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.

Attacking China Rebounds On America’s Little Helpers

Anna Chen – 13 December 2024, Trump on China

The Shanghai skyline at night

US Allies Learn A FAFO Lesson In Geopolitics

This article might contain chickens – and not just our leaders

The list of nations who did US bidding and are now in trouble looks alarming.

Who’d have thought that ganging up on China, our global lifeboat and growth engine that hasn’t had a war in over four decades, would have consequences? It’s almost as if there’s a cosmic rule we might term “FAFO” — F**K around and Find Out. A matched pair with “Honi soit qui mal y pense” — evil to those who evil think — going to the dark side is proving costly.

And this time, China might not save us the way it did after America’s 2008 Great Financial Crash. So play nice.

Karma’s Naughty Step Round-Up: The Master Race

USA: Joker’s in the White House once more, this time bringing all his friends. Not only won’t the mighty US be immune from polio if the quacks get their way, it won’t be immune from any recession created by Donald Trump’s coming tariff binge either. China’s trade and tech ascendence looks inexorable no matter what the fading hegemon throws at it.

With self-reliance now an existential imperative, China finally responded to years of a one-sided protectionist trade war with a $690 Billion cut to US imports, ending America’s privileged role as a key supplier. US agriculture is already reeling from the self-inflicted gut punch, losing its biggest buyer of soybeans — down to 18 percent this year and falling. Other industries are following suit.

Cry for the US people but not for its elites who are doing fine, thank you.

GERMANY: From cock of the Euro roost in one of the three dominant global blocs to chicken dinner not a winner. Chancellor Olaf Scholz swerved Germany from its prosperous China trade trajectory to aiding the rival US bloc in NATO’s war in Europe.

Not one inch eastwards, keep Ukraine neutral and don’t get involved with the 2014 coup: that’s all you had to do. Instead, replacing cheap Russian gas with America’s expensive LNG has wrecked Germany’s industry. And now you’re sailing warships through one-China’s Taiwan Strait?

War ‘n’ poverty, huh!, who is it good for? Absolutely no-one. The electorate knows this, lost confidence in Scholz and is about to punish him at the ballot box.

FRANCE: Similarly with President Emmanuel Macron, whose newly-appointed Prime Minister Michel Barnier has been ousted in a vote of no confidence, replaced by Francois Bayrou. Wants to continue EU tariffs on China where Scholz saw the light but too late to stave off disaster. A tough guy Sophie’s choice – who to please? Macron promises to continue war against Russia if Trump commits coitus interruptus and pulls out, but can the French afford it?

CANADA: Justin Trudeau’s constant stream of China invective can only ingratiate and deflect from Canada’s dire economy for so long, especially now that the “friendly” US is about to rack up trade tariffs on its neighbour to the north. Trump actually told him: 25 percent tariffs or become America’s 51st state. “Governor” Trudeau’s limp trade tariff retaliation and Ontario energy threat against the 300 pound bully is fooling no-one. One of America’s Viking war party. Another white settler nation that climbed aboard the USS Titanic to its own detriment.

AUSTRALIA: After the UK’s spectacular Brexit self-harm, the next US ally to reverse its own fortunes was Australia. This is, after all, the home of the boomerang. Perfectly placed to prosper from its Asia locale, Oz folded like origami under pressure from that other, bigger white settler colony that wiped out its native peoples. Right on cue in April 2020, ministers Peter Dutton and Marise Payne blamed China for Covid. China. Their biggest trading partner buying a third of their produce and putting two jet-skis and multiple cars in every Australian driveway when the global economy was melting down in the US Great Crash. That China.

Never mind, the trade was picked up by the US whose farmers were delighted to have a huge new market vacated by Oz. AUKUS is a similarly painful stitch-up costing billions and making them a target in any proxy war America might have out East.

UNITED KINGDOM: Now fully morphed into US Airstrip One. May enter recession soon. A tiny island excrescence off the arse end of the Eurasia landmass from which we could have prospered had we not done the dirty and splintered the EU bloc in service to the US. It is the monkey most likely to be used to teach the other monkeys a lesson.

Farewell, post-war liberal order. Hello, Oligarchy.

Karma’s Naughty Step Round-Up: Pacific Rimmers

SOUTH KOREA: President Yoon Suk-yeol makes Dracula’s Renfield look like a model of independence and rectitude. Yoon crooned embarrassingly to American Pie for Joe Biden in the White House, literally and figuratively. His constant drone of anti-China drivel may have pleased his masters, but he over-reached when he attempted a coup back home and declared martial law.

The US didn’t leap to his aid, quelle surprise. Horrified mass protests not seen in the country for decades put him back in his box within a few days. Under threat of impeachment he suddenly blames China for his actions. Kids, do not grow up to be like this.

JAPAN: Occupied by America since the end of the Second World War, and stagnating since the 1980s Plaza Accord hobbled its economy, Japan is in no position to buck orders. October’s snap election lost the ruling coalition its parliamentary majority. Shigeru Ishiba, Prime Minister since October, is not having an easy time.

PHILIPPINES: In 2022, the young country elected Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr, son of the famed kleptocrats with all the shoes, gallon bottles of Chanel and bullet-proof bras financed by America. After the US cooled off collecting the $3.9 billion tax owed on his late father’s plundered funds since he took office, Bongbong undid the stable relations with the regional superpower and pinned a target on the island nation by extending it as a US base. A growing economy that could easily be curtailed by war.

Chief talent: stirring conflict in the South China Sea. The US is not a member or upholder of UNCLOS.

Who’s Still Kissing The Ring?

So. NATO, under threat of defenestration by the incoming Trump administration, finds itself another project now that Ukraine is likely off the menu: getting that Viking raiding party together. Blaming China for its own messy losses to Russia, NATO has conveniently discovered China’s “strategic competitor” status from 2017 now that Donald Trump has been reelected and everyone knows what he wants.

Oh no, says a face-palming Mark Rutte. We picked a fight with a sleeping dragon that can build munitions faster and better than we ever dreamed. Better kick it some more.

Don’t say: What’s China got to do with the North Atlantic?

Do say: Give us more impossible tasks to perform. Where do I kiss?

When China Was Our Global Lifeboat

It’s amazing to remember that only eight or so years ago the world was enjoying relative stability as China’s productive economies of scale kept inflation near zero; there were few flashpoints, and the global south was headed economically north. The Great Crash was over, thanks to China’s intervention. Wall Street was happy. We were all friends.

However, America’s best days were over. The Crash had exposed its weaknesses and, although China saved it, no good deed goes unpunished when you are supposed to be king of the heap. Seeing America’s green-eyed monster squaring up to the dragon, the IMF’s Christine Lagarde pointed out we were at last emerging from the USA’s Great Financial Crash of 2008 in sync, so don’t f**k it up!

