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

The Brexit trigger that changed the world

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BBC: China, Britain and the Nunzilla conundrum

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Britain not on the “contain China” bus

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nope.

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

Made in China 2025

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

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

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

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

Britain and the China Golden Goose

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

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

And then … and then …!

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

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

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

Brexit wrecks it

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

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

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

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

Clown car reverses gear

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

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

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

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

Britain hangs on to benefits

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

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

Boris Johnson writing on China in the Telegraph, September 2005

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

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

Superman versus Kryptonite

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eurasia land mess

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

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

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

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

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

Europe, your nine lives are up

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

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

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

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

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

BRICS is now the largest trade bloc on the planet.

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

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

The unfolding endgame: Gaza, rare earths and western decline

Anna Chen – First published 26 July 2025, rare earths

Glimmers of hope in the darkness

Rare earth mining

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

The Corbyn-Sultana Party: forcing accountability on Palestine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Its impact cascades through the Western war apparatus:

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

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

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

Western powers losing their composure

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

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

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

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

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

The Military-Industrial Complex under stress

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

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

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

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

The death spiral of American hegemony

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

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

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

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

The rare earths boomerang effect

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

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

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

The path ahead

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

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

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

Further reading

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

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

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

High anxiety from Hollywood’s first Chinese superstar to China

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

Anna May Wong and China facing the same western fears

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

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

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

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

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

Green Hornet Syndrome

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

Be a sidekick or die.

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

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

And that’s across the political spectrum.

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

Colonialism rules

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

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

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

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

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

Mandelbrot Set’s repeating China patterns

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

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

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

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

The West’s Heart of Darkness

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

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

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

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

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

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

As above, so below.

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

Anna May Wong Must Die!

By Anna Chen, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 …)

China And Its Inventions: Anna Chen On The Radio 2014

Anna Chen – 4 November 2024, China and its inventions

YOUTUBE, Pt 1, Episode 15: Anna Chen presents Chinese Can’t Innovate Says Boris Johnson, ResonanceFM 2014

China Takes The Space Exploration Baton And Flies With It

In the week that Shenzhou-19 transports three fresh taikonauts to the Tiangong Space Station and the Shenzhou-18 crew return safely to the Gobi desert in Inner Mongolia, China’s space marvel remains largely ignored by the media.

True, we don’t get to see that much of the International Space Station, either. But whether this is due to embarrassment that two astronauts have been stuck there for months thanks to Boeing, or the crumbling state of the space station, or plain old ennui, we can only guess.

It should be noted that the fading glory of NASA’s space programme is fondly remembered by many of us who were transfixed by the early missions proudly broadcast by the richest country on planet Earth.

What adds to China’s accomplishments is that, as a developing nation also having to take costs into account, it’s taken the baton and is rocketing with it. This seems as good a time as any to revisit what they’ve been up against and how far they’ve come.

Shenzhou-18 lands in the Gobi Desert, 3 November 2024, carrying 3 taikonauts from the Tiangong Space Station. 35 year old Li Cong is Shenzhou-18 lands in the Gobi Desert 3 November 2024, carrying 3 taikonauts from the Tiangong Space Station. 35 year old taikonaut Li Cong is shortlisted for future moon missions.

Entering The High-Tech Era

The first decade and a half of the 21st century was an information vacuum in the UK when it came to China matters. We were aware that the nation brought in from the cold by Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger and Mao Zedong in the 1970s was chuntering along nicely, making the affordable goods that allowed us to live beyond our means. Inflation was at an all time low of near zero and we were busy buying lots of stuff.

I’d managed to write and present a raft of programmes with a wide range of unexplored themes for the BBC. In 2010 I broke through the Great Wall of Silence and made “China, Britain and the Nunzilla Conundrum” for BBC Radio 4, pointing out that China was about to leave its suicide factories making our tat far behind as it propelled itself into a new phase of its modern era. Not only was Chinese industry on course for making high-end tech, but lots of it utilising their vast economies of scale in production. Few believed it.

In discussing the rising superpower, you were constantly faced with the age-old obstacles of invisibility and degrading depictions as untermenschen, and character-assassinating demonisation if they got too uppity. Devoid of a balanced approach to a potential equal, the West took a schizoid view; wanting their cheap goods and massive investment but hating them for our dependence.

