Tensions rise as China accuses USA of provocation; DPRK tests ICBM - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#14820517
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa- ... SKBN19N0O0



Tensions rise China accuses U.S. war ship of unauthorised entry into China's territorial waters.
A U.S. warship sailed near a disputed island in the South China Sea claimed by China, Taiwan and Vietnam on Sunday in an operation meant to challenge the competing claims of all three nations, a U.S. Defense Department official said.

The USS Stethem, a guided-missile destroyer, sailed within 12 nautical miles of Triton Island, part of the Paracel Islands in the South China Sea, the official said.

It was the second "freedom-of-navigation operation," or "fonop," conducted during the presidency of Donald Trump, following a drill in late May in which a U.S. warship sailed within 12 nautical miles of an artificial island built up by China in the South China Sea.

China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement the U.S. ship had made an unauthorized entry into China's territorial waters.

The operation was a "serious political and military provocation," said the statement, issued late on Sunday, citing ministry spokesman Lu Kang. It said China had sent battle ships and fighter jets to warn off the Stethem.

"China strongly urges the U.S. side to immediately stop this kind of provocative action which seriously violates China's sovereignty and puts at risk China's security," Lu said. China would take all necessary measures to defend itself, he said.

China's Defence Ministry said in a social media post on Monday the U.S. action had seriously damaged peace and stability in the South China Sea and reiterated its resolute opposition to the warship's entry.

"The U.S. conduct seriously damages strategic trust between the two sides and seriously damages the political atmosphere of the development of China-U.S. military relations," the ministry said, without elaborating.

Chinese state-run tabloid the Global Times said in an editorial on Monday the United States was playing political games in the South China Sea and such patrols would not stop Chinese construction work there.

"U.S. provocations cannot change the present situation in the South China Sea," it said.

Twelve nautical miles marks the territorial limits recognized internationally. Sailing within those 12 miles is meant to show that the United States does not recognize territorial claims there.

The Paracels are also claimed by Taiwan and Vietnam. China fully occupied the Paracels in 1974 after forcing the navy of the-then South Vietnam off its holdings.

Trump has heaped praise on Chinese President Xi Jinping, but his administration has also stepped up pressure on Beijing as he has become frustrated that China has not done more to pressure North Korea over its nuclear and missile programs.

On Thursday, the administration imposed sanctions on two Chinese citizens and a shipping company for helping North Korea's nuclear and missile programs, and accused a Chinese bank of laundering money for Pyongyang.

The Trump administration has also approved an arms package for Taiwan worth about $1.4 billion, the State Department said last week. China deems Taiwan its own and has never renounced the use of force to bring the self-ruled island under its control.

Trump spoke to Chinese President Xi Jinping and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Sunday, ahead of meetings he will hold with both leaders on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, next Friday and Saturday.
#14820522
The horse is already out of the fucking stable. The island bases are built and China is going to have several super-carriers in the near future. They're cranking out SSNs like crazy, so there is pretty much no way the US and its Allies could stop China short of a massive conventional war which would almost certainly destroy Taiwan, Japan, Korea and many other nations while also ruining the US as a world power. These futile "aggressive" patrols are not fooling anyone. The US needs to seriously reconsider its Asia policy, and engagement is what is really needed here. Only a few years ago China was starting to get involved with RIMPAC and other international events. Pushing back with trade conflict will backfire, as will the attempt to "get China to deal with DPRK" since clearly nobody wants to deal with DPRK except perhaps the ROK. Anyway Trump is a retard so presumably more mistakes will be made...
#14820530
The U.S. is provoking China. We have no business in their back yard. I wonder how we would react if they were off Cuba?

That said, carriers are the battleships of the 21st century, obsolete against major powers. China has the DF-21D, anti-ship ballistic missile capable of sinking a moving carrier with a conventional warhead (or no warhead). We are no match for China in their back yard. Korea and Vietnam demonstrated this.
#14820548
The US's official position is that we won't say who owns what island. But we also won't accept that international waters can suddenly become Chinese water. Especially when something like 30% of global trade passes through there.

We sail through to reinforce that we do not consider it Chinese water and China isn't going to start a war by firing on ships that are simply sailing through trade routes that we routinely patrol and protect. We have support for sailing through the south China seas from not only our regional allies but all the countries that reply on trade through the south China Sea and don't want China to have the power to shut down their ports.

