Last week I published an article discussing former Ambassador Chas Freeman, one of America’s most highly-regarded professional diplomats of the last half-century. Very early in his career, Freeman had been the personal interpreter for President Richard Nixon during his historic 1972 trip to China and meetings with Mao, and that country remained one of his areas of special expertise.
During subsequent decades, Freeman served as our ambassador to Saudi Arabia at the time of the Gulf War and was afterward appointed an assistant secretary of defense. Then in early 2009, the Obama Administration nominated him as chairman of our National Intelligence Council, responsible for assessing and aggregating the findings of our 17 different intelligence agencies, and then providing the final report to our president and other top leaders. But the Israel Lobby regarded Freeman as insufficiently loyal to the foreign nation that they served, so their activists successfully mobilized to block his appointment.
Despite his very distinguished record of accomplishment, Freeman was rarely interviewed by our media so I was only slightly aware of him. However, over the last year he had become a regular guest on several YouTube channels and he greatly impressed me with his knowledge and acumen, prompting me to publish that piece quoting long sections of his extremely sensible views on our troubled relationship with China.
In that article I noted the vital role played by the Internet, whose video platforms and social media distribution channels now provided the entire world with access to views and ideas that had routinely been blocked by the gatekeepers of the traditional electronic media.
Under different political circumstances, someone like Freeman might have spent the last couple of decades as a top foreign policy advisor to our president, but despite his knowledge and eminence only the Internet transformed him from a name barely known to me into someone whose views I carefully followed on a weekly basis. And much the same had happened with many other individuals, including leading academic scholars and national security experts such as Jeffrey Sachs, John Mearsheimer, Ted Postol, Ray McGovern, Larry Wilkerson, and Douglas Macgregor.
Despite all of this, I only belatedly recognized that the power of this same Internet can also enormously magnify the impact of ordinary, apolitical citizens, whose personal experiences can potentially inform our understanding of major geopolitical controversies.
As Freeman noted, over the last few years our Cold War with China has become increasingly frigid, and although it still remains confined to battles over economic and trade issues, there are some dangerous risks that it might turn hot over Taiwan or the South China Sea. Two years of increasingly severe American restrictions upon the export of our advanced microchips or Western chip-fabrication equipment to China have finally provoked strong retaliation. China heavily dominates the processing of certain vital raw materials, so they have banned the export of these to our own country, an action with potentially serious impact.
A major flashpoint in this growing international confrontation came in January 2020 when top officials of the outgoing Trump Administration joined their counterparts of the incoming Biden Administration in both declaring that China was committing “genocide” against its Muslim Uyghur population of Xinjiang province, with the New York Times and our other leading media outlets endorsing and heavily amplifying those explosive accusations.
Such enormously grave charges soon led many Western companies to ban the use of Chinese products from Xinjiang, a decision that outraged China and prompted economic retaliation.
Both at the time and afterward, I regularly ridiculed those accusations, emphasizing that they seemed based upon no solid evidence and greatly reminded me of the false claims of Saddam’s WMDs that that been used to launch our ill-fated Iraq War. Indeed, none of the world’s many Muslim countries took those claims seriously, with the only supporters being the population of the heavily brainwashed West. And after Israel began its massive campaign to annihilate Gaza’s Palestinians, I noted the huge apparent differences between these two alleged “genocides.”
Scenes from the Uighur “Genocide” Compared to Those of the Palestinian “Genocide”
What made these accusations about Xinjiang seem so totally absurd was that the huge province was completely open to both Chinese and foreign tourists, who regularly traveled there in large numbers, attracted by its scenic vistas and interesting Muslim Turkic culture. The notion that China was committing a “genocide” in a region constantly crisscrossed by tourists seemed like the most mindless sort of dishonest propaganda, aimed at the gullible and the dim-witted.
During several years of this ongoing controversy, I failed to consider that video-loggers had become an important part of the Internet, and that some of these specialized in the stories of their foreign travels. But a commenter recently posted a couple of such videos on one of my articles, and clicking the links I discovered the easy availability of such direct personal evidence about Chinese society.
There are a multitude of such channels, and I recently spent a couple of days exploring the China content of two of them. Nothing I saw much surprised me, but I think that our relations with that huge country would greatly improve if more Americans did the same.
