Category: China

The US War to Destroy China’s Crown Jewel and Secure US Cyber Supremacy

July 6, 2021

Stephen Gowans

When then US president Donald Trump said he would call off US efforts to extradite from Canada Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou to face bank fraud-related sanctions-evasion charges in exchange for trade concessions from China, he effectively admitted to a political kidnapping. The reality that normal US practice is to fine companies that violate US sanctions, not arrest their officers, strengthened the contention that Washington was conspiring with Canada to abduct Meng for political gain.

The Meng case has become the most high-profile aspect of a US campaign to cripple the Chinese tech champion Huawei. But it is also one of the least consequential elements of a multi-layered operation. Since 2010, Washington has spied on Huawei, declared it a national security threat whose equipment must be banned from telecom networks, starved it of US technology, harassed its employees to gather information to use in law suits against the company, and has even gone so far as to pay Huawei’s potential customers to buy from its competitors instead.

The impetus of the campaign is multidimensional and mutually reinforcing. Washington is trying to block China from achieving success in emerging tech industries. Huawei, a global telecom powerhouse, is seen by Beijing as a key player in China’s industrial strategy, a jewel in the country’s crown. Crippling the company could slow China’s technological ascent, condemn China indefinitely to low-wage manufacturing, and ultimately allow US investors, rather than Chinese enterprises, to reap the bounty of tomorrow’s industries.

Moreover, telecom networks are an important part of the infrastructure the NSA and its counterparts in the Five Eyes signal intelligence alliance—Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand—use to gather political and business intelligence, and conduct cyberattacks, around the world. As the preferred network supplier, Huawei was on track to blanket the world’s telecom networks with its gear. This was hardly an auspicious prospect for the US intelligence community. As a Chinese company, Huawei is far less likely to cooperate with US intelligence than equipment manufacturers based in countries under US influence. The latter can be expected to accede to Washington’s demands to comply with US intelligence community requests for cooperation; not so Huawei.

In 2019, Huawei was the world’s largest telecom equipment manufacturer. It had 180,000 employees and the largest R&D budget of any tech company in China. [1] Over 40 percent of its employees worked in research and development. The company was held privately, with an ownership stake divided among 81,000 employees. [2] Renowned for the quality of its gear and the attractiveness of its prices, Huawei was at the forefront of the next-generation 5G networks. [3]

As a global leader capable of outcompeting its US-allied rivals, Huawei was vitally important to Beijing’s industrial strategy. Indeed, so important was the company to Beijing, that Wall Street Journal reporters Bob Davis and Lingling Wei called the company China’s “crown jewel.” [4]

But to Washington, Huawei was a threat. Referring to 5G, US telecom experts prepared a paper for the White House warning that “For the first time in modern history, the United States has not been the leader in an emerging wave of critical technology.” [5]

Huawei’s US competitors were seen as too small to compete with the Chinese firm. [6] As for Huawei’s main competitors, Nokia, Ericsson, and Samsung, Washington and London worried that the Chinese tech company was so attractive to the world’s telecom providers that it would drive its rivals out of the 5G business. [7]

In 2010, the NSA secretly broke into Huawei’s computers, looking for evidence that the company was covertly controlled by the Chinese military, and that the company’s CEO and founder, Ren Zhengfei—he had once served in the People’s Liberation Army Engineering Corps.—retained an active role in the Chinese military. The NSA was unable to confirm its suspicions. [8]  All the same, two years later, Congress declared Huawei a national security threat, effectively shutting it out of the US market. [9]

A half a decade later, with Huawei defying Congress’s efforts to slow its rise, US National Security Advisor John Bolton decided to step up the war on Huawei. [10] Washington plotted to insert “the federal government deep into the private sector to stiffen global competition against Chinese telecom giant”. [11] Senator Tom Cotton,  author of an attack plan to “roll back Chinese power”, [12] tweeted: “@Huawei 5G, RIP.” [13]

One of the first salvos in the Bolton-initiated operation was to formalize the exclusion of Huawei from the US market. US president Donald Trump signed an executive order prohibiting US companies from doing business with China’s crown jewel. [14]

Next, Washington pressured its allies to declare Huawei’s network equipment a potential instrument of Chinese espionage. At its July, 2018 meeting in Halifax, the US-led eavesdropping network, the Five Eyes, announced it would work to ban Huawei 5G equipment from the core of its telecom networks. [15]

Other US allies were pressured to follow suit. Washington designated foreign telecom providers that shunned Huawei as ‘clean telcos’, and implied that those that did business with Huawei were US national security threats to be dealt with accordingly. [16] Frightened of US reprisals, telecom providers turned cool to the Chinese gear provider.  