This doesn't threaten China's security, it threatens it's expansion and influence in the region over it's neighbors.

China doesn't want war with the US, the US doesn't want war with them either. China needs to negotiate with it's neighbors over the control of claimed islands and the seas and not expect to simply be able to plop down bases and imagine everyone will just quitely accept that.
#14820553
The US doesn't have the position that they go away. The official position, at least under Obama good knows what trumps white house is thinking, is that China needs to negotiate with the other countries in the area to negotiate a resolution. The US doesn't side with any country on any particular claims.

As long as the US Navy continues to sail through the region then China can complain that it's their waters but if it isn't recognized by the international community then the only way to enforce it is to start trying to bomb ships.

Which China won't do because they know as well as we do that it would be a terrible war and they would not come out of it in anything but a shambles.
#14820558
The US does not need to pass through like that if all they want to do is test China's restraint.

I hope that the matter of ownership can be resolved, but the US sailing in whenever will not help things. Trump should go back to playing footsie with Trump models or something. He is useless when it comes to diplomacy.
#14820559
China doesn't have to do anything. The US doesn't change the the fact that the island bases exist just by sailing warships around them. China clearly has the high ground here, as the islands threaten US assets in the region, and there is nothing the US or its Allies can do about it. I agree that Obama was on a better course, his "Asia pivot" strategy at least managed some engagement with China, but clearly he sabotaged himself- look at what happened in the Philippines, DPRK nuclear program failed containment, China island basing expansion... The US failed during Obama's tenure to deal with the island basing, let alone the other regional issues, (probably because Obama got suckered into Hillary Clinton's middle east quagmire + Putin suckered him in Crimea), and now Trump (of course) is doing everything he can to undermine Obama's achievements, which he interprets as being "tough" on China. This policy of retrenchment will achieve nothing as the US now needs to deal with a China that is already established.

Trump actaully needs China because he thinks they'll help him on DPRK, which of course they won't. Since he's totally incompetent, he's swinging back and forth between appeasement efforts (Mar a Logo) and the stick (sailing warships around and implementing targeted sanctions, arms deal with Taiwan). Whatever this "strategy" is calculated to do, I guarantee you it will not impact China's strategic position in the south china sea. They will no doubt interpret Trump's blustering policy reversals as incoherent strategic weakness, which they can exploit, basically by doing nothing. Just by holding the bases and building more warships and nuclear submarines they are putting the pressure on the US to respond. Which means building more US warships, which the US can't afford to do anymore. I mean jesus christ they can barely pass a budget let alone reform their health care system. Engaging China in an arms race is just a fucking hole you pour money into.
#14820562
The US does not need to pass through like that if all they want to do is test China's restraint.

I hope that the matter of ownership can be resolved, but the US sailing in whenever will not help things. Trump should go back to playing footsie with Trump models or something. He is useless when it comes to diplomacy.


It's not a test of restraint. It effectively maintains the seas as international waters to maintain trade through those seas, which as I said account for a huge portion of international trade.

Two-thirds of South Korea’s energy supplies, 60 percent of Japan’s, 60 percent of Taiwan’s go through those seas. China's control over them would give china effective power to shut down those countries if it wanted to. Vietnam get's pretty much all it's trade through the south china sea as well. None of these nations nor the US can afford for the Chinese to be able to shut down access to these waters.

Which importantly are not recognized as Chinese waters by the international community. They effectively would be Chinese waters if the US did not sail through, an action supported by every other country in the region except china.
China doesn't have to do anything. The US doesn't change the the fact that the island bases exist just by sailing warships around them. China clearly has the high ground here, as the islands threaten US assets in the region, and there is nothing the US or its Allies can do about it. I agree that Obama was on a better course, his "Asia pivot" strategy at least managed some engagement with China, but clearly he sabotaged himself- look at what happened in the Philippines, DPRK nuclear program failed containment, China island basing expansion... The US failed during Obama's tenure to deal with the island basing, let alone the other regional issues, (probably because Obama got suckered into Hillary Clinton's middle east quagmire + Putin suckered him in Crimea), and now Trump (of course) is doing everything he can to undermine Obama's achievements, which he interprets as being "tough" on China. This policy of retrenchment will achieve nothing as the US now needs to deal with a China that is already established.