I’m not sure of her last name, but the eponymous host of Katherine’s Journey to the East seems like a very pleasant young woman from the Virginia suburbs of DC. Six years ago, perhaps out of a spirit of adventure, she decided to attend Nanjing University for her masters degree in Environmental Engineering, and except for occasional visits back home she has lived in China since then, and might remain there indefinitely.
She is an ardent environmentalist and having become completely fluent in Mandarin, she works for a Chinese company in that field. But during the last three or four years she has also spent a good deal of her time producing personal videos on roughly a weekly basis, and I’ve now watched about two dozen of these, which usually run around 10-20 minutes each. She documents her travels and other activities, and does so in a very sincere and ingenuous manner. Aside from her love of nature, hiking, and other environmentalist sentiments, she seems almost completely apolitical, or at least I never saw anything that suggested otherwise.
Nearly all these videos are in spoken English, but they usually provide both Chinese and English subtitles. Most get hundreds of comments, and casually examining some of those threads suggests that the bulk of her audience consists of Westerners but with a substantial Chinese minority.
Over the years, her channel has accumulated 132,000 subscribers and her videos seem to average about 50,000 views each, though the most popular have reached 400,000. For an ordinary individual focusing on her personal activities, those seem like very substantial numbers, probably comparable to the viewership of many professional cable-television hosts although Katherine obviously lacks their distribution and promotion. I feel confident that she provides a far more honest and realistic view of ordinary life in China than any of the synthetic, ideologically-driven propaganda-products created by television professionals subject to the dictates of their executives.
For the last several years she had been living and working in Hangzhou, a large city of nearly 12 million and the capital of Zhejiang province. But she had always been fascinated by rural Chinese villages, and about a year ago she finally got an opportunity to move out to one of them.
Except for her videos covering her recent visit back home, virtually everyone she shows is Chinese, and I never saw the slightest indication that she ever encountered anything other than a friendly, welcoming atmosphere everywhere she went. Urban amenities throughout the country seemed absolutely on a par with America’s most prosperous cities, but much of the design and planning appeared far superior, with stretches of natural parkland often breaking the monotony of the numerous large buildings, and those were also tastefully varied in style.
My initial interest had been on matters relating to the Uyghurs and Xinjiang, and I quickly noticed that her current boyfriend came from that ethnic group. Partly as a consequence, a number of her videos over the last few months have shown scenes from her visit to that region and her interactions with the local Uyghurs. I think they are well worth watching for the evidence they provide on that inflamed international controversy.
- THEY TRAVELED 4000 km To DO THIS • My Uyghur friends see the ocean for the first time!! • 21:19 • 44K Views
- Uyghur Wedding • 2 WEDDINGS in ONE WEEKEND in Turpan, Xinjiang! • 13:42 • 91K Views
- Xinjiang LOVE STORY • Stories of secret high school romance in far west China • 12:46 • 51K Views
- UYGHUR FARMHOUSE TOUR • Village life in far west China! The most colorful home I have EVER seen! • 8:15 • 45K Views
- THEIR REACTION • Uyghur kids react to meeting an American for the first time! • 9:02 • 37K Views
Another YouTube channel I explored was called Sun Kissed Bucket List, run by a somewhat bubbly British couple, who have spent the last two or three years visiting various Asian countries and producing videos of their travel experiences. Their channel has accumulated slightly more subscribers than Katherine’s, while their videos tend to be much longer, generally running between thirty minutes and an hour and often drawing more than 100,000 views. Like Katherine, the couple seemed completely apolitical, and I think the British husband might be from a Muslim background based upon his appearance.
Many of their travels during the last year have been to various parts of China. Since they don’t speak the language, their interactions with the local population are necessarily more distant, but all their encounters seemed just as warm and friendly as were those of a long-time resident such as Katherine.
Three of their videos from the last year covered their trip to Xinjiang, and their very provocative titles ironically contrasted with the completely innocuous content these contained.
