India proves [Western style] democracy is no longer fit for its purpose, while China’s model shows the way


Deep K. Datta-Ray says democracy’s reliance on people’s ability to be rational [which should be based on access to reliable, not manipulated information] is its fatal weakness. While malfeasance in politics, poverty and inequalities hold back progress in India, China is charging ahead in delivering economic growth, and freedom for its people.

India’s PM Narendra Modi at the podium, addressing a rally.

Deep Kisor Datta-Ray
Dateline: 15 Jun 2018

Disinformation scarred campaigning in elections in the Indian state of Karnataka, culminated in an illegitimate minority government. Its downfall by covert surveillance, money politics and an opportunistic alliance of sworn enemies is no consolation.

Such odious tactics are democracy’s leitmotif globally, as Brexit and Donald Trump’s election demonstrate. In combination, they suggest that democracy is not fit for purpose, especially in developing nations, particularly since there is a clear alternative: China’s political system.

Irredeemably flawed at inception, democracy’s most debilitating characteristic is its reliance on – often illiterate – people to analyse events. This has been proved repeatedly, by electorates worldwide. India’s Narendra Modi stormed to victory in 2014 on the people’s disgust with several scams, but investigations now reveal that there were none! Disinformation continues to be harnessed, with people’s inability to reason through the morass of media reports.


Nearly 90 per cent of India’s population voted the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) into power regionally because they accepted its outlandish claims. Modi, for instance, asserts ancient Indians invented genetic surgery and that climate change is just people feeling colder.

Democracy’s dependence on the democratic principle to animate institutions fatally undermines it because, paradoxically, democracy is eroded by the very politics it countenances. The politicisation of India’s provincial judiciary has now reached the apex court. The Supreme Court is embroiled in an ugly imbroglio to impeach the chief justice. The opposition brought the motion, alleging politically motivated assigning of cases to judges.

Meanwhile, everyone knows justice hinges on wealth and power. Its operation was highlighted, again, by a politician’s son – no less – getting away with murder in February 2006.

Democracy is also unworthy because it is delusive. Claiming to engender equality, democracy actually succeeds by enhancing inequality. Overshadowing highly incendiary rhetoric against minorities is the rise in attacks by the Hindu majority.

Legislative inequality is also distressing. Minorities are disproportionately under-represented in Parliament, by design. In 2014, of the BJP’s 482 candidates, just seven were Muslim. None won. Muslims are roughly 4 per cent of Parliament, but 14 per cent of the population.

The story is replicated in the provincial parliaments. There, as of January, only four of the 1,418 members are Muslim. That the number of minorities exceeded 300 as recently as November 2014 reiterates that the BJP’s democratic success is contingent on eliminating minorities from having any, let alone an equal, political voice.

Ultimately, however, a political system is by definition too grandiose to be judged technically. What matters is its moral accountability, and democracy’s bankruptcy is laid bare when the metric is the only one that matters: delivering freedom.

All Indian parties sing from the same democratic hymn sheet. Yet Indians continue to be subjugated, both absolutely and relative to other developing nations, by poverty. This is often blamed on the handicap of massive colonial exploitation, which developed Europe at India’s expense. But this blame culture divests leaders of any responsibility for having failed to free people, and even permits the erosion of what little freedom they enjoy. What democracy offers then is a powerful elite empowering itself by demonising the enemy without, and by exacerbating inequality within.

Nor are the devastating effects of democracy limited to democratic states, for they wage war. India has been involved in continuous border wars since independence, at a minimum, with Pakistan. Meanwhile, China has fought less in the past 40 years than the UKFrance and the US did in one weekend of bombing Syria. The West calls the Tiananmen Square incident a “massacre”, but it is insignificant compared to the deaths meted out by the democratic West’s militaries.

A pacific China is possible because its political system is moral in a manner impossible for democracies. China is moral for delivering freedom, more equitably and efficiently than, at the very least, India. Until the 1950s, India’s gross domestic product per capita was higher than China’s. In 1978, China’s was US$13 more than India’s.

That China’s political system achieved this is all the more remarkable because those decades saw the tumult of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, but no economic reform. The superiority of China’s political system is confirmed by the freedoms citizens – and beneficiaries of Chinese investment globally – now enjoy thanks to stupendous growth, distributed equitably, over the past 30 years. As the World Inequality Report notes, Chinese inequality is “moderate” because Beijing invests in everyone but Indian inequality is “extreme” because investments are made by them for themselves.

(Be sure to click on the arrows on the top right of the diagram below to see more panels.]


In short, China’s political system, without deluding its people or resorting to international violence, ensures the elite deliver freedoms to the people in a manner unimaginable in India or other democracies. Representative is the freedom to travel and think. In 2017, just 16,000 Indians, versus 88,000 Chinese, were allowed to study in the UK.

Their predecessors imported democracy to Asia, but it is now time for Indians to reassess their inheritance and for the Chinese to disseminate the truth about democracy vis-à-vis Beijing’s system.

The latter is unlikely because Chinese politics encourages humility. After all, which democrat speaks of building a moderately prosperous society, as Xi Jinping did, and that, too, with his political system’s unparalleled success at bettering not just Chinese citizens, but also, mankind?


ABOUT THE AUTHOR
 Deep K. Datta-Ray is the author of The Making of Indian Diplomacy 

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Things to ponder

While our media prostitutes, many Hollywood celebs, and politicians and opinion shapers make so much noise about the still to be demonstrated damage done by the Russkies to our nonexistent democracy, this is what the sanctimonious US government has done overseas just since the close of World War 2. And this is what we know about. Many other misdeeds are yet to be revealed or documented.

Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” — acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump — a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all. Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report

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US Trade War with China

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.

Transcript of PressTV Skype Interview of 29 May 2018

Background


Washington, May 29 (Reuters): The United States said on Tuesday that it will continue pursuing action on trade with China, days after Washington and Beijing announced a tentative solution to their dispute and suggested that tensions had cooled.  By June 15, Washington will release a list of some $50 billion worth of Chinese goods that will be subject to a 25 percent tariff, the White House said in a statement. The United States will also continue to pursue litigation against China at the World Trade Organization.

In addition, by the end of June, the United States will announce investment restrictions and “enhanced export controls” for Chinese individuals and entities “related to the acquisition of industrially significant technology,” it said.  In mid-May, China agreed to increase purchases of U.S. agriculture and energy products, and last week, the U.S. Commerce Department told lawmakers it had reached a deal to put Chinese telecommunications firm ZTE Corp back in business.  While the announcements eased worries about the possibility of a trade war between world’s two largest economies, U.S.President Donald Trump also said last week that any deal between Washington and Beijing would need “a different structure,” fueling uncertainty over the talks.

Trump has threatened to impose tariffs on up to $150 billion of Chinese goods to combat what he has labeled unfair trade practices on the part of Beijing. Meanwhile, China has warned of equal retaliation, including duties on some of its most significant U.S. imports, like aircraft, soybeans and vehicles. 

PressTV: What do you make of this so-called Trade War between the US and China?

Peter Koenig: It’s like almost everything by Trump – “on again, off again…”  Will these threats be materialized or just remain threats for propaganda, for public consumption?

The same with the long-sought head-to-head meeting between Trump and Kim Jong-Un on 12 June in Singapore. It was on, then off and now – maybe.

Iran, after 9 years of hard negotiations, the 5+1 Nuclear Deal was signed in July 2015. Trump comes in, of course, highly influenced by Netanyahu, the deal is off. But he doesn’t like that the other four will stick to it.

Same with China and the so-called Trade War. China certainly will not like tariff “punishment”. But, I’m sure if it happens, China has many avenues to circumvent dealing and trading with the US. But once that happens, China may be lost for good for the US market. And Trump knows it – hence, a little bit the on-and-off game. He wants to test the waters; see who reacts how.

PressTV: You say China has many avenues to circumvent the US sanctions or retaliate. What can China do?

Peter Koenig: China can, of course, also levy import duties on US goods. China doesn’t depend on US imports. China is self-sufficient and has, as it is, a huge trade surplus vis-à-vis the US.

China also controls the Asian market, having over-taken the US already a couple of years ago.

But what I really suspect is that Trump wants to discourage the world from using the Yuan as a reserve currency, since as such, it lowers not only the value of the US dollar, but it replaces the US dollar as the de facto reserve currency in the world.

Only 20 years ago, or so, the US dollar figured to 90% as reserve currency in treasuries around the globe. Today that percentage has shrunk to below 60%.

As you know, the Yuan has become an official IMF reserve currency about a year ago. That established worldwide trust in the Chinese currency, especially since the Yuan is backed by the Chinese economy plus by gold. Whereas the US dollar has no backing whatsoever; it’s pure and simple FIAT money.

Plus, the US is broke. Everybody knows it. The US has a current debt of about 110% of her GDP, more than the Greek debt was in 2008.

And if counting what the US General Accounting Office calls, “unmet obligations” or “uncovered liabilities”, the US debt is about 7 ½ times the US GDP.

Of course, such figures do not go unnoticed by the treasurers of the world.

So, Trump’s trade war with China, or the Propaganda for a Trade war, might as well be a Propaganda against the Yuan, diminishing its reputation, so as to deflect from every country’s golden opportunity to use the Yuan to replace the dollar as reserve currency.



About the Author
 Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a former World Bank staff and worked extensively around the world in the fields of environment and water resources. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for Global Research, ICH, RT, Sputnik, PressTV, The 4th Media (China), TeleSUR, The Vineyard of The Saker Blog, and other internet sites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance


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The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” -- acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump -- a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all. Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report 




China’s only danger: A ‘Generation X’ who believes they aren’t communist

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.


When you have a world war, there is no question: We are all living in a postwar world. However, not all subsequent generations have been shaped the same.

In debunking the standard view of the Cultural Revolution in this series – and also showing that, when it came to politics and non-musical revolutions, John Lennon was the status-quo company man and Mao was the real rock ‘n roller – we see that China’s mid-1960s revolution succeeded even though parallel cultural upheavals failed to produce the nearly-identically desired systemic changes across the West. 

Because China was seemingly the only 1960s revolution which actually succeeded in rebooting their political system, we are faced with a question to which the Western postwar experience doesn’t really apply: How will China’s post-1960s generations develop, and then lead society?

We all know what followed the West’s political failures of the 1960s:

Baby Boomers have proven to be totally incapable of taking the torch from their “Greatest Generation”. The Clintons, Dubya Bush, Obama and Trump are synonymous with corruption, hypocrisy and stupidity, and both America’s 99% and the rest of the world is unhappily living under their most inglorious reign. That’s not my opinion - just talk to any Westerner and they are totally dissatisfied with their systems, except for the tiny Nordic countries, but they have been conditioned to believe TINA (There Is No Alternative) and are too underpaid to have time to be involved with political alternatives.

The children of Baby Boomers became known as “Generation X”, who became disillusioned, navel-gazing and appallingly apathetic to all things political. This second generation clearly did not think much of their parents; in no uncertain terms they proclaimed that Baby Boomer political “glories” were just lying stories. They were right (excepting only African-Americans, who did not win anything close to what they wanted or deserved but did end Jim Crow).

This 2nd generation refused to honor their parents - probably because their parents set unworthy examples - and it’s certainly true that these Baby Boomer parents actually encouraged their children to rebel, as though willy-nilly rebellion is some sort of virtue. That is an enduring aspect of American culture which remains undeniable today. Furthermore, Generation X was invariably instructed - at home and in the general culture - to not honor any of the gods of their allegedly totally-square “Greatest Generation” grandparents, whose rigid unhipness showed that they were wrong in all ways and at all times.

The result of Generation X is clear - being told they have no ancestors to honor, they honored only themselves. That may sum up the expected view from China.

Even capitalist establishment publications, like TIME, which, if anything, prop up the very selfish system they chronicle, have zeroed in on the problem of jaded selfishness characterising millions of young Americans.

