High anxiety from Hollywood’s first Chinese superstar to China

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

Anna May Wong and China facing the same western fears

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

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

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

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

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

Green Hornet Syndrome

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

Be a sidekick or die.

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

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

And that’s across the political spectrum.

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

Colonialism rules

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

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

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

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

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

Mandelbrot Set’s repeating China patterns

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

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

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

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

The West’s Heart of Darkness

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

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

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

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

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

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

As above, so below.

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

Anna May Wong Must Die!

By Anna Chen, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill and the Curse of Erysichthon

Anna Chen – First published 5 July 2025, Big Beautiful Bill

Capitalism eats itself: Erysichthon of Thessaly, cursed with an insatiable hunger by Demeter, goddess of the fertility of the earth. Trump’s Big Beautiful bill

Big Beautiful Bill burns the Earth to pay the rich

Not only does Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill turn his Blackshirt boot-boy ICE forces into his own army, bigger than the FBI, DEA, US Bureau of Prisons put together (as AOC points out), it takes money from vital climate change policies to give to his already bloated elite backers.

Trump’s promised huge tax cuts for the rich will be directly paid for by cutting tax incentives for renewable energy designed to save the planet. You’d think he’d baulk at ending climate change measures that created jobs in red states like Texas, but, no. Along with cuts to medicaid, MAGA are being hit by a triple-whammy from their hero.

A walking casebook of Greek tragedy character flaws, Trump sports inverse parallels with a raft of mythological and folk characters. One that often springs to mind is a composite Robin Hood and King Midas: robbing the poor to pay the rich and everything he touches turns to sh*t.

The curse of Erysichthon

Why do they do it? Loved One tells me of 700-800 US billionaires, 33 are estimated to make over a $billion a year. Millions suffer to enrich a tiny band for whom being the richest on the planet will never be enough.

Investigative reporter Greg Palast once related a conversation with a vulture capitalist and one-time Trump backer (worth: $6.1 billion). Asked why he bilked a petrol pump attendant when he was already so rich, he replied, “I want it all”.

That, dear reader, sums up the mindset of what we’re dealing with. I want it all.

The elite’s elite are stricken with a relentless hunger that can never be satisfied.

The most apt classical analogy in this instance is probably King Erysichthon of Thessaly. Demeter, goddess of the fertility of the earth, cursed him for being destructive and greedy. Disrespecting the gods by cutting down a sacred grove to build a feasting hall was surely gagging for a fitting punishment. She invoked Limos, the spirit of insatiable appetite, until he consumed everything he had and ended up devouring himself. Unfortunately, it’s us they’re feeding on.

Reverse Robin Hood in Britain

Similarly in Britain, PM Keir Starmer and Chancellor Rachel Reeves operate from the Monsters Handbook. They relentlessly take money from the poorest and most vulnerable whom capitalism had left behind and shovel it into the defence industry, whose stock is rocketing. Coincidentally, £5 billion a year “saved” in social funding cuts is the same amount given to Ukraine. No mandate, no discussion.

Starmer refuses to fund his pet projects and proxy wars by taxing the billionaires whose wealth has soared since Covid.

He won’t touch Amazon, which notoriously pays no tax in the UK despite the country making him £27 billion a year. Jeff Bezos is worth $220 billion, and makes $8.99 billion per month, $31 million per day, $8 million per hour, $3,715 per second. He can rub our faces in it by spending 34 million dollars or pounds or whatever fantasy profligacy it takes for a three-day wedding jamboree in Venice like the last days of the Roman Empire while the world burns.

Gloves are off. This is naked Class War.

See also The Trump Heist: the fall of the American Empire

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

Whoever owns language rules the world: Marx vs postmodernism

Anna Chen – Originally published 1 July 2025, language and postmodernism in the Culture Wars

A Clockwork Orange

How politics twists language and shapes reality

Ever feel you’re living through the Act 1 climax of a science fiction movie? The fork in the road where humanity’s future gets rerouted? Will enough of us clock the Morlocks herding us into cattle pens in time to avoid the disaster mapped out before us? Or will we trudge on, mooing and bleating as surplus labour (that’s us!) culled in wars and poverty?

How we sophisticated westerners have been so thoroughly duped by a class that, to put it mildly, doesn’t have our best interests at heart is perplexing. How is the fourth estate, the media which hold up the Executive’s objectives instead of holding it to account, able to regurgitate the state’s script with such a straight face? And could they be connected?