The Asian pivot was Hillary Clintons foreign policy push. You cannot blame her for foreign policy failures but credit the good ideas all to Obama when she was secretary of state. I would also contend that Putin's actions in Crimea were hardly suckering Obama into paying attention to something unimportant. That was an extremely serious issue and remains quite a serious issue.

The US is not going to be able to get rid of the bases I agree, but we cannot afford to cede international waters to china and that is what running ships through maintains. This isn't some new policy Trump started, it was policy under Obama and we regularly sailed ships through the region well before China decided it would build some islands and declare the seas theirs.

We can have relations with China without conceding to their whims in the region and abandoning our allies to their political and economic control. TTIP and our enforcement of international waters and our pressure to solve the problems in the south china sea through diplomacy and multilateral discussions with other regional powers and not military threats and force must be part of any dealing with China.

Trump actaully needs China because he thinks they'll help him on DPRK, which of course they won't.Since he's totally incompetent, he's swinging back and forth between appeasement efforts (Mar a Logo) and the stick (sailing warships around and implementing targeted sanctions, arms deal with Taiwan). Whatever this "strategy" is calculated to do, I guarantee you it will not impact China's strategic position in the south china sea. They will no doubt interpret Trump's blustering policy reversals as incoherent strategic weakness, which they can exploit, basically by doing nothing. Just by holding the bases and building more warships and nuclear submarines they are putting the pressure on the US to respond. Which means building more US warships, which the US can't afford to do anymore.


I think you overestimate China. They cannot afford to create ships endlessly and it'll be decades before they are a naval rival of the United states fleet. I agree that Trumps policy has a tendency to schizophrenia but china cannot enforce control of the south china sea so long as the US doesn't recognize it and it protects trade through the sea. It can have all the bases it likes but the US isn't going to yield a trade route that would effectively give china regional control of south Asia.

China's strategic position in the South china sea is worthless if they aren't willing to enforce it, and they aren't. Both sides know that our economies would completely collapse in a battle and so the current situation is a stalemate for the foreseeable future. A stalemate that benefits the US's position and the positions of the other countries in south asia that rely on that trade route.
#14820628
I'm guessin' that the first time the U.S. launches a strike against China from one of its super carriers China will test a few of its DF-21D.


Nobody is going to bomb anybody god willing. As for the DF missle, they aren't sure fire weapons (none are) and it's not like the Navy has been sitting around not looking for countermeasures to protect their very expensive boats.

John Pilger made a film about this, it's called The Coming War on China


I hope and believe the thucydides trap can be avoided. It has been a topic of much discussion on and between both sides. Nobody wants what would be an inevitably disastrous conflict for everyone involved.
#14820633
This is indeed a needless provocation by the US. The argument that China will/can stop all trade in the region just doesn't fly. Doing anything like that will for all intent and purposes a declaration of war and as said no one wants a sino-us war, neither China nor US nor anyone else.

US warship entering the region now is not going to change anything, potentially China can stop all trade right now, the only reason it won't happen is because China is not crazy and no one wants a war. These US stunts doesn't change any of those things, this is just a display of muscle that changes, achieves nothing other than being a silly act of provocation.
#14820638
Well, I've put my point of view out there, and since it's all speculation about what would or could happen in the future it's rather hard to prove.

I do think that if China was ceded control of the south China Sea it would gain enourmous power over America's allies and because the US would not want war it would allow it.

It would simply be another stalemate but instead of America's needless and evil provocations that will lead to nothing the US will have abandoned it's allies and the region.
#14820640
mikema63 wrote:Nobody is going to bomb anybody god willing. As for the DF missle, they aren't sure fire weapons (none are) and it's not like the Navy has been sitting around not looking for countermeasures to protect their very expensive boats.



I hope and believe the thucydides trap can be avoided. It has been a topic of much discussion on and between both sides. Nobody wants what would be an inevitably disastrous conflict for everyone involved.


The navy developed countermeasures to protect carriers like they developed countermeasures to protect battleships in WWII.
#14820646
How is anyone ceding control of anything? This warship entering or not entering as I said is not changing anything at all. These warships are not holding South China Sea from the "evil" clutches of the Chinese.

The only concrete action that could had been taken was to stop China building those artificial islands (but allies were abandoned and islands were built)but time for that has passed, sending these warships is just an act of provocation, its not "defending" the region from Chinese in any meaningful sense. Right now as it stands, this act was just a silly provocation by US.
#14820647
John Pilger wrote:The Coming War On China

A major US military build-up – including nuclear weapons – is under way in Asia and the Pacific with the purpose of confronting China.

