Four Articles on China
Criticism of the Prashad/Ting/Wolff Panel on China of 9/20/21
By Stanley Heller
These words were never mentioned by anyone in their remarks: Uighur, Hong Kong, labor unions, billionaires, coal plants, exploitation, Taiwan.
The tone of the Zoom talk was that everything about the China was wonderful and that only the US government was doing bad things.
1. The moderator introduced Vijay Prashad elaborately, but did not mention that Prashad is senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. I would point out Chinese universities are not well known for their academic freedom.
Prashad was the first speaker. I didn’t find anything objectionable in the first ten minutes or so of his talk. The Biden pivot for a Cold War with China isalarming. Now around 13 minutes in, Prashad strayed for a while to talk about Russia. Prashad talked about how the US provoked Russia and how Russia then went to defend its only two major warm water ports, Sevastopol (he doesn't mention the word Ukraine) and Tartous in Syria. He doesn't deign to mention that Syria is a separate country. But Tartous is a Russian warm water port, according to Prashad. He claims that the U.S. “provoked” Russia to intervene in Syria. That they were doing this to prop up their allied tyrant Assad against an apparent successful Syrian revolution is not mentioned. No, it’s all about defending “their port”. With the real background of horrific warfare by Putin and Assad forces against mostly civilian Syrians I find Prashad’s statement repulsive
Prashad is all about geopolitics, but he did not mention any of China’s de facto alliances with authoritarians around the world and its use of “techno-authoritarianism”.
click here for the rest of the article (It's continued below)
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A Criticism from Taiwan
"The DSA International Committee recently held a panel on the subject of the “new Cold War.” This event, which was held on September 20th and livestreamed, shared two speakers with the “China and the Left” conference that had taken place on September 18th in New York City organized by the Qiao Collective, People’s Forum, and Code Pink, these being Vijay Prashad and Tings Chak. Other speakers were economist Richard Wolff and DSA member Grayson Lanza. The People’s Forum and Prashad’s Tricontinental Institute are recently in the news after the revelation that each organization received over 12 million USD, funneled through Goldman Sachs. "
"Prashad’s talk proved more focused than his free-ranging comments at the People’s Forum event, Prashad outlining what he viewed as the US ramping up aggression against China. Prashad gave an overview of the history of the Cold War, where he framed the US as the master manipulator that had turned the Soviet Union and China against each other in order to maintain global power, something orchestrated by Henry Kissinger..."
To read the complete article click here.
Book Review
About Richard Smith's Book "China's Engine of Environmental Destruction"
published on the site of New Politics
"As 'part of China,' we Hong Kongers have seen how China’s economic growth has contributed to the degradation of its environment. To be fair, Hong Kong’s economic takeoff had already harmed its environment before China took over the city. We witnessed all our beautiful beaches becoming polluted. The relocation of Hong Kong’s factories to Guandong since the 1990s, instead of alleviating pollution, has, ironically, further exacerbated the city’s environmental destruction. For decades thick clouds of smog have hung over us as Guangdong became a great export-processing zone. The sky only became cleaner, again ironically, when the pandemic swept across the nation, shutting down many factories.
Beijing and its supporters around the globe have always claimed that China’s kind of 'socialism,' or whatever label one would prefer, gives it a strong advantage of governmental control over the nation and hence efficiency in overcoming disasters such as economic crises or pandemics. Even if this theory can be empirically proven, the question remains, at what cost?"
To read the whole article by Au Loong Yu click here
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On Democracy Now 10/18/21
You can both defend China from war and harshly criticize its awful human rights abuses See the DN! video from this point.
Four Articles on China
Criticism of the Prashad/Ting/Wolff Panel on China of 9/20/21
By Stanley Heller
(continued from above)
...2. The second speaker was Tings Chak, “a Shanghai based researcher” and along with Prashad is part of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research. She talked about the Chinese government raising people out of poverty and mentioned a whole host of social programs and a program where what sounds like the equivalent of Chinese social workers live in Chinese poor villages to help people. She mentioned programs that were making repairs to China environmental misdeeds which she said were large. She wasn’t specific, but I got the sense she was talking about things like destroying villages with dams. She did not mention China’s overall environmental policy (see below).
3. The third speaker was US economist Richard Wolff who marveled at Chinese leaps in GDP which far outstripped that of the US. He criticized capitalist economists who never mentioned it or explained it away flippantly. Why use this GDP as the be-all-and-end-all of economic progress? Wolff did not talk about what the overall plan of the Chinese communist party which includes a rapid industrialization based on creating coal-burning power plants at a rate higher than anywhere else in the world. Image what this is doing to the world’s climate and to the health of Chinese people (2017 estimate, one million Chinese deaths per year). The world is approaching tipping points in 2030 and China is not only the leading builder of coal plants, but is the leading producer of automobiles (more than double US production). China is the world’s leading emitter of greenhouse gases in absolute terms, twice that of the US. (yes, I realize China has a much large population and the US is #1 in historical terms, but that’s not going to mean anything if climates collapse).
One more point about GDP. In China's case it includes 65 million empty homes.
Wolff claimed China doesn’t want to compete with the US militarily, but wants to compete “where its strength lies” in “eradicating poverty and decreasing as a matter of policy inequality…which the Common Prosperity and the other programs, attacking the tech giants, moving wealth from the profit category and moving it to the wage category”… “one of the greatest innovations in great power competition”. I’m not qualified to comment on the last assertions. I never heard about the Common Prosperity program. I do know that supposedly socialist China has more billionaires than the USA. This shining example of socialism has also leant the USA treasury $1 trillion though its bond purposes.
4. A fourth speaker was Grayson Lanza’s of the DSA International Committee. He talked about Biden/Pelosi legislation concerning China which no doubt is bad.
I’m not saying everything in the presentations was bad. Certainly, the point that China has lost 4,000 to COVID while the US has lost 700,000 needs to be mentioned again and again. And AUKUS should be condemned. But those points are obvious to anyone on the Left.
The event was sponsored by the DSA International Committee. I'm a DSA member.
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