As late-stage capitalism breaks down, it increasingly deforms language, the collective tool vital for humans to function as a society. We see this every day, in every news report, in every mainstream analysis. The more capitalism collapses, the more outrageously obvious is the elite state power’s hijacking of meaning in order to protect itself. Mass manipulation of cognition is only going to get worse with Artificial Intelligence. So let’s take stock of where we are.

Constructing reality in language

It wasn’t only Joseph Goebbels who, leading up to World War II, latched onto the importance of social engineering through propaganda. He infamously said that the big lie becomes the truth with repetition, something we see permeating the media today.

The Madison Avenue-based advertising industry advanced Goebbels’s praxis in America’s vibrantly expanding economy. This major pillar of post-war capitalism used an army of psychologists to hypnotise a nation of consumers into a highly profitable system of fear and desire. It sold war every bit as effectively as it sold washing machines.

Postmodernism took it even further, philosophically codifying a declining capitalism’s need to change the way we see reality. Empire intellectuals led the charge against 400 years of science and evidence-based Enlightenment and argued that reality is constructed in language. Centuries of challenging faith, belief, and “feeling it in my bones” through observable phenomena was under attack. Their rejection of Marxism made them essential allies in maintaining the power status quo.

Capitalism will eat itself

The philosopher Karl Marx had investigated the capitalist system within which we exist, in the spirit of the Enlightenment. He applied scientific method to make visible the invisible mechanisms of capitalism in Das Kapital and other writings. In demystifying the process, he came up with the tools to enable us to look under the hood and strip it down, to see how it worked.

The beneficiaries of the system had always presented it as productive; a perennially benign dynamo benefiting humankind forever. However, Marx concluded, it divided into two contending classes: the proletariat whose labour produced wealth, and the bourgeoisie who owned the means of production and fed off the workers, always paying them less than their labour was worth. This surplus value was their profit. And the profit motive lay at the core of everything they held dear, if not inordinately expensive.

Unfortunately, this process ran in ever-diminishing cycles until the system would inevitably run out of juice. So, not only was capitalism built on the expansionist ravages of imperialism, it featured an inbuilt entropy that would prove predatory and destructive as it struggled to maintain itself. “Capitalism contains its own grave digger.”

Marx’s theory had gained traction in the post-war liberal order of the American Age. And not only in openly socialist systems with communist aims. It provided an alternative for emerging third world nations which were being plundered by the west, and for the exploited proletariat whose surplus labour was extracted by the bourgeoisie in the form of profits. At the peak of the cycle, Empire might be staring over a cliff and losing its hegemony.

The CIA romance with postmodernism

Out of the depths of the Cold War sprang an intellectual saviour of the state wielding the Sword of Words and the Shield of Language Games. The father of postmodernism, Jean Francois Lyotard, argued in his 1979 book, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, that meta-narratives such as truth, science and philosophy (like Marxism) fragment into smaller and smaller narratives until they are effectively rendered meaningless.

Unsurprisingly, as French intellectuals* rolled over and defected to the state, the state’s core defenders, the CIA, fell in love with postmodernism.

What the raw power of the state needed was a war on the entire fact and science-based Enlightenment.* Postmodernism gave birth to a battalion of nerds drilling down relentlessly arguing why black is, in fact, white. With French philosophers in the driving seat of the Culture Wars (such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes) and American literati in the rear describing the process, postmodernists took Swiss structuralist Ferdinand de Saussure’s semiotic division of the basic unit of language — the Sign — and smashed up meaning.

As if splitting the atom into its component parts, they stripped signifier (representation) from signified (concept), words from meaning, and shattered coherence until a Babelesque confusion of tongues beckoned.

The reins of perception: heaven, hell and hyperreality

Jean Baudrillard privileged the signifier and created “hyperreality,” where whoever has the means of production can grasp the reins of perception. Hyperreality fed into the CIA’s mind control interests, blurring the lines between reality and simulation. It placed paranoia on the same level as concrete phenomena, as we can see in the construction of political narratives today. Any opinion once expressed is given equal weight to provable fact-based reality.

So, the chief of The Better Cotton Initiative who is also head of Supima, the marketing arm of the American cotton industry, can allege forced labour of Uyghurs in Xinjiang on no evidence and the media will report it as true. Likewise, data abuser and Right-wing Christian zealot Adrian Zenz can claim a million Uyghurs in Xinjiang prisons, extrapolated from eight interviews, and the BBC will publish it as the sole truth. (See Jaq James’s scholarly analysis.)

