Shakedown Timeline of America’s 21stC war on China

“Slowly at first and then all at once.”

With its entry into the WTO in 2001, China’s relations with the USA were assumed to be home and dry. However, less than a decade later, they started to unravel — and today they threaten to spin out of control and drag us into World War Three.

Shakedown is an epic contemporaneous timeline by Anna Chen that charts more than twenty years of insights into the relationship between China and the West in live commentary and analysis from within the belly of the beast.

Documenting events as they happened, in articles and radio broadcasts strung on a historical through-line, Shakedown makes visible what’s lurking beneath the surface, and tracks the political development of a British-born writer and national broadcaster of Chinese heritage.

***To get the full chronological picture of the West’s growing hostility towards a developing China, read these extracts from the bottom to the top. This online publication features extracts of Anna’s BBC programmes and published articles (indented) with links. A pdf or eBook with full articles will shortly be available for download.

“Nip troubles in the bud. Sow the great in the small. Difficult things of the world can only be tackled when they are easy. Big things of the world can only be achieved by attending to their small beginnings. … Tackle things before they have appeared. Cultivate peace and order before confusion and disorder have set in. … A journey of a thousand leagues starts from where your feet stand” 
Tao Te Ching

Sunday 31 December 2023
HEROES AND VILLAINS OF 2023
Most of the public by now recognise Boris Johnson‘s role as all the Horsemen of the Apocalypse rolled into one overfed scary clown.
Johnson pauperised Britain with Brexit, losing us our biggest market that happened to be on our doorstep. Costs £100bn a year. Poverty kills.
He handed us over to the US war machine so we now do their bidding. World War III in the making.
Partied like Nero unbound while Covid spread. There are now 220K dead Brits, the second highest number in the developed world.
Personally scuppered the Ukraine peace deal negotiation, April 2022. NYT says 500K dead.
We were dragged from the EU frying pan into the US fire, on the referendumvote of 37% of the population. And now look at the state of us. Instead of delivering the yummy trade deals with China as promised, Johnson nailed us to the USS Titanic and torpedoed our global lifeboat. Now we send war fleets to China’s coast instead of cargo ships.
Xi Jinping could have taken the easy route and taken US heat off himself by letting Jack Ma’s 2020 Ant Group IPO slide by. Instead, Xi saved the economy, prevented a slow business coup and preserved the upward trajectory for China’s workers, enraging Wall Street. He continued this throughout 2023.
Benjamin Netanyahu was already in deep trouble, facing prosecution and unprecedented street protests in Israel for his power grab against the judges. Earlier in the year he pleaded with America to join him in a war on Iran. America said no. Well, he now has his wish. … continues
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Sunday 3 December 2023
US RATCHETS UP CHIP TECH WAR ON CHINA
Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo spearheads increasingly desperate attempts to cut off China from AI technology since the Chips and Science Act was passed in August 2022. The backfiring result is to hobble America’s top technology companies such as Nvidia rather than operate on a level playing field. Meanwhile, China is spurred on to be self-reliant and goes from strength to strength. … continues
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15 November 2023, XI JINPING ARRIVES IN SAN FRANCISCO FOR TALKS WITH JOE BIDEN: The streets of San Francisco are cleared of the homeless tents crowding the pavements. Seeing the rapid clean-up, more US cities wonder if Xi couldn’t give them a visit.

7 October 2023, ISRAEL GAZA CONFLICT ERUPTS. Hamas carries out an invasion attacking Israeli security posts, kibbutzim and the Supernova music festival, killing 1,400 (later revised to 1,200) on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s watch. In the furious backlash against Gaza, residential blocks are flattened, and bombings of hospitals and schools are decried by the UN with nearly 5,000 Palestinians killed in the first two weeks and more military operations to come. Israel cuts off water and supplies as well as the Rafeh crossing into Egypt. Pro-Palestinian protests take place around the world. Hundreds of Jewish protesters storm the Washington Capitol demanding a ceasefire and negotiations to return over 200 Israeli hostages. China also calls for a ceasefire, calm and a permanent political solution for Palestinians. Biden appears to give Netanyahu carte blanche. China hawks start a desperate diversion campaign to drown out international horror with a lame revival of human rights violations claims including the oft debunked Xinjiang narrative. Eleven days later, on October 18, the UK is one of 51 countries to sign a UN resolution condemning China for purported human rights violations in Xinjiang while refusing to sign a resolution to block the actual collective punishment of Gazans. Meanwhile, the inquiry into UK war-crimes in Afghanistan remains buried in bad news. On 19th October, Biden pledges $100 billion to Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan and the border – $60b going to Ukraine.

Sunday 29 September 2023
Don Quixote in the White House: Hollywood deconstructs the narrative
first published by Asia Times
Now that the Writers Strike is over, I can pitch my script for that blockbuster version of Cervantes’ classic crying out to be made: Don Quixote in the White House, updating windmills to stray weather balloons, complete with paranoia & moustache-twirling villains. (Oh. Democrats don’t do facial hair?) 
The B-story is a light romance set in the world’s seat of power. He loves Xi but the sweethearts fall out over a misunderstanding that Xi wants to ditch him and run off with Europe. 
Across the world, every two-bit, dime-a-dozen demagogue, any politician or public figure in need of a reputation cleanser or career booster realizes they can play the China “Get out of jail free” card, ready made for every grade ‘n’ shade of no-goodniks. … continues
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Tuesday 5 September 2023
Zoo Time at Operation Circe: How the Wolf Warrior was invented
first published by Asia Times 
Accusations had been blasted at China in a character-assassination broadside by both sides of the House from which neither facts nor history could save it. China, not Trump, had reneged on the trade deal. China was stealing IP. It was a currency manipulator, despite the fact that, far from undervaluing the yuan, China was spending vast amounts of its reserves propping it up. China, not the top one percent of the US that now owned as much as the bottom 90 percent, was the cause of America’s misery. 
You might suspect, from all the invective in high places, that the US didn’t actually want a stable relationship with its successful partner. … continues
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30 August 2023, UK SAYS DISENGAGEMENT WITH CHINA NOT CREDIBLE. The tiny 11-member foreign affairs committee refers to Taiwan as an “independent country” on the day the Foreign Secretary visits China and confirms disengagement is not on the cards. Foreign Secretary James Cleverly meets his Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi who said, “Dialogue and cooperation are the key words … of China’s policy towards the UK,” and Vice President Han Zheng who wants the visit to “further promote the sound and stable development of bilateral relations”.

Monday 14 August 2023
We’ll always have Beijing – debut column for Asia Times
In the half-century since Bruce Lee’s early death in July 1973, the image of Chinese in western culture and business has come full circle with an added twist of spite. 
Prior to the martial arts deity’s explosion onto cinema screens in the 1960s, Chinese men were barely seen except as anonymous hordes reminiscent of the wave warfare that kept America at bay in Korea. Their ultimate sacrifice was presented in the west as an antlike lack of humanity rather than the collective courage we recognise from the allied storming of Normandy beaches. 
Is whitewashed Doctor Strange about to morph into Dr Strangelove or be eclipsed by Fu Manchu redux? … continues
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23 June 2023 OFFICE OF THE US DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE (ODNI) SAYS NO EVIDENCE THAT THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC ORIGINATED IN A WUHAN LAB LEAK: Not only is it more likely that SARS-CoV-2 had been cooking up in nature before jumping to humans, there’s no evidence that the three WIV researchers at the centre of another lab-leak conspiracy theory had Covid in the 2019 flu season. “All agencies agree SARS-CoV-2 was not developed as a bioweapon, and they agree it wasn’t genetically engineered.” Conspiracy theorists are enraged.
Evidence-free accusations of lab leaks, forced labour and human rights abuses rumble on while the US tools up for a devastating World War in a 21st Century Thucydides Trap that threatens to engulf us all.

19 June 2023 SECRETARY OF STATE BLINKEN REITERATES US COMMITMENT TO ONE-CHINA POLICY AND SAYS HE DOESN’T BELIEVE CHINA IS GOING TO INVADE TAIWAN: Contrary to President Biden’s sabre-rattling provocations and lurid accusations, Blinken tells Xi during his visit to Beijing, “We remain opposed to any unilateral changes to the status quo by either side.” Xi repeats their position that “China respects US interests and does not seek to challenge or displace the United States”. An increasing erratic Biden derails the hopeful atmosphere by calling Xi a dictator the day after Blinken returns. His comments knock from the headlines his son Hunter’s guilty pleas to tax charges and possession of a gun while being a drug user. Blinken’s visit is followed weeks later by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellon on 6 July with some constructive results: “The world is big enough for the US and China”, she says.

Monday 13th February 2023
Stopping the Iraq War 2001-3 20th anniversary: How the press was done
Wednesday 15 February marks the 20th anniversary of the unprecedented million-strong anti-Iraq War demonstration in London.
… The left were expert at holding rallies and demonstrations, but often with little to show for it beyond a nice day out. This time, to prevent our activities disappearing as yet another walk in the park, we needed a coordinated press campaign, otherwise we’d be preaching to the choir. 
With an expanding anti-war campaign, I expected to be working alongside other press officers, in particular veterans from CND. Instead, my emails went unanswered and all attempts to speak to them failed. CND went AWOL. On 27 October, I emailed the STWC convenor asking for back-up to help me with the media work but answer there came none. This left me doing all the national presswork on my own while Marqusee continued to write the STWC releases. …
… Which brings us full circle to the USA’s current go-for-broke policy as the supposedly abandoned Project for the New American Century goes nuclear and the UK, the second biggest force in NATO, nails us to the USS Titanic. 
… I’ve been wondering why there has been so little push-back from the British Left since then over Libya, Syria and Ukraine and while vicious Yellow Peril narratives set like concrete. 
Our current rush to war with the rising superpower, losing us our cheap energy, mass produced goods and food, has gone largely unopposed. Where has the peace movement been in the past few years? Facing nuclear oblivion, the left has only just started to hold peace demonstrations and rallies, but virtually nothing about China. … continues
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Tuesday 3rd January 2023
China’s new Covid measures for 2023 and the West’s response
A welcome mild spell of weather in the UK takes some of the pressure off us from spiking energy prices under the new world order’s decoupling from China, our global lifeboat and factory. Every country that refuses to come to heel in the Rules-based order that has quietly replaced the Rule of International Law is now target for the declining US, riven as it is by a looming recession deflating the Mother of all Market Bubbles, an incipient civil war between two equally unpleasant opposing factions of north America’s ruling class, and Covid rendered endemic in pursuit of the rising rival. …
In December, under some of the most aggressive propaganda attacks ever fielded by the West, China finally decided to make a break for safety, taking advantage of the milder Omicron variant. The media’s screeching about “inhumane” lockdowns under the Zero Covid policy immediately turned on a dime to howls of rage that China dropped Zero Covid. Such doublethink barely masks the absurdity of complaining that China may end up giving us back the variants we’d been stewing up and sending there over the past three years. … continues
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7 December 2022, ANGELA MERKEL ADMITS THE 2014 MINSK PEACE AGREEMENT WAS A SHAM: “The 2014 Minsk Agreement was an attempt to buy time for Ukraine. Ukraine used this time to become stronger, as you can see today. Ukraine in 2014-2015 and Ukraine today are not the same.” The Russian Foreign Ministry stated, “everything that was done in 2014 and 2015 had only one goal: to divert the global community’s attention from the real problems, to buy some time, to pump the Kiev regime with weapons and to lead the situation to a large-scale conflict.” The signatories were Merkel, Hollande and Poroshenko. In August 2023, NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg admits the war started in 2014.

Monday, 28 November 2022
The Power of Propaganda: Barrie Weiss in conversation with Anna Chen and Robbie Barwick 
VIDEO: Parts 1, 2 and 3. A three-way conversation with Anna Chen in the UK, Robbie Barwick in Australia and Barrie Weiss (AKA Barrie V) hosting from China, 16th September 2022. 

September 2022, THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION PLANS CHIP TECH WAR TO HANDICAP CHINA FOR A DECADE: Following the $280b Chips and Science Act passed in August, massively subsidising American semiconductor manufacturers, Biden announces a plan to handicap China for a decade by banning high tech companies from building factories in China for ten years.

2 August 2022 TAIWAN AND THE ONE-CHINA POLICY: Nancy Pelosi’s provocative visit to Taiwan attempts to throw a match into gasoline. Despite insisting that the 1972 One-China policy still holds, the US flouts China’s red line, sending arms and troops to China’s “rogue” province while Western nations sail warships off China’s coast. The US Navy has itself sailed warships through the Taiwan Strait since 2018, claiming them as international waters. The 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), to which the US is not signed up, defines the strait not as international waters (as it lies between two parts of the same country), but as China’s territorial waters and Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). Biden continues US practice of selling weapons to Taiwan, including Patriot, Harpoon and Sidewinder missiles. In April 2023, Biden sends 200 troops to Taiwan. Nancy Pelosi was in Beijing during the Tiananmen Square conflict in 1989.

July 2022, BRITAIN APPROPRIATES VENEZUELA’S GOLD
Fronted by US-backed presidential claimant, Juan Guaido, over $1 billion of Venezuela’s gold reserves held by the Bank of England is purloined when the High Court rules against President Maduro. Reuters reports: “Maduro’s legal team has said he would like to sell some of the 31 tonnes of gold to finance Venezuela’s response to the pandemic and bolster a health system gutted by years of economic crisis. … Legal experts have said the latest case has been unprecedented as it has seen one of a country’s highest courts interpreting the constitution of another.” Venezuelans are subjected to continued poverty imposed not only by US sanctions on their oil sales but now by being denied access to their own national assets.

