826 million Golden Week passengers traveled during the Mid-Autumn Festival and National Day holidays, up  4% from 2019. Holiday tourism generated $104.68, up 1.5% from 2019. Read article →

Xinjiang's $3 billion Golden Week revenue, up 8% from 2019. Read article →

3 million vehicles sold last month, making 21 million YTD, up 8.2% from a year earlier. NEV sales rose 28% to 904,000 units, 32% of the total. Read article →

Three Gorges Dam: 127 million tonnes of freight YTD, the first time the world's largest hydropower project's ship lock broke the 120-million-tonne mark so early in the year – after 20 years of operation. Read article →

China Post revenues rose 8% to $80 billion YTD, as its just-completed global network of 120,000 delivery trucks and 42 cargo aircraft began to pay off. Read article →

The Fuling shale gas field has produced over 60 billion cubic meters since it opened in Chongqing in 2014, China's first large-scale shale gas field. It has proven reserves of 900 billion cubic meters and a daily gas of 23 mcm. Read article →

Above: penetration rate of Fiber to the Home, FTTH. All villages have broadband and optical broadband is super cheap: 100Mbps is $3/month. Read article →

After the the US sanctioned Huawei, the Chinese state started backing Huawei's investment arm, Habo Investment. Habo identified weak links and chokepoints in the manufacturing supply chain, invested in them and gave them its R&D prowess. Central and provincial governments followed with investments of their own. All the investments work together to create a semiconductor manufacturing ecosystem, from Design to Materials to Equipment to Fabrication. Huawei's contribution isn't limited to high end manufacturing, it's has a positive effect on the entire manufacturing supply chain. For example, Huawei works closely with BYD (biggest EV maker in the world) in smart manufacturing solutions. Read article →

Although SMIC, China's largest semiconductor manufacturer, has been blacklisted by the US government, it earned a record $1.5 billion in revenue from the American chip-design customers. In May of 2023, SMIC opened an office in California, and crowds of American semiconductor industry executives came to the scene to celebrate. Read article →

65% of EVs worldwide are made in China. YTD, the US has made 1 million and China 6.2 million EVs. Read article →

Daocheng Solar Radio Telescope 

World's first integrated neuro-memristor chip supports high-efficiency edge learning demonstrated at Tsinghua. TP Huang: "Memristors regulate current in circuits and remember the last charge that flowed through it, without using power. Storing processors and data in the same place gets memory closer to processors. Chinese memory chip technology at 1,000 layers, so this will achieve millions, then billions of synapses on one 3D chip, making circuit boards unnecessary.  A wireless network can make truly distributed computing". Read article → 

 "Expensive and wasteful”: TSMC founder Zhang Zhongmou called US effort to increase the production of domestic chips. "The cost of production in the US is prohibitive." TSMC's Oregon factory, established in 2000, found the cost of making chips 50% higher than that in Taiwan. Existing US design talents are among the world's best, but the shortage of chip manufacturing talent is very serious. Read article →

