G.P. Gray, 2nd June 2023

[Note: The Iconoclast was an outgrowth of the activities of the Hestia group’s annual gatherings and existed to share opinions derived from discussions that occurred at and around those events. Unfortunately, Covid-19 put the group’s activities on hold for a significant amount of time but recently we were able to hold our first in-person event in over two years. You can read a summary of the event here. With a return to such events, we will also return to sharing opinions on various issues.]

The war in Ukraine continues to grind inexorably back and forth, with the UA forces in particular operating as though they are taking orders from the ghost of British General, and master of gratuitous carnage, Douglas Haig:

“There is no other course open to us but to fight it out. Every position must be held to the last man: there will be no retirement. With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause each one of us must fight on to the end.”

Yet, even as the fall of Bakhmut leads Western media to begin to question the long-term gains they are likely to acquire in return for such profligate expenditure of human life, they are already salivating over the prospect of the next great conflict over Taiwan. Certainly, their messaging at present is tentative and limited in both its accusations and threats, but if we look at their past record in regard to Russia, we can see a pattern that is quite likely to play out again in regard to China.

When examining Russophobic media analysis, Britain’s Guardian newspaper is always a reliable barometer of negative extremes, as there never seems to be any angle of attack they will leave unused. Even before the 2014 coup in Kiev, they had targeted the Kremlin as a promoter of homophobic violence. In the wake of Yanukovych’s fall and the annexation of Crimea (which they were already framing as an invasion), they claimed Russia had left Europe in a pre-war state. Over the following years, they would go on to attribute a variety of crimes and internationally destabilising activity to Russia. In 2015, the withdrawal from the ICC and prohibition of colour revolution actors were framed as the actions of a rogue state. In 2016, they hinted that Putin intended “another invasion” and that new anti-terror laws were Russia becoming Orwell’s Big Brother. In 2017, it was RussiaGate  and the repression of self-professed, though far from actual, opposition leader Alexei Navalny. 2018 was something of a bumper year, with stories on Russia creating an arms race, Russian ‘dirty money’ corrupting the UK, a potential Russian invasion of Lithuania, Russian bribery securing the World Cup, Russia manipulating the Brexit vote, and their involvement in the shoot-down of flight MH17.

This is not to suggest that Russia does not engage in activity worthy of criticism, all states do and some of the Guardian stories had a degree of individual merit. It is the double-standard and lack of balance at play that warrants mention. Similar sins of UK allies, notably the USA, receive nothing like as much indignant criticism, while Russia is solely portrayed in a nefarious role. Much like a pantomime villain, if they are involved in something it is taken for granted by Western media that they are up to no good.

The pattern continued through 2019, with extended coverage of a purported Russian assassination plot in Salisbury and an attempted poisoning of that diehard defender of democracy Mr. Navalny (of whom, a more even-handed assessment can be found here). In 2020, it was new claims of Russian interference in that year’s UK election, and supposed Russian war crimes in Syria. By 2021, tensions were reaching their peak and Russian efforts to reduce the threat of war were presented as a list of demands, in response to which the paper glibly promoted Biden’s threats that Russia would “pay a price” for interfering in the US election.

The reason for re-treading this somewhat stale ground is to highlight the fact that narratives, especially those that are aimed at a broad, public audience, take significant time to build up. Obviously, since the broadening of the Ukraine conflict in 2022, the level of Western opprobrium has only grown as further stories of Russian malfeasance, on and off the battlefield, have been promoted. However, it is only the prior seeding, over more than a decade, of incessant and varied attacks on Russia’s national character that allowed the story of the Ukraine conflict to be presented in such starkly black and white moral terms. This was not purely a media campaign; intelligence services, through funnels such as the Integrity Initiative, played their part, as did the political establishment and their use of the repeatedly discredited RussiaGate charade as a distraction from their own corrupt activities.

Which brings us back to the question of Taiwan, and more specifically China, which is likely to find itself the target of a similar multi-year campaign of international character assassination. Needless to say, much like Russia, China is open to considerable, legitimate criticism, whether in regard to its growing authoritarianism, questionable human rights record, or intermittent but notably bellicose, sabre-rattling. The issue, therefore, is not criticism per se, but uneven, hypocritical, or distorted criticism that serves a purpose, not in the good faith highlighting of wrongs, but rather, as an effort to turn public opinion against an entire nation of 1.4 billion people.

Already some themes have become commonplace, such as accusations of IP theft, which some portray as the biggest criminal threat to the West. Like Russia, the country has been targeted for its poor record on LGBT rights, and for having a dictatorial ruler with no respect for either term limits or the democratic process. Meanwhile, in international affairs, it has been charged with acting as a new colonial power in the developing world, and throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, reporting alternatively swung from claiming that China was doing too little, to criticising it for being too authoritarian.

