinese National Assembly decided in 2017 to incorporate it into the Chinese Constitution.
Today BRI spans the globe with some six land and maritime routes. More are under preparation. BRI is not to invade and take over the world, as the west would like you to believe. The New Silk Road is instead promoting a multi-polar world. It will pave the way towards a new world order, but not the one the Rothschilds & Co. are dreaming about, but one that promotes equal partnership and solidarity among countries.
![](https://www.greanvillepost.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/China-Xi-withMacron-Merkel-Juncker-3-2019.jpg)
Pres. Xi sitting with Macron, Merkel and EU representatve Juncker. Nobody can afford to ignore China.
It is amazing, the west was asleep for 6 years, or didn’t want to see. Maybe the Washington driven war machine simply thought it would go away. But it didn’t and doesn’t. China has the world’s strongest economy according to Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) indicators (that’s all that really counts), surpassing the US in 2017. With the BRI, and an ever-stronger currency, the Yuan, due to a stable and steadily growing distributive economy, and in a military and strategic alliance with Russia, China is literally unbeatable. Hence, as basically a last-ditch effort, Washington’s multiple attempts at trade wars. It’s a publicity stunt, to make the world believe the US is still calling the shots. In reality, the New Silk Road is most likely the vehicle to drive the United States warrior arrogance into the ground. Good riddance.
And let’s not forget, BRI is intimately linked with Russia, not only physically as in transport infrastructure, but also strategically for purposes of economic development of henceforth forgotten and neglected countries and regions. So far the west has not even reacted to this “imminent threat”, as perceived by Washington, the Russian haters. If they would add Russia and China together as the new Silk Road front, they would pee in their pants – as they may realize their days of never-ending treachery and lies would soon end. Therefore, better that the Ostrich pulls only one eye out of the sand, blinking at China. Lying to themselves, and of course to their people, is just one more nail in the coffin of the west.
We may not be there yet, as war threats, and attempts at regime change from the neofascist Trump team are still very much “on the table”. But with Russia’s impressive superiority in military power, and the Chinese economic supremacy, this menacing table may soon be symbolically blown apart, meaning, will the commanding and reigning elite living a lush and ego-centric lifestyle really want to run the risk of being out-nuked? – Because a new war will not just be played out in Europe, like the last two WWs; nor will New Zealand offer a safe haven for those elite and super rich who have already secured their properties in this far-away land. – Don’t think so. They, the dark state elite, who pull the strings, rather live in a safe world and enjoy their bounties stolen over hundreds of years, as long as they last, even under a Russia-China and multipolar SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization) sponsorship.
When that recognition dawns on western minds, that all that counts is economics – economics that may bring more equality, a better life and harmony among nations, and more prosperity for more people on this planet earth.
Did Mr. Macron and his European counterparts just see the light? Did he realize that being the king of vassal Europe is really meaningless and that it’s high time to jump the sinking boat? Only the near future will tell.
Another scenario is that China has long realized the self-liquidating nature of the EU, and instead of banking their trade agreements with a potentially dead body, they approach trade deals country by country: Greece, Italy, France, Germany – who is next? – Because, even with the collapse of the European Union, the 28 countries must and will survive. So, trade agreements with each one of them individually have an indefinitely higher value, than signing up with a block of unsolidary, uncoordinated, even in some cases hostile-to-each-other nations – with a fiat currency that is doomed, as it will never survive in such a non-union constellation – without even a Constitution pointing to a common vision.
Why the Europeans can’t see that for themselves, and run away from this disaster called Brussels, is a miracle for me. If a Martian would watch human behavior on our Mother Earth, he, she or it would laugh no end at our abject schizophrenic behavior – but at the same time with tears of sadness, as humanity is hell-bent on self-destruction.
***
Well, "Roi Macron" will not let go, he is not (yet) allowed to let go. His paymasters, those that put him there, the Rothschild financial clan & Co. have not gotten enough out of him yet, in terms of milking Europe to the marrow. How much more can Macron’s naïve pathological egocentricity still give? – By launching the military, the first time since 1948, with live ammunition against harmless, unarmed protesters, the Yellow Vests, his French co-patriots (although he is an Über-French, he is a wannabe European king), this maybe the last nail in Macron’s coffin – figurately speaking.
As Tom Luongo so aptly describes, “There are few people in this world more odious than French President Emmanuel Macron after his behavior this week. I’m sure there are child molesters who are worse. But as a man who is pivotal in the future of hundreds of millions of people, his decision to order the French military to quell the Yellow Vests protests with live ammunition is simply vile. Macron outed himself as the very symbol of what animates the globalist elite he represents. Disdain.”
