China Rising:
Capitalist Roads, Socialist Destinations (A Book Review)
By Moti Nissani on July 19, 2016
China has a lot
more going for it—and the USA a lot less—than what the Western presstitutes
would have you believe.
For a long
time, I have been
trying to satisfy my curiosity about China. I read as much as I could—in
English and Spanish. I attended a scientific conference in Beijing, and
although my Chinese colleagues were happy enough to talk about science, they
were disinclined to talk about politics. I read Chinese literature in
translation and worked in a small town in central China for a few months.
I learned, for instance, that some ordinary Chinese are capable of remarkable
acts of disinterested kindness. My lungs suffered the consequences of
Chinese pollution. However, I never got close enough to a proper
understanding of China—let alone to be able to write about that country or its
future contributions to the world.
Jeff Brown’s
book, China Rising: Capitalist Roads, Socialist Destinations,
helped me close that gap.
For one thing,
Brown is fluent in Mandarin and was thus able to rely on both external and
internal perspectives to construct his narrative. Brown has also lived
and worked, in “the belly of the beast” for 13 years. As well, Brown
traveled extensively in China, an experience recounted in his 2013 book, 44
Days Backpacking in China. He is at home in China, America,
France, and North Africa, and is thus poised to give a multicultural inside
look into Chinese society, politics, and culture.
Brown writes
passionately, from the heart, and does not hesitate to unmask powerful
scoundrels. He obviously finds many things to admire about China, and feels
that it, along with Russia, provides our best hope for a better world and for
escaping the hypocritical tyranny of the Western Princes of Power (his name for
the Controllers of the Invisible Government).
And yet his reporting is
objective, often balancing the pluses and minuses of Baba Beijing (Father
Beijing—Brown’s nickname for the benevolently-authoritarian Chinese
government).
_________
China Rising consists of three interwoven parts, each complementing and reinforcing the
other: The USA and the West, Chinese politics and culture, and the joys and
frustrations of living in China.
Brown rightly
insists that to understand China, we must understand the West and, in
particular, Brown’s home country, the USA. He forcefully reminds us of
America’s rigged elections, corrupt political culture, and sunshine
bribery. The real controllers of the USA, he rightly observes, are not
its titular leaders but the Princes of Power. These Princes do not shy away
from assassinations, from viciously and needlessly impoverishing and enslaving
their own people, from scandalously contaminating our information sources, and
from risking all of our lives with their reckless nuclear brinkmanship.
One of the most
touching parts of the book is Brown’s own gradual awakening to the
Machiavellian realities of American policies at home and abroad. Here is
one passionate description of one landmark in his painful journey:
“Then I read articles about how the United
States duped Saddam Hussein into seizing Kuwait, as a pretext to invade his
country. The entire text of Saddam’s meeting with US Ambassador to Iraq, April
Gillespie, has since been released . For all intents and purposes, Ms.
Gillespie gave Mr. Hussein the green light to invade Kuwait. It’s a diplomatic
version of Paul Newman’s and Robert Redford’s film, The Sting. Again,
there was this angst in my soul, a terrible cognitive dissonance between all
the perfection and self-sacrifice that Uncle Sam has supposedly nobly committed
himself to, and upon which I was nurtured, versus this glaring evidence to the
contrary.”
Brown recalls a
few more snippets of information that Western teachers, textbooks, movies, and
media conveniently forget.
World War I,
Brown observes, was “Essentially an extremely deadly slaughter between
feuding colonial powers, who were out to control as much of the world’s
dark-skinned peoples and their natural resources.”
“All the American
soldiers in Latin America, from Smedley Butler on down, were taxpayer-funded
thugs for Wall Street, pure and simple. Not protecting the home front, not
maintaining Americans’ freedoms, and not making the world a safer place for
democracy.”
