Dehumanize, Then Destroy: Anna Chen on How Empires Manufacture Their Enemies

If you want to understand the larger context of what is unfolding, what I would call not simply a "war on China" but a strategy of mutual denial, continuous grey‑zone warfare, the methodical crossing of red lines, and the normalization of organized violence as the permanent condition of this current multipolar order, this episode of Resistance is Fertile Podcast is essential listening.

In this episode, hosts Benji and indi.ca sit down with the brilliant Anna Chen , who masterfully cuts through decades of Western propaganda. She shows how the British Empire, and later its American successor, built a narcotics‑fueled machinery of extraction and dehumanization that never really ended. The "Yellow Peril" caricatures were, as Anna argues, instrumental (racism). To destroy, conquer, or contain a people, you must first render them less than human—a blank canvas onto which the empire projects its own crimes. This is the cultural‑psychological precondition for the violence that follows, and Anna's account of how it was manufactured, from the 19th century to the fentanyl panic of today, is masterful.

What makes Anna's analysis so vital is how she connects the drug trade to the structural-historical formation we today call the US-led empire. She illustrates how this organized violence is a direct continuation of a baton passed down from the British Empire (In other words, it is a story of an empire that has been passing the same baton—from Jardine and Matheson to the Pentagon and Palantir—for over a century.). The narco-capitalism that destroyed 19th-century China has simply mutated into the modern era, where the empire now cynically projects its own domestic decay and drug crises (like fentanyl) onto its primary (and other) geopolitical target(s).

Anna painstakingly details the modern timeline, showing how China was used to float Western capitalism (its period of financialization) through the Reagan-era wealth transfers and the 2008 financial crash, only to be rewarded with the Obama/Clinton "Pivot to Asia." This pivot marked the beginning of aggressive military repositioning and the descent into a "bunker state" mentality, where the imperial core is perfectly willing to sabotage its own supply lines and destabilize the globe rather than accept a peaceful, multipolar reality. Or as Anna calls it: the Deathstar. (But she explains it much better than me in this podcast episode.)

To get true clarity on these developments—and to understand the deeply rooted, historical continuity of this imperial playbook—I highly recommend listening to this episode. Furthermore, I highly recommend following the work of Anna Chen, who has been diligently, bravely, and painstakingly observing and documenting these developments for decades, often as a lone voice against a tide of media complicity.

Listen to the full episode here: