Our work is cut out for us: “In war, the first causality is truth.” We must think critically and defensively and not take anything attacking China at face value. Our task is to challenge the lies as we organize and work for peace.
Former presidential candidate and current political commentator Dennis Kucinich urged the U.S. public to “get ready for a parceling out of some of the manufactured hate that has been reserved for Russia and President Putin – to hate China and President Xi, and to suffer a fully-manufactured Red Peril.”[1]
Image: Global Times
Get Ready for Election Season: Pivoting of Hate from Russia to China
by Kristin Dooley
Women Against Military Madness Newsletter, Vol. 41, No. 3, Summer 2023
Kucinich predicts that while Washington plans for a hot war with China in 2025, cold war psychology will be used for the 2024 election season, “to scare the bejesus out of even the most pacific U.S. voter.” The U.S. military surrounding China and tension over Taiwan makes it obvious that China is the next target, though it’s a formidable proposition considering that Russia and China, two major nuclear-armed nations, are increasingly allied.
__________________________
This anti-China hate has also turned up in new state laws enacted by red-state politicians including banning the purchase of farmland, digital storage restrictions, and banning the Chinese Communist Party (CPC) “influence” on education in Florida. In Texas, Chinese are banned from owning any land and in Virginia the law bans the sale of farmland to Chinese. [2]
Kristin Dooley is the director of Women Against Military Madness
[1]Kucinich, Dennis. World War III on the Installment Plan. May 4, 2023 Kucinich substack.com For more analysis of the Cold War on China, see: Total Information Warfare. Winter 2020 and Part II: The U.S. War on China: Panda Huggers and Panda Sluggers. Winter 2021 by K.J. Noh. Women Against Military Madness Newsletter. womenagainstmilitarymadness.org
[2]Global Times editorial. Tyranny of Anti-China state bills makes it hard to reverse China-U.S. ties. May9, 2023 tinyurl.com/zpyhn8ec
China, Total Information Warfare: Sinophobia
Our work is cut out for us: “In war, the first causality is truth.” We must think critically and defensively and not take anything attacking China at face value. Our task is to challenge the lies as we organize and work for peace.
ink wash, Southern Song Dynasty, by Che’n Jung (1200-1266)
Part 1 of a 2-part series: Part 2: The U.S. War on China: Panda Huggers and Panda Sluggers“ Vol. 39 No.1, Winter 2021.
The U.S. is already at war against China. It is currently using the many tactics of a multi-domain hybrid war, and, despite the non-interventionist wishes of the American people who want peace, the U.S. is showing signals of escalating rapidly toward direct military confrontation.
While China demonstrates the possibility of multi-polarity, or the sharing of power, the U.S. is committed to unipolarity: its domination of world power at any cost. The current “conflict” is a conflict between unipolarity and multi-polarity, not freedom versus authoritarianism, or capitalism versus market socialism (“communism”).
Despite China’s assurances that it does not want war, hot or cold, that it seeks win-win cooperation and co-existence with all countries, and that it disdains hegemony, the U.S. is continually escalating, provoking, and threatening China, even as it dismantles off-ramps, channels of communication, and global institutions for cooperation and de-escalation.
Biden’s doctrine toward China will likely be a continuation of this noxious arc of history and planning. The think tank advising Biden on foreign policy, the Center for New American Security (CNAS), is a near-rhyming clone to the neocon Project for a New American Century (PNAC). CNAS has grandfathered in most of existing anti-China doctrine, and has mapped out, in obsessive detail, the next steps of a highly destructive and dangerous strategy of confrontation with China. The key way it differs from PNAC is that it will “unite” other countries more skillfully against China, pivot away from Trump’s neo-mercantilism towards a more “globalist” approach, and likely implement some revised version of the Trans Pacific Partnership, the 12-nation economic bloc against China.