Perhaps the most notorious claims, however, are those of the persecution of the Uighur people of Xinjiang province with mainstream sources, such as the BBC, regularly reporting claims of “genocide”, “mass incarceration”, and “systematic rape”. Yet, when the sources for these claims are examined more carefully, questions of their impartiality arise. A widely shared report on the issue was produced by decidedly partisan NeoCon academics, while an op-ed appearing in the New York Times was authored by a writer with questionable ties to the outlawed Falun Gong religious group. A further, oft-repeated claim that the UN stated that China is keeping millions of Uighur prisoner was also shown to be false.

French media reported on how the promotion of false and sensationalist images of ‘Uighur abuse’ were hurting the activists’ cause. Another frequently appearing image of shackled prisoners being transferred was also claimed as evidence of a campaign of persecution. The Chinese government’s statement that these were perfectly “normal judicial activities” was dismissed by Western media in the same breath that they admitted that “prisoners in China are regularly transported wearing blindfolds.” Mass prisoner transfers, like this one in El Salvador, are common throughout the world, and as seen at Guantanamo Bay, the USA has no qualms about blindfolding and shackling its prisoners. Xinjiang has a larger population that the state of Florida, which holds 80,000 people in prison, without experiencing decades of terrorism. That Xinjiang would have tens of thousands of people incarcerated, is perfectly understandable, even without considering that it may have its own versions of Guantanamo Bay to house terrorism-related offenders.

It is worth remembering that the terrorism that plagued Xinjiang for decades has killed hundreds of people though violence has largely abated since 2016. The Chinese response may be harsh, but counter-terrorism policy invariably includes a cost to human rights, and China’s prioritisation of policing and social engagement (including re-education) as it main tools, stands in contrast to the standard American military response. Given the political theatre that has surrounded the January 6th Capitol riot, with one man recently sentenced to 4.5 years in jail for having the temerity to place his feet on Nancy Pelosi’s desk, we can only wonder what would have occurred in America had 197 people been hacked, beaten and burned to death at the Capitol, as happened during a riot in the Xinjiang’s capital of Urumqi in 2009.

The China Watch Institute offers an extensive breakdown of how the Uighur narrative came to develop, from its initial stages, when China and the US were active partners in the ‘war on terror’, through to 2020 when the USA removed the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement from its list of designated terrorist groups. As far back as 2003, the CIA was allegedly intent on using the “Uighur card” as a future tool for exerting pressure on China, following the thinking of British scholar Bernard Lewis whose Cold War-era ‘Arc of Crisis’ theory, sought to fracture countries within the communist sphere of influence along ethnic lines. So far, this has been an effective strategy, generating what is, arguably, the most resilient source of anti-Chinese condemnation among the wider global audience.

As we see the focus move more firmly toward Taiwan, we are likely to see more reports like that out of the Council on Foreign Relations, alleging Chinese interference in Taiwan’s domestic affairs. The UK has also recently threatened to shut down China’s Confucius Institutes over similar claims that they were attempting to promote CCP values in the UK. However, this may be more of an attempt to control China’s ability to establish a counter-narrative or to highlight factual inconsistencies in Western reporting. It’s certainly true that China has its own significant propaganda capabilities, with the Economist reporting that they spend $7 billion annually on efforts to bolster their international image. In the US responses have included S.249, the ‘Countering Chinese Propaganda Act’, a yet to be ratified law which would allow the government to sanction anyone pushing what it perceives as pro-China ‘disinformation’. This would be on top of a $500 million dollar fund already slated for use in countering Chinese messaging through the US Agency for Global Media.

It should be obvious that both China and the US have the resources, and intent, to distort and manipulate political narratives to tarnish their opponent’s image and burnish their own. The problem in the West is, as Chandran Nair puts it, that we cannot expect balanced or fair-minded reporting from media where anti-Chinese rhetoric is already “off the charts” and too much of the rest of the World relies on the large Western media agencies for their news. In his view, the only way to achieve a more balanced understanding of competing narratives will be to “dismantle the dominance of Western media.” Zhang Chengxin, at Think China, argues that so far, China’s own Taiwan-oriented propaganda has failed to match that of the West. By focusing on military grandstanding and relatively empty threats, it has lost ground to the more protracted Western art of long-term narrative-building. He suggests that China too needs to focus on the “long war” and create its own multi-year narratives built around history, norms, diplomacy, and the concept of what is ‘good’ for Taiwan.

It seems inevitable therefore, that if tensions surrounding Taiwan continue to rise, or even if they merely stay bubbling away at the same uncomfortable level, we should expect to see both an increase in Western anti-China rhetoric and an evolution of the Chinese response to it. More than ever, critical and deeply trenchant analysis of media commentary will be vital, not only to understand what is truly happening in East Asian affairs, but to craft policy responses that can bring stability rather than further disruption to the region.