Indian and Western media have been demonising China since the Wuhan or Corona virus pandemic became global. China is being written about as the worst state in current times, a state that has been repeatedly flouting the norms of the international order. Among other things, Western media is accusing China of intellectual property theft from Western states and corporations, of dumping manufactured goods at lower than cost price to Western markets, of using the proceeds from a mercantile trade surplus to fund oppression of it’s own people and enhancing it’s sinister military aggression across South China Sea. Of taking hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs from the West to enrich it’s own people, of funding Wall Street elites including politicians across all Western nations to further it’s agenda of globalisation that in reality means Chinese hegemony. Lastly, China along with it’s pet WHO kept the epidemiology of Covid 19 or Wuhan virus secret for a period of time by when it was too late for the world to react.
All of these accusations are true.
So why defend China?
Because, the accusers from Western media are are all hypocrites and they are exaggerating the Chinese threat. One has to only look in recent past to see why. Vietnam war, war in Libya, Iraq war, Afghan war, Algerian war of independence, several violent regime changes in central and South America. All of these so called liberation wars or regime change wars are in reality conquests of weaker nations and peoples by far superior Western military machines where civilians end up being massacred in their hundreds of thousands. It leaves a trail of destruction far worst then the universal human rights these Western aggressors claim to uphold when they start these conquests.
Even communist Soviet Union bombed Afghan civilians during their conquest of Afghanistan. The fact that most of these wars and conquests ended in failure is nothing to celebrate for the millions from these weaker nations who were killed or lost their loved ones to Western conquests done in the name of democracy and human rights. What about France massacring Algerians because they dared to ask for independence or British killing Kenyans in their fight for independence, both instances of decade long massacres of weaker people by militarised Western democracies carried on till after 1960. All these Western conquests and massacres happened after the end of World War II which western historians call the post-modern age.
China has not done any of this. China funded North Vietnam during the US conquest of Vietnam when over a million Vietnamese were massacred by US aerial bombing and napalm. China supported North Korea in the Korean war in order to have a buffer state against US and it’s allies. China funds separatists in India, occupied Tibet and enabled Pakistan to have a nuclear bomb because it sees India as a threat and does what any enemy state would do. But where has China massacred hundreds of thousands of civilians in other countries unlike the so called Western democracies that continue to do so year after year? This is where facts become uncomfortable for Western media outlets. China at it’s worst is far better that all the western democracies.
Let’s look further back. Japan brutally conquered almost all of South East Asia, all island states and as far as Burma during the second world war. It committed heinous massacres of innocent civilians in China, like the Nanking massacre. What Nazi Germany did is known but what is not commonly known is how the British caused millions to die in forced famines of British India. What about the genocide of complete populations of native Americans by European colonists where almost all original inhabitants were killed of by the settlers. They used biological warfare by deliberately sending viral and bacterial infections in blankets or dead bodies to native populations who were not immune to European diseases. Conquests of Canada, Australia and New Zealand were done on the same basis where aboriginal populations were just killed off.
Further back, the Spanish conquistadors massacred native Aztecs, Inca and many other prosperous societies in the name of religion and for gold. Ottoman empire enslaved and committed massacres in almost all neighbouring states and did so over hundreds of years. Even the muslim conquerors of India were killing and converting millions in India during this time. By comparison, China and Chinese empires were more benign and governed to benefit Chinese people till they were supplanted by Opium and Western colonial aggression. So even historically, China has been a more benign force than almost all of the West and Islamic rulers. India under the Marathas and Sikhs who replaced muslim rule was also benign, but then they were defeated by the British colonial parasite.
China is a one party state and not a democracy. Western political thought states that democracies do not start frivolous wars while dictatorships and autocracies always do. The opposite of this has been true. Western democracies have continued to start conquests and massacres of weaker people across the globe in the guise of either universal human rights or some other fancy stuff. Whether this is their military-industrial complex using Western political elites to go into these conquests or whether the political elite is convinced of it’s evangelical belief, we will never know. What we do know is that the Chinese state under it’s communist party has not gone for any of these massacre causing conquests of it’s neighbours or any other states.
So Western media will continue to rile China without looking in the mirror. But for Indian media, they must learn that at it’s worst, China is a far lower threat to India then all the friendly Western democracies. China must maintain internal political stability which can be jeopardised if it engages in foreign adventurism.
China lifted 850 million or 85 crore of it’s population out of poverty since the 1970s. China’s poverty rate fell from 88 percent in 1981 to 0.7 percent in 2015, as measured by the percentage of people living on the equivalent of US$1.90 or less per day. If India must learn anything from China, it is this.