US pressure to eschew Huawei was seen by foreign telecom providers as a dishonest ploy to gain leverage in trade negotiations with Beijing, rather than an effort to address legitimate national security concerns. The view was reinforced by Washington’s failure to produce evidence showing Huawei was engaged in espionage or that its equipment could be used by Beijing to eavesdrop on Western governments and businesses.

Some US allies questioned “whether America’s campaign [was] really about national security or if it [was] aimed at preventing China from gaining a competitive edge.” [17] Executives at Canada’s first and third largest telecom providers complained that they were being asked to rip Huawei gear out of their networks to satisfy US trade ambitions and to allay US fears of losing its coveted place as a global technology leader. [18]

While trade ambitions and a desire to reply to China’s challenge to US global technology leadership were playing roles in Washington’s campaign to cripple Huawei, so too was another motivation: Controlling the world’s telecom networks to allow the United States to maintain its dominant role in espionage and cyberwarfare.

When the NSA penetrated Huawei’s computers in 2010, it had two goals: First, to find out whether Huawei was an espionage threat; and second, to look for a backdoor into the company’s network equipment. “Many of our targets communicate over Huawei-produced products,” a N.S.A. document leaked by Edward Snowden said. “We want to make sure that we know how to exploit these products,” in order to “gain access to networks of interest” around the world. According to the New York Times, the NSA’s goal was “to exploit Huawei’s technology so that when the company sold equipment to other countries — including both allies and nations that avoid buying American products — the N.S.A. could roam through their computer and telephone networks to conduct surveillance and, if ordered by the president, offensive cyberoperations.” [19]

Washington argued that as a Chinese company, Huawei is obligated to comply with any request from Beijing to use its equipment as a vehicle for spying and cyberattacks. But Washington’s real concern may have been, not that Huawei was a potential tool of Chinese espionage and cyberwarfare, but that it would be an unwilling tool of US espionage and cyberaggression. In contrast, Nokia, Ericsson, and Samsung, as companies based in US satellite countries, would be far easier to recruit, either knowingly or unwittingly, as instruments of NSA eavesdropping and US cyberoperations. From Washington’s perspective, the ideal intelligence scenario would be one in which the guts of a country’s network are provided by manufacturers under US influence. Since Washington has no sway over Huawei, it is undesirable as a provider of equipment to the world’s networks. From the vantage point of US intelligence, Huawei needs to be crippled and blocked so that ductile US-allied manufacturers—Washington’s ‘security’ partners—can take its place.

In order to promote Huawei’s rivals, Washington is paying network equipment buyers to use Nokia, Ericsson, and Samsung. Acting through the U.S. International Development Finance Corp, Washington offers “financial incentives and other enticements to countries willing to shun Chinese-made telecom gear.” [20] For example, the DFC has provided a $500 million loan to a consortium of telecom companies led by the UK’s Vodaphone to build a mobile network in Ethiopia. A condition of the loan is that it cannot be used to purchase Huawei equipment. [21] Meanwhile, Congress is expected to pass legislation that will allow Eastern European countries to use US aid to build cellular networks, so long as they use Huawei rivals. [22] In effect, Washington is paying countries not to use the Chinese supplier.

The DFC was created by Congress in 2018 to compete with China’s One Belt, One Road initiative. While its  main goal is to invest in US companies, the corporation is willing to support non-US firms, if doing so hurts Huawei, and pushes NSA-compliant manufacturers to the fore . “We’re not out to play defense,” DFC head Adam Boehler told the Wall Street Journal. “We’re out to play offense.” [23]

On top of promoting Huawei’s competitors, Washington has sought to degrade the company’s products, by denying it access to the US technology it needs. In 2019, Washington banned the export of US-made chips to Huawei, and additionally blocked Huawei’s access to chips made anywhere in the world with US equipment. The aim, according to the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, is to decouple “computer technology supply chains from China” and Huawei. [24]

Washington has also mounted a campaign of harassment against the company. According to Huawei, US officials have instructed US “law enforcement to threaten, menace, coerce, entice and incite both current and former Huawei employees”. [25] US prosecutors have brought charges of racketeering conspiracy and conspiring to steal trade secrets against Huawei and its partners. [26] FBI agents have visited the homes of Huawei employees to pressure them to disclose information that could be used against the company in US courts. [27]

The most high-profile case of harassment has been the arrest of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou by Canadian officials at Washington’s request. Meng, the daughter of Huawei CEO, Ren Zhengfei, awaits a Canadian decision on her extradition to the United States. US prosecutors allege that Meng helped Huawei circumvent US sanctions on Iran by lying to banks.

On the surface, the case has a number of curious features.

First, the alleged crime appears to have little to do with the United States. Meng’s putative misdeeds occurred in Hong Kong; one of the alleged victims, HSBC, is a British bank; and the accused is a Chinese national. [28] The US connection is the alleged evasion of US sanctions on Iran, but US law does not apply to Chinese nationals or Chinese enterprises outside US jurisdiction.

Second, Washington’s standard practice is to punish corporations that violate its sanctions laws, not arrest company executives. The economist Jeffrey Sachs produced a long list of US and international banks that have paid fines to the US government for sanctions violations. None of their executives were arrested or charged with crimes. [29] Recently, the software giant SAP paid $8 million in fines for selling software to Iran. Not only were company executives spared arrest, the company wasn’t even prosecuted. Instead, it was let off with a promise to improve its compliance. [30] As Canadian political operative Eddie Goldenberg has argued, the arrest of Meng is not a criminal matter. Instead, it lies in “the realm of geopolitics. That is why Ms. Meng was personally targeted when the normal U.S. practice in similar matters is to charge the corporation, not the individual.” [31]

Third, while the Canadian government has presented the Meng affair as a purely criminal matter, when he was US president, Donald Trump told Reuters that he would intervene in her case if by doing so he could secure a better trade deal with China, suggesting Meng had been arrested as a bargaining chip. [32]

US prosecutors argue that the Huawei CFO committed bank fraud by misleading Huawei’s banks in order to evade US sanctions on Iran. The extradition case hinges on the question of whether bank fraud is a crime in both the United States and Canada. Under Canadian law, Meng cannot be extradited for an act that is not recognized as a crime in Canada.

Meng’s lawyers have argued that, notwithstanding US claims, the case pivots on sanctions-evasion, with bank fraud as a red herring. [33] “It is a fiction to contend that the United States has any general interest in policing private dealings between a foreign bank and a foreign citizen on the other side of the world. However, it is the case that the United States has a global interest in enforcing its sanctions policy. Sanctions drive this case.” [34]

Meng’s lawyers have also argued that if the Huawei CFO had misled the banks—a point they do not concede—the banks would have suffered no harm in Canada, since Ottawa has no extra-territorial sanctions which would prohibit Huawei from selling equipment to Iran, and therefore would have no reason to penalize the banks for their actions. The critical point is that deception is not fraud unless harm befalls the deceived party and a benefit redounds to the party practicing the deception. Since the banks would have suffered no harm in Canada, and neither would Huawei have obtained any gain, the necessary condition for extradition of dual criminality—that the actions of the accused constitute a crime in both Canada and the United States—has not been met. [35]

In March, Canadian officials indicated that there was a “strong possibility” that the US Justice Department would drop its extradition request if Huawei admitted guilt and agreed to pay a substantial fine. [36] Huawei CEO Ren Zhengfei rejected the offer out of hand. His daughter, he said, had “committed no crime,” adding that “the U.S. is the side that should plead guilty.” [37]

While US prosecutors and the Canadian government argue that the Meng case is non-political, and purely criminal, the United States’ top business newspaper, The Wall Street Journal, thinks otherwise. “We might prefer that prosecution of its chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou … were over something other than violating U.S. sanctions on Iran,” opined editorial writer Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. “But the U.S. is nonetheless positioning itself to destroy China’s shiniest success story.” [38]

If the US operation succeeds, not only will the world’s telecom networks be dominated by US-allied equipment manufacturers, but the United States will have secured its position as the world’s top cyberwarfare and cyberespionage threat, with the power to spy on governments and businesses, and carry out offensive cyberoperations, virtually anywhere in the world.

1 Dan Strumpf, Min Jung Kim and Yifan Wang, “How Huawei took over the world,” The Wall Street Journal, December 25, 2018

2 Ibid

3 Stephen Fidler and Max Colchester, “U.K. to Ban Huawei From Its 5G Networks Amid China-U.S. Tensions,” The Wall Street Journal, July 14, 2020

4 Bob Davis and Lingling Wei, Superpower Showdown: How the Battle Between Trump and Xi Threatens a New Cold War, Harper Business, 2020, p. 26

5 Editorial Board, “Huawei and the U.S.-China Tech War,” The Wall Street Journal, June 9, 2020

6 Ibid

7 Bojan Pancevski and Sara Germano, “In rebuke to US, Germany considers letting Huawei in,” The Wall Street Journal, February 19, 2019

8 Matthew Dalton, “Spy charges put Huawei’s European ambitions in jeopardy,” The Wall Street Journal, January 14, 2019

9 Ibid

10 Bob Davis and Lingling Wei, Superpower Showdown: How the Battle Between Trump and Xi Threatens a New Cold War, Harper Business, 2020, p. 25

11 Drew FitzGerald, Sarah Krouse, “White House Considers Broad Federal Intervention to Secure 5G Future,” The Wall Street Journal, June 25, 2020.