Total Information Warfare is a tactic that always precedes, justifies, and enables war. To instigate a shooting war, it is necessary to curtail any rational discussion and build consensus in a population. At this time, we are all being drenched with lies through media manipulation and propaganda to incite people to fear China (Sinophobia) and to hate China irrationally and unconditionally for the purpose of manufacturing consent for war. This is what military strategists call “the firehose of falsehoods.” The stories about so-called “Chinese human rights abuses,” “Chinese concentration camps,” “Chinese-made-and-released Covid,” assertions that “China has harmed us economically,” “China has stolen its way to the top,” “China is oppressing Hong Kong” [sources not in the print version of the WAMM newsletter were added online].[1] It has its roots in, and draws on pre-existing racism against Chinese going back to the 1700s. That’s why it’s important to look at the root of anti-Chinese sentiment in history.
ink wash, Southern Song Dynasty, by Che’n Jung (1200-1266)Culture Shock: The challenge to supremacy
The earliest European travelers were astonished to discover in China a country, in many ways, far more advanced than the West: a rich, diverse, multicultural civilization with sophisticated systems of governance and vibrant cities built with complex systems of planning and management. Above all, they marveled at a harmonious multi-religious, multi-ethnic society, free of sectarian strife, and an inclusive merit-based[2] system of political power that selected the most competent people to govern and rule, regardless of creed, color, background, or religion.[3] This contrasted with the Western system of hereditary aristocratic rule within a society torn apart regularly with religious strife. These ideas of diversity, tolerance, inclusion, and earned—not inherited–privilege, would strongly influence the leaders of the Enlightenment, the European intellectuals of the late 17th and the 18th centuries who believed that humanity could be improved through the use of reason, science, and liberalism. Western philosophers such as Voltaire and Leibniz believed that the Chinese had “perfected moral science” and that Chinese statecraft was the model for the West to emulate, if it wanted to develop into an enlightened civilization.
These discoveries struck a hard blow at Christian and Western supremacy. Western colonization was built on a foundational belief that the West was more advanced, more evolved—closer to God—than the “barbarous” countries it was invading, subjugating, exploiting, and destroying. It needed at least the pretense of being more “advanced” to justify its colonial “civilizing mission.”
German illustration. Part of the Forbidden City, seat of imperial Chinese families and officials from 1420 to 1912. European travelers were astonished to discover the sophistication of China’s civilization.Reactionary thinkers like the German philosopher Herder, who had never visited China—lashed back rapidly by propagating a theory of the depravity of Chinese: that China was an “immoral land with no honor,” an “embalmed mummy” characterized by stagnation, in contrast with Western “dynamism.”
In addition, the Chinese system of meritocratic government was deeply troubling to a West built on stratified class privilege. A civilization without hereditary aristocrats was unfathomable and terrifying to the Western ruling class. The French political philosopher Montesquieu thus concocted the trope that China’s more egalitarian system had to be “despotic”, despotic for him because it threatened the “liberties” (aristocratic privileges) of his class. The German philosopher Hegel chiseled this canard into the Western consciousness with an armchair theory of “Oriental Despotism,” whereby the Chinese had failed to evolve due to inherent characterological flaws in its people and its political culture. Other influential intellectuals postulated similar ideas. These allegations of “despotism”—despite being total distortions of Chinese governance ¾ have infused all Western discourses about China since.
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Enter the bandits
At the same time, “embalmed” Chinese “inferiority” notwithstanding, the West craved the exquisite consumer goods of China — tea, silk, porcelain — and this created huge trade imbalances. The Western response to balance the books was narco-trafficking: smuggling in industrial amounts of opium—at its peak, up to nine million pounds a year. When China objected and opposed this on sovereign and moral grounds and confiscated the drugs, war was declared. Reparations for drug seizures were forced, concessions extracted, and the country plundered, looted, and destroyed. In one show of force to the Chinese, in 1860, the Summer Palace of the Emperor was sacked and burned by Lord Elgin, the British high commissioner to China.
Earliest known photo of the ruins of one of the buildings on the grounds of Emperor’s Old Summer Palace, which was looted and burned by the English and the French in 1860.