Those black-hooded “protesters”, who plant the violence, burn down bank entrances, break windows and loot shops, are nothing less than paid agents provocateurs. You may have noticed, in the hundreds of demo-videos circulating on the internet, the police leave them pretty much alone – orders from the Macron regime. Will the military be loyal to deceitful, despicable Macron, or to the nation, i.e. to the people? That remains the question, as fissures within the military are already noticeable.
So, Macron’s about-face, or U-Turn, after having scolded Italy for going it alone, instead of ’collectively’ with the EU, may be by orders of the financial monarchs who forced him with millions of false propaganda into the French Presidency – and who may now also see the light: Europe is no longer a viable bet.
![](https://www.greanvillepost.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Peter_Koenig234-350x204.jpg)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
And here’s the book that answers it.
Get the definitive history of the Russo-American conflict today!
Announcing my new book – I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China
This book is endorsed and recommended by the editorial board of The Greanville Post.
[dropcap]I[/dropcap]’d like to briefly announce that I have a new book for sale, I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China.
China has soared in the 21st century, while the neoliberal austerity-minded West has slumped - longstanding Western predictions and promises have totally failed. There is no longer any doubt about this.
This requires us to accommodate reality and drastically rethink our views of the key events of China’s socialist era, and also re-examine the key political and cultural structures of Chinese socialism. That’s what this new book does.
This type of an honest reckoning is rare in 2019, because Western propaganda on the 1949 Revolution, the Mao Zedong era, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” is so very, very widespread, pernicious and misleading. Standing up for socialist China is not easy, even though their countless Western detractors have been proven totally wrong - will you still keep buying their books, instead?
If you have followed my writing you may recall that last year I wrote an 8-part series which compared old, biased scholarship on China with new scholarship. In short, I exposed the anti-socialist (and thus anti-Chinese) propaganda of the most popular English-language, university-level history textbook on China, written by Harvard’s first-ever China scholar, while lauding the arrival of not hostile, accurate, 21st-century scholarship from people like Jeff J. Brown.
Added in are perspectives and analyses gleaned from my years as a daily hack reporter. Daily reporting, I feel, provides a unique view of politics and society, and one which is under appreciated despite being increasingly rare in modern journalism. The view from ivory tower academia, “woke” expatriate independent analysts, and the urgency and finality of daily journalism - I think you won’t find this potent concoction elsewhere on China analysis.
The bulk of the book includes that 8-part series, as well as some other published writings of mine on China.
Bottom line: yes, these are all available online for free… but wouldn’t it be great if you had them all in one place? I’m certain you have asked yourself exactly that question on at least three separate occasions. Ask no longer!
What does buying this book get you?
The admiration of your friends, certainly. I also note that it functions well as a door stop and/or a coffee coaster. It could also freshen your breath and prevent gum disease (I haven’t tried it for that yet).
The foreword was graciously provided by Dongping Han, who wrote the indispensable The Unknown Cultural Revolution: Life and Change in a Chinese Village, available here. This advertisement is running alongside a new 8-part series I have written which relies on Han’s book to popularise more new analyses and data which staggeringly rewrite the false histories of China’s Cultural Revolution.
The book was published by Badak Merah, a revolutionary & independent publishing house which also prints the indispensable, inspirational and unrepentantly leftist journalism of Andre Vltchek, Jeff J. Brown, and others.
Amazingly, there is simply no other place to sell our book besides Amazon.
It seems amusing and hypocritical that a book about socialism is only being sold on Amazon, which is perhaps the most cutthroat capitalist corporation today. All I can say is: we tried. Amazon has bought up so many parts of the modern publishing industry, like CreateSpace, that there simply are no real options for us. We are looking, though.
Bottom line: the most common phrase heard among leftist authors is, “just get the ideas out there”, because leftist ideas are so harshly repressed in the West, both formally and informally. And it’s not like we’re in this for the money.
Why a price of $16.49? I wanted to keep it as low as possible. However, $12 goes to Amazon. That means my publishers - who worked hard on this and deserve some compensation for their efforts, and who sure picked out a great cover - get only $2. Because they are true leftists who believe in equality - a rarity in publishing - I get $2 as well.
LOL, the idea that $12 of your purchase goes to Amazon’s pockets may make many refuse to buy this book, or any from Amazon, but please keep in mind that your $4 is rather seriously necessary for us to get more good ideas “out there”.