12 Gerald F. Seib, “Tom Cotton Has a China Coronavirus Attack Plan,” The Wall Street Journal, May 11, 2020

13 Bob Davis and Lingling Wei, Superpower Showdown: How the Battle Between Trump and Xi Threatens a New Cold War, Harper Business, 2020, p. 27

14 Parmy Olson, “US would rethink intelligence ties if allies use Huawei technology,” The Wall Street Journal, April 29, 2019

15 Matthew Dalton, “Spy charges put Huawei’s European ambitions in jeopardy,” The Wall Street Journal, January 14, 2019

16 Stephen Fidler and Max Colchester, “U.K. to Ban Huawei From Its 5G Networks Amid China-U.S. Tensions,” The Wall Street Journal, July 14, 2020

17 Matthew Dalton, “Spy charges put Huawei’s European ambitions in jeopardy,” The Wall Street Journal, January 14, 2019

18 Christine Dobby, “Bell, Telus warn of 5G delays, higher costs if Ottawa joins peers in banning Huawei,” The Globe and Mail, December 21, 2018

19 David E. Sanger and Nicole Perlroth, “N.S.A. Breached Chinese Servers Seen as Security Threat,” The New York Times, March 22, 2014

20 Stu Woo and Drew Hinshaw, “U.S. Fight Against Chinese 5G Efforts Shifts From Threats to Incentives,” The Wall Street Journal, June 14, 2021

21 Alexandra Wexler and Stu Woo, “U.S. Fund Set Up to Counter China’s Influence Backs Covid-19 Vaccine Maker in Africa,” The Wall Street Journal, June 30, 2021

22 Stu Woo and Drew Hinshaw, “U.S. Fight Against Chinese 5G Efforts Shifts From Threats to Incentives,” The Wall Street Journal, June 14, 2021

23 Editorial Board, “Huawei and the U.S.-China Tech War,” The Wall Street Journal, June 9, 2020

24 Ibid

25 William Mauldin and Chao Deng, “US-China talks stuck in rut over Huawei,” The Wall Street Journal, July 17, 2019

26 , Jacquie McNish, Aruna Viswanatha, Jonathan Cheng and Dan Strumpf, “U.S. in Talks With Huawei Finance Chief Meng Wanzhou About Resolving Criminal Charges,” The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 4, 2020

27 William Mauldin and Chao Deng, “US-China talks stuck in rut over Huawei,” The Wall Street Journal, July 17, 2019

28 K J Noh, “Why Canada must release Meng Wanzhou,” Asia Times, October 30, 2020

29 Jeffrey D. Sachs, “The U.S., not China, is the real threat to international rule of law,” The Globe and Mail, December 12, 2018

30 Aruna Viswanatha, “SAP Admits Iran Sanction Violations to Justice Department,” The Wall Street Journal, April 29, 2021

31 Eddie Goldenberg, “Want to bring the Michaels home? Send Meng Wanzhou back to China,” The Globe and Mail, January 16, 2020

32 Bob Davis and Lingling Wei, “China moves to address US economic concerns,” The Wall Street Journal, December 11, 2018

33 Sean Fine, Andrea Woo, and Xiao Xu, “Fraud allegations are a façade, lawyers for Meng Wanzhou argue at extradition hearing,” The Globe and Mail, January 20, 2020

34 Ibid

35 Dan Bilefsky, “Huawei executive goes to court, fighting extradition to US,” The New York Times, January 19, 2020

36 Robert Fife and Steven Chase, “Canada held secret U.S. talks in bid to free Kovrig, Spavor jailed in China,” The Globe and Mail, June 7, 2021  

37 Robert Fife, Steven Chase, and Nathan Vanderklippe, “Meng Wanzhou in talks with U.S. Justice Department to allow her to return to China, The Globe and Mail, December 3, 2020

38 Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., “U.S. Can Destroy Huawei, Part Two,” The Wall Street Journal, January 29, 2019

US black legend journalism blunders in attempt to discredit Chinese vaccine

Stephen Gowans

June 28, 2021

A Wall Street Journal article has attempted to discredit the effectiveness of China’s Sinovac Covid-19 vaccine, even though the article presents data which show the vaccine to be highly effective, but does so in a way that conceals the shot’s efficacy and suggests the vaccine has largely failed.

The article is emblematic of black legend journalism aimed at China—the Western media practice of painting a defamatory picture of the Communist country in order for Washington to better battle it, and to discourage other countries that may be seeking to engage more deeply with Beijing, especially in trade and investment.