Did they listen? Heck, President Trump doubled down on Obama’s Pivot to Asia and began his mobster move on the rising superpower, threatening to turn the Golden Goose into a dead duck.

What was Donald Trump’s trade war REALLY about? (Anna Chen 2018)

When Trump’s trade war failed to bring China to its knees, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) backed riots in Hong Kong. The protest leaders were treated like movie stars in Washington and mentored by the old imperialists. Nancy and Joshua in a tree. K. I. S. S. I. N. G.

Hong Kong’s last colonial governor and BBC Trust chair, Chris Patten, even wrote the foreword to their figurehead’s manifesto because Chris wants his Empire back and no steenkin’ Joint Declaration signed by Britain and China is gonna stop him. Even though the last six words of the pertinent clause promises Hong Kong will enjoy full autonomy, “except in Foreign and Defence Affairs“. Six little words that are always left out. Funny that.

China exercised its right to a National Security law in Hong Kong, just like everyone else in the world, and drew the former Opium Wars colony into the bosom of the motherland.

Under the West’s relentless pressure, China’s growth plummeted … to 5 percent. And it still outstripped the covetous band of declining nations now lining up to pillage the rising superpower like a bunch of Dark Age Berserkers drunk on bull’s blood, testosterone and memories of when they were the Master Race.

(EDIT: And don’t even get me started on Covid …)

We’ll always have Beijing: How political necessity changes the cultural representation of Chinese

Anna's new website: ANNA CHEN

Hong Kong thespian and martial artist Bruce Lee. Image: YouTube

Anna Chen’s debut column for Asia Times, 14 August 2023

In the half-century since Bruce Lee’s early death in July 1973, the image of Chinese in western culture and business has come full circle with an added twist of spite. Prior to the martial arts deity’s explosion onto cinema screens in the 1960s, Chinese men were barely seen except as anonymous hordes reminiscent of the wave warfare that kept America at bay in Korea. Their ultimate sacrifice was presented in the west as an antlike lack of humanity rather than the collective courage we recognise from the allied storming of Normandy beaches.

Chinese characters who emerged from this primordial stew were instantly vilified as Yellow Peril, attributed with every hateful human trait. This malicious template returns periodically as Fu Manchu, Dr No, Emperor Ming the Merciless and other evil Chinese who step out of line. It was “balanced” by lovable creatures like Charlie Chan (played by Swedish actor Warner Oland in eye tape); The Pink Panther’s comical Kato (Burt Kwouk, an actual East Asian) as a sidekick even more useless than his boss Inspector Clouseau, the most useless man on the planet. And also another Kato, sidekick this time to The Green Hornet in the TV series, played by an underused Bruce Lee. So much for American original thought and innovation.

The cycle for Chinese cultural representation through the geopolitical eras goes something like this: Opium Wars – bad; gold mining in California – weak; building the Central Pacific Railroad Road for low wages – good; going on strike for better wages and conditions on the CPRR – bad!; 1870s economic downturn in the US – really bad; 1882 Exclusion Act – GTFOH!; Boxer Revolution to the Republic of China – Yellow Peril; War lord Thirties – well, ding, dong, Anna May Wong!; World War 2 – welcome, bro; 1949 – Wut?; Cold War Korea – here comes that ant wave; 1960s – the Blessed Bruce be upon us.

The swinging sixties was a great decade in which to be alive if you were a member of the post-war (preferably white) working and middle-class in America, Britain or parts of Western Europe. Not so great if you were living in China and trying to rebuild your wrecked country while staring down the barrel of foreign embargoes and a messy Cultural Revolution.

Bruce Lee was born and raised in San Francisco. He was beautiful and graceful with a body sculpted like Roman marble but most impressively, instead of submissiveness to the master race, he exuded pride in his Chinese origins. And, true to the cultural aspirations of the time, he stuck up for the little people rather than sticking it to them.

His divinity was felt keenly in the UK when his Hong Kong-made Kung Fu films came out in the 1970s, Enter the Dragon being their stunning apogee. Even my dad raised his head out of his books for long enough to praise this popular hero. For the first time, young males in the West wanted be like Lee, an Asian male, instead of wanting to kick him. Tough working-class lads of every hue sought out martial arts kwoons and dojos and stuck his posters on their walls. He was an inspiration to men of colour and they loved him for it.

If he hadn’t died on the cusp of the Nixon-Kissinger agreement with Mao that would propel China, ever so slowly, into a Golden Age, he’d probably have had his own movie empire on a par with Jackie Chan: JC to Lee’s John the Baptist.

In the glory years since China proved itself to be the rising superpower, Mandarin has been taught in schools and Beijing represented supreme cool. Ten Cent movies made mega bucks. Marvel gave us Shang-Chi, the first superhero movie to star an Asian lead, and TWO Asian main characters in the Agents of Shield TV series, played by Ming-Na Wen and Chloe Bennet. Benedict Wong and Gemma Chan escaped limited prospects in the UK and built solid careers in the Marvel universe and beyond, while Sandra Oh made the sole reverse journey across the Atlantic and busted out with Killing Eve. Michelle Yeoh was Everything, Everywhere All At Once from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to Star Trek. Asians were being normalised.

However, the screech of brakes and smell of burning rubber as the West performs a doughnut spin threatening to send positive images of Chinese crashing through the windscreen, means all change. How do you persuade the public that it’s okay to have a war with people they’ve been encouraged to identify with if you keep humanising them? Are buddy movies with Chinese as equal partners doomed to history before we’ve finished our popcorn? Is whitewashed Doctor Strange about to morph into Dr Strangelove or be eclipsed by Fu Manchu redux?

The tension between an industry making bank in the two leading economies and the demand by China hawks to slaughter the Golden Goose has to be resolved somehow.

A promiscuous use of backfiring tariffs and sanctions may provide the very catalyst that transforms the greenback signs in oligarchal eyes into yuan, as dumping the global reserve currency accelerates and everyone stampedes for the exit.

One advantage China will always have in this wholly unnecessary contest is the USA’s example of a modern Ozymandias: behold my works, ye mighty, and dedollarise. Never has America needed its original eastern hero as much as now to explain the art of the martial to politicians who keep pristine copies of Sun Tzu’s The Art Of War on display but never crack the spine. You’re supposed to use the weight of your opponent AGAINST him, grasshopper. And Be Like Water doesn’t mean running into the berg that sinks the USS Titanic just becuz we can.

In 2018, the International Monetary Fund’s Christine Lagarde side-eyed President Donald Trump’s imposition of tariffs on Chinese goods, loudly announcing that we were finally emerging from a Certain Someone’s Great Crash of 2008 with Another Certain Someone’s help.