What they are most defined by, however, is alienation: they were encouraged to be attached to nothing, they abandoned political efforts to improve the world probably because their parents totally failed in this regard, they rejected all authority – and thus the barest unity – and live today in consumerist individualism with at least 3 TVs in every house. They are the first generation to be totally weaned on “identity politics”, which is the idea that my ideas and needs matter, alone; they pride themselves on “being above political parties” and are proud to be inconsistently all over the map. For them, earthly paradise will occur when only their ideas are followed, and I imagine that in their heaven it is just them all alone with God. Perhaps, like Sartre they feel that “hell is other people”, as they are so very alienated.

The religion of this Generation X is sensual, emotional and not logical; it is certainly a personalised “spirituality”, which comes and goes as a muse might. Most aggravatingly, their commandments are personalized and thus unknowable, and this is why they are so very easily offended: their moral (and thus political) structures are totally unpredictable and undependable. They cannot even express their religious convictions when pressed. However, it is considered impolite to ask an American about religion, and the only people who bring it up in public are in America’s lower class.

So we see how thoroughly the Western Baby Boomers’ political failure has been passed on to their next generation: Even though Generation X is about to take the reins and have staffed the lower levels of government for decades, they cannot muster even a handful of prominent, successful politicians in places like the US - everybody sees right through them and finds nothing but will-to-power and individualism. Thus there are nearly NO Generation X leaders in the West. Even France’s Emmanuel Macron, born 1977, could almost be classified as a Millennial, and I note that his presidential portrait included two smartphones.

I’m not going to get into 3rd-generation Western Millennials other than - I see a lot of good things. They are certainly far less ego-driven (I’m a tough guy / I’m Wonder Woman) than the postwar or Boomer generations, and a lot more community-minded. However, I note that if Western-style-TV-from-birth destroyed Generation X, it’s possible smartphones-from-birth will do the same for Millennials. But it’s early….

What’s undeniable is:

China’s equivalent to the Baby Boomer generation certainly did not fail – their Cultural Revolution was not just “tune in, turn on and drop out”.  Whether you condemn it or condone it, their student radicals actually were given tremendous political power (by a far more enlightened and politically modern elder leadership) and thus actually DID change things. Indeed, a good proof of the Cultural Revolution’s success is all the opprobrium heaped on it by the West today, where the reactionaries clearly won: Nixon & De Gaulle re-elected, societal changes limited to culture and not political structure, etc.

It is interesting to read current reports from Egypt, seven years after Tahrir Square (where I reported during the fall of Mubarak): Egypt’s revolution has also totally failed, and they are now following the same pattern as the West. Egyptians report that their failed revolution did at least produce more societal openness (mainly regarding sexuality), and allow more challenging of traditional and religious structures and ideas, but there is certainly less freedom, both economic and political. (As Martin Luther King said: There is no freedom without economic freedom, and he was not talking about the 1%’s rights under neoliberalism, LOL!) Al-Sissi has the country pointed in a 100% neoliberal direction, and we can predict that life for the average Egyptian will be far less free in the coming years because they will be far more poor, even if they are “enriched’ by the ability to discuss sex in public and the far less-desired right to be a proselytising atheist. There is no reason why Egypt’s 1% would not make these cultural concessions in order to not touch the political and economic structure which keep them above such things, of course.)

So, Westerners can project their own experiences onto China as hard as they can, but the success of the Cultural Revolution created a major postwar divergence for China, and one which is as unappreciated today as the Cultural Revolution itself.

What we can do, and only perhaps, is to set our our gauge back, due to the Cultural Revolution’s success: their “Greatest Generation”, the one who actually won a war, is thus equivalent to the Western Baby Boomers.

Were I a Chinese, that would make me a part of the “Baby Boomer” generation (I am 40); if I marry a Chinese lady and have children (Inshallah), then our kids would be in China’s Generation X. But…is there such a generation already?


Bad news to report: Young Chinese say they aren’t communist

I have Chinese friends, colleagues, and multiple family members who have lived for years in China. The Chinese of this generation - my peers - routinely, but not universally, say that yes, China is not communist.

Surprised I’d admit that, eh?! Think I’m unobjective, do you?!

This is truly a real issue which must be examined. Is it possible that the Western press is actually right?

I say: “No”. Or rather, I say: “I do not really know”.

The reality is that I have never lived in China, have only visited, and that the Chinese people I know are all necessarily hugely influenced by the West.

Even the native Chinese in my family emigrated away from China, even if they went back, and as an immigrant myself I can say: you don’t become an immigrant be being 100% in love with your home country…or you would still be there. It’s also very easy to have an inferiority complex about your home country, because the reality is that immigrants are literally trying to survive in a foreign land and make some friends: it certainly does not make one popular to move to a new country and proclaim: “My home is better than this.” That is only for imperialists, who are there to steal and run, and thus are not truly immigrants. And also for hard-headed, annoying journalists like myself!

My point is - immigrants are not accurate representatives of their home nations: the “Irish” of America are not at all like the Irish in Ireland. Immigrants are certainly a minority, anyway. Therefore, you should largely ignore that combative headline six paragraphs above.

However, perhaps there is a genuine risk inside China?

The two post-Cultural Revolution generations - do they believe their parents are the “Greatest Generation” for winning their war?

I don’t know what goes on at the Chinese dinner table, but I know it matters

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he Cultural Revolution veterans - who know from hard fighting and major personal sacrifice that capitalism is the enemy, that a bit of capitalism don’t spoil no socialist show, that they will never let capitalism dominate - have proven their totally-square socialist bonafides daily for decades. But the young “Boomer Generation” which runs from roughly 30-50 years old…many of them have only lived during the Deng-era capitalist reforms - are they solid socialists? And this group’s children, China’s “Millennials”, might be saying: “My father he ain’t no Che Guevara - he’s a total capitalist!”

The reality is that one’s character is formed at the dinner table, when you are at the elbows of your elders.

“Is old Yeye (father’s father) still going on about his time in the sticks during the ‘60s? Doesn’t he know that my Baba said The Economist called that a huge mistake? I sure don’t want to go to the country - it smells like cow dung! Can I leave the table? I want to watch my favourite TV show again in my room.”

If such a scene is happening regularly in Chinese homes…they will have a problem. That scene has been happening all over the West since the first Boomers started having kids in 1965, and it can happen to China.

(LOL, the primary fault here is calling something your grandfather did “stupid” within earshot of your parents. Certainly that was a hanging offence in my household….)

Ultimately the problem is cultural, and one of corruption: not just monetary or judicial or political, but corruption at the dinner table night after night. This is social and thus ethical corruption. This is a common theme in Iranian politics, but something which the West almost refuses to even consider, which I find so very, very strange.

Such concerns have been falsely labelled as “conservatism” by the West’s fake-leftists. They fail to see that the dinner table is also where leftist revolutionaries can be formed, or not formed. Debunking capitalist propaganda takes more than just one discussion, and more than just one day of shouting slogans at a protest.

So maybe China is capitalist, dammit? Is there a Chinese Generation X, which will take power from the Cultural Revolution generation, and are they really as bad as the West’s Generation X?

I can’t possibly say, to be honest.


Consumerism has become a feature of the younger Chinese generation who, in many cases, have no emotional connection to the great sacrifices the previous generations made to make China modern, affluent, and independent.

Even though what I have described are easily foreseeable, universal responses to modern human experiences, to give an actual answer on this cultural issue is far beyond me; dinner-table dynamics are the most complex in any society, and they go beyond my Chinese ken.

That’s why I’m glad to see the answer so emphatically given in the title of Jeff J. Brown’s

China is Communist, Dammit! This 8-part series has taken his book, and John King Fairbank’s extremely popular university textbook, China: A New History, as jumping-off points to discuss Communist China in 2018.

The reality is that we non-Chinese simply MUST defer to Brown on the question of whether China’s two younger post-Cultural Revolution generations are committed communists or not, due to our lack of knowledge of 2018 China. Cultures change, and quickly: I’m sure an alien visiting Iran in 1978 and 2018 - just 40 years - would be quite surprised at the changes (and pleasantly). Fairbank could never answer this issue, as he passed in 1991. Read Fairbank if you like, but you simply cannot expect answers about what Chinese 2018 culture is like.

However, what neither Fairbank, nor myself, nor you have to completely defer to Brown is regarding the question of whether or not China is communist. That is a question of political analysis of China’s structures, motivations and results. The idea that “all governments are the same”, or some such nonsense, is mere political nihilism: socialism and capitalism have clear structures, policies and easily-traceable patterns which mostly contradict each other.

So why should I kowtow to the political analysis of China of a fictitious Chinese immigrant…if he or she lacks broad political knowledge, or is overly-influenced by Western media? Indeed, to read Western journalism on socialism is to read (not even propaganda, because that requires intelligence) nonsense, stereotyping and sensationalism. “I am Chinese, therefore my political analysis of China is superior to yours” does not hold water. (Indeed. About half of the US electorate chose George W. Bush for president, and did the same for Ronnie Reagan, another execrable political felon. Did these Americans really know what was going on in the country just by being there? Similarly many, tens of millions of influential liberals remain fascinated by Barack Obama, one of the greatest charlatans in recent memory. And what about today, shall we take the word of the MAGA crowd for the state and intentions of America in the world at large?—Ed)

What does hold water is: “I am Chinese, therefore my cultural analysis of China is superior to yours.”

Certainly. But it is quite easy to understand a lot of culture but zero politics, I think we’ll all agree.


However, Brown is not just culturally literate regarding modern China but also obviously politically literate across multiple lands to an extremely high degree. I am not trying to sell his book: I am pointing out the validity of his analysis for our era.

Therefore, if he says China is communist (dammit!) in 2017, then we truly cannot find too many more trustworthy sources in English. Fairbank’s book is two decades old and, despite all its mainstream banking and its Harvard imprimatur, it is truly out of date in modern cultural analysis by a generation.

So you can ask your Chinese friends, as I do, and maybe they’ll say that China isn’t communist…and I wouldn’t say that Brown “knows more about China” than they do - certainly - but I certainly feel quite comfortable positing that Brown may understand Chinese politics & geopolitics better than they do.

So is Part 8’s headline a major concern in 2018 China, or not? Well…alienation, rampant individualism, and corruption of all types always are, aren’t they?

‘Gen X’ is always an existential threat, and thus every generation must be righteous

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]lienation was not discovered in a buried chest in 1946 in Europe - total dissatisfaction with one’s culture and leaders, total disbelief in the power of religion, total post-traumatic stress disorder caused by war and pillage, total disbelief in the ability of humans to create a better world, and a feeling of certainty regarding the total power of human destructiveness is not at all a new sentiment in human history.

But alienation - while real and important and which cannot be ignored - is something which faithful people don’t have time for: they have to get to work.

However, alienation amid peace and plenty is a first-world problem, I believe. And that is where China nearly is - the first-world.

They are not the first socialist country to get there - there is absolutely no doubt that the USSR was on par with the West economically and superior culturally - but they are the first one to reach their level since the demise of the USSR.

They are about to have first-world problems, like the Japanese tourists who get hospitalised by “Paris shock”, i.e. the disparity between the romantic image of Paris and the reality that most looks and treatment here equate to, when compared with polite Japan: “eat dirt and die”. The medicine for such “victims” is clearly a strong dose of Chinese Cultural Revolution farm work, with a heavy emphasis on manure spreading….

Absurdities aside, China truly represents the undeniable, at least medium-term, rebirth of socialism and communism…even though the West declared it to be dead, and went whole-hog into the maximum form of capitalism possible, neoliberalism.

Because it is clearly not dead, their only choice is to co-opt it by falsely claiming its success. I imagine this is the root of Brown’s title.

Thus the cultural threat of denying China’s “communist-ness” – and thus denying Chinese history and the Chinese experience today – is why Xi is so important: a Gorbachev-like pandering to the West, or a Brezhnev-like tolerance of stagnation / corruption / black market / “reactionary dissent and sedition is what ‘free speech’ is”…is all that can turn the tide of China’s rise.

