Behind The Smokescreen An Analysis of the West’s Destructive China Cold War Agenda and Why It Must Stop TFF • The Transnational Foundation for Peace & Future Research 1 Behind The Smokescreen An Analysis of the West’s Destructive China Cold War Agenda and Why It Must Stop Gordon Dumoulin Jan Oberg Thore Vestby TFF • The Transnational Foundation for Peace & Future Research Lund, Sweden • [email protected] • The Transnational • Ph +46 (0)738 525200 • August 6, 2021 • © TFF 2021 Front-page photo 丁亦然 Unsplash 2 Table of Content Introduction The China Cold War Agenda as Dangerous Decline and Decay 6 Executive Summary 15 Chapter 1 China and the West - Competition Not Cooperation 19 Chapter 2 The Xinjiang Genocide Accusations As Agenda - and its sources 26 2.1 The compact Western mainstream media silence 27 2.2 The six primary sources behind the Xinjiang genocide documentation 29 2.3 Problematic issues, materials and producers 30 2.3.1 The number issue How many Uyghurs are in how many detention camps and facilities? 31 2.3.2 Funding and policy affiliations Where does the funding come from to produce the Xinjiang Genocide accusations? What political interests are behind? 36 2.3.3 Databases and witness statements The Victim Databases and the Credibility of witnesses 39 2.3.4 Politicisation, weaponisation and Adrian Zenz On human rights, there is only one interpretation possible 42 2.3.5 ASPI The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) 46 Chapter 3 Some facts about the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR): History and terrorism 52 3 3.1 Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) in China 52 3.2 Xinjiang in recent history 53 3.3 Counterproductive US meddling in Chinese affairs 56 Chapter 4 Smokescreening: Media Manipulation Methods (MMM) Promoted by Governments and Media 59 4.1 Nine Media Manipulation Methods 59 4.2 The decline in Western media and research standards 63 Chapter 5 The China Themes - and Non-Themes - in Western Governments and Media 66 Chapter 6 Concrete Smokescreening and Media Manipulation Methods (MMM) Used Against China 71 6.1 Some random examples 72 6.2 Fake, omission, self censorship and the ’party line’: Cancel dissenters! 76 6.3 Really? The World Bank gave loans to the ”concentration camps”? 80 Chapter 7 Case Studies: The Forced Labour Accusation 82 7.1 ASPI and Adrian Zenz again 82 7.2 The best US think tank ”connects the dots” 85 7.3 The Better Cotton Initiative - and the stories of the great architect of future China and BBC’s Nazi Germany-China parallel 89 Chapter 8 The China Accusation Industry - What’s Next? 96 8.1 Slow genocide non-Zenz 96 8.2 Amnesty International’s participation in the CCWA 97 8.3 Beijing’s coming invasion of Taiwan/ROC 102 8.4 The next items of the China Accusation Industry with its racist overtones 106 4 Chapter 9 Don’t Throw Stones When You Live In A Glass House 109 9.1 Indicators of projection accusation: We, Them & Reality 112 9.2 Atrocity propaganda - it’s about the US itself and will create a boomerang 116 Chapter 10 The China Themes – Terrorism Costs and Results 118 10.1 The costs of the US and China fighting against terrorism 118 10.2 Hidden agendas behind fighting terrorism 121 10.3 Two vitally different ways of combatting terrorism 122 Chapter 11 US Laws For the Anti-China CCWA and Confrontation - Not For Cooperation With China 124 11.1 Not empty words 124 11.2 Human rights as a primary tool for a world-dominating foreign policy that is impossible and self-destructive 127 11.3 The propaganda role of the media in the CCWA 128 11.4 Inevitable world order changes and the forthcoming TFF report 129 5 Introduction The China Cold War Agenda as Dangerous Decline and Decay What happened to the US perception of China? By way of introduction, let’s flashback to 2011. Watch then US Vice President Joe Biden speak in a Chinese classroom - President Xi listening carefully - about how good it is for both China and the US that China grows, how they have nothing to fear from each other and how cooperation and educational exchange programs will yield mutually beneficial results. And less than ten years later, the US began to develop a new China Cold War Agenda, CCWA, fierce and fast. We must ask: Why? What happened to the US and Mr Biden? Recent years have seen a marked shift in how Western government, research and media look at China. Especially the last couple of years, we have witnessed how, daily, a systematically negative attitude bordering on demonisation has been promoted. And according to reliable surveys, it has caused a significant intensification - ”historic highs” - in citizens’ unfavourable views of China in many countries. This could have been caused by some sudden policies and actions by China perceived as negative around the world. We fail, however, to see any such abrupt moves that could have caused such a significant and uniform attitudinal change. It is more realistic to hypothesise that this increasingly negative attitude is manufactured, orchestrated, and correlates with other initiatives and policies pursued by the US and its NATO allies in roughly the same period. 