- MUSLIMS IN CHINA • The Xinjiang China THEY Don’t Want YOU to SEE… 🇨🇳 (British Couple’s SHOCKING EXPERIENCE) • 1:23:59 • 618K Views
- XINJIANG AT NIGHT • ALONE in China’s MOST DANGEROUS Region… 🇨🇳 (NIGHTLIFE in Urumqi, Xinjiang) • 49:55 • 168K Views
- MODERN XINJIANG • MODERN SIDE of Xinjiang China NOBODY Shows You… 🇨🇳 (The TRUTH is Coming Out) • 40:10 • 99K Views
For several years our government and our mainstream media have heavily promoted claims of a Chinese genocide of the Uyghurs of Xinjiang, supposedly drawing upon secretive intelligence sources that I found very dubious. After watching those four hours of personal travelog footage, I consider those incendiary claims as totally preposterous as anything I’ve ever heard. In past years, the province did have some serious episodes of Islamic terrorism and deadly anti-Chinese riots, with a good deal of speculation that these were orchestrated by the CIA as a means of weakening China, and this background is described in a somewhat biased Wikipedia entry.
Given that history of occasional terrorism, one or two videos do show a scattering of police vans parked on the streets of the Xinjiang capital of Ürümqi, and metal detectors are situated outside some major mosques and other public buildings. But neither the police presence nor any other security measures seemed much different than what is often found in many major American urban centers such as New York City or Washington DC. No authorities apparently made the slightest effort to dissuade these foreign visitors from filming street scenes or going wherever they liked, and all the local Uyghurs were quite friendly and curious, apparently having no concerns whatsoever of speaking with visiting Westerners or being recorded on camera.
In walking around the city, the British couple were intrigued by the local culture, noting that they never would have thought they were in China. Instead, the food for sale and the architecture reminded them a little of Istanbul, hardly surprising given that the population consisted of Turkic Muslims, while the written script resembled Arabic.
Based upon the lists of YouTube recommendations and their titles, I think I could have easily found ten or even one hundred times as many other videos featuring very similar personal accounts of Western visitors traveling to Xinjiang and its major cities, or meeting with Uyghurs there or elsewhere. Our government and our media have severely discredited themselves by declaring a Uyghur “genocide” that is obviously just a preposterous propaganda-hoax.
The visit of the British couple to the Uyghur cities of Xinjiang was only a small part of the month or two they spent traveling around China during their four separate trips in which they visited numerous cities and produced dozens of other travel videos for their channel. I watched a few of the ones with the most intriguing titles, and would certainly recommend them to those who might be interested.
- WELCOME TO THE FUTURE • Why The WORLD CAN’T Compete with China’s Infrastructure 🇨🇳 Wuhan is Living in the FUTURE • 48:18 • 46K Views
- ANOTHER MISTAKE? • We Had SERIOUS PROBLEMS in Shenzhen, China… 🇨🇳 (NOT What We Imagined) • 30:08 • 95K Views
- NEVER BEEN SO SCARED IN CHINA • THIS is WHY The WORLD CAN’T Compete with China’s Infrastructure | Shocked in Zhangjiajie 🇨🇳 • 54:18 • 267K Views
- GUANGZHOU IS THE FUTURE • Guangzhou, China is MILES AHEAD of the WORLD! | China is THE FUTURE 🇨🇳 • 56:22 • 105K Views
- BRITISH COUPLE REVEAL SHOCKING TRUTH ABOUT CHINA • The Media Lied to EVERYONE about China? We Share the TRUTH 🇨🇳 • 37:14 • 143K Views
They considered some of their experiences quite remarkable. They took an excursion on Wuhan’s futuristic monorail sky-train that traverses a large nature reserve located just outside that city of 11 million. High-tech Shenzhen was an enormous ultramodern city, whose gigantic malls had a design and style almost certainly unmatched anywhere in the U.S. In Zhangjiajie, the travelers were amazed to walk across the world’s largest glass bridge, suspended over China’s own enormous Grand Canyon. In their visit to Shanghai, they marveled at the astonishing urban cleanliness of that city of 30 million, the largest in China and one of the largest in the world.
In the last of this handful of videos, they summed up the results of their earlier trips, describing their experiences in China as totally different than what was suggested by the dishonest Western media. They emphasized that they freely went everywhere, recording everything with their cameras, and no one ever once appeared concerned or asked them what they were doing. Instead, all the Chinese were extremely friendly and helpful, and were generally quite happy to be filmed by the two foreigners. Ironically enough, when the British couple had previously traveled around many parts of the West, they often encountered a great deal of suspicion about their activities, including questions about why they were filming their surroundings and whether they had official permission to do so.