When I first went to Hiroshima in 1967, the shadow on the steps was still there. It was an almost perfect impression of a human being at ease: legs splayed, back bent, one hand by her side as she sat waiting for a bank to open. At a quarter past eight on the morning of 6 August, 1945, she and her silhouette were burned into the granite. I stared at the shadow for an hour or more, unforgettably. When I returned many years later, it was gone: taken away, ‘disappeared’, a political embarrassment.

I have spent two years making a documentary film, The Coming War on China, in which the evidence and witnesses warn that nuclear war is no longer a shadow, but a contingency. The greatest build-up of American-led military forces since the Second World War is well under way. They are on the western borders of Russia, and in Asia and the Pacific, confronting China.

The great danger this beckons is not news, or it is news buried and distorted: a drumbeat of propaganda that echoes the psychopathic campaign embedded in public consciousness during much of the 20th century.

Like the renewal of post-Soviet Russia, the rise of China as an economic power is declared an ‘existential threat’ to the divine right of the United States to rule and dominate human affairs.

To counter this, in 2011 President Obama announced a ‘pivot to Asia’, which meant that almost two-thirds of US naval forces would be transferred to Asia and the Pacific by 2020.

Today, more than 400 American military bases encircle China with missiles, bombers, warships and, above all, nuclear weapons. From Australia north through the Pacific to Japan, Korea and across Eurasia to Afghanistan and India, the bases form, says one US strategist, ‘the perfect noose’.

A study by the RAND Corporation – which, since Vietnam, has planned America’s wars – is entitled War with China: Thinking Through the Unthinkable. Commissioned by the US Army, the authors evoke the Cold War when RAND made notorious the catch cry of its chief strategist, Herman Kahn – ‘thinking the unthinkable’. Kahn’s book, On Thermonuclear War, elaborated a plan for a ‘winnable’ nuclear war against the Soviet Union.

Today, his apocalyptic view is shared by those holding real power in the US: the Pentagon militarists and their neoconservative collaborators in the executive, intelligence agencies and Congress. The current Secretary of Defense, Ashley Carter, a verbose provocateur, says US policy is to confront those ‘who see America’s dominance and want to take that away from us’.
‘Punish’ China

In Washington, I met Amitai Etzioni, distinguished professor of international affairs at George Washington University. The US, he writes, ‘is preparing for a war with China, a momentous decision that so far has failed to receive a thorough review from elected officials, namely the White House and Congress.’

This war would begin with a ‘blinding attack against Chinese anti-access facilities, including land and sea-based missile launchers… satellite and anti-satellite weapons’. The incalculable risk is that ‘deep inland strikes could be mistakenly perceived by the Chinese as pre-emptive attempts to take out its nuclear weapons, thus cornering them into “a terrible use-it-or-lose-it dilemma” [that would] lead to nuclear war.’

In 2015, the Pentagon released its Law of War Manual. ‘The United States,’ it says, ‘has not accepted a treaty rule that prohibits the use of nuclear weapons per se, and thus nuclear weapons are lawful weapons for the United States.’

In China, a strategist told me, ‘We are not your enemy, but if you [in the West] decide we are, we must prepare without delay.’ China’s military and arsenal are small compared to America’s. However, ‘for the first time,’ wrote Gregory Kulacki of the Union of Concerned Scientists, ‘China is discussing putting its nuclear missiles on high alert so that they can be launched quickly on warning of an attack… This would be a significant and dangerous change in Chinese policy… Indeed, the nuclear weapon policies of the United States are the most prominent external factor influencing Chinese advocates for raising the alert level of China’s nuclear forces.’

Professor Ted Postol was scientific adviser to the head of US naval operations. An authority on nuclear weapons, he told me, ‘Everybody here wants to look like they’re tough. See, I got to be tough… I’m not afraid of doing anything military, I’m not afraid of threatening; I’m a hairy-chested gorilla. And we have gotten into a state, the United States has gotten into a situation where there’s a lot of sabre-rattling, and it’s really being orchestrated from the top.’

I said, ‘This seems incredibly dangerous.’

‘That’s an understatement.’

Andrew Krepinevich is a former Pentagon war planner and the influential author of war games against China. He wants to ‘punish’ China for extending its defences to the South China Sea. He advocates seeding the ocean with sea mines, sending in US special forces and enforcing a naval blockade. He told me, ‘Our first president, George Washington, said if you want peace, prepare for war.’