Among the defamations are claims that China is perpetrating a genocide against the Uyghur people, is exploiting coerced labor in Xinjiang, is engaged in covering up a coronavirus lab leak, and, now, is peddling ineffective vaccines across the global south.

More than one hundred years ago, Lenin identified the practice of black legend journalism aimed at China. “At the present time, the press is conducting a campaign against the Chinese,” he wrote in 1900, in connection with the Boxer Rebellion. “Journalists who crawl on their bellies before the government and the money-bags are straining every nerve to arouse the hatred of the people against China.”

The latest attempt to inspire enmity against a country which Washington has issued a virtual declaration of war against, is Jon Emont’s June 27, 2021 Wall Street Journal article titled “Covid-19 Killed 26 Indonesian Doctors in June—at Least 10 Had Taken China’s Sinovac Vaccine.”

According to Emont, “At least 10 of the 26 doctors in Indonesia who died from Covid-19 this month had received both doses of the vaccine developed by Sinovac Biotech Ltd.”, raising “questions about the Chinese-made shot that is being used in many parts of the developing world.”

Rounding out his attack on CoronaVac, the name of Sinovac’s Covid-19 vaccine, Emont went on to quote two professors, one from the UK, who opined that “the Sinovac vaccine was ‘probably not as effective a vaccine as most of the other vaccines that are on the market’,” and another from Hong Kong, who recommended that Indonesian medical workers be given “a U.S.-developed shot to ensure stronger protection.”

Emont’s message is clear: The Sinovac vaccine is largely ineffective, US-developed vaccines are superior, and Chinese vaccines are leaving the global south unprotected.

The problem is that the data in Emont’s report make a stronger case that the Sinovac vaccine is highly effective than largely ineffective.

According to his reporting, “Around 90% of Indonesian doctors—roughly 160,000 in all—have been vaccinated with Sinovac’s shot.” This information, along with Emont’s lead that at least 10 of the 26 doctors who died had been vaccinated, is all that is needed to estimate the efficacy of Sinovac’s vaccine in reducing Covid-19 mortality among Indonesian doctors.

The table below assembles the data Emont provided. Figures marked by an asterisks were directly cited in his article. The remainder are arithmetic deductions (e.g., if 10 of 26 doctors who died were vaccinated, then 26 – 10 = 16 were not vaccinated.)

Vaccinated (90%)*Not vaccinated (10%)Total (100%)
[A] Died from Covid-1910*1626*
Didn’t die from Covid-19159,99017,762177,752
[B] Total160,000*17,778177,778
Mortality rate [A/B]0.0063%0.0900%0.0146%

At less than one two-hundredths of one percent, the Covid-19 mortality rate among Indonesian physicians is vanishingly small. It’s questionable that a Covid-19 mortality rate this miniscule merits an article in a major US newspaper. Lenin’s imagery of journalists “straining every nerve” is highly relevant here.

The mortality rate is much smaller among vaccinated than unvaccinated doctors. In fact, doctors who were vaccinated with CoronaVac were more than fourteen times less likely to die from Covid-19 compared to unvaccinated physicians. This translates into an efficacy rate of 93 percent, using a formula analogous to the one used to calculate vaccine efficacy (see the note at the end).

Emont blundered by restricting his analysis to doctors who died, rather than comparing the mortality rate of unvaccinated physicians to those who received the vaccine. Because the vast majority of Indonesian doctors are vaccinated, most Covid-19 deaths are going to happen in this group owing to its preponderant size.

Emont’s error is tantamount to arguing that most people who die in traffic accidents were wearing seatbelts, therefore seatbelts are ineffective. Since most people wear seatbelts, it’s likely that most traffic deaths will happen among this majority group. To know how effective seat belts are, traffic accident fatality rates must be compared between two groups: those who wear seat belts and those who don’t. When the analysis is done properly, the conclusion is that seatbelts are effective.

Likewise, to examine the efficacy of a vaccine, those who are vaccinated must be compared with those who aren’t. When the analysis is done this way, it appears that Sinovac’s vaccine has worked well.

It’s possible that Emont is numerically and logically inept, and that he made an honest error, but then we would have to conclude that his editors are equally inept, also a possibility. However, just as some stories are too good to check, so too is some stupidity too good to correct. I have had opportunity on countless occasions to see research of low quality receive unqualified praise when it corroborated a desired political position, while research of high quality was torn apart that challenged the same stance.

It’s possible that Emont’s blunder was overlooked because it said what the Wall Street Journal’s editors and owners, the US government, Wall Street money-bags, and not least, those with investments in Western vaccines, wanted to hear. Or it could have been a crafty construction of a defamatory anti-Chinese message. Whatever the case—stupidity allowed by a system of propaganda to evade all checks, or a deception deliberately constructed to fit such a system—Sinovac’s vaccine appears to have been effective in protecting Indonesian doctors from Covid-19 mortality.   

