VIDEO: How America wrecked Britain and China’s Golden Age

The Brexit trigger that changed the world

Our British Defence Secretary John Healey keeps up the Labour government’s war-on-China schtick with a “we’re ready to fight” battle-cry that was widely mocked. Was Britain always this aggressive and desperate for war with China? Anna Chen analyses how it got this bad after so much promise.

Britain scored a victory in Beijing in 2010, ushering in a “golden age” collaboration that was mutually profitable & peaceful, uniting the Eurasia landmass in Belt and Road trade. What followed was a concerted effort by the declining US to stop the prosperous stabilisation of Europe and Asia at all costs and stifle the emergence of BRICS. The results have been tragic and avoidable.

Article first published 30 July 2025: How the US wrecked Britain and China’s “Golden Age”

“Ready to fight,” blustered British Defence Secretary John Healey, heady on the new car smell rising from a lone HMS Prince of Wales aircraft-carrier docked in Australia at the weekend.

To widespread mockery, Healey delivered his oration on the fantasy threat to Taiwan the moment Prime Minister Anthony Albanese stepped on Yellow Peril turf on his diplomatic trade mission to China.

Were Healey's lurid suggestions of China invading its own province designed to inject steel into an Oz government wavering under an AUKUS lash-up now shrunk to AUK?

Some Australians finally twigged the folly of an existential war with their biggest trade partner (not to mention regional superpower). It’s no surprise, therefore, to see them seeking an off-ramp. If only the same could be said of the UK.

Britain wasn’t always so aggressively determined to wage war on China. Certainly not since the Cold War or even the Hong Kong handover. What changed?

BBC: China, Britain and the Nunzilla conundrum

In 2010, the BBC allowed me to make another programme for Radio 4: China, Britain and the Nunzilla Conundrum. It pointed out that China’s days of making our tat were over and the new kid on the block was about to transition into a world-leading technological, giant.

How they laughed. What, with all those suicide factories?!

The timing turns out to be most telling. 2010 is the year of Obama’s Pivot to Asia (announced November 2011), following declaration of his status as the first Pacific President in a gargantuan territorial-pissing statement of intent.

Hillary Clinton kicks off the all-change with her incendiary speech at the ASEAN Regional Forum in Hanoi on 23 July 2010. She initiates the “smart power” strategy: stirring up enmity using carrot and stick to get the rising superpower’s neighbours on board to “contain China.”

Dubbing the Chinese end of the Pacific the “Western Pacific,” the US will later rename it the “Indo-Pacific,” removing China’ presence from its own coastal territory in favour of another Asian country completely round the corner. And as round the bend as Trump’s much-sneered-at renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America”.

All despite China saving the global economy from America’s greed-fuelled Great Crash of 2008 only two years previously. Oh, yes, who was it who did the damage? And who came to the rescue?

The BBC green-lighting my programme was a clear signal that, at that time, Britain had no intention of torpedoing their lifeboat and growth engine just on Obama’s say-so.

“Expect proxy wars and monstering of China in the supine media as we all get programmed to cheer World War Three and a Half.”
Anna Chen, 17 November 2011 after Obama’s Pivot to Asia

Britain not on the “contain China” bus

US and UK divergence is confirmed later that year after China floats the world economy out of danger.

In November 2010, Prime Minister David Cameron and his trade team score a victory in Beijing, ushering in a “golden age” with China. A collaboration that is mutually profitable, peaceful and helps knit together the Eurasia landmass end-to-end in Belt and Road trade.

Remember not so many years ago when food was cheap and plentiful? Interest rates were near zero? And supply chains were mwah!

In the geopolitical Three Body Problem of Europe, China and the US, Italy signs up to BRICS. Duisberg shapes up to become Europe’s busiest port. Crimea is granted pole position as a major BRICS hub, while China invests heavily in Ukraine’s agriculture. The first freight train from China running the entire length of Eurasia arrives in east London in 2017.

Ominously, a declining America, still on the naughty step for its global malfeasance, finds its influence jeopardised. What with being so well protected by two oceans that it’s cut off from the rest of the Northern hemisphere where all the action’s happening. And so dependent on sea and air. If only it had terrific High Speed Rail like that lot over there. What, not even one kilometre of HSR? And those pesky oceans keep getting in the way.

So g’wan, guess what happens next. Maybe America accepts China’s invitation to join in and keep the party going, as asked by ambassador Cui Tankai?

Nope.

Check out my Shakedown Timeline, compiling articles, analysis and programmes over two and a half decades as it happened.

Made in China 2025

Europe and China have stabilised Eurasia following recession and the near-fatal US crash harshing everyone’s economic mellow. The global economy is rising in sync and there are very few flashpoints to blow up. Slow and steady as it goes.

In 2015, Premier Li Keqiang signs Made in China 2025 (MIC 2025), announced by President Xi to great fanfare. This strategic plan aims to lift China out of its role as world’s factory by upgrading manufacturing and innovation, turning itself into a technological powerhouse, and earning a place at Top Table with the Big Boys.

We’ll make you so proud of us, they think naively. I remember shuddering a bit and wondering, did you get an okay from the alpha male? Not that you should be asking permission, but America might not be the proud parent you’re hoping for. You can feel the frisson of fury in the West as MIC 2025 throws the spotlight onto China’s beautiful cities, shrinking poverty, a growing middle-class and numerous achievements.

Oh, well, you must know what you’re doing.

Britain and the China Golden Goose

Britain continues to resist pressure to give up the Golden Goose they accessed in 2010. A big yah-boo-sucks to Obama’s neocon Pivot. Yay, bring on the Chinese tech. C’mon Huawei and your gorgeous 5G. Rah, Hinkley Point C nuclear power, you are so gonna make us world class. We might even get a Chinese built High Speed Rail.