 Click here to Download Expats' Guide to Shanghai

Why do people who have been to China and the USA prefer China? I am an American. I have been living in China for nearly twenty years now. I have the option to return back to the ‘States. Instead I decided to stay in China. Here’s some bullet points of MY reasons why I stayed, and why I have absolutely no inclination, nor desire to return “home”.
·        I have a family here. When I tried to move back to the United States, the Consulate official refused to grant a spousal visa to my wife. Claiming that she was too beautiful, and was only using me to go to America. Well, we decided against moving to the ‘States. Instead, we moved to American Samoa which is a US Territory. Played a bit, and then returned back to China. China is THE place to raise a family.
·        I own homes / property here. I have roots. I have homes. I have a nice car. I have clubs, and social groups that I belong to. But in the United States, it’s a different story. I don’t own any homes, or cars, or property or businesses, or storage lockers there. It’s one big land of “empty” as far as I am concerned. My possessions and all the rest is in China.
·        I have a modest income. Fixed plus some international income. It’s enough to life off of in China with a nice middle class lifestyle. But I would be living in absolute poverty if I were in the United States.
·        I have friends and a social life. In the ‘States, I had a television set, and a computer. That was my social life. The towns and suburbs where I lived were all quiet and lonely places. Nice well mowed lawns, but zero social interaction. Not so in China. It’s boisterous and entertaining. Everyday is Christmas and the fourth of July.
·        I will live longer. In Western Pennsylvania, as a white male, my life expectancy is to age 76. China’s life expectancy is around 84, but here, in the Pearl River Delta, the life expectancy is 94. I can expect that by living the local lifestyle to approach the local life expectancy.
·        The food is healthy. No GMOs. No hormones. Everything is fresh. Lots of fish to eat, and the prices are so reasonable. And it is delicious too. In America, it’s all grilled and fried GMO laden protein slabs. Breakfasts of sugar coated something in homogenized milk substitute, eaten cold while in a rush.
·        I eat better. Sure, I could eat “city chicken”, pot roasts, meatloaf, at fine family sit-down meals. But truthfully that is something that never really happened. Instead, I often ate fast food, pizzas, and a weekend meal in a chain restaurant like Olive Garden, Shoneys, or a “King Buffet”. Here, we eat formal sit-down meals, and enjoy the many, many food venues that are so cheap and easy to experience.
·        It is pet friendly. Contrary to the Western “news”, the Chinese absolutely love dogs and cats. On a scale that blows my mind. I have never seen such pampered and adored pets in my life, but here it is normal, and I am really ok with that.
·        It is safe. I mean super safe in China. No violent crime, and personal crime is way down. You don’t need to carry a gun. You don’t need to put locks on your doors. You don’t need to worry about a mass shooting at your kid’s school.
·        Orderly. I love the order, and the attention to detail. Street sweepers in the early morning, followed by large group dancers. Delivery services delivering goods, and people calmly going about their business.
·        Medical Care is affordable. Really. You don’t need to pay $5000 every month for American insurance. You also don’t need prescriptions to buy most medicines. Costs are super affordable. So no need for medical insurance. Easy access to doctors and clinics. New, state of the art, hospitals. And access to Chinese traditional medicines.
·        Traditional. No “womans libbers”, and woke anything. People fall in love, get married, and set up traditional households. And have children. That appeals to me, and it is really refreshing compared to the mess of the United States.
·        No pollution. Seriously. Blue skies every single day. Where I live is lush, tropical, with amazing smells, and fine weather. Even when it is overcast, and humid (Monsoon season) the lushness and the scents of all the flowers is simply wonderful.
·        The Schools are great. My kids attend local Chinese schools. They are bilingual, and they have instilled military discipline. I’ve read a lot of disparagement about the Chinese educational system, but I really disagree. To get where I am was though difficult choices, tough efforts, and a rigorous sense of discipline. That is automatically instilled into my children. I really admire that.
·        You can participate. China is a society of participants. While the United States is a nation of spectators. If you are “local”, you don those yellow, red or blue vest and help. You clean the streets. You organize events. You help others in need. You watch over the children. It’s so refreshing from the entitlement society that I came from.
·        Nothing is “woke”. No LGBQ+ pushing their strange ideas on your children. No obese people riding four-wheeled electric gurneys. No tattoo laden Chicks with big-ass nose rings, and green hair. No gangs of thugs preying on people, cars waiting at a stop light or looting stores.
·        People are happy. China is up-beat, happy. The music is calm and soothing or up-beat dance music. Dance venues, singing venues are everywhere. You are not living life if you are not dancing and singing, and this fits me well.
·        China is convenient. Everything is orderly, and volunteers are often available to help you. You pay by QR, and I haven’t carried cash in years. Face scanning is normal, and it is used to go in most places. There’s no April tax reporting American style, and taxes are graduated, but tiny in comparison to the massive American chunks taken from you.
·        I can save. In the United States, it was impossible to save money without taking a hit on lifestyle. I lived paycheck to paycheck, and with the endless layoffs, and downsizing, I just couldn’t save. This caused all sorts of stress. Not so in China. China doesn’t have all those rules, laws, or hands on your wallets. And because of that, I have a very nice savings and financial cushion.
·        Drinking culture. It’s no big deal. Alcohol is not “carded” and you are always served high end super potent alcohol when you have get-together’s. Same with cigarettes, and betel nut. You just go to a store and buy it. No “liquor laws” specifying “dry counties” and “Sunday rules”.
·        China is reasonable. A comparison between American “news”, and Chinese news is all you need to see. I’ll leave it at that.
·        Holistic traditional medicine is used. In the United States, the Rockefeller's gave “modern” Western medicine a monopoly by banning all traditional forms of physical care. China, on the other hand, embraces traditional remedies alongside the Western equivalents. The result is a balanced mix of price and soft-easy body maintenance.
·        Chinese leaders deserve respect. China is a merit-driven society. So everyone got to where they are through hard work and perseverance. So it is something that I am comfortable with. As, that is my personality, and my story. So like attracts like, and I am very comfortable here.
·        China is a peaceful place. It really is. Even in the most boisterous places, there’s oasis of sanity everywhere. You just simply pass through a door, and you are in another world. parks, trees, flowers and birds are everywhere.
·        China is the future. No matter what the American media says. And America’s days are gone. With the probable sunset some time in the early 1960’s.
So, what’s the problem? I mean, and am being clear about it. I like China far more than America. I spent 40 some years in the United States, moved to China and have been here some 20+ years. And, based on my personal experience, it suits me.
Robert Vannrox, Former Operator at Office of Naval Intelligence (1981–2007). Read article →

