Oppose the new Cold War against China: a reading list

As the decline of the U.S. empire becomes increasingly apparent to the rest of the world, the corporate media in the West is doing everything in its power to prepare the minds of the population for a eventual showdown with the People’s Republic of China. People in the West, but particularly in the United States, are being bombarded with negative story after negative story about China to justify increases in military budgets, convincing them that an eventual use of force will be a justifiable to contain China’s rise. Every single day there is a new outlandish story put out in the Western press about China, and these stories are presented in ways that portray the nation and its people as nefarious with wicked motives for every action they take. Some of the outlandish stories being pushed about China which are presented as fact with very little investigation are those claiming China is creating super-human soldiers, committing a genocide of Muslims, or most insidious of all, “harvesting the organs of minorities.” The United States, a nation which has more people incarcerated by rate and population than any country in world history, a nation responsible for slaughtering tens of millions of people in dozens of countries all over the world, pretends as if it has the moral authority to wave the banner of human rights and accuse China of committing all the crimes for which the United States itself is guilty of. Below are some of the mythical narratives the United States and its allies have latched onto and shamelessly exploited in their propaganda war against China, along with a list of essential reading material to help better understand China from a perspective the corporate media will never present.

Myth #1: “China is committing a genocide of the Uyghur Muslim population in Xinjiang and keeping 1 million in concentration camps.”

Reality: The only countries which are pushing this narrative are the Western white-majority countries (plus their ally Japan) as evidenced by this map of how the UN voted on this issue.

The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a well-known CIA front group, has gone on record admitting to funding Uyghur militant separatist groups in China dating back to 2004.

The CIA apparently wished to recreate the strategy from the 1980s in which they funded and trained the mujahideen in Afghanistan (Osama bin Laden was one of them) to wage a holy war against the Soviet Union and ultimately dismantle it. When the strategy failed in China due to the actions of the Chinese state, the U.S. decided to switch to a strategy of convincing the world that those actions were in fact genocide. While China is endlessly criticized for its de-radicalization centers, there has not been one word from any Western country about the use of re-education camps for Muslims in France. What is with the double standard? Meanwhile the United States has been bombing and drone-striking Uyghurs in Afghanistan, but when Uyghurs are in Afghanistan the corporate media refers to them as “Uyghur militants.”

• China detaining millions of Uyghurs? Serious problems with claims by US-backed NGO and far-right researcher ‘led by God’ against Beijing
• No, the UN did not report China has ‘massive internment camps’ for Uyghur Muslims
• Xinjiang and Uyghurs – what you’re not being told
• “US de-lists Uyghur terrorist organization aimed at China“
• China invites UN to visit ‘education centers’ in Xinjiang
• NY Times’ pseudo-expert accusing China of genocide worked for far-right cult Falun Gong’s publicity arm

Myth #2: “China is repressing a pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong. Hong-Kongers universally wish to become an independent state.”

Reality: It’s rather interesting and quite telling that the same media figures and politicians who shower praise on the insurrectionists in Hong Kong and refer to them as “pro-democracy” demonstrators are the same people who refer to the fascist mobs who stormed the U.S. Capitol (with the help of police) on January 6 as domestic terrorists. The opposition in Hong Kong, which gets support and funding from the CIA front-group known as the NED, is made up of extreme right-wingers who’ve aligned themselves with Ukrainian neo-Nazis, anti-Black Lives Matter politicians from the U.S., and Donald Trump supporters. According to a Reuters poll from a year ago, only 17% of Hong Kongers said they support independence from China, which of course came as a shock in the Western media.

• The Hong Kong protests and imperialism: what the corporate media isn’t saying
• Ukrainian neo-Nazis flock to the Hong Kong protest movement
• Hong Kong’s ‘pro-democracy’ movement allies with far-right US politicians that seek to crush Black Lives Matter
• Hong Kong’s opposition unites with Washington hardliners to ‘preserve the US’s own political and economic interests’
• Interesting poll shows Hong Kongers not exactly against China
• Agents of chaos. How the U.S. seeded a Colour Revolution in Hong Kong

Myth #3: “The Dalai Lama is a man of peace. Life in Tibet was so much better for the average person under the Tibetan feudal system before the Communist Party came to power.”