China is throwing money at us, investing in lil old Britain because it loves us. It loves our style, our queen. Our status as former biggest empire the world has ever known. Forget the pokey embassy in Portland Place up the street from the BBC. We’re gonna need a bigger base. Let’s have us the Royal Mint as home from home.

And then … and then …!

2016. Prime Minister David Cameron snatches defeat from the jaws of victory and caves in to right wing pressure to hold a referendum to leave Europe. Brexit: just the move that would fracture Europe and halt progress in its tracks.

“In order to bring China to heel, Trump would have to break the European Union first. That affects Britain, too. Once we’re out of the EU, it’s unlikely that Trump will allow Britain to trade with China … What was that about Brexit ‘taking back control’?”
Anna Chen, What’s Donald Trump’s trade war with China REALLY about? 13 November 2018

Boris Johnson – London mayor (2008-16), Foreign Secretary (2016-18) and Prime Minister-to-be (2019-22) – and the Brexit bus promise to fund the NHS from money saved, 2016.

Brexit wrecks it

American-born Boris Johnson, who doesn’t care about anything except his own interests, is pulled both ways. He eventually campaigns for Brexit in front of a red London bus bearing the promise to save £350 million a year for the NHS.

Later, Peter Thiel’s Palantir and Cambridge Analytica, Facebook and the Donald Trump campaign (close to Nigel Farage) are all suspected of links to the outcome. Far from taking back control, 37% of Britons have voted to leap out of the EU frying pan and into the US fire, nailing us to the USS Titanic. Not burning but drowning.

Still, not to worry. Everyone knows it’s only a non-legally binding referendum to take the temperature of national opinion and not an actual deciding vote.

Over to you, leader of the opposition who is our last ditch defence against such xenophobic madness. Whatever you do, don’t press that big red Article 50 button.

Clown car reverses gear

The deed done, we may be losing the huge European market, as well as considerable political influence in the EU, but at least we have China as backup.

Taking us completely by surprise, however, unforeseen by everybody except those of us paying attention, the Right and far Right float to Europe’s surface, emboldened by the wave of xenophobic reaction sweeping the continent.

In Britain, Farage reverses sharply from using trade with a rising China as a bribe for leaving the European Union: “Look at lucky Iceland, able to make lucrative deals with China! Leave the EU and we can too”.

Overnight, post-Brexit vote, China is morphed from strategic partner to competition bogey man. Preaching conflict with China, Farage’s new pet project, sits in alignment with US neocons and isolationists like his hero, presidential candidate Donald Trump.

Britain hangs on to benefits

However, Boris Johnson isn’t blind to China’s great wealth. A massively overflowing trough, it awaits the likes of clever men like the Prime Minister to free up all that moolah. In addition to the benefits the country enjoys from our golden age relations, Johnson’s family has financial interests in China. Johnson holds out manfully.

In his 2005 Telegraph article, in which he scoffed at the Chinese for being incapable of original thought, he wrote: “It has become a cliché of geopolitical analysis to say that China is the next world superpower, that the 21st century will belong to Beijing, and that we had better get in tutors to teach our nippers Mandarin if they are to make it in the new world order.”

Boris Johnson writing on China in the Telegraph, September 2005

Britain has invested around £7 billion in Huawei 5G infrastructure which will secure our place ahead of the pack in the modern tech era. Helping our energy independence now that the North Sea is running out of oil (unfortunately privatised and no longer owned by the nation), there are several nuclear power stations in the pipeline, including Hinkley Point C, a third owned by the Chinese who are investing billions in the UK.

But there’s a new sheriff in town, a new clown in the driving seat, a giant bluebottle in the ointment. Choose your own metaphor and stir until shaken. Meet President Donald Trump, a throwback to 1950s nostalgia for a powerful America, Jim Crow and war on everyone who won’t bow down. Or am I confusing him with Nero or Caligula or Eric Cartman? Whatever, the prognosis isn’t looking good for anyone.

Superman versus Kryptonite

Brexit Day, 3 February 2020. Prime Minister Boris Johnson gives his famous Superman speech at the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich about future trade agreements and championing free trade now that he’s lost us our key neighbouring market.

He has ignored US demands on several occasions, including from Mike Pompeo only the previous month, to drop Chinese investments such as Huawei’s 5G, to which Johnson had just given limited approval, excluding it from military and nuclear sites and keeping it to the uncontroversial phone mast system.

The cheeky monkey even has the temerity to comment that America’s trade war on China has been “letting the air out of the tyres of the world economy”. This will be the last time Johnson ever shows evidence of a spine.

A few days later, Johnson feels the wrath of Trump in a phone call.

US Vice President Mike Pence says that the Trump administration had made its disappointment with the UK “very clear to them”. According to the Sunday Times account of the White House delegation’s visit to London in May 2019, the GCHQ team whose detailed intelligence and technology assessment exonerated Huawei, was given the hairdryer treatment for five hours. Former British ambassador to the US, now Lord Kim Darroch, says there were no “compelling technical arguments that undermined GCHQ’s case” and that the US case was “political”.

Nevertheless, Johnson ditches Huawei in June 2020 after Trump bans the company from using US-made chips. Neither Theresa May nor Johnson gets a post-Brexit trade deal with the US out of this.

