It’s remarkable how much of the propaganda that America creates about China feels like projection. The United States, which frequently censors dissenting voices, persecutes Muslims and other disfavored ethnic groups, is controlled by an oligarchic corporate regime that keeps half of its own people in poverty, and perpetuates the largest empire in history, is accusing China of all the atrocities that it’s committed itself.
This “accuse your enemy of that which you are guilty” strategy is useful for America’s goal with China, which is to destroy a power that’s threatening to ruin its quest for imperial hegemony. Communist China has been an obstacle to the American empire right from the start, with China having fought on the side of the DPRK amid America’s genocidal invasion of Korea. It’s now continuing its role as a bulwark against imperialism by working to protect Venezuela from a potential invasion, by backing Syria in its fight against U.S.-backed terrorists, and by remaining loyal to north Korea as the capitalist world wages war against the DPRK. So as China continues to move towards becoming the world’s dominant economic and military power, America has every reason to sabotage China.
The propaganda aspect of this sabotage effort, ironically, depends on painting China as the exact kind of imperialist menace that the U.S. is. I debunked many of the lies that make up this false image of China in one of my articles from last month, but that essay requires a second volume. Here I’ll cover the fraudulence of the major concepts about China that are instilled into Westerners.
by Rainer Shea
Big lie #2: “China is totalitarian”
The degree of social repression that China’s government carries out has been slanderously and hyperbolically exaggerated by Western imperialist narratives. These narratives have been deeply ingrained into the American psyche over the course of the last generation, which is the era in which we’ve often heard about the so-called Tiananmen Square Massacre.
The hoax surrounding the events in Tiananmen Square started with a series of false accounts of what happened when the Chinese government cleared the square of the “pro-democracy” protesters on June 4, 1989. According to China, about 300 had died in clashes, many of whom were part of the People’s Liberation Army. By the most well documented accounts, these altercations were instigated when the protesters set fire to unarmed soldiers and lynched them with their corpses hung on nooses. But according to sources from the Western media which were less reliable to say the least, the soldiers were actually the ones who’d carried out the mass slaughter.
The hoax surrounding the events in Tiananmen Square started with a series of false accounts of what happened when the Chinese government cleared the square of the “pro-democracy” protesters on June 4, 1989. According to China, about 300 had died in clashes, many of whom were part of the People’s Liberation Army. By the most well documented accounts, these altercations were instigated when the protesters set fire to unarmed soldiers and lynched them with their corpses hung on nooses. But according to sources from the Western media which were less reliable to say the least, the soldiers were actually the ones who’d carried out the mass slaughter.
The New York Times, in a prelude to its famous fraudulent story about WMDs in Iraq, said that “thousands” of protesters had been killed in Tiananmen Square. The casualty figures claimed throughout the U.S. media ranged from 2,600 to 8,000 to “tens of thousands,” but these ridiculous inconsistencies in the lies that Americans were being told didn’t shatter the emotionally powerful new Western perception that an oppressive government had brutally slaughtered its people for wanting freedom. To help buttress this fragile lie that they were trying to sell, America’s anti-Chinese propagandists presented additional outrageous accounts of what had taken place; eight days after the confrontation in the square, the New York Times published an “eyewitness” report about Tiananmen from the student Wen Wei Po which was so clearly fabricated that the Times’ correspondent in Beijing Nicholas Kristof took exception to the main points in the article.
Predictably, the incident that these fabricated reports were based off of was instigated by American destabilization efforts within China, with the U.S. having been actively involved in efforts to promote the “pro-democracy” protests through a well-funded propaganda machine within China. The strategic disinformation which was put out by the U.S.-backed radio station Voice of America (which falsely claimed that some PLA members were firing against others and that China’s Prime Minister Li Peng had been shot) greatly contributed to the unrest of that time and therefore to the horrific anti-PLA violence that ensued.
All of this makes it no surprise that cables released by WikiLeaks have since shown that no bloodshed among protesters took place when China put down the protests in Tiananmen Square.