Obviously, some aspects of Chinese society were disagreeable. For example, the couple disliked the fact that so many Chinese smoked and they were also irritated that older Chinese sometimes tended to jump queues. But their overall experiences in China and with the Chinese had been extremely positive ones.
Based upon their statements, their main reaction to the Chinese cities that they visited was one of total astonishment. As they repeatedly stated in their videos, compared to their own country of Britain or most of the others they had visited in the West or in other parts of the world, China was already living in the future, providing the 1.4 billion Chinese with technological infrastructure and amenities probably unmatched almost anywhere else in the world.
This same impression of China’s cities was also conveyed in the videos of another YouTube channel called Exploropia. These provide drone-based overviews of numerous major urban centers around the world, and those depicting Chinese cities are among the most impressive of these, including some of the ones listed below. These enormous, stunning metropolises might almost seem like they were produced by the special-effects wizards of a Hollywood film, but instead they represent the real world of today’s China.
From the late 1970s onward, my predictions for China’s future development had always been far more optimistic than those of anyone else whom I knew, but nonetheless I have been staggered by the astonishing scale of that country’s achievements over the last 45 years.
In 2012 I published an article summarizing some of these accomplishments:
The rise of China surely ranks among the most important world developments of the last 100 years…Adjusted for purchasing power, most Chinese in 1980 had an income 60–70 percent below that of the citizens in other major Third World countries such as Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Kenya, none of which were considered great economic success stories. In those days, even Haitians were far wealthier than Chinese…
During the three decades to 2010, China achieved perhaps the most rapid sustained rate of economic development in the history of the human species, with its real economy growing almost 40-fold between 1978 and 2010. In 1978, America’s economy was 15 times larger, but according to most international estimates, China is now set to surpass America’s total economic output within just another few years…
A World Bank report recently highlighted the huge drop in global poverty rates from 1980 to 2008, but critics noted that over 100 percent of that decline came from China alone: the number of Chinese living in dire poverty fell by a remarkable 662 million, while the impoverished population in the rest of the world actually rose by 13 million…
China’s economic progress is especially impressive when matched against historical parallels. Between 1870 and 1900, America enjoyed unprecedented industrial expansion, such that even Karl Marx and his followers began to doubt that a Communist revolution would be necessary or even possible in a country whose people were achieving such widely shared prosperity through capitalistic expansion. During those 30 years America’s real per capita income grew by 100 percent. But over the last 30 years, real per capita income in China has grown by more than 1,300 percent.
All of this follows the pattern of Lee Kwan Yew’s mixed-development model, combining state socialism and free enterprise, which raised Singapore’s people from the desperate, abject poverty of 1945 to a standard of living now considerably higher than that of most Europeans or Americans, including a per capita GDP almost $12,000 above that of the United States. Obviously, implementing such a program for the world’s largest population and on a continental scale is far more challenging than doing so in a tiny city-state with a population of a few million and inherited British colonial institutions, but so far China has done very well in confounding its skeptics.
Consider that in 1980, the Chinese population overwhelmingly consisted of desperately impoverished peasants, far poorer than Haitians. And compare that recent past with those videos of China’s enormous, futuristic cities, now among the most advanced in the entire world, with nearly all of those gleaming, towering edifices constructed in just the last two or three decades. Obviously, nothing like this has ever previously happened in the history of the world.
The drone-based video embedded above depicts the city of Shenzen. In the late 1970s that place had been a small town of about 25,000, filled with poor fishermen. But in less than fifty years, its population has grown nearly a thousand-fold, creating the wealthiest city in all of China and the third largest after Shanghai and Beijing, with the surrounding region now including 85 million people. In a recent interview, Jeffrey Sachs explained that Shenzen had become a global leader in many different fields, including technological development, industrial production, financial services, shipping, and higher education, probably being unique among the world’s cities for such diverse success.
As a child, I occasionally visited Disneyland, and one of the popular early attractions of that pioneering theme park was Tomorrowland, depicting the urban wonders that our future would hold. But as far as I can tell, few if any of those developments ever occurred in our own country, with California’s aging, increasingly decrepit freeways merely becoming much more congested that they were a half-century ago, and America lacking even a single mile of high-speed rail. Meanwhile, the scenes of China’s magnificent cities seem exactly like what Walt Disney had originally envisioned, but filled with far more greenery and nature areas and constructed on a scale ten-thousand times larger.