However, I always hate to reduce nations to just one person. Especially in socialist-inspired countries which had modern revolutions, focusing on the leader is a structurally inaccurate to describe their societies, which is why propaganda efforts do exactly this. China - like Cuba, Iran, etc. – is not run by a person but by a vanguard party which has grassroots-elected, democratic support. The preferred presidential candidates of Iran’s “Supreme Leader” have repeatedly lost, for example - these are modern democracies, not Macronian liberal warlords

Therefore, let us think of Xi only as a symbol for what all of China’s middle-aged and elders must be like, both now and in the generations to come:

The role of Xi: not spiking the ball on the 1-yard line

If Xi is part of the “Greatest Generation”, surely he rejects such a moniker: it implies that China has already peaked, already won. China has further to go, and many to help bring along with them, lest they be selfish capitalists.

The good news is: Xi spent 7 lice-filled years helping to bring the countryside up to modern levels during the Cultural Revolution - he will not be hospitalised by a rude French waiter.

And Xi is doing the opposite of Gorbachev – he is following, per Brown, in Mao’s footsteps by leading anti-corruption campaigns, cleaning up corruption in the Peoples’ Liberation Army and reducing propaganda contamination points the West so desperately needs open, now that they have no “hard power” options.

This is probably why Xi is so popular: he is doing what the People want – strengthening them and their chosen institutions. China has just ended their 2-term limit for presidents, with widespread domestic support…and I say: good call.

Of course China should want their “Greatest Generation” (the Cultural Revolution generation) to stay in power: have you seen how bad the West’s two ensuing generations are doing?! China is so close to being a humanity-improving superpower…and you want them to spike the ball on the 1-yard line because George Washington said so?

George Washington, the root cause of of the two-term trend, quit after two terms - it’s pretty easy to hand the reins to your successor and say: “Keep stealing land and enslaving people: boom, economic growth issue - solved! Now don’t bother me - I’m retired and have many slaves to beat and/or rape.”

Xi is likely looking at Germany's liberal strongwoman Angela Merkel – now in her 4th term of control – and seeing the positive national effects of long-term leadership within a democracy.

He is likely also looking towards Iran’s model, where the elected role of the Supreme Leader provides a constant counterweight in favor of ideological purity, against backsliding and in favor of the defense of Iran’s popular, anti-imperialist, socialist-inspired revolution. It’s not all the economy, stupid - who is keeping track of the intangible and spiritual within the political?

(It is ironic that Communist China cares more openly for this issue of spirit than the rabidly secular West, as is abundantly proved by Brown’s chapter “21st Century Street Art for the Communist Body And Soul”, which documents state “propaganda” efforts on totalitarian obsessions such as “Dedication”, “Equality”, “Freedom”, “Harmony”, “Honesty”, etc. No such propaganda efforts exist in the West, because a government is what it promotes: the West promotes neoliberalism - no government - and so they produce no art or advertising designed to help people better themselves, because the government is not supposed to care or get involved.)

Germany's democracy is West European (bourgeois), Iran's is Islamic, and China’s is Chinese socialist and none are perfect - as only God is – but we cannot deny that all three are indeed working democracies, with voting citizens, regular protests, repeated polls of support for their systems, etc. They have structural weak points, but they knew the weak points when they created and kept supporting their chosen system (although it seems totally incorrect to call postwar Germany’s imposed system “chosen”, and there is also the ongoing US occupation).

At the very least, all three of these nations are certainly not authoritarian dictatorships nor neocolonial puppets, like most of the developing world is, and that is no small success to a journalist surveying the world in 2018. It’s an absurdity that Iran and China are portrayed as such.

Xi is also looking at Russia, where Putin had the cunning to defy George Washington via recourse to legalistic explanations. This was not very honest…but the Russian people voted repeatedly, and the Russian system is just as democratic as any of the above three, so outsiders cannot say the Russian People don’t largely have what they want within their system. No “humanitarian intervention” needed here either, please.

Because of the US and EU’s military impregnability and the lack of any outside neo-colonial influence, they simply cannot comprehend the feeling among Iran, Cuba or others of being forced to operate under the gun. But certainly, in a time of crisis - WWII - the US abandoned the George Washington precedent to save their nation, as Roosevelt served 4 terms.  Amid constant US belligerence Xi can fairly claim to be under threat (fairly…but certainly not after one more decade of socialist economic success, especially as the Eurozone’s never-reported Lost Decade is likely to turn into a Japanese-like Lost Score); France’s Hollande or Macron cannot make the same claim legitimately, but they certainly did whatever they wanted via citing the threat of “Islamic terrorism”.

So if China was communist, dammit, when Brown’s book was published in 2017, they will certainly remain communist for another 5 or 10 more years under Xi.

Xi’s success and, as Brown’s book demonstrates over and over, Xi’s socialist bonafides cannot be denied. Rules are made to be broken, but not the dream of socialism.

The world needs Chinese socialism to remain strong…obviously

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]t is said that one’s true character is revealed after one becomes successful and achieves their dreams.

For some, like Xi, the dream is moderate prosperity. For some, like Iranians, the dream is paradise on earth as much as possible in order to earn paradise in the Afterlife. For some, like the French, the dream is (I am quoting French people here) to be Gerard Depardieu: to be constantly eating, constantly drinking, constantly posing like an actor, to be considered a great artist just for posing, constantly arguing, constantly undermining everyone else’s faith in anything. For some, like Americans, the dream is everything in the world you can possibly imagine. It’s possible there may be some stereotypical nonsense here….

Let’s stop with the nonsense: China is socialist, dammit!

Capitalism is only a tool - in order to build wealth in order to have something to share - and a necessary one to construct communism, per Marx. China’s ideals are certainly communist and there certainly is a very real, very effective, very concerned Communist Party in charge. Anyway, communism is an ideal communists pray to (the atheistic communists, that is, who are definitely a tiny minority); socialism is what working people do to improve the world a bit more today.

Ultimately, this article asked the question: What is “21st century socialism” when successful?

Because they are no longer susceptible to intense outside pressure, China is certainly the one which will most elucidate this answer, and with the most intense global and historical ramifications.

There is an easy way for China to put this very long-running “are they or aren’t they communist” question to rest: give more support for other nations in regions which are certain to encounter Western resistance, and possibly hurt China’s bottom line by doing so.

Cuba used to do this, Iran does this…but these are costly. China helps far more than they get credit for, and certainly they gave in Korea and Vietnam, but their twin socialist success in both economic growth and economic equality is getting to the point where cost is not truly a major issue if they have socialist-inspired ideals. China has remained rather (pre-WWII) Stalinist in foreign policy since Deng, and that can’t continue forever.

They aren’t about to start giving major support to Palestine, sadly, but China needs to start throwing its weight around in favor of socialism again. Foreign help will show the young generation that sacrifices must be made (thus be content with “moderate prosperity”), and it will also force Westerners to accept their socialism-ness. All this increased acceptance of Chinese democratic socialism will only safeguard China further.

But if there’s one thing China has done better than any socialist-inspired nation it is: playing the long game. And the communist long-game is, clearly, nationalist Stalinism until universal Trotskyism. At least, that’s what they will call it if communism goes universal (of course, some Trotskyists won’t be happy until communism AND atheism goes universal, thus pushing their idea of victory to the realm of, I believe, impossibility). But you don’t skip steps in a game - unless you want to lose.

However, the idea of Stalinism (socialism in one country), which Maoism has clearly incorporated, is essentially: take care of your own backyard, and wait for the rest of the neighbourhood to catch up. But what does China do when their backyard can’t be made more beautiful? Either you harmoniously share the wealth with your neighbors, or the cycle of success ends and you wane into unharmonious capitalism.

A self-sufficient, safe, thriving China…choosing to implode into capitalism?! The USSR did it, but I think China is not blind to history.

But…people do crazy things which cannot be explained, the electron’s path still cannot be predicted, and political science is not a science.

Some questions may remain up for debate, but in 2018 it is certainly crazy to call China capitalist, dammit!

Series Postscript:

[dropcap]I[/dropcap] used many proofs for this series from Jeff J. Brown’s book, not just that final line, so I’d like to stress: If one wants to find seemingly unprecedented documentation and analysis of modern China …one would be much better off buying his book than reading this series.

I’d also like to say that I wrote this series entirely without any personal involvement from Brown whatsoever, so there can be no question regarding my objectivity.

I hope this “double-book review” has shown just how different China scholarship can be, and also how much scholarship can change in just 20 years. I also tried to provide a few original ideas to put up for discussion, and to show how China’s experience can be useful in other countries.

I do owe Brown a debt of gratitude for writing such a fine work on which I leaned heavily. I also owe a debt of gratitude to the legal doctrine of “fair use”, which allowed me to quote extensive parts of Brown’s and John King Fairbank’s books without violating copyright laws!

To the dearly departed Mr. Fairbank: Yours is certainly not an unuseful book, but quite reactionary by even 20th century political standards. However, because you explained your scholarship and methods so clearly, when less biased and more modern ideas could be applied to your data more accurate answers on Communist China could be produced.

Finally: I’d like to point out that this series has been very clearly a political analysis of China, and not a cultural analysis. I have almost exclusively re-examined historical events and described political structures & policies.

Brown and Fairbank are China scholars who are qualified to make non-Chinese cultural analyses of China. However, political analyses are the privilege of every citizen - from the bus driver to the professor. Political analyses must be so very democratically available in order to constantly find - via merit and consensus - socio-political solutions to socio-political problems, the most pressing of which are, I believe, universal.

It seems quite incorrect to conclude this series with something focusing on myself….

New analyses are needed on China, and on many other socialist-inspired nations - the events of 1989-91 were a long time ago, and the Great Recession is proving, still, that the alleged victory of capitalism was very short-lived. Whatever socialism’s failures have been and are, the 1%-led Western model clearly cannot lead any country, as their leaders do not even wish to capably lead their own nations and communities - just their own fortunes.

***********************************

This is the final article in an 8-part series which compared old versus new Western scholarship on China.

Here is the list of articles which have been published, and I hope you will find them useful in your leftist struggle!

About the author
 RAMIN MAZAHERI, Senior Correspondent & Contributing Editor, Dispatch from Paris •  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. His work has appeared in various journals, magazines and websites, as well as on radio and television.


 Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

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Military wars—South China Sea, Indian Ocean and Pentagon’s ‘String of Pearls’ Strategy

BE SURE TO PASS OUR ARTICLES ON TO KIN, FRIENDS AND COLLEAGUES

Hello again, Dear Reader,

For this edition of my gratis newsletter I want to share with you a selection from my book, Target China. I was invited to China for the first time in April, 2008, just before the much-anticipated Beijing Olympics and just after a CIA-instigated Color Revolution in Tibet designed to make the Beijing Government "lose face" before the world. That did not succeed.

Since that first visit, a promotion of the Chinese edition of my best-selling A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics, I have had the rare opportunity to return to China by now a total of sixteen times over almost a decade, to visit cities from north to south, from Shanghai to Chengdu to Kunming to Xi'an. In the course of my visits, discussions with Chinese intellectuals, former ministers, students and military strategists, I had an exceptional chance to see, with other eyes, vulnerabilities of the New China should Washington one day decide to "cut China to size."
My book, Target China, is the product of those observations, written in the form of describing a NATO effort at containing China and subduing her into the West's globalized New World Order. Now a new American President in Washington explicitly makes China a "target" of his policies. I hope you will find this portion of my book, Target China, written during the Obama term, useful to better comprehend our world today.
As always I converted the text to a pfd-file for a better reading experience which you can find in the attachment of this mail. It's 29 pages in A4 format.

Thank you again for your interest,

F. William Engdahl



A few Amazon Reader Reviews of Target China:
"Fabulous“ -- Norman
“…Engdahl is your man.” -- Amazon Customer
"An extraordinary book...“ -- Amazon Customer
"This guy knows his stuff“ -- Tony
"I recommend reading this book“ -- mishal0909
“A good read and highly recommended“ -- Phil Bourgeois
"Another eye opener by Mr. Engdahl... A must read for all Americans!“ -- James Sisneros

"Good read and full of info not found in the normal media.“ – Audi Steinwand



Chapter Five:

Military wars—South China Sea, Indian Ocean and Pentagon’s ‘String of Pearls’ Strategy


The US Navy has markedly increased its activities in the Pacific with a view to stifling China's development and exercise of sovereign regional rights.