Worldhistory/photo.blogspot
Earliest known photo of the ruins of one of the buildings on the grounds of Emperor’s Old Summer Palace, which was looted and burned by the English and the French in 1860.This violence, banditry, and racism, justified by the belief in the subhuman nature of the Chinese, became normalized practice against the Chinese over two centuries, and great American fortunes—Perkins, Astor, Forbes, Cabot, Delano (Roosevelt) ¾ and Ivy league institutions at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia were built on this extraction and narco-trafficking. Hewing to the belief that the Chinese were less than human, drug barons pushed opium that addicted ten percent of the population, which had the effect of essentially incapacitating an entire nation while stealing its wealth. Just as U.S. Southern wealth had been built on the decimation of black bodies through the slave trade, U.S. East Coast wealth was built on the destruction of Chinese bodies through the drug trade, in what historian John K. Fairbank described as “the most long-continued and systematic international crime of modern times.”
Opium ships off the coast of China, painting by 1824 by William John HugginsDehumanization, humiliation, assault, theft, rape, colonization, appropriation—these became the standard Western approach towards China and the Chinese; the Chinese people were “filthy yellow hordes,” an inferior, subhuman race, lacking agency, fit only to be colonized, exploited, enslaved, lynched, erased, and wherever possible, extinguished through race war.
It would continue.
The Yellow Peril and a Chinaman’s Chance
Inside U.S. territory itself, the mythology of the “yellow peril”—originally a German colonial war trope—became pervasive. Horace Greeley, the editor of the New York Tribune, argued that the Chinese were “uncivilized, unclean, and filthy beyond all conception, without any of the higher domestic or social relations; lustful and sensual in their dispositions; every female is a prostitute of the basest order.” Greeley, a progressive, was simply mouthing the platitudes of his day.
Much worse than rhetoric was the routine violence. Chinese immigrant labor was employed during the California gold rush and the building of the transcontinental railroad across the U.S. (1848 to 1869). What followed, prefiguring similar present-day fears, was the idea that the Chinese were stealing jobs, wealth, or threatening America. Thousands of Chinese were massacred, lynched, set on fire, expelled from their communities in the late 19th century.
Starting in 1871, violent mobs attacked Chinese immigrants. A mass lynching in the Los Angeles’s Chinatown that year was followed in 1880 by the Denver Yellow Peril pogrom. On September 3rd, 1885, during the Wyoming Rock Springs massacre, Chinese workers were scalped, mutilated, castrated, dismembered; 50 were murdered, and 78 Chinese homes burned to the ground. This was followed days later by incidents in Washington Territory: the Issaquah Valley attack, the Coal Creek mines attack, and the Black Diamond expulsions. In November of that year, in Tacoma, 200 Chinese were rounded up at gunpoint and forced into boxcars, expelled on trains whose tracks they had built. After their expulsion, the entire Chinatown of Tacoma was razed and burned to the ground.
This string of expulsions and atrocities would continue in 1886: the Seattle Riot expelled 350 Chinese; in 1887, Oregon Hell’s Canyon massacre robbed, mutilated, and murdered 34 Chinese.
At least 150 such attacks against Chinese in U.S. states and territories were recorded.[4] “A Chinaman’s chance” became a common term: To be Chinese was to be subject to sudden death at any time at the whim of white people.
In response, the Chinese hid themselves inside ghettoes where they could. They fled pogroms, arson, and mass lynchings, and kept their heads down, “eating bitter” and trying to stay alive. Where they managed to settle down without being killed, they were subjected to cultural erasure, economic blockade, social isolation, a ban on owning property and businesses, and a proscription on marrying and having children ¾ in short, planned elimination.
U.S.-Chinese Foreign Relations and the Red Scare
In 1885, Chinese laborers were massacred in brutal and sadistic ways at Rock Springs, Wyoming. Harpers Weekly illustration.A minor respite in U.S.-China foreign relations occurred during WWII, when the U.S. allied itself with the Christian-led right-wing Chinese nationalist political party, the Kuomintang (KMT), against the Japanese; it gave a small glimmer of reprieve, as Chinese leaders tried to establish breathing space, and the Japanese took on the role of the “bad Asians.”
