Social media’s reactionary hierarchy only has itself to blame for the Professor Jiang fiasco
This is an extended version of an article first published at Substack, 5 September 2026
There’s been a thorough post-Gamergate exclusion of women from the debate by pundits who were late to the fight. Mostly male, mostly white. If you were a woman and Chinese, you were doubly stuffed. Putting the ram into ramifications, it goes even wider. Exclusion from discussion of the forces you’d observed lining up against China over decades while the slow children caught up means time lost to any prospect of struggle. And this sorry situation doesn’t appear to disturb anyone’s ethics.
It’s only this year in 2026 that the penny dropped for the commentators colonising social media: that China is the ultimate target of the hegemon state. As I’ve been pointing out in my contemporaneous Shakedown Timeline of America’s 21st century war on China, this phase was triggered with Paul Wolfowitz’s 1992 Defence Planning Guide and has progressed ever since in ebbs and flows, which I charted as it happened, and always towards the same end.
Jiang’s Iran War “prediction”
I was permitted to argue these geopolitical tensions in the mainstream media during the brief “Golden Age” of British Chinese relations in which a semblance of balance regarding the sleeping dragon was allowed. Using this window to challenge reactionary narratives about China in the Guardian and on the BBC and elsewhere, I aimed to combat the dehumanisation of Chinese in the culture and show how the Empire’s dynamics of dominance were all working under the hood.
I helped prevent one alarming anti-Chinese pogrom reach an ugly conclusion under Tony Blair. It was crucial to make sure the vacuum wasn’t total — invisibility renders you vulnerable whether for individuals or communities. In 2009, I was one of the few to go on the BBC to argue against demonisation of China during the Copenhagen COP15 climate change summit when the Danish Text scandal revealed the stitch-up of poorer nations. And then there was trying to head off the Iraq War.
Of course, once Barack Obama performed his Pivot to Asia seeking to “contain” China, and Trump doubled down in his bid to out do his bete noir, I was silenced and rendered invisible in the media that once tolerated a lone Chinese dissenting voice. Even this was now too much for their objectives. The establishment required a total absence; a big blank canvas on which to project monsters.
No problem, you might think. Surely there were enough concerned citizens who would have found the situation an undemocratic travesty of free speech and alerted their followers that support was needed. No such luck. I was “strategic competition” stranded on the beachhead, regarded, as I was to discover, a threat to the wave of newcomers now colonising the space. Attacked, marginalised, pillaged and deleted, for a crucial five years: all you saw was wall-to-wall mostly white guys reinventing the wheel and carving out their territory. And essentially nailing old hierarchies into place under cover of sympathy with the communist state.
They had to let one through eventually. It was supposedly Jiang’s “prediction” in 2024 that there would be an Iran war that propelled him into algo-boosted prominence. This was a surprise to those of us who had already been flagging it up with good reason.
The Cassandra Curse
The curse of Cassandra was that she was always ignored. There are Greeks in that wooden horse, she’d yell, but would they listen? Departing from all common sense, they insisted on dragging their enemy’s gift into the city of Troy with the result that any Trojans who weren’t slaughtered were enslaved. Clever guys!
Besides tweeting during Trump 1 what was to me the bleedin’ obvious, I was yelling an alert on my 15-year old Madam Miaow Twitter/X account two days after 7 October 2023 that Benjamin Netanyahu had just addressed the UN General Assembly two weeks earlier to call for joint “nuclear” action against Iran. (This was later changed to “military” in the record.) IRAN! The assembly’s collective response was luke warm. Oh, it’s just Bibi on his 30-year obsession again.
But this time, something ugly slouched its way towards Bethlehem. What Washington and Israel needed was a build-up and getting the public on board for a major conflict that could lead to World War III levels of conflict. On President Joe Biden’s watch, Gaza looked like a first step and a warm-up for hostilities against a heavily-armed foe. This aspect required attention. Within a year, Secretary of State Antony Blinken would be chucking weapons into Israel’s armoury at pace.
X deleted Madam Miaow that December — no violations, six appeals. The response was a big fat nothing from the “China-friendly” accounts. No debate on the topic. Utter silence on the censorship. Not one single, solitary new “China-friendly” account alerted their readers or asked them to follow my back-up account. But they did give the gabbling newcomer houseroom on their podcasts when they saw his algo-boosted numbers the following year. Jiang is described as “the man who predicted the Iran War in 2024” but was in fact much later to the news than those of us alarmed by Netanyahu’s appearance at the UN in New York on 22 September 2023. Even earlier, for many geopolitical analysts.
A bamboozled commentariat of gatekeepers
Jiang’s critics have grown louder as his questionable promotion beyond his abilities has become more apparent and suspicions have been raised. For me, not only was it the sudden inorganic swelling of follower numbers in a couple of years, but the regurgitation of obvious AI hallucinations, many favouring the Donald Trump orbit’s eccentric take on history.
