Reprising Is China a Threat?

The answer is still No.

A reader of last week’s post (“Who’s afraid of big bad China?”) asked:

… are you favouring China - with its 700 000 000 security cameras - I don't think you would last more than a few hours before being sent to be re-educated with your outspoken views on various matters!

For better or for worse, the critical attitude extends across the board: I do not favour any government or political entity. However, after a lifetime of propaganda, people are often shocked to hear that something they simply accept as true probably isn’t. For example, I said last week that China is not a military threat to the US, or to Australia, or to anybody else. It has one overseas military base, established in Djibouti a few years ago as part of the UN anti-piracy program in the Red Sea. The US has at least 850 overseas military bases, plus it sails its mobile bases, its massive, nuclear-armed carrier task forces, in every ocean. On that basis, which country is more capable of mounting military threats against foreign countries? Which country has the record of invading other countries? And which country regularly undertakes “regime change” for governments it doesn’t like? Or taking territory that it does like?

The problem of propaganda is the old one: “Fish don’t know they live in water.” People raised in a sea of propaganda don’t recognise it for what it is. The message never varies, it all seems normal. We just believe what we’re told, especially if we hear it over and over in a myriad forms from all possible authorities. Eventually, it becomes part of the wallpaper of our lives. For people who have been raised on the Yellow Peril or the Red Peril (or both), hearing that their duly-appointed enemy is not a risk comes as a shock, to the extent that it sounds like the speaker is taking sides with the enemy. As for future risks, we can only go on the past. Has China ever been a risk to foreigners? Practically never. Apart from the Korean War when, after being warned not to cross the Yalu River, American forces threatened to do just that and China retaliated (successfully), small numbers of Chinese troops have spent just three weeks outside their borders since 1949. That’s it (China never relinquished its historical claim on Tibet even though by rights, it should be independent).

Most people in the West don’t know that. From what they’re told, they believe we’re in serious danger of attack by China, as the recent confected panic over PLA ships in the Tasman Sea shows. After giving notice, three Chinese ships briefly crossed the Australian exclusive economic zone (EEZ). This was reported as “Chinese navy in Australian waters.” That’s false. The EEZ reaches 200nm from shore (340km) while territorial waters extend to 18km. As everybody involved knew perfectly well, the Chinese ships were wholly within their rights to sail through the EEZ. After due warning, they conducted live firing drills, which all navies do, but this was reported as “China Defiant After Wargames Near Australia With Nuclear-Capable Warship.” This is sensationalist drivel. There were no war games. War games are like when the Australian navy recently joined half a dozen others in the South China Sea and buzzed around, planes going here and there, making mock attacks on each other. The Chinese ships were reported as “aggressive,” which they weren’t, and “nuclear-capable,” even though all modern warships (and the entire Chinese navy is modern) are “nuclear-capable” (whatever that means). That’s about as helpful as saying they were capable of floating. And as for the unspeakable cheek of those slippery Chinese for being “defiant,” how dare they? Who do they think they are, white men? In fact, they simply pointed out the relevant bits of international law, which the Australian gutter press knew and had chosen to ignore so they could spin their propaganda. And that’s the whole point of propaganda: it doesn’t work if your targets ever get to hear the truth. Flood the airwaves, drown the truth or, as the mega-unlovely Steve Bannon says, “Flood the zone with shit.”

However, that sort of juvenile scare-tripe is just your standard, bread and butter propaganda that pours out 24/7 from the loudspeakers in your home. For the heavy duty stuff, you had to follow a “think tank” in Canberra called Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI). They had a group of staff dedicated to beating up the many and varied “plots” by the Chinese to bring us to our knees. For example, a year ago, several major Australian newspapers ran a coordinated scare campaign titled “Red Alert,” even drenching their front pages in red ink (paywall; also here). All of that material came straight from ASPI, and they got it verbatim from their sponsors. However, due to Herr Trump’s recent defenestration of USAID, ASPI have suddenly stopped warning us to check for Reds Under Our Beds. Seems they were being paid by USAID to broadcast this stuff and when the money dried up, so did the existential risk. Not even the money they get from companies such as Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, huge American weapons manufacturers, was enough to buy their loyalty. Who could have guessed?