Wednesday 6 July 2022
A Brief History of the Chinese Who Came to Britain: Anna Chen’s Introduction to Hannah Lowe’s new poetry collection, Old Friends
Introduction written by Anna Chen 
How many Chinas are there? 
In 2022, two Grand Narratives jockey for position as the dominant conventional wisdom which will define China and its global diaspora: the one which demonises its subject, and the other which humanises.  
After enduring their “century of humiliation”, China achieves superpower status and finds itself in the headlines for all the wrong reasons. For the past few years, geopolitical stability has tumbled down a Sliding Doors rabbit-hole, splitting the narrative of the peaceful emergence of a multipolar world. One version portrays an existential threat to a western way of life already rapidly approaching its best-by date. The other, which it aims to topple, depicts the dragon reborn, a technological marvel raising 800 million out of poverty, battling the Covid-19 which has already felled western powers, while building beautiful futuristic cities and a new Silk Road. … continues
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Saturday, 28 May 2022
A short 21st century timeline of the race to World War III
VIDEO AND TEXT: When China explored the world in the 15th century and reached as far as East Africa, they traded a bit and brought back a giraffe. When Europeans landed in the Americas in 1492, they killed and enslaved its native peoples, stole their treasures and gave them smallpox blankets in an early form of biological warfare. 
In North America, 100 million native Americans were killed, Black Africans were put through slavery, Jim Crow and imprisonment. The USA was literally built on an ancient Indian burial ground, because that’s what they’d turned it into. 
And that’s pretty much been the template ever since … continues
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May 2022 DAVOS: Blackrock wins the prime role coordinating extraction of wealth from the Ukraine as JP Morgan did in Iraq in 2003. As China became Ukraine’s biggest investor in 2019 after years of investment, this makes a nice killing for the US as it’s unlikely that China will ever see its investments returned.

March 2022 UKRAINE RUSSIA PEACE DEAL SCUPPERED BY BORIS JOHNSON: A peace deal between Russia and the Ukraine is on the table and already signed when British PM Boris Johnson travels to Kyiv to relay UK and US displeasure. Peace deal off, war back on.

24 February 2022 THE UKRAINE WAR BEGINS: Following eight years of provocation, repression and and killings of Russian speakers in the Donbass since the US-backed Maidan coup in 2014, Putin does what his enemies want and invades the Ukraine. NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg openly admits the war started in 2014.

4 February 2022, 2ND US BILL ATTACKING CHINA IS PASSED: Congress passes the the House’s “Competes Act for 2022“. It follows the “United States Innovation and Competition Act of 2021” (USICA) of 8 June 2021 with which it will be merged. Prospect says: USICA creates a “Countering Chinese Influence Fund” totaling $1.5 billion over a five-year period, “with more than a third of funds aimed at media outlets.” The bill “aims to crowd out Chinese investment in developing countries, and also encourages criticism of China’s projects in those markets”. The “push for anti-China coverage … could potentially undermine the credibility of journalists involved in the reporting. …doesn’t really qualify as genuine journalism.” “Otherwise, this funding is just an exercise in crude soft-power projection, with many sources at risk of being much more easily dismissed or repressed as pawns of a U.S. geopolitical strategy.” “The terms [‘disinformation’ and ‘misinformation’ ] are not defined in either bill.”

January 2022: KAZAKHSTAN COLOUR REVOLUTION ENDED. In January 2022, after 30 years of peace in this stable Stan, a colour revolution attempt in Kazakhstan (fourth largest country in Asia, nestled between Russia and US target region Xinjiang) breaks out and is swiftly ended by Russia and China in cooperation. It becomes clear that, in order to defeat China, the US axis will have to cut the legs out from under it – prime target, Russia. 

Thursday, 2 January 2022
PARTYGATE: another day, another diversion from 176,000 Covid deaths in the UK
UK frogs still being boiled slowly as the government declares Covid-19 to be endemic and ends restrictions. System failed but mission accomplished 
So was it negligent homicide, homicidal negligence or mass murder? No, it’s worse: attending parties during lockdown. 
It may have been illegal under their own rules, selfish and hypocritical while people were dying, but the charging elephant in the Downing Street garden party is the mainstream media’s news blackout on how China eradicated Covid by day 43 of its unprecedented 76-day lockdown of 23rd January 2020. … continues
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Tuesday, 2 November 2021 
A Permanent Reservoir of Scapegoats: how racism drives the geopolitics of China’s rise
VIDEO AND TEXT: America has become a supernova, both imploding and exploding at the same time, leaving a fragmented shell of its former self. Unfortunately, it seems intent on dragging us all to hell with it. 
Racism is more than an ugly word shouted at us, more than an assault on any individual. It goes wider than the gunshot massacre of Asian women in Atlanta. Racism is a poisonous force which could, on this trajectory, result in the mass murder of millions of human beings if the USA and its Western allies get the war for which they are busily manufacturing consent, throwing huge resources at it to get their way … continues
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15 September 2021 AUKUS LASH-UP BETWEEN THE US, UK AND AUSTRALIA ANNOUNCED: The trilateral military pact between the US, UK and Australia to pour military hardware and troops into the Asia region is formally announced. Biden continues to manufacture his casus belli around Taiwan despite the long-established One-China policy. France’s lucrative submarine deal with Australia is dropped. Within 24 hours, France’s Pasteur Institute announces that they found a closer relative of SARS-CoV-2 than RatG13 and they found it in Laos, not China.

Thursday, 2 September 2021
Open letter of complaint to Channel 4 Dispatches “Covid Leak”: politicising Covid-19 for partisan US agenda
Channel 4 squanders its reputation as a serious investigative news channel by regurgitating overwrought right-wing claims about lab-leak theories, which have been regularly debunked by virologists who the programme makers fail to interview for the programme.
Timed for the release of Biden’s Covid Origins report, Channel 4 Dispatches cheerleads the USA’s Cold War, reinforces the side with its fleet in China’s back yard, threatening war on the upcoming rival just as China’s economy is about to draw level with America’s … continues
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30 August 2021 US EXITS AFGHANISTAN AFTER 20 YEARS: Biden pulls the US out of Afghanistan in a messy exit, ending a 20 year war that’s achieved nothing.

Thursday, 17 June 2021
Opium Wars 2 and the propaganda war on China: No Cold War launch
VIDEO AND TEXT: Tonight, I’m going to discuss the current build-up in hostility towards China in the context of the Opium Wars of the 19th century and the propaganda war leading us there once again. 
At the start of the first Opium War in 1839, China was the most technologically advanced country in the world. It had already invented hydraulics, gunpowder in the 9th century, ships’ rudders, the stirrup, paper, moveable type printing and much more. 
But it was their beautiful porcelain and silks, tea, lacquer (the first plastic) and furniture that drove the enthusiasm for chinoiserie in Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries. 
Because Britain had little to trade with China that they didn’t already have – rough woollens and clockwork toys being top of the list on offer — Britain’s treasury was being drained to satisfy the public’s appetite for all things Chinese. 
Britain’s solution to the trade imbalance was to grow cheap, mass-produced opium in stolen Bengal and sell that to China. Up until then, opium had been an expensive habit only used by the wealthiest Chinese … continues
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8 June 2021, THE FIRST BILL TARGETING CHINA INVESTMENT AND INDUSTRY IS PASSED: the United States Innovation and Competition Act of 2021 (USICA) is passed by Congress: It aims to “crowd out Chinese investment in developing countries, and also encourages criticism of China’s projects in those markets”. It is followed by the Competes Act 4 February 2022.

Monday, 3 May 2021
The Roots of the Clash between the United States and China: Virtual Vigil for the Victims of the Atlanta Shootings 
VIDEO AND TEXT: After a year of increasing anti-Asian violence encouraged by unscrupulous politicians and media, we took another lurch to the dark side when eight people were killed in the Atlanta shootings (16th March 2021), six of them Asian women. Elsewhere, Asian people are being regularly maimed and murdered. 
Why have we been beset by this wave of sinophobic hatred when only four years ago, Christine Lagarde (International Monetary Fund) was remarking on the even pace of economic growth in the world? We had relative stability — if you weren’t a Palestinian, a Venezuelan or Iranian under US sanctions or a Black person in Ferguson — and as a species, for one glorious historical moment, we seemed to be headed towards the light.
But just as China’s economy was drawing level with the American superpower, we got the Thucydides Trap – classically the conflict that occurs when an established power feels threatened by a rising one — and now, more than 2,000 years after the original Sparta-Athens knock-down, we find ourselves being dragged into a war with a nuclear power which is also our global growth engine, the factory of the world and our lifeboat … continues
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Wednesday, 7 April 2021
Standing up to sinophobia: how racism has its roots in politics
VIDEO AND TEXT: So here we are in April 2021 as America’s anti-Chinese pogrom goes full blown. We’re seeing almost daily attacks on Asian people who’ve been caught up in this vicious wave of sinophobia. Britain is thankfully further behind but is being dragged in the same direction. 
In the deadly Atlanta attack, six out of eight people who lost their lives were Asian women. 
After Atlanta, we saw a brief display of crocodile tears from the government and media but then a return to business as usual. 
Because this isn’t about being nice to minority victims. This is about turning a group of people – in this case 1.4 billion human beings – into a dehumanised blob so that the American superpower can retain top position as ruling hegemon in a unipolar world. 
President Joe Biden finally admitted to what Victor Gao calls “Tonya Harding Syndrome” — with the declining superpower trying to smash the kneecaps of its upcoming rival. Biden declared that “China will never grow wealthier or more powerful than us on my watch”, despite China having four times the population, a lot of talent and an aim to raise the tide that floats all boats … continues
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” … to the China haters spinning this atrocity porn, every drop of poison, every toxic word, every lurid rape fantasy: what you’re saying about China doesn’t tell us who they are. It tells us who you are.” – Anna Chen, 7 April 2021

March 2021 PRESIDENT BIDEN “NOT ON MY WATCH”: “China has an overall goal … to become the leading country in the world, the wealthiest country in the world, and the most powerful country in the world,” he told reporters at the White House. “That’s not going to happen on my watch.”

Wednesday, 13 January 2021
The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters from the West’s Own Id: No Cold War on China
I first realised that China was the likely end game in the Project for America in the 21st Century, in 2005, watching Dubbya Bush standing in the rubble of the Iraq war and declaring China to be a competitor.
America’s wars since carving up YUGOSLAVIA have been like ticking off boxes in a steady stream of horror: Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Iran, Libya, Venezuela, Bolivia and now Cuba – not forgetting YEMEN where British and American weapons are killing people even now. China is the big prize at the end of their list of imagined foes.
President Carter told Donald Trump that the reason China does well is that it doesn’t have wars and invests so much in the country – unlike America which has barely had a period when it hasn’t been at war, spends 20 times more than China on its military, and starves the US of investment … continues
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6 January 2021, JUAN GUAIDO DOWNGRADED BY THE EU
All 27 states of the EU stop recognising US favourite Juan Guaido as interim president of Venezuela and head of the National Assembly following December’s legislative elections, even though the EU does not officially recognise the vote. Designating him an “important actor” and “privileged interlocutor” instead, there’s an unmistakeable sound of distance made while saving face, although he’ll come in handy in 2022 when he helps the Bank of England purloin Venezuela’s gold. The term “free and fair” elections joins “democracy” and “human rights” in the lexicon of euphemisms meaning the complete opposite in service to empire.

3 November 2020 CHINA’S REGULATORS HALT MASSIVE IPO OF JACK MA’S ANT GROUP.  In the cage fight of communist ideals versus raw capitalism, the government wins. After years of tension, Xi Jinping and the Chinese regulators quash the $350-450 billion initial public offering of Jack Ma’s giant Ant Group in Shanghai and Hong Kong. The biggest stock offering in history, this mega debut threatens to make Ant too big to fail. Furthermore, Ant Financial defies regulatory protective measures by working outside the rules. Ma openly dismisses the regulations set up to prevent systemic financial risk as “red tape”. Aware that business runs government in the ailing USA, reaping low taxes and endless bailouts, the CPC is never going to allow the same to happen in China. As a result of the last-minute halt, the Chinese economy is no longer allowed to run too hot into a crash, bitterly disappointing Wall Street investors.
One might have thought that, in a communist society, the people who helped make Ma’s ecommerce titan Alibaba (which birthed the Ant Group) one of the most profitable companies in the world, should be pampered and share in the wealth (even John Lewis does this in the UK). Instead, Jack Ma further pushes his luck by defending dreaded 996 conditions (9am-9pm, 6 days a week, 72 hours a week) for his workers and China’s workforce.  
In this one move, Xi saves the economy, prevents a slow business coup and preserves the upward trajectory for China’s workers. He is subsequently traduced by the west. The fight is on in earnest.

November 2020 JOE BIDEN WINS THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION: Joe Biden is elected president and raises America’s military spend to $780 BILLION a year. He later tops this by placing a fat bounty on China’s head when he budgets $500m a year specifically on anti-China propaganda in the House’s “Competes Act for 2022,” 4 February 2022.  This follows the Senate-led 8 June 2021 “United States Innovation and Competition Act of 2021 (USICA)” which aims to “crowd out Chinese investment in developing countries, and also encourages criticism of China’s projects in those markets”. The terms “disinformation” and “misinformation” are not defined in either bill. 
After promising he won’t start World War 3, Biden forms AUKUS with Australia, and UK in September 2021, bringing the prospect of nuclear war to the prosperous region of Asia to add to the noose of hundreds of bases surrounding China. 

9 September 2020 NEWS BREAKS THAT TRUMP KNEW ABOUT COVID DANGERS SINCE 28 JANUARY 2020. Published in The Washington Post, former president Donald Trump admits he knew about the coming deadly coronavirus pandemic from at least January 2020 when he was briefed by the NSA. Despite his knowledge, and having already dismantled the White House pandemic team and the CDC office in Beijing the previous year, he would continue to pump the markets, downplay the coronavirus, call it a hoax, undermine the science, stigmatise masks, hold super-spreader rallies, allow sporting and music events to go ahead, and suggest injecting bleach. On 13th March the president had performed his reluctant U-turn and declared a national emergency, saying, “I don’t accept responsibility at all”. The State Department sends a cable Friday 20 March, based on National Security Council points, to federal agencies, telling them to blame China. This is reinforced by a detailed 57-page strategy document from the National Republican Senatorial Committee  to candidates on 17 April 2020.    

