Showing posts with label cold war. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cold war. Show all posts

Monday, 3 May 2021

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

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

Text of Anna Chen’s talk 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Tuesday, 23 June 2020

“Let's Blame China": an infantile disorder when Covid-19 comes knocking

How the White House turned "China bought us time" into "China lied, people died" and put the world at risk    




"Let's blame China" has become the lazy go-to for so many politicians and media lacking the will to think outside the Trump admininistration box, it's tragic. Literally. Stupefied by the past three years of a vicious trade war on China, the commentariat allows information which could save our lives to be buried in the mush of memes and accusations put out by the various right-wing think tanks: from Bannon to the fugly Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC). Meanwhile, the bodies pile up.

Even LBC radio host James O'Brien, usually one who incisively questions the status quo, went on autopilot the other day to blame China's "appalling conduct" for the Covid-19 pandemic.

Blaming China is several degrees north of perverse when the US knew about the coming pandemic at least from November, even briefing NATO and Israel while keeping this vital information from the nation that would be the first to deal with it. [Edit: the Pentagon now denies this.]

Anyone scapegoating the country that lost thousands of lives and devastated its own economy in the drive to eradicate the virus and buy time for the rest of the world, needs to be reminded of what China learnt once they got on top of it. Because that's our collective knowledge, too. 

Up until Trump's U-turn in mid-March, most were impressed with the record time in which China identified, sequenced and shared the "strange pneumonia's" gene code as they struggled to make sense of what was happening since the first case was confirmed on 27th December 2019. Having finally confirmed human-to-human transmission 20th January after initial confusion and missteps, they turbocharged their efforts. Three days later on 23rd January, they shut down the city of Wuhan, and Hubei, a province of 66 million (about the same population as Britain), and halted its air traffic. The purpose was to starve the virus of hosts in order, not just to contain it, but to wipe it out completely. 


I watched the webcam broadcasts of two mega-hospitals being built in 10 days and wondered how – after witnessing these unprecedented feats by a fifth of humanity – anyone could ever return to the incessant dehumanising depictions thrust at us over the three years of Trump's trade war. 


We didn't have to wait very long. As early as January, Senator Tom Cotton; Steve Bannon; the Washington Times; Radio Free Asia; Fox 'News' and other right-wing mouthpieces had begun accusing China of creating the SARS-Covid-2 virus in the Wuhan lab: a patent falsehood now debunked by scientists and the Pentagon. Commie bashers hurled abuse and ridicule at the evhul totalitarian state for clamping down on freeberty, something we would never do in the West. Masks were depicted as a mark of subhuman Them versus superior Us, and we were assured that we would never see these symbols of Asian subjugation on the streets of Old Blighty.

Trump wasted precious time as Covid-19 seeded itself in the population leading to chaos and recriminations. Then on 13th March the president performed his reluctant U-turn and declared a national emergency, saying, "I don't accept responsibility at all." 

Cue blame game.

A week later on 20th March, the same day the UK went into lockdown and news emerged of US senators selling their stocks on the eve of the long-awaited crash finally triggered by the coronavirus Black Swan, the White House sent a cable to State Department officials, issuing "guidelines for how U.S. officials should answer questions on, or speak about, the coronavirus and the White House’s response in relation to China."

The Daily Beast reported that the cable's key talking points to be pressed home were that the Chinese government "... hid news of the virus from its own people for weeks, while suppressing information and punishing doctors and journalists who raised the alarm. The Party cared more about its reputation than its own people’s suffering."

However, Dr Zhang Jixian, the director of respiratory and critical care at Wuhan Hospital had raised the alarm on 27th December, informing the head of her hospital and the local health authorities that the "strange pneumonia" confounding the doctors was not the suspected return of SARS, but a "novel coronavirus". Far from being punished, she was rewarded and honoured for her diligence, an inconvenient fact ignored by Western press. 