The alliance between the U.S. and China lasted until the Chinese communists liberated themselves in 1949 and wrested back their own country. “China has stood up”, Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong declared, igniting jubilation throughout the Third World and sending shockwaves of horror through the colonial West. This arrant act of self-liberation and self-determination—along with the U.S.’s astonishment that the monstrous KMT fascists it had courted and funded had been trounced ¾ unleased a hysterical new wave of Sinophobia within the U.S. during the McCarthy era. High-ranking Congressional committees demanded “Who lost China?”— as if it had been theirs to lose. They purged the State Department of the moderate “China Hands,” who had been sympathetic or were knowledgeable about China and its political institutions. A paroxysm of anti-China and anti-Asian hatred would shiver and fester throughout the Cold War, burning, stoking, and consuming itself through two hot wars —the Korean War and the Vietnam War.
However, during the ’70s, the U.S., battered from the Vietnam War, decided, for pragmatic reasons, to use China to counterbalance against the Soviet Union. Thus began a brief realist honeymoon.
This was not to last. After the fall of the Soviet Union, two decades later, two things became readily apparent: 1) there was no further political need to engage with China, since the primary reason (the threat of the Soviet Union) had gone away, and 2) it was clear, both from history and geography, that, due to its size, capacity, and dynamism, the U.S. would consider China a challenger to the United States itself. Thus the long, unabated, and persistent thread of anti-China hatred, reinvigorated with red-scare-yellow-peril-thinking, came back with a vengeance. Despite continued engagement with China for business during the Clinton years, Sinophobia persisted as an underground current, marshalling tremendous force.
Our work is cut out for us: “In war, the first causality is truth.” We must think critically and defensively and not take anything attacking China at face value. Our task is to challenge the lies as we organize and work for peace.
Comic book from the 1950’s incites readers to “See Captain America (“Commie smasher”) defy the Communist hordes.”K.J. Noh is a journalist, political analyst, educator, and peace activist. A veteran of the Republic of Korea (the South Korean Army or ROK) Army and a member of Veterans For Peace in the U.S., he is special correspondent on Asia for KPFA’s Flashpoints, and does political analysis for Loud & Clear, Critical Hour, and other progressive news shows. He also writes for Dissident Voice, Counterpunch, Black Agenda Report, Popular Resistance, MROnline, and the Asia Times. FFI: peacepivot.org
Next installment in the China series by K.J. Noh: Who controls the levers of U.S. policy and power toward China: the business class (“Panda Huggers”) who want continued engagement with China, the ideologues (“Panda Sluggers”) who see China as a mortal and irreconcilable threat, and the comingling of the two?
ENDNOTES:
1] [ https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/information-operations-june-2020.html; according to The Guardian, “the major themes of the tweets were that Hong Kong protesters were violent, and the U.S. was interfering with the protests; accusations about Guo; the Taiwan election, and praise of China’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic – which turned out to be true. Twitter coordinates with ASPI, a key source of anti-China propaganda.
[2] For example, the German Jesuit missionary Adam Schall was appointed to high bureaucratic office in the court of the Ching Dynasty.
[3] Du Halde, Jean-Baptiste (1741), Brookes, Richard (ed.), The General History of China, 3rd ed., vols. I, II, III, & IV, London: J. Watts. And Du Halde, Jean-Baptiste (1735), Description géographique, historique, chronologique, politique, et physique de l’Empire de la Chine et de la Tartarie Chinoise [A Geographical, Historical, Chronological, Political, and Physical Description of the Empire of China and of Chinese Tartary], vols. I, II, III, & IV, Paris: P.-G. le Mercier.
[4] Pfaelzer, Jean (2007), Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans, Random House.
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The U.S. War on China: Panda Huggers and Panda Sluggers
By K.J. Noh WAMM Newsletter Vol 39, No. 1 Winter 2021
Part 2 of a 2-part series following Part I: “Total Information Warfare: Sinophobia” Vol. 38 No.6, Winter 2020
Both China and the United States are nuclear armed nations. Very dangerous escalation of warfare is occurring now. In fact, the U.S. is already at war against China in multiple ways (multi-domain, hybrid warfare).