This naturally raises very disturbing questions about why the ruling elites of America and other Western nations have failed to accomplish anything even remotely similar during that same period of time although they began with every possible economic and technological advantage. The devastating comparison between their manifest failure and the stunning success of China’s leadership obviously raises potentially dangerous issues, so our propagandistic media has attempted to conceal the reality of this situation.
As part of this effort, the New York Times and our other leading media outlets have done their best to obscure China’s success, running numerous major stories contrasting China’s terrible economic stagnation with our own booming economy. But this represents a total inversion of reality no different from that produced by the propaganda organs of the decaying Soviet Union.
Consider for example, two of the recent Times headlines from the last few months, describing China’s terrible economic problems:
But automobiles are the world’s largest industrial sector, with manufacturing and sales together totaling nearly $10 trillion per year, almost twice that of any other. And the following month the Times published a chart showing the actual trajectory of China’s auto exports compared with that of other countries, and the former had now reached a level roughly six times greater than that of the U.S.
Coal mining is also one of the world’s largest industries, and China’s production is more than five times greater than our own, while Chinese steel production is almost thirteen times larger. The American agricultural sector is one of our main national strengths, but Chinese farmers grow three times as much wheat as we do. According to Pentagon estimates, China’s current ship-building capacity is a staggering 232 times greater than our own.
Obviously America still dominates some other important sectors of production, with our innovative fracking technology allowing us to produce several times as much oil and natural gas as does China. But if we consult the aggregate economic statistics provided by the CIA World Factbook or other international organizations, we find that the total size of China’s real productive economy—perhaps the most reliable measure of global economic power—is already more than three times larger than that of the U.S. and also growing much more rapidly. Indeed, according to that important economic metric, China now easily outweighs the combined total of the entire American-led bloc—the United States, the rest of the Anglosphere, the European Union, and Japan—an astonishing achievement, and something very different from what most casual readers of the Times might assume.
Obviously the lion’s share of China’s enormous success has been due to the ability and hard work of the Chinese people.
For decades, international testing has shown that China has the world’s highest average IQ, and this finding has dramatic implications at the top end. As physicist Steve Hsu pointed out in 2008, international psychometric data indicates that the American population probably contains some 10,000 individuals having an IQ of 160 or higher, while the total for China is around 300,000, a figure thirty times larger.
Over the last couple of generations, respectable American intellectual circles have severely anathemized this controversial topic, but scientific reality exists whether or not our elites choose to pretend otherwise. Indeed, these racial and evolutionary factors regarding the Chinese people have been completely obvious to me for nearly the last half-century, and such factors largely explained my confident expectations of China’s rise, expectations that have been proven entirely correct. I recently summarized these issues in a lengthy review article:
Although foreign tourists and flying drones may easily present the highlights of major cities, and international statistics can demonstrate overall economic success and prosperity, these sources of information fail to provide a sense of the ordinary daily life enjoyed by the local population. So for such insights, it is worth turning to the videos produced by Katherine, someone who has lived in China for the last six years and is completely fluent in Mandarin. Several of these described her activities as a graduate student at Nanjing University.
As those videos show, both her university grounds and the huge surrounding city seem very tastefully laid out, containing large urban nature preserves, while individual apartment complexes often include smaller parks and gardens. Contrary to what many Westerners might assume, her campus was home to a multitude of birds and numerous stray cats who enjoyed its hospitable terrain, with both of these regularly being fed by the animal-loving students. Snack-bars were freely open to everyone on an honor system, and the facilities of the university seemed as good or better than that of anything found in the West. Although her city of more than 9 million was significantly larger than New York City, she was just a five minute bike-ride from a large urban lake, which she explored in one of her videos.
Although China is mostly urbanized these days, until the 1980s an overwhelming fraction of the population was rural, living in perhaps a million small villages and following a lifestyle that had existed since time immemorial, so nearly all Chinese have personal roots in such communities. I’m sure that many Chinese sociologists have written treatises on present-day village life, but few Westerners have probably lived in such places.
However, after getting her degree in Environmental Engineering at Nanjing University, Katherine relocated to Hangzhou for a job, then during the last year finally fulfilled her dream of moving to a rural Chinese village on its outskirts. This very fortunate development allowed her to produce a long series of videos describing the first-hand experiences of her new home, including answering the many questions about village life from her curious subscribers.