The media preferred to turn the late opthalmologist Dr Li into a martyr as proof of a cover-up despite his WeChat message wrongly identifying SARS going "viral" in an email and threatening panicked flight of a possibly infected public after Dr Zhang had already reported her grim discovery. (EDIT: Dr Li's message was to a small WeChat group, a member of which shared it against his specific request.) The World Health Organisation, US CDC and press including Reuters knew of the novel coronavirus by 31st December. Dr Li wasn't arrested as claimed, but was heavy-handedly reprimanded by police on 3rd January — after work had begun on the virus and news was out — and told to sign a document pledging he wouldn't do it again. Tragically, he would become an early victim of the virus, catching it from a patient and dying on 7th February.

Americans would find suppression of critical medical information nearer home in Seattle where Dr Helen Chu found early Covid-19 cases from as far back as January 2020 — "It's just everywhere already"— but was told to shut up and stop testing. Or watch the CDC's director Robert Redfield finally testifying to Congressman Harley Rouda in March that they had been wrongly diagnosing Covid-19 deaths as flu.


However, he who smelt it must have dealt it. Politico got hold of "a detailed 57-page memo authored by a top Republican strategist advising GOP candidates to address the coronavirus crisis by aggressively attacking China", dated 17th April.

The memo includes advice on everything from how to tie Democratic candidates to the Chinese government to how to deal with accusations of racism. It stresses three main lines of assault: That China caused the virus “by covering it up,” that Democrats are “soft on China,” and that Republicans will “push for sanctions on China for its role in spreading this pandemic.”

The document urges candidates to stay relentlessly on message against the country when responding to any questions about the virus. When asked whether the spread of the coronavirus is Trump’s fault, candidates are advised to respond by pivoting to China. “Don’t defend Trump, other than the China Travel Ban — attack China,” the memo states.

Other smears doing the rounds in a tsunami of hate included linking Chinese to filth and pestilence  — very Goebbels — by claiming Chinese eating bats started the outbreak when the heat of cooking would have killed the virus, and bats are eaten in Micronesia, Indonesia, Texas and Louisiana ... but not generally in China. [EDIT: Some minorities in southern China near the border eat bats but the wildlife trade was banned in January following the coronavirus outbreak.] 

In a piece headlined "'Don't defend Trump, attack China': Republican memo reveals coronavirus campaign strategy" the Independent pointed out more talking points and how Republican senatorial candidates were instructed to use them:

... the GOP's messaging effort to attack China for the coronavirus pandemic and blame the country's communist government leadership for "covering it up, lying, and hoarding the world’s supply of medical equipment."
 
...encourages candidates to promote unverified theories that the coronavirus is "likely the result of an accidental release by a Chinese research facility," which China and the World Health Organisation (WHO), among other groups, deny.


Even in Britain, the BBC continues to twist reality by excluding all mention of anything positive done by the most populous nation on Earth, rendering their reports absurd and denying Britons access to the Covid-19 roadmap drawn by China through their trial by fire. In post-Brexit Britain, results of this month's trade negotiations with the declining US superpower have been largely kept quiet but UK media exclusion of positive news from China and hostile reporting as our death toll rises to over 42,600, have generally not improved.

What this means is that, in the absence of vital information learnt by the Chinese as the first to grapple with the pandemic, the nations that set up China as the antagonist have had to reinvent the wheel, squandering months during which the virus has spread, killed people and may be mutating into forms against which the vaccines currently being developed may not work. Six months after the outbreak, we have only just been told that masks do indeed cut the spread of the virus. Yet one Chinese scientist had informed us on Twitter around February that research done at home in Cambridge indicated that as much as 70 per cent of the virus could be stopped with masks. 


If only Trump and Boris Johnson had dropped their egos and learnt, as decidedly non-authoritarian New Zealand's Jacinda Ardern had done, that a lockdown was immediately necessary, we too might only be stamping out flare-ups instead of sinking under the weight of death and sickness. Most Britons and Americans aren't even aware that the lockdown serves a purpose beyond just keeping case numbers down. The virus needs human hosts to survive, and therefore quarantine lockdown starves the virus to extinction. In China, this was achieved within the 76 day lockdown. [Edit: The Covid-19 virus fell to zero in 43 days.]