China today, because of its dynamic economic growth and its determination to pursue sovereign Chinese national interests, merely because China exists, is becoming the Pentagon new “enemy image,” now replacing the false “enemy image” of Islam used after September 2001 by the Bush-Cheney Administration to justify the Pentagon’s global power pursuit. The new US military posture against China has nothing to do with any aggressive threat from the side of China. The Pentagon has decided to escalate its aggressive military posture to China merely because China has become a strong vibrant independent pole in world economics and geopolitics.


Pentagon Targets China

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the nominal end of the Cold War some twenty years back, rather than reducing the size of its mammoth defense spending, the US Congress and US Presidents have enormously expanded spending for new weapons systems, increased permanent military bases around the world and expansion of NATO not only to former Warsaw Pact countries on Russia’s immediate periphery; it also has expanded NATO and US military presence deep into Asia on the perimeters of China through its conduct of the Afghan war and related campaigns.

On the basis of simple dollar outlays for military spending, the US Pentagon combined budget, leaving aside the huge budgets for such national security and defense-related agencies of US Government as the Department of Energy and US Treasury and other agencies, the US Department of Defense spent some $739 billion in 2011 on its military requirements. Were all other spending that is tied to US defense and national security included, the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies estimates an annual military spending of over $1 trillion by the United States. That is an amount greater than the total defense-related spending of the next 42 nations combined, and more than the Gross Domestic Product of most nations.

China officially spent barely 10% of the US on its defense, some $90 billions, or if certain defense-related arms import and other costs are included, perhaps $111 billion a year. Even if the Chinese authorities do not publish complete data on such sensitive areas, it is clear China spends a mere fraction of the USA and is starting from a military-technology base far behind the USA.

The US defense budget is not just by far the world’s largest. It is dominant to everyone else completely independent of any perceived threat. In the nineteenth century, the British Royal Navy built the size of its fleet according to the fleets of Britain's two most powerful potential enemies; America's defense budget strategists declare it will be "doomsday" if the United States builds its navy to anything less than five times China and Russia combined. “ [1]

If we include the spending by Russia, China’s strongest ally within the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, their combined total annual defense spending is barely $142 billions. The world top ten defense spending nations in addition to the USA as largest and China as second largest, include the UK, France, Japan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Germany, India and Brazil. In 2011 the military spending of the United States totaled a staggering 46% of total spending by the world's 171 governments and territories, almost half the entire world. [2]

[dropcap]C[/dropcap]learly, for all its rhetoric about peace-keeping missions and “democracy” promotion, the Pentagon is pursuing what its planners refer to as “Full Spectrum Dominance,” the total control of all global air, land, ocean, space, outer-space and now cyberspace.[3] It is clearly determined to use its military might to secure global domination or hegemony. No other interpretation is possible.

China today, because of its dynamic economic growth and its determination to pursue sovereign Chinese national interests, merely because China exists, is becoming the Pentagon new “enemy image,” now replacing the false “enemy image” of Islam used after September 2001 by the Bush-Cheney Administration to justify the Pentagon’s global power pursuit. The new US military posture against China has nothing to do with any aggressive threat from the side of China. The Pentagon has decided to escalate its aggressive military posture to China merely because China has become a strong vibrant independent pole in world economics and geopolitics.


Obama Doctrine: China is the new ‘enemy image’


[dropcap]A[/dropcap]fter almost two decades of neglect of its interests in East Asia, in 2011, the Obama Administration announced that the US would make “a strategic pivot” in its foreign policy to focus its military and political attention on the Asia-Pacific, particularly Southeast Asia, that is, China.

During the final months of 2011 the Obama Administration clearly defined a new public military threat doctrine for US military readiness in the wake of the US military failures in Iraq and Afghanistan. During a Presidential trip to the Far East, while in Australia, the US President unveiled what is being termed the Obama Doctrine.[4]

The following sections from Obama’s speech in Australia are worth citing in detail:


With most of the world’s nuclear power and some half of humanity, Asia will largely define whether the century ahead will be marked by conflict or cooperation…As President, I have, therefore, made a deliberate and strategic decision -- as a Pacific nation, the United States will play a larger and long-term role in shaping this region and its future…I have directed my national security team to make our presence and mission in the Asia Pacific a top priority...As we plan and budget for the future, we will allocate the resources necessary to maintain our strong military presence in this region.  We will preserve our unique ability to project power and deter threats to peace…Our enduring interests in the region demand our enduring presence in the region. 


The United States is a Pacific power, and we are here to stay. Indeed, we are already modernizing America’s defense posture across the Asia Pacific.  It will be more broadly distributed -- maintaining our strong presence in Japan and the Korean Peninsula, while enhancing our presence in Southeast Asia.  Our posture will be more flexible -- with new capabilities to ensure that our forces can operate freely.  And our posture will be more sustainable, by helping allies and partners build their capacity, with more training and exercises. We see our new posture here in Australia…I believe we can address shared challenges, such as proliferation and maritime security, including cooperation in the South China Sea.[5]

The centerpiece of Obama's visit was the announcement that at least 2,500 elite US Marines will be stationed in Darwin in Australia’s Northern Territory. In addition, in a series of significant parallel agreements, discussions with Washington were underway to fly long-range American surveillance drones from the remote Cocos Islands — an Australian territory in the Indian Ocean. Also the US will gain greater use of Australian Air Force bases for American aircraft and increased ship and submarine visits to the Indian Ocean through a naval base outside Perth, on the country’s west coast.

US military actions in Cocos Islands and Australia are aimed at Chi

The Pentagon’s target is China.

To make the point clear to European members of NATO, in remarks to fellow NATO members in Washington in July 2012, Phillip Hammond, the UK Secretary of State for Defense declared explicitly that the new US defense shift to the Asia-Pacific region was aimed at China. Hammond said that, "the rising strategic importance of the Asia-Pacific region requires all countries, but particularly the United States, to reflect in their strategic posture the emergence of China as a global power. Far from being concerned about the tilt to Asia-Pacific, the European NATO powers should welcome the fact that the US is willing to engage in this new strategic challenge on behalf of the alliance." [6]

As with many of its operations, the Pentagon deployment is far more sinister than the relatively small number of 2,500 new US soldiers might suggest.

In August 2011 the Pentagon presented its annual report on China’s military. It stated that China had closed key technological gaps. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence for East Asia, Michael Schiffer, said that the pace and scope of China's military investments had "allowed China to pursue capabilities that we believe are potentially destabilizing to regional military balances, increase the risk of misunderstanding and miscalculation and may contribute to regional tensions and anxieties." [7] He cited Chinese refurbishing of a Soviet-era aircraft carrier and China’s development of its J20 Stealth Fighter as indications of the new capability requiring a more active US military response. Schiffer also cited China's space and cyber operations, saying it was "developing a multi-dimensional program to improve its capabilities to limit or prevent the use of space-based assets by adversaries during times of crisis or conflict." [8]


Pentagon’s ‘Air-Sea Battle’


The Pentagon strategy to defeat China in a coming war, details of which have filtered into the US press, is called “Air-Sea Battle.” This calls for an aggressive coordinated US attack in which American stealth bombers and submarines would knock out China's long-range surveillance radar and precision missile systems located deep inside the country. The initial "blinding campaign" would be followed by a larger air and naval assault on China itself. Crucial to the advanced pentagon strategy, deployment of which has already quietly begun, is US military navy and air presence in Japan, Taiwan, Philippines, Vietnam and across the South China Sea and Indian Ocean. Australian troop and naval deployment is aimed at accessing the strategic Chinese South China Sea as well as the Indian Ocean. The stated motive is to “protect freedom of navigation” in the Malacca Straits and the South China Sea.


Air-Sea Battle's goal is to help US forces withstand an initial Chinese assault and counterattack to destroy sophisticated Chinese radar and missile systems built to keep US ships away from China's coastline.[9]


 US ‘Air-Sea Battle’ against China

In addition to the stationing of the US Marines in the north of Australia, Washington plans to fly long-range American surveillance drones from the remote Cocos Islands — an Australian territory in the strategically vital Indian Ocean. Also it will have use of Australian Air Force bases for American military aircraft and increased ship and submarine visits to the Indian Ocean through a naval base outside Perth, on Australia’s west coast.[10]
The architect of the Pentagon anti-China strategy of Air-Sea battle is Andrew Marshall, the man who has shaped Pentagon advanced warfare strategy for more than 40 years and among whose pupils were Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. [11] Since the 1980s Marshall has been a promoter of an idea first posited in 1982 by Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, then chief of the Soviet general staff, called RMA, or 'Revolution in Military Affairs.’
The best definition of RMA was the one provided by Marshall himself: “A Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) is a major change in the nature of warfare brought about by the innovative application of new technologies which, combined with dramatic changes in military doctrine and operational and organizational concepts, fundamentally alters the character and conduct of military operations.” [12]

Marshall, a RAND Corporation nuclear expert, was brought by Henry Kissinger onto the President’s National Security Council that Kissinger headed. Marshall was then appointed by President Nixon in 1973, on Kissinger’s and Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger’s recommendation, to direct the Office of Net Assessment, a highly secretive internal Pentagon think tank. Marshall was reappointed by every president thereafter, a feat surpassed only by the late FBI Director, J. Edgar Hoover. Andrew Marshall was the only official in the Rumsfeld Pentagon who had participated in strategic war planning throughout virtually the entire Cold War, beginning in 1949 as a nuclear strategist for RAND Corporation, then moving to the Pentagon in 1973.[13]


It was also Andrew Marshall who convinced US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his successor Robert Gates to deploy the Ballistic Missile “defense” Shield in Poland, the Czech Republic, Turkey and Japan as a strategy to minimize any potential nuclear threat from Russia and, in the case of Japan’s BMD, any potential nuclear threat from China.


‘String of Pearls’ Strategy of Pentagon

Already back in 2005 in an Annual Report to the US Congress, a select group of commissioners tied to the US intelligence community issued a report defining their view of the emerging China “danger.” They wrote:


China’s methodical and accelerating military modernization presents a growing threat to U.S security interests in the Pacific. While Taiwan remains a key potential flashpoint, China’s aggressive pursuit of territorial claims in the East and South China Seas points to ambitions that go beyond a Taiwan scenario and poses a growing threat to neighbors, including U.S. alliance partners, on China’s periphery. Recent and planned military acquisitions by Beijing—mobile ballistic missiles, improved air and naval forces capable of extended range operations—provide China with the capability to conduct offensive strikes and military operations throughout the region…

…China wants a military that is capable of performing a variety of essential offshore missions, including protecting its eastern seaboard and ensuring the security of the sea lanes through which it receives resources essential to its continued economic development. But as Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld warned a Chinese military audience, ‘‘expanding [Chinese] missile forces’’ and ‘‘advances in Chinese strategic capability’’ worry China’s neighbors and raise questions, ‘‘particularly when there is an imperfect understanding of such developments on the part of others.’’
China’s aggressive pursuit of territorial claims arising from disputes with Japan in the East China Sea and multiple countries in the South China Sea and its forays into the Bay of Bengal give rise to growing regional security concerns in Japan, India, and Southeast Asia. China’s military threat against Taiwan is implicitly a threat to the United States as a result of both explicit and tacit assurances that have been expressed to Taiwan by every U.S. Administration since 1949. Taiwan has successfully converted from authoritarian rule to a functioning democracy, making it an even more significant symbol of American interest in the region and increasing the likelihood that a Chinese conflict with Taiwan will also involve U.S. forces. [14]

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he 2005 China report to the US Congress went on to describe what they saw as Chinese military strategy to defend her access to vital oil from the Persian Gulf and elsewhere:


In addition, a growing dependence on imported energy resources needed to sustain its economic development exposes China to new vulnerabilities and heightens its need to secure new energy sources and the sea lines of communications (SLOCs) from East Asia to the Persian Gulf and Africa needed to move energy supplies to China. With Myanmar’s consent, China operates a maritime reconnaissance and electronic intelligence station on Great Coco Island and is building a base on Small Coco Island in the Bay of Bengal.17 According to an Asian defense analyst, China is helping Myanmar modernize several naval bases as a means of extending its power into the region. Moreover, Indian authorities claim that China has helped build radar, refit, and refuel facilities there to support further Chinese naval operations in the region in the future.[15]

In January that same year, 2005, Andrew Marshall, head of the Office of Net Assessments, issued a classified internal report to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld titled “Energy Futures in Asia.” It was the same Marshall behind the Pentagon secret ‘Air-Sea Strategy against China.  The Marshall report, which was leaked in full to a Washington newspaper, invented the term “string of pearls” strategy to describe what it called the growing Chinese military threat to “US strategic interests” in the Asian space.[16]


The internal Pentagon report claimed that “China is building strategic relationships along the sea lanes from the Middle East to the South China Sea in ways that suggest defensive and offensive positioning to protect China’s energy interests, but also to serve broad security objectives.”