Some politicians and commentators coped with the decline by reviving degrading tropes about Chinese that I’d hoped were gone for good. Bubbling away in the background, the whole gamut was run from theft, dirt and cruelty to subhumanity, And yet it was these comic book villains who saved the world from the crippling US Great Financial Crash of 2008.

Attitudes remind me of the 1870s America economic downturn when the Chinese became the scapegoat for America’s ills, leading to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

In 2014, fed up with the constant bleating denigrating China, our global growth engine, I devoted Episode 15 of my Resonance FM radio series to China’s phenomenal abilities.

Up until Britain forced narcotics onto China in the 19th century Opium Wars, China had been the most technically advanced country on the planet. They invented the seed drill 2,000 years before Jethro Tull did in 18th century England. Metal stirrups allowed Ghenghis Kahn to conquer half the Eurasia landmass up to Europe. They had astronomy, and invented the first plastic in lacquer, the compass, paper money and gunpowder.

Here’s your chance to catch up with an early discussion about China’s innovations, recorded at Resonance 104.4 FM in London as part of my pioneering Madam Miaow’s Culture Lounge series.

RADIO MINI SERIES Parts 1-5, Episode 15, 15 April 2014: China’s Innovations On YouTube And TikTok
RADIO MINI-SERIES Part 1 (above): “Chinese are incapable of original thought,” said the London mayor in 2005. Now look what they’ve achieved. Anna Chen presents Part 1 of the Madam Miaow’s Culture Lounge ResonanceFM104.4 radio series, Episode 15: China’s Scientific and Cultural Innovations and the Opium Wars. The 2008 Beijing Olympics debuts China’s technological advances in a stunning opening ceremony and shows the world how far it has come. Live broadcast London, 15 April 2014.

Part 2: China’s Scientific and Cultural Innovations from the seed drill to the metal stirrup and the first plastic.

YOUTUBE Ep15 Pt2 China’s Scientific & Cultural Innovations – Anna Chen 2014

RADIO MINI-SERIES: Anna Chen asks How did Europe get to dominate the world after China’s spectacular early technological success for nearly two millennia?

RADIO MINI-SERIES: Anna Chen asks How did Europe get to dominate the world after China’s spectacular early technological success for nearly two millennia?

Anna Chen presents The Opium Wars, Part 4 of Episode 15: China’s Scientific and Cultural Innovations. Madam Miaow’s Culture Lounge at ResonanceFM104.4

YOUTUBE Anna Chen presents The Taiping Rebellion (Revolution or Civil War), Part 5 of Episode 15: China’s Scientific and Cultural Innovations.

RADIO SERIES – FULL EPISODE: Anna Chen Presents MADAM MIAOW’S CULTURE LOUNGE, Episode 15: China’s Scientific and Cultural Innovations – at ResonanceFM, 15 April 2014. Includes a rare, early discussion on the Opium Wars. Groundbreaking series recorded 2013-2014.

YOUTUBE FULL EPISODE 15: China’s Scientific and Cultural Innovations – Anna Chen Resonance FM, 2014

New poetry videos and a cultural feast from Anna Chen

Anna Chen's poetry and politics at TikTok

Culture and politics converge in Anna Chen’s video surge

I’m delighted to announce I’m adding more videos to my long form writing as found extensively on this website. I’ll be spreading the love to TikTok and YouTube.

My TikTok page got off to a promising start with POE, my funny poem about Edgar Allan Poe, garnering 218K likes in a week. Oh, now 219.3K. Yup, who knew the dark story-lord had so many fans? I’m going to keep this up. It’s not like I’m short of material, heh! Please bookmark the pages and follow.

Political and cultural commentary feature as it’s my contention that they are not separate but inextricably linked in service to power. It’s just that the West is so much better at it. That’s not a surprise considering that the US poured so much money into its cultural domination wars.

Culture wars always and everywhere

For example, spearheading the international art world with its wave of modern art. Francis Stonor Saunders explains this brilliantly in her book, Who Pays the Piper? I bought this when it was published around 2000, having been told about this corner of the culture war as a yoot by British artist and critic Patrick Heron in my home-from-home in St Ives, Cornwall.

Hollywood is well known as operating as the main arm of the US propaganda machine with many books and articles now available about the role of the CIA and the Office of Strategic Affairs in its movies. Whoah! Did you know that Hollywood suppressed the Weinstein revelations under the influence of Certain Parties?