She admitted that she disliked some aspects of life in her village. The local dogs all barked a great deal at night, which annoyed her until she got noise-cancelling headphones. Her small village lacked any meal delivery service and after she tired of the menu at the two local restaurants, she began cooking most of her meals at home. But she explained that her natural surroundings more than made up for those problems, with her village nestled at the foot of a huge bamboo forest, ideal for hiking, while she greatly enjoyed the presence of all the chickens, ducks, geese, and other animals.
Once installed, her Internet service worked perfectly, and the products she ordered online usually arrived in two or three days, with package deliveries dropped off a couple of times each day on a communal village rack close to her house. Although that rack was open, she never experienced any pilferage, and all her neighbors were very friendly. She didn’t have a car, but there was a twice-daily bus service that could take her to Hangzhou and one of its metro stations in forty-five minutes.
Aside from being relatively close to a major city, nothing about her village seemed particularly unusual, so watching some of those individual videos or the entire playlist My life in a Chinese village! probably provides a good flavor of China’s rural countryside, still home to hundreds of millions of Chinese.
She also produced several videos covering aspects of her recent visit back home, and I found those quite interesting as well since they highlighted the contrast with her current life in China.
In many respects, she was surprised at the technological backwardness and inconvenience of much of the American infrastructure, especially including her train trip to a conference in Milwaukee. She had planned to stop off and spend a few hours exploring Chicago, but her mother was terrified by the enormous homicide rate in that city and persuaded her against that.
As she walked through a couple of smaller American cities during the daytime, the streets and neighborhoods seemed dingy, poor, and dirty compared to what she had become accustomed to in China, though she was too polite to say that in her videos. She did mention how unattractive the buildings of her suburban middle school and high school looked compared with the ones she had seen in China.
The conversations she had with her parents, other relatives, and friends were also quite enlightening. One subject that came up was the American housing crisis, with rents having become so unaffordable that the younger generation found it very difficult to find a place to live and families were moving back to once-depopulating rural towns because expenses were so much lower.
The looming presidential election was another major subject, with both Harris and Trump widely disliked and the dispute mostly being over which would be worse, with many of the individuals mouthing campaign slogans with little enthusiasm. Although our democratic system purportedly involves the citizens in their own government, I had no sense of that in any of the discussions, and I think that most of the participants would have been much happier with a moderately competent government, whether elected or not.
Another subject was the number of genders, with the older individuals somewhat defensively asserting that there were just two, while the younger ones mostly accepted the existence of several, perhaps even five or ten different ones. So although Americans have no high-speed trains and our cities are dirty and crime-ridden, we are still far ahead of the ignorant Chinese in certain other important matters, including leading the world in the number of different human genders we have recently discovered. I’m sure that her entire Chinese audience was extremely puzzled by these strange American beliefs, so different from those of their own people, and they also wondered why so many Americans owned guns.
Considering all these factors, it’s hardly surprising that nearly all the Chinese in her videos come across as so energetic and filled with happy optimism, while the Americans on her visit back home generally seemed much more subdued and sullen, perhaps almost a little depressed at their situation.
Although many aspects of Chinese society appear remarkable to us, I think that achieving such results is much less difficult than it might seem.
Many of China’s cities are stunning in their layout and infrastructure. Yet if competent, well-trained urban planners and architects were given sufficient resources and authority and told to build neighborhoods that would be attractive, pleasant places for people to live and work, I think that they would probably produce something along those same lines. But in America, so many other competing ideological factors take precedence that nothing similar is likely to be realized. Matters might be very different if our country were still run along the lines that it had followed in the 1950s.
For similar reasons, the serious problems of crime, urban decay, and disorder are actually quite easy to solve except that our political elites chose not to do so for ideological reasons. During its long decline, the shops of the old USSR kept many ordinary consumer products under lock and key, and we always ridiculed that absurd situation. But over the last several years, many of our drug stores have begun doing exactly the same thing because of an epidemic of rampant, brazen theft, which remains unpunished for ideological reasons.
During the long decades of Soviet decline, visitors from that country who came to the West were shocked by the possibilities of what they saw, with so many aspects of our daily lives being almost unimaginable in their own society. The notion of simply going to a local market and seeing large quantities of delicious fruit, vegetables, and meat freely available for sale seemed almost utopian compared to their own practice of standing in endless long lines hoping to stock up on whatever random product had suddenly become available.