In the Pentagon Andrew Marshall report, the term China’s “String of Pearls” Strategy was used for the first time. It is a Pentagon term and not a Chinese term.


The report stated that China was adopting a “string of pearls” strategy of bases and diplomatic ties stretching from the Middle East to southern China that includes a new naval base under construction at the Pakistani port of Gwadar. It claimed that “Beijing already has set up electronic eavesdropping posts at Gwadar in the country’s southwest corner, the part nearest the Persian Gulf. The post is monitoring ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz and the Arabian Sea.” [17]


The Marshall internal report went on to write of other “pearls” in the sea-lane strategy of China:


Bangladesh: China is strengthening its ties to the government and building a container port facility at Chittagong. The Chinese are “seeking much more extensive naval and commercial access” in Bangladesh.

Burma: China has developed close ties to the military regime in Rangoon and turned a nation wary of China into a “satellite” of Beijing close to the Strait of Malacca, through which 80 percent of China’s imported oil passes. China is building naval bases in Burma and has electronic intelligence gathering facilities on islands in the Bay of Bengal and near the Strait of Malacca. Beijing also supplied Burma with “billions of dollars in military assistance to support a de facto military alliance,” the report said.
Cambodia: China signed a military agreement in November 2003 to provide training and equipment. Cambodia is helping Beijing build a railway line from southern China to the sea.
South China Sea: Chinese activities in the region are less about territorial claims than “protecting or denying the transit of tankers through the South China Sea,” the report said. China also is building up its military forces in the region to be able to “project air and sea power” from the mainland and Hainan Island. China recently upgraded a military airstrip on Woody Island and increased its presence through oil drilling platforms and ocean survey ships.
Thailand: China is considering funding construction of a $20 billion canal across the Kra Isthmus that would allow ships to bypass the Strait of Malacca. The canal project would give China port facilities, warehouses and other infrastructure in Thailand aimed at enhancing Chinese influence in the region, the report said. The report reflects growing fears in the Pentagon about China’s long-term development. Many Pentagon analysts believe China’s military buildup is taking place faster than earlier estimates, and that China will use its power to project force and undermine U.S. and regional security. The U.S. military’s Southern Command produced a similar classified report in the late 1990s that warned that China was seeking to use commercial port facilities around the world to control strategic “chokepoints.” [18]

Breaking the String of Pearls

[dropcap]S[/dropcap]ignificant Pentagon and US actions since that 2005 report have been aimed to counter China’s attempts to defend its energy security via that “String of Pearls.” The US interventions since 2008 into Burma/Myanmar were of two phases.


The first was the so-called Saffron Revolution, a US State Department and CIA-backed destabilization in 2007 aimed at putting the international spotlight on the Burma military dictatorship’s human rights practices. The aim was to further isolate Burma internationally from economic relations aside from China, especially threatening  the China-Myanmar oil and gas pipelines.


US moves to open Burma are aimed at the China Energy Corridor

[dropcap]F[/dropcap]orcing Burma’s military leaders into tighter dependency on China was one of the factors triggering the decision of the military to open up economically to the West. They declared that the tightening of US economic sanctions had done the country great harm and President Thein Sein made his major liberalization opening as well as allowing US-backed dissident, Aung San Suu Kyi, to be free and to run for elective office with her party in return for promises from US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of US investment in the country. [19]


The US corporations approaching Burma are hand-picked by Washington to introduce the most destructive “free market” reforms that will open Burma to instability. The United States will not allow investment in entities owned by Myanmar’s armed forces or its Ministry of Defense. It also is able to place sanctions on “those who undermine the reform process, engage in human rights abuses, contribute to ethnic conflict or participate in military trade with North Korea.” The United States will block businesses or individuals from making transactions with any “specially designated nationals” or businesses that they control — allowing Washington, for example, to stop money from flowing to groups “disrupting the reform process.” It’s the classic “carrot and stick” approach, dangling the carrot of untold riches if Burma opens its economy to US corporations and punishing those who try to resist the takeover of the country’s prize assets. Oil and gas, vital to China, will be a special target of US intervention.   American companies and people will be allowed to invest in the state-owned Myanma Oil and Gas Enterprise.[20]


Barack Obama also created a new power for the government to impose “blocking sanctions” on any individual threatening peace in Myanmar. Businesses with more than $500,000 in investment in the country will need to file an annual report with the State Department, with details on workers’ rights, land acquisitions and any payments of more than $10,000 to government entities, including Myanmar’s state-owned enterprises.


American companies and people will be allowed to invest in the state-owned Myanma Oil and Gas Enterprise, but any investors will need to notify the State Department within 60 days.


As well, US “human rights” NGOs, many closely associated with or believed to be associated with US State Department geopolitical designs, including Freedom House, Human Rights Watch, Institute for Asian Democracy, Open Society Foundations, Physicians for Human Rights, U.S. Campaign for Burma, United to End Genocide— will now be allowed to operate inside Burma according to a decision by State Secretary Clinton in April 2012.[21]


Thailand, another key in China’s defensive String of Pearl Strategy has also been subject of intense destabilization over the past several years. Now with the sister of the corrupt former Prime Minister in office, US-Thai relations have significantly improved.


After months of bloody clashes, the US-backed billionaire, Former Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra , managed to buy the way to put his sister, Yingluck Shinawatra in as Prime Minister, with him pulling the policy strings from abroad. Thaksin himself  was enjoying comfortable status in the US as of this writing, in summer 2012.


US relations with Thaksin’s sister, Yingluck Shinawatra, were moving in direct fulfillment of the new Obama “strategic pivot” to focus on the “China threat.” In June 2012, General Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, after returning from a visit this month to Thailand, the Philippines and Singapore stated: “We want to be out there partnered with nations and have a rotational presence that would allow us to build up common capabilities for common interests.”  This is precisely key beads in what the Pentagon calls the String of Pearls.


The Pentagon is now quietly negotiating a return to bases abandoned after the Vietnam War. It is negotiating with the Thai government to create a new “disaster relief” hub  at the Royal Thai Navy Air Field at U-Tapao, 90 miles south of Bangkok. The US military built the two mile long runway there, one of Asia’s longest, in the 1960s as a major staging and refueling base during the Vietnam War.


The Pentagon was also working to secure more rights to US Navy visits to Thai ports and joint surveillance flights to monitor trade routes and military movements. The US Navy will soon base four of its newest warships — Littoral Combat Ships — in Singapore and would rotate them periodically to Thailand and other southeast Asian countries. The Navy was pursuing options to conduct joint airborne surveillance missions from Thailand.[22]


In addition, Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter went to Thailand in July 2012 and the Thai government has invited Defense Secretary Leon Panetta who met with the Thai minister of defense at a conference in Singapore in June.[23]


In 2014, the US Navy was scheduled to begin deploying new P-8A Poseidon reconnaissance and anti-submarine aircraft to the Pacific, replacing the P-3C Orion surveillance planes. The Navy was also preparing to deploy new high-altitude surveillance drones to the Asia-Pacific region around the same time. [24]


Pentagon targets China Oil Shipping Lanes from Africa and Mideast

India-US Defense ‘Look East Policy’


Several years ago during the Bush Administration, Washington made a major move to lock India in as a military ally of the US against the emerging Chinese presence in Asia. India calls it India’s “Look East Policy.” In reality, despite all claims to the contrary, it is a “look at China” military policy. In comments in August 2012, Deputy Secretary of defense Ashton Carter stated, "India is also key part of our rebalance to the Asia-Pacific, and, we believe, to the broader security and prosperity of the 21st century. The US-India relationship is global in scope, like the reach and influence of both countries." [25]


Carter continued in remarks following a trip to New Delhi, "Our security interests converge: on maritime security, across the Indian Ocean region; in Afghanistan, where India has done so much for economic development and the Afghan security forces; and on broader regional issues, where we share long-term interests. I went to India at the request of Secretary Panetta and with a high-level delegation of U S technical and policy experts.” [26]


Indian Ocean


[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he Pentagon “String of pearls” strategy against China in effect was not of beautiful pearls, but a hangman’s noose around the perimeter of China designed in the event of major conflict to completely cut China off from its access to vital raw materials, most especially oil from the Persian Gulf and Africa. As former Pentagon adviser Robert D. Kaplan noted, the Indian Ocean is becoming the world’s “strategic center of gravity” and who controls that center controls Eurasia, including China. The Ocean is the vital waterway passage for energy and trade flows between the Middle East and China and Far Eastern countries. More strategically, it is the heart of a developing south-south economic axis between China and Africa and Latin America.


Since 1997 trade between China and Africa has risen more than twenty-fold and trade with Latin America, including Brazil, has risen fourteen fold in only ten years. This dynamic, if allowed to continue, will eclipse the economic size of the European Union as well as the declining North American industrial economies in less than a decade. That is a development that Washington circles and Wall Street are determined to prevent at all costs.


Straddled by the Islamic arch--which stretches from Somalia to Indonesia, passing through the countries of the Gulf and Central Asia-- the region surrounding the Indian Ocean has certainly become the world's new strategic center of gravity.[27]


No rival economic bloc can be allowed to challenge American hegemony. Former Obama geopolitical adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, still today along with Henry Kissinger one of the most influential persons in the US power establishment, summed up the position as seen from Washington in his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And It's Geostrategic Imperatives:


It is imperative that no Eurasian challenger emerges, capable of dominating Eurasia and thus of also challenging America. The formulation of a comprehensive and integrated Eurasian geo-strategy is therefore the purpose of this book. [28]


For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia…. Now a non-Eurasian power is preeminent in Eurasia -- and America's global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained.  [29]


In that context, how America 'manages' Eurasia is critical. Eurasia is the globe's largest continent and is geopolitically axial. A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world's three most advanced and economically productive regions. A mere glance at the map also suggests that control over Eurasia would almost automatically entail Africa's subordination, rendering the Western Hemisphere and Oceania geopolitically peripheral to the world's central continent. About 75 per cent of the world's people live in Eurasia, and most of the world's physical wealth is there as well, both in its enterprises and underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for 60 per cent of the world's GNP and about three-fourths of the world's known energy resources. [30]


[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he Indian Ocean is crowned by what some have called an Islamic Arch of muslim countries stretching from East Africa to Indonesia by way of the Persian Gulf countries and Central Asia. The emergence of China and other much smaller Asian powers over the past two decades since the end of the Cold war has challenged US hegemony over the Indian Ocean for the first time since the beginning of the Cold War. Especially in the past years as American economic influence has precipitously declined globally and that of China risen spectacularly, the Pentagon has begun to rethink its strategic presence in the Indian Ocean. The Obama Asian Pivot was centered on asserting decisive control over the sea lanes of the Indian Ocean and the waters of the South China Sea.


The US military base at Okinawa, Japan was being rebuilt as a major center to project US military power towards China.  As of 2010 there were over 35,000 US military personnel stationed in Japan and another 5,500 American civilians employed there by the United States Department of Defense. The United States Seventh Fleet is based in Yokosuka. The 3rd Marine Expeditionary Force in Okinawa. 130 USAF fighters are stationed in the Misawa Air Base and Kadena Air Base.


The Japanese government in 2011 began an armament program designed to counter the perceived growing Chinese threat. The Japanese command has urged their leaders to petition the United States to allow the sale of F-22A Raptor fighter jets, currently illegal under U.S law. South Korean and American military have deepened their strategic alliance and over 45,000 American soldiers are now stationed in South Korea. The South Koreans and Americans claim this is due to the North Korean military’s modernization. China and North Korea denounce it as needlessly provocative.[31]


Under the cover of the US war on Terrorism, the US has developed major military agreements with the Philippines as well as with Indonesia’s army.