In 2015, in high secrecy, the US staged its biggest single military exercise since the Cold War. This was Talisman Sabre; an armada of ships and long-range bombers rehearsed an ‘Air-Sea Battle Concept for China’ – ASB – blocking sea lanes in the Straits of Malacca and cutting off China’s access to oil, gas and other raw materials from the Middle East and Africa.

It is such a provocation, and the fear of a US Navy blockade, that has seen China feverishly building strategic airstrips on disputed reefs and islets in the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea. Last July, the UN Permanent Court of Arbitration ruled against China’s claim of sovereignty over these islands. Although the action was brought by the Philippines, it was presented by leading American and British lawyers and can be traced to then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

In 2010, Clinton flew to Manila. She demanded that America’s former colony reopen the US military bases closed down in the 1990s following a popular campaign against the violence they generated, especially against Filipino women. She declared China’s claim on the Spratly Islands – which lie more than 7,500 miles (12,000 kilometres) from the United States – a threat to US ‘national security’ and to ‘freedom of navigation’.

Handed millions of dollars in arms and military equipment, the then government of President Benigno Aquino broke off bilateral talks with China and signed a secretive Enhanced Defense Co-operation Agreement with the US. This established five rotating US bases and restored a hated colonial provision that American forces and contractors were immune from Philippine law.

Under the rubric of ‘information dominance’ – the jargon for media manipulation on which the Pentagon spends more than $4 billion – the Obama administration launched a propaganda campaign that cast China, the world’s greatest trading nation, as a threat to ‘freedom of navigation’.

CNN led the way, its ‘national security reporter’ reporting excitedly from on board a US Navy surveillance flight over the Spratlys. The BBC persuaded frightened Filipino pilots to fly a single-engine Cessna over the disputed islands ‘to see how the Chinese would react’. None of the news reports questioned why the Chinese were building airstrips off their own coastline, or why American military forces were massing on China’s doorstep.

The designated chief propagandist is Admiral Harry Harris, the US military commander in Asia and the Pacific. ‘My responsibilities,’ he told The New York Times, ‘cover Bollywood to Hollywood, from polar bears to penguins.’ Never was imperial domination described as pithily.
Malleable media and obsequious partners

Harris is one of a brace of Pentagon admirals and generals briefing selected, malleable journalists and broadcasters, with the aim of justifying a threat as specious as that with which George W Bush and Tony Blair justified the destruction of Iraq.

In Los Angeles in September, Harris declared he was ‘ready to confront a revanchist Russia and an assertive China… If we have to fight tonight, I don’t want it to be a fair fight. If it’s a knife fight, I want to bring a gun. If it’s a gun fight, I want to bring in the artillery… and all our partners with their artillery.’

These ‘partners’ include South Korea, an American colony in all but name and the launch pad for the Pentagon’s Terminal High Altitude Air Defense system, known as THAAD, ostensibly aimed at North Korea. As Professor Postol points out, it targets China.

In Sydney, Australia, Harris called on China to ‘tear down its Great Wall in the South China Sea’. The imagery was front-page news. Australia is America’s most obsequious ‘partner’; its political elite, military, intelligence agencies and the dominant Murdoch media are fully integrated into what is known as the ‘alliance’. Closing the Sydney Harbour Bridge for the motorcade of a visiting American government ‘dignitary’ is not uncommon. The war criminal Dick Cheney was afforded this honour.

Although China is Australia’s biggest trader, on which much of the national economy relies, ‘confronting China’ is the diktat from Washington. The few political dissenters in Canberra risk McCarthyite smears in the Murdoch press. ‘You in Australia are with us come what may,’ said one of the architects of the Vietnam War, McGeorge Bundy. One of the most important US bases is Pine Gap near Alice Springs. Founded by the CIA, it spies on China and all of Asia, and is a vital contributor to Washington’s murderous war by drone in the Middle East.

In October, Richard Marles, the defence spokesperson of the main Australian opposition party, the Labor Party, demanded that ‘operational decisions’ in provocative acts against China be left to military commanders in the South China Sea. In other words, a decision that could mean war with a nuclear power should not be taken by an elected leader or a parliament but by an admiral or a general.

