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

The Brexit trigger that changed the world

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BBC: China, Britain and the Nunzilla conundrum

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Britain not on the “contain China” bus

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nope.

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

Made in China 2025

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

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

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

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

Britain and the China Golden Goose

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

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

And then … and then …!

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

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

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

Brexit wrecks it

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

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

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

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

Clown car reverses gear

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

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

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

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

Britain hangs on to benefits

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

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

Boris Johnson writing on China in the Telegraph, September 2005

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

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

Superman versus Kryptonite

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eurasia land mess

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

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

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

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

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

Europe, your nine lives are up

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

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

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

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

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

BRICS is now the largest trade bloc on the planet.

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

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

Attacking China Rebounds On America’s Little Helpers

Anna Chen – 13 December 2024, Trump on China

The Shanghai skyline at night

US Allies Learn A FAFO Lesson In Geopolitics

This article might contain chickens – and not just our leaders

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Karma’s Naughty Step Round-Up: Pacific Rimmers

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

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

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

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

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

Who’s Still Kissing The Ring?

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

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

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

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

When China Was Our Global Lifeboat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

China: scapegoat and diversion from what ails western capitalism

We all know the United States of America was built on an ancient Native American burial ground, courtesy of European immigrants. Another original sin was slavery; kidnapping men, women and children from Africa for the brute workforce that built so much of America's wealth.

Then there's the 1 per cent ripping off the American people for decades, failing to invest in infrastructure, education, housing, healthcare while the richest 26 individuals took as much as the bottom half of humanity.

And now the US teeters on the edge of the worst economic recession since 1929. The national debt increased to $22 trillion with Trump adding over $2 trillion so far and China's new wealth is expected to pick up the declining superpower's tab as a result of Trump's trade war shakedown.

The next recession will have no China in shock absorber mode as the world's growth engine the way there was in 2008. By allowing other nations to devalue their currencies next to the yuan while China took a massive hit, they helped float the global economy out of the bankers' crash. The next time we hit the buffers, China can't keep us out of trouble because someone sawed off the branch we're all sitting on.

How can it be that in three years the whims and caprice of one man has brought us to the brink of a major recession against which we have no more ammo? Trump and his billionaire friends have the reckless assurance of men with access to luxurious nuclear shelters as far away as New Zealand who assume they can flit off and leave us to face the mess they created if this goes to a hot war. They probably think the planet is overpopulated anyway, so what's a population cull to them? Having tried to short China and Europe into the ground, they'll buy up everything at firesale prices in the wreckage they've made of our human society.

A whole new Orwellian narrative has been shaped to justify the coming grand larceny: Trump's US and its supporters at home and abroad accusing their mark of exactly the same crimes and misdemeanours of which they themselves are guilty.

Manipulating the currency? China spent vast amounts of its reserves propping up the yuan even under assault from Trump's trade war and resulting negative market forces. Trump's real demand isn't that China should stop manipulation (which isn't happening) but that it should start manipulating its currency upwards in favour of the dollar.

Theft of intellectual property? Hawkish commentators conflate actual theft (against which there are laws) with the agreed exchange of assets between one side that had cash (Edit: and access to their huge 1.4 billion market, a fifth of humanity) and one that had know-how. The Art of the Deal, remember? Besides which, the tech ship has sailed.

China has caught up and now outpaces the previous pack leader. America's security forces aren't that worried about Huawei spying on them. That's America's own trademark schtick as we know from a blizzard of information: Edward Snowden whistleblowing on the NSA, US tech's own back doors (hello, Cisco) and that pesky bug that sat on Angela Merkel's personal mobile for ages. No, America is alarmed because Huawei's new technology has overtaken the US with unhackable quantum cryptography at the core of 5G, which means they will no longer be able to spy on their friends, enemies and their own people. (See Crypto AG)

Cruelty? That good ol' Yellow Peril trope always comes in handy. China may be heavy-handed in dealing with murderous terrorist attacks and trying to avoid its own 9/11 but so far it hasn't bombed a string of third countries leaving depleted uranium, land-mines and cluster bombs to continue their destruction.

A manic energy has gone into turning China into America's dark mirror, eclipsing and absolving the US of its Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo horrors in the public eye. Reading claims about three million Uyghurs supposedly being tortured to death by nazis, I'm reminded of New Labour's dodgy dossier insisting on the presence of Weapons of Mass Destruction, and Chalabi's role banging the wardrum for the Iraq War.