U.S. military presence in the Asia Pacific 2020. Map: basenation.us
U.S. military presence in the Asia Pacific 2020. Map: basenation.usPart 2 of a 2-part series following Part I: “Total Information Warfare: Sinophobia” Vol. 38 No.6, Winter 2020
Note: In this article, China refers to the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
Warfare just below the threshold of direct military engagement is being waged on the ground through:
The Hybrid War on China
Economic Warfare: trade sanctions and a tariff war
Technological Warfare: attempted seizure of Chinese companies (TikTok), attacks on China’s international 5G contracts; sanctions on the primary and secondary supply chains of key sectors of Chinese technology – e.g., Huawei’s semiconductor supply chain; attacks on Jack Ma and Ant Finance’s IPO (Initial Public Offering of stocks)[1]
Legal Warfare (“lawfare”): includes over 380 anti-China bills in Congress, and 14 individual and state lawsuits[2] against China for over $30 trillion in “Covid damages”; the long-arm “legal” kidnapping of Huawei’s executive, Meng Wanzhou, by extending U.S. jurisdiction to Canada.[3]
Diplomatic Warfare: includes consulate shutdowns, harassment of diplomats, breaching of diplomatic pouches (containers for official documents) and compounds, and calls for regime change and quasi-official recognition of Taiwan.[4]
Military Brinkmanship: and posturing in the South China Sea, the East China Sea, the Taiwan Strait; complete encirclement of China with strategic weapons, surveillance, and 400 offensive bases (“The Pacific Pivot” – known under Obama as “Rebalancing”), the use of airbases in Taiwan for military surveillance, and (proposed) stationing of intermediate range nuclear missiles all along China’s periphery.[5]
Civil Subversion and Color Revolution: color revolution,[6] urban terror, destabilization and de-legitimation operations in Hong Kong[7] (and other places where China has interests), including millions of dollars funneled for organization and training, and encrypted communications infrastructure built to coordinate anti-government activities, support of Uighur separatists, and the delisting of the UN-designated Uighur terrorist movement ETIM (East Turkestan Independence Movement) from U.S. official terror list.
Academic Warfare: through the FBI’s China Initiative, every 10 hours a case is opened against a Chinese student or researcher in the U.S. (last summer: 2,700 cases) and all Chinese students are considered potential “non-traditional,” “collectors,” “spies” involved in a “thousand grains of sand” collection strategy.[8]
Information Warfare: last but not least, we are seeing total information warfare
stories about so-called “massive human rights abuses,” “Chinese concentration camps,” “Chinese-made-and-released Covid,” “China has harmed us economically,” “China has stolen its way to the top,” “China is oppressing independent Hong Kong” are part of this information warfare.[9] This information warfare against China has damaged us by creating a blind spot regarding Covid. First, it prevented us from taking the virus seriously (“this is a uniquely Chinese virus caused by their own political system, a Chinese Chernobyl,” “China is the sick man of Asia”), then in taking useful measures (“quarantines are authoritarian abuse”), and receiving Chinese assistance with testing and treatment.[10]
Unless we do something about it, President Biden’s doctrine toward China will likely be a continuation of the noxious U.S. arc of history, ideology, and planning. The think tank advising Biden on foreign policy, the Center for New American Security (CNAS), a rhyming clone to the neocon plan, Project for the New American Center (PNAC), has assumed most of the prior anti-China doctrine and mapped out a highly destructive and dangerous strategy of confrontation.
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The architect of the “Pivot to Asia” and the co-founder of CNAS, Kurt Campbell will have a key position in the administration handling U.S. relations with China. The key difference is that CNAS will attempt to “unite” countries more skillfully against China, reduce some of Trump’s protectionist policies, and likely restart the Trans Pacific Partnership, the 12-nation economic bloc against China.
The U.S. is mocked for an exaggerated fear of China while it pokes the bear. Cartoon: Craig Stephens/South China Morning PostLevers of Power: Panda Huggers and Panda Sluggers
To understand future possibilities, it’s a good idea to see how we as a nation arrived at this point.
Those hard-liners agitating for war against China referred to themselves as “Panda Sluggers.” But the U.S. government also facilitated the U.S. business class, “Panda Huggers,” who wanted engagement with China. These two threads of U.S.-China policy have developed in the last several decades, sometimes at odds with one another and sometimes complimenting one another.