All of this makes it no surprise that cables released by WikiLeaks have since shown that no bloodshed among protesters took place when China put down the protests in Tiananmen Square.
A similar incident of U.S.-manufactured outrage against China has been carried out in this past month, conveniently coinciding with the anti-Chinese media propaganda blitz that’s accompanied the thirty year anniversary of the fictitious “Tiananmen Square Massacre.” This latest spectacle has come in the form of the recent Hong Kong protests, which have been heavily covered throughout the American media with the same theme about how the Chinese people are simply standing up for “democracy.” But as China Daily’s Ian Goodrum has assessed in an interview with MintPress News, the extradition law that the protests are centered around doesn’t justify such characterizations:
It’s unfortunate there’s been all this hullabaloo over what is a fairly routine and reasonable adjustment to the law. As the law reads right now, there’s no legal way to prevent criminals in other parts of China from escaping charges by fleeing to Hong Kong. It would be like Louisiana — which, you’ll remember, has a unique justice system — refusing to send fugitives to Texas or California for crimes committed in those states.
Honestly, this is something that should have been part of the agreement made in advance of the 1997 handover. Back then bad actors used irrational fear of the mainland to kick the can down the road and we’re seeing the consequences today.
Honestly, this is something that should have been part of the agreement made in advance of the 1997 handover. Back then bad actors used irrational fear of the mainland to kick the can down the road and we’re seeing the consequences today.
So why have these protests happened? Well we know that the American NGO-industrial complex has been doing all it can to help the protesters and spread their anti-China narratives, and that most of the protesters are emphatically supportive of British colonialism despite its brutally repressive and undemocratic nature in comparison to that of the Chinese authorities (elections in Hong Kong didn’t even exist until 1986). And since most of Hong Kong’s population stands on the side of the People’s Republic of China and its just policy to combat sex tourism and unlawful asylum-seeking in Hong Kong, the imperialist agenda behind these protests is extremely apparent. As MintPress News’ Alex Rubinstein has observed, “Something about the Hong Kong protests’ messaging seems tailor-made for Western audiences. Most signs [from the protests] I am seeing also happen to be in English.”
These kinds of artificially created street dramas are a standard American regime change agitation tactic, paralleled by this year’s right-wing anti-Maduro demonstrations in Venezuela. And they reflect upon the deeply suspicious, U.S.-tainted undercurrents behind all of the other stories we hear about China’s supposed totalitarianism.
Another fishy media narrative about China is the one which involves Ai Weiwei. No doubt Weiwei has been mistreated by Chinese authorities, such as when he was beaten by Chinese police in 2009. But the facts surrounding his legal case have been presented with consistent bias among Western media outlets, and the “humanitarian” U.S. regime change network has done everything possible to exploit Weiwei to further its agenda.
Another fishy media narrative about China is the one which involves Ai Weiwei. No doubt Weiwei has been mistreated by Chinese authorities, such as when he was beaten by Chinese police in 2009. But the facts surrounding his legal case have been presented with consistent bias among Western media outlets, and the “humanitarian” U.S. regime change network has done everything possible to exploit Weiwei to further its agenda.
When Weiwei was arrested in 2011 on charges of tax fraud, the Western media reflexively condemned China and claimed that Weiwei’s detention was motivated by his political views. As China Daily’s Mo Nong has written, this display from the media was the symptom of an “ideological bias” which Western reporters look to China through. “Ideological confrontation is the default mode for some Westerners and Western media when it comes to issues of human rights,” lamented Nong in a 2011 column. “For these people, it has become an intuitive reaction to point their fingers at China when anyone they consider a dissident is detained or arrested on legal grounds…With such a mentality, they consider anyone who criticizes the political system of China and the Chinese authorities as they do, heroes or heroines, regardless of what these people have done, or how they behave, or what effect their activities will have on the future of this country and its people."