Reality: The Dalai Lama was on the CIA payroll from 1959 until the 1970s at least. After he fled Tibet following a failed coup against the Communist-led government in 1959, he set up a government in-exile in India which received $1.7 million yearly from the CIA to carry out its campaign against China. The Dalai Lama personally received $180,000 each year. As far as being a “man of peace”, there was absolutely nothing peaceful about the rule of the Llamas for the vast majority of the population. 98% of Tibetans were enslaved under feudal serfdom during the Llama’s reign. Serfs who did not wish to be obedient had their arms or legs cut off or their eyes gouged out. Some of the horrifying images of the victims of such practices can be found here. In 1959, China abolished these cruel practices of slavery, serfdom and unjust taxation in Tibet. It built hospitals, roads and schools for people who’d never been educated before. The life expectancy for the average person doubled. These are the facts that are conveniently neglected anytime the Dalai Lama and his ‘free Tibet’ movement are celebrated in the West.

• Friendly Feudalism: the Tibet Myth
• Tibet, China, and the violent reaction of a wealthy elite
• Behind Dalai Lama’s holy cloak
• China, Tibet and U.S.-sponsored counterrevolution

Myth #4: “China is executing ethnic minorities and stealing their organs for transplant.”

Reality: The “organ-harvesting” story has been widely spread in the West by the Falun Gong, an extreme right-wing religious cult that believes God will return to earth and wipe out homosexuals and that heaven is segregated by race. They use their heavily-promoted newspaper, The Epoch Times, to spread the narrative that Donald Trump was sent by heaven to eliminate the Chinese Communist Party. The Epoch rag puts out a new outrageous story about the CCP with each publication, and unfortunately the ideas promoted by its writers have been picked up by mainstream news outlets like the New York Times, the Guardian and the Wall Street Journal. Some of the other outlandish theories put out by the Falun Gong include “that modern science was invented by aliens as part of a scheme to take over human bodies; or that feminism, environmentalism, and homosexuality are part of Satan’s plan to make us into communists; or that race-mixing severs our connection to the gods.” In other words, the credibility of the source for the “organ-harvesting” accusation is beyond questionable to say the least.

• Reports on China ‘organ harvesting’ derive from front groups of far-right cult Falun Gong
• The strange rise of the Sinophobic Epoch Times

Myth #5: “China hid the truth about COVID-19 from the world, thus leading to chaos and unpreparedness in countries like the United States.”

Reality: A ground-breaking report by FAIR exposes the fact that the leaked Chinese documents obtained by corporate media confirm the fact that China did not hide or cover up COVID-19. Chinese President Xi Jinping even alerted U.S. President Donald Trump early on about just how contagious the coronavirus was. This was at the very same time Trump was publicly downplaying the virus as being nothing more contagious than the common flu.

• Corporate media’s leaked Chinese documents confirm China didn’t hide Covid-19
• NYT’s China Syndrome

Myth #6: “In 1989, thousands of peaceful pro-democracy demonstrators were massacred in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square by the People’s Liberation Army.”

Reality: In 2011, cables obtained by Wikileaks of correspondence from the U.S. embassy in Beijing confirmed there was no massacre of demonstrators inside Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989 despite the popular narrative. It is true that several hundred people were killed in street clashes some distance from Tiananmen Square. Among the dead were many PLA soldiers. The West has always presented these events as if there was a huge massacre by the PLA without ever having mentioned the soldiers who were set on fire and lynched in the streets, their bodies strung up and hung from buses. One of the main leaders of the protests, Chai Lang, said that the ultimate goal was to provoke the government into bloodying up the demonstrators so that the population would overthrow the People’s Republic of China. This goal, however, was kept from the other demonstrators who had other reasons for being there.

• Tiananmen: the massacre that wasn’t
• Wikileaks: no bloodshed inside Tiananmen Square, cables claim
• A note on the Tiananmen protests

Bonus reading:

• Did Mao really kill millions in the Great Leap Forward?
• Reassessing the Great Leap Forward
• U.S. arm sales to Taiwan are an act of aggression against China