In 2002, the year following the 9/11 attacks, the United Nations Security Council declared an official terrorist threat in a region of Stans that's been named "East Turkistan" [EDIT that's territory within China]:

'The Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) is an organization which has used violence to further its aim of setting up an independent so-called “East Turkistan” within China. Since its establishment, ETIM has maintained close ties with the Taliban, Al-Qaida (QDe.004) and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (QDe.010). It was founded by Hasan Mahsum from Xinjiang, China, who was killed by Pakistani troops in October 2003. ETIM is currently led by Abdul Haq (QDi.268), who was also a member of Al-Qaida’s Shura Council as of 2005. ... In recent years, ETIM has set up bases outside China to train terrorists and has dispatched its members to China to plot and execute terrorist acts including bombing buses, cinemas, department stores, markets and hotels. ETIM has also undertaken assassinations and arson attacks and has carried out terrorist attacks against Chinese targets abroad. Among the violent acts committed by ETIM members were the blowing up of the warehouse of the Urumqi Train Station on 23 May 1998, the armed looting of 247,000 RMB Yuan in Urumqi on 4 February 1999, an explosion in Hetian City, Xinjiang, on 25 March 1999 and violent resistance against arrest in Xinhe County, Xinjiang, on 18 June 1999. These incidents resulted in the deaths of 140 people and injuries to 371.'

There have been many more since then.

Friendly advice on how to deal with jihadiism humanely and allowing Uyghur cultural integrity (the vast majority lead normal lives), should be welcomed, only not from the nation that's used two nuclear bombs on civilian populations, waged a vicious war in Indo-China, destroyed Iraq and Libya, and destabilised so much of the world while ripping off its own workers for decades. If peace could be achieved for Northern Ireland and South Africa, then maybe some sort of peace and reconciliation could be had here if Certain Parties stopped stirring it up.

Meanwhile, it's a year since Jamal Khashoggi was butchered in a Saudi consulate in Turkey but Trump rewards the regime behind the killing with more weapons, and now even plans to provide nuclear technology despite US bombs still killing citizens in Yemen.

At home, baby prisons, child death and disappearances; a president in thrall to the National Rifle Association (NRA) while mass shootings at schools and public places proliferate; deaths of African Americans by cops; a president expressing a raging tyrant's desire to maim, hurt, kill, destroy with dark age punishments such as snakes and alligators, flesh-piercing spikes and shooting migrants in the legs. Climate change, the environment, fossil fuels ...

Perhaps Trump is only clumsily trying to finish what Obama started with his pivot to Asia and setting up the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in 2014, since when the US has poured $29 million into Hong Kong. I'm curious to see how Britain and America will deal with street protests when similar eruptions occur at home.

The Hong Kong protesters had me at democracy. There's an unpleasant authoritarianism in Chinese society (and increasingly out in the open in Britain and the US) that should be challenged from below. That's healthy. But they lost me at "Democracy" when that word is used as a Stars 'n' Stripes and Union Jack-waving euphemism for bringing back the old colonial oppressors ... as if Trump and Boris Johnson are really defending the principle of free speech. How much actual democracy did Hong Kong Chinese enjoy under British rule?

It is hardly a class war for liberation when HK protesters, who are not prospering under this vestigial British imperial system, refuse to take on the property tycoons who manipulated some of the most expensive real estate in the world. For a potted history and illuminating overview, read this:

'British imperialism, in the 155 years it ruled Hong Kong, denied rights to millions of workers. There was no elected government, no right to a minimum wage, unions, decent housing or health care, and certainly no freedom of the press or freedom of speech. These basic democratic rights were not even on the books in colonial Hong Kong.

For the past 25 years, including this year, Hong Kong has been ranked No. 1 in the right-wing Heritage Foundation’s list of countries with the “greatest economic freedom”—​meaning the least restraints on capitalist profit taking. Hong Kong’s ranking is based on low taxes and light regulations, the strongest property rights and business freedom, and “openness to global commerce and vibrant entrepreneurial climate … no restrictions on foreign banks.” For this Hong Kong is the “freest society in the world.”

This “freedom” means the world’s highest rents and the greatest gap between the super-rich and the desperately poor and homeless. This is what Hong Kong youth face today. But the youth are consciously being misdirected to blame the city administration for the conditions Hong Kong is locked into under the “One Country, Two Systems agreement.”'