Wall Street had a conniption. Gary Cohn, Trump’s Chief Economic Advisor, fumed, “Peter Navarro ratfucked us into a trade war with China by taking advantage of Trump’s very small brain.”

We watched aghast as, in the words of the British PM whose backbone hadn’t yet crumbled, Trump “let all the air out of the tyres of the global economy”. (Including, presumably, Boris Johnson’s own family’s investments. We sincerely hope he was personally reimbursed after ripping out our Huawei 5G infrastructure at the behest of the First Certain Someone with maybe a loan or sumthin’.)

And now President Joe Biden triples down on the madness.

Ironic that the Kung Fu concept of your own actions rebounding and hurting you when you point a loaded finger and find three fingers pointing back, has taken place in real time in front of our eyes. Every poisonous character assassination, every fusillade of hurt ends up damaging the perp as the target slips further out of reach.

My blu-ray of The Great Wall, perhaps the last of the Hollywood/China blockbuster lash-ups, arrived in 2018, two years after its 2016 release. Tainted by all the ensuing unpleasantness, it sits forlornly on a shelf, still in its shrink wrapper.

I may never find out how Matt Damon saved Chinese civilisation. But we’ll always have Beijing.

We'll always have Paris

Anna's website: ANNA CHEN

US Asian youth bears brunt of anti-China drive

Anna's website: ANNA CHEN


First published 3 August 2023

The anti-China pogrom is having the required effect in the United States, providing a dumping ground for an imploding society’s fears in the form of its Asian children. The feral elite can guage its success in turning its successful rival into a diversion and scapegoat for its own failings by the high number of suicides of Asian kids who are the canaries down the mine and currently bearing the brunt of American aggression.

The US was never going to allow China to develop and overtake it, choosing destruction over cooperation and mutual benefit. When the ruling class has sucked dry its own people, hollowing out the working and middle-classes until the top 1 percent owns as much as the bottom 90 percent, you know they’re not going to slow down their predations for 1.4 billion human beings across the other side of the world.

President Joe “not on my watch” Biden doubled down on Donald Trump’s multi-fronted attack on the rising economic superpower, chucking hundreds of billions of dollars at its military industry and budgeting over $500 million a year for a character assassination campaign, which has been eagerly taken up by its morally bankrupt adherents. From academia to media commentators and bent politicians, the whole of the US has been turned into a playground for bullies in a complete meltdown, trailed by the UK and other vassal states.

Meanwhile, the media keep us mute and invisible, denying a voice to those who would speak for themselves and mount a case for the defence. Any evidence-based debate is suppressed, the target group is dehumanised and thrust into the shadows.

Instead of challenging age-old anti-Asian bias, purported pro-China social media have done the same and created an apartheid industry for themselves. The lack of solidarity keeps the vacuum going where the sleep of reason produces monsters. We continue to be a blank canvas onto which any old phantasms can be projected, providing catharsis for exploited boneheads and a career for gatekeeping “rescuers” who have now become part of the problem.

Asian kids have a higher calling right now and will need every ounce of inner strength. All power and love to you.

“Whatever current western propaganda demands you believe, we are capable of altruism, fellow feeling, critical thinking and original thought. Of course we are. We’re human.”

SEE ALSO:

The Conversation: Asian American young adults are the only racial group with suicide as their leading cause of death, so why is no one talking about this?

What you can do to fight violence and racism against Asian Americans: Although this PBS piece aims to help specifically in America, there are principles that apply everywhere that US anti-China hysteria is having an effect. In Britain there has been no action and little comment by anti-racism groups on the growing anti-Chinese pogrom.

The Monitoring Group: The only anti-racism group I can find in Britain that has stood with east Asians.

Sinophobia: How racism has its roots in politics. In an effort to “contain” China’s rise, the US is using every dirty trick it can muster to retain its status as sole hegemon, promoting hate at macro and micro levels.

Yellowface: How east Asians are almost completely erased from the culture.

Anna's website: ANNA CHEN

We Can't Make It Here Anymore by James McMurtry: the state of America

James McMurtry performs We Can't Make It Here Anymore

James McMurtry recorded this video in 2007 and the message is becoming increasingly apt for our modern times as the superpower implodes and America rips itself apart.

This is the state of the richest country on Earth after the oligarchy bled it dry. What they did to their own people should serve as a warning.

We're seeing the same happen in the UK.

The oligarchs ate your wealth and now they want to do the same to China, our global lifeboat.

No wonder they're spending billions on dirty tricks and propaganda.

Hat tip to Patrick Eden for the link.

In 1945-1981, earnings for the bottom 90 per cent of Americans rose 77 per cent. In 1981 - 2014, they shrank by 3 per cent. For the top 1 per cent, in 1945-1981, earnings rose 29 per cent, while from 1981-2014, their wealth rose 176 per cent. This is where America's schools, healthcare, roads, bridges and rail infrastructure have gone.
THE WEALTHIEST 26 PEOPLE ON THE PLANET OWN AS MUCH AS THE BOTTOM HALF OF THE WORLD'S POPULATION — AUSTERITY IS THE TRANSFER OF WEALTH FROM THE POOR TO THE RICH.
The top 0.1 per cent in America now own the same amount of wealth as the bottom 90 per cent. The top 0.01 per cent own 11.2 per cent of America's wealth.

The Roots of the Clash between the United States and China: Virtual Vigil for the Victims of the Atlanta Shootings

VIRTUAL VIGIL FOR THE VICTIMS OF THE ATLANTA SHOOTINGS
Organised by the Goldsmiths Anti-Imperialist Society — Sunday 2nd May 2021

Text of Anna Chen’s talk 

The Roots of the Clash between the United States of America and China

After a year of increasing anti-Asian violence encouraged by unscrupulous politicians and media, we took another lurch to the dark side when eight people were killed in the Atlanta shootings (16th March 2021), six of them Asian women. Elsewhere, Asian people are being regularly maimed and murdered.

Why have we been beset by this wave of sinophobic hatred when only four years ago, Christine Lagarde (International Monetary Fund) was remarking on the even pace of economic growth in the world? We had relative stability — if you weren’t a Palestinian, a Venezuelan or Iranian under US sanctions or a Black person in Ferguson — and as a species, for one glorious historical moment, we seemed to be headed towards the light.

But just as China’s economy was drawing level with the American superpower, we got the Thucydides Trap – classically the conflict that occurs when an established power feels threatened by a rising one — and now, more than 2,000 years after the original Sparta-Athens knock-down, we find ourselves being dragged into a war with a nuclear power which is also our global growth engine, the factory of the world and our lifeboat.