There is, however, a concrete reality to contend with. As much as they might deny it, objective truth still exists. As someone said, if you threw Lyotard into the sea, he’d still get wet. By keeping an eye on the contradictions as they emerge, you test and challenge the enormous mind-fuck being perpetrated against the human race as the predator tries to disguise itself.

Late-stage capitalism: Morlocks herd Eloi into cattle pens. (The Time Machine, 1960)

Hiding crisis and chaos

Few can miss that we find ourselves firmly entrenched in the “Capitalism will eat itself” stage of the game. Little works for the people. That which does is swiftly cannibalised for the benefit of the top elite.

Elon Musk’s DOGE escapades in the US are a crude example. Pauperising workers by sacking them while Trump’s billionaire backers like Charles Schwab make even more billions overnight from his tariff mayhem, illustrates the process perfectly. Britain gifting billions to the defence industry via the West’s proxy war in Ukraine and Nato, while slashing support for the weakest that capitalism left behind, is another case in point. It’s growing difficult to move without tripping over more examples as the decaying West goes belly up.

The establishment creates crisis and chows down on the resulting chaos in ever more violent waves. Meanwhile, its tame media perpetuate invisibility of the workings of the system by distraction, outright lies and a subtle Orwellian distortion of language. There are so many examples of language games flooding the zone in service to the ruling monsters. Where to start?

Satan’s little helpers

The liberal media, such as the Guardian and BBC, are among the worst exponents, as they have a ton of enlightenment to undo.

After WWII, Europeans and Americans were the best educated and informed populations in the world. They had mass access to an Alexandrian Library worth of books, information, philosophy, arts and humanities. For every savage manifestation of the feral state, there was an opposite, if not equal, eruption of freedom and liberty (when those terms meant what they said), harking back to the French Revolution and ancient Athens.

How do you unravel all that and get the population on track? It would take a humungous ideological pivot to sell willing blindness to the plebs. (The far Right doesn’t have the workload as they’re all on board the bus to hell anyway. They never had to dress up poison as Kool Aid the way our faux progressives had to do.)

Language games in action: repetition of a lie becomes the truth

Most of us, by now, have noticed how “Rules Based Order” replaced “International Law” in the post-war discourse, hammered away by Obama around the time of his Pivot to Asia. International Law is thrashed out over time by reasoned argument, the other imposed by raw power.

Similarly, Taiwan “independence” actually means dependence on the hegemon.

Just as “Mother” is turned into a dirty word in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, so “woke” becomes a trigger for hate. Although when you ask why being aware instead of asleep is so bad, no-one can offer an adequate explanation.

“Aggression” is an abused term repeatedly applied to the country defending itself from Empire predations and never to the one with a fondness and track record for aggro. For example, “aggression,” as used with abandon beyond satire in Israel’s claims that Iran attacked them last year, even though the strikes were a response to Israel attacking first when it bombed the Iranian consulate in Damascus in April.

China defensively beefs up its military while the US spends more on the Military Industrial Complex than the next nine countries together, while pouring arms into Taiwan, interfering with elections and surrounding China with bases. Yet China’s sensible response is depicted as aggression: instigation rather than effect following cause. The crucial context of America waging non-stop wars, in contrast with China not having any in 40 years, is wiped.

The word “unprovoked” peppers press reports whenever an attacked country responds. Whether you condemn or support Russia’s military incursion into Ukraine in 2022, the conflict has roots in 2013 and was far from “unprovoked”. It did not start on 24 February, information that should be public for any discourse to be meaning-full.

Democratically elected President Yanukovytch rejected the IMF and VP Biden’s insistence that he smash open the economy and liberalise, slashing budgets and energy subsidies along the way. His subsequent turn towards Russia for economic support saw America continue to renege on Jim Baker’s 1998 promise, “Not an inch eastwards,” and advance nuclear Nato up to Russia’s borders, engineering the 2014 Maidan coup. “F*ck the EU,” said Victoria Nuland to the US ambassador in Ukraine. And they did. The western media, which had been reporting fairly accurately, turned on a dime and excised these foundational events from their accounts.

Liberal institutions not so liberal

Perhaps the most egregious example of institutional truth-twisting is how western media, such as the BBC, misreport Israel’s attack on the Gaza strip.