Blunders of this sort, along with shoddy reporting on the Uyghurs and alleged coerced labor in Xinjiang, all of which rely on patently biased sources, along with the resurrection of a conspiracy theory about a lab leak that is manifestly inspired by the political goal of diverting attention from Washington’s abject pandemic failures, can’t help but recall Lenin’s imagery of journalists crawling on their bellies before the government and the money-bags, straining every nerve to rouse the hatred of the people against China.

Notes

1 The formula used to calculate the efficacy of CoronaVac in reducing Covid-19 mortality among Indonesian doctors is:

Efficacy = (mru – mrv) / mru X 100%

where

mru is the mortality rate among the unvaccinated

mrv is the mortality rate among the vaccinated

2 My analysis of CoronaVac’s efficacy in reducing mortality among Indonesian doctors departs from a proper analysis, which would require random assignment of doctors to vaccinated and non-vaccinated groups. Assuming this didn’t happen, the Indonesian doctors who weren’t vaccinated may be different in important ways from those who were–in ways that make them more or less likely to be exposed to SARS-CoV-2 or die from the disease. It cannot, therefore, be concluded from my analysis that CoronaVac is highly effective, but the analysis strongly challenges Emont’s reporting and is far more supportive of the idea that CoronaVac works well in reducing Covid-19 mortality than doesn’t.

Washington’s Lab Leak Playbook Revealed?

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We need an inquiry into the origins of the pandemic

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A scandal is being thuggishly covered up by a regime more interested in propaganda than human life

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The politics of the Wuhan lab leak hypothesis

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Do Communist-Led States Protect Public Health Better Than Capitalism?

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The Catastrophes of the Pandemic are the Catastrophes of Capitalism

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The watchdogs of imperialism and the Uyghur genocide slander

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The problematic relationship of Canada’s parliament to the concept of genocide

By Stephen Gowans

February 23, 2021

Sadly, a country that has played a significant role in what David E. Stannard called the American Holocaust, the massive depopulation of aboriginal people from the Americas, has blithely debased genocide by ignoring it where it occurs and condemning where it hasn’t.

In a vote of 266 for, and 0 against, the Canadian House of Commons declared on Monday that Chinese authorities committed atrocities in Xinjiang that contravene the United Nations’ Genocide Convention.

Canada’s parliamentarians made this declaration on the basis of dubious evidence, sourced to an ideologically-inspired researcher who opposes communism and openly seeks the demise of the Chinese Communist Party.  

The allegation is politically contrived, not legally defensible.

On the eve of the vote, the magazine Foreign Policy reported that “The U.S. State Department’s Office of the Legal Advisor” had concluded that “there was insufficient evidence to prove genocide.”

Even John Ibbitson, a right-wing columnist with the Globe and Mail, a Canadian newspaper which has led the charge against China, conceded that the case that Beijing has breached the United Nations genocide convention had not been made. (That didn’t stop him, however, from insisting that China had committed genocide notwithstanding.)

The genocide allegation, the fantasy of German anthropologist Adrian Zenz, which was aped by Canada’s parliament, is “ridiculous to the point of being insulting to those who lost relatives in the Holocaust”, intoned Lyle Goldstein, a China specialist and Research Professor in the Strategic and Operational Research Department of the Naval War College, quoted by The Grayzone.

The Grayzone’s Gareth Porter and Max Blumenthal showed that the genocide charge—first made by former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo in the dying days of the Trump administration—rests on dubious analyses carried about by Zenz.

Zenz has argued that the evidence for a Beijing-orchestrated genocide lies in the decline in the birth rate of Xinjiang’s Uyghur population. While it is true that rate at which the Uyghur population is growing has slowed, slower growth does not mean no growth, or contraction. Indeed, the Uyghur population continues to grow. Growth has slowed because Beijing is enforcing measures to limit population growth in the form of a two child per couple limit (three in rural areas) which apply equally to Uyghurs, and the Han Chinese ethnic majority, alike. Previously, the policy was not rigidly enforced in Xinjiang. Today it is, with the consequence that the Uyghur population is growing, but not as rapidly as it once was. Zenz has seized on the change in birth rate as evidence of genocide. While the UN Convention would define the prevention of births with the intention of destroying the Uyghurs as genocide, Uyghurs aren’t prevented from having children. On the contrary, with a limit of two children per couple and three in rural areas–the same limit that applies to the Han majority–Uyghurs are hardly being subjected to a discriminatory policy of birth control or a demographic genocide.

The German researcher is a senior fellow with the US-government-founded Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, which works toward the destruction of the Chinese Communist Party.