The road to war is paved with malign intent and the whipping up of China-hate to get the tax-paying American public on track for conflict is about as monstrous as you can get.

China is only 40 years into its modern era, having endured over a century of misery ever since Britain forced mass-produced opium onto the entire country at gunpoint in the 19th century Opium Wars, turning what had been an aristocratic vice into a nationwide addiction.

So why can’t the West take pleasure in China finally getting off its knees and raising an astonishing 850 million people out of absolute poverty? It is providing stability, healthcare, housing, education, food, an amazing high speed train system and beautiful cities. Why can’t we have a multi-polar world instead of one winner taking all?

One key difference between the American and Chinese systems is that US oligarchs control their government. Whoever you vote for, the government always gets in. Its politicians are backed by private money, and its corporations are too big to fail.

In China there is uneven distribution of wealth, but not on the scale of the declining superpower. This unevenness is something China appears to be tackling as it develops — as evidenced by the recent containment of Jack Ma’s Alibaba and Ant Financial empire.

Jack Ma was something of a philanthropist hero who’d promised his workers a share of the vast wealth generated by the Alibaba behemoth in the form of a shorter working week. He also produced a major online resource in the fight against Covid, and he offered to create a million new jobs for Donald Trump in America – which was was rejected.

But then he reverted to billionaire type, demanding that, despite his vast wealth, his workers should labour 996 hours — that is nine til nine, six days a week. He encouraged an excess of debt and then set about launching Ant Financial to service that debt with too small a cash reserve to stop it being too big to fail if anything went wrong. At the eleventh hour, the Chinese government audaciously clipped his wings, insisting Ant Financial should have a larger stash of cash, and are investigating possible monopoly transgressions.

The West was outraged. You can still hear them screeching that a government should have the temerity to reign in a company that could bring down the whole system in the same way that America’s deregulated mortgage industry almost collapsed the global economy in its 2008 crash … until China stepped in as the world’s shock absorber and lifted us out of danger.

China’s system is a new model that is not welcomed by certain parties in the West’s old declining capitalism.

America’s wealth is mostly stacked up in the hands of the top 0.1 per cent who own as much as the bottom 90 per cent. But it wasn’t always this way. Prior to Ronald Reagan’s presidency in 1981, post-World War 2 earnings for the majority went up by a hefty 77 per cent. Then, from 1981 earnings shrank by 3% under the Reagan regime. At the same time as America’s middle-class was expanding in its post-war glory years, earnings for the top 1% rose 29%, but from 1981 they soared by a colossal 176 per cent. It was the beginning of a huge transfer of wealth from the middle and working-classes to the super-rich that continues to this day.

This is where America’s healthcare, schools, jobs, roads, bridges and infrastructure went – into the pockets of the super-rich in the form of tax cuts. With little investment in its own people, poverty soars, the middle-class is hollowed out. And tent cities proliferate.

Having devoured the country down to the bone, like a shark that needs to keep moving or it dies, the billionaire class needs to look elsewhere for its dinner.

To jump metaphors, here’s China, the new rich kid on the block who’s just walked in wearing a Rolex and who’s about to get rolled.

China’s futuristic cities, transport and tech, its healthcare for all, its stability and safety present a juicy prize for stretched oligarchs hungry for new loot.

Not only that, but especially with the eradication of the coronavirus by day 43 of its 76-day lockdown — while Trump’s Covid super-spreader policy led to over a half a million dead — China is a model that America’s oligarchs do not want giving the public any big ideas.
“Hey. They look like they’re getting things right.” … is not what they want to hear.

So containment of the upcoming rival plus the promise of plunder have been too tempting to resist. The wall of hate propaganda is a form of self-hate as their lurid claims are all what’s happening at home in America, as we can see every day.

In the UK, we’ve gone through a similar immiseration of the working and middle-classes. Having inflicted austerity onto us, the same people who persuaded the country to leave the EU on the promise of fabulous trade deals with China are now trying to start a war with it. Having nailed us to the USS Titanic they are now trying to sink our lifeboat.

In true Tonya Harding Syndrome fashion, they’re out to smash the kneecaps of the upcoming rival. Biden said that China will not overtake America on his watch and pledged three hundred million dollars a year just to fight China’s Belt and Road initiative, on top of all the rest of the psyops and dirty tricks.

The American ruling class would rather be the last one standing in the rubble than hand over the baton in the human race to fulfill its potential. The Asian women who were killed in Atlanta, the elderly who have been maimed and died, have already paid the price for this folly. We need to wake up and ensure they are the last and not the first.

US financial press admit that in the American system, business interests trump those of the public. One system works for the billionaire oligarchy, the other works for society.

Response to China's market crash yesterday:
China “may have calmed some investors for now but the reputational damage is done. The message: China can clamp down any sector it deems a threat or hinders the goals of social welfare.”
I should hope so! 😱🤣https://t.co/9MZsC01b9E

— Anna Chen (@MadamMiaow) July 29, 2021

Standing up to sinophobia: how racism has its roots in politics

STANDING UP TO SINOPHOBIA: From Fu Manchu to Bat Soup

Online event hosted by The Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding (SACU) 6th April 2021

Contribution by Anna Chen

HOW RACISM HAS ITS ROOTS IN POLITICS

So here we are in April 2021 as America’s anti-Chinese pogrom goes full blown. We’re seeing almost daily attacks on Asian people who’ve been caught up in this vicious wave of sinophobia. Britain is thankfully further behind but is being dragged in the same direction.

In the deadly Atlanta attack, six out of eight people who lost their lives were Asian women.

After Atlanta, we saw a brief display of crocodile tears from the government and media but then a return to business as usual.

Because this isn’t about being nice to minority victims. This is about turning a group of people – in this case 1.4 billion human beings – into a dehumanised blob so that the American superpower can retain top position as ruling hegemon in a unipolar world.

President Joe Biden finally admitted to what Victor Gao calls “Tonya Harding Syndrome” — with the declining superpower trying to smash the kneecaps of its upcoming rival. Biden declared that “China will never grow wealthier or more powerful than us on my watch”, despite China having four times the population, a lot of talent and an aim to raise the tide that floats all boats (see poverty eradication).

We’ve been assailed by a relentless Case for the Prosecution with no right of reply, obscene stories invented by an obscenely resourced psychological operations campaign. And here was Biden threatening that China would not overtake the US by any metric.

I first realised that China was the probable endgame of the Project for America in the 21st Century in 2005 when Dubbya Bush stood in the rubble of a destroyed Iraq and suddenly declared China to be a competitor. It came as America was ticking off its wars in a never ending stream of horror: in this latest round, Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia. And I guessed that China stood at the end of that list, somewhere near Russia.