20 August 2020 HONG KONG PROTESTER VIOLENCE IGNORED BY WESTERN MEDIA: Western media and politicians continue to ignore violence done by the protesters to Mandarin speakers and any Chinese who disagree with them — chiefly women and elderly men as seen in the flood of videos posted online — and ignore the trashing of the infrastructure. The British ambassador leaves out of her Twitter thread the key six words from the 1884 Joint Declaration on Hong Kong? “… EXCEPT IN FOREIGN AND DEFENCE AFFAIRS.” The MSM keep repeating this omission ad infinitum.

TWEET: “The first, is based on the Joint Declaration, agreed by Deng Xiaoping and Margaret Thatcher which is an international treaty lodged at the United Nations. It agreed that Hong Kong will have a high degree of autonomy for 50 years after the handover.” 5/8— UK in China 🇬🇧 (@ukinchina) August 19, 2020
The British ambassador to China continues to omit the final crucial six words of the Joint Declaration clause: a high degree of autonomy “EXCEPT IN FOREIGN AND DEFENCE AFFAIRS”

Sunday, 26 July 2020
Early Coronavirus chronology after COVID-19 found in Spain from March 2019
Coronavirus fact check chronology: Very interesting development that a strain of the Covid-19 virus — SARS-CoV-2 — has been discovered in a frozen sample of sewage in Barcelona dating from 12th March 2019, indicating (as some scientists have posited) that the virus was already circulating the world before exploding so virulently in Wuhan in December 2019.
America needs to provide an explanation as to why they were able to brief NATO and Israel about the coming pandemic in November but failed to warn China in the middle of a vicious trade war. (The Pentagon now denies this.) In a bonfire of the virus protection measures: Trump disbanded in May 2018 the pandemic team set up by Obama, slashed their Beijing CDC office until no staff remained by July 2019, threatened to pull out of WHO and defunded research … continues
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TWEET: “The #COVID19 outbreak has changed everyone’s life. Here is a video on the lives of ordinary people in #Wuhan, the epicenter of the #coronavirus outbreak, where a “pause” button on life has been pressed for the past 20 days.” pic.twitter.com/DuApPpA1lb— T-House (@thouse_opinions) February 15, 2020

Tuesday, 23 June 2020
‘Let’s Blame China”: an infantile disorder when Covid-19 comes knocking 
How the White House turned “China bought us time” into “China lied, people died” and put the world at risk
Up until Trump’s U-turn in mid-March, most were impressed with the record time in which China identified, sequenced and shared the “strange pneumonia’s” gene code as they struggled to make sense of what was happening since the first case was confirmed on 27th December 2019. Having finally confirmed human-to-human transmission 20th January after initial confusion and missteps, they turbocharged their efforts. Three days later on 23rd January, they shut down the city of Wuhan, and Hubei, a province of 66 million (about the same population as Britain), and halted its air traffic. The purpose was to starve the virus of hosts in order, not just to contain it, but to wipe it out completely. 
Trump wasted precious time as Covid-19 seeded itself in the population leading to chaos and recriminations. Then on 13th March the president performed his reluctant U-turn and declared a national emergency, saying, “I don’t accept responsibility at all.” 
Cue blame game.
A week later on 20th March, the same day the UK went into lockdown and news emerged of US senators selling their stocks on the eve of the long-awaited crash finally triggered by the coronavirus Black Swan, the White House sent a cable to State Department officials, issuing “guidelines for how U.S. officials should answer questions on, or speak about, the coronavirus and the White House’s response in relation to China.” … continues
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Sunday, 14 June 2020
Plague, protests and how the hybrid war on China is prolonging Covid-19 pain in the West
I’m back after a long break following my bout of strange, dry bronchitis in December (Loved One had a dry hacking smokers’ cough in parallel) which lost us Christmas and New Year, through the coronavirus crisis, a ramped up Cold War on China, and world-wide Black Lives Matter protests set off when African-American George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police on camera in front of us over an agonising 8 minutes and 46 seconds of horror, supposedly over a $20 bill … 
In the UK, arrogance and incompetence from the Boris Johnson/Dominic Cummings government has brought Britain to its knees. Instead of learning from the Covid-19 road map drawn for us by China, as New Zealand’s Jacinda Arden did, the political, media and even some of the science establishment got jealous and arsey about China’s unprecedented lockdown of 1.4 billion human beings in order to contain the virus and starve it of hosts. 
The mainstream media (MSM) mostly joined the news blackout on anything positive about China’s management of the virus after Trump’s U-turn in March led to co-ordinated attacks on China. While China sent a medical team to the UK at the end of March, along with PPE and 300 ventilators when hospitals were running out, the BBC countered with the bogus “faulty equipment” smear and the ever-hateful Guardian spun it as “China portrays itself as a global benefactor”. Because, of course, the Yellow Peril can never act out of altruism, empathy, humanity, ethics or just plain practical understanding that the virus doesn’t respect borders … continues
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17 June 2020 US CONGRESS FORMALISES OPENING XINJIANG FRONT AGAINST CHINA: Congress formally reverses years of partnership with China on the War Against Terror with the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act. Three Washington-based or funded entities feed thoroughly rebutted claims of genocide, millions incarcerated and forced labour: ultra-hawkish Australian think tank ASPI, also financed by the military industry as well as the US government and the tech giants; the World Uyghur Congress (WUC); and the right-wing Evangelical statistics abuser Adrian Zenz who believes Jews will burn in “God’s fiery furnace” and that he is “led by God” on a mission against China. Practically every story about Xinjiang in the western mainstream media names one of these three as their source, latterly joined by the NED-funded Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD). Xinjiang is hugely rich in natural resources including oil and gas deposits and rare earths, already eyed up by US companies. Strategically located, it is China’s back door into Europe through which the Belt and Rail new Silk Route runs, is almost the size of Europe and sits at the heart of the central Eurasia landmass coveted by the US.

17-19 April 2020 AUSTRALIA FOLLOWS US COVID LINE ON CHINA AND KICKS ITS BIGGEST TRADE PARTNER IN THE TEETH: A few months after Scott Morrison returns from his stay at the military resort in Hawaii, Oz Ministers Peter Dutton and Marisa Payne begin a barrage of unfounded claims against China just as it wins its fight against the coronavirus, clearing the virus by day 43 of a 76-day lockdown and setting a model for eradication. Trump had pursued a super-spreader policy and delayed action for months, calling the pandemic a hoax, holding giant infectious rallies, stigmatising masks and suggested injecting bleach. His U-turn in March is sidelined by the 57-page “blame China” instruction manual released by the National Republican Senatorial Committee on 17 April 2020, the very same day that Dutton launches Australia’s campaign.

13 March 2020, PRESIDENT TRUMP’S CORONAVIRUS U-TURN:  The president performs his reluctant U-turn and finally declares a national emergency, saying, “I don’t accept responsibility at all.” A week later on 20th March, the same day the UK goes into lockdown and news emerges of US senators selling their stocks on the eve of the long-awaited crash finally triggered by the coronavirus Black Swan, the White House sends a cable to State Department officials, issuing “guidelines for how U.S. officials should answer questions on, or speak about, the coronavirus and the White House’s response in relation to China.” “NSC (National Security Council) Top Lines:  [People’s Republic of China] Propaganda and Disinformation on the Wuhan Virus Pandemic.”

12 March 2020 THE INVENTION OF THE WOLF WARRIOR: Throughout two years of Trump’s aggressive trade war, China has been walking on eggshells, with chief negotiator Liu He famously polite and diplomatic despite relentless US character assassination of his country. Following violent NED-backed riots in Hong Kong, the Trump administration’s decision to “blame China” for the Covid pandemic, naming it “Wuhan flu” and “China flu”, is the last straw. On 12 March, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian mounts a robust defence, raising the Wuhan Military Games as a possible point of infection, opening on 18 October 2019 (same day as Event 201, the table-top pandemic exercise laid on in New York by the Johns Hopkins Institute, WEF and Bill Gates). Zhao is instantly raged against as a “Wolf Warrior” in the western media, an animalistic label that literally dehumanises him and other China critics of US policy as “a fierce, bloodthirsty, and cruel animal”. Speaking out of turn in defiance of the flailing hegemon is met with the political equivalence of sticking fingers in ears and yelling. And the points being made are never addressed.
COVID PANDEMIC: A day later, 13th March, Trump finally declares a national emergency after weeks of playing down the pandemic as a “hoax”: “I don’t take responsibility at all.”
On the same day in the UK, Sir Patrick Vallance defends the Koch-backed ‘herd immunity’ strategy: “40m Britons would have to contract coronavirus to prevent future outbreaks”. Both the US and UK continue to ignore effective action in China and other countries, politicians and mainstream media relentlessly vilifying China while the virus seeds itself in the population.

February 2020 HUAWEI, THE UK AND BORIS JOHNSON’S SUPERMAN SPEECH: The healthy growth in the world economy since emerging from America’s Great Crash of 2008 with China’s stabilising support starts grinding to a halt due to Trump’s protectionist trade war on the rising superpower. In his “Superman” speech (3 February 2020), Boris Johnson notes Trump is letting all the air out of the the tyres of the global economy. A few days later, Trump rages at him for not ceasing trade with Huawei and ripping out billions worth of 5G infrastructure as instructed to by the US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo the previous February (during Theresa May’s government), by the US delegation to the UK in May 2019 and again on 13 January 2020 (during Boris Johnson’s tenure as PM). US Vice President Mike Pence says that the Trump administration had made its disappointment with the UK “very clear to them”. Former British ambassador to the US, now Lord Kim Darroch, says there were no “compelling technical arguments that undermined GCHQ’s case” and that the US case was “political”. Johnson ditches Huawei in June 2020 after Trump bans the company from using US-made chips. Neither May not Johnson gets a post-Brexit trade deal with the US out of this.

24 February 2020, NAMASTE TRUMP- THE PRESIDENT IN INDIA: Trump visits Modi in India to revitalise the Quad like the Joker in the White House getting his gang together. A trade deal doesn’t materialise, aside from India buying US military equipment and LNG, and India still has a foot in the Russia camp. The Western establishment changes the name of the region from Asia Pacific to Indo-Pacific even though India is completely round the Malacca Strait corner from the Pacific. On 6 May India is constructing a road and crosses the Line of Actual Control (LAC), entering the China controlled Galwan Valley, and in June, August and September, India and China have their first border clashes in 45 years.
Back in the USA, by 24 February, the CDC’s own designed Covid test is found not to work. When a teenager tests positive in Seattle, the federal government tells the doctor to cease and desist as it sinks in that the virus has been around a lot earlier than officially admitted.

20 February 2020 US MARKET CRASH The Black Swan event everyone’s been waiting for: After two years of the Trump Pump, pressuring the FED’s Jay Powell to turbo-charge Quantitive Easing and inflate the Mother Of All Bubbles, the US markets begin a spectacular collapse. The S&P500 will drop 30 percent over the next few weeks, hitting a low on 23 March when reloading begins. It emerges that US lawmakers were unloading their stocks at the all time high in the days preceding the crash after receiving classified briefings on the Coronavirus threat while Trump played it down.

23 January 2020, COVID LOCKDOWN BEGINS. BEIJING LOCKS DOWN WUHAN AND TWO OTHER CITIES IN HUBEI PROVINCE: HUANGGANG AND EZHOU. 15 OTHER CITIES IN HUBEI FOLLOW THE WUHAN MODEL THE NEXT DAY.

22 January, COVID PANDEMIC IN THE US: Trump says, “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control”. Meanwhile, China warns that the virus could mutate and spread and steps up precautions. Trump is fully briefed on the seriousness of the coming pandemic 28 January 2020.

15 January 2020, TRUMP’S TRADE WAR – PHASE ONE CHINA TRADE DEAL SIGNED: Wall Street closes at an all-time-high: Throughout 2018 and 2019, Trump has pressured the FED’s Jay Powell to keep rates low with Quantitive Easing, resulting in the Trump Pump as the US nears election year. Trump’s Phase One trade deal with China is finally signed, boosting the markets. China agrees to buy an additional US$200 billion of American goods and services over the next two years. Meanwhile, financial pundits are waiting for the Black Swan event that will burst the Mother of All Bubbles.

January 2020, THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC: Initial panic settles into action as the novel coronavirus is identified, sequenced and shared by 11 January. China reports its first death 9 January, same date as the US with the death of Lovell “Cookie” Brown. A Chinese study in The Lancet warns: “Preparedness plans and mitigation interventions should be readied for quick deployment globally.” The WHO says in its 14 January press briefing that, while there is “no clear evidence” yet of human to human transmission, “it is certainly possible that there is limited human-to-human transmission”. H2H transmission confirmed 19 January.

30-31 December 2019, Wuhan, China: The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission notifies its medical institutions about a “strange pneumonia” and on the 31st posts a public warning on its Weibo account about the novel coronavirus that is not SARS. The news is picked up by the agencies and the WHO and reverberates around the world. This is Day Zero for the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Later, samples in France, Barcelona, Italy, Brazil and Red Cross blood samples in the US show Covid has been quietly circulating in 2019 but is first identified in China.

December 2019, Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison holidays at a US military resort in Hawaii during the devastating bush fires. Morrison goes AWOL as firefighters die, koalas and kangaroos fry, in one of the worst ever bush fire seasons. Turns out he was in Hawaii. On a military resort. On an American military resort in US territory. Not taking instructions or anything. A few months later, his Home Affairs minister Peter Dutton & Foreign Affairs minister Marisa Payne join in US Covid accusations against China in April 2020 in parallel with the release of America’s 57-page “blame China” document. Some might think this dirty pool considering China kept Australia safe from America’s 2008 Great Crash as it shook the rest of the world.