As for Pompeo—who did much to publicize Zenz’s nonsense–he once boasted that under his leadership the CIA “lied, cheated, and stole.”  

It is no secret that the United States, and its ductile and craven subordinate Canada, regard China as an economic and ideological rival. Ever since the People’s Republic of China began to challenge US economic and technological primacy, departing from its Wall Street-desired role as low-wage manufactury for US corporations and market for advanced Western goods and services, the United States has pursued a campaign of information warfare to discredit Beijing and blacken China’s reputation.

Joe Biden endorsed this approach nearly a year ago in an article he wrote for Foreign Affairs.

“The most effective way to meet” the “challenge” of China getting “a leg up on dominating the technologies and industries of the future,” the future president wrote, is “to build a united front of US allies and partners to confront China’s abusive behaviors and human rights violations.”

If Biden had said that Chinese human rights violations in their own right merited a campaign to confront Beijing, the sincerity of his entreaty might, for a brief moment, have appeared to possess a jot of credibility. But Washington has shown itself to have an endless tolerance for human rights abuses, as long as they serve US corporate and strategic interests. And he didn’t say that China ought to be confronted over actual human rights abuses; he said that confronting China over human rights (presumably real or imagined) is an effective way to deal with China as an economic rival.

China’s economic rivalry is matched by its systemic rivalry. Where the Chinese government has overcome the Covid-19 pandemic, set its economy once again on a growth trajectory, and lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty (a project that continues unabated), governments in North America have proved themselves incapable of meeting the health, human welfare, and economic challenges of Covid-19. While Chinese citizens look to the future with optimism, their living standards ever improving,  North Americans look to the future with pessimism, plagued by governments that fail to deliver, growing inequality, declining economic opportunity for all but the wealthiest, and incomes that, at best, stagnate.

As the former US diplomat Chas Freeman recently pointed out,

This year, China will celebrate the 100th anniversary of its ruling Communist Party.  Chinese associate the Party with the astonishingly rapid transformation of their country from a poor and beleaguered nation to a relatively well off and strong one.  Most Chinese  … are optimistic that the enormous progress they have experienced in their lifetimes will continue.  China’s decisive handling of the pandemic has bolstered its citizens faith in its system.  Morale is high.  China is focused on the future.

By contrast,

….the United States entered this year in an unprecedented state of domestic disarray and demoralization.  A plurality of Americans disputes the legitimacy of the newly installed Biden administration. Despite a booming stock market supported by cheap money and chronic deficit spending, we are in an economic depression.

If a government fails to delivers for its citizens while its rival succeeds, what better way to divert attention from its failure and recover its credibility than to create a dark legend to vilify its successful rival and a golden legend to celebrate itself?  Certain players in the United States and Canada—Biden, Pompeo, the Canadian parliament, and the mass news media—have chosen to follow this course, and are doing so by carelessly echoing accusations of genocide made by an anti-Communist fanatic with an ideological ax to grind. The practice debases the very concept of genocide. Sadly, it is hardly new.

From my window, I can see Canada’s National Holocaust Monument. A short distance away is the site of the as-yet-completed Memorial to the Victims of Communism. Canada commemorates the genocide of the Jews (carried out in another land by another people) but does not commemorate the Canadian Holocaust, carried out on its own territory by its own people. At the same time, it commemorates the Nazis, fascists, and their supporters, who perpetrated the Holocaust Canadians profess to abhor. The ‘victims’ the memorial honors, were, after all, the very same people the communists jailed and executed.

Canada has no monument to the Canadian Holocaust. While it is prepared to ensure “the lessons of the [Nazi] Holocaust … remain within the national consciousness for generations to come,” it makes no such commitment to ensuring the lessons of the Canadian holocaust remain in the national consciousness, much less enter it.

As for The Holocaust, with a capital H, the Canadian government defines that genocide as “the mass extermination of over six million Jews and countless other victims.”

Who are these countless other victims?

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which defines the Holocaust as ‘the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jewish men, women, and children by the Nazi regime and its collaborators,” has the answer. Helpfully, the Museum enumerates its victims. Unhelpfully, it lists the victims in a way that obfuscates who the primary victims were.

The Museum claims there were nearly 12.5 million non-Jewish Slavs (comprising Soviet civilians, Soviet prisoners of war, and Poles) who were victims of the Holocaust and Nazi persecution, as against the usually cited six million Jews. The Museum breaks out the Slav groups separately, so that individually, neither group preponderates Jewish victims, and in listing the victims this way, the reality that the principal victim category was Slavs, not Jews, is obscured. Richard C. Lukas made a brave attempt to correct this oversight in his 1986 book Forgotten Holocaust.