Bush had first called China a competitor during his election campaign of 2000.

The same year that Bush was putting China in the crosshairs, Prime Minister Tony Blair was badly mishandling the outbreak of Foot and Mouth disease in Britain. The countryside was full of flaming pyres of dead livestock. Farmers were going bust and committing suicide.

A few months later, in March 2001, a government office — the Northumberland branch of the Ministry for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) — briefed the press that the outbreak had been started by a Chinese restaurant in the north of England whose leftovers, they claimed, had contaminated food collected for pigswill.

It was absurd. It didn’t matter there was no science to back it up, or that Chinese restaurants buy their meat at the same place as everyone else: at the butchers. Or that the price of food and meat in the fourth richest economy in the world was at a near all time low, meaning that speculation about antelope meat being smuggled in by a Chinese Mr Big was as unhinged as the vision of herds of wildebeest roaming the plains of the Chinese serengeti – that is, it didn’t exist.

It was enough to use the method favoured by Goebbels that powered this character assassination — of linking the scapegoated group to filth and pestilence. And we know that the Big Lie, if repeated enough times, becomes gospel truth.

This was the first time I’d seen a government in the developed world blatantly triggering hate and disgust to divert problems onto a scapegoat. It seemed so crude and cruel and archaic.

Luckily, most Brits were too sceptical to buy into this, and many seemed quite outraged by it.

Chinese Brits held an unprecedented protest in London’s Chinatown and a delegation presented the Case for the Defence to the minister, Nick Brown, who seemed genuinely shocked and ended up publicly vindicating us.

However, there was no rectification or apology from the press. It was as if someone was testing out how effective scapegoating us would be.

It was like going back in time to the 19th and early 20th centuries when Yellow Peril imagery dehumanised the Chinese using tropes of over-sexualised, maleveolent, dirty Other, most famously expressed in Sax Rohmer’s FU MANCHU books, whose clever, cruel villain possessed “a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan”. That is to say, he’s smarter than us, almost like us but not quite. Fu Manchu was the embodiment of the evil Other, which is really only a mirror for all the cruelty we were doing in Empire.

So where did this vilification of an entire race begin?

To locate its origins, we’d have to travel in our time machine back past the Cold War and China’s revolution to liberate itself; past the deportation from Liverpool of thousands of Chinese sailors who’d run our British merchant navy during World War 2; past the United States Exclusion Act of 1882 which was designed specifically to keep out Chinese and which didn't end until 1943; past the 19th century lynchings in America when to have bad luck meant you had only an unenviable Chinaman’s Chance, and it took ten Chinese voices to carry the same weight as one white person … and even then, not so much. And past the Chinese who built north America’s rairoads from sea to shining sea.

This monstering of the Chinese began in earnest during the 19th century OPIUM WARS when Britain forced cheap, mass-produced opium grown in stolen Bengal onto China at gunpoint, turning what had been an expensive aristocratic vice into a nationwide addiction.

The narco-capitalists proceeded to smear their victims as sub-human and deserving of the crimes committed against them.

Not only was China plundered, their great treasures stolen, but the famed Summer Palace was looted and burnt to the ground by the French. Tens of thousands were massacred. Great chunks of China, like Hong Kong, were bitten off by the invading imperial powers that followed Britain. In the first great case of industrial espionage and theft of intellectual property, Britain stole China's tea trade and transplanted smuggled tea plants to India. America joined in the opium trade and took advantage of the unfair treaties forced onto a weak Qing government. Astor, Forbes, HSBC, Jardine, Matheson, the Midland Bank ... the opium trade made fortunes and helped finance the West’s industrial revolutions.

It was a carve-up that led to more than a century of suffering from which China’s only emerged in the last 40 years.

People who are convinced of their own superiority have to justify their savagery against their neighbours on this small, blue planet. And, as happened to native Americans, enslaved Africans and Aboriginal Australians among others, they have to dehumanise their victims.

SO WHY NOW?

Why is this happening now only five years after Christine Lagarde observed that the world economy was coming up evenly together with growing stability, prosperity and optimism? And little more than a decade after China saved the global economy from America’s devastating 2008 crash which threatened to plunge us all into a depression?

By allowing global currencies to devalue against the yuan, taking a huge hit in the process, China had acted as the world’s shock absorber and stabilised us. Consumption of foreign goods was stimulated by the Chinese government. China also bought a ton of American debt and helped kick-start the longest bull run in American markets ever. So if you made money from that, just remember how different things could have been.

And this is the thanks they get.

So why this hate for China? Unfortunately, the West is in trouble and losing their lead as its capitalism enters geriatric old age. No universal healthcare in the US. Crumbling infrastructure. Rising poverty with tent cities springing up everywhere. Treasure spent on endless wars. The richest zero point one percent owning the same as the bottom 90 percent. The whole system is built on the upward suck of national wealth by the billionaire class who own the government. They’ve sucked their country dry and are looking elsewhere.

In Britain, austerity laid low the economy, Brexit chaos threatens to finish it off, and Covid mishandling means we are dying in large numbers with no end in sight.

Meanwhile, China has the world’s only positive GDP growth in 2020. It’s the world’s growth engine as well as our lifeboat. It invested in its people, raising over 800 million out of absolute poverty — that’s well over twice the population of the US. It’s built them homes, created jobs, extended life expectancy and gradually given them a prosperity that Mr Spock would have been proud of. “Live long and prosper” might well be the motto of modern China.

Not only that, but having stood up to President Trump’s vicious trade war, after some initial fumbles, China then protected its people from the new coronavirus.

While America shockingly closed down its pandemic team and the CDC office in Beijing that was supposed to have helped China monitor and contain any new diseases, China identified, sequenced and shared the virus’s gene code with international scientists in record time.

It amazed the world with its unprecedented lockdown of Wuhan and Hubei province, with a population of 64 million, almost the same size as the British Isles. By day 43 of its 76-day lockdown, China had eradicated the Covid-19 virus bar flare-ups.

China bought us time which Trump’s Covid superspreader policy proceeded to squander: stigmatising masks, holding massive rallies and playing down the danger which we now know he was aware of as far back as his briefing by the NSA right at the start on 28th January 2020.

When Trump performed his U-turn in March 2020, the White House issued instructions for politicians to incessently blame China as reported by The Daily Beast, the Independent and Politico. So we’ve had lab creations, bat soup and twisted timelines … and it’s been a revelation as to which politicians and media have gone along with it.

It's been long discussed that the objective is to "contain China". The way Trump claimed that China's wealth is all America's doing, this suggests plunder as well. On top of everything else, let's not forget that Xinjiang happens to have the second largest oil field in the world as well as being China’s old Silk Route into the Middle East and Europe which now has the Belt and Road running through it.