“The people who brought us AUSTERITY, then sold us BREXIT on the promise of a trade deal with China beyond the dreams of avarice, are the same Empire Crusaders who now want a war with it. China is the newly rich kid who’s strayed onto mafia turf and is about to be rolled.”
Anna Chen, The Sleep of Reason produces monsters from the West’s own id, 13 January 2021

Eurasia land mess

A far cry from the optimism of 2017, and in contrast to the pre-Trump era, Europe is shooting down the swannee.

The world is stuck between Scylla and Charybdis. Had Trump not won the 2016 election, the US might not have doubled down on Obama’s Pivot to China quite so fast. But had Hillary won, Russia would be back where it was after Gorbachev and Yeltsin sold out their own country. Pensioners going unpaid, children addicts living in sewers. Really bad Christmas-style jumpers being the height of fashion in Moscow. And quite possibly flattened.

With a four-year Trump pause, they’ve had time to build up defences against predatory NATO schemes.

In the Middle East, the Democrats have already shown their appetite for ruthless cruelty against the Palestinians, so no advantage there.

Ukraine is a proxy-war tragedy. “F**k the EU,” said Victoria Nuland to the US ambassador in Kiev just before their 2014 Maidan coup, as I am fond of reminding everyone. And they certainly did.

Europe, your nine lives are up

The EU bankrupts itself, throwing money at Zelensky even as he takes the anti-corruption agencies under his control. Germany is deindustrialised by the loss of cheap Russian energy, accepting the Nordstream pipeline being blown up by allies. Mertz wants a replay of Stalingrad with Russia and neglects domestic matters.

Ursula von der Lyen has more lives than a cat. She’s survived accusations of grift, dodgy Pfizer deals, war-mongering galore, and a humiliatingly bad deal with President Trump. A $700b commitment over three years to buying America’s expensive LNG even though declining supplies make fulfilling orders unlikely. A $600b “investment” tribute to Trump, and “only” 15% tariffs. What a bargain.

France has been shafted before by the US, previously over the AUKUS nuclear submarine deal. Ursula’s agreement that the EU market be prised open for US aggrobiz has not pleased French farmers.

NATO chief Mark Rutte calls Trump “daddy” and dreams of fighting China. Presumably from the depths of a luxury bunker while the rest of us fry.

It would be ironic as well as suicidal for Britain to now rejoin the EU. Brexit did the damage. Is there really any point jumping into it as it circles the drain?

BRICS is now the largest trade bloc on the planet.

How the US wrecked Britain and China’s “Golden Age” is also published at Anna’s Substack

About Anna Chen: Writer, presenter and broadcaster: BBC and Guardian before the pivot to China; ResonanceFM. She has written for Asia Times, Tribune, Morning Star, New Internationalist, South China Morning Post. TED speaker, Orwell Prize shortlisted, cultural outrider.

The unfolding endgame: Gaza, rare earths and western decline

Anna Chen – First published 26 July 2025, rare earths

Glimmers of hope in the darkness

Rare earth mining

The relentless violence against Palestinians by Israel in Gaza continues to expose the brutal logic of Western imperialism, but two significant developments offer glimmers of hope in the unremitting darkness: the rise of a new UK political force challenging Labour’s complicity, and China’s rare earths squeeze that is crippling the US-led war machine. These forces, combined with a tornado of reckless reactions under pressure, suggest an accelerating decline of American hegemony.

The Corbyn-Sultana Party: forcing accountability on Palestine

Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s newly launched left-wing party, temporarily dubbed “Your Party,” represents the most significant challenge to Keir Starmer’s Labour government from the left. Its founding declaration explicitly condemns a “rigged system” that funds “billions for war” while denying basic welfare, and demands a “free and independent Palestine”.

This isn’t mere rhetoric. Starmer is vulnerable. The party’s emergence follows Labour’s internal rebellions over Gaza and welfare cuts, with Sultana suspended for opposing the two-child benefit cap. Corbyn’s independent victory in Islington North proves grassroots support exists for anti-war, redistributive politics.

On Thursday, Starmer performed an abrupt U-turn from branding himself a supporter of Zionism “without qualification” to acknowledging what the rest of us can see: the suffering in Gaza is indefensible. Timing suggests this might have been stated to save his skin from the Hague, besides which, he is still resisting recognition of an independent Palestinian state. By calling out UK policy as complicit in genocide, the new party amplifies legal and moral pressure on him. With the ICJ investigating genocide claims, Corbyn’s alliance with pro-Gaza independents could provide a home for a fractured Labour’s base.

Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana announce the formation of the Your Party, July 2025

China’s rare earths fightback: economic warfare against the war machine

Deng Xiaoping said in 1987 that the Middle East has oil but China has rare earth minerals.

China’s restriction of rare earths exports, controlling 90% of global processing and 70% of mining, is a masterclass in asymmetric economic statecraft. It’s a determined throttle rather than an immediate military face-off, pre-empting US stated intentions to go to war with it by 2027. Never do what your enemy wants you to do, a lesson underlined by Russia’s incursion into Ukraine under provocation.

Its impact cascades through the Western war apparatus:

Israel’s Iron Dome is at Risk. Raytheon, manufacturer of the Iron Dome system, relies on Chinese-sourced terbium and dysprosium for guidance systems. Export controls have already slashed US rare earth magnet imports by 58%.

There’s panic in the Pentagon as supplies run dry and weapons are used up on the European and Middle Eastern fronts before they even have a taste of China, the neocon elite’s ultimate objective.

This month’s $400 million investment in MP Materials, America’s sole rare earth producer, is a desperate, unsustainable stopgap. MP’s refining capacity remains years behind China’s, and its California mine lacks heavy rare earth reserves essential for advanced weaponry.