Selling pro-socialist works in English necessarily aims at a very small audience, unfortunately. My personal hope is that this book sells just 1,000 copies, but I am being rather optimistic. That means this type of a book is more likely to cause me hassles with various governments, than to give me a ton of profits. However, these admissions should show how important I think it is that weoverturn western propaganda on socialist China.
What’s with the title? Poor grammar in the first part. Well, that comes from the David Bowie song “China Girl”, and music is a terrible way to properly learn a language. But it was either a line from that song, or “(Everybody Was) Kung-Fu Fighting”. However, a title like, “Funky Chinamen from Funky Chinatown: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China,” just didn’t work for me.
So, if you can possibly afford a copy I can assure you that it would be much appreciated. And if you can make the purchase, I wish you happy reading!
Thank you,
Ramin Mazaheri
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
A necessary revolution in discussing China’s Cultural Revolution: an 8-part series (1/8)
[dropcap]P[/dropcap]erhaps the most important unresolved dichotomy in the West today is not the male-female divide but the urban-rural divide. The #MeToo Movement is making advances towards better gender equality - a direct result of the election of US President Donald Trump - but city and country remain locked in a most ungratifying combat.
In the US this is known as the “red state-blue state” socio-political war, which essentially pits liberal metropolitan areas against allegedly-backwards conservative rural areas; in the UK it’s sovereignty-demanding Leavers versus allegedly more intelligent anti-Brexiteers; in France it is the Yellow Vest movement engaging in civil disobedience on the Champs-Elysées due to the dismissive neglect and icy snobbery of those who can afford to live in the major centre-villes.
This is all explains why I feel that studying China’s Cultural Revolution (CR) is more important than ever: no modern nation has made such sincere and drastic efforts to correct this rural-urban imbalance, an imbalance which exists in all nations and which is as fundamental to human existence as female/male or yin/yang.
However, especially for developing countries, in places like India, Africa and Latin America, where rural farming is still often done in a manner similar to pre-21st century China, the incredible rural gains - economically, politically and culturally - which were the explicit goal of the CR are not just important but staggeringly inspirational. This article will quickly prove why that is not hyperbole, because the facts of these “incredible rural gains” will get a rare unveiling instead of another heaping of obfuscating capitalist-imperialist propaganda.
![](https://www.greanvillepost.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/MaosCulturalRevolution7865.jpg)
The Red Guards have been demonised by the West and also internal enemies of the Cultural Revolution, but their role in upsetting the status quo was logical, natural, and beneficial.
Unfortunately, most Westerners are as uninterested in China’s CR as they are in their own rural areas. I am certain this is true, because as a journalist I am 100% aware of my field’s failures in reporting on, from, or about rural areas. What’s worse, Western journalism has exacerbated their urban-rural divide by reporting from a starting point that rural areas are not morally equal to urban areas. This is a major shift from previous times: for example, during the US Revolution the farmer-citizen was Thomas Jefferson’s ideal man, and their Electoral College was created in part to ensure rural voices are not drowned out by city-slickers.
Let me give a personal anecdote which exemplifies modern journalism’s endemic failure on modern China and the Cultural Revolution:
Just prior to writing this series I was at a social function where I was introduced to an Anglophone journalist from a top international news organization (which I will not name). He had spent 10+ years based in China, spoke Chinese, and he was told I was publishing a book on China (more on this later). I told him the book is more about “Chinese socialism” than “China” per se, and he was very surprised that my goals were to rebut the vilification of Mao, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, etc. This journalist pounced firstly on my defense of the CR, and said that their media had him interview many people in China about the horrors of the CR - he couldn’t imagine that I would want to defend it? I didn’t start defending it to him - I simply asked: “The people you interviewed – what class were they from?” He evaded the question in order to stress the CR’s horrors and failures, so I repeated, “From what class?” The reason I did this was because – contrary to Western belief – class still matters, and the view of the CR changes drastically in China depending on one’s class. At this point the person looked to our mutual acquaintance in mock horror and said, “What have you gotten me into with this guy?!” LOL….
![](https://www.greanvillepost.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/MaosCRfollowers.jpg)
Mao's strength always lay with the love and trust of the Chinese people—the peasants (whom he understood exceedingly well), and the workers. China's majority.
Clearly, the lens of “class” never even came into this Western mainstream journalist’s mind, and just bringing up the concept created shock and disbelief. This journalist is not atypical of his class.
Furthermore, I am certain he (or she) did not go into China’s rural areas and dig out the truth of the CR because… I myself never go outside of Paris to do journalism for PressTV. The reality is that city journalists just don’t have the monetary resources, the time and often the inclination, and their editors do not care / can’t get more funding.