Washington’s think tanks, such as CIMSEC, have stated an aim of “Preparing the American public for competition and conflict”. The only thing holding a fractured America together today is hatred for a common enemy. Fears are rising and the motivation is high.

As US Covid deaths continue to rise, the economy implodes with $28 trillion dollars in debt to date and race relations deteriorate, America needs a pressure valve and they have decided that China is its safety release.

I've long seen the WESTWORLD TV series as a potent metaphor for the current situation with Chinese cast as the hosts upon whom the guests can inflict any horror they want.

So to the China haters spinning this atrocity porn, every drop of poison, every toxic word, every lurid rape fantasy: what you’re saying about China doesn’t tell us who they are. It tells us who you are.

Notes and further reading:

A Reservoir of Scapegoats: How Chinese in Britain challenged the Foot and Mouth disease smear campaign of 2001.

"I will not flinch from...WAR!" Our ruling elite just might be stupid and sociopathic enough to go to war with China.

The Struggle with China is not a Replay of the Cold War: Remarks to the Asia American Forum by former Ambassador Chas Freeman

Italian paper researching Xinjiang allegations made by the US bloc: "... accounts and testimonies coming out of China, as well as from foreign journalists, diplomats, experts, students and professionals who have had and continue to have the chance to visit Xinjiang and its cities and counties, tell a very different story, which seriously undermines the West’s charges."

Australian report on Xinjiang by the Citizens Party: "The November 2020 – March 2021 Australian Alert Service series of eight articles assembled here, with an appendix of related material from the AAS, demystifies what is going on in and around Xinjiang, and why."

US State Department accusation of China ‘genocide’ relied on data abuse and baseless claims by far-right ideologue

The Opening to China Part I: the First Opium War, the United States, and the Treaty of Wangxia, 1839–1844

The Opening to China Part II: the Second Opium War, the United States, and the Treaty of Tianjin, 1857–1859

Higher wages won in Seattle supported by electorate: Ed Miliband should watch this

Workers across America are winning a living wage.

Halfway decent minimum wages work … certainly better than what we currently have. An important principle is grasped in America and is spreading. Let's hope the same happens here.

Ed Miliband should remember this when the Labour right are pressing him to emulate Ukip.

Will Hutton writes in the Observer:

Last Monday, the mayor of Seattle signed into law a city-wide minimum wage of $15 (£8.90) an hour. … chronically low-paid work does not make any sense. It is bad for business. It chokes demand for goods and services, even for fast food. There is no worker loyalty or commitment, just a mass of desperate, distracted men and women permanently on the look-out for a better job. … "People look at the $27bn (£16bn) in profit Walmart makes every year and they celebrate it without connecting it to the fact that Walmart workers are the biggest recipients of food stamps in the country and are all in poverty." But, Hanauer adds: "If you say to them, look, we can live in a world where Walmart made $17bn (£10bn) in profit and each one of the million lowest-paid Walmart workers would earn $10,000 (£5,900) more a year and all of them would be able to buy more stuff from your business, and you don't have to pay food stamps, then they're like, 'Oh, shit, we should do that!'"

Read more here.

Aditya Chakrabortty on rising poverty while the rich get richer.

...when Ipsos Mori asked the public this spring which issue they considered the most important in Britain, poverty/inequality had its strongest showing ever, ranking above schools, hospitals, crime, inflation, pensions and housing. … Branson and the train operators, who make easy money for investing next to nothing; the utilities, which pay their investors handsomely, pay the taxman next to nothing and expect the British public to stump up for their investment; Serco and Capita and G4S, with their business models of running public services for as much profit as possible.

On the Mississippi Blues Trail: Madam Miaow in America

Duck stars at the Peabody Hotel, Memphis

This article first appeared in Gap Year Magazine

The Mississippi Blues trail

It was the ducks that did it. Even they had their own musical accompaniment: the King Cotton March by John Phillip Sousa, as it happens.

Any trip worth remembering will have its own soundtrack that stays with the traveller long after the souvenirs have gathered dust: whether it be the favourite tracks you load onto your MP3 player or, if you seek escape from your private tourist bubble, the local music you stumble across as you pass through exciting new landscapes.

There are few sounds more powerful than the music associated with the American blues trail, carrying with it the history of an entire people from tragic beginnings in slavery to the creation of a major art form that’s sired jazz and rock and roll in all its forms … except maybe for ABBA.

From what’s left of sleepy sensual New Orleans in the Mississippi Delta in the south after Hurricane Katrina and the developers got through with it, to the speedy urban setting of Chicago on the banks of Lake Michigan 930 miles away in the north, the Blues Highway is one of the culturally richest journeys you can make. The cast in this story features African American music legends John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, BB King, Buddy Guy, Bessie Smith, Billie Holliday, Sam Cooke, Charley Patton , Willie Dixon, and not forgetting Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and a whole bluesmobile-full of others.

I did this by car, taking in all the main centres along Highway 61 in little over a week. A leisurely fortnight would have been ideal and if you can manage longer, well, lucky you.

* * *

The invention of the cotton gin in the late 18th century rejuvenated the use of slavery in the massively profitable cotton growing areas of the Deep South including the Mississippi River Delta. When the Civil War brought an end to slavery, it was replaced by sharecropper poverty and vicious Jim Crow laws as the chief source of misery.

A generation of young African American men left the plantations for work in the cities. The easiest escape was jumping the train north to St Louis and Chicago.

The blues had grown out of field hollers and spirituals. Musical instruments were improvised out of any materials that were to hand. Thus the diddley bow was born out of a piece of wire strung between two nails hammered into the porch. Guitars and harmonicas could be bought cheaply from catalogues and stores.

The luckier among them could get work in the Chicago heavy industries, and because their instruments were portable, the talented ones could make a living or at least feed their souls with their music.

When you take the Mississippi blues trail, you are following in the footsteps of these refugees and early pioneers of jazz and rock. So load up your MP3 player with blues goodies and get ready to roll.


Memphis.

Situated on the banks of the Mississippi River at the crossroads between Tennessee, Louisiana and Arkansas, Memphis is the centre of the American heartland that gave birth to the blues. Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Jim, the runaway slave, would have sailed past on their raft on their way to freedom.

There’s an observation you’ll see emblazoned everywhere except in sky writing so I’ll introduce you to it here: the Mississippi Delta "begins in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel (in Memphis) and ends on Catfish Row in Vicksburg". They may as well have a T-shirt printed with it. They probably do already.