“France lost 5%
of its population during World War I, a pointless slaughter between greedy,
Western colonialists. Ireland lost 15% of its people during the
British-legislated Great Potato Famine Genocide 1845-1853. French
colonialists in Vietnam, in a terrible drought, forced two million to starve to
death in 1945, which was 9% of the local population. The United States
massacred 7% of the Filipinos, starting in 1898, when it colonized that island
country. More recently, the United States killed 3.3 million Iraqis, 1990-2012,
including 750,000 children, the total which represents almost 19% of the
population.”
“Most Chinese
know their information is censored. Most Westerners obediently believe they
have “freedom of the press” and that censorship is everybody else’s problem.
Sadly, Westerners are deluded, gullible and easily manipulated. But this has
been true of all citizens of Empire, since the dawn of civilization.”
“America’s prison
population in a supposedly democratic country is increasing exponentially; in
autocratic China, it’s going down. Another geopolitical irony.”
_________
The part that
captivated me most about China Rising was—China itself.
“The Chinese
understand history much better than Westerners. They will never forget their
century of humiliation, 1840-1949, when the UK and the US engaged in what is
called, ‘the longest running and largest global criminal enterprise in world
history’ – enslaving the Chinese people with opium. They, along with the
European colonial powers, then proceeded to cart off the nation’s silver
bullion and rob it of its agricultural, mineral, forest and human resources.”
Side by side
photos of Stalin and Mao, as seen through a glass barrier, in the Chinese high
school where I worked
On my first
arrival in China, I remember my dismay seeing photos of Mao Zedong
everywhere. China Rising offers an explanation.
As a result of
bad decisions of China’s rulers and century long-brutal colonial exploitation,
by “1949, China was basically a 19th century hellhole,” with
100 million opium addicts, people on average died at age 35. After coming
to power in 1949, Mao “eradicated opium use and cultivation, prostitution,
child slavery, child trafficking and feet binding in only two years, saving
many tens of millions of lives and improving the lives of hundreds of millions
more. They also wiped out war lords, organized crime, gangsters,
gambling, loan sharking, drugs, gun running and the protection rackets in the
same record time. This is unprecedented in such a short period of time,
especially with such a vast population. All this alone transformed the lives of
the Chinese from misery and exploitation to hope and security.”
Now literacy is
almost 100%, and longevity 76 years. Above all, Mao liberated China “from
the horror of being a western whore.”
We hear much from Western presstitutes about
China’s environmental woes—and little about our own, or the environmental
horrors of countries under the Princes’ control. Nor do the Western media
bother to tell us about the progress that has taken place in the last 25
years, nor about China’s leadership’s genuine commitment to make further
improvements. For instance, Brown wryly notes:
“Now the
environment is front and center in their policy making decisions and
implementation is coming with more and sharper administrative teeth. Can you
imagine another country that would dare to even imagine shutting down their
capital for two or three days, costing the economy billions in gross city
product, like the smog alert system Baba Beijing has set up?”
The Western media
shed crocodile tears about the horrors of Chinese dictatorship; China
Rising reminds us of inconsistencies in that self-serving version of
reality. Did you know that
“Unbiased,
Western polling companies, like Gallup and Pew, prove that around 80% of
China’s people are happy with their lives and leaders. This, versus the
capitals of the West, where politicians are routinely polling in the teens and
sometimes even in single digits”?
How often have we
heard about the Tiananmen Massacre, the bravery of its “freedom
fighters”? Yes, my friend, if you stillbelieve that, you are—like Brown and I
(before we woke up)—a victim of mind manipulation. China Rising rightly
calls it “the massacre that never was.”
The Tiananmen
confrontation “follows the script of CIA regime change operation to the
letter. After a month, the CIA decided to bring it to a head: Well
organized, well-armed protesters, with materiel that could have only been
provided by outside agents, upped the ante of violence with automatic weapons
and Molotov cocktails, and Baba Beijing responded by sending in armed soldiers
to suppress these violent groups.” Until then, it should be noted, the
government troops were unarmed. It was only after some soldiers were
lynched by the CIA stooges that the government reacted.
