Banned by Twitter/X: Jerry Grey chats to Anna Chen on being cancelled

Anna Chen – 13 May 2024, Jerry Grey

I recently hooked up online again with Brit-born China commentator Jerry Grey after many months for a lively catch-up and to review the latest litany of loony accusations poured forth by the declining West’s propaganda machine.

Jerry caught the public eye when he cycled around Xinjiang when Western press and politicians, taking advantage of the dearth of information about the region, were maligning China in a fantasy projection of their own historic persecution of Muslims. He has now built a solid body of informative videos about China. Applying his forensic ex-police brain to challenging prejudice and twisted narratives with fact-based evidence, he’s produced a fascinating resource for anyone interested in what’s really going on with the rising superpower that the declining US sees as a rival.

Oh, and the UK wants its colonised China back.

Our ninety-minute discussion covered the topics of China, the US and the UK. We also touched on my tale of woe about X closing my 15-year old, blue-tick @MadamMiaow Twitter account with 15K followers which was already being throttled by algos. With questionable timing, X shut it down the month after October 7, and deleted it completely in December. No violations, six appeals with ID and no response. (See video extract above). So much for Elon the free speech champion.

It’s a measure of how fragile the Establishment must be feeling if it can’t bear even one lone dissenting voice from a British person of Chinese heritage. My deplatforming occurred in the midst of a wider crackdown on opposition around the Gaza issue, but it looks like an excuse to get rid of the account in the build-up to war on China. The psyops requires a complete vacuum which it can fill with the same old Yellow Peril stereotypes; the blankest of blank canvasses on which to project the monsters from its own id.

And this has to be said. It’s a disappointment that some white/non-Chinese saviours need to depict the Chinese diaspora as being made up of dim lackeys and shills. It would do the latecomers’ careers no favours to show that political obsequiousness is not some genetic affliction to which the Chinese are peculiarly disposed. Exposing their audience to a voluble, informed Chinese Brit diminishes their raison d’etre. Both sides seem to agree that someone like me is not supposed to exist.

And why does this matter?

The absence of solidarity in favour of a turf war has slowed down collective raising of consciousness when speed was of the essence to stop narratives setting like concrete. It’s been like watching the slow children catching up. This info blackout takes advantage of anti-Asian and anti-women bias embedded in the cultural codes, for nothing is true unless a white person says it is true. It further marginalises and dehumanises Chinese who are not represented as political beings in western society unless in service to the war machine, and reinforces the blankness of the canvas onto which negative images of cruelty, untrustworthiness, aggression and stupidity are projected.

It effectively does the work of the state in getting the public onside for a war on China.

And in an atmosphere where Asian women are targeted and killed, WTF are you doing?

This is only one reason why Jerry Grey is such a gem in bucking this regressive tendency.

Among a myriad of topics, we talked about The Steampunk Opium Wars which I wrote and presented at the Royal National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, in 2012. The Opium Wars is not taught in schools and most of the audience had never heard about it.

One point made in this show, and other writing and broadcast over more than a decade, was that the opium wasn’t burnt — for obvious reasons. It was actually destroyed by Commissioner Lin Zexu using lime and seawater. (I always picture Lin squeezing half a lime over it like it was a dish, but that’s just me …)

About three years ago, Jerry independently realised that the opium couldn’t have been burnt — there’s that deductive copper’s brain again. Seeing academics like Julia Lovell and Niall Ferguson fail to similarly reason it out and repeat again and again this commonplace claim in their work gives you an idea of the sorry state of western intelligentsia.

I tried playing our fabulous song, Lin Zexu Just Say No, whose jolly refrain is, “I’ll sprinkle it with lime and throw it in the sea”. Unfortunately, it sounded a bit muffled (a bit like my political voice, heh!). However, the lyrics and video can be found at the Lin Zexu page.

You can watch our video conversation in its entirety complete with Live Chat at Jerry’s Take On China YouTube. Or at my YouTube channel.

Our first online chat in May 2023 can be found at Jerry Grey’s channel and at my YT channel. It was so enjoyable it went on for over two hours even though it was the middle of the night for the host. The comments at Jerry’s YT page cheered me up enormously. Thank you all.

Anna’s current working Twitter/X account is @AnnaChenMiaow

Shakedown: a timeline of America’s 21st century war on China. Contemporaneous articles, broadcast and analysis for nearly three decades.

China: Anna Chen’s essays, theatre and broadcast about China over 30 years. Its history, the Chinese diaspora and the West’s bid to keep them in place.