Stepping into the Peabody Hotel on Union Street conjures up Tennessee Williams, mint juleps and a hundred variants of barbecue sauce that have me drooling even as I write. This homage to the original Peabody, which closed in 1923, was built two years later in the style of the Italian Renaissance, with all the grandeur of the deep south but with ethnic minorities. Suffering more tragic declines than Blanche DuBois, its faded fortunes were revived in 1981.

If you can’t afford to stay here, you can still enjoy the bar which did brisk under-the-counter business during prohibition, but it won’t be the plush surrounds or the travertine marble fountain that amaze you. Time it right and you’ll witness a sight that has had tourists crowding the lobby since the 1930s with not one call for BBQ sauce.


Every morning at 11am, the poultry wrangler known as the “Duckmaster” escorts one mallard drake and four hens from their penthouse Duck Palace (cost $200,000) on the Plantation Roof, into the elevator and down into the lobby where they waddle in line to the fountain to frolic for the rest of the day until bedtime at five o’clock when it all happens in reverse. Reader, I have watched movie star Nic Cage on the balcony watching the duck parade below, as spellbound as any other out-of-town visitor. That’s how weird and wonderful it is.

If this is making you hungry, you’re in the right place. Southern soul food is another one of the delights of this region. Several blues maestros own music venues serving the local fare. If you head for BB’s (owned by B B King) on Beale Street, a famous centre of African-American music, you’ll get great food and music in the same hit. Forget burgers. We ate cornbread, Jack Daniels-marinaded steak, gumbo and a rack of ribs smothered in sticky BBQ sauce until we were stuffed silly. All washed down with the weak brew which the locals joke gets its flavour from the Mississippi water it’s made from.

If that doesn’t satisfy you, you can try the Elvis Presley restaurant that replicates the menus that ultimately killed the King. Speciality: a loaf halved lengthways and fried in butter, filled with bacon fried in butter with peanut butter, jello (jam), mashed banana and probably a knob of butter. Add a carton of clotted cream and this would be my idea of heaven even if my heartburn would be hell.

Elvis was a local lad made good after he ventured into Sun Studios, round the corner from Beale Street, and caught the ear of owner and producer Sam Phillips. For twelve bucks you can take the studio tour and see where the legends of Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison and Johnny Cash were created. I have a snap of me singing into the very same Epiphone microphone (or one just like it) that Elvis would have used.





Charles Shaar Murray at Sun Studio, Memphis

If you have time, get over to Graceland, Elvis’s famous mansion home. It’s a lot smaller than you imagine. Who knew you could spend half a million dollars in Woolworths?

A sadder story is the one of the other King at the Lorraine Motel in Downtown Memphis. It’s here that Dr Martin Luther King was shot dead on the balcony outside his room by racist loonies eager to keep black people in their place. There’s some controversy attached to the building as it was home for the wretched poor when the decision was made to turn it into a state-of-the-art museum. While the shell has been preserved and King’s room encased in glass, the area behind has been completely rebuilt and the residents evicted. The exhibits include a bus like the one where Rosa Parks, an African American woman, refused to give up her seat for an able-bodied white man, kicking off the Montgomery Bus Boycott and galvanising the Civil Rights movement of which King became a leader. Worth seeing but you may first want to speak to Jacqueline Smith, the last of the motel residents to be evicted and who has mounted a lonely protest outside for twenty years.


If you are a music fiend, you could make a detour to Nashville, home of the po' white folk equivalent of the blues: Country and Western. Otherwise, head south towards New Orleans on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico.

Clarksdale

After 60 miles, where Highway 61 meets Highway 49 just outside Clarksdale, there’s a junction steeped in myth — the biggest one in the whole mythography of music. It’s where the young musician Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil in order to gain his supernatural guitar skills. It gained him fame, glory and sex for a few years before the devil called in his marker and Johnson was poisoned by the jealous boyfriend of a woman he was seeing. The Crossroads of legend turns out to be several places in the real world as there are different intersections all telling you you’re crossing 49. We were stymied. It’s not like you can trust the gigantic crossed guitars at one of them — even if X does mark the spot — as this was smart advertising for a local business. My advice: pick a place and meditate. It was all invented so you might as well join in. As long as you locate the crossroads deep in your soul …

Squealing like a porker that’s caught a whiff of BBQ sauce, I nearly crashed the car when I spotted the Riverside Inn (now Hotel) just outside town. For this is where singer Bessie Smith breathed her last with her magnificent lungs when it was formerly a hospital for black people in the bad old days of legalised racism.

Smith should rightly be referred to as “legend” rather than mere singer, but we are now in an area renowned for its legends. Throw a rock and you will hit a spot that had something to do with one, whether it be Ike Turner, Sonny Boy Williamson II, Duke Ellington or Robert Nighthawk who all stayed at the Riverside. There must be ley-lines or a spooky alignment of the planets or maybe they put whisky in the water. Whatever it is, I want some.

Clarksdale is a small town — maybe one and a half horse’s worth. But what a history. I stood staring at the tiny single-platform station where mile-long cargo trains trundle past on the Illinois Central Railroad, very slowly but never stopping, with the ghosts of desperate young men showing me how easy it would have been to hop a train north.

Across from the station, the Ground Zero Blues Club: perhaps the most famous of the juke joints, part owned by Morgan Freeman. Outside on the sidewalk, one of the kitchen staff sits on an old armchair for a smoke. Inside, it’s a large square room with a small stage at one end with just enough room to swing a Strat, and a bar running down the side. We drink bourbon and eat ribs followed by peach cobbler and feel like we are in hawg heaven.

Clarksdale’s Delta Blues Museum documents the town’s amazing history and is run by volunteer heroes. Star feature is Muddy Waters’ shack from Stovall Farms where he was a sharecropper before finding fame and fortune with his axe. Son House and Charlie Musselwhite were local lads who also have their own sections in the exhibition.

Three miles from Clarksdale, the Shack-Up Inn is one of the most unusual places I’ve ever stayed at. Occupying a slice of the old Hopson Plantation where the early cotton picker was trialled, it’s an unconventional hotel complex made out of real sharecroppers’ shacks, giving cultural historians an authentic glimpse of the environment that produced the blues. Some might call it misery tourism but there are skint creatives out there looking for a quiet place to think and compose: patrons include Morgan Freeman, Samuel L Jackson, Charlie Musselwhite and the late Ike Turner. None of the cabins are luxurious, although they contain the requisite bathrooms, fridges and fans, and many come with keyboards and sound systems. Trying sitting on the porch in the torpid heat of a southern summer evening, drinking a cold beer with Hooker, Howlin’ Wolf or Waters playing in the background. Ah, magic. Apart from the mosquitoes. They’re just maddening.