To see how U.S. relations arrived where they are with China today, we have to trace the threads back to the decade of the 1970s, when splitting the communist bloc by engagement with China was seen as a way to diminish the USSR, which was perceived as a competing superpower.
In 1989, the Cold War began to thaw and the Berlin Wall fell; American political theorist Francis Fukuyama would postulate that it was “the end of history” and a new era was born, as “an unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism.” This triumphalism was reinforced by the fall of the Soviet Union. The ruling class believed that neoliberalism was destined to dominate – meaning that the nations of the world would eventually become capitalist and incorporate into a U.S.-led global system with free markets, limited regulation, and the privatization of public sectors – or else they would collapse like the USSR. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher claimed that “there is no alternative” in a phrase that became so much a part of the vernacular, that it was known by the acronym, TINA.
With changes occurring in the world, powerful people in the West believed that they knew what had to take place inside China, and generally fell into these sometimes overlapping groups:
Collapsists believed that China was a Potemkin state, a deck of cards, that would collapse as a state from its internal contradictions: corruption, economic inefficiencies in planning, and demographic factors.
Assimilationists/integrationists hubristically believed that engagement with China would result in China’s liberalization and total transformation – the inevitable result of engaging with a “superior” Western political ideology and economic system. Its people would become enthralled with economic freedom, “one of democracy’s most cherished values,” as President Bill Clinton saw it while recommending that China be admitted into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in the year 2000.[11] “Liberty will spread by cell phone and phone modem,” Clinton proclaimed, and resisting the liberalizing power of the internet would be, he said, “like nailing jello to the wall.”[12]
Opportunists/exploiters in the U.S. business class saw China as a high-profit global workshop and factory floor for their companies – a source of cheap labor and outsourced production.
In spite of these laissez-faire predictions about China internally, U.S. engagement of any kind was up against aggressive plans that had been percolating for years within the U.S. These would take concrete shape when it became clear, in the 2007 financial crash that China was not likely to collapse or assimilate anytime soon. In fact, it was clear that it was the U.S.-led capitalist order that was in danger of collapsing, whereas China was powerful and resilient.
The Pentagon’s Oracle of China Policy and the Graduates of St. Andrew’s Prep School
If there is one person most responsible for the hawkish strategy in U.S.-China relations for the past several decades, it’s Andrew Marshall, who died at the age of 97 in 2019. Often referred to as “Yoda,” he was the Pentagon’s oracle, directing its secretive internal think tank, the Office of Net Assessment, for 42 years, and was top advisor to twelve Secretaries of Defense. Marshall was originally part of an elite group (Herman “Dr. Strangelove” Kahn, James Schlesinger, Daniel Ellsberg, and Albert Wohlstetter) at the powerful think tank RAND, who worked on military gaming theory and modeling, including the unthinkable and the insane: how to win at nuclear Armageddon.
Throughout his long tenure at the inner sanctum, Andrew Marshall had two key obsessions: U.S. military supremacy, first over the Soviet Union; then, after the fall of the USSR, over China, which meant preventing China’s rise as a power in the world.
Pulp fiction character Flash Gordon, a polo player and Yale graduate, who became a “freedom fighter” against antagonist Ming, the Merciless, imperial ruler of an alien planet.Marshall mentored many into his world view and strategies who would become neocon heavyweights. Graduates of what was known as “St. Andrew’s Prep School” were: Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Elliot Cohen, Andrew Krepinevich, Michael Pillsbury, Herman Kahn, Richard Perle, Richard Armitage, Michael O’Hanlon, as well as countless others.
As the Soviet Union dissolved, the U.S. hawks began to lay out their plans. In 1992, a group of Marshall’s top protégés (Zalmay Khalilzad, Lewis Libby, Paul Wolfowitz) drew up the Defense Planning Guidance document, an ambitious and aggressive plan for U.S. unipolar hegemony, positioning the U.S., alone, as the dominant global power, unrestricted by any sense of proportion, rationality, or morality. The plan asserted the right to wage pre-emptive, aggressive war using U.S. power without regard to international law.