Western powers losing their composure

In Europe, Ursula von der Leyen’s dire threats of WTO action are a bark worse than any bite she can muster, and echo the failed 2012 case against China. EU High Representative and Vice President Kaja Kallas is reduced to screeching at Wang Yi and accusing China of enabling Russia which is clearly winning the West’s proxy war in Ukraine.

Beijing now frames restrictions as “environmental protections” and “security measures,” utilising WTO rules while accelerating BRICS mineral independence. Why on rare earth would you enable openly hostile forces to tool up against you?

The rare earths battle is part of an existential problem for China but one which they’ve tackled with martial arts dexterity without a shot being fired.

China’s high prices allowed US and European companies to set up competitive rare earth mining enterprises, including Chevron’s Molycorp Mountain Pass mine in 2008. When China lost the WTO ruling in January 2015, it had to drop its export restrictions. Its response was to massively lower its prices until its competition could no longer compete, and sent Chevron’s mine into bankruptcy. Two years later, MP Mine Operations LCC, which had a Chinese minority interest, bought it up: it’s now better known as MP Materials Corp; trading as MP on the New York Stock Exchange.

Raytheon makes Israel’s Iron Dome and declared the war on Gaza as “good for business”. But it is running out of rare earths.

The Military-Industrial Complex under stress

The war economy’s insatiable greed now collides with material reality.

War profiteering has been exposed. Raytheon’s CEO openly declared the Israel-Gaza war “good for business” as Biden sought $14 billion to restock the Iron Dome. “ He said, “I think really across the entire Raytheon portfolio, you’re going to see a benefit of this restocking. On top of what we think is going to be an increase in DOD top line”. Yet China’s export controls have triggered artillery shortages in Ukraine and delayed F-35 deliveries to Israel; systems dependent on Chinese-refined scandium (restricted April 2025).

While 700 defence lobbyists swarm over Washington, MP Materials’ $400 million Pentagon bailout can’t resolve its dependence on Chinese processing. Apple’s parallel $500M deal with MP underscores corporate panic over supply chains.

Apart from which, Israel and the Ukraine are running out of weapons from sheer disproportionate overuse. Nato members are being compelled to send their own Patriot systems to the Ukraine while chucking money at the Military Industrial Complex in order to keep Israel armed. US General Witkoff’s abrupt withdrawal from truce talks with Hamas on spurious grounds shows how panicked they are as they race against time.

The death spiral of American hegemony

It didn’t have to be this way. China’s gratitude for Nixon-Kissinger and genuine affection for America was an equilibrium that could have rolled on for ages with America enjoying its twilight years as venerable elder.

My wishful thinking on this, however, may be belied by the dynamics of imperialism and the tragic inevitability of the failing power lashing out in its death throes.

China inadvertently tested US relations when it gave the benefit of the doubt and hoped for the best. It showed more than good will by rescuing the global economy from America’s Great Crash of 2008, taking a hit itself and kicking off the longest market bull run ever. It was promptly rewarded two years later by Obama’s world-changing Pivot to Asia to “contain” China, an act of aggression that, far from revivifying US fortunes at the end of its capitalist cycle, has accelerated its own demise. All that affection, admiration and support destroyed by the hegemon’s paranoia and, paradoxically, its hubris: the worst possible combo.

Nixon-Kissinger’s triangular diplomacy once balanced China against the USSR, securing US twilight dominance. But Obama’s “Pivot to Asia” shattered that balance, revealing imperial hubris. America’s proxy war against Russia, beginning with the US-backed Maidan coup in 2014, ensured China awakened to its own position as final target once Russia was dispatched.

The rare earths boomerang effect

By treating China as a threat after it rescued global capitalism in 2008, the US accelerated BRICS consolidation. Russia now supplies 70% of China’s palladium; China processes 59% of the world’s lithium.

It has resulted in Capitalism’s auto-cannibalism. The dollar’s weaponisation hastened de-dollarisation. The US prints money to fund MP Materials and Ukraine aid, but inflation erodes this lifeline. As Raytheon lobbies for more wars, the economy strains under $1.7 trillion F-35 programmes.

The Global South’s Answer: BRICS embodies collective resilience. China’s rare earths strategy isn’t aggression; it’s self-defence against a dying hegemon’s lashing out.

The path ahead

Gaza’s suffering is not an anomaly but a template: the Palestinians today are the Global South tomorrow. Yet the tools of resistance are crystallizing. Corbyn’s party fractures the political cover for genocide. China’s rare earth stranglehold exposes the war machine’s material fragility.

The U.S. still dreams of a 2027 war with China, but Beijing refuses to play by Washington’s script: never do what your enemy wants. China’s rare earths throttling is a masterful evasion; a peaceful, systemic counterstrike that collapses the war economy from within. The Erysichthon Curse takes hold: the empire, gorging on its own institutions, now consumes itself.

Food queue of starving Palestinians in Gaza due to Israel’s blockade of aid trucks. Even medics and press are starting to succumb.

Further reading

Shakedown: A Timeline of America’s 21st century war on China: Page 4, 2024 to the Present — President Donald Trump’s second term turmoil

Shakedown Timeline 2010-2020: Page 2, Obama’s Pivot-to-Asia to Donald Trump’s first presidency

Anna Chen — Writer, presenter and broadcaster: BBC and Guardian before the pivot to China; ResonanceFM. Asia Times, New Internationalist, South China Morning Post. TED speaker, Orwell Prize shortlisted, cultural outrider.

High anxiety from Hollywood’s first Chinese superstar to China

Anna Chen – First published 11 July 2025, Anna May Wong and containing China

Anna May Wong and China facing the same western fears

Anna May Wong Must Die! but the China dynamic lives on

China catches up and America fires off a frenzy of Yellow Peril mania ever since Trump’s first trade war doubled down on Obama’s Pivot to Asia.