This is the Pentagon line, a historic departure for any state calling itself a democracy. The ascendancy of the Pentagon in Washington – which Daniel Ellsberg has called a silent coup – is reflected in the record $5 trillion the United States has spent on aggressive wars since 9/11, according to a study by Brown University. The million dead in Iraq and the flight of 12 million refugees from at least four countries are the consequence.

‘I state clearly and with conviction,’ said Obama in 2009, ‘America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.’ Under Obama, nuclear warhead spending has risen higher than under any president since the end of the Cold War. A mini nuclear weapon is planned. Known as the B61 Model 12, it will mean, says General James Cartwright, former vice-chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that ‘going smaller [makes its use] more thinkable’.
Peaceful resistance

The Japanese island of Okinawa has 32 military installations, from which Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Afghanistan and Iraq have been attacked by the United States. Today, the principal target is China, with whom Okinawans have close cultural and trade ties.

There are military aircraft constantly in the sky over Okinawa; they sometimes crash into homes and schools. People cannot sleep, teachers cannot teach. Wherever they go in their own country, they are fenced in and told to keep out.

A hugely popular Okinawan movement has been growing since a 12-year-old girl was gang-raped by US troops in 1995. It was one of hundreds of such crimes, many of them never prosecuted. Barely acknowledged in the wider world, the resistance in Okinawa is a vivid expression of how ordinary people can peacefully take on a military giant, and threaten to win.

Their campaign has elected Japan’s first anti-base governor, Takeshi Onaga, and presented an unfamiliar hurdle to the Tokyo government and the ultra-nationalist Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s plans to repeal Japan’s ‘peace constitution’.

The resistance leaders include Fumiko Shimabukuro, aged 87, a survivor of the Second World War, when a quarter of Okinawans died in the American invasion. Fumiko and hundreds of others took refuge in beautiful Henoko Bay, which she is now fighting to save. The US wants to destroy the bay in order to extend runways for its bombers. As we gathered peacefully outside the US base, Camp Schwab, giant Sea Stallion helicopters hovered over us for no reason other than to intimidate.

Across the East China Sea lies the Korean island of Jeju, a semi-tropical sanctuary and World Heritage Site declared ‘an island of world peace’. On this island of world peace has been built one of the most provocative military bases in the world, less than 400 miles (650 kilometres) from Shanghai. The fishing village of Gangjeong is dominated by a South Korean naval base purpose-built for US aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines and destroyers equipped with the Aegis missile system, aimed at China.

A people’s resistance to these war preparations has become a presence on Jeju for almost a decade. Every day, often twice a day, villagers, Catholic priests and supporters from all over the world stage a religious mass that blocks the gates of the base. In a country where political demonstrations are often banned, unlike powerful religions, the tactic has produced an inspiring spectacle.

One of the leaders, Father Mun Jeong-hyeon, told me, ‘I sing four songs every day at the base, regardless of the weather. I sing in typhoons – no exception. To build this base, they destroyed the environment, and the life of the villagers, and we should be a witness to that. They want to rule the Pacific. They want to make China isolated in the world. They want to be emperor of the world.’

I flew to Shanghai for the first time in more than a generation. When I was last in China, the loudest noise I remember was the tinkling of bicycle bells; Mao Zedong had recently died, and the cities seemed dark places, in which foreboding and expectation competed. Within a few years, Deng Xiaoping, the ‘man who changed China’, was the ‘paramount leader’. Nothing prepared me for the astonishing changes today.

I met Lijia Zhang, a Beijing journalist and typical of a new class of outspoken mavericks. Her best-selling book has the ironic title Socialism Is Great! She grew up during the chaotic and brutal Cultural Revolution and has lived in the US and Europe. ‘Many Americans imagine,’ she said, ‘that Chinese people live a miserable, repressed life with no freedom whatsoever. The [idea of] the yellow peril has never left them… They have no idea there are some 500 million people being lifted out of poverty, and some would say it’s 600 million.’

She described modern China as a ‘golden cage’. ‘Since the reforms started,’ she said, ‘and we’ve become so much better off, China has become one of the most unequal societies in the world. There are lots of protests now: typically, land being grabbed by officials for commercial development. But farmers are more aware of their rights; and young factory workers are demanding a better wage and conditions.’
The world is shifting east

China today presents perfect ironies, not least the house in Shanghai where Mao and his comrades secretly founded the Communist Party of China in 1921. Today, it stands in the heart of a very capitalist shopping district; you walk out of this communist shrine with your Little Red Book and your plastic bust of Mao into the embrace of Starbucks, Apple, Cartier, Prada.