The liberal media continue to bland out mass murder and starvation, flattened cities and a whole raft of sadistic actions in a collective punishment over nearly two years since 7 October 2023. The 70-year Naqba is written out of accounts. Despite a 34 to 1 kill ratio, one side is humanised, the other dehumanised. Crime is benign and resistance is aggression. The word “genocide” is verboten even when used by victims of the Holocaust to describe what’s being done to Gaza’s civilian population. (See BBC on Gaza-Israel: one story, double standards report by the Centre For Media Monitoring.)

George Orwell at least gave us the tools to interrogate the twisted language of dictators: War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength. Britain appeared to use his dystopian novel 1984 (written in 1948) as a manual rather than a warning, renaming the Ministry of War as the Ministry of Defence in 1964.

Today, four decades after the setting of 1984, AI is hard at work: OpenAI, Oracle, Palantir, Cambridge Analytica, Microsoft, Carbyne, Black Cube and Pegasus are some of the outfits connected with Israel and its interests, and which control our social media. This is what our most liberal institutions have helped usher in. And this is what will shape our perception as we are herded into cattle-pens or over a cliff.

* Note: Some French intellectuals were critical, such as Alain Touraine. The “sanitized” document below, released in 2017 under Freedom of Information legislation, is no longer available. Howzat?!

* EDIT 9 July 2025 to clarify: What the raw power of the state needed was a war on the entire fact and science-based Enlightenment.

Open Culture: The CIA Assesses the Power of French Post-Modern Philosophers: Read a Newly Declassified CIA Report from 1985

Further reading on the Culture Wars

Sergei Eisenstein Collection review: film theory essay by Anna Chen, published 1998

The Triumph and Turmoil of Niall Ferguson: Western academia resets the global order, 10 March 2011

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

Neil Hornick, Phantom Captain of the counter-culture, dies at 85

RIP Neil Hornick, legendary writer, performer and theatre director

First published 21 April 2025

Neil Hornick, a pioneer of 1960s counter-culture and alternative theatre, left the stage at the weekend aged 85.

Like many others, I met him through his script company, Reading and Righting, and found myself ushered on board the good ship Neil. True to his counter-culture roots, he was old-school generous, creative and always on the look-out for non-conforming artistry.

It was no surprise he’d take me to do street theatre (my first and only) at Jim Whiting’s Bimbotown in Leipzig in the 1990s (another legendary, counter-culture figure, Jim made Herbie Hancock’s mechanical dolls in the Rockit video.) You couldn’t wish for a whackier, more delightful experience.

Neil was sensitive, super-smart and witty. His many creative outings since founding the Phantom Captain theatre company in 1970 – including The Serviette Union, hardy har! – fed an army of creatives, sparking their imagination and allowing them an expression.

The Steampunk Opium Wars: art as subversion

In 2011 (premiered 2012) I was commissioned to create an event, and help curate, for the Royal National Maritime Museum to mark the opening of their Traders Gallery, which included the tiniest acknowledgment of the East India Company’s opium trading — less trading and more inflicted on China at the barrel of a Royal Navy gun. Britain was two years into its “Golden Age” of trading with China after Prime Minister David Cameron’s Beijing initiative, and it might have been considered churlish not to mention this considerable part of their history in the Greenwich home of the Royal Navy.

The Opium Wars were not on the school history syllabus. So I decided to give it to the narrative vacuum thus far with both barrels in The Steampunk Opium Wars.

I devised a musical extravaganza with a small but perfect cast. I was the Narrator. Writer and guitarist Charles Shaar Murray was joined by bassist Marc Jefferies. The characters Lord Palmerston (John Crow Constable), Sir Jardine Matheson (a composite narco-capitalist played by Paul Anderson) and Queen Victoria (Louise Whittle) presented the British imperialist case. William Cobstone (a composite anti-opium wars campaigner played by John Paul O’Neill) and Commissioner Lin Zexu (Hugo Trebells) argued against, while Captain Ironside would be our eye-witness to the horror of the destruction and massacre on Chinese soil by the rapacious British Empire.

And who better to play Captain Ironside than the Phantom Captain himself: Neil Hornick.

VIDEO YouTube: Neil Hornick’s speech as Captain Ironside in The Steampunk Opium Wars, 2012

Farewell to the innovators and seers

Before the show we handed out foil wraps of opium from dinky bourgie East India Company bags — actually lumps of sticky Soreen bread I’d lovingly rolled over two nights (not on my thighs, I’ll hasten to add, for we are subverting the stereotypes, not enhancing them). Neil did this wonderfully well, enchanting the audience with his English charm as he handed out poison from a pretty bag — much like Empire but with less GBH.