Western anxiety about Chinese getting too big for their foot bindings has been with us ever since the Opium Wars of the 19th century. The mountain of guilt, fear, loathing and desire that went into defining them as a dehumanised Other is still with us today, turbo-charged by neocon ambitions.

Yep, desire is in there as well: you fear the thing you crave. And, so often, vice versa. Powerful it may be, but the impulse is also paralysing.

One way to escape the pain is to destroy the object of desire. What was Captain Ahab’s vengeful pursuit of Moby Dick about if not the control of the entity that was more powerful than him, making off with his leg in a classic image of castration? Some societies eat their enemy. Some have hot wars. Many seek resolution in territorial pissing turf wars.

Green Hornet Syndrome

In the light of all-pervasive sinophobic insanity, I’m coining the term Green Hornet Syndrome to designate the white saviour cohort which insists on Chinese being underlings, or invisible even –— especially! — when outclassed by them.

Be a sidekick or die.

At the macro level, it means tearing down China for being so damn good.

At the micro level, it means tearing down Chinese for being so damn good.

And that’s across the political spectrum.

It’s not just the usual suspects of the usurped Masters of the Universe who cling on to the delusion of supremacy. Purported progressives who can’t resist the system’s white domination blandishments, even subconsciously, are also doing the work of the state. If there’s no visibility, there’s no empathy. No empathy means less resistance to war on a group you barely recognise as human. Look what happened to Muslims after 9/11.

Colonialism rules

Deletion, cancellation, erasure and invisibility are the boss group’s boys-club stock-in-trade in the New Colonialism. But it’s not a recently-minted strategy — it has a tedious history.

In America’s economic downturn of the 1870s, it took ten “Chinamen” to equal the voice of one white man. Demagogues like Denis Kearney were able to whip up a diversionary wave of hate among European workers who were losing their livelihoods, culminating in the Exclusion Act of 1882, specifically aimed at the Chinese.

We see the same attitudes today despite the lip-service of enlightenment. Chinese are written off as copyists, incapable of original thought. They lack an inner life. The ruling group must speak for them. Nothing is true until a white person says it is true.

This regression into archaic relations from a bygone era exposes a widespread lowering of consciousness that’s depressingly become the norm in what we vainly think of as our sophisticated age.

The template currently coded into the Matrix seems to be: occupy the space and clear out the inhabitants. Absurdly, in the face of World War III, the urge to be an asshat eclipses urgent communal efforts for the collective good. A colonial mindset prevails when more self-knowledge, generosity and solidarity in the face of disaster might be more helpful than indulging residual Gamergate impulses.

Mandelbrot Set’s repeating China patterns

It’s an imperialist throwback that needs challenging. In 2005, I wanted to make a programme about Anna May Wong, Hollywood’s first Chinese screen legend, for her 1905 birth centenary. I was astonished that so few knew who she was. It was disappointing when the BBC’s commissioning editor turned down our first pitch on the grounds that “No-one’s heard of her”. Fortunately, my brilliant producer persisted and we eventually made A Celestial Star in Piccadilly in 2008, broadcast in 2009.

Anna May Wong’s story beautifully illustrates the dynamic of imperial power relations which remain embedded in the cultural codes. Our perceptions are invisibly shot through with it at every level like a repeating pattern in a Mandelbrot Set and, as it is ubiquitous, the situation is accepted as a given.

China has been suppressed and degraded in the public eye through the press, literature and the screen arts, ever since the Opium Wars carve-up by Britain and the Eight Nation Alliance which put down the Boxer Rebellion. Yellow Peril untermenschen tropes abound in the cultural undergrowth. Wong’s oppressive experience provided a miniature synechdochal example of the whole process.

I wrote a poem (below) about Wong’s unique pioneering position, wanting to satirically distil its essence and flag it up to a wide audience. It’s not something I was aware of doing while writing it. I was simply unloading what I immediately felt about the hypocrisy and oppression to which I could relate. But the subconscious is an amazing thing. Only in reading it back did I realise what was nailed, the heart of the matter coalesced and exploding out of the final two lines.

The West’s Heart of Darkness

Wong was born third-generation Chinese-American in Los Angeles, 1905. Not only did she face race discrimination in her everyday life, her successful film career in early Hollywood turned her into a symbol of it. The same forces present in Anna May Wong’s life-long struggle within and against a hostile system are here today in America’s bid for supremacy over a rising China.

In her movies, whether playing angel or devil, she had to be punished for the white hero’s attraction to her, sex being one of our fundamental drivers. From a 17-year old playing a tragic Madam Butterfly character in Toll of the Sea, to the daughter of Fu Manchu, her character always had to die.

As in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the ultimate threat to the white man’s world is embodied in a non-white woman of Freudian nightmare: mysterious, untamed and powerful. The horror! A feminised China in Western eyes similarly represents to timid minds the unknowable, unconquerable entity at the centre of their own id: their fears made flesh.

Even though the white hero could flirt with Wong, find her amusing, be besotted with her exoticism, they were never allowed to kiss onscreen. Similarly, the West may play with the exotic East, admire China’s cleverness and buy its cheap goods, but will never recognise it as an equal. As long as the object of desire never excels, reminding them of what it is they lack, it is tolerable.

However, being cleverer, more able when let off the leash, repositories of secret knowledge held in dark corners of the mind alien to the big lugs who seek dominance, is not tolerable.

Never mind that this threat is mostly paranoid projection. How insecure do you have to be to hold Chinese from Anna May Wong to the nation of China responsible for your own neurosis surrounding their outstanding distinction? Never truly welcomed as a strategic partner, China will always be defined as the strategic competitor; forever smacked down for someone else’s inadequacy.