Scientists are still trying to find out where the virus originated. Current research suggests that the Wuhan outbreak was the B-strain of a coronavirus originating in horseshoe bats that had possibly been circulating the world for years before mutating and erupting in Wuhan, the transport hub of America's upstart rival superpower, three years into a nasty trade war.

President Trump's administration knew about the pandemic threat in November, informing Israel and NATO — which means Britain knew in November and also failed to warn China. It closed down the pandemic team set up by Obama, cut the CDC office in Beijing to a third of its usual 47-team, slashed the funding for its Eco Health Alliance lookout in the Wuhan lab, and continues to trash-talk China. [EDIT: the Trump admin closed down the CDC's Beijing office completely by July 2019.] More to the point, the US couldn't even identify its own early cases, let alone develop a test that actually worked, or collaborate with China on any meaningful strategy for elimination of the virus. Injecting bleach doesn't count. Nor does gargling with anti-malaria tablets.

Some might categorise the US pirating Personal Protection Equipment (PPE) from other countries as "appalling conduct" while China was sending out PPE by the ton to Serbia, Iran, Italy, Cuba and a number of other countries, including a medical team dispatched to the UK which was ignored by most of the media. Confiscating PPE and ventilators from blue states and giving them to private outlets under control of your son-in-law and red states that voted for Trump is hardly pretty, either.

There are now 305,289 cases and 42,600 deaths in the UK; 2.32 million cases and 122,000 deaths in the US. Globally, nearly 9 million cases and 469,000 deaths.

But, yeah. Let's blame China.

EDIT 10th September 2020:

Confirmed: Trump admin knew of the Covid-19 dangers on 28th January 2020 but covered it up


We now know that Trump and his admin knew the dangers of Covid-19 from at least the 28th January 2020 when, according to the Washington Post, he was told at a top secret meeting:
“This will be the biggest national security threat you face in your presidency,” national security adviser Robert C. O’Brien told Trump ... “This is going to be the roughest thing you face.”

Matthew Pottinger, the deputy national security adviser, agreed. He told the president that after reaching contacts in China, it was evident that the world faced a health emergency on par with the flu pandemic of 1918, which killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide.

A reminder that Trump closed down the White House Pandemic Team and shut the US CDC's Beijing office, which was supposed to help China monitor new diseases, by July 2019. Despite being told about the deadly dangers of SARS-CoV-2 at least by the 28th January 2020, Trump ran a super-spreader policy, playing it down, calling it a hoax, stigmatising masks and holding massive unmasked rallies. PPE was pirated from both international supplies and red states at home. As soon as cases grew too numerous to ignore, the White House issued instructions on how to blame China, as reported by The Daily Beast and others.

EDIT 2 31st August 2021

CHINA BECOMES THE FIRST COUNTRY TO END A DELTA OUTBREAK making five times that China has zeroed Covid.

Sky News 24th August 2021:  "China records zero Delta cases in a world first. First country to prove they can crush the Delta outbreak after reporting zero locally acquired cases for the first time since July."




The Lancet: How China Managed COVID-19. Active case finding with case management: the key to tackling the COVID-19 pandemic

Sharp timeline observations by K J Noh: How to Yellow-Cake a Tragedy: the NY Times Spreads the Virus of Hatred, Again

The Gray Zone: How a Trump media dump mainstreamed Chinese lab coronavirus conspiracy theory

Peter Beinart in The Atlantic: Trump’s Break With China Has Deadly Consequences. After scuttling its partnership with Beijing on public health, the U.S. was unprepared for the pandemic.

Foreign Policy: China Deserves Some Credit for Its Handling of the Wuhan Pneumonia. "Within weeks of detection of the initial outbreak in December in Wuhan, China has already identified the novel coronavirus ... Beyond the credit Beijing should rightly take for acting relatively swiftly on this disease, the World Health Organization (WHO) has also played a key supporting role."

