The Guardian
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I’ve had little trust in the Guardian ever since their part in the shoddy Foot and Mouth Disease affair in 2000-2001, when Tony Blair was failing to get the outbreak under control, the countryside was ravaged by burning pyres of livestock and ruined farmers were taking their own lives. What better solution for failing government policy than to deflect mounting public rage onto a ready made scapegoat: British Chinese. One effect of excluding east Asians from the culture and rendering them invisible is that they are a blank canvas onto which inner demons can be projected, providing a permanent reservoir of scapegoats. If the sleep of reason produces monsters then crises in national and global politics are the perfect occasion for that reservoir's utility.
In early 2001, someone in the Northumberland Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (the now defunct MAFF) briefed Valerie Elliot of the Times that UK Chinese restaurants were responsible for contaminating the pigswill that probably started it, no matter that the Chinese food trade gets its meat from the same places the rest of us do, British butchers. The mainstream press who — apart from the principled Independent newspaper — unquestionably repeated this bit of Goebbels playbook, linking a minority with filth and pestilence, included the cuddly, liberal Guardian.
The Guardian claimed it had been briefed by Downing Street (that is Tony Blair's office) that Nick Brown was about to make a statement to Parliament:
The Chinese community swiftly formed a delegation (of which I was a member) that presented evidence to the head of MAFF, Nick Brown, of the scientific impossibility of a restaurant doing this, and concerns about the subsequent rising sinophobia and a massive financial dent in the UK Chinese restaurant industry. On Sunday 8th April, it shut down London's Chinatown in protest against this patently absurd and damaging claim and marched to MAFF headquarters.
Brown never did make that statement in Parliament. To our faces, a genuinely shocked Brown, insisting that he was no racist, immediately distanced himself from both the northern MAFF and Downing Street briefings. After another meeting on the day of the Chinatown protest, he vindicated the UK Chinese in front of the world's cameras which were parked outside.
Afterwards, the late Hugo Young, chair of the Guardian's Scott Trust, had to tell his newspaper to cut it out, and their own Readers Editor, Ian Mayes, found evidence of "anti-Asian bias".
Dismally for us, it never really went away. The Guardian refused to apologised or publish the vindication, doubling down in 2007 (after Hugo Young's death) when it tried to revive the smear. It named China as being a source of smuggled meat and yet could only give examples of antelope, "West African delicacies", bush meat and, curiously, beef jerky smuggled in from the US. Nothing from China, unless you think wild antelope roam the serengeti of the provinces.
Which brings us to the latest manifestation of the filth and pestilence narrative.
Novel coronavirus — the disease is called Covid-19 — is a threat to public health that started in China in the same way that ebola, Aids, swine flu or H1N1 flu originated in different parts of the globe. It was first linked to a wet market in Wuhan but these cases were subsequently thought to be a cluster by scientists who suspected it had already gone round the world and pitched up in Wuhan where it mutated into the B strain. We're still awaiting news of the parent A-strain and where that might have started. There's a much more infectious C-strain (mutated from the D614 clade to D614G, or plain old G614) which took off in Europe and travelled to New York while Trump was banning incomers from China. It is thought to have jumped from bats to humans via an intermediary species. Despite attempts by US Secretary of State and Tony Soprano looky-like Mike Pompeo in concert with Rupert Murdoch to concoct a narrative where evuhl Chinese made the virus in a lab, scientists conclude that it jumped from bats somehow and some when.
In the three years of Donald Trump's trade war, the US has imposed ruinous trade tariffs, prompted the Canadian arrest of the daughter of Huwei's founder, intensified violent NED-backed protests in Hong Kong and seccesionists in Xinjiang province, both pressure points, and engaged in a ferocious character assassination around the globe and in its mainstream media. China has been struck at least three times by a serious virus: 2018 swine flu, leading to a massive pig cull and increased pork imports; 2019 novel coronavirus; and in 2020, bird flu, killing their poultry and necessitating increased chicken imports.
The 1.4 billion people of China have had one tragedy heaped upon another.
I can see why The Washington Post would be particularly nasty about China. It is owned by Jeff Bezos, richest man on the planet, who is furious that China has excluded his Amazon juggernaut from marauding through its domestic economy, so I understand why WaPo wants to smash up the huge Chinese economy for Amazon, Google and Facebook (dear god!). But the Guardian’s antipathy towards people who look like me has never made sense. I just can not understand why a newsparer that presents itself as progressive not only declines to examine the American desire to maintain its status as Number One Superpower to the detriment of the global growth engine — American capitalism in decline — but has been willing for 20 years to whip up anti-China hysteria. All ciriticism where criticism is due, but credit also.
