China’s law against foreign sanctions is a defensive measure to cope with containment and repression and is fundamentally different from “unilateral” sanctions imposed by certain countries, Zhang Yesui, spokesperson for the fifth session of the 13th National People’s Congress (NPC), told a press conference on Friday.
He said China does not stir up trouble but if others do it is not afraid. He stressed that China will safeguard its sovereignty, security and development interests and protect lawful rights and interests of Chinese citizens and organizations with measures including the law against foreign sanctions.
Zhang highlighted that China always stands for developing friendly relations with other countries based on the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, and opposes hegemonism and power politics.
Nury Vittachi: LIST OF SANCTIONS (I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP) Most of East Asia is staying well away from the conflict in eastern Europe. 制裁清單（我不是在編造這個） 東亞大部分地區都遠離東歐的衝突.
Wise, considering the irrational list of punishments being issued: • No Russia woman, man or child can get visitor visas, said Japan, the Czech Republic, and Latvia. • “Russians are not welcome here,” said Belgium’s Minister of Immigration Sammy Mahdi. • America must start “kicking every Russian student out of the United States” said US lawmaker Eric Swalwell on CNN. • No avatars of Russian footballers or teams can appear in our latest e-sports football games, said the FIFA game programmers. • No cat born in Russia can be listed on our books of pedigree animals, said the Fédération Internationale Féline. • No forests in Belarus will be included in our program on making natural areas sustainable, said the World Bank. • No Dostoevsky literature can be taught, said Italy’s main University in Milan. • No Russian science can be published in our journal said the publisher of Journal of Molecular Structure. • Swan Lake cannot be performed at our theatre, said a UK group. • No cartoon meerkats with a Russian accent will appear on TV, said a British firm. • Tchaikovsky cannot be played in Zagreb, says concert organizers
Ukrainian people protested in front of the U.S. embassy in Ukraine against the U.S.-made war incident in Ukrainian, but CNN and other Western medias will not report it! 烏克蘭人民在美國驻烏大使館前，抗議美國在烏製造戰爭事端，是真正的戰爭殺手，但CNN等西方媒體卻不會報導！
Global Times: Who is SupChina – West-backed anti-China organization exploits Ukraine crisis to further antagonistic agenda and division 環球時報：誰是SupChina – 西方支持的反華組織利用烏克蘭危機進一步對立議程和分裂 Mar 3 2022
While the world is under threat of being ripped further apart amid the ongoing Ukraine crisis, some political forces, as opposed to fixing the division, are taking advantage of the turbulence to smear China by peddling false information.
SupChina, one of many veteran China-bashing organizations, based in New York, has been actively creating, spreading, and hyping anti-China content during the ongoing crisis, trying to use the Ukrainian issue unrelated to China in all respects, to create an anti-China global public opinion.
Public opinion war has become a key frontier in the war of politics today. The US has not given up taking advantage of the Ukraine crisis to misinform and make fools of its people to form a distorted image of China, Li Haidong, a professor from the Institute of International Relations at the China Foreign Affairs University in Beijing, said.
In the long term, such anti-China forces, which are using online media tools and social platforms to serve the governments of the US and its Western allies, have been working to form a system to create a “broader and more powerful” atmosphere of public consensus to confront China, which is highly alarming, Li told the Global Times on Thursday.
From the recent articles published on SupChina’s website, it can be noticed that the organization has several “strategic goals” on Ukraine-Russia conflicts, including propagandizing the connection between the Ukraine crisis and the island of Taiwan; distorting online comments by Chinese netizens; and hyping the “soft power offensive” of China in Ukraine.
Previously, when the situation had just begun to worsen in Ukraine, a handful of netizens – male respondents to be exact – said on China’s social media platforms that they “wanted to take home Ukrainian beauties who have lost their homes amid the ongoing Ukrainian crisis,” and such comments were strongly condemned by most other Chinese netizens, and China’s internet watchdog soon took action to punish the accounts that had been posting and spreading such inappropriate comments.
However, an article published by SupChina alleged that “misogynistic comments about potential Ukrainian refugees began trending – and extended beyond the virtual borders of the Chinese internet.”
Those responsible for spreading the “Chinese netizens posting improper speeches on Ukrainian beauties” narrative on Twitter are also mainly accounts supporting “Hong Kong independence” or similar anti-China content.
The article ignored the fact that the mainstream Chinese people hold a generally friendly and empathetic attitude toward Ukraine and hope peace will soon be restored in the country, and that the Chinese government has repeatedly called for peace and talks between the stakeholders.
On February 25, SupChina also interacted with William Klein, a senior official from the American Embassy in China, to help promote the US’ political stance on Ukrainian issues.