LA Times: Trump administration ended pandemic early-warning program to detect coronaviruses

CDC: While China took days to identify the novel coronavirus (27th December to 8th January 2020) the US's CDC took six months to identify H1N1 Swine Flu in 2009 which had likely been circulating in different forms for years. Why the aggressive response to China on Covid-19 when they did so much better and faster?

FAIR: No, China Didn’t ‘Stall’ Critical Covid Information at Outbreak’s Start

A Twitter thread by Anna Chen on Trump's Covid timeline from his covfefe tweet in 2017 to catching Covid-19 in late 2020. Original Twitter thread.

People's Covid Inquiry report summary 1st December 2021: Mike Mansfield chaired months-long inquiry into misconduct in public office. Why did so many thousands die unnecessarily?

PODCAST Media Roots Radio: Bannon, Tom Cotton, Bill Gertz & Anti-China Neocon Propaganda In the Wake of COVID19 (Part 1 of 2)


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Sunday, 3 February 2008

Movie watch: 55 Days At Peking


I suppose I should be breaking out the Mao Tai and celebrating in style as this glorious annus mirabilis of the Beijing Olympics is, so I'm told, my year.

And about time, too. After a lifetime of invisibility and stuck with a status somewhere between ninja manicurist and evil opium warlord, British Born and Anglo Chinese like me are set to be in yer face for the whole of 2008.

This means the TV schedulers, lazy and stoopid, falling over themselves to make the most of this ready-made theme, and dusting off the archives for repeat heaven. Yes, an hour after you've seen one, you'll be wanting another.

Already this week we've had the rarely aired Love Is A Many Splendoured Thing from the book by Han Suyin, and today, at nearly three hours but feeling like the entire eight weeks, 55 Days At Peking, a cold-war era jingoistic wet dream starring skullhead Charlton Heston, he of the "cold dead hand" and hero of the US gun lobby.

As there'll be lots of this rubbish coming thick and fast with no taste and discrimination exercised (oh, okay, lots of discrimination but not exactly the way I wished) you'll be needing a bit of orientation (har, har) around the subject.

Cometh the hour, cometh the blog - I guess that's me, then.

So ...

55 Days At Peking, directed by Nicholas Ray who should've known better and was sacked from the job for his pains. (And briefly seen in a cameo role as the wheelchair-bound American ambassador.)

Set in 1900, 55 Days purports to tell the story of the Boxer Rebellion, when indiginous Chinese made a last effort to get the rapacious foreign powers out of their own country. Eleven imperialist nations occupied major chunks of China with 13 out of 18 Chinese provinces under foreign control. The diplomats found themselves holed up in the Peking legation compound awaiting relief by their armies with nothing but Chuck Heston's US Major Lewis, David Niven's Sir Arthur Robertson, and Ava Gardner's Baroness Natasha Ivanoff (as the romantic interest) between them and the Yellow nightmare.

Now I know that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, but it is interesting to unpack the process by which a noble aim is turned into an evil act, and heroes made villains.

The only background you get to the rebellion is when the opening narration tells us that 100 million Chinese are hungry and that the famine is fanning the winds of discontent. Nothing else. Nothing about the British Opium Wars from 1839 when, as top dog in the imperialist pack, Britain transformed what had been an upper class vice in China into a nationwide calamity when they forced China to import cheap Bengal opium to offset the crippling balance of trade, with such august institutions as the Midlands Bank (now HSBC) and the East India Trade Company helping to bring China to its knees.

The perfectly fair statement by sinister wily Prince Tuan (Robert Helpmann) that, if the Chinese Boxer rebels destroy the foreign forces, it shows that China is no longer helpless; "It will be the beginning of freedom," is turned on its head.

This laudable objective is undermined by the constant reminder that these heathens, being subhuman and degenerate, have no right to the same treasured rights as you and me. OK, maybe not me, 'cause I'm a sinister wily oriental, but you get my drift.

So off we go on a trip showing us exactly how lowly and undeserving the antagonists are. We know that one of the themes of the film is what makes a person "whole" and what is incomplete; what is human and what is Other. To the injured Mancunian squaddie lying in the makeshift hospital, the prospect of losing his leg terrifies him as the worst thing in the world: "I don't want to live as half a man," he begs.