One reason America is so good at concealing its mass manipulation is that it’s had decades of practise in its advertising industry. Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders is the classic text on this subject.

America has an army of psychologists with nothing better to do than researching new and more effective ways to twist your melon completely out of shape. This has added to the the already existing Yellow Peril tropes embedded deeply in Western culture ever since the 19th century Opium Wars and the eight-nation alliance of murderous bandit powers that maimed and pillaged China for a hundred years.

I’ve been investigating this geopolitical friction from Empire for 30 years, ever since I took Suzy Wrong – Human Cannon to the Edinburgh Fringe festival in 1994 — a first for a Chinese Brit. See my various writings on this such as Yellowface: the erasure of a race, Sinophobia and the political roots of racism, and A Permanent Reservoir of Scapegoats and many more.

Poetry videos and radio series

In addition to my culture and poetry videos, and having the perfect face for radio, I’m going to be uploading 16 episodes of my pioneering ResonanceFM series from 2013 and 2014, Madam Miaow’s Culture Lounge. I’m aiming to get these up on YouTube and at this website over the rest of the year. So do have a listen to what someone straddling two major cultures since birth has to say about them.

Boomers poem at TikTok

The Diss Persists poem at TikTok

Has the US had its chips? Chip tech under fire

First published at Anna's new website: ANNA CHEN

Chip tech (Photo Jiefeng Jiang)

The US semiconductor technology war against itself

US chip tech once more faces government friendly fire, courtesy of Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo’s rant about cutting off China from AI technology. Severance in the same way you might close a stable post equine scarper: is it the door or the horse that’s bolted?

Welcome to late stage capitalism where making a buck is no longer the name of the game. Trashing your competitor is the aim.

Military interests are now prioritised over straight up capitalist concerns, which must be worrying for supertech manufacturer Nvidia. “Such is life, protecting our national security matters more than short term revenue,” scolded Raimondo.

It’s alarming to see the USA lurch deeper into self-harm as it loses its top-dog ranking. But, however much it yearns for its old supremacy, it can howl at the moon and gnash its teeth all it likes. That won’t rescue the oligarchs from their self-made predicament. Which stage of grief are we at now? Still stuck at anger?

The intellectual, diplomatic and economic skillsets supposedly exemplified by America in the postwar years should have come to its rescue. Instead, it grew old before it grew wise. We’re left with geriatric grandpa having a tantrum and spraying his nappy contents over the world while the rest of us duck and cover.

Behind the rage, however, fear stalks the upper crust. Abandoning cooperation in its bullying hubris, the elite discovered itself to be incapable of competing on a level playing field. A fundamental aspect of its national self-image, this failure to win has been wounding.

A last-ditch attempt to regain past glories resorted to mobster tactics when all else collapsed. Trying to smash China’s kneecaps at every turn was so not a good look. Especially when it rebounded spectacularly, spurring China on to even bigger and better advancements in chip technology.

The glass slipper fitted Cinderella courtesy of a cosmos that was evidently on the newcomer’s side. Cutting off its own toes wouldn’t help the Ugly Sister one bit.

Yet here is America doing exactly that when the chips are down.

Because if it’s Monday it must be tech time. Again.

Joe “Not on my watch” Biden explicitly aims to handicap China’s chip tech for 10 years. China’s had its chips and it ain’t getting ours, says Gina Raimondo, as if this is a brilliant new strategy, even though depriving the rising superpower of semi-conductors has only accelerated its advances. Suffer ye Silicon Valley to save our status.

“Chip tech ours. No way are we letting China catch up. Biggest threat. China not our friend. Protect America. Game on, game on. Exterminate, exterminate, exterminate!” (Okay, either that last bit was a dalek or I’ve been listening to too much news.) If madness is repeating the same act over and over despite getting the same results, then the boomerang must have hit America square in the noggin.

An obsolete system even chip tech protectionism can’t save

The US represents an old mode of thinking for an obsolete system that no longer works for its people. While it may be horrible to live through these events, it is also undeniably fascinating. Like watching the fall of the Roman Empire in a few years rather than decades, in fast motion speed for a modern sensibility conditioned by binge-watching.