It is easily verifiable that those who appear on the SupChina website are also anti-China veterans.
On her LinkedIn page, Anla Cheng, founder of SupChina, wrote that the platform’s aim is to “inform and educate an English speaking audience.”
Collusion of the rabble
The Global Times found that most of SupChina’s listed partners are notoriously anti-China NGOs that constantly concoct rumors about China.
The China Africa Project (CAP), for example, a US-based news and analysis outlet that claims to explore all aspects of China’s engagement with Africa, has gone on a misinformation campaign on its official website about China allegedly creating “debt traps” in Africa. The CAP has also often hosted podcasts inviting anti-China activists to bash China, trying to undermine Chinese-African relations by employing skewed perspectives.
Russia Today revealed that although the CAP was initially self-funded, it has been receiving funding from the Ford Foundation since 2018, which is inextricably linked to the US government, and even considered a front for the American spying agency CIA.
NüVoices, another SupChina partner and one that interacts closely with Muyi Xiao, a journalist at The New York Times, has produced a number of articles that target China’s family planning policy and used sexual harassment cases involving Chinese celebrities to initiate attacks against the Chinese system and stir up gender-based antagonism.
When searching SupChina-related news on the internet, it can be seen that their articles are often reposted or quoted by Radio Free Asia, the Human Rights Watch, and other typical Western anti-China organizations or cult websites.
In addition, in July 2020, Washington-based think tank the Hudson Institute, a prominent anti-China institute, also worked directly with SupChina on weaponizing COVID-19 to lambast China.
In a public discussion titled “The Pandemic Will Make US-China Relations Much Worse,” Jeremy Goldkorn, editor-in-chief of SupChina, and Robert Spalding, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and retired US Air Force brigadier general, talked up the so-called human rights abuses in China. The slanderous accusations even absurdly called for the US to decouple from China.
Misleading Chinese readers
While busy attacking China with misinformation on foreign online community platforms, SupChina also attempted to mislead readers in China by posting biased, baseless stories on Chinese social media platforms like WeChat, observers found.
By searching the keyword “SupChina” on WeChat, users can find two accounts, one of which was last updated in January 2021. WeChat showed that this account was registered in April 2018, and actively kept posting articles about China on an almost weekly basis in 2018 and 2019.
Readers who look into some of the articles that SupChina shared on WeChat may be enraged by the inflammatory content that tries hard to defame China and the Chinese people.
A “news article” posted on April 25, 2019, for instance, made fun of and smeared Chinese athletes and sports lovers with targeted inflammatory language. Starting with the subjective sentence, “If it feels like you’ve heard about Chinese marathon runners being less than honest, you’d be right,” the author publicized one or two isolated incidents of athletes who were punished for cheating to conjure up an image of a sports body riddled with dishonesty.
An article on April 10, 2019, highlighted street cleaners in Nanjing, East China’s Jiangsu Province, who debated being asked to wear smart watches, which would track the cleaners’ real-time positions. Although the smart watches did arouse controversy among the Chinese public for “distrusting employees,” the SupChina article distorted it into a “Big Brother-type surveillance system,” trying to imply this was “evidence” of China “violating human rights.” Meanwhile, the smart watch manufacturer had stipulated to Chinese media that the product didn’t invade privacy, and cleaners could take off the watches after work. The SupChina author seemed to have turned a blind eye to that very fact.
Ironically, while claiming itself an “independent media” outlet, SupChina seldom bothered to disguise its intention of defaming and even spreading its divisive rhetoric in China. In a WeChat article in December 2018, it purposely posted an incorrect map of China that excluded the island of Taiwan. The incomplete map once again revealed the separatist and anti-China face of SupChina, observers noted.
The US and its Western allies have been spreading false information and manipulating public opinion in their countries, in Europe, and in Ukraine in order to meet the need for a swayed public opinion to prepare for a confrontation with China, Li told the Global Times on Thursday. “They want to build a consensus of being unfriendly toward China.”
“However, many ordinary people may lack the ability to tell the truth and rumors apart, which will lead to disastrous effects on diplomacy and politics,” Li said. “Therefore, clarifying the facts and uncovering the dark figures behind the lies is necessary.”
Sidebar: Usual means of SupChina misleading readers
Hyping isolated cases to create an atmosphere as if China is full of that (bad) situation
Quoting only one-sided, negative comments by netizens to show that a policy is “unwelcomed”
Filling its articles with subjective, exaggerated, eye-grabbing terms
Using inaccurate maps of China, especially the ones that maliciously exclude the island of Taiwan
Anti-China propaganda is increasingly deliberate and dishonest. A recent example was illustrated through Human Rights Watch and New York Times social media posts about the alleged disinterest of the Chinese government in the health and lives of the Chinese people.