Like Trump and Brexit, the Hong Kong protest is a revolution from the right. Trump just threatened to mention Hong Kong, but do us a favour and investigate the Bidens. All of this happening now just as America is hitting the buffers and China's economy and 1.4 billion-strong market presents a juicy prize.

As the late Hugo Young told me when we were concerned that his newspaper, the Guardian among several others, was blaming the UK Chinese for starting the 2000 Foot and Mouth Disease outbreak (and for which Chinese Brits were vindicated) in a diversion for Tony Blair: "There are wheels within wheels." He had to tell the staff to knock it off around the same time that even more examples of anti-Asian bias emerged after a Readers' Editor's investigation.

As far as the bourgeois liberal commentariat goes ... now, him I miss.

Winston Churchill on the partition of China: "I believe in the ultimate partition of China—I mean ultimate. I hope we shall not have to do it in our day. The Aryan stock is bound to triumph."

New York Times Xinjiang papers "Absolutely no mercy" ... but for who? 

Happy New Year: Will Donald Trump's tiny hand press the Big Red Button in 2019?

It's fascinating (in a horror-show kind of way) to watch the United States of America write itself a new narrative. Not the one where it dominated the post-World War II liberal global order and made itself the wealthiest economy on the planet by a long chalk, but a victim narrative in which poor little America is bullied and ripped off by China, formerly one of the poorest countries in the world but which now happens to be looming in America's rear-view mirror.

For several years, we've been told by the experts that China is the exciting new economy in which the world's investors were parking their money, while the US was in decline with failing demographics and dim long-term prospects. With China's population of 1.4 billion, a growing middle class of over 500 million, 800 million raised out of poverty, an internet penetration rate of only 55 percent (against US 83 percent), and American companies making money hand over fist with a lot more to come, you can see how some might cast an enviable eye over such a fat, juicy market and think: I'll have that.

According to the China hawks' tortuous retrospective logic, goods bought cheap by middle- and low-income earners, allowing them to live beyond their means and consume to their hearts' content, was some sort of conspiracy draining the nation's precious essences. Trump sees the phoney deficit of $300-500bn as money owed to them, in the same way that a Mafia Don might eye some successful business and persuade himself (by an assortment of mental, moral and factual gymnastics) that this treasure somehow belongs to him. It always did. We were always at war with Eastasia. I hope all those poor cheated consumers descend on Walmart (whose fortune was founded on buying cheap Chinese goods made in often dreadful conditions) with decades of receipts in hand to demand their money back.

The unpalatable fact for Trump is that – taking into account in-country Chinese sales of US goods and services such as those of Starbucks, Apple, MacDonalds, Coke etc – the US has a $24bn SURPLUS with China. And as even Gary Cohn pointed out, the "deficit" represents $300bn of goods that Americans could buy cheaply and thereby feel richer than they actually were.

And how about all that US debt bought up by China after the 2008 crash which allowed US citizens to avoid the full brunt of the crisis and continue to buy stuff despite the US being broke? Having been punched in the face for their help, I doubt they'll do the same next time America's in trouble. Furthermore, some pundits are considering the possibility that Trump simply defaults on US debt. Don't forget that "Trump ran for office on his background as a captain of industry, touting his companies’ four bankruptcies as shrewd business maneuvers."

So far we've been fed ad infinitum the myth of forced technology transfer, accusations of spying, and claims that China is manipulating its currency downwards when it has actually been spending vast amounts of its reserves to prop up the yuan. And now we have everything but the kitchen sink thrown at China in order to whip up war fever and justify the unthinkable: war with a nuclear power. Casting itself as lily-white ingenue on the world stage, taken advantage of by Sinister Forners, this indulgence of paranoid wingnut Peter Navarro means conveniently forgetting American spychips – including one on Angela Merkel's phone – and all the spying that the west is so good at. We've all forgotten western pride in its espionage capabilities, from fictional James Bond to the actual School of the Americas. It's like Edward Snowden's revelations about the NSA's global surveillance have been wiped from the media's collective memory.