Anna and CSM in the Cadillac Shack at the Shack-up Inn, Clarksdale

St Louis

Short of time, we miss New Orleans — home of dixieland jazz and all things Creole — and head back north through Memphis to St Louis, best known for ragtime jazz and a major stopover for the black exodus of the 1920s and 30s. The only obvious landmarks are the Gateway Arch on the West bank of the Mississippi, looking like half a monument to McDonalds, and the gorgeous rail terminus. Union Station’s huge vaulted ceiling is more cathedral than railway station, once the biggest in the world, now the luxury hotel that annoyingly gave up our room despite notice that we’d be arriving late.

We spend our evening at BB’s Jazz, Blues And Soups, a smallish joint which stays open until 2am, and serves pleasant food to some cracking live music.

Chicago

Driving to the Windy City of Chicago, the spiritual end of the Blues Highway, we struggle to find any of the great blues stations we’d listened to on the car radio at the start of our journey. The further north you go the angrier and meaner become the jocks and commentators.

The architecture of central Chicago is fabulous: a creamy Gotham of art deco and waterways. We stay in the Essex Hotel on Lake Shore Drive fronting onto Lake Michigan, in the four-mile part of the city destroyed in the Great Fire of 1871. The rebuilding took place during the wealthiest period in America’s history, when skyscraper construction had just been made possible. No wonder it looks amazing. Except for the Essex Hotel which looks like something constructed in Essex; perhaps Ripple Road in Romford. Luckily, we were on the inside looking out.

The best way to see the sights is to take the tram, touring the El railway, the Sears Building, Wrigley Field stadium, the waterfront, Oprah Winfrey’s modern tower block and the fairground underneath.

Take a cab down town to Chess Records to complete the music tour. Willie Dixon, Etta James, Aretha Franklin, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley; all the blues giants recorded here. So great was their impact that their effect was felt in Britain, inspiring bands like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

Just one last music stop: Buddy Guy’s Legends, serving some of the best food I have ever eaten. Jambalaya, gumbo, frogs legs, ribs, catfish, crawfish etouffée … Mmm, excuse my drool. If you’re lucky, you may get to see the man himself perform. If you’re luckier still, Buddy might even be personally cheffing in the kitchen ...

Music and artists associated with the Delta:
Bessie Smith, Memphis Minnie, Junior Parker, Jimmy Reed, Sam Cooke
Sun Records: Sam Phillips (producer), Elvis Presley, Muddy Waters, Jerry Lee Lewis, Howlin' Wolf, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Ike Turner
Chess Records: Muddy and Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson, Buddy Guy, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, John Lee Hooker

Shack Up Inn, Clarksdale
Delta Blues Museum
1 Blues Alley - Clarksdale, MS 38614 - 662-627-6820 
Current Hours - Monday thru Saturday - 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM
Sun Studio, Memphis
Buddy Guy’s Legends, Chicago
Chess Records, Chicago

SOPA bites the dust but how did the Chinese view the US firewall?

With a mixture of sympathy, schadenfreude and amusement, it seems.

Evan Osnos writes in The New Yorker:

After several years in which American diplomats have inveighed against Internet censorship in China, the proposals have inspired a bit of snickering. 'The Great Firewall turns out to be a visionary product; the American government is trying to copy us,' one commentator wrote. A Chinese message making the rounds on Thursday said: 'At last, the planet is becoming unified: We are ahead of the whole world, and the ‘American imperialists’ are racing to catch up.'

On Weibo, "a commentator known as Dr. Zhang wrote: 'I’ve come up with a perfect solution: You can come to China to download all your pirated media, and we’ll go to America to discuss politically sensitive subjects.'"

Ah well. At least the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act managed to achieve one good thing: uniting global netizens in their distaste for the clampdown. Netizens of the world unite: you have nothing to lose but your keychains.

Obama in Yo Mama war with China: Pacific Rimmers look out!

"We never liked their noodles, anyway."

Is it my imagination or is cuddly President Barack Obama picking a fight with China?

No sooner has the world begun to heal after the Bush neocon excesses that led to such bloodshed in the Middle east, not to mention an enormous fillip to the arms industry, than Obama announces a tectonic shift in US imperialist policy.

Only a few weeks since Hillary Clinton announced that the new superpower was in the queue not so far along from Iraq, Afghanistan, Lybia, Syria, Iran and Korea for whipping into shape, I listened to Obama's speech to the Australian Parliament last night, struck by sabre-rattling out of a bygone age. "The United States is a Pacific power, and we are here to stay." Is he on something?

The Guardian said:

Obama's speech came the day after he announced he would send military aircraft and up to 2,500 marines to northern Australia for a training hub to help allies and protect American interests across Asia. He declared the US was not afraid of China, by far the biggest and most powerful country in the region.

China's sensitive about having gunboats up her Yangtse, and sending in the marines plus warships to the region is like poking a stick at a pitbull. Reminding China of her ignominious past being gang-banged by the West is not the best way to foster good relations, especially if you are seeking her dosh to get you out of our economic crisis. I would suggest less of the, "C'mon if you think you're 'ard enough", and more of the "Gosh, what big mountains of cash you have. May we have some? Please?"

Actually, Barack said: ""Let there be no doubt: in the Asia-Pacific in the 21st century, the United States of America is all in." Which is diplomat speak for: "You spilt my pint. Outside!"

He continued:

"With most of the world's nuclear powers and some half of humanity, Asia will largely define whether the century ahead will be marked by conflict or cooperation, needless suffering or human progress. We've seen that China can be a partner, from reducing tensions on the Korean peninsula to preventing proliferation. We'll seek more opportunities for cooperation with Beijing, including greater communication between our militaries to promote understanding and avoid miscalculation."

Obama held out the threat of the big stick and I understand several horses' heads are now winging their way to Hu, Wen, Hao and Wai.

The cheeky fucka told them: "We will do this, even as continue to speak candidly with Beijing about the importance of upholding international norms and respecting the universal human rights of the Chinese people."

Meanwhile, the US Occupy protesters are being given tea and cakes in the White House and treated to BBQs in New York's Zuccotti Park while sympathetic cops give them foot-massages.

I'm sure the Australian Aboriginal peoples will be most pleased to have the American's using their vast bombing ranges in the north of the continent as well as all the other excercises and "training". Wonder if the School of the Americas will have a chance to shine?

Could the shift in focus to the Pacific be anything to do with the large oil resources in the South China Sea? As George Orwell said, imperialism consists of the cop and the soldier holding down the native while the businessman goes through their pockets. Or as I see it, the school bully is mugging the other kids for their lunch-money. Unfortunately for America, this new kid does kung fu.

Expect proxy wars and monstering of China in the supine media as we all get programmed to cheer World War Three and a Half.