I expose how and why this propaganda is not only deliberately dishonest, but also how it is an example of Western projection where what the West is guilty of in actuality is many times worse than what the West is accusing China of in fiction.
Russia, Ukraine, and the Race Problem, Russia’s intervention in Ukraine has demonstrated just how much the West is drowning in a pool of its own racism 俄羅斯、烏克蘭和種族問題，俄羅斯對烏克蘭的干預表明，西方有多麼深陷於自己的種族主義池中by Danny Haiphong Mar 3 2022
Russia has been the subject of intense outrage in the West following its decision to wage a military offensive against Ukraine. The military operation caught many by surprise. While the Western foreign policy establishment exploited the development as a “told you so” moment, the general public was thrown into a state of utter confusion. A particularly comforting explanation for the conflict has been a singular and decontextualized “Russian aggression.” At the heart of the confusion and outrage is a tidal wave of chauvinism that has come crashing from all sides of the Western political spectrum.
That the West is saturated with anti-Russian racism should come as no surprise. Western imperialism, led by the United States, is a racist project that requires a systematic dehumanization campaign on a scale unseen in human history to justify its violent history of colonial conquest, slavery, and genocide. The Cold War elevated the importance of racism significantly. Russia, China, and the one-third of the world that was engaging in the development of socialism had committed one of the gravest crimes in the eyes of imperialism. Not only were the people of these nations standing up to their imperialist masters as humans, but they were also participating in the complete overthrow of the dominant system of exploitation.
Cold War racism was both a domestic and global weapon of war designed to strip anti-imperialist resistance of its humanity. Western elites dehumanized Black Americans fighting Jim Crow as potential “Reds” with just as much fervor as they dehumanized the people of the Soviet Union and other nations engaged in building socialism abroad. Anti-communism increased public support for devastating U.S. military interventions against nations such as Vietnam and violent state repression against domestic dissent at home.
During the Cold War, the ruling class feared that domestic dissent would find inspiration and strength via relationships with socialist and anti-colonial movements abroad. Black radicals such as Paul Robeson, Robert Williams, Claudia Jones and others were growing increasingly curious of and sympathetic to the socialist cause. The Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, Korea, Cuba and other socialist movements were viewed by an influential section of the Black movement as potential allies in the fight against Jim Crow white supremacy. Prominent Black movement leaders also worked with and in some cases joined the Communist Party of the United States to organize against economic exploitation and fight the scourge of lynch mob rule.
Paul Robeson during one of his many trips to the Soviet Union beginning in 1934. Paul Robeson’s son, Paul Robeson Jr., received part of his education in the Soviet Union before moving back to Harlem to attend high school.
The fall of the Soviet Union didn’t end the Red Scare. Indeed, the Red Scare’s ideological foundations in the dehumanization of people in resistance flowed naturally into the Global War on Terror’s campaign to overthrow the remaining independent nations in the “Middle East” and erect a massive surveillance state to fortify Western imperialist rule at home. Fear of “Islamic terrorists” and “Arabs” was spread by the ruling class’s organs of misinformation in service of these imperialist aims. As the War on Terror’s legitimacy started to wane in the age of Obama, racism of the anti-communist variety returned in the form of the New Cold War. The U.S. and its junior partners in the West declared that the new imperial mission was to “contain” China and Russia, making Red Scare racism 2.0 critical for the development of popular ambivalence to endless war.
Since the U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine in 2014, Russia has been portrayed as an “aggressor” without a cause. The nation’s President, Vladimir Putin, has been painted as the quintessential Cold War villain—a dictator whose only goal is to bring about the second coming of the Soviet Union and the KGB. In 2016, with the help of U.S. intelligence and the corporate media, Russiagate was born. Russiagate exploited anti-Russian racism by casting blame for the U.S. and West’s problems onto Russia while simultaneously accusing Russia (and everything deemed “Russian”) for interfering in the 2016 elections on the side of Donald Trump. Leftist publications and media such as Black Agenda Report were labeled “dupes” of Russia and suppressed on corporate media platforms and social media outlets accordingly.
MSNBC’s Maddow covers Russia more than all other topics combined: analysis MSNBC host Rachel Maddow was found in 2017 to have focused on Russia in at least 53 percent of her program over a six week period. Credit: Getty Images.