KEY DATE 18 October 2019, Event 201 and the Wuhan Military Games: The Event 201 tabletop pandemic showcase, backed by Bill Gates, Johns Hopkins University and WEF, takes place in New York, the same day as the opening of the Military Games in Wuhan. The following month, in November 2019, US intelligence briefs NATO and Israel about the pandemic in China but doesn’t warn China. Although the Pentagon later denies this, Israel insists it happened, the “assessment” culminating in the President’s Daily Brief January 2020 which Trump admits to in a recorded interview with Bob Woodward (pub 9 September 2020).

Saturday, 5 October 2019
China: scapegoat and diversion from what ails western capitalism
We all know the United States of America was built on an ancient Native American burial ground, courtesy of European immigrants. Another original sin was slavery; kidnapping men, women and children from Africa for the brute workforce that built so much of America’s wealth. 
Then there’s the 1 per cent ripping off the American people for decades, failing to invest in infrastructure, education, housing, healthcare while the richest 26 individuals took as much as the bottom half of humanity.
And now the US teeters on the edge of the worst economic recession since 1929. The national debt increased to $22 trillion with Trump adding over $2 trillion so far and China’s new wealth is expected to pick up the declining superpower’s tab as a result of Trump’s trade war shakedown.
Like Trump and Brexit, the Hong Kong protest is a revolution from the right. … All of this happening now just as America is hitting the buffers and China’s economy and 1.4 billion-strong market presents a juicy prize. “I believe in the ultimate partition of China—I mean ultimate. I hope we shall not have to do it in our day. The Aryan stock is bound to triumph.” – Winston Churchill. … continues
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June 2019 THE HONG KONG PROTESTS – National Endowment for Democracy (NED) implicated: As China fails to buckle under Trump’s renewed onslaught, anti-China protests break out in Hong Kong when Carrie Lam proposes an extradition agreement with Taiwan in order to bring to justice Chan Tongkai, a Hong Kong resident who has murdered his pregnant girlfriend on holiday in Taiwan.
Initially peaceful and attracting large numbers, the protesters claim to be demanding “democracy”. They gain sympathy at first as freedom fighters who are wary about the proposed law allowing Hong Kong resident and visitors to be extradited to the mainland. This author expects them to take over the transport system and run it for free to get Hong Kongers on board. Instead, they trash the transport and the city and begin a campaign of beating and maiming mainland Chinese, Mandarin speakers and anyone who disagrees with them, as can be seen from the numerous videos posted online. They claim police brutality but no deaths occur in the same year that US cops kill 1,004 Americans.
However, the protesters’ own brutality results in crippling injuries of civilians, the petrol burning of a 54-year old worker, attempts on police lives and a 70 year old janitor who is bricked to death. Little of this is reported in the western mainstream media except for the relentless hatchet job on the Chinese government and the Hong Kong police force whose top British officers are doxxed and threatened. Westerners are videoed directing the violence and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) emerges as supporting the protesters. The leaders are feted and flattered in Washington. Former Governor Chris Patten (also ex-chair of the BBC Trust) writes the foreword to protester Joshua Wong’s book. Western journalists video themselves cooing over petrol bomb factories in the university. 
The difference between what is seen in the videos and what is reported in the press is probably the biggest factor in widespread change of consciousness since the Iraq War and Gaza. Many commentators cite the Hong Kong protests as the moment that cemented their support for China.

Saturday, 11 May 2019
Donald Trump’s hostile takeover of the Chinese economy continues
Donald Trump’s attempted hostile takeover of China’s economy continues apace. The Chinese walked into an ambush when they presented their latest round of changes last week thinking they were still negotiating. Kicked off by Reuters’ “exclusive” briefing by “three U.S. government sources and three private sector sources”, the media then fell in with Trump and trade representative Lighthizer’s narrative that the Chinese “reneged” on a deal that was already sewn up. 
With two tweets on Sunday (provocatively, the 20th anniversary of the US bombing the Chinese embassy in Belgrade which killed three journalists) stating he was raising current tariffs on China from 10% to 25%, and planning the same for an additional $300 billion of Chinese trade, the President snapped his fingers and wiped $1.36 trillion from the world economy … continues
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March 2019 EU LABELS CHINA A “SYSTEMIC RIVAL”: Only months after a joint naval exercise with China, and on the eve of a possible end of Trump’s trade war with a deal that excludes European business interests, the EU finally buckles under Washington pressure and echoes US definition of their trade partner as an economic competitor and systemic rival. It slams Italy for joining the Belt and Road initiative (23 March 2019), a trade route running across the length of the Europe Asia landmass and beyond. Having been bailed out by China after America’s devastating 2008 crash, the EU complains about China’s subsidised economy.

Sunday, 3 February 2019
How’s it hanging in Brexitland? Politicians fiddle while Brits stare catastrophe in the face
The EU is a rich men and women’s club. But it was a partial counterweight to America’s bullying. The danger was that if Johnson et al succeeded in splitting one of the three most powerful countries in the EU away from the others, there was a real danger of pulling Britain into the US camp and under control of the Military Industrial Complex, thus making the world a more dangerous place. And we would all suffer the economic fallout … continues
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Monday, 24 December 2018
Happy New Year: Will Donald Trump’s tiny hand press the Big Red Button in 2019?
It’s fascinating (in a horror-show kind of way) to watch the United States of America write itself a new narrative. Not the one where it dominated the post-World War II liberal global order and made itself the wealthiest economy on the planet by a long chalk, but a victim narrative in which poor little America is bullied and ripped off by China, formerly one of the poorest countries in the world but which now happens to be looming in America’s rear-view mirror. 
For several years, we’ve been told by the experts that China is the exciting new economy in which the world’s investors were parking their money, while the US was in decline with failing demographics and dim long-term prospects. With China’s population of 1.4 billion, a growing middle class of over 500 million, 800 million raised out of poverty, an internet penetration rate of only 55 percent (against US 83 percent), and American companies making money hand over fist with a lot more to come, you can see how some might cast an enviable eye over such a fat, juicy market and think: I’ll have that. 
The unpalatable fact for Trump is that – taking into account in-country Chinese sales of US goods and services such as those of Starbucks, Apple, MacDonalds, Coke etc – the US has a $24bn SURPLUS with China. And as even Gary Cohn pointed out, the “deficit” represents $300bn of goods that Americans could buy cheaply and thereby feel richer than they actually were … continues
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December 2018 HUAWEI’S MENG WANZHOU ARRESTED IN CANADA: Reminiscent of what ancient Roman tyrants used to do, the daughter of the founder of the Huawei 5G tech rival to the US is arrested in Canada on suspicious charges that are never proven in court. After three years under house arrest, fighting off efforts to extradite her to the US, she is finally released 21 September 2021.

Tuesday, 13 November 2018
What’s Donald Trump’s trade war with China REALLY about?
History repeats itself: Trump’s fantasy trade-deficit is an excuse for carving up China
I’d been hoping for the press to fact-check the issue of Trump’s trade war on China, which threatens to tip parts of the world (including America) into recession. I am disappointed to see the figures of $376bn and $500bn US trade deficit with China regurgitated in the British and American media with few corrections, or any attempts to cut through the hawks’ spin.
These elevated figures are further distorted by the fact that China is still mainly a base for assembly of goods which the nation is hoping to leave far behind in favour of high-end tech. So, for example, a thousand-buck iPhone X costs around $500 to make, out of which the high-end components are made elsewhere (Taiwan and South Korea), while China’s costs amount to about 10 per cent, or around $47. And yet the entire wholesale cost of $500 is counted in the purported deficit with China — a ten-fold distortion …continues
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AUGUST 2018 The UN XINJIANG REPORT THAT IS NOT THE UN: The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) confirms that the widely-reported claim of mass incarceration of Uyghurs in internment camps was made by the one American member of the independent Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, and not by the UN or its officials. Associated Press reveals that this member “did not specify a source for that information in her remarks at the hearing” and yet it spreads far and wide in the mainstream press, ending up quoted as verification.

Friday, 4 May 2018
When is a dress just a dress? American teenager’s Chinese prom dress and cultural appropriation The Guardian
Anna Chen issues a warning in the Guardian and burns her bridges with the mainstream media (MSM): With President Trump and his acolytes pumping up yellow peril fears around China, and his trade wars threatening to slip into hot wars, the last thing we need is this trivialised pastiche of serious debate. Minorities have precious little ammunition with which to challenge tribal juggernauts. Don’t waste what little cultural and political firepower we have … continues
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April 2018: Even the bankers recognise the dangers of the threat of a trade war on our global lifeboat. Christine Lagarde of the IMF points out that the world economy is emerging in sync for the first time since America’s Great Crash of 2008, so don’t wreck it. Boris Johnson later complains in 2020 that Trump’s trade war is letting all the air out of the tyres of the global system. Lagarde nails the problem: “At the core was financial innovation that vastly outpaced regulation and supervision. Financial institutions—particularly in the United States and Europe—went on a frenzy of reckless risk-taking.” 

Jan 2018: THE GERMAN PORT OF DUISBERG BECOMES EUROPE’S MOST IMPORTANT HUB FOR CHINESE TRAINS ALONG THE BELT AND ROAD. Europe and China gravitate closer together, threatening to leave America in the cold even though US companies are making half their profits from in-China sales and services. A three-way standoff looms.

December 2017 THE START OF US SANCTIONS AGAINST HUAWEI: Congress prohibits the use of Huawei equipment in the US government in 2018. John Bolton, US National Security Advisor 2018-19, admits he knew in advance of the arrest in Canada of Meng Wanzhou, the daughter of Huawei’s founder and top executive of the tech giant, in December 2018 on the day Trump secures a trade war truce with President Xi Jinping in a personal meeting. He later claims in 2019 that Trump offers her up in exchange of a trade deal with China. Huawei is accused of criminality by the Department of Justice and added to the trade restriction Entity List by the Department of Commerce in May 2019. The Department of Justice ups the ante in February 2020, adding racketeering and theft of trade secrets to the charge sheet which is never proved in a court of law. Biden keeps Huawei on the Entity List but both admins carry on limited low key trade. Meng is finally released from Canadian house arrest on 21 September 2021.

Friday, 7 April 2017
President Trump turns on a dime and bombs Syria: deep state regains control
Lemme see … in the week when Steve Bannon is finally ousted from the National Security Council (NSC) with nary a murmer from Trump who suddenly does a dramatic reverse on Syria in the very moments when Chinese President Xi Jinping is at Mar-a-Lago … Phew! All the behind-the-scenes action finally manifesting in the public sphere with the first direct U.S. airstrike on a Syrian airbase. 
Let’s unpack this with what little info we have. Assad is winning the civil war but, just at the moment the rebels and their backers want the US smashing them into regime change, he handily provides the event most likely to bring it on and uses the banned chemical weapon sarin on his citizens leaving some 80 dead and many more horribly injured. And only weeks after 30 Yemeni civilians including “beautiful babies” and an American Navy Seal were killed in allied airstrikes in concert with those noble defenders of democracy, Saudi Arabia, and closely following over a hundred killed in Mosul. …continues
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Friday, 27 January 2017
President Trump to personally handle UK trade deal despite his nightmare record in business: Theresa May rolls over
Madam Miaow prescient yet again in 2017 …
So the Fed will have to tighten monetary control by raising interest rates to control rising inflation after years of trying to kick start it, and the US will be at, or heading back to, negative rates by next year.  
Asia might pull something positive out of a hat, especially if China fills the gap left by a protectionist USA. But then the stubby-fingered one will most likely try to bomb them back to the stone age. You can see the boys gagging to play with the toys with a blockade of the South China Sea’s Malacca Straits as the opener. … continues
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CHINESE BELT AND ROAD REACHES BARKING, EAST LONDON: A glimmer of hope for the world as the first of China’s UK-bound Belt and Road trains reaches Barking in East London, 18 January 2017. The China Railway Express left Yiwu in eastern China two weeks previously on 3 January carrying our favourite merchandise, saving on time and pollution.

Saturday, 19 November 2016
Trump’s protectionism could be midwife to prosperous Asian region — if he doesn’t nuke it first
As Europe implodes and the US goes into protectionist lock-down, the strongest potential area of growth is the Asian region (including Australasia) due to powerful demographics. Christine Lagarde of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) forecasts Asia to drive nearly two-thirds of global growth over 4 years. But that was BT (before Trump). 
President Barack Obama saw China as an economic rival and tried to strangle it by creating the Tran-Pacific Partnership (TPP) consisting of 12 South American and Pacific nations and the US but EXCLUDING China in its own backyard. Poking the sleeping dragon with a sharp stick, Obama also transferred military from the Middle East to the Pacific Rim and the South China Sea. 
Whether you like it or not, China saw what was coming down the pike and asserted its presence by building those islands … continues
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Monday, 7 November 2016
Zombie Punks vs Scary Clowns in the New World Order after Clinton or Trump wins POTUS election
With only one day to go before the US votes for its next president, one question remains: who is the least worst? 
Think about this. Trump, Putin and now, it appears, China, are contemplating a period summed up in the famous term of the early 20th Century economist Joseph Schumpeter as ‘creative destruction’. …
… Recession is coming to the UK thanks to inflation of at least 4 per cent headed our way. (Mark Carney is staying on at the BOE until 2019 ’cause he knows the chickens will be coming home to roost by 2018.) Employers won’t match inflation, wages will freeze or effectively fall, our spending will drop and companies will go bust. And there’s that great big global debt bubble that has to eventually go “pop” … 
But for capitalists who can hang on through the slump, there are fortunes to be made as Britain then “recovers” and stocks bought at fire sale prices rise. Same for the US where markets are at the end of a bull run that has been fuelled by easy money injected into the system by the central banks. Only the fittest survive in Trumpworld, everyone else is going to find it very hard. … continues
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Friday, 4th November 2016
BBC turns Terracotta Warriors origins into culture wars
The world is changing, the sun sets on the British empire and all that is solid melts like a Mr Whippy ice-cream in the summer heat. 
Some people can’t stand it. In terms of cultural appropriation, Dan Snow’s claim in his programme, The Greatest Tomb On Earth: Secrets Of Ancient China, that the Terracotta Warriors (made some two centuries before the Common Era), were Greek-led innovations takes the chauvinist biscuit. 
Snow dons his best Victorian colonialist demeanor to assure BBC viewers that, joy of joys, it was us who did it after all. All is right with the world. 
According to the BBC puff, “Mobilising the latest technology, delving into some of the oldest texts, enlisting world experts and employing forensic science, together the three reveal an explosive secret from the foundations of the Chinese empire”. … continues
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Friday, 21 October 2016
Global economy running on fumes: let’s have a jolly nice war
Sterling has taken a post-Brexit pounding and may even fall below parity with the dollar. The US economy is at the top of a bull run and running on fumes. The Euro is sliding and the European Union may disintegrate. Deutsche Bank may fail (it’s much, MUCH bigger than Lehman Bros) and could be the trigger for another economic meltdown … only without the safety net of a wealthy China growing at full throttle. China has the best potential to thrive but has a ticking time-bomb credit bubble of 250 per cent of GDP. … continues
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JUNE 2016, BREXIT: The UK referendum decides by 52 to 48 per cent of the total votes cast to leave the European Union in order to “take back control”. Thus only 37 per cent of the British population votes to take us out of the EU frying pan and into the US fire. Europe has been been drawn by China’s sheer size and gravity towards the rising superpower that America sees as its rival and “strategic competitor”. Obama warns Britain they are back of the queue for trade deals. Republicans such as Donald Trump and his allies like UKIP’s Nigel Farage relish the move.