Such as on The Duran, where Jiang claimed the City of London was making its money from narcotics. Now, this may have been a foundational truth in the 19th century (see the Opium Wars) but to say London’s banking system was still dependent on the sale of drugs for its profits today, appeals to an audience raised on tabloid-level crime-capers. It blunts ability to analyse the world around you. And it chimes with the Trump narrative justifying bombing fishermen’s boats off the coast of Venezuela. Jiang’s statement’s were so increasingly bizarre that the hosts quietly dropped the video off their list.
It also fits like a glove with Trump allies now going after an injured Britain with accusations of control of Libor exchange rates, and Lloyds shipping insurance that thwarts the president’s attempts to push tankers through the explosive Strait of Hormuz in his fantasy control of the Trump Strait.
America recapitalises in Opium Wars 2.0
“Trump is taking on global deep state, ” states Jiang. “The City of London, Wall Street, who he thinks caused him to lose election 2020. They exercise power by controlling three ways of generating immense profits … debt and gambling, slavery, and drugs. The City of London, it’s still a money laundering operation. If you’re Trump and you want to destroy the deep state, you attack what makes money, their drugs smuggling operations. When Trump says we’re bombing the drug smugglers and everyone’s, like, no, no, they’re fishing vessels, he’s telling the truth in this instance. I think they are actually bombing drug smugglers and so they’re trying to destroy the drug smuggling apparatus of the world. That is the grand play here, to weaken the globalist deep state by destroying their money-making operations.”
That’s the genius Jiang analysis: that London makes its money from drug-smuggling operations and the human beings in boats bombed by remote actually are “drug smugglers”. Judge, jury and executioner in one robotic package.
On London, he’s only a century out. The Opium Wars may have capitalised western industrial revolutions in the 19th century and were foundational to the banking system but drugs are not the engine now. London is not a drug-running centre that heroic Trump is trying to fell — it’s actually far worse if you understand how capitalism works. The assertion that Trump is heroically bringing down deep state by attacking “their drug-smuggling operations” is ludicrous.
If anything, it is America that is now aping the British Empire in its own Opium Wars 2.0: the elite of the declining hegemon seeking to recapitalise using other people’s resources.
Jiang hallucinations
As for Jiang’s famed predictive ability, he says: “I don’t think Trump will actually invade Venezuela, I think that’s all bluster and I think you’ll see continual actions against drug smuggling operations around the world.”
So, that’s aged well. On top of which, where is the proof that the Venezuelan boats were carrying narcotics? Drugs are the new WMD for the not very bright who’ve blown their brains on an excess of Guy Ritchie and Marvel movies. The Sackler family and medical industry have done far more damage to America. Where drug problems do exist, they are a symptom of a failing society and not a cause. And they’re mostly imported into the US by Americans anyway. Why are commentators capitulating to the sensationalist role of drugs in the spotlight but won’t go anywhere near the CIA’s history of narcotics dealing? Doesn’t Jiang know that drug villainy as he tells it serves as the narrative McGuffin, a shiny object deflecting from the overriding dynamics of the declining hegemon’s bid to remain top dog.
Felix Abt and others detect similar eccentricities in the bogus professor’s schtick. Abt writes of Jiang: “He has dismissed subjects including evolution, Roman history and the Holocaust as ‘nonsense,’ while entertaining conspiracy theories such as Pizzagate and claims that the Moon landings were faked. These are not minor disagreements among historians. They are enormous claims that require enormous evidence.”
Jiang and the Enlightenment
Both Trump and enablers of his invented reality such as Jiang mount a further assault on the science-based Enlightenment with gaslighting exercises in mass manipulation. In this real world chaos, everything solid melts into the air. Perfect for the monsters grabbing the world by the pussy. If your lips are flapping and you’re not calling it out, like Jiang and his podcast hosts, then you’re part of the machine.
Why are the pundits so slow? Why so exclusionary and lacking in solidarity or generosity? Why so territorial about the space they’ve occupied like colonials of old from which they’re blocking insights and input?
In 1870s America during the economic downturn, Chinese were scapegoated. Attitudes towards the men who’d travelled so far from home to help build America — constructing the first transcontinental railroad for Central Pacific — deteriorated to the point that demagogues such as Denis Kearney in California were whipping up anti-Chinese pogroms in an atmosphere where it took ten “Chinamen” to equal the voice of one white male. Not unlike today. Lynchings of the scapegoated minority occurred, culminating in 1882 with the Exclusion Act aimed specifically at the Chinese.
In Britain and the rest of Europe, too. The hideous excesses of the Opium Wars that founded so many financial institutions, funded the British administration in British-ruled India and create the big East Coast dynasties in America, needed rationalisation and justification. Threadbare arguments that abounded then remain today: it was about free trade; they were asking for it; they’re not properly human anyway.
At one point I’d hoped this a thing of the past. That we were all far too sophisticated to fall for something so crude. But when you press certain weaknesses and contradictions, you realise it’s all still punted up to and including Julia Lovell’s Opium War revisionist love-note to British Empire and the ignoble men who made their fortunes from opium. Despite a thorough debunking from me in 2012, Lovell’s book, The Opium War, enjoys pride of place in the British Museum shop. The author is invited to curate their Asia events. Quite fitting, really, to be so beloved by the kleptocratic institution. This stuff has deep roots in service to western empire.
