So with every newspaper published in the English language throwing out US propaganda about China, I want to offer another perspective. China has a lot of exports, especially technology, but one export people do not know about is democracy.
This might surprise some, and yes, it’s true, China has a large state security mechanism. A lot of people forget this, but China has been, throughout its entire modern history, enveloped in a cold war. Imagine 9/11, except it happens on a weekly basis. That’s the level of security threats that China has been dealing with for decades in the form of CIA coup attempts, western-backed terrorists, trade blockades, espionage and sanctions.
People forget that sanctions are actually one of the world’s deadliest modes of warfare.
To quote Noam Chomsky:
“The number of people killed by the sanctions in Iraq is greater than the total number of people killed by all weapons of mass destruction in all of history.”
And it is precisely this phenomenon I want to discuss. China has a wonderful alternative to sanctions. The US, when faced with an ideological opponent, will starve the people in order to reach the leaders. In Brazil, China turned this formula on its head.
As you may know, Bolsanaro is not entirely aligned with Chinese political ideas. In fact, the man is a rabid far-right anticommunist.
So what does China do?
As Covid and natural disaster threatens Brazil’s agriculture, China bails it out.
This is just one of several deals throughout the last two years. If the tables were turned, and Brazil had a socialist government, the US would starve them with sanctions in order to win the compadore opposition.
China is instead feeding the people, in order to win the popular majority. This is a huge shift in the way foreign trade has been handled in a largely US-dominated sphere of influence, with most naval trading routes being under NATO control throughout the cold war.
But what exactly makes China’s Belt and Road Initiative different from say… USAID?
Well, for one thing, USAID does provide aid, but it’s not always to the people you might be thinking of.
To quote the source:
Mitrione’s first posting was in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, where he worked on the police aid program for USAID’s Office of Public Safety. OPS trained and armed friendly — read anti-communist — Latin American police and security officers. Ostensibly, it was meant to teach police how to be less corrupt and more professional. In practice, it operated as a CIA proxy. As for its parent organization, one former USAID director, John Gilligan, later admitted it was “infiltrated from top to bottom with CIA people.” Gilligan explained that “the idea was to plant operatives in every kind of activity we had overseas; government, volunteer, religious, every kind.”
Before Mitrione’s arrival, standard operating procedure for Brazilian police was to beat a suspect nearly to death; if he talked he lived, if not, well… Under Mitrione’s tutelage, officers introduced refined torture techniques drawn from the pages of KUBARK, a CIA instruction manual describing various physical and psychological methods of breaking a prisoner’s will to resist interrogation.
Many of the abuses in KUBARK would later become familiar to the world as the “enhanced interrogation” techniques used during the US war against terrorism: prolonged constraint or exertion, ‘no-touch’ torture (stress positions), extremes of heat, cold or moisture and deprivation or drastic reduction of food or sleep. KUBARK also covers the use of electric shock torture, a favorite tool of both the Brazilian and Uruguayan police under Mitrione’s instruction.
For a long time, colonised and exploited nations had to rely on the US Aid monopoly, which often came with strings attached in the form of IMF contracts, large amounts of debt, and puppet dictatorships.
One of the worst examples of this mafia-like approach to foreign policy was of course when the IMF decided to make an example of Yugoslavia.
To quote To Kill A Nation:
Restructuring wreaked its neoliberal havoc. The World Bank drove hundreds of firms into bankruptcy, producing six hundred thousand layoffs in 1989–90, with additional hundreds of thousands working without pay for months at a time .4 Tens of thousands of Yugoslays were forced to find employment as guest workers in West Germany, Switzerland and elsewhere. Industrial production, which had averaged over 7 per cent annual growth during the late 1960s, plummeted to less than 3 per cent in the 1980s, and to minus 10 per cent by 1990. The IMP and World Bank “financial aid package” allowed for an influx of imports and unrestricted foreign capital, leading to a further slump in domestic production.
Transfer payments from Belgrade to the republics were frozen, again undermining the federal fiscal structure .5 The drastic economic depression induced by IMF restructuring in turn helped fuel the ensuing ethnic conflicts and secessionist movements .6 By 1991, the international creditors were in control of monetary policy. Yugoslavia’s state-run banks were dismantled and the federal government no longer had access to its own Central Bank.
Economist Michel Chossudovsky points out that the country “was carved up under the close scrutiny of its external creditors, its foreign debt carefully divided and allocated to the republics, each of which was now committed to decades of debt payments .”7 With a few strokes, the international creditors helped dismember the FRY and put a fiscal headlock on the newly “independent” republics.
[….]