We have new research and new journalism on the Cultural Revolution so… please buy our books!
That’s why The Unknown Cultural Revolution: Life and Change in a Chinese Village by Dongping Han is such an important book. Han was kind enough to write the forward to my new book, and I have written this series to popularize and discuss his far, far more important book on Chinese socialism.
My book, incidentally, has just been published by Badak Merah Publishing house, which publishes the indispensable, inspirational and unrepentantly leftist journalism of Andre Vltchek, Jeff J. Brown, and others. It is titled, I’ll Ruin Everything you Are: Ending Western Propaganda in Red China, and is now available on Amazon in English, and very soon in Mandarin Chinese as well. I hope you can buy a copy for yourself and your 300 closest friends.
My book is not bad, but I think that Han’s book is incredibly necessary, and for an obvious reason: that mainstream journalist did not venture into rural areas to discover the opinions of rural Chinese on the CR, whereas Han did.
Han, who is now a professor in the United States, grew up in Jimo County, China. It’s a place with over 1,000 villages, 30 townships and 1.1 million people today, located along the eastern seaboard and in Shangdong Province. In yet more proof that it’s a small world, my cousin married a woman from rural Shangdong Province. The county seat, Jimo, has a population of just 61,237… which should indicate that this is a highly rural area. It is also historically a poor area: Jimo ranked the 16th-poorest in (the former) 17-county Yantai Prefecture.
Han’s work is an academic, technocratic, specialized study of the CR, but it is also investigative, long-form journalism: Thanks to his background, open mind and obviously sincere aims, Han was able to interview more than 200 farmers, CR rebel leaders, students, parents and local leaders in Jimo County. He ate, worked, and even slept in the homes of those he interviewed – pretty in-depth stuff, and so in-depth that he can’t fudge the data to fit his preconceived notions. For quantitative research he pored over decades of local records, which became available shortly after the year 2000 in China.
Han’s book gives us a comprehensive view of Jimo County before, during and after the CR – both anecdotal and statistical – and one which we should not expect any journalist to better anytime soon. Also, as Han notes, there is no reason we cannot extrapolate Jimo’s experience to the rest of rural China – Jimo County was not atypical. Han has given us the West a foundational text for modern understanding of the CR.
Han was objective like a journalist as well, because he did not go into his CR analysis with a bias, unlike mainstream journalists and Western academics. His starting point was: What was the effect and view of the CR from the rural perspective?
I can’t read Chinese, but I can say this regarding English language CR studies: That is a revolutionary perspective. Normally we only have the urban perspective, the perspective of college professors, the perspective of those judged guilty by the CR – we never, ever hear the perspective of anyone who might have possibly benefitted from the CR.
I encourage readers to not just read this series – which condenses Han’s book, discusses the key points and occasionally offers a different perspective on his data and global socialism trends and history – but to buy and read Han’s book. It is not long, it is not written in boring academic-ese, and has many interesting anecdotes which only a Chinese farmer living during the CR could relate. Truly: Where else can you read in English what a Chinese farmer honestly has to say about the CR?!
The reality is that because of China’s success since the Great Recession - in contrast with the West’s economic failure - everybody is starting to realize that our perceptions of China’s society, government and economy are misguided, because the West is failing as China is thriving. They must be doing something (many things) right, no? The idea that China’s success is due to being a “Western sweatshop” is no longer tenable and was always a way for the capitalist-imperialist West to try and co-opt credit for Chinese success.
The only way to right our misguided perceptions of China in 2019 is to listen to Chinese people themselves. That is what Han did, and that is what this series does. I hope it will prove useful to you.
As Han reminded me during a discussion, by 1976 almost all school-age students (including high school-age) were enrolled in the rural school system free of charge, something which has not even been achieved in the US today.
Clearly, this is hugely at odds with the well-known belief that the CR was a time of Chinese academic regression! That propaganda only works if one focuses solely on university-level (elite-level) education and only for a short period of time, but such a view simply does not fit the data when examining rural areas.
Just as clearly: for developing countries, this type of an explosion in rural education is urgently needed and even more-urgently desired by their inhabitants.
So that was the impact of the CR on rural mass education - and it’s staggering - what about rural industry?
Early 1960s in Jimo County: 10 rural industrial enterprises, employing 253 people. By 1976: 2,557 enterprises (2.5 per village), employing 54,771 people. Increases of 26,000% and 22,000% respectively.
In both education and industrial activity Han relates a stunning explosion during the CR decade; it’s no exaggeration to say that the CR finally brought the industrial revolution to China’s rural areas!