Russia’s intervention in Ukraine has opened the floodgates for anti-Russian racism to consume political discourse in the West. The racism has come in many forms. There is the ongoing framing in the Western media and establishment politics of Vladimir Putin as a “dictator” and a uniquely horrific evil. Some have even compared Putin to Adolf Hitler with the hardly creative moniker, “Putler.” Russia and its leaders are viewed as mindless and thoughtless “savages” deserving of the harshest punishment that can be leveled by the West. However, dehumanizing Russia and its leadership has only been one component of the West’s racist crusade. Racism requires a human subject or risk total failure as an ideological project.
That’s where Ukraine comes in. Despite being treated as vassal state of the West since the 2014 coup, Ukraine has suddenly been entrusted with the fringe benefits of whiteness. The corporate media has received significant backlash from audiences who have rightly rebuked the blatant Eurocentrism in its coverage of Ukraine. Ukraine’s Deputy Chief Prosecutor, David Sakvarelidze told BBC viewers that witnessing Russia’s intervention was an emotional experience because he saw “European people with blue eyes and blonde hair being killed” with no pushback from the hosts. CBS foreign correspondent Charles D’Agata reported that Kyiv wasn’t “Iraq or Afghanistan…this is a relatively civilized, relatively European city.”
These examples just scratch the surface of the corporate media’s racism. A total of eight were compiled by journalist Alan McLeod of MintPress News. The racist media campaign against Russia has also extended to the realm of propaganda. Ukraine has been glorified as the pinnacle of European humanity through the dissemination of fake images. Photos of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in military gear has gone viral for its example of bravery in the fight against the Russian horde. The images were actually of Zelensky on a routine visit of combat forces in eastern Ukraine three months prior to Russia’s military operation.
The most racist Ukraine coverage on TV News.
The BBC – “It’s very emotional for me because I see European people with blue eyes and blonde hair being killed” – Ukraine’s Deputy Chief Prosecutor, David Sakvarelidze
45,234 Retweets80,466 Likes Fake photos have also been disseminated to spread a narrative that Russia is committing crimes against humanity in Ukraine. A photo of Israel’s bombing of Gaza has been attributed to Russia. Palestinian resistance activist Ahed Tamimi’s viral photo of her punching an IDF soldier has also been attributed to Ukraine’s “civilized” fightback against Russia. The imperialists have thus resorted to projecting their own crimes against humanity onto Russia. One must question why it is so difficult for Western media to find legitimate examples of Russian atrocities in Ukraine, especially given that Kyiv is essentially a puppet state of the Western imperialist order that provides full access to Western media.
Perhaps the worst purveyor of Western chauvinism has emanated from the so-called “progressive” section of the Democratic Party in the United States. Popular political figures such as Bernie Sanders and Marianne Williamson have embraced the White Man’s Burden foreign policy orientation of the U.S. military industrial complex. Bernie Sanders’s statement unironically declared that Russia’s intervention “may well kill thousands” while openly calling for sanctions, a form of economic warfare which has proven to kill thousands around the world. Marianne Williamson took the desire for the United States to “DO SOMETHING” even further. Williamson endorsed the decision of the United States to send additional weapons to Ukraine on the basis that “doing nothing” doesn’t make one “anti-war.”
The bystander narrative promoted by Williamson is reminiscent of neocon hawk Samantha Power and her work on genocide. Power, who serves as Biden’s point person for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), is an important architect of humanitarian interventionism. In her famous book, A Problem from Hell: America and the age of Genocide, Power argues that the United States immorally stood by as Rwandans were massacred in the 1994 genocide. She would take her political philosophy to the Obama administration’s National Security Council where she served as a key figure in convincing Obama to overthrow the Libyan government in 2011.
Whether in the form of humanitarian interventionism or blatant anti-Russian propaganda, Western chauvinism has been remarkably effective in manufacturing consent for war. Majorities in the West hold a negative view of Russia and China. Americans in the majority support starving Russia into political submission through sanctions. While most Americans reject direct military intervention due to the heavy personal cost, they have shown a willingness to support any other act of war taken by their government to cause discord and destruction abroad. Western outrage over Russia’s intervention in Ukraine is therefore driven by a deep-seeded “America First” attitude that makes real diplomacy involving the United States impossible.
Still, the West, led by the American Empire, is in marked decline. Western chauvinism increasingly offers few fringe benefits for workers or oppressed peoples. In fact, chauvinism is tearing the West apart at the seams as sections of the ruling class compete for ideological supremacy at the expense of the people and the planet. Western chauvinism is effective for waging war, but it utterly fails to bring about stability. The importance, then, of opposing Western chauvinism and developing a peace movement rooted in solidarity has never been greater amid a Western-led New Cold War that is leading humanity into hot conflicts such as Russia’s intervention in Ukraine.
Johnson Choi Biz 