Supposedly it was Serbian mass atrocities during 1991–95 that necessitated Western intervention. In fact the Western powers were deeply involved in inciting civil war and secession in the FRY before that time. One of the earliest and most active sponsor of secession was Germany, which first openly championed Yugoslavia’s dismemberment in 1991, but was giving Slovenia and Croatia every encouragement long before then. Washington’s declared policy was to support Yugoslav unity while imposing privatization, IMF shock therapy, and debt payment, in effect, supporting Yugoslavia with words while undermining it with deeds.
Concern was expressed by the Bush administration that Bonn “was getting out ahead of the US” with its support of Croatian secession, but the United States did little to deter Germany’s efforts .3 And by January 1992, the United States had become an active player in the breakup of Yugoslavia. That Washington consciously intended to undermine the socialist government of Yugoslavia one way or another is not a matter of speculation but of public record. As early as 1984, the Reagan administration issued US National Security Decision Directive 133: “United States Policy towards Yugoslavia,” labeled “secret sensitive.” A censored version of this document was released years later.
[….]
After the bombings stopped, various police stations around Belgrade displayed dozens of photos of officers killed while performing rescue operations or other duties during the aerial attacks. Casualties among rescue workers were high. NATO had devised the devilish technique of bombing a site, then waiting fifteen minutes — just time enough for rescue teams to arrive and get working — to hit the target a second time, killing many of the would-be rescuers, and making it extremely dangerous for teams to dig for survivors. This method of delayed follow-up precision missile attack on a civilian target was one of NATO’s innovative war crimes.
[….]
Soon after NATO troops rolled into Kosovo, it was widely reported that the KLA itself had disarmed and disbanded. In fact, by early 2000, it was generally understood that KLA gunmen had not disarmed in any appreciable numbers. KLA personnel became the core of a civilian police force and administrative staff, the Kosovo Protection Corps, that did even less than the KFOR troops (NATO’s Kosovo Force) to protect the non-Albanian minorities from violence. Indeed, former KLA members were soon involved in the misdeeds, including torturing and killing local citizens and illegally detaining others.
As we all know, IMF’s intervention in Yugoslavia lead to the most brutal ethnic massacres in the Balkans since the holocaust. To train police officers how to torture, and to impoverish people and arm and fund death squads in order to incite ethnic warfare is a little bit different from China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
And once again as we look at Somalia for instance, we see the opposite. China wanted access to Somalia’s oil supply. So what to they do? Do they declare that it’s time for the boys to bring democracy to this Islamic country? Yes, but not in the way you think.
Instead of bombing and invading Somalia, China brought democracy to them in another way, namely, independence and sovereignty. By helping Somalia upgrade its infrastructure, China opened up Somalia to the world. No more debts, no more monopoly deals with Exxon, no more mafia deals with the IMF.
China gave Somalia the opportunity to decide for themselves, and it paid off, as goodwill often does.
Was this an act of self-interest for China? In some ways, yes, but it was a fair act of self interest. That is what we sometimes refer to as trade. Remember that? Foreign trade? When people exchanged goods as to gain some kind of mutual benefit? In the days before NAFTA, and GATT and WTO and the European Commission For Privatising Yet Another Tax-Funded Resource?
Yeah I don’t either, that’s mostly cold war propaganda, and prior to modern economics the British empire traded slaves, but the concept of actual trade sounds nice, and my generation might be the first generation to experience such a global economy.
A lot of people in the US seem puzzled by “anti-American” sentiment. And obviously they would be, given how all such news coverage has zero context to it. Generally speaking it’s Iranians for instance. Why do Iranians hate Americans so much? Why does Mahmoud Hamza want to behead Johnny Sixpack over at main street USA? Is it because he drives a truck? Or loves his dog? Or enjoys the smell of drying white paint on his mortgaged picket fence? Why do they just hate Americans so much?
Obviously they don’t. They hate the US government. I personally know people from Iran, and they have nothing against the people, what they have something against is having to starve under US sanctions.
Even if, for the sake of argument, Iran has to follow America’s arbitrary rules for some reason, then does the Ayatollah really go hungry? Of course not. It’s the people who do, and they are not blaming the Ayatollah, they are blaming the government who threatens to kill or bankrupt anyone who brings food and medicine across their borders.
So when China steps in, and offers food, infrastructure and freedom to countries, in the form of actual tangible services and economic independence, whether it is Brazil, Somalia, or even Greece, then they are offering countries the ability to opt out of America’s “IMF or KLA” program.
Not many know what US Aid looks like to the people who are subjected to it, and China’s alternative will permit nations to find their own democracy and self-determination following a century of imperial monopolies and debt colonies.
China is no longer dealing with the backlash of the 90s, and the future is looking Eastward.