But the military base on Diego Garcia is the lynchpin of US control over the Indian Ocean. In 1971 the US military depopulated the citizens of Diego Garcia and build a major military installation there to carry out missions against Iraq and Afghanistan. China has two Achilles heels—the Straits of Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Malacca near Singapore. Some 20% of China oil passes through the Straits of Hormuz. And some 80% of Chinese oil imports pass through the Strait of Malacca as well as major freight trade.


To prevent China from emerging successfully as the major economic competitor of the United States in the world, Washington launched the so-called Arab Spring in late 2010. While the aspirations of millions of ordinary Arab citizens in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and elsewhere for freedom and democracy was real, they were in effect used as unwitting cannon fodder to unleash a US strategy of chaos across the entire oil-rich Islamic world from Libya in North Africa across to Syria and ultimately Iran in the Middle East. [32]


The US strategy within the Islamic Arch countries straddling the Indian Ocean is as Mohamed Hassan, a strategic analyst of the Islamic world put it,


The US is therefore seeking to control these resources to prevent them reaching China. This was a major objective of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but these have turned into a fiasco. The US destroyed these countries in order to set up governments there which would be docile, but they have failed. The icing on the cake is that the new Iraqi and Afghan government trade with China! Beijing has therefore not needed to spend billions of dollars on an illegal war in order to get its hands on Iraq’s black gold: Chinese companies simply bought up oil concessions at auction totally within the rules.


One can see that the USA's imperialist strategy has failed all along the line. There is nevertheless one option still open to the US: maintaining chaos in order to prevent these countries from attaining stability for the benefit of China. This means continuing the war in Iraq and Afghanistan and extending it to countries such as Iran, Yemen or Somalia.[33]


 South China Sea


[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he completion of the Pentagon “String of Pearls” hangman’s noose around China to cut off vital energy and other imports in event of war by 2012 was centered around the increased US manipulation of events in the South China Sea. The Ministry of Geological Resources and Mining of the People's Republic of China estimated that the South China Sea may contain 17.7 billion tons of crude oil (compared to Kuwait with 13 billion tons). The most optimistic estimate suggested that potential oil resources (not proved reserves) of the Spratly and Paracel Islands in the South China Sea could be as high as 105 billion barrels of oil, and that the total for the South China Sea could be as high as 213 billion barrels. [34]


The presence of such vast energy reserves has become a major energy security issue for China, understandably. Washington has made a calculated intervention in the past several years to sabotage those Chinese interests, using especially Vietnam as a wedge against Chinese oil exploration there. In July 2012 the National Assembly of Vietnam passed a law demarcating Vietnamese sea borders to include the Spratly and Paracel islands. US influence in Vietnam since the country opened to economic liberalization has become decisive.


In 2011 the US military begun cooperation with Vietnam including joint “peaceful” military exercises. Washington has backed both The Philippines and Vietnam in their territorial claims over Chinese-claimed territories in the South China Sea, emboldening those small countries not to seek a diplomatic resolution.[35]


In 2010 US and UK oil majors entered the bidding for exploration in the South China Sea. The bid by Chevron and BP added to the presence of US-based Anadarko Petroleum Corporation in the region. That move is essential to give Washington the pretext to “defend us oil interests” in the area. [36]


In April 2012, the Philippine warship Gregorio del Pilar was involved in a standoff with two Chinese surveillance vessels in the Scarborough Shoal, an area claimed by both nations. The Philippine navy had been trying to arrest Chinese fishermen who were allegedly taking government-protected marine species from the area, but the surveillance boats prevented them. On April 14, 2012, U.S. and the Philippines held their yearly exercises in Palawan, Philippines. On May 7, 2012, Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Fu Ying called a meeting with Alex Chua, Charge D'affaires of the Philippine Embassy in China, to make a serious representation over the incident at the Scarborough Shoal.


From South Korea to Philippines to Vietnam, the Pentagon and US State Department is fanning the clash over rights to the South China Sea to stealthily insert US military presence there to “defend” Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean or Philippine interests. The military hangman’s noose around China is being slowly drawn tighter.


While China’s access to vast resources of offshore conventional oil and gas were being restricted, Washington was actively trying to lure China into provocations and incidents that amount to a sophisticated form of economic warfare, namely trade war and use of the WTO as America’s biased cop in those wars.

Endnotes:

[1] Winslow Wheeler, The Military Imbalance: How The US Outspends the World, March 16, 2012, accessed in http://www.iiss.org/publications/military-balance/the-military-balance-2012/press-statement/figure-comparative-defence-statistics/.
[2] Ibid.
[3] F. William Engdahl, Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order, 2010, edition.engdahl, Wiesbaden.
[4] President Barack Obama, Remarks By President Obama to the Australian Parliament, November 17, 2011, accessed in http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/11/17/remarks-president-obama-australian-parliament.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Otto Kreisher, UK Defense Chief to NATO: Pull Your Weight in Europe While US Handles China, July 22, 2012, accessed in http://defense.aol.com/2012/07/19/uk-defense-chief-to-nato-pull-your-weight-in-europe-while-us-ha/?icid=related4.
[7] BBC, China military 'closing key gaps', says Pentagon, 25 August 2011, accessed in http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-14661027.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Greg Jaffe , US Model for a Future War Fans Tensions with China and inside Pentagon, Washington Post, August 2, 2012, accessed in http://www.turkishweekly.net/news/139681/us-model-for-a-future-war-fans-tensions-with-china-and-inside-pentagon.html.
[10] Matt Siegel, As Part of Pact, U.S. Marines Arrive in Australia, in China’s Strategic Backyard, The New York Times,
[11] Greg Jaffe, op. cit.
[12] F. William Engdahl, Full Spectrum Dominance: Totallitarian democracy in the New World Order, Wiesbaden, 2009, edition.engdahl, p. 190.
[13] Ibid., p. 190.
[14] US-China Economic Security and Review Commission, 2005 Report to Congress of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, US Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, November 2005, accessed in http://www.uscc.gov/annual_report/2005/annual_report_full_05.pdf, pp. 115, 118.
[15] Ibid., p. 120.
[16] The Washington Times, China Builds up Strategic Sea Lanes, January 17, 2005, accessed in  http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2005/jan/17/20050117-115550-1929r/?page=all#pagebreak.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Wall Street Journal, An Opening in Burma: The regime's tentative liberalization is worth testing for sincerity,
Wall Street Journal, November 22, 2011, accessed in http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204443404577049964259425018.html
[20] Radio Free Asia, US to Invest in Burma’s Oil, 7 November, 2011, accessed in http://www.rfa.org/english/news/burma/sanctions-07112012185817.html
[21] Shaun Tandon, US eases Myanmar restrictions for NGOs, AFP,  April 17, 2012, accessed in http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jmwmJ3e0yIjyD-7N52GAFISnweAA?docId=CNG.a8c1c3e2edf92a30cc1b3c9bd5ed11c1.131
[22] Craig Whitlock, U.S. eyes return to some Southeast Asia military bases, Washington Post, June 23, 2012, accessed in http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-seeks-return-to-se-asian-bases/2012/06/22/gJQAKP83vV_story.html
[23] Ibid.
[24] Ibid.
[25] Zeenews, US-India ties are global in scope: Pentagon,  August 02, 2012, accessed in
[26] Ibid.
[27] Gregoire Lalieu, Michael Collon, Is the Fate of the World Being Decided Today in the Indian Ocean?, November 3, 2010, accessed in  http://www.michelcollon.info/Is-the-fate-of-the-world-being.html?lang=fr
[28] Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And It's Geostrategic Imperatives, 1997, Basic Books, p. xiv.
[29] Ibid., p. 30.
[30] Ibid., p. 31.
[31] Cas Group, Background on the South China Sea Crisis, accessed in http://casgroup.fiu.edu/pages/docs/3907/1326143354_South_China_Sea_Guide.pdf
[32] Gregoire Lalieu,, et al, op. cit.
[33] Ibid.
[34] GlobalSecurity.org, South China Sea Oil and Natural Gas, accessed in http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/war/spratly-oil.htm
[35] Agence France Presse, US, Vietnam Start Military Relationship, August 1, 2011, accessed in http://www.defensenews.com/article/20110801/DEFSECT03/108010307/U-S-Vietnam-Start-Military-Relationship
[36] Zacks Equity Research, Oil Majors Eye South China Sea, June 24, 2010, accessed in www.zacks.com/stock/news/36056/Oil+Majors+Eye+South...

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
  Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States, Engdahl is the son of F. William Engdahl, Sr., and Ruth Aalund (b. Rishoff). Engdahl grew up in Texas and after earning a degree in engineering and jurisprudence from Princeton University in 1966 (BA) and graduate study in comparative economics at the University of Stockholm from 1969 to 1970, he worked as an economist and freelance journalist in New York and in Europe. Engdahl began writing about oil politics with the first oil shock in the early 1970s. His first book was called A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order and discusses the alleged roles of Zbigniew Brzezinski and George Ball and of the USA in the 1979 overthrow of the Shah of Iran, which was meant to manipulate oil prices and to stop Soviet expansion. Engdahl claims that Brzezinski and Ball used the Islamic Balkanization model proposed by Bernard Lewis. In 2007, he completed Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation. Engdahl is also a contributor to the website of the anti-globalization Centre for Research on Globalization, the Russian website New Eastern Outlook,[2] and the Voltaire Network,[3] and a freelancer for varied newsmagazines such as the Asia Times. William Engdahl has been married since 1987 and has been living for more than two decades near Frankfurt am Main, Germany.


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Do you prefer the 1% or The Party? (Or: Why China wins)

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.


Pres. Xi reviewing honor guard. A highly qualified statesman for our troubled times.

The Chinese communists kicked out the the Japanese, then the Europeans, held off the American neo-imperialists at Korea and then Vietnam, provided spectacular economic growth during all that time, ended rampant drug abuse, forbid ethnic quarrelling, and is the economic envy of the world in 2018.

Maybe you don’t want to live there, but you certainly wish your country was doing as well for itself as China is.

Every Third-Worlder would agree with that in a nanosecond, and only a French-style superiority/inferiority complex could cause a Westerner to deny it (or perhaps total ignorance of modern politics).

How did we get here? Divine intervention? Cultural superiority? The dumb luck of an electron’s random path?

Somebody is running political-economic policy on this earth, and the West European (bourgeois) system and socialist-inspired Chinese system answer that question quite clearly in their parts of the world. This is the 7th part in an 8-part series which essentially compares the two systems via comparing two leading English-language literary lights of either one.

And if you’ve read this far you know all that already, so I’ll spare you the preambles and get right down to the nitty gritty.

So who’s your Daddy?

Everybody's got a vanguard party. Democracy is not perfect (only God is), but this does not mean there are not varying degrees of perfection which we can analyse and attain.

In the West, your modern-era vanguard – after decades of money-grubbing, back-stabbing, standing on daddy’s rich shoulders, and exploiting those who work for them – is the economic 1%.

To add journalistic balance: they also got to be the vanguard via the admirable, ethical business practices of Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, the genius of people like Warren Buffett to support the growth of private, abusive monopolies, and the incredible skills of being phony in public by actors like Ronald Reagan…these are whom have been chosen in the West – via both informal and formal democratic consensus – as their vanguard party.

According to the author of the top English-language university textbook on China, John King Fairbank and his China: A New History, China has always been culturally predisposed towards rejecting that type of a vanguard.

“Once the literati who set the tone of ruling class opinion became convinced that the dynasty had lost its moral claim to the throne, little could save it. This is a factor in Chinese politics today.”

If I said that Chinese literati ran China I’d be called “romantic”, but that’s the view from a pair of Western eyes, which can usually only imagine the army, money, or an only-negative, reactionary clergy to be the the deciding factor in politics.

However, we can say that there certainly was a literati in charge in Revolutionary War-era America – it was bourgeois and slave-owning, but they often talked the right anti-imperialist talk and walked it, too. But nobody can say that about America’s leadership today: I don’t know what the 9th century Chinese theatre equivalent of Bedtime for Bonzo was, but I don’t think the lead actor got very high on their political ladder.