6 During the past two years, there has also been a substantial increase in Western attention to China concerning various issues. One immediately thinks of the Coronavirus, human rights violations, genocide in Xinjiang, riots in Hong Kong, the Taiwan issue or security threats from Huawei and other Chinese businesses as some of the headline concerns in news, commentaries, documentaries and also research and policy debates. China has increasingly been a priority for political debates, foreign policy agendas and mainstream media in Western nations with narratives and accusations piling up with more extreme accusations by the day followed by condemnations, warnings or restrictions by trade, sanctions, media narratives, diplomacy, militarism, cultural exchange or education. Yet another dimension of this change is that China has been narrowed down, so to speak. Most media and people, including foreign policy officers, only need one hand to point out how they view China and what they think about China. Finding nuanced notes or different perspectives in these media productions, opinions and discussions is like searching for a needle in a haystack. It is possible to summarise these - negative-only - themes into a few types: dictatorial menace to the free world + human rights violations + security threats + exploitations through the Belt and Road Initiative + territorial aggressions (Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Tibet, Taiwan, South China sea) and forced labour. In general, Western media do not report on, and politicians do not bother about, the obvious fact that something positive is (also) happening in China - be it the uplifting of some 850 million people out of poverty, the tremendously fast socio- economic development the last forty years, the Belt And Road Initiative (BRI) - humanity’s largest-ever civilian cooperation project involving today 80+ countries. While the Chinese are curious about and have learnt from the West for decades - and tens of millions of them travel to the West as tourists every year - the 7 general curiosity about China in the West is rather close to zero. Chinese culture has not been assimilated into the West while lots of elements of Western lifestyle, music, theatre, ballet, art and the English language has been welcomed and assimilated into the Chinese society. This second TFF report This report is the second in a series from TFF. The first was ”The Xinjiang Genocide Determination As Agenda” (April 2021). It had a more narrow focus than we have here in that it investigated the quality of the Xinjiang genocide accusation’s documentation (as presented in an allegedly authoritative, independent report). It concluded that there was too much deficient scholarship, untrustworthy sources and most of it produced by many scholars who seem to have a less noble agenda, such as ”weaponising” human rights issues in service of an even more hawkish US foreign policy in general and vis-a-vis China in particular. In what follows, we provide an overview of how - and how fast - the downward spiralling of negative China themes came about, including insights and perspectives for broader and deeper analysis in a series of forthcoming TFF reports. We offer an account of what we believe is an orchestrated policy and media campaign, which we call the China Cold War Agenda, CCWA. It has deplorable undertones of a Sinophobia and racism that builds on old historical elements and may remind us of the ”Yellow Peril”. It is virtually devoid of deeper factual knowledge about China - its history, people, culture, values, ways of thinking, socio-economic system and political outlook. We cannot but present a substantial criticism of Western mainstream media in general and their coverage of the US/NATO-China relations in particular. 8 None of the authors come from the media world - but we have used media ourselves and been consumers of media for quite a few decades. TFF being a research-based public education foundation - and completely independent of state and corporate funding - has always interacted with media. We know how to critique politicising media and media that serve war instead of public information based on facts, diverse and factual sources and as objective as humanly possible. As peace researcher Johan Galtung has stated somewhere - ”If truth is war’s first victim, complexity is the second.” The reduction of the world’s complexity into a typical Western dichotomy of bad guys versus good guys, them versus us, the West versus the Rest - with no wish to understand the issues or problems that stand between the parties in any conflict - has become unbearable from both a scholarly and a public service perspective.