I recently had to argue one of their journalists into changing another vile “bat soup” smear in an article purporting to be defending us from sinophobia. This was the original text:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/01/coronavirus-weaponised-way-to-be-openly-racist
And this was the horror picture it linked to, obliterating any superficial claim to be challenging sinphobia:
No explanation or investigation of the text at this page. And there is no such thing as "Chinese bat soup".
"Bat soup" is not eaten in China, not that you’d know from the article. By the date the Guardian piece was published, the mainstream media and even the Daily Mail were correcting perceptions and clarifying that these pictures and videos were from Indonesia and Palau island in Micronesia, a US territory. But not the Guardian which, under the pretext of challenging sinophobia, perpetuated it.
Which brings me to Hong Kong and the Guardian's biased reporting of it.
You don’t have to like the Chinese Communist Party (CPC) - I could write a list of the things I don’t like about them (for another time when the nation is not under existential threat). But prominent in their plus column is the fact that they have created a middle class larger than the population of the United States, and are tackling their awful pollution problem whereas the US has not only walked out of the Paris Accord, but is actively promoting fossil fuels and denying climate change. China is also close to eliminating absolute poverty, unprecedented in human history, while US and UK life expectancy reverses. Anyone with any basic understanding of geopolitics knows that the trade war and the very real possibility of a hot war with a nuclear power is explained at least in part by the Thucydides Trap, whereby the dominant superpower tries to destroy the upstart rival, as the US is doing now that China’s economy has drawn level with its own.
Last June, I was sympathetic to the Hong Kong protesters. Their living standards are dropping in comparison to the mainlanders who they've always regarded as peasants, and they are losing the superiority they felt under British colonialism. The tycoons have added to this impoverishment by ensuring HK property remains the most expensive in the world which ordinary residents can’t afford. However, seeing their demented violence against ordinary civilians, including headbutting a heavily pregnant woman, savagely beating women and elderly men and even killing and immolating them without any condemnation from the movement’s “leaders", I was disgusted.
Any cops anywhere in the world would have stopped this violence and the destruction of their own infrastructure. It’s a marvel thay they have not killed anyone despite the shrieking claims of Joshua Wong — meanwhile, cops are actually killing protesters in Paris, Chile, Gaza, Baghdad, and so on. The police should of course be subject to laws the same as anywhere else, but they should also be doing their job and closing down bomb factories and protecting the public. As part of their trashing of China, the US establishment have joined in an unholy alliance with assorted exiled Chinese billionaires, the descendents of the 1% ousted by the communists, fascists like Bannon and other far-right elements from Europe, in order to smash up China: all reminiscent of the 19th century Opium Wars carve-up.
It’s no surprise that the Yellow Peril sinophobia this generates is blowing back on us.
All the way through the Hong Kong protests looking for the political argument but there seems to be none short of complete overthrow of the "CCP" which would mean civil war and countless people dying, only three years since they were experiencing their first sustained period of peace, prosperity and stability ever. There has been a notable absence of criticism of the tycoons who actually gain from attacks on the Chinese government; no acknowledgment that at least Hong Kong has elections now — 23 since 1997 instead of just one right at the end of Britain's tenure; no suggestion of how the protesters would build a better society. No intelligent running of the buses and trains, offering free transport to get workers on their side. Instead, just brainless destruction and barbaric attack after attack on bus and taxi drivers, killing a janitor, setting fire to someone who disagrees with them while ingratiating themselves with their former and would-be colonial masters.
I asked their journalists Emma Graham-Harris and Lily Kuo to correct their biased reporting of Hong Kong, describing the first shot protester as “a teenager shot at point blank range by police” when even American press reported correctly that the 18-year old young man had been in a running battle with police and was trying to beat the cop with a metal bar. The Guardian stopped their video of the second shot protester at the point where he was grabbing for the cop’s gun, denying their readers and viewers the whole context. Compare this with American cops shooting (mostly black) civilians dead for little or no reason. The Guardian also stopped their video of the man burnt with petrol on the bridge before the ignition, and barely mentioned it. Same with the elderly janitor killed with a brick - video shows the cowardly killer take deliberate aim.
Then there’s Lily Kuo’s video in which she's drooling over the petrol bomb factory (barely mentioned in the Guardian reports) where they are adding flour to the petrol to make it stick to human flesh like napalm. In what hellspace is this acceptable?
It’s one thing to support the aims of the protesters, but the lack of balanced reporting in the liberal press, promoting the US agenda, is deeply suspect.
Request to the current Guardian Editor via Twitter went unanswered.
And now Jim Waterson's article trumpets CGTN censured by Ofcom for doing exactly what the Guardian does.