1965 total horsepower for farm machines in Jimo County: 8,272 HP. In 1975: 116,856 HP. Increase of 1,412%.
With all that new horsepower at their disposal, did farming productivity improve? Of course:
1964 grain output for Jimo County: 136,630 tons with a unit yield of 69.5 kilos. In 1975: 369,000 tons with a unit yield of 191 kilos. Increases of 270% and 275%, respectively.
1965 area and output of cash crops for Jimo County (peanuts, hemps, vegetables & tobacco): 9,660 tons with a unit yield of 79 kilos. In 1975: 33,350 tons with a unit yield of 129 kilos. Increases of 345% and 63% respectively.
1965 annual per capita grain and income possession and income in Jimo County: 230 kilos and 37 yuan. In 1975: 421 kilos and 80 yuan. Increases of 183% and 216% respectively.
What on earth did I just read?!
You just read about 2 times more food and 2 times more money for the average Chinese person, 14 times more horsepower (which equates to 140 times manpower), 50 times more industrial jobs, 30 times more schools and 10 times more teachers during the CR decade in rural areas.
This is the Unknown Cultural Revolution in China; this was not achieved by capitalism. (I add “in China” to differentiate it from Iran’s CR, which was the world’s only other state-sponsored CR.)
• Can we have some of that, please?!
• How did they do it?
• Can we replicate it?
For under-developed nations the idea that such increases could actually be made in only 10 years must sound like a gift from heaven.
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Consumerist China: Excited young people go shopping on the streets of Hong Kong. The early phase of the Revolution, whose roots were planted and preserved under Mao, made this new affluence possible.
What we can dispense with is the idea that it was luck: The increase came despite the worst and longest drought in Jimo in several decades (1967-1969), so in many ways the CR succeeded where the Great Leap Forward failed, as the GLF was famously handicapped by weather disasters.
“In these 10 years, Jimo suffered no less serious and no fewer natural disasters than in previous decades. There were altogether four serious droughts, four serious floods, four wind disasters, nine hailstorms and three serious insect disasters. Nevertheless, agricultural production steadily and rapidly increased,” as Han notes.
The rural-urban divide exists because the rural viewpoint is historically repressed – Mao knew this, the CR aimed to fix it
[dropcap]S[/dropcap]uch stunning data allows Han to make a hugely exciting, revolutionary declaration on the CR, and one which directly contradicts both the Western propaganda view as well as the official Chinese view today:
“The radical egalitarianism of the Cultural Revolution decade (1966-1976), official history maintains, led to economic disaster. The official assessment is widely endorsed by Chinese intellectuals and echoed by Western academics.”
But there was obviously no disaster…? Why China maintains this official stance will be explained later in this series, but only after we ask: “How could such an amazing socio-economic success occur?”
Han’s thesis is: “…this study contends that that the political convulsions of the Cultural Revolution democratized village political culture and spurred the growth of rural education, leading to substantial and rapid economic development.”
Simple: empower the average person and they will reach their full potential, improving all of society – that’s the absolute essence of socialism.
Just as excitingly, Han proves (yet again) that collectively-organized economies can be not just more stable than market-based economies, but even more dynamic. And let’s not forget the increased social cohesion they also provide….
Thirdly, Han shows that the CR was a glorious affirmation and victory for the 2nd of the socialism’s twin pillars (the first being redistribution of wealth, the second being redistribution of socio-political power). After all, a collective & redistributive economy simply cannot function properly without democratic empowerment of the overall culture and the political culture in favor of the average person / worker.
Ignore the Cultural Revolution… in order to keep pushing 1%-er neoliberal policies and failed ‘trickle-down’ economics
The CR’s political changes actually produced enormous economic development - why aren’t Western capitalists jumping at this?
The simple answer to that is: While any form of democracy is based on a well-educated citizenry - so the best decisions can be chosen in order to ensure the collective good - capitalism most certainly is not.
But Han gives us a global answer specific to the CR: “The official assessment is largely the work of officials and scholars who, because of their social positions, were subject to attack during the Cultural Revolution. Almost all published accounts are written from the perspective of urban elites. This book presents a rural perspective, one rarely found in the current literature on the Cultural revolution.”
So we return to the start of this article: the urban-based elite are the ones who write the journalism, who get interviewed by journalists, who write the textbooks, who draft the education policies without local input, who draft economic policies without rural input, who own the commodities exchanges which exploit rural toil… and Han’s book challenges them by using the rural viewpoint as both the start point and the end point when analyzing the CR. Why not? We are talking about 82% of the country, after all.