Afterwards, Neil/Captain Ironside ushered audiences into a side-room where actor and former Cock Sparrer guitarist and singer Gary Lammin presented the Hackney Tea Ceremony, satirising the fragrant western tourist version of the ritual with an electric kettle and heavily sugared mugs of PG Tips, all in front of a Union Jack. Mindful of his current band, The Bermondsey Joyriders, Gary subverted the subversion by renaming his activity the Bermondsey Tea Ceremony: Norf and Sarf London battling it out in a microcosm of East and West.

One of Neil’s enviable adventures was his performance at the British pavilion at Shanghai Expo in 2010. I really wished he could have got me on that gig, a longing only eased five years later when I visited China under my own steam as a speaker at the Bookworm Festival in 2015.

He will be much missed as the dwindling number of innovators and seers pass over the edge and leave us in the final waves of what had been a tremendous tsunami breaking on the shore. It is a tragedy that later generations will have no experience of these figures.

Neil died soon after his book, The Magic Eye: the cinema of Stanley Kubrick, was finally published after decades of legal threats and blocks by the temperamental director who demanded less of the critique. Neil’s integrity was not for sale.

He leaves a wife, daughter and son: Savka, Maya and Kelsang Wangdak.

Listen to Neil’s interview with Unfinished Histories.

Neil Hornick as Captain Ironside hands out opium wraps in silver foil from an East India Company bag at The Steampunk Opium Wars premiere, Royal National Maritime Museum, 2012. (Actually squished cake.)

VIDEO YouTube: Neil Hornick as Captain Ironside in a post-show discussion at The Steampunk Opium Wars premiere at the Royal National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, 16 February 2012.

Anna Chen and Neil Hornick in Phantom Captain mode at Jim Whiting's Bimbotown, Leipzig 1990s (The bed travels across the floor!)

Dreamlike: Anna Chen, Jim Whiting and Neil Hornick on a bucking mechanical sofa at Bimbotown, Leipzig, 1990s

Neil Hornick and Susan Croft at the Restaging Revolutions exhibition in Lambeth & Camden 1968-1988. Pic: Anna Chen

The Trump Heist: the fall of the American Empire

Trump Mk II: the sequel. This time everybody gets whacked

First published at Anna’s Substack 4 April 2025

My mother taught me how boom and bust works using stick-figure drawings before I even started school. She drew a TV factory scenario in a series of pictures showing what happens when too many sets are manufactured with no-one to earning enough to buy them. If the workers are on low wages, they can’t afford to purchase what they make. If they are paid high wages, the TVs cost too much for everyone else to buy.

Which means at four years old I knew more about markets than Donald Trump does with his entire army of economic advisers pretending that you can bring back manufacturing jobs like the past five decades never happened.

You may think the Don is a good-hearted idiot whose ultimate objective is to save the US economy and is merely making the wrong calls. But his tariffs “liberation day,” following on the heels of DOGE destruction at home, evokes a raging geriatric punch-drunk well past his mobster prime, in the pub at closing time, terrorising the cowering clientele. “C’mon fight with me. One hand tied behind me back with tissue paper and me boys tooled up over there.”

If, like me, you believe his objective is far from benign and what he and his cohort want to do is make as much money for themselves and screw everyone else, then this is no foolish accident. He’s trying to get right what he wasn’t able to see through in his first term. The Covid Black Swan event crashed the markets just after his mates sold at the top of the Trump Pump in February 2020, allowing them to reload at the bottom. Fortunes were made, doubled and tripled.

February: The US is officially in recession, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, having expanded since June 2009 after China floated the global economy out of America’s Great Crash, 2008. … 13 February 2020: US politicians dump their stocks a week before the Covid market crash “Black Swan” event.

Maybe he wants to repeat the magic. Maybe he’s got the taste for extortion with menaces. A grand heist, fortune favouring the brilliant criminal mind and all that and here’s the Joker back in the White House with all his little friends.

America’s Wile E Coyote moment

In this latest round of feckry — Trump Mk II: the sequel – this time everybody gets whacked — his gang raced straight off the starting blocks, moving fast and breaking everything in sight.

Now it’s the turn of the economy to enter the crosshairs of the dreaded trade war trashing. Again.