And here they are, surrounded and about to be swamped by such half-men.

To the Chinese of this world, life is not valued except in cash terms; a Chinese life is worth 20 dollars, while the tortured English priest is priced at 40 dollars. Interestingly, the priest is strapped crucifix-style to a water wheel by sinister wily Chinese Boxers (this is Christian values under assault by pagan scum, after all), and plunged into the water until he drowns. Not like waterboarding, then, as used by the CIA.

The sinister pitiless Dowager Empress Tzu Hsi, played by Flora Robson, orders two lots of unjust executions. General Yung Lo (Leo Genn) attempts to halt the first in his best British thesp accent, the execution of a Chinese Colonel who has tried to impose order on Prince Tuan's favoured Boxers. Despite his superior argument, having a somewhat rational western mind to go with his perfect diction, she insists the victim be executed for the petty "crime" of making them quarrel.

The second incident is a mass beheading of Boxers who have just carried out the killing of the German minister at the behest of fiendish Prince Tuan. They may be ours, but even our friends are expendible. The Dowager Empress tells Sir Arthur, "Chinese justice is swift and thorough." To which he replies, "Where's the guilt - those who wield the sword, or those who give the command?" because the British care about these things, and Sir Arthur, such a delicate civilised soul, is shocked despite being a military man. (Ask Craig Murray, former ambassador to Uzbekistan until he tried to put these principles into practice.)

Of course the Brits never carried out executions and massacres, did they? Amritsar is a whole 19 years in the future, and they ruled Empire with kid gloves. Yeah, right.

The Brits have much to teach: "China is learning new arts of peace from the West." And then watch how Sir Arthur's oily charm delivers a threat as a compliment. Having contemptuously kicked away the cushion on which he is expected to kneel in the Imperial court, he tells the Dowager Empress, "China's greatest virtue is her patience. ... If not, then the blood of millions will be shed."

He continues; "I have come here with the Truth." Being a heathen, she tells him, "We reject your truth," and orders them all to leave the country. Ooh, now we're not even occupying the same world of perception. We ain't in Kansas any more.

Meanwhile, as the Boxers are marauding, "killing every white man" and Chinese Christians in numbers that I am guessing would be dwarfed if Britain plunges the country into a major armed conflict, the westerners are humanised and made compassionate and worthy of compassion at every opportunity. Ye gods, how different these big-nose white devil invaders are. They care about the enemy as well as their own side, they introspect, they question themselves, they have God on their side.

Major Lewis urges his men to treat the Chinese as human; "Pay your money and don't expect any free samples."

In turn, Major Lewis is reprimanded by Sir Arthur for the death of the Boxer - who was about to shoot Lewis dead.

Fearful that her injured son - the little innocent Tommy - is somewhere in "An enormous, empty Chinese limbo," Lady Sarah Robertson crumples while her man grapples with the Big Questions; Whose ambitions is he serving? Who gains? How many children must die? Well may he ask. Sir Arthur's rather anodyne conclusion is, "The pain is not yours alone," and he is rewarded with the observation by his wife that "Only an honest man would ask such a question." These are, after all, the marks of the civilised man.

And these civilised men have no defences against the barbarism waiting outside the compound except for their books piled and squeezed into makeshift barricades.

"Don't go through there, Ma'am," the young soldier advises the Baroness just before he is cruelly cut down by a sniper. "There are Chinese on the other side." There are, actually, Chinese on both sides, but who's counting?

All the representatives of the foreign powers are thus depicted as human, rounded, full with an inner life. Even the bloody Japanese officer, Colonel Shiba, is played by a proper Japanese actor (the "delicious", according to some, Juzo Itami) who happens to be dashingly attractive unlike the wily sinister Chinese. Did the filmmakers not understand Japanese history in China? Good grief!