Given this sort of wall-to-wall frog shit “reporting,” it’s no wonder a lot of ordinary people start to think China is a threat. That means anybody who doesn’t fall for it is going to look “pro-China” by comparison. However, with the Narcisso-Fascism posts, we’re not just examining today’s chaotic world critically, as there are lots of very capable people who do that. Instead, we’re looking at events from the particular point of view that a very large part of human behaviour is driven by an urge to lift ourselves above our fellows. We are social animals, with the emphasis on animals, and we therefore have lots of animalian inclinations. For example, we are curious creatures and like to explore and explain things as chaos frightens us. We like to play and laugh together; we like beautiful things and enjoy decorating ourselves; but most of all, we love to dominate our surroundings, both the human and the physical. This means that equality is not innate. It doesn’t come natural to us because that’s not how we’re built.

The urge to dominate is an immensely powerful, far-reaching and universal drive with a clearly-defined basis in biology. It is so deeply ingrained that we hardly even know it’s there, which also means we hardly try to control it. The other side of the domination coin is, of course, an equal and opposite drive to resist being dominated, to fight even to the death to prevent somebody forcing us to submit to their will. This is the paradox of hierarchy. From infancy, we are taught in ten million ways: “You have to win, you show ‘em, but don’t let anybody push you around. Stand up for your rights, you tell ‘em.”

Look wherever you like in the world today, you will see people trying to dominate their neighbours and the neighbours resisting. It doesn’t matter where you look – sports fields, card games, politics, religion, finance, industry, entertainment, cooking shows, debating clubs, everything – the name of the game is domination. Two examples in the last week show this. Trump, like all American businessmen and politicians, wants to dominate everything that he thinks counts (he doesn’t count music, art, cooking and so on). However, he sees domination in terms of money. If he can’t get money out of the suckers, sorry, clients, say they’re broke, he immediately loses interest and looks somewhere else. Loyalty, honour, devotion, all that shit mean nothing to him. So he looked at the balance sheet for the disastrous war in Ukraine and realised, hey, we’re losing. Those slimy Slavs are screwing us, don’t they know the rules of the game? We screw, they get screwed.

At this point, some clown who hadn’t read the US Geological Survey told him Ukraine has $15trillion worth of minerals buried in its rich black soil (which is actually worth more than what’s under them) so he ordered them to hand over half of it. The Ukrainians rightly said No so he dumped them. Cut off military aid, withdrew the “intelligence assistance” and wandered off to see who else he could screw. The only difference is that because of his dementia, this is all being done in the open for the entire world to see. Anybody who thinks the US has ever been different is a fool, as Kissinger gloated: “To be America’s enemy is dangerous, but to be America’s friend is fatal.” He was laughing when he said it but he wasn’t joking. It was the exultant laugh of a psychopathic bully who knows he’s untouchable.

Part of Trump’s stage routine is to rail against immigrants, not the nice ones from northern Europe but the brown and black ones from everywhere else who do the dirty work as they’re all rapists and drug dealers. So it was surprising that two drug-dealing rapists were released from pre-trial custody in Rumania and flown by private jet to Florida. The brothers Tate have joint UK and US citizenship, so they had the right to enter but they were released only by direct intervention of the US government. These two, particularly Andrew, the elder, are truly appalling human beings but they show something important: their widespread appeal, especially to insecure young men, is that they broadcast in purest form the joy and delight that comes from smashing other people (see 6.15 in that video but be warned, it’s gross; also see how Trump’s half-witted lawyer, the well-rewarded Alina Habba, fawns over them at 5.25). In their case, it’s women they smash but it could be Muslims or Jews or Africans or Chinese or fags or the poor or even the aristocracy, it doesn’t matter. What counts is their obvious delight in knocking other people to the ground and kicking them.