BBC Radio 4 and the World Service are risible with reports labouring to discuss the crisis but without mentioning China in their list of nations that crushed the virus to the point they can open up and stamp out wildfire breakouts.
In early 2001, someone in the Northumberland Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (the now defunct MAFF) briefed Valerie Elliot of the Times that UK Chinese restaurants were responsible for contaminating the pigswill that probably started it, no matter that the Chinese food trade gets its meat from the same places the rest of us do, British butchers. The mainstream press who — apart from the principled Independent newspaper — unquestionably repeated this bit of Goebbels playbook, linking a minority with filth and pestilence, included the cuddly, liberal Guardian.
The Guardian claimed it had been briefed by Downing Street (that is Tony Blair's office) that Nick Brown was about to make a statement to Parliament:
Contaminated meat smuggled into Britain will be highlighted today by the agriculture minister, Nick Brown, as the most likely source of Britain's foot and mouth epidemic. A damning official account of the likely source of the outbreak will claim that pigs were fed meat that was illegally imported for possible use in Chinese restaurants. ... A Downing Street spokeswoman said: "Nick Brown will say that foot and mouth may have entered the country through illegally imported meat fed to pigs as catering waste pigswill."
The Chinese community swiftly formed a delegation (of which I was a member) that presented evidence to the head of MAFF, Nick Brown, of the scientific impossibility of a restaurant doing this, and concerns about the subsequent rising sinophobia and a massive financial dent in the UK Chinese restaurant industry. On Sunday 8th April, it shut down London's Chinatown in protest against this patently absurd and damaging claim and marched to MAFF headquarters.
Brown never did make that statement in Parliament. To our faces, a genuinely shocked Brown, insisting that he was no racist, immediately distanced himself from both the northern MAFF and Downing Street briefings. After another meeting on the day of the Chinatown protest, he vindicated the UK Chinese in front of the world's cameras which were parked outside.
Afterwards, the late Hugo Young, chair of the Guardian's Scott Trust, had to tell his newspaper to cut it out, and their own Readers Editor, Ian Mayes, found evidence of "anti-Asian bias".
Dismally for us, it never really went away. The Guardian refused to apologised or publish the vindication, doubling down in 2007 (after Hugo Young's death) when it tried to revive the smear. It named China as being a source of smuggled meat and yet could only give examples of antelope, "West African delicacies", bush meat and, curiously, beef jerky smuggled in from the US. Nothing from China, unless you think wild antelope roam the serengeti of the provinces.
Which brings us to the latest manifestation of the filth and pestilence narrative.
Novel coronavirus — the disease is called Covid-19 — is a threat to public health that started in China in the same way that ebola, Aids, swine flu or H1N1 flu originated in different parts of the globe. It was first linked to a wet market in Wuhan but these cases were subsequently thought to be a cluster by scientists who suspected it had already gone round the world and pitched up in Wuhan where it mutated into the B strain. We're still awaiting news of the parent A-strain and where that might have started. There's a much more infectious C-strain (mutated from the D614 clade to D614G, or plain old G614) which took off in Europe and travelled to New York while Trump was banning incomers from China. It is thought to have jumped from bats to humans via an intermediary species. Despite attempts by US Secretary of State and Tony Soprano looky-like Mike Pompeo in concert with Rupert Murdoch to concoct a narrative where evuhl Chinese made the virus in a lab, scientists conclude that it jumped from bats somehow and some when.
In the three years of Donald Trump's trade war, the US has imposed ruinous trade tariffs, prompted the Canadian arrest of the daughter of Huwei's founder, intensified violent NED-backed protests in Hong Kong and seccesionists in Xinjiang province, both pressure points, and engaged in a ferocious character assassination around the globe and in its mainstream media. China has been struck at least three times by a serious virus: 2018 swine flu, leading to a massive pig cull and increased pork imports; 2019 novel coronavirus; and in 2020, bird flu, killing their poultry and necessitating increased chicken imports.
The 1.4 billion people of China have had one tragedy heaped upon another.
I can see why The Washington Post would be particularly nasty about China. It is owned by Jeff Bezos, richest man on the planet, who is furious that China has excluded his Amazon juggernaut from marauding through its domestic economy, so I understand why WaPo wants to smash up the huge Chinese economy for Amazon, Google and Facebook (dear god!). But the Guardian’s antipathy towards people who look like me has never made sense. I just can not understand why a newsparer that presents itself as progressive not only declines to examine the American desire to maintain its status as Number One Superpower to the detriment of the global growth engine — American capitalism in decline — but has been willing for 20 years to whip up anti-China hysteria. All ciriticism where criticism is due, but credit also.