On that “no original thought” cliché
The stereotype has always been that Chinese are incapable of original thought. That we can only copy. That our thinking is a pale shadow of the dominant group’s excellence. However, the group hates it when we display a capacity for imagination and ingenuity but will tolerate a simulacrum if it’s in an institutional form whose fortune they can ride. Such as Jiang and his algo-boosted numbers. When Mike Marqusee congratulated me on my “flair and imagination” in bringing media skills into the Left during several campaigns in 2001, my supposed comrades kicked up a storm.
You must forever be the Green Hornet’s sidekick, even if you are Bruce Lee.
In fact, I’ve watched aghast over many years as the dominant group has played catch-up, only getting on board when something was up for grabs. Or, amusingly, when it was safe. I was inadvertently something of the canary down the mine. The creature sent into the minefield, only to look back once the terrain was tested, to see the barbarian horde of prospectors bearing down to carve out their newly safe turf.
One core fear of theirs is, if a Chinese person can articulate and fight for their situation, what need of the army of white saviours? The prospect of Chinese able to see events coming down the pike well in advance terrifies the Masters (and Mistresses) of the Universe who can’t. The same malign dynamic as observed in Western ruling-class resistance to China’s rapid progress runs through its petit bourgeois gatekeepers who haven’t shaken off their class position: as above, so below. Given a fractal reading, what China the country can do, so can individual Chinese in a big geopolitical Mandelbrot set of consciousness. The horror, the horror!
Our commentators, some of whom were actually opposed to China when it was struggling, had a turning on the Road to Damascus when the odds changed. But at base, the dynamic is the same. A classic Yellowface attempt at replacement. The fundamental progressive, socialist principle of linking arms in struggle with the target group is utterly alien to them.
A McCarthyite climate
I would add, in case some have forgotten, that when the latecomers arrived in numbers after the Hong Kong riots, I welcomed them, using the heft of Madam Miaow to amplify and publicise them. There had been an almost complete vacuum. The deputy ambassador in London had been so wounded by the silence of people who had received friendship and embassy hospitality that he contacted me and even asked me to address one of their events.
It was a chilling McCarthyite atmosphere in which no-one in Britain was speaking up. I can only recall Martin Jacques, one financial journalist and a couple of Labour MPs who were rapidly put under heavy manners.
Once it looked safe and the dam started to break, George Galloway asked me for help. I was pleased to orientate him around the Twitter China debate, recommending speakers for his talk show. Other newcomers said they were so alarmed by the Chinese media’s failure to engage in the battle shaping up that they suggested a comradely approach to authorities in China.
Then, suddenly, they clammed up. In a decidedly unheroic grasping of the chance to dominate, no-one engaged with me. Some attacked me. When I pointed out to one who’d been painting diaspora Chinese as treacherous, that we weren’t all Vickies and Gordons, he blocked me. The hugely algo-boosted French guy gloated that he was ignoring me and would continue to do so. Others used struggles in which I’d personally been involved, such as Yellowface exclusion, as content but wouldn’t interview me about the events. Another used the insight I’d given him, about the opium being destroyed by seawater and lime and not burnt, a point which was emblematic of my years-long challenge to British academia who had insisted it was so, as if it was his own when it would have made an interesting podcast chat. Galloway just turned nasty — no explanation, no discussion, no comradeship. It goes on and on.
Jiang verbiage vs social practice
White guys ganging up on the Chinese woman who’d been fighting on this front for so long did remind me of the eight-nation invasion of China at the dawn of the 20th century. The dynamic of white saviourship and exploitation by Empire’s little pashas are still here. Throw in the clown professor for entertainment and tokenism but keep out the Chinese woman with praxis and political chops. There has been no raised consciousness, just information used as currency. And data exchange is a far cry from analysis.
Algo-boosted latecomers took full advantage of the inbuilt anti-Chinese bias in the system’s cultural codes while they built careers and reinforced their own class position. They effectively did the state’s work for it, attacking and rendering invisible the Chinese who’d fought not only the media awareness battles, but was active in political defence of Chinese: against efforts to build a pogrom at home as well as a war abroad.
Chinese readers should note that many of these belated China-friendly accounts generally do not actually like Chinese but they like the high status that vestigial colonialised brains afford them. We used to call them FILTH: Failed In London, Try Hong Kong. My dad who, among other things, was in the delegation that negotiated the end of the British embargo on China in the 1950s and ‘60s, taught me the words, “adventurers,” “opportunists” and “careerists” at an early age. So I should have expected it.
And we know from South African apartheid and American slavery that intimate relations with non-whites does not make you a non-racist.
So all Jiang did was make the most out of an opportunity that was set up for him. Don’t blame him when so many constructed the conditions that made it possible.
Further reading
Read Felix Abt’s article on Professor Jiang: The “Chinese Professor” Who Fooled the Internet’s Biggest Gatekeepers
The Raft of the Medusa: how the eff did we get here?
Anna Chen on the pitiful state of the discourse: Stopping the Iraq War 2001-3 20th anniversary: How the press was done.
Anna Chen's China pages: 30 years of analysis and commentary.
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