Given the depth of his investigations, resources, local knowledge and analysis, it’s impossible to argue with Han’s conclusion: “This investigation of the history of Jimo County has challenged this official account. The take-off of the rural economy in Jimo began not with market reforms, I have shown, but rather during the Cultural Revolution decade. Agricultural production more than doubled and a network of rural factories were established which fundamentally transformed the county’s rural economy in less than 10 years. Jimo’s story is not unique. … Once it has been established that the economic take-off began during the collective era, the claims of market reformers have to be put in perspective.”
The few figures I gave you fully back up Han’s claims about Jimo County; it is up to the reader to provide a theory as to why Jimo’s history would be unique or an aberration in China.
Bottom line: increased horsepower is great, but the best capital is human capital. The CR created immense human capital, where there was previously very little, and this best explains the foundation of China’s dominance in 2019.
Cultural Revolutions are scary to the minority holding power, but not for the average citizen
As I wrote, a new perspective is needed in order to properly explain modern Red China’s success, and therefore we must investigate a new perspective on the Cultural Revolution. Han’s book and this series aim to provide that.
For the West there is only one path: stop trying to appropriate credit for China’s success, and start listening to Chinese people. This is what Han provides.
For the Chinese, who officially disavow the CR - even if it is not disavowed in rural areas, the solution is more complicated than that but amounts to the same thing: disregard the official party line - the thinking of the establishment - on the CR and start looking at it honestly. Indeed, openly criticizing the Party line was perhaps the single-most important message of the Mao-backed CR!
LOL, the closed-minded will not believe me, but that’s why I have penned this series.
What’s certain is that the CR era – being such a vibrant episode of human political activity – has much to teach everybody, even the Chinese themselves.
I do not and will not disavow the CR, nor will I condemn the Chinese Communist Party for officially doing so today because I know that - much to the happiness of anti-revolutionaries everywhere – revolutionary spirit waxes and wanes. All revolutions show this - the Revolution of Islam in the 7th century, the Soviet Revolution, etc. – because Revolutions are human phenomena, and therefore it could not be otherwise.
If the CR is not thought well of in China today, it will come back into fashion eventually for this simple fact: it was such a huge success that it doesn’t take only an ardent leftist to appreciate. It only appears that way, especially in the West, because of the massive propaganda which has been designed to prevent the appearance of a CR in the capitalist-imperialist West.
I’ll make a spanning-the-decades prediction: if Chinese dominance falters, we’ll see a Cultural Revolution #2 - because the CR worked! (Because it is truly socialist democratic, of course….)
The Cultural Revolution undoubtedly represented a decade-long waxing of leftist revolutionary spirit – what were the real results for the average Chinese person, i.e. a Chinese rural inhabitant? Han’s book and this series discusses the CR’s invaluable contribution in the fight for socio-economic equality which the various forms of socialism incarnate.
***********************************
This is the first article in an 8-part series which examines Dongping Han’s book The Unknown Cultural Revolution: Life and Change in a Chinese Village in order to drastically redefine a decade which has proven to be not just the basis of China’s current success, but also a beacon of hope for developing countries worldwide. Here is the list of articles slated to be published, and I hope you will find them useful in your leftist struggle!
Part 1 - A necessary revolution in discussing China’s Cultural Revolution: an 8-part series
Part 2 – The story of a martyr FOR, and not BY, China’s Cultural Revolution
Part 3 - Why was a Cultural Revolution needed in already-Red China?
Part 4 - How the Little Red Book created a cult ‘of socialism’ and not ‘of Mao’
Part 5 - Red Guards ain't all red: Who fought whom in China’s Cultural Revolution?
Part 6 - How the socioeconomic gains of China's Cultural Revolution fuelled their 1980s boom
Part 7 - Ending a Cultural Revolution can only be counter-revolutionary
Part 8 - What the West can learn: Yellow Vests are demanding a Cultural Revolution
Ramin Mazaheri is the chief correspondent in Paris for Press TV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. He is the author of I'll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China. His work has appeared in various journals, magazines and websites, as well as on radio and television. He can be reached on Facebook.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Washington is Waging a New Dimension War Against China – and will Lose out Bitterly
Dateline: 03/13/2019
Once the all-encompassing chittering and chattering about tariffs on Chinese imports by the western corporate media subsided, Trump, egocentric businessman rather than the President of the Empire, “out of the blue”, one could almost say, under the pretext of ‘unfair’ Chinese trading, launches a new ferocious and as usual totally illegal campaign of aggression against China’s fast-growing economy. It’s an illicit campaign against Chinese competition, against Chinese unstoppable growth. It’s a tacit recognition of China’s emerging supremacy which the United States can only confront with fraud, deceit and illegal activities. And this only as long as Washington controls the western monetary system. This won’t be for much longer.