I recently had to argue one of their journalists into changing another vile “bat soup” smear in an article purporting to be defending us from sinophobia. This was the original text:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/01/coronavirus-weaponised-way-to-be-openly-racist
And this was the horror picture it linked to, obliterating any superficial claim to be challenging sinphobia:
No explanation or investigation of the text at this page. And there is no such thing as "Chinese bat soup".
"Bat soup" is not eaten in China, not that you’d know from the article. By the date the Guardian piece was published, the mainstream media and even the Daily Mail were correcting perceptions and clarifying that these pictures and videos were from Indonesia and Palau island in Micronesia, a US territory. But not the Guardian which, under the pretext of challenging sinophobia, perpetuated it.
Which brings me to Hong Kong and the Guardian's biased reporting of it.
You don’t have to like the Chinese Communist Party (CPC) - I could write a list of the things I don’t like about them (for another time when the nation is not under existential threat). But prominent in their plus column is the fact that they have created a middle class larger than the population of the United States, and are tackling their awful pollution problem whereas the US has not only walked out of the Paris Accord, but is actively promoting fossil fuels and denying climate change. China is also close to eliminating absolute poverty, unprecedented in human history, while US and UK life expectancy reverses. Anyone with any basic understanding of geopolitics knows that the trade war and the very real possibility of a hot war with a nuclear power is explained at least in part by the Thucydides Trap, whereby the dominant superpower tries to destroy the upstart rival, as the US is doing now that China’s economy has drawn level with its own.
Last June, I was sympathetic to the Hong Kong protesters. Their living standards are dropping in comparison to the mainlanders who they've always regarded as peasants, and they are losing the superiority they felt under British colonialism. The tycoons have added to this impoverishment by ensuring HK property remains the most expensive in the world which ordinary residents can’t afford. However, seeing their demented violence against ordinary civilians, including headbutting a heavily pregnant woman, savagely beating women and elderly men and even killing and immolating them without any condemnation from the movement’s “leaders", I was disgusted.
Any cops anywhere in the world would have stopped this violence and the destruction of their own infrastructure. It’s a marvel thay they have not killed anyone despite the shrieking claims of Joshua Wong — meanwhile, cops are actually killing protesters in Paris, Chile, Gaza, Baghdad, and so on. The police should of course be subject to laws the same as anywhere else, but they should also be doing their job and closing down bomb factories and protecting the public. As part of their trashing of China, the US establishment have joined in an unholy alliance with assorted exiled Chinese billionaires, the descendents of the 1% ousted by the communists, fascists like Bannon and other far-right elements from Europe, in order to smash up China: all reminiscent of the 19th century Opium Wars carve-up.
It’s no surprise that the Yellow Peril sinophobia this generates is blowing back on us.
All the way through the Hong Kong protests looking for the political argument but there seems to be none short of complete overthrow of the "CCP" which would mean civil war and countless people dying, only three years since they were experiencing their first sustained period of peace, prosperity and stability ever. There has been a notable absence of criticism of the tycoons who actually gain from attacks on the Chinese government; no acknowledgment that at least Hong Kong has elections now — 23 since 1997 instead of just one right at the end of Britain's tenure; no suggestion of how the protesters would build a better society. No intelligent running of the buses and trains, offering free transport to get workers on their side. Instead, just brainless destruction and barbaric attack after attack on bus and taxi drivers, killing a janitor, setting fire to someone who disagrees with them while ingratiating themselves with their former and would-be colonial masters.
I asked their journalists Emma Graham-Harris and Lily Kuo to correct their biased reporting of Hong Kong, describing the first shot protester as “a teenager shot at point blank range by police” when even American press reported correctly that the 18-year old young man had been in a running battle with police and was trying to beat the cop with a metal bar. The Guardian stopped their video of the second shot protester at the point where he was grabbing for the cop’s gun, denying their readers and viewers the whole context. Compare this with American cops shooting (mostly black) civilians dead for little or no reason. The Guardian also stopped their video of the man burnt with petrol on the bridge before the ignition, and barely mentioned it. Same with the elderly janitor killed with a brick - video shows the cowardly killer take deliberate aim.
Then there’s Lily Kuo’s video in which she's drooling over the petrol bomb factory (barely mentioned in the Guardian reports) where they are adding flour to the petrol to make it stick to human flesh like napalm. In what hellspace is this acceptable?
It’s one thing to support the aims of the protesters, but the lack of balanced reporting in the liberal press, promoting the US agenda, is deeply suspect.
Request to the current Guardian Editor via Twitter went unanswered.
And now Jim Waterson's article trumpets CGTN censured by Ofcom for doing exactly what the Guardian does.
BBC Radio 4 and the World Service are risible with reports labouring to discuss the crisis but without mentioning China in their list of nations that crushed the virus to the point they can open up and stamp out wildfire breakouts.