In France, every politician must write at least one book, but…c’mon – they are imperialists, cultural chauvinists and fake-leftists, or somehow all three at the same time quite often. However, at least France is not American, eh?

China may or may not have a “literati” in charge today…but you certainly cannot possibly rise in the Communist Party without being literate in modern political and economic theory. You can call me “Confucian”, but the best way to lead is by example – so what example does their current vanguard party give us?

Just how good is China’s economic planning? There’s a reason we aren’t told.

At 7 parts I’m starting to feel bad for my readers, even though you have paid me nothing, and 98% of you not even paid me a comment compliment!

Regardless of your shameless taking advantage of my labor, I’m going to put the juicier section – China’s economic planning – ahead of the “as painless as possible” very quick recap of the Chinese political structures which permit such a juicy economic policy.

The reality is that people are right to fear rule by the Party – it’s radically new. In human history it has been the 1%, 99% of the time. Even in aboriginal societies, how often were women and the disabled allowed to make major decisions? Therefore, we have almost no data to rely on regarding what happens when an 99%-inspired Party rules.

Common sense tells us that public opinion can’t rule 100% of the time….but just once every 4 years? The scientific method tells us that data and testing are important – we should use them in politics and not just the chemistry lab, no?


[dropcap]A [/dropcap]great thing about Jeff J. Brown’s China is Communist, Dammit!, just released last year, is that he gives us plenty of evidence which leaves no doubt that China’s system uses data on what the People think: it is a People’s democratic dictatorship, after all, and they absolutely cannot have democracy without compiling data on what the people say they need, want and generally opine on important subjects.

The reality is that China compiles and actually draws from this “Peoples’ data” hugely impressively. It is also a reality that Western parliaments care very little about public opinion on seemingly all policy making, and certainly Western executive branches are not constrained by it either, nor is the European Union or Eurogroup (which runs the Eurozone).

The disparity between China’s reality and image is startling: a “5 year plan” is portrayed as pure dictatorship, but here’s how it’s actually compiled:

“These five-year plans are not done in a vacuum. A vast hierarchy of information speeds up from village committees to county, district, provincial and then national levels. These statistics are based on surveys and polls of the masses. The Communist Party of China is one of the largest polling organizations in the world, obsessively interested in what citizens think about, the good, the bad and the ugly, from garbage services, to medical care, to the ability to buy food or a car.

Computers have made a huge improvement in collecting and analyzing all this information but still thousands of statisticians, actuaries, database experts and technicians who studied at university in urban, rural, agricultural, environmental and economic planning, hundreds of thousands of collective work hours to interpret and analyze this soon army of data statistics and information….Needless to say, for a continent-sized country with over 1 billion citizens, it takes hundreds of thousands of people involved to develop each five-year plan.”

It is not “needless to say”, however, because such facts about China’s governmental and economic process are never uttered in the West. They must fear that we would be contaminated by such democratic common sense. “China is an unfeeling totalitarian system…and they’re capitalist, too. End of story!!!”

This is where new China scholarship by Brown should revolutionise the conceptions of China for those who are honest; Brown has lived there for nearly two decades and is involved in normal, everyday life as an active immigrant-citizen, as his book repeatedly demonstrates. He relates how he knows that polls of all types, and of all demographics, are taking place because he sees constant flyers for them in his regular-class neighborhood. Fairbank will always be “Harvard’s first China scholar”, but he can never outclass Brown on “new”, living China scholarship, though he probably does outclass Brown on old, outdated, scholarship of dead Chinese.

In the West public opinion is polled just one time: during election time, and then is totally ignored. French President Emmanuel Macron and others pride themselves on not listening to public opinion once reaching office, and he is steadfastly implementing whatever the hell he wants; during election campaigns candidates like Hillary bend anyway the latest poll is blowing. Among the People of the West there is abundant proof of support for leftism, and certainly majority support for many socialist-inspired policies, but they are totally ignored because they are unable to play a role in their money-centered, 1%-created and supported, bourgeois, individualistic political process.

Not so socialist China….

“Compared to Western countries, what is amazing is the lack of serious influence that China’s private sector has on the process of developing each five-year plan and budget. The idea of having thousands of lobby and special interest groups, let’s be honest, with hundreds of millions of dollars and euros in hand to essentially buy legislation for their direct benefit, is alien to Chinese governance.

Do various, aforementioned government entities contact the offices of Jack Ma (Alibaba), Robin Li (Baidu), Wang Jianlin (Dalian Wanda Group), and others among China’s elite business world? Of course. But the idea that any of these CEOs or their companies go to the state planning commission or National People’s Congress, with checkbook in hand, to write and buy their own laws, which is standard practice in Eurangloland (European Union, NATO plus Australia, New Zealand and Israel), is unthinkable in Communist China. Their wishes and suggestions are surely known by everyone concerned, but they are trumped by Baba Beijing’s overriding priority of maintaining social stability, called wending in Chinese, and keeping the Heavenly Mandate for the long term. And these Chinese movers and shakers in the business world are in total agreement. No wending is very bad for business, unless you sell arms and weapons, and almost all of these in China are state-owned.”

Brown clearly does not have red-colored glasses about the increased access of China’s 1%, but he demonstrates that the real project of modern socialism is to not to destroy capitalism 100% but to limit it and harness it for the benefit of the 99%.

“Suppose Baba Beijing declared a serious funding issue or the masses began to turn on their superrich 1% class, which is now looked upon with a certain amount of national pride? The National People’s Congress might feel compelled to pass a law requiring all fortunes over $1 billion dollars to pay a 10% or 25% wealth tax to the state treasury. China’s 1% may grumble and complain, but the checkbooks would necessarily be whipped out. They know the only reason they have accumulated the wealth they possess is due to the Communist Party of China’s strategic, long-term, five-, and now essentially 10-year economic plans, and all the well-thought out strategies, subsidies, targeted tax cuts, etc., that were bestowed upon them. There is no sense of thankfulness on the part of Western capitalists for what their governments do for them, because they now they own the process in the first place. How can you be thankful for something which you already consider yours by right?”

The key is that, when it comes to economic planning, socialist-inspired countries have huge leverage to force their economic direction in a way which guarantees – guarantees – to be pointed in a way which is at least primarily intended to help the 99%. Nobody can guarantee economic growth, perhaps, but central planning is a far, far more secure system than trickle-down economics and the boom-bust cycle of capitalist democracies.

In the West public opinion is polled just one time: during election time, and then is totally ignored. French President Emmanuel Macron and others pride themselves on not listening to public opinion once reaching office, and he is steadfastly implementing whatever the hell he wants; during election campaigns candidates like Hillary bend anyway the latest poll is blowing. Among the People of the West there is abundant proof of support for leftism, and certainly majority support for many socialist-inspired policies, but they are totally ignored because they are unable to play a role in their money-centered, 1%-created and supported, bourgeois, individualistic political process.

Undoubtedly, what the above quote demonstrates is how China is able to end to “individually planned” economies – like Macron’s France or the Eurogroup for the Eurozone – which are a clear betrayal of the ideals of Western democracy and certainly socialist democracy, which insists on some equality instead of unrestrained individualist rights.

“In the West, the politicians and policymakers owe their allegiance and existence to the one percent, with their vast sums of money. In China, it’s one percent owes its allegiance, existence and vast sums of money to the Communist Party of China, its politicians and policymakers.” 

That is socialism – it is the opposite of individualism; greatly undermining rampant individualism – not all individualism – is the only way to socialism.

It would be nice to reach the ideal of no private property and total equality among citizens – that is communism – but, to paraphrase Fidel: we must change today that which can be changed.

But that is what the experience of the Chinese Communist Party has done: to insist on the unity and brotherhood of all peoples by cutting off at the knees the false idea of the self-made man. Truly, anywhere, everywhere and at all times in history people have made fortunes thanks to help – subsidies, protectionist policies, corruption, favourable loans, favourably-frothing electrons, etc. We are all connected, whether mighty yang CEOs or soft housewife yins.

This acknowledgement – inherent in socialism – is why the Chinese are winning, economically.

Even though I have quoted him liberally, Brown goes into these vital insights in far greater detail, making his book a tremendously valuable read. Governments DO change – all systems are NOT alike – China’s system and practices are stunningly effective, obviously, and stunningly modern as well.

Document and Parliament – Both are shinier, newer and more reflective

But to get so stunningly stunning, there must be a legal foundation to promote and protect such stunningness.

There is a hugely important mistake many people commonly make about life: People in the past were younger (and thus stupider) – those of who are living today are actually older, and thus the repositories of more experiences, maturity and human intelligence.

So why on earth would anyone think a country with a constitution 200 years younger (the US, written 1787) than China’s (written 1982) is somehow “more modern”? The world was so much younger and stupider then?


China Rising remains a fundamental text for those wishing to understand China in a comparative framework with the West.

Part of the problem is the use of the phrase “the people’s dictatorship” – whoever sired it, dictatorship is always undesirable to modern ears. However only the Western media uses this two-word phrase! It is truly foreign to Chinese ears – the preamble of the Chinese constitution uses a very different term: “the people’s democraticdictatorship”. This is not a small nuance at all.

China is not really totally ruled by the Party: You never hear this in the West, but there are eight other political parties known as the “Democratic Front”. As their name implies (democracy currently being more associated with personal freedom than equality, for some reason) they are more capitalist and personal freedom-oriented. Far from being a token, they account for some 30% of seats in the largest national legislative body or parliament – the National People’s Congress.

Just as I always say Iran’s PressTV is more diverse and open than Western media – because even though our editorial line is clear we have rabid pro-Zionist analysts all the time, whereas the West doesn’t even have Arab analysts when they are talking about Palestine, (much less Palestinian analysts, LOL) – China’s top legislature has far more ideological balance than the English-speaking world does. The 30% is not in charge – by law – but they are there, and they do make a difference.

There is no such ideological political tolerance in the English-language world, where Hillary passes for a leftist; Corbyn is a very new phenomenon; Canada and Australia have totally lost their sense of self and are US-apers, and I would not have written that 30 years ago.

Continental Europe does not merit being lumped in with them..but not by much, as their non-mainstream / true leftist parties have dwindled greatly.

My overall point is: There IS ideological balance in China’s top legislative body, but it is not a perfect balance NOR should it be. The West has 50-50 balance between left and right regularly…and it produces total gridlock. Probably because it’s a balance of “bad” and “worse”, ideologically!

China also outdoes socialist Cuba in this area: In Cuba’s brand-new parliament – just the 2nd female-majority parliament globally, and with 40% Black or Mestizo members – only 10% of members are not members of the Communist Party. I’m sure that’s never reported either….

But, socialist fanatic that I am repeatedly imagined to be, both China and Cuba (and Iran and Vietnam) have succeeded because they allow more ideological balance at the top then is given credit for. We socialist fanatics like to remember that those horrid souls called “the opposition” do have some valid ideas to implement.

Lobbies are not really democratic – China puts those pigs in a pen

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hy should you have more influence just because you are rich and well-connected? You should not be able to “pay” for more free speech just because you have the money to do so. If this is considered a lamentable inevitability, then structures are needed to limit it, or simply eliminate it entirely.

That’s why China has another national body which is designed to formally harness an uncontrollable force in the West: special interest groups. Indeed, if you find any nonsensical legislation in the West – the root cause is always a lobby.

Thus, parallel to their parliament, China has the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, which contains all the different types of lobbies – private industry, farmers, youth, pensioners, etc. This body meets at the same time as China’s Congress (Parliament), so they are democratically present at the key time and can do their best to influence opinion.

And I think I have been able to explain – quickly and without boring you – China’s top legislative bodies and how they work. Clearly it is superior in conception, composition and practice to West European (bourgeois) democracy…and if you can just hang in there a tiny bit longer I can sum up China’s modern advantages in the other two branches of government.