As above, so below.

So here is a poem: my political analysis, cultural response and artistic endeavour in 32 lines.

Anna May Wong Must Die!

By Anna Chen, 2009

Down in the alleys of old Chinatown,
In the gawdy bawdy backstreets of sinister renown,
Dope pedlars peddle, the dragon gets chased,
It’s the same old story, the same yellowface
The Man with the Fu Manchu opium embrace
Could kill you in an instant and never leave a trace.
He knows all the tricks how to get you high
And that’s why Anna May Wong must die.

Down in the sewers of Chinatown way,
Chinamen get chinkified every single day.
Little yellow people all merging into one,
You eat their rice for punishment, their noodles are no fun.
Robotic ant-like army with phasers set to stun,
Marching cross the countryside, nowhere left to run.
Here’s a tall poppy soaring in the sky
And that’s why Anna May Wong must die.

Silver screen dreams in black and white
But without the black bits, so that’s alright.
Along came a flapper, a cute little score,
The women went ‘Ooh!’ and the boys went, ‘Phwoah!’
Black hair, almond eyes, a figure to adore,
Yellow skin glistening, sticking in their craw,
There’s a comet in the heavens, the end is nigh
And that’s why Anna May Wong must die.

Who’s that upstart flouting all the rules?
Not one thing or the other, fall between two stools.
It’s Anna getting cocky, Anna out of line,
Anna take your punishment, Anna do your time,
Scary Chinee nemesis looking mighty sly
Crush the Dragon lady, the mastermind of crime.
Anna kissed a white boy and made him cry
And that’s why Anna May Wong must die.

More about Anna May Wong in the BBC profile: A Celestial Star in Piccadilly (2009)

Anna Chen — Writer, presenter and broadcaster: BBC and Guardian before the pivot to China; ResonanceFM. Asia Times, New Internationalist, South China Morning Post. TED speaker, Orwell Prize shortlisted, cultural outrider.

Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill and the Curse of Erysichthon

Anna Chen – First published 5 July 2025, Big Beautiful Bill

Capitalism eats itself: Erysichthon of Thessaly, cursed with an insatiable hunger by Demeter, goddess of the fertility of the earth. Trump’s Big Beautiful bill

Big Beautiful Bill burns the Earth to pay the rich

Not only does Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill turn his Blackshirt boot-boy ICE forces into his own army, bigger than the FBI, DEA, US Bureau of Prisons put together (as AOC points out), it takes money from vital climate change policies to give to his already bloated elite backers.

Trump’s promised huge tax cuts for the rich will be directly paid for by cutting tax incentives for renewable energy designed to save the planet. You’d think he’d baulk at ending climate change measures that created jobs in red states like Texas, but, no. Along with cuts to medicaid, MAGA are being hit by a triple-whammy from their hero.

A walking casebook of Greek tragedy character flaws, Trump sports inverse parallels with a raft of mythological and folk characters. One that often springs to mind is a composite Robin Hood and King Midas: robbing the poor to pay the rich and everything he touches turns to sh*t.

The curse of Erysichthon

Why do they do it? Loved One tells me of 700-800 US billionaires, 33 are estimated to make over a $billion a year. Millions suffer to enrich a tiny band for whom being the richest on the planet will never be enough.

Investigative reporter Greg Palast once related a conversation with a vulture capitalist and one-time Trump backer (worth: $6.1 billion). Asked why he bilked a petrol pump attendant when he was already so rich, he replied, “I want it all”.

That, dear reader, sums up the mindset of what we’re dealing with. I want it all.

The elite’s elite are stricken with a relentless hunger that can never be satisfied.

The most apt classical analogy in this instance is probably King Erysichthon of Thessaly. Demeter, goddess of the fertility of the earth, cursed him for being destructive and greedy. Disrespecting the gods by cutting down a sacred grove to build a feasting hall was surely gagging for a fitting punishment. She invoked Limos, the spirit of insatiable appetite, until he consumed everything he had and ended up devouring himself. Unfortunately, it’s us they’re feeding on.

Reverse Robin Hood in Britain

Similarly in Britain, PM Keir Starmer and Chancellor Rachel Reeves operate from the Monsters Handbook. They relentlessly take money from the poorest and most vulnerable whom capitalism had left behind and shovel it into the defence industry, whose stock is rocketing. Coincidentally, £5 billion a year “saved” in social funding cuts is the same amount given to Ukraine. No mandate, no discussion.

Starmer refuses to fund his pet projects and proxy wars by taxing the billionaires whose wealth has soared since Covid.

He won’t touch Amazon, which notoriously pays no tax in the UK despite the country making him £27 billion a year. Jeff Bezos is worth $220 billion, and makes $8.99 billion per month, $31 million per day, $8 million per hour, $3,715 per second. He can rub our faces in it by spending 34 million dollars or pounds or whatever fantasy profligacy it takes for a three-day wedding jamboree in Venice like the last days of the Roman Empire while the world burns.

Gloves are off. This is naked Class War.

See also The Trump Heist: the fall of the American Empire

Anna Chen — Writer, presenter and broadcaster: BBC and Guardian before the pivot to China; ResonanceFM. Asia Times, New Internationalist, South China Morning Post. TED speaker, Orwell Prize shortlisted, cultural outrider.