The conclusion, then, is that while both Canada and the United States commemorate the genocide of the Jews, they have anonymized the more numerous Slav victims, and have largely made them invisible—consonant with the refusal of both countries to commemorate the much larger holocaust against American Indians perpetrated on their own territories.

The elevation of Jews to the status as principal–and in the pedestrian understanding, the sole—victims of the Nazi genocide, did not happen by accident. It is the outcome of a political agenda—one of legitimizing the Zionist settler colonial project in Palestine; sheltering it from criticism; and allowing Zionists to conceal the true motivations for their settler colonialism and aggression on behalf of US foreign policy behind a pretext of Holocaust-prevention. The entire project of Zionism in West Asia, sponsored and bankrolled by the US state, is to promote US corporate, and particularly energy, interests, contra indigenous movements for national independence and sovereignty, rationalizing every action taken on behalf of this project as necessary to prevent another Holocaust.

Likewise, the fabrication of a black legend about a Chinese holocaust in Xinjiang has a political purpose: to discredit an economic and systemic rival.

The holocaust against the Slavs; the Germans’ earlier holocaust against the Nama and Herero people of southwestern Africa; and countless other holocausts perpetrated by colonial powers against defenseless peoples, are marginalized and never memorialized for the simple reason that they were modelled, sometimes explicitly, on the American and Canadian Holocausts. Genocide, as Mahmood Mamdani has pointed out, is an act of nation building, and European settlers in North America provided the template.

Nazi Germany deliberately sought to exterminate the Slavs of Eastern Europe, a territory its leaders saw as equivalent to the North American West. Just as Europeans committed a genocide against the American Indians and stole their land, Germans, following the American model, would exterminate the Slavs and steal their land. It was on this very same territory that the majority of the world’s Jews lived, and were victimized—along with their non-Jewish Slav neighbors—by Germans inspired by the US and Canadian conquest of the North American West.

David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen recounted in their 2010 book, The Kaiser’s Holocaust, that “Hitler told his entourage that the peoples of the East were to suffer the same fate as the ‘Red Indians.’ They were to be exterminated and then simply forgotten. ‘We also eat Canadian wheat’, [Hitler] reminded his audience, ‘and don’t think about the Indians.’”

Beijing has had to contend with jihadist violence in Xinjiang, just as other governments have found it necessary to deal with violent jihadism on their own or other territories. The approach of the United States and Canada to violence inspired by political Islam has been war, military occupation, assassinations, torture, arbitrary detention, massive electronic surveillance of their own populations, and Islamophobia.

Beijing, by contrast, has followed an approach based on job training, economic development, and deradicalization. Part of the reason US and Canadian governments have called for boycotts against goods produced in Xinjiang is to stymy Beijing’s efforts to mitigate the problem of violent Jihadism through economic development.

That China is relying on uplift and deradicalization to conciliate its jihadists, rather than aping the US approach of assassination, torture, and secret prisons, explains why “the Organization of Islamic Cooperation — a group of 57 nations that has been a vocal defender of the Rohingyas and Palestinians” has “praised China for ‘providing care to its Muslim citizens.’” Similarly, in July, 2019, “a host of Muslim-majority nations, including Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt, Syria and the United Arab Emirates”, signed “a letter to the United Nations Human Rights Council praising China’s governance of Xinjiang.”

If the US response has been decidedly violent, the response of governments with significant Muslim populations has been similar to that of China. Egypt and the Gulf states detain jihadists and Islamist radicals and enrol them in ‘deradicalization’ programs.  It is the similarity in approach to China, according to The Wall Street Journal, that accounts for why Muslim-majority countries have not censured China for its response to Islamist violence. On the contrary, they have praised Beijing for its treatment of China’s Muslim population.

The careless hurling of genocide charges, in the context of a commercial rivalry between a US-led West and China, stamps the practitioners of this regrettable act as chauvinists, prepared to stoop to any depth to give “their” bourgeoisie a leg up in a competition with an international rival. That the so-called progressive wing of Canada’s parliament, the New Democratic Party and Green Party, voted en masse for the anti-Chinese motion, is a stain on their record, but only one of many, and hardly surprising. Progressives have made a habit, dating back to World War One, of backing “their” bourgeoisie, even to the point of siding with their own ruling class in the industrial slaughter of their class cohorts. The infamy continues.

Rather than taking up the jingo’s cry against an emerging China by endorsing a politically-inspired confection concocted by Adrian Zenz, an anti-Communist fanatic who believes a supreme being has inspired him with a mission to destroy the Chinese Communist Party, Canada’s parliamentarians ought to address a genocide that really did happen—the one perpetrated on their own territory, which they continue to ignore.