It has painted itself unnecessarily into a corner where it behaves like the proverbial cornered rodent when it should have held on to friendship and cooperation. They’d have been better off if military supremacy had never been tested but had remained a mystery. After all, China’s a known quantity when it comes to helping the Numero Uno superpower out of a tight spot. Think of the 2008 US Great Crash, when China raced to the rescue instead of letting the global economy burn.

Now China’s forced to take defensive measures and spend on building up its armed forces. And, hey, guess what? They’re even catching up on that. The US’s only remaining advantage is decades of advertising psychology: whipping up fear, desire, unrealisable self-image. All converging in war fever.

And who is this for? Not the American working and middle classes who’ve seen their share of national wealth drop alarmingly.

“America leads the world in artificial intelligence … That’s because of our private sector,” Raimondo boasted. Private wealth, not public good.

Without a change of heart and a return to cooperation, all the US state has left to look forward to is continued collapse. Or at questionable best, ossification as the world’s military overlord, maintaining its position through brute terror. Suzanne Collins nailed this structure in The Hunger Games with the Capitol, ruled by President Snow, at the centre of Panem’s 13 districts.

“Panem is a sovereign nuclear state and democratic constitutional republic established sometime after a series of ecological disasters and a global conflict brought about the collapse of modern civilization. It is situated in North America, consisting of a federal district, the Capitol, and thirteen outlying districts.”

And there you have it. The American model for the future with a shrinking number of beneficiaries feeding off the districts whose people yearn to be free. “Protect the Capitol! Hide the chips!”

* * * * *

Some of the ways that China is more self-sufficient than the US in semiconductors are:

— William Huo (@wmhuo168) December 3, 2023

Tech links below courtesy of William Huo. Follow him at Twitter for reliable China tech info.

HOW HUAWEI MADE A CUTTING EDGE CHIP IN CHINA AND SURPRISED THE US: China’s flagship smartphone maker pulled off the feat despite sanctions. Hush, hush, sweet Charlotte … “This article from Ars Technica tells the story of how Huawei and SMIC managed to produce a powerful smartphone chip, the Kirin 9000S, despite the US sanctions that cut them off from global semiconductor supply chains. It reveals how the companies used vast resources, state support, and innovative techniques to overcome the challenges and achieve a breakthrough in AI chip production.” WH

US CHIP SANCTIONS “KNEECAP” CHINA’S TECH INDUSTRY: The toughest export restrictions yet cut off AI hardware and chipmaking tools crucial to China’s commercial and military ambitions. “This article from WIRED explains how the US export controls, announced in October 2022, aim to keep China’s AI industry stuck in the dark ages by blocking its access to advanced chips and chipmaking equipment. It also discusses how the restrictions affect China’s leading tech companies, such as Alibaba, Baidu, and ByteDance, and what strategies they might adopt to cope with the situation.” WH

BIDEN ADMINISTRATION IMPOSES SWEEPING TECH RESTRICTIONS ON CHINA: New rules include measure to exclude China from using semiconductor chips made anywhere in world with US tools – Reuters/Guardian 7 October 2022. “Report on the Biden administration’s decision to publish a set of export controls in October 2022, including a measure to cut China off from certain semiconductor chips made anywhere in the world with US tools. It describes how the rules are designed to slow down China’s technological and military advances, and how they have sparked criticism and backlash from China and some US companies.” WH

US CHIP TECH SANCTIONS MAY NOT BE ENOUGH TO DETER CHINA’S MILITARY AMBITIONS: “East Asia Forum report, 30 August 2023, analyzes the impact and limitations of the US chip sanctions on China’s military modernization. It argues that the restrictions may not be effective in deterring China’s development of data-intensive AI models, supercomputers, and hypersonic missiles, as China has alternative sources of chips and can leverage its domestic capabilities and partnerships. It also suggests that the US should pursue a more cooperative and constructive approach with China on technology issues.” WH

SHAKEDOWN: Timeline of America’s 21st Century War on China — the Opium Wars on steroids

DON QUIXOTE IN THE WHITE HOUSE: from windmills to stray weather balloons, the monsters inside the American id

US CHIPS AND SCIENCE ACT July 2022 to subsidise the highly profitable US semiconductor industry with $280b budget. Passes in August 2022.

US BANS ADVANCED TECH FIRMS FROM BUILDING FACTORIES IN CHINA: September 2022. Ban to last ten years.