Whoever owns language rules the world: Marx vs postmodernism

Anna Chen – Originally published 1 July 2025, language and postmodernism in the Culture Wars

A Clockwork Orange

How politics twists language and shapes reality

Ever feel you’re living through the Act 1 climax of a science fiction movie? The fork in the road where humanity’s future gets rerouted? Will enough of us clock the Morlocks herding us into cattle pens in time to avoid the disaster mapped out before us? Or will we trudge on, mooing and bleating as surplus labour (that’s us!) culled in wars and poverty?

How we sophisticated westerners have been so thoroughly duped by a class that, to put it mildly, doesn’t have our best interests at heart is perplexing. How is the fourth estate, the media which hold up the Executive’s objectives instead of holding it to account, able to regurgitate the state’s script with such a straight face? And could they be connected?

As late-stage capitalism breaks down, it increasingly deforms language, the collective tool vital for humans to function as a society. We see this every day, in every news report, in every mainstream analysis. The more capitalism collapses, the more outrageously obvious is the elite state power’s hijacking of meaning in order to protect itself. Mass manipulation of cognition is only going to get worse with Artificial Intelligence. So let’s take stock of where we are.

Constructing reality in language

It wasn’t only Joseph Goebbels who, leading up to World War II, latched onto the importance of social engineering through propaganda. He infamously said that the big lie becomes the truth with repetition, something we see permeating the media today.

The Madison Avenue-based advertising industry advanced Goebbels’s praxis in America’s vibrantly expanding economy. This major pillar of post-war capitalism used an army of psychologists to hypnotise a nation of consumers into a highly profitable system of fear and desire. It sold war every bit as effectively as it sold washing machines.

Postmodernism took it even further, philosophically codifying a declining capitalism’s need to change the way we see reality. Empire intellectuals led the charge against 400 years of science and evidence-based Enlightenment and argued that reality is constructed in language. Centuries of challenging faith, belief, and “feeling it in my bones” through observable phenomena was under attack. Their rejection of Marxism made them essential allies in maintaining the power status quo.

Capitalism will eat itself

The philosopher Karl Marx had investigated the capitalist system within which we exist, in the spirit of the Enlightenment. He applied scientific method to make visible the invisible mechanisms of capitalism in Das Kapital and other writings. In demystifying the process, he came up with the tools to enable us to look under the hood and strip it down, to see how it worked.

The beneficiaries of the system had always presented it as productive; a perennially benign dynamo benefiting humankind forever. However, Marx concluded, it divided into two contending classes: the proletariat whose labour produced wealth, and the bourgeoisie who owned the means of production and fed off the workers, always paying them less than their labour was worth. This surplus value was their profit. And the profit motive lay at the core of everything they held dear, if not inordinately expensive.

Unfortunately, this process ran in ever-diminishing cycles until the system would inevitably run out of juice. So, not only was capitalism built on the expansionist ravages of imperialism, it featured an inbuilt entropy that would prove predatory and destructive as it struggled to maintain itself. “Capitalism contains its own grave digger.”

Marx’s theory had gained traction in the post-war liberal order of the American Age. And not only in openly socialist systems with communist aims. It provided an alternative for emerging third world nations which were being plundered by the west, and for the exploited proletariat whose surplus labour was extracted by the bourgeoisie in the form of profits. At the peak of the cycle, Empire might be staring over a cliff and losing its hegemony.

The CIA romance with postmodernism

Out of the depths of the Cold War sprang an intellectual saviour of the state wielding the Sword of Words and the Shield of Language Games. The father of postmodernism, Jean Francois Lyotard, argued in his 1979 book, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, that meta-narratives such as truth, science and philosophy (like Marxism) fragment into smaller and smaller narratives until they are effectively rendered meaningless.

Unsurprisingly, as French intellectuals* rolled over and defected to the state, the state’s core defenders, the CIA, fell in love with postmodernism.

What the raw power of the state needed was a war on the entire fact and science-based Enlightenment.* Postmodernism gave birth to a battalion of nerds drilling down relentlessly arguing why black is, in fact, white. With French philosophers in the driving seat of the Culture Wars (such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes) and American literati in the rear describing the process, postmodernists took Swiss structuralist Ferdinand de Saussure’s semiotic division of the basic unit of language — the Sign — and smashed up meaning.

As if splitting the atom into its component parts, they stripped signifier (representation) from signified (concept), words from meaning, and shattered coherence until a Babelesque confusion of tongues beckoned.

The reins of perception: heaven, hell and hyperreality

Jean Baudrillard privileged the signifier and created “hyperreality,” where whoever has the means of production can grasp the reins of perception. Hyperreality fed into the CIA’s mind control interests, blurring the lines between reality and simulation. It placed paranoia on the same level as concrete phenomena, as we can see in the construction of political narratives today. Any opinion once expressed is given equal weight to provable fact-based reality.

So, the chief of The Better Cotton Initiative who is also head of Supima, the marketing arm of the American cotton industry, can allege forced labour of Uyghurs in Xinjiang on no evidence and the media will report it as true. Likewise, data abuser and Right-wing Christian zealot Adrian Zenz can claim a million Uyghurs in Xinjiang prisons, extrapolated from eight interviews, and the BBC will publish it as the sole truth. (See Jaq James’s scholarly analysis.)

There is, however, a concrete reality to contend with. As much as they might deny it, objective truth still exists. As someone said, if you threw Lyotard into the sea, he’d still get wet. By keeping an eye on the contradictions as they emerge, you test and challenge the enormous mind-fuck being perpetrated against the human race as the predator tries to disguise itself.

Late-stage capitalism: Morlocks herd Eloi into cattle pens. (The Time Machine, 1960)

Hiding crisis and chaos

Few can miss that we find ourselves firmly entrenched in the “Capitalism will eat itself” stage of the game. Little works for the people. That which does is swiftly cannibalised for the benefit of the top elite.