This plan was leaked, and an embarrassed Pentagon disavowed and redacted the document, but it was reworked into the “Project for a New American Century (PNAC): Rebuilding America’s Defenses.” [13] This document became the foundation for the Bush Doctrine and its aggressive, illegal wars in the Middle East. It also laid out specific plans “to cope with the rise of China to great-power status.”
Among Marshall’s protégés, some will most be remembered for their roles in PNAC, the doctrine of preemptive war, and post-9/11 attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, but some of them also had a strong influence on U.S.-China policy.
Andrew Krepinevich was the brain behind the current China war doctrine, “AirSea Battle,” a strategy for taking war to the Chinese: decapitating strikes deep into Chinese territory, invoking Marshall’s “revolution in military affairs,” while strangling it by choking off its trade routes. AirLand Battle was the war doctrine against the Soviet Union during the Cold War. In line with the AirSea Battle, in 2011, the Obama administration announced the “Pivot to Asia,” which in practical terms is a comprehensive plan to encircle and contain China with U.S. bases, offensive weapons, and alliances.
Another of Marshall’s mentees, Michael Pillsbury, assisted in the creation of the regime-change NGO known as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the arming of Mujahideen in Afghanistan, the implementation of the genocidal covert subversion program in Latin America (the Reagan Doctrine), but most importantly, he is credited with initiating, in 1973, the “China card,” the idea that the U.S. could use China as a balance of power against the USSR. He eventually became a key hawk in the Trump administration. In 2015, he published a book with the help of Marshall, called The Hundred Year Marathon,[14] foreshadowing the massive threat inflation and anti-Chinese scare-mongering that is common currency now. In 2019, the Trump administration withdrew from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF). This was widely understood as simply the continuation and implementation of the vision of Marshall.
As the original U.S. reason for allying with Beijing – to counterbalance Moscow – became moot, another group of China-bashers, those who still had old axes to grind, began to crawl out of the cracks. These were red-baiting ideologues with unresolved Cold War paranoia left over from the 1950s. The business class (“Panda Huggers”) wanted to continue engagement with China, but ideologues (“Panda Sluggers”) saw China as a mortal and irreconcilable threat.
Shanghai, China’s financial center. Photo: Wikimedia CommonsBlue Team Unleashed
During President Bill Clinton’s administration, anti-communist ideologues cross-pollinated with Marshall’s neocon followers – a rogues’ gallery of high-powered political operators: Michael Ledeen, Frank Gaffney, Robert Kagan, Bill Kristol, and Michael Pillsbury, who brought their neocon dreams of global domination into loose coalition, came together and used the influential right-wing and neocon newspapers, The Washington Times and The Weekly Standard, as their platforms. Although the “Blue Team” had no official offices, no official members, no overt policy statements, they included key Congress members/staff of both parties (Tom DeLay, Nancy Pelosi, and Robert Byrd among them), think tankers, journalists, and lobbyists.[15]
Blue Team propagandists, former CIA analyst William C. Triplett with Edward Timperlake, a national security analyst, went on to write a lurid series of conspiracy books alleging quid-pro-quo between the Clinton administration and China: Year of the Rat (published in 1998) and Red Dragon Rising (published in 1999).[16] They alleged Taiwanese lobbyists with Chinese mafia connections were acting as agents for the PRC government and manipulating the White House. They also alleged Chinese theft of military secrets, slave labor, and the proliferation of WMD to Iran and other rogue states, and insinuated that Clinton’s “constructive engagement” was knowingly undermining the U.S. for the benefit of the Chinese. These allegations became an underlying mythology about a dangerous, corrupt, and belligerent China.
The most virulent of China sluggers was Frank Gaffney, who was so hawkish he had been forced out of the Defense Department in the Reagan administration. In 2019, he recycled an old paranoid Cold War group into the current “Committee on the Present Danger: China,” contending that “there is no hope of coexistence with China.” Though he built a reputation as an outlier extremist, Gaffney’s ideology and guiding principles[17] approximate official positions on China which guide key U.S. foreign policy toward China today and now control the levers of power in both parties, setting the groundwork for war against China.