Wednesday, 6 July 2016
CHILCOT REPORT confirms anti-war movement was right from the start: Tony Blair trampled over the truth for the Iraq War
The Chilcot report on the Iraq War has finally been published and all eyes are on Tony Blair. 
It’s taken seven years and 2.6 million words to confirm what anti-war voices were saying from September 2001 — do not invade Iraq on a flimsy pretext, because the results will be dire for the Iraqis and for the world. 
Chilcot says the inquiry does not accept Blair’s claim that it was impossible to predict the post-invasion problems. Those problems, he says, were indeed anticipated.
“Mr Blair had been warned, however, that military action would increase the threat from Al Qaeda to the UK and to UK interests. He had also been warned that an invasion might lead to Iraq’s weapons and capabilities being transferred into the hands of terrorists,” Chilcot said in this morning’s opening statement. … continues
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20 October 2015 UK CHINA GOLDEN ERA — PRESIDENT XI JINPING’S STATE VISIT TO BRITAIN: President Xi toasts Queen Elizabeth at the state banquet. Two days later, Prime Minister David Cameron takes Xi for a pint at his local pub. Xi urges Cameron to stay in the EU:  “China hopes to see a prosperous Europe and a united EU, and hopes Britain, as an important member of the EU, can play an even more positive and constructive role in promoting the deepening development of China-EU ties”.

5 October 2015, THE TRANS PACIFIC PARTNERSHIP: The Obama administration’s TPP agreement with 11 partnering nations is concluded. It excludes China from membership and benefits such as the elimination of 18,000 import taxes on US goods, standing as high as 70 per cent in the auto trade and covering manufacturing, agricultural, information and communication products.

24 September 2015 THE THUCYDIDES TRAP: Graham Allison raises the spectre of the Trap in The Atlantic the week Xi Jinping make his first visit to the US to meet President Obama. Xi offers not to militarise China’s reclaimed islands as Vietnam has been doing. Obama’s response is to pile in even more military. Allison publishes his thoughts on the dangers of competing superpowers stumbling into catastrophic war in his 2017 book, Destined for War, whose Thucydides Trap model uses the classic example of ancient Sparta feeling threatened by upcoming rival Athens and the ensuing war that cripples both states.

May 2015 MADE IN CHINA 2025: President Xi announces the national strategic plan to lift the country out of its lowly status as the “world’s factory” making our cheap tat and turn themselves into a technological powerhouse.

30 August 2014
South China Morning Post magazine: The Chinese Labour Corps by Anna Chen
This month, the world commemorated the centenary of the outbreak of the first world war. Notably absent in the British ceremonies was any mention of the 140,000 or more Chinese workers, including 96,000 in the Chinese Labour Corps (CLC), who provided the support system for frontline Allied troops. Thousands of these men died in service.
The Chinese did the heavy support work – digging trenches, hauling ammunition and supplies, and retrieving bodies. Yet none of Britain’s 43,000 first world war memorials acknowledge the participation of the CLC, despite the battlefields of France and Belgium being littered with the remains of these men. … continues
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1 March 2014 XINJIANG: A terrorist attack at Kunming rail station in Yunnan Province kills 31 and injures 143. As in the US and the UK, China is subjected to a renewed wave of terrorism, 2009 to 2017.

February 2014 THE UKRAINE COUP: The US-backed Maidan coup following the Euromaidan protests succeeds in the Ukraine, overthrowing the democratically elected President Yanukovych. Neo-conservative national security advisor Victoria Nuland (wife of Project for the New American Century founder Robert Kagan) infamously tells the US ambassador, “F**k the EU.” Russia takes back Crimea, populated mainly by Russian-speakers.

2013 THE IMF AND THE UKRAINE: The International Monetary Fund (IMF) demands that, having defied them and raised minimum wages and pensions, President Viktor Yanukovych should liberalise the Ukraine economy and slash budgets and energy subsidies in exchange for trade integration with the EU and an aid package of $15 billion. He declines Vice President Joe Biden’s deal and turns instead to Russia. This seals his fate. NATO pledges support for the Ukraine. The American-backed coup succeeds in 2014. Ukraine will cut energy subsidies to satisfy the IMF in 2016. The Nord Stream pipelines will be blown up in September 2022 making Europe dependent on American Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) and sending prices soaring.

July-August 2013 TALISMAN SABER MILITARY EXERCISES: 22,000 US personnel and 7,000 Australians using 26 ships and V-22 aircraft practise war on China off north east Australia. It involves blockading various straits, including the crucial Malacca Strait, fencing in our global factory under the pretence that China will want to block its own sea lanes.

10 March 2013, FORMER VICE-PRESIDENT XI JINPING IS ELECTED STATE PRESIDENT at the 12th National People’s Congress, replacing President Hu Jintao

15 November 2012, XI JINPING GAINS KEY LEADERSHIP ROLES
Vice-president Xi is elected general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC) at the 18th Central Committee. Along with two thirds of the party leadership replaced, this represents a major change of guard, although he keeps Li Keqiang as premier. He stresses that China does not export revolution or poverty. The average Chinese Joe wants better education, jobs, healthcare, higher living standards and environment and Xi is the the man to deliver the “Chinese Dream”. Both tigers and flies would be targeted in anti-corruption action, and he isn’t about to do anything reckless with the economy. Slow and steady progress is the order of the day.

2012, PRESIDENT OBAMA’S PIVOT TO ASIA TURNS EVEN NASTIER IN THE MALACCA STRAIT
Obama’s Pivot to Asia steps up its intimidation of China in 2012 when US plans for military expansion in the Asia-Pacific include sending more forces to Singapore, Darwin, Perth, Guam, Philippines, South Korea and Japan plus a floating navy of 16,000 troops. The Malacca Straits becomes a key focus, linking the Pacific with the Indian Ocean and the location of US ally war exercises. To all intents and purposes, this is a practise run to blockade China and its sea routes to the rest of the world outside outside Asia. In addition, the US has a noose of hundreds of bases surrounding China.

22 October 2012
The Guardian: Memo to the RSC: east Asians can be more than just dogs and maids by Anna Chen
The Royal Shakespeare Company’s casting for The Orphan of Zhao seems to hark back to an age of British imperialism
It’s no fun being bred out of the cultural gene pool. Watching TV, theatre or film, I’m on constant alert for a glimpse of someone who looks Chinese, for the slightest resemblance to an estimated 499,999 others like me living in the UK. …
So it was with a sense of “here we go again” that we learned that the esteemed Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) is mounting the classic play The Orphan of Zhao in the way prize trophies usually get mounted: gutted and stuffed. This 13th-century Yuan-dynasty masterpiece may be the first Chinese play, to make it to the hallowed RSC, but the only parts given to actors of east Asian heritage are two dogs. And a maid-servant. Who dies. Tragically.
Yes, out of 17 roles in the classic known to Eurocentrics as “the Chinese Hamlet”, a grand total of three have gone to Asians. Another dog is played by a black actor, making you wonder exactly what the RSC is trying to say. … continues
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2 August 2012
The Guardian: The monstering of swimmer Ye Shiwen says much about declining superpowers by Anna Chen
Chinese Olympic athletes are people, not comic book villains. Something’s going on when one nation is so singled out
It’s not cricket, you know. There’s something fiendishly cruel about the monstering of 16-year-old Ye Shiwen, who won a swimming gold in Saturday’s 400m individual medley. First she was labelled a cheat in front of a global audience and then refused an apology when repeated drugs tests show up clean as a whistle. …
The argument slips around like a noose that keeps on missing. You can’t get her on doping as she’s clear so, in order to save face, it must be genetic engineering, the Chinese being so subhumanly clever and ruthless. …
Elsewhere, the press has been sly in their dehumanising insinuations about Ye looking like a “killer whale”, and the Chinese being selected to the point of being a “different species”, with shades of Morrissey’s infamous “subspecies” jibe. …
Is it the howl of big beasts who once defined human excellence and standards of beauty being knocked off their perch by the rising superpower? … continues
READ MORE: Guardian article >>>
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Thursday, 17 May 2012
The Opium War by Julia Lovell book review: Smoke and mirrors
The West’s culture warriors get into gear, bending the narrative to warm us up for what’s coming down the pike – a reordering of global power.
With renewed calls for the West to assert its imperial might in the interest of “capitalism and democracy … if necessary by military force ” (historian and BBC Reith Lecturer Niall Ferguson), it’s useful to examine one episode in Britain’s history when we attempted to do so, with catastrophic results for the conquered nation. …
Lovell seeks to make a case against the communist government, but her thrust replaces one orthodoxy with another. In describing the fundamental rottenness of an ossified and decadent empire (China’s, not ours) she inadvertently stirs a degree of sympathy with those men and women who tried to build a better society in response to the horrors visited upon a country on its knees but who have tragically failed to avoid writing their own catalogue of misery despite doubling life-expectancy and raising 600 million out of absolute poverty. As a demolition job on the upstart rival on the global stage, this book is sure to do well among those less scholarly than the professor who will seize on this exercise in exculpation with glee. …continues
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March 2012, CCTVS IN CHINA FACILITATED BY US CAPITAL
Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital finances China’s mass installation of CCTVs across the country, overtaking the UK for the number of surveillance cameras per capita.

“Expect proxy wars and monstering of China in the supine media as we all get programmed to cheer World War Three and a Half.”

Anna Chen, 17 November 2011

Thursday, 17 November 2011
Obama in Yo Mama war with China: Pacific Rimmers look out!
Is it my imagination or is cuddly President Barack Obama picking a fight with China? 
No sooner has the world begun to heal after the Bush neocon excesses that led to such bloodshed in the Middle east, not to mention an enormous fillip to the arms industry, than Obama announces a tectonic shift in US imperialist policy.  
Only a few weeks since Hillary Clinton announced that the new superpower was in the queue not so far along from Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Iran and Korea for whipping into shape, I listened to Obama’s speech to the Australian Parliament last night, struck by sabre-rattling out of a bygone age. “The United States is a Pacific power, and we are here to stay.” Is he on something? … Expect proxy wars and monstering of China in the supine media as we all get programmed to cheer World War Three and a Half.
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17 NOVEMBER 2011: PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA (2009-2017) TOURS THE ASIA-PACIFIC AND ANNOUNCES A CHANGE OF POLICY SHORTLY AFTER CHINA HAS BAILED OUT AMERICA AND THE GLOBAL ECONOMY.
Obama appears to pick a fight with them, no good deed going unpunished. “America is a Pacific power and we are here to stay,” China must be a “responsible stakeholder” and “play by the rules”.
“As President, I have, therefore, made a deliberate and strategic decision – as a Pacific nation, the United States will play a larger and long-term role in shaping this region and its future, by upholding core principles and in close partnership with our allies and friends. … I have directed my national security team to make our presence and mission in the Asia Pacific a top priority. As a result, reductions in U.S. defense spending will not – I repeat, will not – come at the expense of the Asia Pacific. … As we plan and budget for the future, we will allocate the resources necessary to maintain our strong military presence in this region.  We will preserve our unique ability to project power and deter threats to peace. We will keep our commitments, including our treaty obligations to allies like Australia. And we will constantly strengthen our capabilities to meet the needs of the 21st century. Our enduring interests in the region demand our enduring presence in the region. The United States is a Pacific power, and we are here to stay.”
Obama’s speech follows Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s manifesto, “America’s Pacific Century,” published by Foreign Policy, 1 October 2011. In it, she emphasises the strategic importance of the central EurAsia landmass and the “Western Pacific,” right up to China’s South and East China Sea coast.
“The future of politics will be decided in Asia, not Afghanistan or Iraq, and the United States will be right at the center of the action.”
The following year, President Barack Obama announces his Pivot to Asia, pulling out military forces from the Middle East and moving them to Asia.