Would Mao be shocked? I doubt it. Five years before his great revolution in 1949, he sent this secret message to Washington. ‘China must industrialize,’ he wrote. ‘This can only be done by free enterprise. Chinese and American interests fit together, economically and politically. America need not fear that we will not be co-operative. We cannot risk any conflict.’

Mao offered to meet Franklin Roosevelt in the White House, and his successor Harry Truman, and his successor Dwight Eisenhower. He was rebuffed, or wilfully ignored. The opportunity that might have changed contemporary history, prevented wars in Asia and saved countless lives was lost because the truth of these overtures was denied in 1950s Washington ‘when the catatonic Cold War trance,’ wrote the critic James Naremore, ‘held our country in its rigid grip’.

Eric Li, a Shanghai venture capitalist and social scientist, told me, ‘I make the joke: in America you can change political parties, but you can’t change the policies. In China you cannot change the party, but you can change policies. The political changes that have taken place in China this past 66 years have been wider and broader and greater than probably in any other major country in living memory.’

For all the difficulties of those left behind by China’s rapid growth, such as workers from the countryside living on the edge in cities built for conspicuous consumption, and those Tiananmen brave-hearts still challenging ‘the centre’, the Party, what is striking is the widespread sense of optimism that buttresses the epic of change.

The world is shifting east; but the astonishing vision of Eurasia from China is barely understood in the West. The ‘New Silk Road’ is a ribbon of trade, ports, pipelines and high-speed trains all the way to Europe. China, the world’s leader in rail technology, is negotiating with 28 countries for routes on which trains will reach up to 400 kilometres an hour. This opening to the world has the approval of much of humanity and, along the way, is uniting China and Russia; and they are doing it entirely without ‘us’ in the West.

We – or many of us – remain in thrall to the US, which has intervened violently in the affairs of a third of the members of the United Nations, destroying governments, subverting elections, imposing blockades. In the past five years, the US has shipped deadly weapons to 96 countries, most of them poor. Dividing societies in order to control them is US policy, as the tragedies in Iraq and Syria demonstrate.

‘I believe in American exceptionalism with every fibre of my being,’ said Barack Obama, evoking the national fetishism of the 1930s. This modern cult of superiority is Americanism, the world’s dominant predator. Accompanied by a brainwashing that presents it as enlightenment on the march, the conceit insinuates our lives.

In September, the Atlantic Council, a US geopolitical thinktank, published a report that predicted a Hobbesian world ‘marked by the breakdown of order, violent extremism [and] an era of perpetual war’. The new enemies were a ‘resurgent’ Russia and an ‘increasingly aggressive’ China. Only heroic America can save us.

There is a demented quality about this war-mongering. It is as if the ‘American Century’ – proclaimed in 1941 by the American imperialist Henry Luce, owner of Time magazine – has ended without notice and no-one has had the courage to tell the emperor to take his guns and go home.
#14820657
How is anyone ceding control of anything?


I fail to see how you think international waters becoming Chinese water is not a change of control.

This warship entering or not entering as I said is not changing anything at all. These warships are not holding South China Sea from the "evil" clutches of the Chinese.


I never said China was evil, controlling the south China Sea would be tremendously positive for china and it's perfectly rational for them to claim them and protect them with military bases.

These warships maintain the seas as international water and trading routes. By completely ignoring Chinese claims to sovereignty in a way that China is unwilling to prevent as it would require starting a war.

This too in completely within the interests of the us and the nation's that rely on trade in the south China Sea.

The only concrete action that could had been taken was to stop China building those artificial islands (but allies were abandoned and islands were built)but time for that has passed, sending these warships is just an act of provocation, its not "defending" the region from Chinese in any meaningful sense. Right now as it stands, this act was just a silly provocation by US.


Would you suggest bombing the ships building these islands? That's a rather terrible idea given that you think even sailing through formerly international waters is a provocation to fill scale war.

As it stands ships sailing through ignoring China's claims in a way China is not willing to take the steps necessary to prevent maintains them as effectively international waters and unless China is utterly out of their minds they aren't going to be provoked to war over.

@skinster I suppose I can't be particularly surprised that you think the US is essentially irrational and wants to start a nuclear war.
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