Weiwei has since been characterized by the American media as an innocent victim of political repression, and has been aided by organizations which seek to manufacture consent for America’s destabilization efforts in China. In 2016, Weiwei spoke at a New York City event for the Council on Foreign Relations, a notoriously pro-imperialist Washington think tank. Weiwei has also collaborated with Amnesty International, a group that’s deliberately misled Americans about Syria, Venezuela, and other Washington regime change target countries. And in 2013, Weiwei received the Human Rights Foundation’s Vaclav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent-an award that the HRF has also been politically biased enough to give to Park Sang-hak, a man who’s been known to plan violent protests against the DPRK and collaborate with American intelligence.
You only need to look a little bit beneath the surface to see how frequently the anti-China stories we see in our media are connected to the American regime change complex. And in addition to this propaganda network’s role in the narratives I’ve mentioned so far, it regularly makes up outrageous atrocity stories to influence public opinion about China.
In my last China article, I detailed how the Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders has used the money it receives from Western governments to spread baseless claims which reinforce the completely fabricated narrative that China is holding millions of Muslims in concentration camps. I’ve since learned that another Chinese opposition group, called “China Tribunal,” has propagated similarly suspect claims about the Chinese government harvesting organs from prisoners. Even as they’ve released their “Final Judgement & Report” about this allegation, they apparently haven’t even been able to publish the “full report” on their findings, which supposedly contains all of the evidence they need to support their assertions. And buried deep in their report was this telling paragraph:
Representatives of both the Transplantation Society and the World Health Organisation (WHO) have spoken out on behalf of recent changes in human transplant systems in the PRC, particularly the development of COTRS (see above) and the voluntary donor scheme. They argue that changes are being made and external criticism is not warranted. They have supported a transition for the sourcing of organs from death-row prisoners and suggested that executed prisoners are no longer used.
All of these charges against China, along with the misleadingly presented Western portrayals of China’s “Orwellian” social credit system, make up the main arguments for why China is “totalitarian.” The purpose of these hoaxes is to give basis to an extremely dark and sinister view of China’s government which isn’t supported by the facts.
Despite instances of Chinese police brutality-like the one that Weiwei has experienced-the Chinese government is overall far more tolerant of dissent than the U.S. government is. Unlike is the case in America, political social media posts in China aren’t especially likely to be censored. And as Nong’s column also stated, China doesn’t take political prisoners like the U.S. does: “Ai’s political discrepancy with the Chinese government is one thing; his alleged involvement in illegal economic activities is another. China has established its socialist legal system after decades of progress. Everybody, including Ai, is equal in the eye of the Chinese law.”
In my last China article, I detailed how the Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders has used the money it receives from Western governments to spread baseless claims which reinforce the completely fabricated narrative that China is holding millions of Muslims in concentration camps. I’ve since learned that another Chinese opposition group, called “China Tribunal,” has propagated similarly suspect claims about the Chinese government harvesting organs from prisoners. Even as they’ve released their “Final Judgement & Report” about this allegation, they apparently haven’t even been able to publish the “full report” on their findings, which supposedly contains all of the evidence they need to support their assertions. And buried deep in their report was this telling paragraph:
Representatives of both the Transplantation Society and the World Health Organisation (WHO) have spoken out on behalf of recent changes in human transplant systems in the PRC, particularly the development of COTRS (see above) and the voluntary donor scheme. They argue that changes are being made and external criticism is not warranted. They have supported a transition for the sourcing of organs from death-row prisoners and suggested that executed prisoners are no longer used.
All of these charges against China, along with the misleadingly presented Western portrayals of China’s “Orwellian” social credit system, make up the main arguments for why China is “totalitarian.” The purpose of these hoaxes is to give basis to an extremely dark and sinister view of China’s government which isn’t supported by the facts.
Despite instances of Chinese police brutality-like the one that Weiwei has experienced-the Chinese government is overall far more tolerant of dissent than the U.S. government is. Unlike is the case in America, political social media posts in China aren’t especially likely to be censored. And as Nong’s column also stated, China doesn’t take political prisoners like the U.S. does: “Ai’s political discrepancy with the Chinese government is one thing; his alleged involvement in illegal economic activities is another. China has established its socialist legal system after decades of progress. Everybody, including Ai, is equal in the eye of the Chinese law.”
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