24 August 2011
Vincent Chin and Simon San: two murders, same indifference
Asian lives continue to be devalued and diminished in the USA and Britain. Dehumanisation is enabled by keeping us invisible and excluded from the culture. It is easier to scapegoat and wish ill on someone whose humanity is hidden.
Vincent Chin and Simon San were born and murdered decades apart on two different continents, but the common factor is the callousness and indifference with which their cases have been dealt with by the investigating police and prosecutors. 
Justice is off the menu when it comes to these Chinese deaths. While the police finally admitthat an acknowledgment of the racist dimension of Simon’s murder by a white mob outside the family-run takeaway in Edinburgh in Scotland would have resulted in stiff sentences, the men have been given 24 months, 26 months and five years for the thug who landed the killer blow that smashed Simon’s head against the pavement. …
This insulting sentence echoes the $3,000 fine and three years probation imposed on the white Detroit car-workers, Richard Ebens and Michael Nitz, who beat Vincent Chin to death with a baseball bat in front of witnesses one summer evening in 1982. … continues 
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JULY 2011, CHINA’S HOLDING OF US TREASURIES PEAKS: Having saved, not only America’s economy but the global system, too, China realises that no good deed goes unpunished. One year after Obama leads the attack on the rising superpower with his Pivot to China in July 2010, China’s purchase of US Treasuries stall with the result that it’s all downhill from here.

June 2011 WIKILEAKS CABLES RELEASED: Secret cables from the US embassy in Beijing from 1989 reveal there were not the deaths in Tiananmen Square as claimed in a vicious propaganda war. There are estimated to be between dozens to several hundreds deaths from clashes between the PLA and protesters in the surrounding streets, which is bad enough, but not the massacre. In retrospect, this looks like one of the USA’s early Colour Revolutions we’ll see again and again in the years following. This revelation confirms what I’d suspected and marks a change of consciousness not just for myself, but many others. No wonder America wants revenge on Julian Assange. For the record, I no longer think of Gaddafi as a despot and I question the attacks on America’s list of target countries. America’s ruling elite won’t even share wealth with their own people, with the top one per cent owning as much as the bottom 90 percent, and 0.1 per cent owning 15.7 per cent of the nation’s wealth. Why would they share the world with anyone?

21 May 2011
Is China a responsible stakeholder? Chatham House report review
In 2005, the Bush Jr administration echoed the fear that China would not be a responsible stakeholder even as they bombed Iraq. And Condoleeza Rice had America on paranoia standby when she declared China to be “not a status quo power”, meaning the US could not be certain that its own interests would remain untouched by the new kid on the block. …
… However, the John Milius school of Red Dawn politics rages that China is only pretending to be peaceful and that she’ll reveal her full gory glory in true Fu Manchu fashion once all her plans and capabilities are in place. I saw Team America. I know how this one plays out. …
… Surfing a tidal wave of claims that China is not pulling its weight, Etzioni cites a parsimonious foreign aid policy. After the Haiti earthquake in 2010, I remember foreign media reporting the rapid arrival of fully tooled-up Chinese rescue teams, complete with dog-handlers, on the stricken island before many Western nations, including Britain, could muster their forces.
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Sunday 1 May 2011
Unto the last babe. Gaddafi’s family slaughtered
Muamar Gaddafi led the richest country in Africa whose people enjoyed housing, health, interest-free loans, free electricity, a percentage of oil sales for all citizens and many other socialist benefits. He’d proposed an African Alliance and continental currency, was then branded a dictator, the prelude to violent regime change, and was assassinated while Obama and Hillary Clinton watched: “We came, we saw, he died,” she quipped. Most of his wealth remains unaccounted for.
Killing Muammar Gaddafi’s family unto the last babe doesn’t seem to have much to to with protecting the rebels from our old mucker but it draws the oil reserves ever closer to our grasp. … continues
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Thursday, 10 March 2011
Working for the Clampdown: Niall Ferguson’s testosterone theory of history
Culture warrior lays out US empire’s core strategy and aims in his Channel 4 TV series. Niall Ferguson’s ‘Killer Apps’ was an early shot by academia in rationalising the coming realignment of global power for the public. The Golden Age with China is to have a limited shelf-life.
Coming on like an Oxbridge Jeremy Clarkson, Ferguson promises an explanation as to why the West is in decline and about to be overtaken by Asia, as represented by China in the first programme. However, instead of presenting a cool economic and political analysis of history since 1420 when China was the most advanced nation in the world and England was a ‘septic isle’, this heavyweight intellectual rammed home a barrage of triumphalist tub-thumping which quite startled me. His nostalgia for Empire, as once observed by an astute Eric Hobsbawm, was cranked up to eleven as he attempted to nail his viewers to the headboard … 
Fergy fetishises capitalist competition out of context, out of time. ‘By being divided, the West was able to rule the world’, he says, as if this is a good thing on its own. He wants this ‘killer app’ applied as a principle where we are all atomised and competing against each other for dwindling resources … continues
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18-21 January 2011, PRESIDENT HU JINTAO’S STATE VISIT TO THE US
President Hu Jintao meets Barack Obama in Washington and appears to settle the atmosphere after the ructions of Copenhagen and China’s reluctance to rein in North Korea’s President Kim Jong Un and his nuclear tests. In a joint statement Hu and Obama “reaffirmed their commitment to building a positive, cooperative, and comprehensive U.S. – China relationship for the 21st  century, which serves the interests of the American and Chinese peoples and of the global community.”

Thursday, 11 November 2010
UK PM DAVID CAMERON’S TEAM WEAR POPPIES IN CHINA
Yes, that’s a great idea. Wear poppies on a trade visit to China in the 150th anniversary year marking the end of the Opium Wars when Britain forced cheap Bengal opium on the Chinese people at the point of a gun. Prime Minister David Cameron may think he is remembering the dead of World Wars One and Two, but in China the vivid symbols only serve as a reminder of Western arrogance and corruption and the Chinese who died due to the actions of a ruthless invading force … continues
[Ironically, this event ended up marking the start of the Golden Era of UK China relations, brought to a close by the US and Boris Johnson.] 
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Saturday, 25 September 2010
Ed Miliband a safe pair of hands for the US
So, Miliband Minor gets the job. No surprises there considering he’s been falling over himself to prove that he’s as much in the US’s pockets as Tony Blair was. …  As I commented at the time, the Danish Text produced in secret by the rich nations led by the US at the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit last year was in OPPOSITION to the position of China, India, et al. It would have left the US producing carbon emissions at four times per capita that of the Chinese. … continues
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Sunday, 8 August 2010
BBC jumps the orientalist shark: Fu Manchu in Edinburgh
Shortly after Anna presented the series, Chinese in Britain, and other rare efforts to challenge Yellow Peril tropes embedded in the culture (and possibly prompted by them), here’s their revival. Another vampire that won’t stay staked.
Even Radio 4 is at it. Hard on the heels of last week’s Sherlock oriental hate-fest, my beloved BBC Radio 4 has just broadcast someone called Miles Jupp presenting a thinly disguised bit of sinophobia celebrating one of the most notorious exercises in colonialist literature: Fu Manchu In Edinburgh. 
While it’s valid to explore the imaginary world which an iconic literary creation inhabits, the unquestioning depiction of Chinese as dehumanised hate-figures in the almost utter absence of humanised Chinese in the culture is fairly loathsome, not to mention irresponsible. The (il)liberal peppering throughout of orientalised buzz-words such as “fiendish” and “diabolical” only reinforces the suspicion that they’ve dug up Leni Riefenstahl and hired her as executive producer. … continues
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KEY DATE: 23 July 2010, OBAMA’S STRATEGIC PIVOT TO ASIA IS LAUNCHED, ENDING THE US-CHINA PARTNERSHIP.
The opening salvo in Obama’s “return to the Asia-Pacific” is fired by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the ASEAN Regional Forum in Hanoi 23 July, right in the middle of China’s World Expo 2010 showcase in Shanghai. This is the year China overtakes Japan to become the world’s second largest economy, and passes the US to become the world’s largest manufacturer.
The US is clearly rattled by China’s rapid progress and the rising superpower is now seen as America’s main rival rather than its partner.
Obama deploys 60 percent of US navy and air force to the Asia-Pacific region and creates the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) which excludes China from its trade benefits.
In further containment policy, Hillary Clinton starts her “smart power” initiative, stirring up conflict between China and its neighbours.
Critics point out that the effect was to startle China into modernising its military, deepened mistrust between the two superpowers, and focused China’s energies on its economic and trade structures such as Belt and Road, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RECP), the Free Trade Area of the Asia-Pacific (FTAAP) and creation of the BRICS Development Bank and Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Some have labelled President Joe Biden’s aggressive anti-China policy since his election in 2020 as “Obama’s third term”.

Tuesday, 8 June 2010
Anna tackles embedded dehumanisation of Chinese in the culture, making visible the invisible. Or, in this case, making audible the unperceived subtleties of manipulation through music.
Chopsticks At Dawn – BBC Radio 4
BBC Radio 4 — 13:30
Tuesday 8th June 2010 
Written and presented by Anna Chen with Dr Jonathan Walker. Produced by Mukti Jain Campion and Chris Eldon-Lee for Culture Wise.
Pick Of The Day: RadioTimes, Observer, Sunday Telegraph, Time Out, Mail On Sunday. Also daily choice in the Times, Telegraph and Independent
“Anna Chen reflects, through gritted teeth, on representations of Chinese music, the ingy pingy clichés as used by everyone from George Formby to David Bowie, demeaning a culture which, in other fields, we respect. This isn’t a dreary sermon, though. It’s a lively, rueful journey through aural conditioning. Why do some sounds suggest the Orient to us? She listens to Ravel and has the pentatonic scale (as played on a piano’s black keys) explained to her as a short cut to something that to Westerners signals ‘east’. But there’s more to it than that.” – Daily Telegraph
What makes certain configurations of notes in Western music sound Chinese? And why does it set my teeth on edge?
Chinese decorative arts are revered in the West. From Willow pattern dinner plates to the Brighton Pavilion, their designs are regarded as beautiful and sophisticated. But for the past two centuries European composers and musicians have had no qualms about mercilessly parodying what they thought of as ‘Chinese tunes’.
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1 May to 31 October 2010 WORLD EXPO, SHANGHAI and CHINA BECOMES SECOND LARGEST ECONOMY IN THE WORLD
Like the 2008 Olympic Games held in Beijing, the Shanghai Expo showcases China’s technological progress, drawing 73 million visitors from across the world. In the first quarter of 2010, the Chinese economy overtakes Japan to become the second-biggest in the world after the USA. Goldman Sachs predicts China will become the largest around 2027.

Friday, 19th March 2010
This is where the West wants to keep China, making our tat instead of innovating and steadily developing as the world’s lifeboat and growth engine. Anna made this programme in 2010 and look how far they’ve come.
China, Britain and the Nunzilla Conundrum
Written and presented by Anna Chen. Producer Sally Heaven.
BBC Radio 4 – 11.00-11.30am 
PICK OF THE DAY Guardian Guide, Radio Times and Daily Telegraph which says, ” … tying it with a ribbon of her wit. “
PICK OF THE WEEK Sunday Telegraph ” … refreshingly original …”
Recommended by the Diocese of Liverpool
Made in China, designed in Britain, consumed in the West. Anna Chen asks what throwaway gifts such as the fire-breathing wind-up Nunzilla toy or Mummy Mike tell Britain about both its own society and its relationship with China.
“Perhaps a taste for tat signals an economy in the later stages of capitalism which, staring into the abyss, finds solace (if no actual solution) in fits of giggles. For the Chinese, with memories of deprivation rooted in centuries of foreign exploitation, imperial rule and civil wars, wasting money on trivia is serious business. …
… “People want to buy into the brand,” he says of a nation entering the equivalent of Britain’s 1960s economic explosion. “There is extreme wealth, and they aspire to European brands and European-made products.”
“Simon Collinson of Warwick University Business School says change is underway. “As the Chinese get better at understanding what is needed in the West they will get better, not just at designing, but actually coming up with new innovations.”
“The good news is that the government is closing down the bad old factories, with fewer but higher-tech facilities surviving. Only 3,000 out of 8,000 toy factories survive. And in 2006 they would have relaxed their restrictions on unions had the American Chamber of Commerce, backed up by the Europeans, not lobbied hard to stop it happening. …” continues
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2010, SOUTH CHINA SEA AND ASIA PIVOT:
The Shakedown timeline begins in earnest. In 2010, the Obama administration begins a new strategy, echoing NATO’s proposed extension to Russia’s borders, by asserting US power on mainland Asia. It woos Vietnam and Cambodia, China’s close neighbours, with “strategic cooperation” and military exercises.
On the Korean peninsula, Bush’s planned gradual military withdrawal is reversed as Obama pours in even more forces. Australia and Singapore receive new deployments of US troops & hardware.
In 2012, China ends support for US sanctions on Iran.

Tuesday, 22 December 2009 
Sinophobia and Copenhagen: open letter to the Guardian’s Mark Lynas 
PREVIOUSLY: The story so far … One moment we were told there was a scandal brewing with the leaking of the ‘Danish Text’, a stitch-up of the poor nations by the wealthy, with the US and Britain among those implicated (8th Dec 2009 onwards), the next moment, this happened. 
The Copenhagen blame game continues with the media reaching a hysterical pitch in their attempts to demonise China over the disappointing results at the climate change summit. 
The Guardian publishes another lurid smear, this time by someone called Mark Lynas and titled: “How do I know China wrecked the Copenhagen deal? I was in the room” 
Starring Mark Lynas as Sax Rohmer which, I guess, makes me Fu Manchu. (I recommend you read all the comments on the Guardian thread.) … continues
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Saturday, 19 December 2009 
Climate change: Is new Independent newspaper regime Sinophobic? 
Well, I used to be a fan of The Independent, what with having Robert Fisk and being so brilliant on the Iraq war. But with an article yesterday headlined, “China’s delaying tactics threaten climate deal” by Chris Green, and allowing racist epithets in their comments threads, has The Indy jumped the shark? … 
Let’s remember it’s not China that’s been belching out carbon emissions for over a hundred years. America has cheated the Kyoto figures, claiming to aim to cut emissions by a measly 17 percent by 2020. But this is against 2005 levels and not the Kyoto base year of 1990, meaning if we’re lucky, the US will have made cuts of only 4 percent. No wonder they put the rat into ratify and refused to sign up. 
Currently producing four times the emissions of China per capita, even if all had gone well at Copenhagen, the US would still have been allowed to pollute at twice the rate of the poor countries for each man, woman and child by 2050. … continues
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Saturday, 12 December 2009
Tony Blair admits Iraq war lies: what happens at Chilcot?
What sort of madness is it that makes a person insist in the face of facts, principles and public opposition, that they alone are right in taking an action that results in over a million civilian deaths, impoverishes us as a nation and rips up our moral fabric?
Tony Blair has now admitted in the softest of interviews with BBC’s Fern Britton — not Jeremy Paxman or any of the other heavyweights, note —that his decision to go to war in Iraq was nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), and everything to do with regime change. … continues 
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8 December, COPENHAGEN: LEAKED “DANISH TEXT” STITCH-UP BY THE RICH NATIONS
News breaks on day two of the summit that the industrialised nations are secretly working to betray the poorer nations by grabbing power over poorer nations while weakening their own commitments to reducing greenhouse gases despite having pumped out most of the CO2 themselves since the industrial revolution. The document abandons the 2C global warming limit, omits targets to cut emissions by the developed nations, sidelines the UN and effectively trashes the agreed Kyoto protocol. It would mean the richer nations, per capita, would be allowed to emit twice as much as everyone else.
Within days, knives are out. A rogues gallery of politicised climate experts divert anger and frustration onto China.