“The CPC
[Communist Party of China] even invited protest leaders on national TV, as a
means of dialogue. . . . Deng told his colleagues that it was either the CPC or
the West that was going to control their country and they could not allow China
to relive another century of colonial, imperial humiliation. The time to act
was now. Declare martial law and send in the PLA with arms, to protect the
thousands of unarmed soldiers already in harm’s way, and end the protests
peacefully.”
Most westerners
are likewise misinformed about the contemporary Chinese miracle.
“Since 1980, just
ask the World Bank and the IMF: China has created the world’s largest middle
class in the world, over 300 million, while adding to this tally, 10,000 per
day. Baba Beijing has done this in the shortest amount of time in human
history, and continues to do so. Yes, China is also creating a lot of wealth at
the highest levels of society, but so far, not at the expense of the urban and
rural classes.”
“Conversely, the
United States is destroying what used to be the world’s largest middle class,
in record time, to the tune of 1-2 million personal bankruptcies per year,
since 1990. That’s 2,700-5,400 a day, and that’s a whole heap of misery.”
A sign of the
remarkable transformation in Beijing in just 26 years:
“In 1990, there
were 25,000-50,000 vehicles on the streets and about 10,000,000 bicycles.
Today, there are 5,500,000 vehicles and maybe a few hundred thousand bikes.”
China Rising provides hard-hitting criticisms of
China as well.
One of the most
readable part of the book is Jeff’s experiences, in the 1990s, with “the
pathological corruption that eats at the very marrow of” China. A few
harrowing experiences capture the flavor of living in a country where
contracts, promises, and honor mean nothing to China’s ‘successful’
scoundrels—and they can get away with it. Reading this, you finally
understand what an unresponsive political system can do to people, and why
there are still, every day, some 400 demonstrations across China.
“The Xi and Li
anti-corruption drive looks superficially good on paper. But not until some of
these Red Nobility take a hard fall and do some hard time,
will I be able to take all the chest beating and theatrics genuinely
seriously.”
Any
self-preserving white collar criminal would much rather plunder public and
private purses in the United States than in China.”
I remember
visiting the supermarket in our small town of Hong Hu, in Hubei Province, and
realizing that a criminal campaign was afoot to persuade the Chinese people to
let go of their delicious, healthy, cuisine, and replace it with shiny Western
packaging of unhealthy junk. A similar campaign was under way trying to
replace traditional Chinese values with crass consumerism. Why does the
government, I asked myself, permit such disasters? Jeff asked himself the
same question:
“Too many Chinese
are not savvy or experienced enough to understand the vacuity and
meaninglessness of consumerism on steroids. They are just aping what they
consider to be the defining apex of success.”
For my wife and
I, the most troubling aspect of living in China had been our inability to make
friends—unlike any other country we have been to. We felt more welcome in
Tibet in one week than in mainland China in 4 months. With the exception
and 2 young adults we met outside our workplace and a some of our teenaged
students, we felt alone. I still don’t know the reason, and suspect that we
either crossed some cultural taboo or that our coworkers had been warned not to
get too close to us. Anyway, it was comforting to know that our
experience was not unique. In a 1996 letter to family and friends, cited
in the book, Brown writes:
“How to put a
positive spin on an overseas experience that has rendered not one true local
friend in five years of daily contact, when in every other country I lived and
worked, I felt a real emotional, fraternal involvement with many local friends
and associates.”
China Rising is especially entertaining and informative
when giving the reader an insider view of day-to-day life in China, and how the
authoritarian government of that country accomplishes its goals. For
example, to deal with fire hazards in Beijing apartments, the local government
first tries the soft approach public signs and persuasion, asking people to
remove combustible litter from the stairways. When that fails, they
change tactics—and largely succeed.
_________
I read China
Rising with great pleasure, agreeing entirely with the portrayal of both
China and the USA and with Brown’s ambivalence towards both. Throughout this
entire book, I found myself questioning only two points.