It’s an aggression against leading Chinese businesses and against China’s embracing a policy of a multi-polar world – through connection of entire continents, countries, cultures, joint research, education and agricultural, as well as industrial development – through transport lines, equal trade, respect for each other and recognition of people’s and countries’ comparative advantages by technical knowhow and bestowed by nature. It’s based on fair and equal interchanges. It’s the multi-trillion-yuan Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), also called the New Silk Road; an initiative launched in 2013 by President Xi Jinping during an official visit to Indonesia and Kazakhstan.
BRI consists by now of 6 land and sea routes, currently comprising some 152 countries and international organizations in Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America.
This new Chinese economic behemoth is tentatively projected through the 2040’s. The BRI is all-inclusive and, thus, so strong, it was recently incorporated in China’s Constitution. However, it was largely ignored by the west, and especially by the western presstitute media – with the western “Vogel Strauss” politics of halfwits, ignore it and it will go away. Now the west realizes, it won’t go away – and it is tough competition for the falsely propagated west’s trade and economic superiority. Too late my friends. As I often said, by endless greed and thirst for power with impunity, of short-term rent seeking, of relentlessly provoked wars and conflicts, killing layers and layers of human societies throughout the world to bring opponents of this small diabolical elite to their knees, the west is committing slowly but surely suicide. This is nature. Nature will not only survive, but overcome and subordinate this luciferian approach to world domination. The future is in the east. Most definitely. There is no way back. ***
Among the first steps of the US’s new generation of aggression against China is Washington’s ordering its northern vassal, Canada, to arrest Huawei’s Chief Financial Officer (CFO), Meng Wanzhou, in transit, at Vancouver airport on 1 December 2018.
Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. is a Chinese multinational telecommunications equipment and consumer electronics manufacturer, headquartered in Shenzhen. Huawei is the world’s 7th largest telecommunication corporation and was founded by Ren Zhengfei, a former military engineer in the People's Liberation Army, in 1987. Ms. Meng Wanzohou is the founder’s daughter and deputy CEO. Ms. Wanzhou is now accused of breaking the totally illegal sanctions against Iran by doing business with Iran. Washington, unabashedly puts one illegal action of their own – sanctions – over another one – taking hostage a lead person of a strong Chinese competitor, to coerce Huawei to abide by an illegally US-imposed rule – sanctions. It is an unbelievable catch-22 story. But even more unbelievable is that the dictate of the abusive Washington policies is still followed and even worse, that there are hardly any protests.
This is possible without most of the western world saying “beep”, only because they all still recognize – for now – the US as the self-imposed "exceptional nation" – the nation that makes and breaks laws as it goes along. – But how much longer?
Ms. Wanzhou, still in Canadian custody, at risk of being extradited to US “justice” (sic), may face 30 years in prison, for absolutely no illegal infraction – only by acting against what the US made up as a law – sanctions – that everybody has to adhere to, or else, they will themselves be subject to sanction. Can you see how sick our western system has become?
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It is now a war without bombs. It’s become a war of economics, recognizing that a war with bombs and missiles the US could not win any longer – not that they ever did! – since Russia and China have developed technically far superior military equipment. Hence, the United States’ last trump card (no pun intended) – is working their fraudulent monetary system to the last ditch.
Venezuela, one of the west’s only true and last democracies, has been aggressed for the last 20 years, peaking now, because she refuses to bend to the rules of Washington, abandoning her socialist ideology, handing over her natural resources – the world’s largest oil and gas reserves—to the empire’s usurping corporations, the same that have been usurping and enslaving the Venezuelan people for hundreds of years before President Hugo Chavez came to power in 1999 – and started changing the rules for the people, dismissing the usurpers and nationalizing the country’s resources for the benefit of the Venezuelan people.
Today the empire is waging a war on Venezuela, a war without bombs, a financial and economic war, where – thanks to the fraudulent monetary system that western societies embrace and have been willy-nilly accepting, and even today they don’t dare to openly object to it, the empire is applying the international illegality of all illegalities, “sanctions”, interference in another country’s internal affairs, blocking trade, monetary transfers, confiscating – i.e. stealing – billions worth of Venezuelan assets abroad.
