Media Bash China in New Cold War Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit ------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the October 30, 1997 issue of Workers World newspaper ------------------------- MEDIA BASH CHINA IN NEW COLD WAR By Deirdre Griswold Jiang Xemin, the president of the People's Republic of China, will arrive in the United States near the end of October for a state visit. It is an opportunity for the ruling capitalist establishment of the United States, the wealthiest and biggest military power in the world, to demonstrate that it is ready to cooperate and live peacefully with one-fifth of the human race. But the big-business media and Hollywood have been spitting out a venomous tide of anti-China propaganda to coincide with Jiang's visit. Ads for movies like "Seven Years in Tibet" and "Red Corner," which depict China in the most fraudulent Cold War stereotypes, are playing on every TV network. Aimed directly at a mass audience, they are meant to shock, terrify and whip up a lynch-mob spirit. The scenes from "Red Corner" that purport to show a U.S. "good guy"-- Richard Gere--being brutally beaten in China rank among the most racist anti-Asian propaganda shown on television in years. It is very clear that, despite the diplomatic niceties coming from official Washington, a very substantial section of the super-rich U.S. ruling class wants to use the visit to insult and defame the leaders of the PRC. At an earlier time, when an anti-feudal, anti-imperialist socialist revolution was still transforming China and inspiring liberation movements of oppressed peoples all over the world, Washington's virulent anti-China hostility was deeply ideological. It hated China's egalitarianism--the way the revolution lifted up millions of peasants and workers while pulling down the brutal landlords and bosses. The U.S. government at that time denied the very legitimacy of the Chinese Communist government, although it had come to power through the broadest mass struggle. >From 1949 until the mid-1970s, the U.S. establishment stuck to the fiction that the Chiang Kai-shek warlord regime on Taiwan was the real government of China. It blocked the PRC's entry to the United Nations. In this period, the United States was hated and ridiculed in much of the world because of the war in Vietnam and the U.S. failure to recognize China. But President Richard Nixon and his advisers--particularly Secretary of State Henry Kissinger--finally came to recognize the futility of this posture. Nixon was the first U.S. president to visit the PRC. Since then, both capitalist parties here have recognized the authority of the Chinese Communist government over all of China--for diplomatic purposes. They admit, officially at least, that Tibet and Taiwan are both parts of China. This has allowed Washington to carry on more normal political and commercial relations with Beijing. But it has not stopped other instruments of the U.S. ruling class, like the secret intelligence agencies and the media, from fomenting separatism and trying to dismantle the PRC. Imperialist diplomacy is only a means to an end. Again and again, the establishment analysts here specializing in China have stated quite bluntly that their aim is to move the PRC away from its socialist roots and into the international framework of trade, investments, and political and military relations dominated by U.S. imperialism. At the same time, they see China's rapid industrialization and economic growth, even if it's on a market basis, as a threat to their own hegemony in the Asian-Pacific region. Right now, for example, the countries of Southeast Asia that had been held up as models of rapid capitalist development-- earning them the nickname "tigers"--are suffering a severe currency and financial crisis. The Western imperialist banks--especially the U.S.-dominated International Monetary Fund and World Bank--have put the screws to these countries, holding back new loans while demanding higher interest rates. China, however, has offered assistance to countries like Malaysia. The prospect that a stronger China in the future could to some extent counterbalance U.S. imperialism's stranglehold on the global economy does not sit well in the board rooms. There is a growing movement in this country against the oppression of workers exploited in sweatshops here and around the world. It can show its true independence from big-business ideology by rejecting the current campaign defaming China. This campaign is anti-worker to the core and is a cover for the capitalist establishment's reactionary and militarist agenda. - END - (Copyright Workers World Service: Permission to reprint granted if source is cited. For more information contact Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail: ww@workers.org. For subscription info send message to: info@workers.org. Web: http://workers.org) ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytas-10.22.97-23:27:57-21936