In 2018, Russia was the biggest propaganda target in Washington’s cold war against its rival superpowers. Even though a cold war with China had arguably begun during Obama’s “pivot to Asia” in 2011, and America’s great-power competition with China was certainly heating up, the first priority of the imperialist propagandists in that moment was to demonize Russia in the minds of the Western public. The dubious “Russiagate” scandal was being weaponized as a geopolitical propaganda tool, and sensational headlines blamed Russia for a myriad of recent political developments. Then in 2019, the focus suddenly shifted to China.
The fizzling out of Russiagate after the release of the anticlimactic Mueller report in spring 2019 was one factor in this. But there was also an array of factors from around that time which made China into far more of a concern for the empire than it had been previously, and that caused the Washington propaganda machine to shift its messaging accordingly.
One of these factors was that the U.S. had decisively begun to lose the trade war with China in 2019. Throughout the year, Trump’s efforts at economically strong-arming China kept failing, until Trump was forced in October to reach a deal which let China continue all the trade practices that were threatening the hegemony of the U.S. corporatocracy. The response from Trump, and from the U.S. political and media class at large, was to escalate the rhetoric of economic nationalism. The “democratic socialist” senator Bernie Sanders began to attack other politicians for not being economically aggressive enough towards China, and the Democratic presidential debates became rife with denouncements of China’s “theft” of American “intellectual property.”
Trump’s May 2019 ban against the Chinese company Huawei from doing business with U.S. companies solidified this pattern of escalation. Washington’s ever-increasing sanctions against Russia were now becoming matched or outpaced in regards to China, whose economic ties to the U.S. were rapidly fraying and are now even less substantial. Trump’s biggest stated economic threat is to cut off all Chinese exports to the U.S., which the U.S. business community is slowly moving towards as deglobalization accelerates during Covid-19.
The unintended consequence is that like the anti-Russian sanctions, these acts of economic belligerence are further isolating the U.S. from the world; U.S. allies like Italy and Brazil have been growing economically closer to China, while China has overall been rising as an economic power amid the geopolitical disruptions caused by the pandemic.
Another factor that stirred Washington to intensify its anti-China campaign was the violent struggle over Hong Kong which erupted in 2019. The Hong Kong protests are a destabilization effort funded by the CIA front group the National Endowment for Democracy, and they were set off in 2019 because this was when Washington became especially enamored with one goal: to recolonize Hong Kong by taking away China’s ability to absorb the city in the long term. This “pro-democracy” movement was naturally used as a weapon by the imperialist media, which portrayed the police responses to the protesters’ provocateur tactics as proof of Chinese “authoritarianism.”
These efforts to seize control of China’s surrounding territories, both in Hong Kong and Taiwan, are also backfiring. In response to this last year’s extreme violence and vandalism from the Hong Kong protesters, China has enacted a security law that makes it much harder for Washington to carry out subversion within the city. China also recently threatened to invade Taiwan if its government capitulates to the efforts from Washington to strong-arm it.
The other development that raised Washington’s alarm about China last year was China’s rising threats to U.S. military hegemony. Russia and China promised to protect Venezuela from invasion last year during the U.S. coup attempt. 2019 was also the year when Australian analysts observed that “America’s military primacy in the Indo-Pacific is over and its capacity to maintain a favourable balance of power is increasingly uncertain,” all while China’s military strength in the region was growing. Washington’s response, both in 2019 and throughout the last decade, has been to carry out massive military buildup in the places surrounding China. As Caitlin Johnstone explains in a review of John Pilger’s film The Coming War on China, this buildup is an extension of something that’s been happening for several generations:
The powerful film breaks down the way the USA has been encircling China with a “noose” of military bases since the Korean War, which all have massive amounts of military firepower, including nuclear firepower, pointed right at China’s cities. Pilger shows the psychopathic toll this has inflicted upon the people who live in the areas where the US war machine has set up shop in the Pacific, including an especially enraging segment on the use of Bikini Atoll natives as human guinea pigs to test the effects of nuclear radiation on people. Also deeply disturbing is the revelation of just how close the US came to launching nuclear warheads at China due to a miscommunication during the Cuban missile crisis.
Now the U.S. is escalating the situation to a near World War III scenario again, regularly sending vessels to the South China Sea to try to reassert military dominance within the area. This is making the South China Sea the place where a U.S.-China accident is most likely to occur. It all ties in with the nuclear arms race that Trump has started with China by sabotaging nuclear treaties, and by ramping up general cold war tensions.
“America’s ‘hybrid war’ against China has entered a new phase,” assessed New Eastern Outlook’s Christopher Black in August of last year. “The first stage involved the massive shift of US air and naval forces to the Pacific…The second stage was the creation of disinformation about China’s treatment of minority groups, especially in Tibet and west China…[in the third stage] the propaganda was extended to China’s economic development, its international trade, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, its Silk and Belt Road Initiative, its development bank…The fourth phase is the US attempt to degrade the Chinese economy with punitive ‘tariffs,’ essentially an embargo on Chinese goods…Last year it moved to a fifth phase, the kidnapping and illegal detention of Meng Wanzhou, the Chief Financial Officer of China’s leading technology company Huawei…The latest phase in this hybrid warfare is the insurrection being provoked by the US, UK, Canada and the rest in Hong Kong.”
This year’s phase is the campaign from the U.S. to blame China for Covid-19, one that’s encouraging American entities and individuals to try to sue China for the supposed damages the country has caused to them. The U.S. corporatocracy’s growing isolationism from China in response to the geopolitical ramifications from Covid-19 relate with Washington’s overall efforts to demonize and sabotage China’s New Silk Road initiative. Washington has been trying to get its European allies to join in on the recent economic warfare against China because if the New Silk Road keeps succeeding, Washington will irreversibly lose control over Eurasia.
Despite the hybrid war, the New Silk Road initiative, as well as China’s Belt and Road project, are in a better state than ever. On all fronts, whether economic, military, or diplomatic, the advantage keeps shifting in China’s favor. The most frustrating part for Washington is that in many cases, its hybrid war’s measures are compounding the dilemma that it finds itself in.
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