This is not, incidentally, to give China a free pass for its own abuses. Advances in gay and women's rights have been clawed back; trade union rights are a site of struggle; emulating America's cruel mistakes — from locking up its Japanese citizens following the Pearl Harbor attack to incarceration without end at Guantanamo — by shoving Uighurs into "re-education" camps is surely storing up trouble. But ... worse than Saudi Arabia? Deserving of being bombed back into the stone age? It wasn't China that nearly started World War III with a war on Iraq that killed 450,000 people or created the current humanitarian crisis in Yemen. All most Chinese want to do is drink Starbucks coffee and wear Nike trainers as part of a life that's lived decently. The new Chinese society saves pandas and tigers, campaigns against animal cruelty, condemns the racism of rogue Chinese business in Africa, and debates where they are headed as a nation. We are more alike than not.

The wealthiest nation on earth knows its decline has a variety of causes: under-investment; spending and not saving; the 1 percent and 0.1 percent creaming off the profits until, according to Wikipedia, "Currently, the richest 1% hold about 38% of all privately held wealth in the United States while the bottom 90% held 73.2% of all debt. According to The New York Times, the richest 1 percent in the United States now own more wealth than the bottom 90 percent." The political scapegoating of China for America's woes looks more and more like a diversion from who ate all the pies.

All of which brings me to my big prediction for 2019. I truly and sincerely hope events will prove me wrong. All signposts point towards a global calamity, but that doesn't mean that human ingenuity can't avoid it.

Now that General Mattis ("the last adult in the room") is leaving, Trump can remove the remaining troops from Syria and Afghanistan — notionally a good thing if you are anti-war (which I am). However, an abrupt and unplanned withdrawal without peace negotiations means, for instance, abandoning the Kurds, who fought valiantly to defeat Isis, to be slaughtered. But I don't believe that Trump's withdrawal is entirely without purpose.

Similar to Obama's pivot to China — when Barack took his military out of the Middle East and moved them to Asia, stockpiling missiles around the South China Sea aimed at the Middle Kingdom, and then acted surprised when they built defences — I think there's a chance that Trump will pile his forces into the South China Sea, engineer a conflict and get to use his big red button. Either that or some slip-up with North Korea putting Seoul at immediate risk. Or Iran. You just know he's itching to do it: "What's the point of having nuclear weapons if you're afraid to use them?"

His friends will all take to their nuclear bunkers in New Zealand, assuming that simply existing as a mobile meat sack in a post-nuclear apocalyptic world, even in material luxury perhaps, is preferable to preserving peace for the whole of the human race on this extraordinary planet. That's if their security squads haven't mutinied, slaughtered their masters and taken over the asylum.

Ho, ho, ho. A merry Christmas and a happy new year to all. Let's hope it's not our last.

What's Donald Trump's trade war with China REALLY about?

History repeats itself: Trump's fantasy trade-deficit is an excuse for carving up China

So the west is at it again, carving up the juicy market of 1.4 billion (EDIT 1.386bn in 2017) human beings that is China. I suspect most people have twigged by now that US President Donald Trump's trade war on the upcoming nation has little to do with the purported goods deficit of over $300bn. As Gary Cohn, former Goldman Sachs supremo and Trump's ousted top economic advisor (replaced by Fox News commentator Larry Kudlow), pointed out at the recent Bloomberg conference in Singapore, the sum does not, as claimed by Trump, represent a loss of money. It actually means over $300bn of goods that Americans were able to buy cheaply, as if you'd spent at Walmart or T K Maxx, or if you'd bought groceries from the supermarket. Having consumed the goods they sold you, you wouldn't then demand your money back with menaces. Presumably.

I’d been hoping for the press to fact-check the issue of Trump’s trade war on China, which threatens to tip parts of the world (including America) into recession. I am disappointed to see the figures of $376bn and $500bn US trade deficit with China regurgitated in the British and American media with few corrections, or any attempts to cut through the hawks’ spin.

The figures of a $376bn and $500bn trade deficit for the US excludes in-country sales and services in China by enormously lucrative US companies such as Apple, Starbucks, Coca Cola and McDonalds, which generate vast profits out east. When that’s taken into account, the actual trade balance is more like a $24bn surplus for the US, but this fact doesn't serve the narrative and therefore gets left out, thanks to laziness or connivance in the press.

These elevated figures are further distorted by the fact that China is still mainly a base for assembly of goods which the nation is hoping to leave far behind in favour of high-end tech. So, for example, a thousand-buck iPhone X costs around $500 to make, out of which the high-end components are made elsewhere (Taiwan and South Korea), while China's costs amount to about 10 per cent, or around $47. And yet the entire wholesale cost of $500 is counted in the purported deficit with China — a ten-fold distortion.