Anna's website: ANNA CHEN

America blames China for its opioid epidemic

Anna's new website: ANNA CHEN

Attorney General Merrick Garland announces sanctions on China for the US opioid crisis. Photo: Manuel Balce/AP

America blames China for its opioid epidemic 

The United States of Amnesia is at it again. Blasting China with a whole new round of sanctions and indictments, Attorney General Merrick Garland’s claim on Tuesday, that China is responsible for the fentanyl crisis, diverts from the opioid epidemic caused by American companies Johnson and Johnson and others, “profiting from a flood of addictive painkillers that devastated communities”. As a result, J&J faced a $26 Billion lawsuit in 2021 but we’re encouraged to forget this as the social and health damage deepens.

Blame shifting includes: “The companies have maintained that they were filling orders of legal drugs placed by doctors – so they shouldn’t shoulder blame for the nation’s addiction and overdose crisis.”

From US doctors to China, the blame game goes on while the conditions of poverty and despair that breeds drug addiction are allowed to continue. China manufactures the precursor chemicals for fentanyl, a synthetic opioid pain-killer used legitimately in medicine but there is no widespread fentanyl abuse in China. Why is America incapable of tackling criminal drug production and trafficking? What next? Making China culpable for producing steel that makes guns?

This is a useful ploy by western elites to rewrite history, deleting their own role in the 19th century Opium Wars atrocity, when Britain forced vast quantities of mass-produced opium grown in Bengal using industrial methods on to China at gunpoint.

It turned an aristocratic vice into a nationwide addiction, massacred Chinese and made huge profits for British, American and other western narco-capitalists which helped finance their industrial revolutions.

US profits in the richest country on the planet could have been spent over the years on creating a model society for all its people. Instead, wealth was gobbled up by the elites like a giant Pac-Man until the top one percent owns as much as the bottom 90 percent … and it shows.

As rationalisation for war with the successful rising superpower, it’s primitive, crude and relentless. Prepping for Opium Wars 2 and the hoped for carve-up of the China Golden Goose by the declining West builds like some dark age Berserker raid.

Which all goes to show that the western capitalist system of putting profit before people’s needs is doomed to destroy itself. I believe someone else made this observation nearly 200 years ago, 18 centuries after another seer kicked out the money dealers in some temple.

We can do better than this.

Video: more info at Jerry’s Take on the US and opioids

Anna's new website: ANNA CHEN

Zoo Time at Operation Circe: How the Wolf Warrior was invented

Anna's new website: ANNA CHEN

Zoo Time at Operation Circe: How the Wolf Warrior was invented

by Anna Chen, first published by Asia Times, 5 September 2023  

When China’s vice-premier and top trade-war negotiator Liu He arrived in Washington in May 2019* to finalise the trade agreement with the USA at the end of tortuous negotiations, neither he nor his hapless opposite number Robert Lighthizer realised he’d walked into an ambush sprung by the capricious president. Even as Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin announced that the trade war was on hold, and Wall Street broke out the bubbly, Donald Trump harshed their mellow with yet another round of tariffs and trade blocks.

Gloating that he’d compelled China to buy huge amounts of agricultural products they didn’t need, it was yet another humiliation through which the dignified Chinese politician stoically ploughed in the interests of his country and the global economy.

Accusations had been blasted at China in a character-assassination broadside by both sides of the House from which neither facts nor history could save it. China, not Trump, had reneged on the trade deal. China was stealing IP. It was a currency manipulator, despite the fact that, far from undervaluing the yuan, China was spending vast amounts of its reserves propping it up. China, not the top one percent of the US that now owned as much as the bottom 90 percent, was the cause of America’s misery.

You might suspect, from all the invective in high places, that the US didn’t actually want a stable relationship with its successful partner. China may have saved the world from America’s Great Crash of 2008 when the capitalist system itself was imploding but, suddenly, it was decreed that the rising superpower could do no right and the USA no wrong.

But still China kept a stiff upper lip.

Insult after insult from slap-happy politicians eager to outdo each other drew comment that China was outstandingly polite, exemplary and grown-up, if a tad too passive. A nostalgic fondness grew for old-school diplomacy rather than shoot-from-the-lip grandstanding.

Which was frustrating for the stone-throwers in their glass houses.