The first is a
repeated reference to “dark-skinned people” and to racism as the underlying
Western motive. On occasion, we encounter the claim that the Princes of
Power (the member of the Invisible Government) do not murder their own
people. But the historical record suggests that the Princes are
equal-opportunity exploiters. They happily killed white Serbians, Irish,
Afrikaners, Argentines, and Southern Brazilians. For a long time their
archenemy has been Russia. They targeted, and probably still target,
Moscow alone with more than 150 nuclear bombs, and yet, overall, Russians are
whiter than Americans. Nor has the conflict ever been anchored in
ideology. It would appear that those Princes play the racist and
ideological cards to confuse their subjects. Their real underlying motive
is lust for power, and any race, any gender, any religion, will serve as cannon
fodder or a candidate for genocide.
In an effort to
gain control of the vast resources of southern Africa, the Rothschilds and
their agents in the British government had little trouble treating the white
Boers just as murderously as they treated members of others races. At least
26,000 Afrikaner women and children died in British concentration camps.
The second point
of divergence concerns Brown’s view that “Baba Beijing and the Chinese think in
terms of decades and centuries. Americans can’t think past the 24-hour
propaganda spin and quarterly stock reports.” The historical recordsuggests otherwise. This issue has important
strategic implications: it was actually the renowned Sun Tzu who cautioned his
countrymen to never underestimate their enemies.
No single book
can resolve the Chinese enigma, but China Rising provides many
valuable clues and insights. Hopefully, Jeff J. Brown will next turn his
passion, insights, and critical and literary skills, to tackle questions that
still might puzzle his readers:
- Who controls the Bank of China?
- Is Michael Hudson right, and the Chinese are paying for
their own military encirclement? If so, why? Have they been
threatened with nuclear annihilation once again if they stop funding the
Empire?
- Why does Baba Beijing collude in Western manipulation of
the prices of precious metals? Why is Baba protecting the U.S.
dollar? Why did it encourage its people to buy gold—and then stood
by while Western bankers once more drove the price down?
- Why doesn’t China, a nominally communist
country, pass a law that limits the ratio of wealth of the richest to the
poorest person to a modest 100 to 1?
- Since China is going to lose its trillions of
dollar reserves soon enough, why doesn’t it use some of that money to save
potential allies like Venezuela? Why doesn’t it accelerate its
shop-for-everything campaign? Why does it nickel-dime Russia, by far
its most important ally in its confrontation with America?
- Why does China massively develop nuclear power, even though this power poses an existential
risk to China and the world, and even though, in the long term, it
consumes more electricity than it generates?
- Can China overcome its corruption and
authoritarianism? If so, how?
- Does China have a nuclear second-strike
capability? If not, is it working full-steam to achieve it?
- Wouldn’t China be better off if it let go of
its authoritarian Confucianism and embraced more elements of its Buddhist
tradition?
_________
I agree with
Brown that we
need to defeat the Princes of Power’s totalitarian dream. I hope, with
all my heart, that China and Russia survive America’s provocative regime-change
gambits and nuclear brinkmanship, and that they can outmaneuver the Princes and
attain even greater sovereignty than they enjoy now.
I do however love
freedom, equality, spirituality, and sustainability. For me, China falls
short on all these scores. My own ideal society is far closer to the kind of real
democracy that existed in most tribal societies, or, in literate societies, in
the Iroquois Federation and, at times, in ancient Athens and her sister
democracies. In fiction, one such model is provided by Le Guin’s The Dispossessed.
So while real
democrats wish the Chinese people all the best, and while they ardently hope
for the restoration of a multipolar world, they also recognize that the Chinese
colossus is not the answer to humanity’s prayers for a better
world. Such a world could only be created when enough ordinary people
everywhere rise up and fight the Princes of Power.
I highly
recommend Jeff Brown’s book to anyone interested in a frank, brilliant,
no-holds-barred, insightful review of China—where it came from, where it is,
and where it might be going.
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