In 2018 I wrote a piece pointing out the erroneous claims about huge deficits (looks bigger in tiny hands) by Trump and Democrats alike in their aim to carve-up a rising China: What’s Trump’s trade war REALLY about?

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, 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.

Even back then, the US deficit didn’t include fortunes made by US corporations in-country sales and services to China which was estimated at $24 billion in 2018. The US runs a services surplus of around $20 billion. Plus US corporations make around $40 billion in profit. Which brings the goods deficit down from $279 (in 2023) by a good chunk to a total deficit of $219 billion. But the facts don’t support his sophisticated “Look what they done to me, waa!” thesis.

They were all at it. Schumer accused China of manipulating currency down when they’d spent vast amounts of their reserves propping up the yuan. And that was according to the West’s US financial press like Bloomberg and the FT.

Liberation day for who?

MAGA supporters hail his latest moves as “genius”: pushing money out of the stock market and into Treasuries to force Powell’s hand at the FED and make him cut interests rates under threat of a recession or worse. That means 401K pensions and other institutional investments up in smoke.

Forcing companies to build factories in the US, having already gone to the expense of setting up new operations in the likes of Vietnam and Cambodia to keep prices down for American consumers – see above what my mummy taught me. Costly, capricious and unaffordable.

Can’t keep egg prices down? Pauperise farmers by forcing them to sell at home at lower prices in a screaming economy. Farmers are already suffering losses of soybean and rice sales to China. Why not go the whole hog? Not that anyone’s bringing home the bacon any more.

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The adventures of a Chinese Brit growing up in post-war liberal Britain

Anna Chen, UK’s first Chinese punk. Catsuit made for her by Vivienne Westwood. 
Pic Bob Carlos Clarke

Anna Chen launches her Substack account

Originally published at Anna’s Substack 25 March 25

“Charming, witty and sophisticated. ” – SUNDAY TIMES

“… extraordinary … independence and spirit. A very distinct voice, very funny …” – Jean Seaton, Director, ORWELL PRIZE

“Assured, funny, angry, exhilarating … A triumph.” – Alan Moore

Sui generis

Okay. In brief, here’s a bit about me before I throw myself into the world of Substack for your amusement and delectation.

I am the UK’s first Chinese punk, the first Chinese Brit to take a show to the world-famous Edinburgh Fringe Festival, a published poet at 14, Orwell Prize shortlisted and longlisted, a TED speaker, a BBC writer and presenter of groundbreaking programmes back when there was an inch of space to do such things, a dissenting journalist (formerly Guardian, New Internationalist, Asia Times), critical thinker and political analyst.And, yes, contrary to the template, I am capable of original thought.

I was born and raised in Hackney, east London, the child of a Chinese father and an English mother. Growing up in the heart of two major civilisations at a historic crossroads, it was hardly surprising that I would end up as a cultural outrider.

Born into the belly of the imperial beast, it was difficult to miss how no Chinese were positively reflected in the culture. Realising young it was only supposed to be vampires, not humans, who cast no reflection, I kicked up.

My disquiet went far beyond the ghetto of identity politics, the safe zone into which minorities are usually shovelled. I grew to recognise this erasure as a manifestation of a larger class conflict that required women and labour, as well as empire minorities, to submit to a grinding world order. I may have found myself on the immediate frontline of sinophobia but it was one battlefield in a wider class war.

One of my objectives — to demystify and humanise the Chinese as a counterweight to the Yellow Peril stereotypes embedded in western culture – was never an effort to empower the bourgeoisie of one ethnic group to which I happened to belong. It was a matter of survival and solidarity with everyone else who fell on the wrong side of the divide.

It was also good training in discerning truth from illusion.

The pressure was always to be submissive and why should I submit? I was sensitive but I wasn’t a delicate lotus blossom. I didn’t giggle. I didn’t have a bell-like, tinkling laugh, more a throaty guffaw like Fenella Fielding had just been told a rude joke. I was never tiny and doll-like. My glutes were built for running 100 metre hurdles and I was likely to squish you if I landed on you.

I won my chess matches, I argued my case. A classic autodidact, I was into dinosaurs, astronomy and science. I read The Little Red Book by six. By twelve, I could tear a telephone directory in half. (Technique, baybee!) I’ve survived being mauled by a puma and swum with sharks (the fishy kind). I was never going to defer to pasty-faced Masters of the Universe.

So …

Undeterred by the absence of role models and fed up with deeply embedded stereotypes that were taken for granted, I defied the degrading western narratives and carved out new ground in my activities, my writing and my commentary on British politics and culture.