China had enough of warlords, but the West loves ‘liberal warlord judge’ Macron

China also differs in the executive branch: in the West it is personified by Emmanuel Macron, the new “liberal (free market / non-racist) strongman”. Macron rules by decree even though his Party has an absolute majority in Parliament! That’s because the open debate of his far-right economic policies would inspire a lot of bad press. Truly, an emperor in the old Chinese mould…minus the conscience-pricking Heavenly Mandate, of course.

China’s system, instead, spreads out the power of the executive branch in order to safeguard the control of the vanguard party – the Communist Party – which has been democratically installed by their 1949 popular revolution. This decentralisation of individual power to preserve the power of an entire Party is what socialism is all about: no more strongmen (and certainly not during non-wartime).

Thus the 300-member Central Committee (of the Communist Party) is the first step above the Congress, but the members are voted for by Congress. That is indirect election, and the US has this (electoral college), as does France (500 mayors are required to sign your petition to run for president). Cuba just elected Canel-Diaz and their Central Committee via the same system. You can call it “not democratic”, and the socialists can call the capitalist system “not democratic”, and that will allow me to move on with this analysis….

The Central Committee elects the members of the Politburo, Military Commission (Party control over army) and General Secretary (leader of Politburo and the top post in China). The Politburo is often described as an “executive cabinet” but it’s much more powerful: of course, in Western cabinets they all serve the will and at the consent of the king. Macron’s cabinet has absolutely no real individual power; Hollande had four prime ministers in 5 years.

There is no public debate within a cabinet and there is no public debate with the Politburo, but the latter’s members are undoubtedly known to wield much more power than Western cabinet members. France’s Prime Minister actually was known for having significant power in shaping domestic policy, historically, but Macron has changed that drastically.

Within the Politburo is the Politburo Standing Committee, which is chosen by Politburo members, and which is best described as similar to a West cabinet, as it includes the president, premier and the nation’s top 5 to 9 advisors. And that’s it.

To sum up: The people vote for Congress, and then you have these committed Party members winnowing themselves down democratically via three smaller rings.

The key is: there is tremendous democratic discussion within these rings, though it is not public. This is something which Western media either cannot or will not understand. But this is why most of the decisions are unanimous – consensus is agreed upon before a vote via discussion. Why on earth should public policy be a “winner take all” situation – China’s solution is clearly more democratic because it actually produces more compromise.

Brown goes into Chinese “face saving” as a reason for not publicly filibustering like a blowhard, and it makes sense, but Cuba’s negotiations are private as well because, again, it actually produces compromise. Yes, odd gadflies cannot pore over every word, but the proof is in the pudding of China and Cuba’s long-term success amid decades of Western blockades.

Back down at the local level, China has the inhabitants of one million villages vote by secret ballot for mayors and city councils. This is the exact same in the West. It differs above this in that China switches from direct to indirect representation after the municipal level: those directly elected at the municipal level vote for township, in turn for county, in turn for province, and then province votes for national assembly.

So we see the same principles of direct and indirect democracy are undoubtedly at play – as they are in Cuba, Iran, etc. – and are at play at different levels. But both principles are used and accepted in both the capitalist and socialist democratic systems.

The major difference is that decades of freedom-fighting and leadership caused the Chinese people to insist on a single vanguard party to oversee the country in order to preserve democracy, and not to hand it to one liberal strongman warlord.

Iran is the same way: our vanguard party, which provided decades of freedom-fighting and leadership – which is the only way such a party can possibly have the credibility and influence needed to mobilise the masses – was the clergy.

To sum up this recap of the structure of Chinese socialist democracy – a quick note about the judicial branch:

China’s judicial history is longer than anyone’s, and is pretty interestingly rendered by Brown. It had explicit civil and penal codes predating not just the Magna Carta but Jesus Christ; has an informal/communal justice system which is the same as the one being hailed as groundbreaking in Northern Syria; and has notes of French and German civil law.

Undoubtedly there are Muslim influences as well, given that many Khans were Muslim and were favoured by the Ming dynasty. This is an area which merits further scholarship, as it is certainly a mine which will produce. It would also provide counter-illumination for self-understanding in many Muslim countries, because countries like Iran were controlled by the Mongols for quite a long era and thus have many “Chinese”-origin policies, thought they may not know it.

The main difference between China and West in the judicial branch is quite simply: the judicial branch is explicitly under the leadership of the Communist Party – a group is the ultimate judge.

In places like the US and France: The ultimate judge is the president. State of emergency or not, they routinely subvert justice simply by claiming “terrorism”. This is not new: before that it was by claiming “communism”. Before that it was by claiming “White superiority”.

So, from Chinese eyes, someone like Macron has made himself into a “liberal warlord judge” even more than previous French warlords.

There is another vital difference: In the West, the inhabitants are encouraged to believe a fiction that their judiciary is completely unaffected by politics, wealth, religion or ethnicity. The West also believes in Santa Claus, but that’s mainly their children.

The same policy of: “A claim of objectivity is laughably unmodern, and also cannot be more important than our overall Party principles” applies to China’s fourth estate – the press. The West also believes their press achieves objectivity, but that is not only among their children.

What have you done for me lately, or let me do?

[dropcap]G[/dropcap]erman, French and English leaders have spent the last 150 years leading horrifically bloody battles against each other. Therefore, is it any wonder that the current European leadership – exemplified by the corrupt, undemocratic Eurogroup – is so reactionary, and so unable to provide the standard of living their people deserve: Europe is perhaps only at the tail end, or perhaps even still in the midst, of a major era of warlordism?

This is probably why there are so many protests in the age of austerity in France. China thinks that’s great, and surely encourages France’s very cute, very comparatively petite efforts at modern democracy.

Protests are good because they let a government know about urgent problems which need to be resolved. These are problems which have not been headed off beforehand, say, by…I don’t know…public polling?

Protests are important to the Chinese Communist Party because they care about corruption, to the point of execution (like Iran), and protests let the public and the Party know which officials are corrupt / inept, and which companies are not following labor laws.

Thus the Communist Party actually encourages pubic protests, which is how China has an average of 3-500 daily protests. That’s a mind-blowing statistic, and I’ve used it before, but this is how new scholarship blows apart previous paradigms, thankfully. France has 10, and they are considered the most protest-happy Western country – proportionally, France has half as many protests as China. I also doubt Chinese protests feature as much alcohol and scatalogical protest signs.

The US has essentially no protests, and the ones I have seen on Youtube have been thwarted by two cops on bicycles, LOL.

Protests in Iran are far, far more common than Westerners think. There is no way for Western media to cover every Iranian protest with the breathless anticipation of the fall of the Iranian Revolution like last January. Protests need permits, just like in France, and I’m not sure what if the US requires a permit or not before some 130-kilo once-a-month National Guard member gets to don $100,000 of equipment before stepping into his assault vehicle. Iran is not China, nor is it France, but it is also not Cuba.

Cuba, does not have any protests other than the Ladies in White. Cuba, being so close to the United States, simply can’t afford to mess around – not with protests, not with the media, not with drugs, not with crime, not with corruption, not with focusing your meager tourist dollars on anything but food, housing, education and medical care (and that’s for the medicines which are not part of the embargo). They have no oil, have a pack of rabidly capitalist Scarfaces glaring at them from Miami, and yet are a helluva lot more successful societally than any non-socialist inspired government.

France, which is assumed to be so very, very socially successful, keeps putting tear gas in my eye. I am not crying tears of liberation, and I have narrowly avoided worse. They also have a delusion that one day of protest does anything to an uncaring government, although maybe that is changing in France’s currently ongoing: “May ’68, 50 years later”.

I just found this protest stuff interesting, and I’m down to just one more part – I’ll wrap this up.

The excellent news is that the 1% has no chance against the Party…any Party

Jeff Brown: Certainly NOT reviewed by the New York Times, which proves his worth to independent minds.

Brown reads off the tale of the tape simply and perfectly:

“Xi commandeers a centrally-planned state-owned economy being guided by the Communist Party of China, all of whom are planning years and decades into the future, with a clear vision and solemn mission statement. Meanwhile, Obama has packs of rabid hyenas circling him, the spydom pack, the military pack, corporate pack, bankster pack, not to mention the Zionist pack. Then he has to deal with a huge flock of vulture legislators on Capitol Hill, venal, fatted and corrupt to the core.”

That is the 1% in a nation of any colour or of any religion which is capitalist and multi-party.

And if you believe THAT is superior to an enlightened vanguard Party working to enforce the People’s will, then…your problem is structural; your blindness is cultural; your individualism is grating to me.

The idea that what Brown has failed to report is that: in China there is a 1% and Deep State-guided industrial-military-banking-media Complex on the exact same model of the West is…absurd. But I can see why the West would think that: humans often project their own experiences onto others, as it is far easier than seeing others as individuals.

Beyond not having this Complex burden, another reality is that the West’s 1% is not burdened by any mandate of good governance or equality, either cultural or found int the structures of their 200-year old founding documents.

Furthermore, the idea that in the modern era of capitalism known as neoliberalism, the West’s 1% has any solidarity with even their own government runs directly contrary to their vision of globalisation.

These last three points are all rather enormous issues, no?

Not the Party’s problem….

It is lazy stereotyping to say that China has this superior leadership because of the Confucian focus on correct, virtuous conduct of the ruler, of which there is nothing like in the West. Islamic Socialist Iran certainly has this ideal omnipresent in their government. However, this idea denies Westerners the chance to see that China’s socialism is both modern and open to all for adoption – it is not culturally predicated, but is a political choice.

Trump just pulled out of the JCPOA on Iran’s nuclear energy program, but all he will do is cause short-term economic pain: Iran, like China, has a modern government which has 5-year plans and can actually act in the long term. I hope Iranian officials are reading Brown’s book and adopting certain Chinese strategies, of course, but Iran has a People’s Democratic Dictatorship Under God, and I am truly comfortable with our long-term success (Inshallah). Anybody who loves socialism, Islamic or not, and the right of People to choose, should be pleased to hear that I and many Iranians actually feel secure in our future despite Trump’s decision, which is quite in keeping with the aggressive policies of Obama, the Bushes, Clinton and Reagan.

In the short-term…well, the US making problems and killing people with blockades -there is nothing new about this, nor does this make Iran special, sadly.

All the West can do is threaten to invade – to repeat their warlordism – but I am not worried at all for places like China and Iran. They can never invade (much less hold) either of these two – they haven’t even been able to invade far, far, far poorer Cuba!

And also: for all the reasons so superbly enumerated by Brown, socialism’s victory is deserved and assured, if not expected right today.

The success of the Chinese Communist Party – and the socialist vanguard parties in places like Cuba, Iran, Vietnam, etc. – are an acknowledgment of their People’s modern refusal to reject the self-aggrandizing nonsense of bourgeois West European political thought. That will bring success, as much as humans can determine it for themselves.

The inherent truths of this statement is clear to any observer, and is the reason why Western media is so against any victory of socialism anywhere in the world, and why they have no choice but to try and falsely claim the credit for China’s success despite have two economic plans which have tremendously few parallel structures.

Brown has some pretty fascinating passages when it comes to the interplay between China’s government and its economics, and I really must stress that I have only given a sample. His debunking of the Western propaganda theme of “ghost cities” makes such propaganda pretty laughable.

Or rather, I’m laughing…and then I’m left rather envious!

You should be too. Certainly, any thinking person starts responding to the question posed by this article’s headline with: “Well I sure don’t want the 1%….”

***********************************

This is the 7th article in an 8-part series which compares old versus new Western scholarship on China.

Here is the list of articles slated to be published, and I hope you will find them useful in your leftist struggle!

Old vs. new scholarship on the continent of China an 8-part series

Daring to go beyond Western propaganda on the Great Leap Forwards famine

When Chinese Trash saved the world: Western lies about the Cultural Revolution

Maos legacy defended, and famous swim decoded, for clueless academics

The Cultural Revolutions solving of the urban-rural divide

Once China got off drugs: The ideological path from opium to liberal strongmanMacron

Prefer the 1% or the Party? Or: Why China wins

China’s only danger: A ‘Generation X’ who thinks they aren’t communist

About the author
 RAMIN MAZAHERI, Senior Correspondent & Contributing Editor, Dispatch from Paris •  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. His work has appeared in various journals, magazines and websites, as well as on radio and television.


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