In the United States, we commonly understand âYellow Perilâ as a xenophobic response to influxes of Chinese laborers. Yellow Peril produced national shames such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which remains the first and only ban on all immigrants from an ethnic group. But the propaganda also supported foreign policy. In the late nineteenth century, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany supposedly dreamed of Buddha seated on a dragon, threatening to invade Europe. He used Yellow Peril (die Gelbe Gefahr) to build alliances with other imperialist nations and justify invading China first lest the East conquer the West. In the Opium Wars of the 1840s, the U.S. and other Western nations killed 30,000 Chinese people so that they could forcibly sell opium to civilians, while notable Americans and elite institutions such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton built their wealth on opium colonialism. This is the foundational moment of U.S.-China relations.
Critical to this contemporary promotion of Yellow Peril is the image of China as the military aggressor. But right now, the U.S. has 800 overseas military bases, half of them encircling China. China has one (in Djibouti). The U.S. spends more on defense than the next 10 nations combined, including China. The U.S. has extensively planned for a naval blockade of China, cutting off its oil supply. The U.S. has 20 times the nuclear warheads of China and yet is still spending an additional $100 billion to build up a new nuclear arms arsenal. The U.S. Indo-Pacific Command has stationed 130,000 troops in the region, conducting nearly daily military exercises with drones, missile drills, helicopters, island hopping and more, according to Madison Tang, campaign coordinator at CODEPINK. âThese military exercises create accidents. These exercises can be provocations in and of themselves. Thereâs a lot of military brinkmanship happening where American forward posturing (is being) framed as defensive,â says Tang.
Good thing trump was playing 3-dimensional chess when he backed out of the nuclear deal with Iran and increased tensions by killing their general. Because incentivising them to make agreements with the Chinese is clearly a brilliant move to bolster American power.
The article is behind a paywall... so not readable for anyone, including myself. Perhaps, you could post some snippets?
Else, going by the headlines only, it seems CHINA is replacing TRUMP in the media-narrative, as to why Americans love going at each others' throats (killing each other). Where is RUSSIA in this new narrative? Surprisingly gone?!
That even framed as "think-tankery"... makes me feel quite dizzy. But perhaps, you can help out by laying down the arguments from the article on WSJ, so all may understand where your deep tankery is coming from?
I hope it is not merely pointing fingers on an 'outside' source, again, as would be more than usual by now... (It seems more than agreeable instead, that TRUMP has been potrayed as such in the media throughout, since 2016 at least).
If otherwise, you might as well be inadvertently feeding the narrative of the GOP, that the US has been infiltrated by the CCP... which leaves me smh.
One of the first battles in the American civil war took place near a Missouri town that it amused fate to name Carthage. Two millennia before, the Romans sacked the original, only to turn against themselves in the ensuing peace. Metus hostilis, fear of the enemy, had kept the republic together, wrote the historian Sallust, a favourite of the US founders. Without it, discord and corruption had licence to breed.
If the US is always recruiting for a Carthage (Gore Vidal referred to its âenemy of the month clubâ) it is not because of an innate militarism. It is just that peace can be a psychic ordeal. Without an ethnic basis, a nation can need something outside to define itself against. The civil war happened after the US trounced the closest thing it had to a local threat in Mexico. Urban strife grew between the world wars: it was armed mobilisation, not just the New Deal, that bound ethnic Italians, Poles and Irish into a civic whole. As for the cold war, note the surge in partisanship after its end. Unanimous confirmations of Supreme Court nominees are one proxy-measure of a co-operative Washington. There has not been one since 1988.
An unchallenged US is a divided US. It follows that Americaâs best hope of retaining some cohesion in the coming decades is a mighty China. What is disastrous for its relative power in the world might turn out to be a godsend for its internal cohesion. Decline has its uses. (...)
Last week, in his first appearance at the Pentagon as president, he made clear that US actions in Asia will be focused almost exclusively on deterring China and its rising military and economic power.
I assure you we are not going to war with China, they have everything they need from us now. We are completely in line and with their program. They own us.
hmm, that's the narrative most people hold. time to start to change that, is my point. not overnight, but you have to start somewhere/sometime, especially with a "partner" so adversarial and wrong.
I assure you we are not going to war with China, they have everything they need from us now. We are completely in line and with their program. They own us.
hmm, that's the narrative most people hold. time to start to change that, is my point. not overnight, but you have to start somewhere/sometime, especially with a "partner" so adversarial and wrong.
Evil. This is the 'war' we should be fighting with China. Send this to every company/CEO who does business with China. Stop buying anything from this country. Boycott China
garcon
hold the war, but i'll take a double order of press and political posturing
everyone just needs to tell them to free those people asap
yes, war of words and other measures, not guns and guts
I assure you we are not going to war with China, they have everything they need from us now. We are completely in line and with their program. They own us.
