Our ancestors set sail to conquer the world; their ancestors built a wall.
The Chinese wall. (Jakub Ha?un/Wikimedia Commons)
By Caitlin Johnstone
Caitlin’s Newsletter
Listen to Tim Foley reading this article.
The buzz around Xiaohongshu and then DeepSeek has had an unusually high volume of westerners speaking positively about China for the last couple of weeks.
That means of course we’re also seeing many westerners falling all over themselves to say, “Well actually China is actually quite bad, actually” in response.
Western liberals who fancy themselves enlightened and critical of power tend to get very squirmy and uncomfortable in their skin when they hear people saying positive things about the PRC, and love nothing more than to tell you that China is just as evil and tyrannical as the western power alliance, if not worse.
This is objectively, measurably false. China hasn’t spent the 21st century killing people by the millions in wars of aggression.
China isn’t circling the planet with hundreds of military bases while working to destroy any nation or group anywhere in the world who disobeys it.
China isn’t strangling nations around the globe with starvation sanctions for refusing to bow to its dictates.
China didn’t just spend 15 months lighting the middle east on fire and backing a live-streamed genocide.
China hasn’t spent the last three years endangering the world in frequently terrifying acts of nuclear brinkmanship with a rival nuclear superpower.
Only the U.S.-centralized empire has done this.
Whenever I point this out I get empire apologists going “Well yeah, SO FAR! We haven’t seen China doing all that evil foreign policy shit YET because they’re still not powerful enough!”
Which is just silly. China absolutely is powerful enough to be a whole lot more abusive and murderous abroad, and it simply isn’t.
Westerners love to claim that China has secret agendas to conquer the world someday (hilariously implying that these hypothetical future abuses make China morally comparable to the U.S. empire’s current known abuses), but if you actually dig into the evidence for these claims what you’ll find every time is that all they provide evidence for is China’s openly stated goal of a multi-polar world that isn’t ruled by Washington.
Our ancestors set sail to conquer the world; their ancestors built a wall.
This notion that China has an interest in ruling over a bunch of white foreigners has as much rational basis as old racist superstitions that black and brown people wanted equal rights so that they could come and steal white men’s wives and have sex with their daughters.
They’re just a better civilization than ours — not because theirs is miraculous or perfect, but because ours is just that murderous and dystopian.
They simply do the normal thing while we do the freakish thing: they make the lives of their citizens better and better and avoid unnecessary wars, while western governments make the lives of their citizens worse and worse while plunging into new acts of mass military slaughter every few years.
Any criticisms you could level at China — that their domestic policy is more authoritarian than ours, that their culture is more conservative, etc. — are eclipsed in moral terms by the depravity of our own western governments by orders of magnitude.
And why would you even level such criticisms while living under the single most bloodthirsty and tyrannical power structure on earth? That would be like a German living under the Third Reich looking overseas and bitching about Brazil.
I find nothing more pathetic than a westerner who lives under the shadow of the U.S. empire spending their time and energy criticizing the abuses of nations who lie outside that power structure.
It’s an embarrassing, bootlicking way to live. Focus on criticizing the far greater abuses of the far greater evil that you actually live under, loser.
Caitlin Johnstone’s work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following her on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud, YouTube, or throwing some money into her tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy her books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff she publishes is to subscribe to the mailing list at her website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything she publishes. For more info on who she is, where she stands and what she’s trying to do with her platform, click here. All works are co-authored with her American husband Tim Foley.
This article is from CaitlinJohnstone.com.au and re-published with permission.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
How the West” can keep on about “authoritarian régimes” when referring to those which provide decent lives for their citizens and are shown in polls to satisfy the needs and desires of their populations,shows how easily fooled we are. I live in “rights of man” France, where the government ignores election results, follows Ursula and Kaja Kallas into greater militarism and Russophobia, keeps websites and other “disinformation” hidden, and sinks us deeper into penury. I remember when there was a “Left”, it was pacifist and actually tried to improve our environment. Now, look what “Green” means in Germany!
I’m always hesitant to make statements about a country after the mistakes people made during the 1930s in praising Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union. Nevertheless, because I live half my time in China and half in the U.S., I can say that feel exactly the same as Caitlin. In fact, in many respects I am more comfortable living here in China than in a country that has participated in genocide. I also find life here safer – guns are not a part of the culture; even the police don’t normally carry them, and the violent crime rate is low. All in all China feels to me to be a safer, more sane and stable nation.
This is a courageous take on large-scale geopolitics; one which, I fear, will not attract a very large audience in the places needed: not that it is totally true, but is absolutely essential to have in the quiver. That region and its people (‘China’ is an outlandish simplification) have all the human capacities for evil, clearly demonstrated in its history, but it does seem at this time that the central government of that region (we can call it China if we want) has the survival of the earth’s living space — natural world and unnatural humanity— as a more serious concern than the American empire does.
Caitlyn’s ability to cut through to the moral heart of things with hilarious (if tragic) irony has few parallels.
(I do wish that the links in the first sentence were to somewhere other than Wikipedia!)
Nicely drawn picture painted with words . Heartfelt , I felt the pulse of your heart rise and fall .
“Focus on criticizing the far greater abuses of the far greater evil that you actually live under”
Indeed. And, besides, there’s also the Chomsky argument that we need to criticize our own government because it’s the one we pay for and have a potential ability to affect.