The dishonest propaganda of Soviet media always concealed these favorable aspects of Western society, so visitors from that bloc often became outraged when they discovered the lies that they had been told. Such individuals sometimes declared how much they longed to live “in a normal country,” rather than under a regime whose irrational ideological constraints had inflicted so much unnecessary misery upon its suffering people. Many Americans traveling abroad, including to China, probably sometimes experience similar sentiments.
So in many respects, the astonishing Chinese success may be less difficult to properly explain than the long record of our own American failure, which has become increasingly obvious over the decades. I suspect that if a few thousand experienced members of China’s political leadership class were simply brought to our own country and given sufficient legal authority to fix matters, within a couple of years most of our serious social problems would have been completely eliminated.
One hypothesis advanced by Prof. Kevin MacDonald is that the West has fallen under the control of a “hostile elite,” that for various reasons hates the population that it governs and has therefore deliberately sought to inflict harm upon its own society. Although I’m willing to accept that this might apply to a small fraction of those individuals, I’m skeptical that such animus is any broader than that. My own contrary explanation is that for the last generation or two, a substantial fraction of our ruling elites have consisted of parasitic and totally incompetent criminal sociopaths. But I’d freely admit that the two possibilities may sometimes be difficult to successfully distinguish in empirical fashion.
However, I do think that there are at least a handful of major cases that much better fit my own explanatory framework, and some of the video evidence from Chinese society enters into this analysis.
The dishonest anti-China propaganda foisted by our government and its media lapdogs upon ignorant Americans has sometimes taken a very sinister turn. One of the most important examples of this came in the aftermath of the sudden appearance of the deadly Covid virus in the large Chinese city of Wuhan during late 2019.
Our intelligence agencies almost immediately began circulating the claims that the virus had been the result of a lab-leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, probably a consequence of its unsafe working conditions. However, there was never the slightest solid evidence that any such lab-leak had occurred, and an experienced Western virologist working there at the time was extremely skeptical of such a possibility, while she also described the lab’s safety procedures as being outstanding.
Most Americans probably still possess the vague mental image that Chinese cities are filthy and Chinese enterprises remain backward and poorly run, and these assumptions would naturally support the idea that a careless lab-leak might have been responsible for the global pandemic that killed tens of millions. But such completely outdated and totally erroneous beliefs are very different than the actual reality of today’s absolutely spotless streets of Shanghai, a city of thirty million, and the stunning technological infrastructure found all across Wuhan. With mundane Chinese engineering functioning in almost flawless fashion everywhere across that huge country, the notion of a dangerous viral lab-leak at a highly-secure research facility seems extremely implausible.
When he earlier worked for the Times, Michael Gordon became notorious for eagerly reporting the fraudulent, planted stories of Saddam’s WMDs. Now employed at the Wall Street Journal, Gordon passed along similar American intelligence claims that three Chinese lab-workers had allegedly fallen ill with Covid in 2019 many weeks before the outbreak began, strongly suggesting that a lab-leak had occurred. Shortly before the end of the first Trump Administration, Secretary of State and former CIA Director Mike Pompeo had his subordinates release a brief summary report making those same claims.
But when our government officials were repeatedly pressed to provide the factual details of those allegedly-infected laboratory workers, the individuals they finally identified turned out to be data analysts who never had had any direct contact with the live viruses studied there, strongly suggesting that their names had merely been plucked off the Internet to fill out a propaganda-hoax.
The obvious reason for this desperate subterfuge was to deflect attention from the strong, perhaps overwhelming evidence that the global Covid epidemic had been due to the blowback from a botched American biowarfare attack against China (and Iran), and protect the rogue operatives responsible for that gigantic, worldwide disaster.
So it seems quite likely that our national government was so disorganized and poorly run that during 2019 some of its elements launched an unauthorized biological warfare attack against our Chinese and Iranian adversaries while their own president remained completely ignorant of what had taken place. Moreover, the illegal operation was so badly planned that the virus soon spread back into our own country, resulting in two years of severe social disruption while killing well over a million Americans.
I think that this unfortunate sequence of events much better fits into my own analysis of the reasons for America’s problems than that of MacDonald.
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