The Blue Team built powerful commissions and institutions focused on attacking China, including the Congressional Executive Commission on China,[18] the US-China Security Review Commission.[19] The Taiwan Security Enhancement Act was also written at this time.
[WAMM Newsletter Editor8al Note: The Taiwan Security Enhancement Act was never passed by Congress, but as a parting gift to the Biden administration, on January 9, 2021, Secretary of State Pompeo made its intention official by dropping limitations on U.S involvement with the island, which China considers its own. Also in 2020: “Blue Team” Nancy Pelosi hosted Hong Kong overthrow dissidents and Ted Cruz joined them in Hong Kong riots.] [20]
K.J. Noh is a special correspondent on Asia for KPFA Radio’s Flashpoints, and a political analysis for Loud & Clear, and other news programs. His writing can be seen at Asia Times, Counterpunch, Black Agenda Report, and other publications. A veteran of the ROK Army, he is a member of Veterans for Peace.
Featured Image of Panda and Eagle: Illustration by Liu Rui/GT
ENDNOTES
[1] Wray, Christopher. DOJ Conference (2020, February 6). Confronting the China Threat. FBI News. tinyurl.com/y5gzh23
[2] Minski, S., & Anderson, S. (2021, January 22). What’s in the Many Coronavirus-Related Lawsuits Against China? Lawfare. tinyurl.com/yajxrqom
[3] Reporter, G. S. (2020, October 30). Meng Wanzhou lawyers accuse US of “cherry-picking” evidence for extradition. The Guardian. tinyurl.com/y6mpalwg
[4] U.S. Department of State. (2021, January 19). Determination of the Secretary of State on Atrocities in Xinjiang. tinyurl.com/y3vfzd6e
[5] Baldor, L. C. (2019, August 4). Esper U.S. to Soon Put Intermediate Range Missile in Asia. Associated Press/Military Times tinyurl.com/yybweq4c
[6] Ruggeri, L. (2020, September 30). Agents of Chaos. How the U.S. Seeded a Colour Revolution in Hong Kong. Qiao Collective. tinyurl.com/y3ddajnj
[7] Hong Kong News. (2021, January 29). Washington finally admits it has been interfering in Hong Kong. tinyurl.com/y6jdaxqq
[8] Feng, E. (2019, June 28). FBI Urges Universities to Monitor Some Chinese Students and Scholars in the U.S. NPR News All Things Considered. tinyurl.com/yxpge92n
[9] Nor, K. J. Total Information Warfare: Sinophobia. Women Against Military Madness Newsletter vol. 38 no. 6 Winter 2020, pp. 6-9, womenagainstmilitarymadness.org
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[12]Reporter. (2000, March 9). Clinton’s Words on China: Trade Is the Smart Thing. New York Times. tinyurl.com/y38wq7ow
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[15] Rushford, G., (2002, August 8). In Search of an Enemy. The Rushford Report. tinyurl.com/y3dsozv
[16] Triplett, W. C., & Timperlake, E. (1998, 1999). tinyurl.com/4u4998o7
[17] Committee on Present Danger China. (2021, January 27). Guiding Principles. tinyurl.com/yyzjtthj
[18] Congressional Executive Commission on China. cecc.gov/
[19] U.S. China Economic and Security Review Commission. uscc.gov/
[20] Tiezzi, S. (2021, January 12). US Secretary of State Pompeo Lifts Restrictions on Exchanges With Taiwan. The Diplomat. tinyurl.com/yydjac76; Beaudoin, M. The Nature of the Hong Kong Protests (2019, November 26). Consortium News. tinyurl.com/y4h33dk8
Both China and the United States are nuclear armed nations. Very dangerous escalation of warfare is occurring now. In fact, the U.S. is already at war against China in multiple ways (multi-domain, hybrid warfare)
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https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/imo/media/doc/PSI%20Report%20China's%20Impact%20on%20the%20US%20Education%20System.pdf
What about Confucius classrooms and institutes in America? Is this another example of American total information warfare, K.J. Noh?