Sunday, 6 December 2009 
China, Copenhagen and climate change
Another climate summit, another chance for the West to blame China for the pollution they themselves pumped out over a century and a half since their industrial revolutions. Having transferred manufacturing to the profitable cheap labour of China’s global workshop, the US leads the charge deflecting from their own inaction.
Monday sees the start of the Copenhagen climate conference, marking the end of a two-year period which aims to see a far-reaching and legally binding global agreement on how to combat climate change. 
China is widely regarded as the Big Bad in this scenario, called “the world’s biggest polluter”, and yet the West has been belching out carbon emissions for 160 years with no serious sign of abatement. The US is still the biggest polluter per capita with Americans still consuming a huge proportion of the world’s resources. I don’t know whether the figure of one American kid consuming the same as 100 Bangladeshi children still holds true, but the nation that wants gas at ten cents a gallon and persists in its divine right to drive Humvees is telling China to shut the fridge door. …
China has introduced a whole slew of newly released renewable energy and clean technology regulations, while all the West can come up with are delusional carbon market exchanges where rich nations buy carbon allowances from poor nations. Over five million people in the city of Dezhou, Shandong, use electric appliances powered by solar energy. 
Each Chinese household will be expected to pay the annual equivalent of $64 to contribute towards the $30 billion dollars per year China needs to invest to meet its climate aims. … continues 
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16-18 November 2009, OBAMA STATE VISIT TO CHINA
The joint statement from Presidents Obama and Hu Jintao recognises that “U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue offers a unique forum to promote understanding, expand common ground, reduce differences, and develop solutions to common problems,” whatever they might possibly be. It stresses the importance of US and Chinese to “advance sustained and reliable military-to-military relations in the future” just in case …
Which is why the events at the upcoming Copenhagen climate summit the following month are so startling.

13 November 2009 OBAMA IN TOKYO
At the Tokyo leg of his tour of Asia, one year after his election, Barack Obama calls himself the “first Pacific president” despite all that World War II baggage, while China saves the world economy from America’s devastating crash by acting as shock absorber.

Friday, 9 October 2009
Chinese serial killer tamed: Turandot first night review
The West divides Asian women into dangerous Dragon Ladies and passive Lotus Blossoms, the deep, collective psychological template for a feminised China, and codifies it across the culture. In this instance in opera. Giacomo Puccini creates the submissive, tragic, Cho Cho San in his 1904 opera of David Belasco’s 1900 play about Americans in Japan, Madame Butterfly.
The play and opera are written for western audiences shortly after the first Sino-Japanese war (1894-5) makes Japan the dominant power in the region, so perhaps the feeble, disempowered East of the theatrical portrayal is wishful thinking.
China is at its weakest due to a decaying Qing dynasty and foreign forces feasting on the wounded nation. Japan has learnt from China’s Opium Wars defeat and put on military muscle.
Turandot is premiered in 1926, 14 years after the Republic of China is founded and civil war looms. China and Japan are gaining strength in their own way. Eastern defiance of the West is embodied in the nightmare vision of the killer princess (see also Anna May Wong as evil daughter of Fu Manchu). Culture shapes western perceptions of Asians that will last for generations.
Puccini gives us the other half of his Orientalist pairing in the opera Turandot, first performed in 1926. Having sweetened up audiences with Madama Butterfly‘s selfless lotus blossom character almost thirty years earlier, he shocks the bourgeoisie with a tale of a wicked serial-killer Princess who kills her innocent male suitors when they fail to answer her three riddles.
The latest ENO production has decided not to subvert depictions of the Chinese as barbarian torture-mongers, but instead reinforces it with images of cannibalism which I suspect are absent from the original libretto — roasted decapitated bodies of Turandot’s victims hanging from the kitchen ceiling like barbecued duck, and stared at by a row of heads. Very appetising if you’re planning an after-show dinner round the corner in Chinatown. Perhaps they took their (barbe)cue from More Light at the Arcola this summer, where another yellowface production made much of Chinese cruelty. High art seems to be going all out to link China’s most popular benign contribution to world culture, its food, with old colonialist fantasies of the Chinese as subhuman. … continues
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2009, US GREAT FINANCIAL CRASH FALLOUT
This is the period when the world is reeling from America’s Great Crash of 2008. A worldwide recession threatens to tip into a depression. China acts as our global lifeboat as well as growth engine and stabilises the economy by allowing international currencies to devalue against the yuan, taking a huge hit itself. It creates credit for infrastructure spending and digs into its reserves to prop up the yuan. Furthermore, it buys up a third of US debt and encourages domestic consumption in its huge middle class which, at over 500 million, is bigger than the entire population of the United States. China also encourages its people to buy American to help out their superpower friend. In doing so, it kicks off the longest bull run ever in American markets.
But no good deed goes unpunished …

5 July 2009 URUMQI, XINJIANG: A riot and terrorist attack in the capital city of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR)kills 197 and injures 1,721, mostly Han Chinese. Further attacks in May 2014 kill 43 with 90 wounded.

7 May 2009, CHINA SUBMITS 9-DASH LINE MAP TO THE UN
Vietnam and the Philippines have been reclaiming islands in the South China Sea for decades. Vietnam has occupied three of the disputed strategically located Spratly Islands in the South China Sea since the 1970s, one military garrison ejected from the Johnson South Reef by China in 1988. (Sino-Vietnam War February – March 1979.) Malaysia, the Philippines and Taiwan also have garrisons on islands. but, notably, China does not.
In 2009, Vietnam steps up “fishing militia” militarisation and, with Malaysia, seeks United Nations approval to extend 200 mile continental shelf limit. China responds by submitting its nine-dash line claim to the UN in 2009, reaffirming “indisputable sovereignty over the islands in the South China Sea and the adjacent waters”.
The PRC’s nine-dash line is based on the Republic of China’s 11-dash map of 1947, itself based on a 1935 map.
China will follow Vietnam’s example in 2014 and begins militarising, having previously reclaimed land features as part of its UNESCO obligations agreed in Paris 1987. According to Kishore Mahbubani, in 2015, when Xi Jinping makes an offer to Obama not to militarise their islands, Obama responds by sending even more military. In July 2016, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), ratified in 1994 and to which the US has not signed up, rules for the Philippines against China’s nine-dash line territorial claim. The ruling is rejected by both the PRC and the ROC (Taiwan).

Tuesday, 13 January 2009 
Anna’s first attempt to introduce a new generation to Hollywood’s first Chinese screen legend, Anna May Wong, was rejected by the BBC in 2005 (AMW’s birth centenary) on the grounds that, “No-one knows who she is”. Second time lucky and it was finally made in 2008. 
Anna May Wong: A Celestial Star In Piccadilly – BBC Radio 4
Anna Chen writes and presents a half-hour profile of Hollywood’s first Chinese movie star for BBC Radio 4. Produced by Mukti Jain Campion for Culture Wise.
Born in Los Angeles in 1905, during the height of the Yellow Peril fears about the Chinese, Anna May Wong overcame prejudice and racism enshrined in US law to become Hollywood’s first Chinese screen legend, making more than 60 movies.
Broadcast 11:30, Tuesday 13th January 2009. 
Chosen as Pick of the Week by BBC R4, Guardian Guide, The Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday. 
Anna May Wong Must Die! 
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Sunday 14 December 2008
Barack Obama wins the US presidential election November 2008
Obama placates angry Asians: How politics works
President-elect Barack Obama’s appointment of pugnacious banker Rahm Emanuel as his Chief-of-Staff couldn’t have been more controversial, what with Rahmbo’s volunteer service in the Israel Defence Forces, his support of Bush’s Iraq war, and advocacy of compulsory “universal sevice” for all young Americans.
But then Obama nominated New Mexico governor Bill Richardson for commerce secretary, an appointment which pitched Latinos and Asian-Americans against each other. Richardson displayed none of the racial sensitivity he reserves for his Hispanic constituency when he helped prosecute Taiwanese-American Wen Ho Lee, a former nuclear scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, for spying ten years ago.
  “This was the major Chinese-American civil rights case in the last 30 years,” said Albert Wang, a Fremont physician. “And there was a feeling among many Chinese-Americans, particularly in Silicon Valley, that Bill Richardson did a lot to promote the notion that all Chinese-Americans are potential spies.”
“Wen Ho Lee bore the brunt of Richardson’s actions, but there were many Chinese-American scientists who felt great fear,” said Der, who once headed Chinese for Affirmative Action in San Francisco. “Even I got a visit from the FBI, and I’m not a scientist.” Gee, how was Obama gonna get all the US Asians on board?
Hmmm, how to mollify a substantial minority with financial clout and an eye on political power?
Meanwhile, and entirely unconnected, Obama’s cabinet gets an Asian. It looks like science super-egghead and Nobel Laureate Dr Stephen Chu will be Head of the Department of Energy where his remit is biofuels, a poisoned chalice if ever there was one. 
Hated by the big coal producers AND loathed by environmentalists, I don’t fancy Chu’s chances. 
Hey, Steve, the vessel with the pestle has the pellet with the poison. The chalice from the palace has the brew that is true. Doh! No, the flagon with the dragon holds the brew that is true … Watch out!

12 May 2008, SICHUAN EARTHQUAKE
The devastating 8 magnitude earthquake’s epicentre rips 19km below Wenchuan county in Sichuan, in the foothills of the Himalayas in the west of China and only 50 miles from the city of Chengdu.
It is the second costliest earthquake since 1900 at an estimated economic loss of US$130 billion, the most powerful since 1950, and leaves more than 87,000 people dead or missing. At least 4.8 million people lose their homes.
Poorly constructed buildings including schools and hospitals collapse, compounding the disaster.
Recovery and reconstruction entails speedy, efficient mobilisation and investment of US$146 billion, helped by the World Bank. Lessons are learnt. Quality, facilities and regulations are improved. The earthquake turns out to be “an opportunity to reconstruct all public-service facilities in the affected areas with high seismic standards and modern equipment.”
China asks the World Bank to partner in an overall $740 million project “to restore infrastructure, health and education services in several counties and municipalities in Sichuan and Gansu.” It will be used to, “among other things, reconstruct roads and bridges, water supply and sanitation, solid waste collection and disposal, and drainage, and to strengthen flood control, and restore health centers and schools.“

4-20 FEBRUARY 2008 THE BEIJING OLYMPICS
Much maligned and sneered at by the western press even as China is saving the world economy from America’s meltdown. Artist Ai Weiwei removes his name from the beautiful Birds Nest Stadium he designed as a protest. Under pressure, Steven Spielberg removes himself as an artistic adviser, leaving only Zhang Yimou to direct the spectacle. The technological showcase is an awe-inspiring breakthrough as China shows the world it has come of age.

2007-2008 THE AMERICAN GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS (GFC)
The American Global Financial Crisis (GFC) is the most serious financial crisis since the 1929 Great Depression, almost blowing up the world economy. The US stock market drops 20% and oil soars to more than $140 per barrel. China saves the world economy from America’s devastating crash by acting as shock absorber.
China’s foreign exchange reserves are more than US$1.9 trillion, much of which is invested in US treasury bonds or equities.

2006, US DEBT
The US manages to inflate its way out of much of its debt due to the value of the dollar falling by a third following the invasion of Iraq. When China complains, the US tells them to suck it up. Meanwhile, an alarming housing bubble is being pumped up.

20 April, PRESIDENT HU JINTAO VISITS THE WHITE HOUSE
“We feel very happy about the healthy and stable expansion of China-US relations,” says Hu. “Our bilateral relations are very good,” replies Bush. “And we – you and I – are committed to keeping them that way. Obviously, with as much commerce between our countries as there is, there’s going to be trade difficulties, but nevertheless, we both adopt a spirit of mutual respect and the desire to work through our problems for the common good of our peoples.”
Tensions remain. US critics insist China is undervaluing its currency by 40 percent. China’s economy, growing at 10.2 percent, has overtaken Japan to become the second largest in the world, standing at $8,200 billion against the USA’s $12,400.

June 2005 US TRIUMPH CONTINUES IN IRAQ – FORT BRAGG SPEECH
George W Bush’s Iraq War victory speech to troops at Fort Bragg announces the US won’t be leaving Iraq any time soon. “Our mission in Iraq is clear. We are hunting down the terrorists. We are helping Iraqis build a free nation that is an ally in the war on terror. We are advancing freedom in the broader Middle East.”
Meanwhile, hawks in the admin are worried about trade competition and reiterate the “strategic competitor” label as China starts to overtake the US in auto parts and furniture. It’s around this point that this author surmises the US is ticking off boxes in a list of obstacles to its absolute worldwide hegemony including Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan, and would likely include Libya, Lebanon, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea and end with Russia and China as the Grande Finale. The danger is that, being invisible and a mysterious model minority, Chinese are sitting ducks for what’s coming down the pike. The challenge will be to humanise them and extract them from the cultural and political ghettos to which they’ve been consigned.