For them it was all one big Yo Mama case for the prosecution, with no defence permitted for the country that hadn’t had a war in over 40 years. Western media and politicians made hay with the 2019 Hong Kong riots trashing the city, despite zero protesters being killed in the same year that US cops somehow managed to kill over a thousand civilians. Later that year, a “strange pneumonia” mysteriously erupted in the central transport hub of Wuhan, marking the start of the pandemic.

To everyone’s amazement — part dignity, part rabbit in the headlights — China didn’t buckle even when the far-right Usual Suspects immediately accused it of creating the virus in the lab. Nor did China return the insults, instead turning the cheek to every barb.

After initial fumbles, not only did the Chinese draw up a remedial roadmap and eradicate the coronavirus by Day 43 of an unprecedented 76-day lockdown, they identified, sequenced and shared the genome with the world within days of its discovery. However, if anyone thought America would take stock and say, “Well done, old chap, you came through like a champ,” they were in for a shock.

The leader of the free world, largely aped by the UK, had already closed the US pandemic team and their Beijing CDC office. He delayed action; played down the virus; called it a hoax; held super-spreader rallies; allowed concerts and sports events; misdiagnosed early Covid deaths as ‘flu’; suggested injecting disinfectant, and pumped up the markets into the Mother of All Bubbles while insisting everything was fine.

Then the Black Swan, awaited by a nervous financial press for months, swooped in the day after politicians sold their stocks at all-time-highs, did the damage and disappeared back into the ether. The Trump Pump over and his Phase-One trade deal signed, the president U-turned on Covid in March, declaring an emergency, stating, “I don’t accept responsibility at all,” and launched his “Wuhan Kung Flu” attack.

One Chinese minister finally had enough. Having endured several years of non-stop verbals, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lijian Zhao dared to talk out of turn and posted THAT tweet, raising the Wuhan Military Games as a possible point of infection, opening as it had on 18 October 2019: the same day as Event 201, the table-top pandemic exercise laid on in New York by various illustrious institutions.

Primed, locked and loaded, the western media exploded in an entirely uncoordinated wave of outrage as one. Montgomery Burns might as well have howled, “Unleash the hounds!” In one short pithy Tweet, China was transformed from placid scapegoat into Wolf Warrior for defending itself on this one occasion. And the points made remained uninvestigated. Overnight, Americans who’d been strangers to history and the world outside their borders, instantly knew everything there was to know about China and that “Sin Chang” which they continually fail to find on a map.

Articles blared out lurid “Wolf Warrior diplomacy” headlines in a joint “Gotcha!”. Old tropes linking target groups to filth and pestilence were wheeled out, Secretary of State Pompeo demagoguing that “China has a history of infecting the world.”

Debate was debased to the point where Fox News broadcast a rant extolling “Type-A men”‘s desire to “sit on a throne of Chinese skulls”. People now talk openly of nuking cities-full of people into glass, as if this was normal only five years ago.

And lo! We have always been at war with Eastasia.

Psyops successful.

This, children, is how the wolf warrior got his fangs. Drawn on by hawks with crayon.

In classic Greek mythology, Circe was a sorceress who turned men into beasts, a neat trick if you are prepping your country for conflict. Not only are America’s opponents being dehumanised as fierce, bloodthirsty creatures, but to entertain the new barbarism, the population of the world’s most advanced nation is being dragged to new depths by state magicians and their little helpers on bloated budgets who know how to flip everyone’s amygdala en masse.

The more you hate, the less you think.

The tactic of dehumanising human beings in order to eliminate them is as old as Greek myth, even if the closest the US gets to Homer is Homer Simpson. First we had the Thucydides Trap, then ancient Greek gods and monsters. Is the West plagiarising the cradle of western civilisation for inspiration in its desperation?

This potent force has been tapped by western psychological warfare and financed by President Biden’s $500 million propaganda bounty on China’s head. Operation Circe seems to have succeeded in turning men into beasts.

First, we had to destroy the village in order to save it. But we never thought the village would be ours. Or that the ‘beasts’ would be us.

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* EDIT NOTE: The date of Liu He’s visit to the US was originally given as May 2018. This piece has been corrected to May 2019.

READ MORE: For the timeline of America’s 21st Century war on China, see Shakedown

Anna's website: ANNA CHEN