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

Thirty years of writing inside the belly of the empire beast

There was a lot to learn from a lifetime of watching geopolitics unfold while living through the West’s cycle of capitalism. From post-war austerity, through its sparkling zenith of The Beatles and the arts to an ignominious end in crushing austerity redux (which we’re entering right now), I realised that we were in danger of completing the circle and ending up in another world war if we didn’t pull a rabbit out of the hat.

Looking around me now, I’m shocked by how much that we took for granted we’ve lost. I’m a direct conduit back to a kinder time when the British working class were at peak confidence. Having the oldest working class in the world, the country had the greatest potential for social change for the benefit of the majority: AKA revolution. Karl Marx came to London and wrote about it. A century later, I lived it and saw the hope wax and wane.

In the expanding post-war economy we’d had it good compared to our cousins in the remnants of the British Empire. We were granted a National Health Service, housing, jobs and education which turned the majority into a society of high-functioning, apex proletarians with upward class mobility.

Don’t knock it; it gave us the space to raise the collective consciousness and for a while we soared.

However, it came with a dark perk: you, too, could join the ruling class should your moral compass fail. This perpetually dangling carrot kept profits high and seduced many of us away from the temptations of communism, a prospect that terrified our elites.

The 1960s were marvellous unless you were living in China or Northern Ireland or South Africa or the Gorbals or the USA’s deep south or any number of nations struggling to be reborn, but I digress.

We went on strike, we protested. We created marvellous cultural artefacts. The media had relative bandwidth, the press was benign up to a point. With access to the world’s art, literature, philosophy and politics, our souls and spirits were enriched, our empathy finely developed to embrace fellow humanity.

All these things we could do before the jaws of the State snapped shut. Because we understood too late that the State isn’t a charity. It isn’t our parents unless you count Wicked Stepmothers and brutish fathers. It does enough to keep itself in power and no more.

With the collapse of the Soviet communist bloc in 1991, our ruling elites no longer had to pretend to care. They started to claw back all our gains on turbo-charge.

As the elites of the declining empire cut us adrift like gangrenous limbs, preserving the core organs, I’m addressing a new generation I see cheated out of what was possible: dreams made concrete reality through cooperation rather than the fetish of “competition” — for which, read dog-eat-dog and devil take the hindmost.

Oh, but here comes an upstart: a Cinderella story of the world’s factory transformed into a fabulous Golden Goose. Our global lifeboat and growth engine bringing peace, stability and affordable stuff.

I bet the Wicked Stepmother and the Ugly Sisters are going to have something to say about that. “Load the cannon, fire the torpedoes and break out the bubbly. We have a class war to win!”

A detailed biography and blog archive can be found at Anna’s About page

Renew the spirit, free the mind, change the world. In the meantime, maintain.

In the tiny sliver of time that is my life, I managed to carve out a space in the culture from being the first Chinese Brit to take a show to the prestigious Edinburgh Fringe Festival 30 years ago, the satirical trailblazer Suzy Wrong, Human Cannon, to making groundbreaking programmes for the BBC. But the Obama Pivot to Asia and Trump’s Captain Ahab schtick with the white whale of China means that’s all closed down. In order for the West’s Viking raiding party to turn the Golden Goose into a dead duck, it requires a dehumanised, cartoon China on whom to unleash their worst impulses. And that means no Chinese with whom to empathise. Blank canvases only.

The same goes for the working and middle classes everywhere. The Empire wants to do to the whole world what they did to the Native Americans, to India, Africa and China.

I’m here for kindred spirits who say, hell no!

I want to talk to those interested in critical thinking, who look around and says wtf!? To Brits, Americans and Europeans who wonder where their lives, livelihoods and hopes went in some of the richest economies on the planet. To people of Chinese heritage who wonder what the hell’s happened in the West. And to the Chinese emerging into their day in the sun, breaking out of their centuries-long cocoon as beautiful butterflies only to find the predators lining up — don’t be seduced into our bad habits.

Anyone interested in clarity, a different perspective rooted in 400 years of the Age of Enlightenment, is welcome.

I feel a special kinship with the young women being buried by a Gamergate generation bringing back the old oppressions dressed up in new clothes. Bright young women who decline to submit to the hierarchy of delusional ass-hattery and plonkerdom.

Let this be your spiritual home.

Anna’s Substack account is now live.