There are good Chinese, though, represented by the mixed race Teresa, a pretty eleven year old daughter of a US captain and a Chinese woman, now dead. Teresa has been deposited in a Chinese orphanage for the duration, where she seems to have no relation to her peers, but pines for her white daddy who has promised to take her back "home" to Illinois. She lives for his rare appearances in Peking but, unbeknown to her, Daddy is having second thoughts. He tells Major Lewis, "They'd treat her like a freak back home." Lewis agrees; she is "better off with her own kind, " even though she has no mother.

When Captain Marshall - her father - dies, Major Lewis is transformed from a soldier merely doing his job into the father of the spirit of the new post-imperial China as embodied by Teresa; the good, free, non-threatening Chinese spawned by our side (again, not me, but, you know ...). As the priest tells Lewis, "The only language a child understands - love. Every man is the father of every child."

Only two years before making this film, Heston was again transformed, this time in El Cid, from man into myth, when his cold dead corpse is strapped to his horse and sent flying through the enemy, scattering them and winning Spain from the swarthy heathen scum. Chuck's good at these roles.

So, there you have it. China as a pretty loveable malleable child in need of rescue by the paternal force of US imperialism. At the end, as Lewis is riding out of the city at the head of his troops, he bends down to Teresa: "Here, take my hand". And she rides off on the back of his horse - presumably into a future where she'll learn fast, trounce him at manufacturing, and poison his dogs and his kids with tainted pet-food, toothpaste and leaded toys. Heh, heh! And serves him right.

Don't ask me about the Ava Gardner/Baroness Natasha Ivanoff storyline with its diamond necklace MacGuffin thread that goes nowhere. The budding romance between her and the Major is strangely underdeveloped with more passion occurring between ol' granite-jaw and Sir Arthur, than with her. (Appropriate, though, as the British Foreign Office has always had the experience and the brutality to keep one of the biggest empires afloat and has played a leading backroom role in US adventures. Don't forget Britain's little lesson with the dodgy dossier and Niger uranium when the nature of the US/British relationship came to light.)

As soon as she admits to shagging a Chinese General you know she's doomed. And, indeed, she dies from a Boxer bullet while performing heroics and bringing opiates for the wounded and fruit for the children. How’s this for classic dialogue?

“I want the drugs and a wagonload of fruit for the children.”

Hmm, recreation and roughage - just my sort of heroine. Or heroin. Which is why it was an eleven year old girl on the back of the Major's horse and not the glamorous transgressive Baroness. The tabloids would have a field day - unpack that, Rebecca Wade!

On one level, 55 Days is just another siege movie. It could have been cowboys against Indians, or plantation owners versus African tribes. Here it's brave white soldiers versus the yellow hordes and their fiendish wave attacks representing the hostile Other.

On another, it's a 1963 Cold War epic set on dehumanising an ideological enemy in crude terms.

It boggles my fine mind to think that as recently as 1963, when this ponderous bit of colonialist propaganda was made, Hollywood was still putting western actors in yellow-face and epicanthic eyelids.

In the villains' corner, Flora Robson, who has one of the biggest schnozzles in cinematic history, is the cunning and sinister Dowager Empress, Chinese not being best known for noses the size of Beachy Head. Arch fiend Prince Tuan is played by the ballet maestro Robert Helpmann with an accent ... what the hell was that accent? A eunochoidal RADA twang via Widow Twanky.

However, the more human the character (read - sympathetic to the cause of the white westerners), the less their vowels were in an uproar. Hence, Leo Genn's General Yung Lo, who wants to curb the Boxers, is allowed to thesp away like a Saturday matinee in Leatherhead.

Finally, that opium.

The doctor struggles to look after the wounded with no alcohol, iodine or painkillers. They are "back in the dark ages".

The Doctor Han tells the Baroness, now working selflessly as his nurse, "We are in the land of opium and there are no opiates."

Perhaps he should have asked his dealer. I would have tried Sir Arthur, myself. He looks like a man who knows.

Channel 5 followed 55 Days with a Jackie Chan movie. This was not adequate compensation.

A big thank you to Babeuf for enduring this pomp-fest with me and who will have a thing or two to say about The King And I ...
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