Washington is coercing and blackmailing so-called US allies into doing the same, commitingt lowly ‘highway robbery’. By now some US$ 40 to 50 billion equivalent throughout the world were blocked and essentially stolen, including 1.2 billion dollars of gold withheld in the London City of Money. By seizing Venezuela’s foreign assets and boycotting Venezuela’s hydrocarbon sales – Venezuela is in dire straits – but not in despair, not dying from famine as the western media would like you to believe. No – Venezuela manages with calm and pride – and solid solidarity.
A similar situation prevails in Syria, where the Syrian national army with the help of Iran, Russia and Hezbollah, has pretty much defeated the terror network of ISIS, Al Nusra et al. In other words, the US, NATO, western and Gulf states, vassal allies which have been – and still are – financing these terror organizations as proxies, have lost their war of bombs, their fight for ‘regime change’ – at least for now. We know, the empire won’t simply let go, only when it reaches its last breath. And that moment will come, sooner or later.
So, the bombs are replaced by economic shackles – blocking Syria from using the international monetary transfer system, from accessing international credit, from importing vital goods, medicine and medical equipment, food, industrial equipment and spare parts – all that a society needs to function, to rebuild their western-demolished infrastructure, all these vital goods and services are being embargoed by the west – while Syria has never done any harm to a western country – all to the contrary. Syria is the bedrock of western history, providing the west with brilliant intellects, scientists, university professors and offering a rich culture – the cradle of western civilization.
Syria is strategically placed – with access to five seas. President Assad’s “Five Seas Vision”, connecting strategically located Syria with the Mediterranean, Caspian, Black Sea, Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, “making Syria the unavoidable intersection of the world in Investments, transport and more” - this vision, plus the fact that President Assad is running Syria with a socialist philosophy and is as popular as always (70% - 80% of a highly educated Syrian population support their President), make Syria a perfect target for ‘regime change’. Again, the continuation of a war without bombs, but killing all the same with a weaponized western economic system.
The most exasperating fact is – again – that the western allies, predominantly Europe, that is, their corrupt leaders (sic), participate in this atrocity in Syria, as well as in Venezuela – and throughout many other rebellious, non-submissive nations. This, largely against the will of their own people. Though indoctrinated day in and day out by fake news, people have started seeing the light.
Frankly – what else would you expect from Europe? – Europeans for hundreds of years have been exploiting, raping, abusing Asia, Africa and Latin America, killing hundreds of millions of people, while stealing their resources – which now can be seen transformed into European “culture”, religious monuments – castles of kings and queens and their dictators, who still walk this earth as parasitically as in ancient times.
When the European empires successively collapsed, they simply regrouped and transplanted their reign from the Old Continent across the Atlantic to build a new AngloZionist kingdom, but not before, again, massacring the original inhabitants of that once great land, called America. At that time the noble forefathers of this newly nascent empire felt secure between two shiny seas. But, hélas, times have changed. Attempting to emulate the grandeur of the Roman Empire, at one time calling their plan to Full Spectrum Dominance, “Pax Americana”, the association with “Pax Romana” became evident. Pax Romana were the three to four hundred bloodiest years of the Roman Empire, eventually collapsing under its own weight.
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he big danger for the US-driven western criminal monetary and debt-driven pyramid system, is China, because China’s economy is based on hard economic output, construction, manufacturing, intellectual and scientific development, as compared to the US-driven western neoliberal profit-maximizing dogma with inflated services, one that outsources hard production to low-wage countries, foregoes long-term economic gains and institutional memory, for a GDP of hot air, McDonalds-type jobs, consumption of cheap and useless imports; and, of course, – a destructive war and killing industry.
That’s why Washington is hastily trying to elevate their lie and deceit campaign onto another level. Kidnapping Huawei’s Ms. Wanzhou, lambasting Europe to ban Huawei’s equipment from their markets, because it —we are told by none other than Mike Pompeo—contains spyware, is just one example of a ruthless illicit approach to eliminating competition. On the other hand, Washington’s fading empire dares slandering President Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative and, in a last desperate effort, blackmailing Europe, as well as African BRI-contenders, with more illegal sanctions – not to sign up to China’s New Silk Road. No matter that most of them have already done so. Italy clearly said they will soon sign an agreement with China to use Italian ports for BRI’s maritime routes. As to banning Huawei from Europe, Germany, for one, has already said they will not ban Huawei. Let’s hope others will follow Germany’s lead.
The Belt and Road Initiative is an unstoppable train – that left the station some five years ago and is on a projected route for the next 30-some years initiating peaceful socioeconomic development throughout the world. As a Chinese representative at the recent Cuban Conference for The Equilibrium of the World said – "We are building bridges to connect people of all continents, while the west is building walls."
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First published by the New Eastern Outlook – NEO
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.