Elon Musk’s DOGE escapades in the US are a crude example. Pauperising workers by sacking them while Trump’s billionaire backers like Charles Schwab make even more billions overnight from his tariff mayhem, illustrates the process perfectly. Britain gifting billions to the defence industry via the West’s proxy war in Ukraine and Nato, while slashing support for the weakest that capitalism left behind, is another case in point. It’s growing difficult to move without tripping over more examples as the decaying West goes belly up.

The establishment creates crisis and chows down on the resulting chaos in ever more violent waves. Meanwhile, its tame media perpetuate invisibility of the workings of the system by distraction, outright lies and a subtle Orwellian distortion of language. There are so many examples of language games flooding the zone in service to the ruling monsters. Where to start?

Satan’s little helpers

The liberal media, such as the Guardian and BBC, are among the worst exponents, as they have a ton of enlightenment to undo.

After WWII, Europeans and Americans were the best educated and informed populations in the world. They had mass access to an Alexandrian Library worth of books, information, philosophy, arts and humanities. For every savage manifestation of the feral state, there was an opposite, if not equal, eruption of freedom and liberty (when those terms meant what they said), harking back to the French Revolution and ancient Athens.

How do you unravel all that and get the population on track? It would take a humungous ideological pivot to sell willing blindness to the plebs. (The far Right doesn’t have the workload as they’re all on board the bus to hell anyway. They never had to dress up poison as Kool Aid the way our faux progressives had to do.)

Language games in action: repetition of a lie becomes the truth

Most of us, by now, have noticed how “Rules Based Order” replaced “International Law” in the post-war discourse, hammered away by Obama around the time of his Pivot to Asia. International Law is thrashed out over time by reasoned argument, the other imposed by raw power.

Similarly, Taiwan “independence” actually means dependence on the hegemon.

Just as “Mother” is turned into a dirty word in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, so “woke” becomes a trigger for hate. Although when you ask why being aware instead of asleep is so bad, no-one can offer an adequate explanation.

“Aggression” is an abused term repeatedly applied to the country defending itself from Empire predations and never to the one with a fondness and track record for aggro. For example, “aggression,” as used with abandon beyond satire in Israel’s claims that Iran attacked them last year, even though the strikes were a response to Israel attacking first when it bombed the Iranian consulate in Damascus in April.

China defensively beefs up its military while the US spends more on the Military Industrial Complex than the next nine countries together, while pouring arms into Taiwan, interfering with elections and surrounding China with bases. Yet China’s sensible response is depicted as aggression: instigation rather than effect following cause. The crucial context of America waging non-stop wars, in contrast with China not having any in 40 years, is wiped.

The word “unprovoked” peppers press reports whenever an attacked country responds. Whether you condemn or support Russia’s military incursion into Ukraine in 2022, the conflict has roots in 2013 and was far from “unprovoked”. It did not start on 24 February, information that should be public for any discourse to be meaning-full.

Democratically elected President Yanukovytch rejected the IMF and VP Biden’s insistence that he smash open the economy and liberalise, slashing budgets and energy subsidies along the way. His subsequent turn towards Russia for economic support saw America continue to renege on Jim Baker’s 1998 promise, “Not an inch eastwards,” and advance nuclear Nato up to Russia’s borders, engineering the 2014 Maidan coup. “F*ck the EU,” said Victoria Nuland to the US ambassador in Ukraine. And they did. The western media, which had been reporting fairly accurately, turned on a dime and excised these foundational events from their accounts.

Liberal institutions not so liberal

Perhaps the most egregious example of institutional truth-twisting is how western media, such as the BBC, misreport Israel’s attack on the Gaza strip.

The liberal media continue to bland out mass murder and starvation, flattened cities and a whole raft of sadistic actions in a collective punishment over nearly two years since 7 October 2023. The 70-year Naqba is written out of accounts. Despite a 34 to 1 kill ratio, one side is humanised, the other dehumanised. Crime is benign and resistance is aggression. The word “genocide” is verboten even when used by victims of the Holocaust to describe what’s being done to Gaza’s civilian population. (See BBC on Gaza-Israel: one story, double standards report by the Centre For Media Monitoring.)

George Orwell at least gave us the tools to interrogate the twisted language of dictators: War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength. Britain appeared to use his dystopian novel 1984 (written in 1948) as a manual rather than a warning, renaming the Ministry of War as the Ministry of Defence in 1964.

Today, four decades after the setting of 1984, AI is hard at work: OpenAI, Oracle, Palantir, Cambridge Analytica, Microsoft, Carbyne, Black Cube and Pegasus are some of the outfits connected with Israel and its interests, and which control our social media. This is what our most liberal institutions have helped usher in. And this is what will shape our perception as we are herded into cattle-pens or over a cliff.

* Note: Some French intellectuals were critical, such as Alain Touraine. The “sanitized” document below, released in 2017 under Freedom of Information legislation, is no longer available. Howzat?!

* EDIT 9 July 2025 to clarify: What the raw power of the state needed was a war on the entire fact and science-based Enlightenment.

Open Culture: The CIA Assesses the Power of French Post-Modern Philosophers: Read a Newly Declassified CIA Report from 1985

Further reading on the Culture Wars

Sergei Eisenstein Collection review: film theory essay by Anna Chen, published 1998

The Triumph and Turmoil of Niall Ferguson: Western academia resets the global order, 10 March 2011

Anna Chen — Writer, presenter and broadcaster: BBC and Guardian before the pivot to China; ResonanceFM. Asia Times, New Internationalist, South China Morning Post. TED speaker, Orwell Prize shortlisted, cultural outrider.