The richer country should always have the surplus, as they can afford to buy the goods in the first place. Americans do not save. Chinese do.

Trump’s tax cuts have pushed their overall deficit to well over a trillion and rising. This will bite them on the bum, but we can guess who’ll be blamed.

Far from manipulating the yuan down, which even smart critics such as John Oliver repeat ad infinitum, China used large amounts of its reserves propping it up. Under Trump’s attacks, the yuan is buckling and if China does what the US wants they could easily burn through all of their cash. There’s both irony and cynicism in the fact that the very measures that Trump is taking will, according to HSBC and others, weaken the yuan against the dollar. Not to mention that the dollar is powering up against a whole basket of currencies, not just China. However, Trump likes to have his beautiful chocolate cake and eat it ... greedy boy! He was disappointed to be told on entry to the White House that, no, he wasn't allowed to print money; manipulation of the currency not being a point of principle for our orange overlord, just a means to an advantage. Besides, what does Trump think Quantitive Easing is if not wholesale manipulation which saved America and others from the 2008 financial meltdown?

China has raised about 800 million of its people out of poverty by making our stuff in cruel, unhealthy conditions in suicide factories such as the Taiwan-owned Foxconn, for low wages. This has facilitated higher living standards for western consumers, and huge profits for American companies. During the bankers’ crash of 2008, China picked up the debt slack and allowed Americans to live beyond their means. Now that western capitalism is in decline and facing crisis, China is being politically scapegoated. This is not only unfair on a nation only recently getting up off its knees after nearly two centuries of western abuses, it also muddies the waters so the global economy can’t advance. The IMF's Christine Lagarde noted earlier this year that the global economy was in sync, floating itself out of the economic devastation of the 2008 crash together. After Trump's trade tariffs, not so much.

There’s plenty for China to negotiate. Although it was the US that persuaded China to join the World Trade Organisation and abide by the rules made by the US, perhaps they are at a point where they do need to shift on some points as they are no longer an ingenue economy. Indeed, China is already moving on intellectual property issues and gradually opening up its markets to foreign investment. We thought everyone had seen sense in May when the meetings between Steve Mnuchin and China’s Liu He produced an agreement. However, under the influence of arch China hawks John Bolton and Peter Navarro (a vicious wingnut on China despite no expertise who is overreaching badly), Trump capriciously changed his mind and now we may be staring something much worse in the face if he doesn’t get his “utter capitulation”.

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, as per the new clause in the rejigged NAFTA deal between the US, Canada and Mexico. What was that about Brexit "taking back control"? So we’d be totally dependent on an irrational, brutish regime, eating their chlorinated chicken and Monsanto death seed produce. Wilbur Ross has already advised US business to take full advantage of a vulnerable post-Brexit Britain, calling our hour of need "a God-given opportunity".

Right now, it looks like America has given itself a heavenly mandate to go stomping the world's economies into dust because it is unable and unwilling to sort out its own problems of underinvestment, changing demographics and basic flaws in the ageing capitalism that served it so well in the past.

A closer look at those accusations of IP theft: Why US accusations of IP theft by China don’t add up
'In 2005, when the US government was pressing China to allow the renminbi to appreciate, Phillip Swagel, a former member of president George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, wrote: “If China’s currency is undervalued by 27 per cent, as some have claimed, US consumers have been getting a 27 per cent discount on everything made in China, while the Chinese have been paying 27 per cent too much for Treasury bonds.”' Donald Trump misread the US-China trade relationship.
History repeats itself: The Steampunk Opium Wars
China-bashing exercises by the establishment: The Opium War by Julia Lovell, and two from Niall Ferguson: The Triumph and Turmoil of Niall Ferguson's obsession with China and Working for the Clampdown: Niall Ferguson's testosterone theory of history
FT: How China's role as "shock absorber" and world's growth engine helped pull the global economy out of America's 2008 crash. China bought a ton of US debt, allowed global currencies to devalue against the yuan, taking a huge hit themselves, stimulated domestic consumption and started the longest ever bull run in American markets.
(Delighted to have written this piece without recourse to the cliché of the Thucydides Trap ... D'oh!)