31 March 2005, IRAQ WMD CLAIMS CONFIRMED FALSE
The Iraqi Intelligence Commission concludes in its final report that pre-war intelligence regarding WMD’s was false.” The commission tells Bush, “Dead wrong … a major intelligence failure”. “The report also expressed misgivings about U.S. intelligence on Iran, North Korea, China and Russia, but it said most of those findings were classified,” reports CNN.

2005, CHINA TRADE MOTORS AHEAD
This is the year China’s manufacturing takes off and starts to overtake the United States. China exports more auto parts than it imports – US industry struggles to keep up. Its wood furniture takes 60 percent of the market while US factories close. Cheap labour costs put China ahead but accusations start to fly that it is keeping the renminbi unfairly weak at 8.28 per $ … says the party that owns the dollar reserve currency.

7 September 2003 JP MORGAN WINS IRAQ BANK BONANZA
JP Morgan bank wins pole position in the Iraq War feeding frenzy when it is granted the Iraq bank mandate, coordinating 13 banks in the extraction of wealth from the invaded country. JP Morgan ends up paying Tony Blair £2-3 million a year for “consultancy”.

1 May 2003 BUSH DECLARES IRAQ VICTORY
In a televised speech from the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, in front of a banner declaring “MISSON ACCOMPLISHED”, Bush says: “”Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.”

19 March US WAR AGAINST IRAQ BEGINS
Operation Iraqi Freedom begins with air strikes, followed by a ground assault by forces comprising 250,000 American and 45,000 British troops, 70,000 Kurdish militia and a handful of others. Baghdad falls on 9 April.

15 February 2003 THE ANTI-IRAQ WAR MOVEMENT CULMINATES IN THE BIGGEST PROTEST IN BRITISH HISTORY
In a global day of protests against the looming Iraq War, Britain sees the largest demonstration in its history of over a million marching for peace. Despite this, a month later on 18 March 2003, Parliament votes to go to war and illegally invade Iraq.

September 2002 PAUL WOLFOWITZ BREAKS NATO PROMISE NOT TO ENLARGE UP TO RUSSIA’S BORDERS
At the NATO conference 24-25 September 2002, Paul Wolfowitz – author of the “Wolfowitz Doctrine,” architect of the Iraq War post-911, U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense under Donald Rumsfeld 2001-3, and 10th President of the World Bank (2005-7) – breaks with the NATO promise, made after German reunification (1990), not to extend to Russia’s borders.
In his Defense Policy Guidance for the Department of Defense (the “Wolfowitz Doctrine” written in 1992 for 1994-9 in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union), he established: “Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union.”
In 2002, he targets among others, the Balkans – Central and Eastern Europe – for “operational engagements” by the USA/Nato.
He has previously told General Wesley Clark in May 1991 that the U.S. would lead regime-change operations in Iraq, Syria and other former Soviet allies later identified as Lebanon, Libya, Somalia and Sudan: “We’re going to take out seven countries in five years.” 
To come: In 2005, in the wake of the war in Iraq that he advocated, Wolfowitz becomes the 10th President of the World Bank. In 2006, Robert Kagan — neocon architect of the Project for the New American Century and who is married to US Ambassador to Nato, Victoria Nuland — will name the Ukraine as being key in “the extension of Western liberal hegemony”. At the trial of Apple Daily tycoon Jimmy Lai in January 2024, Wolfowitz will be linked to the 2019 Hong Kong protests.

6 September 2002, BUSH BLACKLISTS UIGHUR SEPARATISTS
President Bush and the UN designate the Uighur East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM, based in the Xinjiang Special Autonomous Region of China) to be a terrorist organisation alongside Al Qaeda. China is brought on board as a partner in the War on Terror. 1992-2017 sees an intensive period of terrorist attacks across China killing over 1,000. and injuring many more. The Trump administration will later delist ETIM and accuse China of “genocide”.

11-13 April 2002 US-BACKED COUP AGAINST VENEZUELA’S PRESIDENT HUGO CHAVEZ FAILS
On 11 April, the US-supported opposition and military high command stage a coup to topple Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, elected democratically since 1998.
Venezuela has the largest reserves of oil in the world, bigger than Russia, bigger than Iran and bigger even than Saudi Arabia. Having already established his socialist credentials by helping the nation’s exploited farmers, the democratically elected Chavez raises public spending, increases oil industry taxes to 30 percent and brings the private transnational oil companies under greater government participation of 51 percent, giving the state run company, Petróleos de Venezuela S.A.(PDVSA), joint control.
In August 2000 Chavez had toured Opec countries to revitalise the organisation and control the price of oil, including visiting Saddam Hussein and Iran, the first time the two adversaries have worked together for decades.
The coup is a direct reaction.
The leaders install Pedro Carmona as president, but after two days of street protests and a widespread refusal of the military rank-and-file to support their commanders, the coup collapses and Chávez returns to power.
To come: In 2013, Venezuela will accept major Russian and Chinese investment. In 2015, the Obama administration will impose the first of US sanctions preventing the sale of oil, labelling Venezuela a “national security threat” as a terrorist-supporting state. Trump will deal a body blow in 2017 by targeting banking and SWIFT payments, crippling their economy in 2019 when he sanctions the oil companies. The sanctions hit 90% of Venezuela’s economy, plunging the oil-rich country into poverty. In 2022, the Bank of England will purloin over $1 billion of Venezuela’s gold reserves.

21 March 2002, CHINA’S FIRST COMPLAINT TO THE WTO
China and others join action brought by EU concerning US restrictions on steel in violation of WTO terms. On 10 December 2003, the US informs the parties that President Bush has terminated all of the measures subject to the dispute. 

11 December 2001, CHINA JOINS THE WORLD TRADE ORGANISATION
President Bush signs a proclamation giving China permanent normal trade relations with the US only days after China joins the WTO on 11 December. Was the Bush admin only fattening the golden goose? Were they lulling China into passivity and getting them onside until the US had crushed Iraq? After all, Bush repeats his claim that China is a strategic competitor in 2005. In 2001, China is the USA’s largest trading partner. For the next seven years, relations largely improve.

11 September 2001: TERRORIST ATTACKS ON AMERICA – THE WAR ON TERROR
Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda are held responsible for the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington DC which kill 2,977 people. Afghanistan is invaded the following month. In a welter of Dodgy Dossier disinformation about weapons of mass destruction (WMD), Saddam Hussein is also blamed and Iraq is marked for war. The UK anti-war movement takes off.

Stopping the Iraq War 2001-3 20th anniversary: How the press was done.
In 2001, Anna Chen established and ran three press campaigns. They were the Foot and Mouth Disease smear of UK Chinese by part of the Blair administration; the Socialist Alliance general election campaign challenging an increasingly rightward Labour Party; the third revived a moribund Stop the War by creating their anti-Iraq war press campaign when they wouldn’t even issue a press release on the grounds that they refused to deal with “the bourgeois press”. These last events propelled the long-serving but little-known Labour backbench MP Jeremy Corbyn into the public spotlight.
2001 was a busy year for presswork even before the September 11 attacks in the USA.
In March, we had woken up to lurid headlines splashed across the media accusing UK Chinese of starting the previous year’s Foot and Mouth Disease outbreak which had brought the British countryside to its knees, and which Prime Minister Tony Blair was still failing to bring under control …
Relieved that we’d headed off disaster, I was able to concentrate on the next press campaign: the Socialist Alliance’s run in the summer’s General Election. After three years of New Labour’s betrayals of their own constituents, a danger grew that the electorate would grow so disappointed in Blair’s rightward drift that they would abandon Labour for the Far Right. …
So, by the time we watched two airliners smash into the World Trade Centre on 11 September, I was as ready for the challenge as I could ever be. …
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1 April 2001 THE HAINAN INCIDENT AND SPY PLANE COLLISION
Only ten weeks after George W Bush is inaugurated as president, an American navy EP-3 surveillance plane flies off Hainan province in the South China Sea and collides with a PLA J-8II Interceptor jet. The Chinese pilot, Wang Wei, dies. The American plane with 24 crew makes an emergency landing without permission on Hainan island. The crew is released when the US apologises after a 11-day stand-off. The disassembled plane yields important information and is returned to the US six months later in Russian aircraft where it is repaired and eventually returned to duty.

The Foot and Mouth Disease Outbreak Campaign of 2001  
Anna Chen organised the press campaign for the UK Chinese action that surprised everyone by  fighting back against being scapegoated in March 2001 by the government for Tony Blair’s failure to deal with the Foot and Mouth Disease outbreak that brought rural Britain to its knees. She was also a member of the delegation that negotiated with Minister Nick Brown in the wake of the scandal. 
It is very Goebbelsesque to associate a scapegoated minority with filth and pestilence but, a few months after George W Bush labelled China a strategic competitor in his 2000 election campaign, this is exactly what Tony Blair’s government tried to do to the Chinese in Britain … until we fought back. 
When Britain suffered a severe outbreak of Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) in 2001, the countryside was full of burning pyres of animals as the New Labour government got it desperately wrong. The Chinese community suddenly found itself scapegoated for the outbreak in a lunatic briefing by a northern outpost of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) to The Times. 
Such was the degree of the disaster that farmers were committing suicide as livelihoods were lost, and anger was beginning to be diverted away from the government and onto one of the minority communities. Broadsheets and tabloids alike carried lurid headlines such as, “Sheep and Sow Source” as the Chinese were primed for blame. … 
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7 November 2000 GEORGE W BUSH ELECTED US PRESIDENT
Well, sort of. Amid talk of butterfly ballots and hanging chads, Florida’s secretary of state Katherine Harris works overtime to purge the electoral rolls, certify Bush votes and stop the recount in this key state. Democrat candidate Al Gore reluctantly concedes defeat after failing to get the recount.

10 October 2000 THE US-CHINA RELATIONS ACT PASSES
Clinton signs the US-China Relations Act, landmark legisation granting China permanent normal trade relations with the US, clearing the path for China to join the WTO. On 11 December the following year, China is formally admitted into the WTO, opening China’s vast market and adding 800 million workers to the world economic system. China begins to buy US debt.

9 March 2000 CLINTON SUPPORTS CHINESE WTO ENTRY
In a speech to Congress, Clinton welcomes China JOINING the World Trade Organisation: “Supporting China’s entry into the WTO is about more than our economic interests,” he says. “It represents the most significant opportunity that we have to create positive change in China since the 1970s, when President Nixon first went there.” .

19 November 1999-2000 STRATEGIC PARTNER VS STRATEGIC COMPETITOR
After Bill Clinton calls China a “strategic partner,” George W Bush, front-runner for the 2000 Republican US presidential nomination, attacks Clinton’s support for a “constructive strategic partnership” with China: “China should be seen as a competitor, not a partner and treated without ill-will but without illusions.”
Imagine that timeline with Gore winning! The neo-cons win.

24 March – 10 June 1999 THE US BOMBS THE CHINESE EMBASSY IN BELGRADE
As part of the Nato campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia during the Kosovo war, opposed by China and others as a violation of the UN charter, five American guided bombs hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. The attack kills three people, all journalists and injures dozens more, despite Nato being given the coordinates. There are widespread demonstrations in China, and the US and Nato apologise for a “mistake”. The narrative started by Britain’s Observer newspaper, that the embassy was deliberately targeted by the Central Intelligence Agency due to nefarious Chinese activity in the basement, is vigorously quashed by Madeleine Albright, George Tenet, Robin Cook and others. Sino-American relations temporarily freeze.

1998 CLINTON IN CHINA
Reciprocating China’s President Jiang Zemin’s visit to the United States the previous year, Clinton begins a nine-day visit to China, the first by a US president for more than a decade. The public highlight is a live televised press conference with Jiang, in which the two leaders have a sharp exchange of views on the events in Tiananmen Square in 1989 (see Wikileaks cables June 2011). They both agree to disagree. On the trip, Clinton reassures his hosts of America’s benign intentions: “We see China at a moment in history when your glorious past is matched by your present sweeping transformation and the even greater promise of your future.” He declares the “three no’s”: that the US does not support Taiwan’s independence, “two Chinas” or “one China, one Taiwan” policies, or Taiwan’s membership in international organisations where statehood is required. This is also the year that the Monica Lewinsky scandal erupts, rendering Clinton politically vulnerable to his detractors. China suffers extreme floods.

24 October 1997 PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON CALLS FOR CHINA PARTNERSHIP
China’s President Jiang Zemin visits America 26 October-3 November – the first by a Chinese leader in 12 years.
In the run-up to the summit, President Bill Clinton argues for “constructive engagement” with China: “Isolation of China is unworkable, counter-productive and potentially dangerous. Military, political and economic measure to do such a thing would find litte support among our allies around the world.” The summit agrees cooperation on arms control, technology, health policy, education, drug smuggling, the environment – and, most importantly, steps towards normalisation of US-China trade and Chinese accession to the World Trade Organisation.

1 July 1997 IN THE BEGINNING … THE END OF BRITISH COLONISATION OF HONG KONG AND THE START OF US PARTNERSHIP – HONG KONG IS RETURNED TO CHINA
China regains sovereignty over the city and its region after 156 years of British rule. Hong Kong was ceded to Great Britain after the first of the 19th century Opium Wars under the 1842 Treaty of Nanking, with Kowloon and Stonecutters Island added in 1860 and the New Territories in 1898.
According to the Sino British Joint Declaration, signed by Margaret Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping in 1984, “The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region will enjoy a high degree of autonomy, except in foreign and defence affairs which are the responsibilities of the Central People’s Government.”