The crucial point here is this: their brutal pleasure is not mental disorder. It is universal and normal in that we all have exactly the same biology as the unspeakable Andrew Tate [1]. It’s nowhere near as strong in women but it’s still there – in case you hadn’t noticed, women are also quite seriously hierarchical. Purely as a question of biology, each of us is no different than Donald “grab ‘em by the pussy” Trump, no different than Heinrich “burn the Jews” Himmler, or Joseph “destroy the kulaks” Stalin, or football hooligans rampaging after the match, or William “crush the Cubans” McKinley, or Winston “let the Bengalis starve” Churchill, or Benjamin “totally destroy the Amalekites” Netanyahu, or Richard “bomb North Vietnam back to the stone age” Nixon… you get the message.

What counts is not the urge, but how we handle it, and that goes back to childhood. We have to be trained to control the urge to take more than our share, trained not to yell at smaller children or to gang up and push the little ones around. We have to learn to follow the rules at football, that winning isn’t everything and losing isn’t the end of the world. We have to learn not to cheat at board games (or golf, Donald), learn how to thank grannies for yet another boring present, how to wait in line at the canteen, all this boring stuff, just so we can make the world work together. But some people never learn it, we call them psychopaths, and some people seem to learn it but are cheating underneath. We call them politicians.

Without cooperation, there is only chaos. Wherever we look today, there is only chaos, and it’s getting worse by the hour. Regardless of whatever justification is offered, the central element in all cases is the same: the unwavering determination to be Number One, to smash the opposition into the ground and then stand astride them gloating. Or, in the case of women, rape them, the ultimate humiliation. Forget the high-sounding talk, forget the religions and political systems, that’s just window dressing: it all goes back to the drive to dominate. If we don’t quickly bring this under control, the human race doesn’t have a future.

So is China a threat? One of the most basic features of all political and religious propaganda is demonising The Other. We are brainwashed to strip their humanity until we see them as monsters, then we can attack them without guilt. We have to convert our neighbours (and we are all neighbours now) into robots with a human form but with no humanity, then we feel justified in crushing them. We’ve got to be carefully taught, to hate all the people our relatives hate *, to stop seeing them as humans with a legitimate point of view, different from ours but equally justified, before we can shove them into gas chambers or drop 2000lb bombs on terrified children crammed into a school for safety (Anne Lamott: “You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do”).

Is China a threat? Are Palestinians a threat? Russia? Only to the paranoid fantasists who have taken control of our governments and are hurling us toward Armageddon. If we don’t take back control, we don’t have a future. As the Chinese Foreign Ministry said this week in response to yet more of Trump’s spurious threats over fentanyl:

Intimidation doesn’t scare us. Bullying doesn’t work on us. Pressuring, coercion or threats are not the right way of dealing with China… the right thing to do is to consult with China on the basis of equality, mutual respect and mutual benefit to address each other’s concerns… We urge the U.S. to stop being domineering and return to the right track of dialogue and cooperation at an early date (more details here; the Ministry’s spokesman here).

Urge the US to stop being domineering…? Good luck with that. Unfortunately, treating Chinese as equals, or even as superiors in many respects, doesn’t enter the American consciousness. In particular, any politician who said “We need to treat China as our equals” would be out of a job. But unless their insane lust for “full spectrum dominance” is burned out of their collective psyche, we’re likely to go the way of the dinosaurs.

*From South Pacific, 1949. People sniggered nervously when they heard it.

1. McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge.

Some afterthoughts:

What’s China like? Ask people who live there:

German journalist Max Chernov:

An astute Pom, Living in China:

Cyrus Janssen, analyst, was there for ten years:

Andy Boreham, a sharp Kiwi reporter, lives in Shanghai:

CCTV in the UK: 4.5million cameras. https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna5942513

82% of people are “happy” or “very happy” with them as they reduce crime and people feel safer, especially since the Jamie Bulger murder:

Some boiler plate propaganda on war between China and Australia:

You wonder why they would bomb the Gulf of Carpentaria but geography was never his strong point.