Anna Chen – 15 May 2025, China narratives
Chris Hedges’ uncritical interview with China-hawk Kenneth Roth
The mysterious East continues to mystify western intelligentsia. I’ve noticed some leftist commentators are great on all the big issues except when it comes to China which remains a cavernous black hole in their understanding.
When Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and respected leftist Chris Hedges interviewed former Human Rights Watch chief Kenneth Roth, who has a book to plug, he allowed Roth to regurgitate his tired old China-bashing schtick unchallenged. Honestly, sometimes I wonder if there’s some deeply buried psychosexual fear lurking in the background with some of these guys, Peter Navarro being another case in point.
Where to start?
Ken says: “One, a question, are people happy? Which is meaningless in China because there’s no independent polling.”
Surely they are aware of Harvard University research showing 95.5% satisfaction with the government. While the Edelman Trust barometer saw 91% trust in 2022.
He cites riots in Hong Kong (2019), calling them “protests,” when we now know that NED financed them to the tune of nearly a million bucks. Indeed, some parents were alarmed to find thousands of dollars stashed in their kids’ bedrooms, and video exists of westerners handing over wads of cash to HK youths.
No rioters were killed. But one elderly janitor was bricked to death by rioters, another man in his 50s burnt with petrol, and countless beatings of the public happened daily, especially of women. How would we deal with that sort of violence in the US or Europe? Oh, yes, the same year, American cops killed 1,002 civilians.
The final six words of the Joint Declaration signed in 1984, returning to China the territory seized by the British in the Opium Wars, are always omitted by hawks. It says, Hong Kong is to enjoy autonomy “except in foreign and defence affairs.” Hong Kong was stolen in the 19thC Opium Wars. It’s now been returned.
Taiwan, or the Republic of China (that’s CHINA), was recognised as part of One-China for decades until the US-led West decided to initiate a carve-up of the Golden Goose. The US has been arming Taiwan over the years until it bristles with missiles like a porcupine. It has military on Kinmen island next door to the mainland city of Xiamen like a cocked pistol to its head. American imperialism can’t let others be. It has to be the scorpion stinging the frog – it can’t help itself. That’s what imperialism does.
We have always been at war with Eastasia
Do Ken and Chris seriously think we have “free and fair elections” in the West? Look at how Cambridge Analytica screwed Britain over the Brexit vote. How our Fourth Estate skews the news and prevents informed voting. How whoever you vote for every four or five years, the government always gets in and ignores their pledges and our wishes for the rest of the term. Chinese people have much more power at the grassroots level than we do, effecting change up the political food chain.
Ken says: “Xi Jinping puts enormous importance on how the international community treats him. Do they treat him as a legitimate, respectful leader?”
Well, duh. China rescued the global economy from America’s devastating Great Crash of 2008, started the longest market bull-run ever and was catching up with the hegemon, providing western workers with a model of how a society can look when its leaders invest in it instead of committing banditry. It made fortunes for Wall Street, manufactured our stuff and kept it affordable while wealth was being transferred to the richest in tax cuts. And this is how you thank it.
China’s great crime is that it is catching up with the declining superpower by excelling in all the areas America abandoned. But instead of the US redirecting its forces to compete fairly, out comes the dirty tricks, character assassination and MIC.
Obama subsequently went neo-con and “pivoted” to China. Trump doubled-down and started the trade war and other shenanigans. Biden put a propaganda bounty on China’s head, raising it to $1.6 billion which buys a lot of character assassination. And Ken can’t work out why Xi is treated badly after this Yellow Peril monstering.
US China narrative makes no sense
The US killed millions of Muslims through the Patriot Act. China educates and trains. Washington’s lurid Xinjiang narrative has been debunked over and over. By now there would be plenty of evidence if it was true, just as images of Gaza get through. Instead, we see the reverse with plenty of tourist videos showing normal life, Uyghurs participating in Chinese society, owning businesses, in government, in the media, the culture, their script in signage and even on China’s paper currency.
Why would China need to do the things Ken and other hawks claim? China was already winning and developing with pride without a shot being fired.
Forced labour charges were initially made by the Better Cotton Initiative whose chief is also head of Supima, the American cotton industry’s marketing arm – fancy that! China has 1.4 million people – why on earth would they need forced labour? Whereas America’s private prison system has the highest rate of incarceration in the world (2.3m at one point), 40 percent Black, with only a fifth of China’s population. Under the 13th amendment, slavery is legal for criminals.
The US: “Of the 1.2 million people incarcerated in state and federal prisons, nearly 800,000 are prison laborers, most of them by force (ACLU and GHRC 2022).”
The not-so-subtextual China cruelty trope is straight out of Yellow Peril sinophobia and one I’d hoped was dead like the dinosaurs. China successfully got up off its knees and is thriving. The West could have been part of that, as demonstrated in their 2008 bailout. So why is it once more choosing conflict like a Beserker throwback?
This Empire take proliferates in what’s supposed to be the left. Do they really want to usher us into World War III in a hurry? There’s too much lazy establishment narrative to unpack in Chris’s Substack note and the video. I’ll just finish by saying how disappointed I am in Chris who I’d previously admired, thinking he had higher standards of critical inquiry than most. Is he just another Cold War warrior?
Further reading
SHAKEDOWN: A TIMELINE OF AMERICA’S 21ST CENTURY WAR ON CHINA
Page 1: Shakedown Timeline 1997-2010. In the beginning … Hong Kong Handover and WTO entry to Barack Obama’s Pivot-to-Asia
Page 2: Shakedown Timeline 2010-2020. Obama’s Pivot-to-Asia to Donald Trump’s first presidency
Page 3: Shakedown Timeline 2020 to the Present. Covid, Joe Biden’s presidency to Trump’s 2nd term