And so the Uyghurs were reborn as a people, professing a new religion and speaking a different language. But this transmutation is informatively contradicted by genetics: the Karluks and Old Uyghurs were related Turkic people who together rose in Mongolia in the 7th century as the eastern steppe’s earlier ruling dynasties collapsed. Genetically, they were both ultimately Siberian, despite having absorbed some Iranian ancestry thousands of years earlier from Scythians, Sarmatians and their Indo-Iranian predecessors. They were heirs to the Xiongnu and subsequent Turkic people. The Old Uyghur arrival in the Tarim Basin after 800 AD is visible in the genetic patterns we see in modern Uyghurs, with a several-century-long rise in northern East Asian ancestry evident in ancient DNA. Combined with the older Iranian, Tocharian, Han, Tibetan and Siberian forager ancestry, all the major threads were in place when the Mongols conquered Xinjiang in the 1200’s. 

Since then, the social and political changes have been memetic, not genetic. The arrival of Kara-Khanids, Chagatai, Kalmyks and Manchu were matters of elite transfers of power. The demographic vortex that had been the Tarim Basin since the end of the last Ice Age finally slowed to a steady state that would endure in the second millennium of the Common Era. The modern Uyghurs have roots ancient and recent; from Turks who arrived 1,000 years ago, to Han Chinese who followed imperial armies 2,000 years ago, Iranians who came in their chariots 3,500 years ago and proto-Tocharians who drove their herds into Dzungaria 4,500 years ago, and the ancestors of the Tarim Basin mummies who may have arrived as early as 9,000 years ago. The Uyghurs have always been there, despite their modern name being a creation of 20th-century Communist ethnologists. And perhaps, unlike the Dzungars, whatever their official name, the timeless Uyghur presence will prove permanent, withstanding even the most vicious 21st-century Chinese Communist attempts to suppress the most salient features of their cultural identity or extirpate them completely from their homeland after a tenure millennia in the making. Eternal Equipoise: millennia at Eurasia’s heart.

Global Times: The Israel-Palestine conflict is a consequence of the  strategic failure in the Middle East resulting from its long-standing practice of favoring one side. The biased "support" only exacerbates the situation, offering no help in reducing bloodshed, casualties, and preventing the conflict from escalating into a potential sixth Middle East war. Wu Hongbo asked a roundtable of European ambassadors if they ever considered how many countries in the world refuse to take sides in their Ukraine war? Or forget the suffering of the Iraqi people after being invaded by a permanent member of Security Council without approval of the United Nations, and how that country was let off so easily? Read more →

Chinese fighters escort President Bashar's departing flight until a Pakistani Air Wing picked it up at the border, handed it to four Iranian fighters, who handed it on to the Saudi Air Force. Four Jordanian fighters escorted the plane on its final leg into Syrian airspace. Read more →

US Navy Institute Report to Congress: China’s navy is, by far, the largest of any country in East Asia, and sometime between 2015 and 2020 it surpassed the U.S. Navy in numbers of battle force ships (meaning the types of ships that count toward the quoted size of the U.S. Navy). DOD states that China’s navy “is the largest navy in the world with a battle force of approximately 340 platforms, including major surface combatants, submarines, ocean-going amphibious ships, mine warfare ships, aircraft carriers, and fleet auxiliaries…. This figure does not include approximately 85 patrol combatants and craft that carry anti-ship cruise missiles (ASCM). The … overall battle force [of China’s navy] is expected to grow to 400 ships by 2025 and 440 ships by 2030.” The U.S. Navy, by comparison, included 290 battle force ships as of October 5, 2023, and the Navy’s FY2024 budget submission projects that the Navy will include 290 battle force ships by the end of FY2030. U.S. military officials and other observers are expressing concern or alarm regarding the pace of China’s naval shipbuilding effort and resulting trend lines regarding the relative sizes and capabilities of China’s navy and the U.S. Navy. Read more →

Prof. Lyle Goldstein: While I was at the Naval War Colleg, I watched us getting more and more involved with a nascent Ukrainian navy. American taxpayer money funded the total upgrade of the piers in Odessa which were, of course, getting ready to service American destroyers and NATO warships, right next to Russia's Black Sea fleet. They set up a NATO-style command center near Odessa. One reason China is so obsessed with Taiwan is not that they dream of conquering the island. Rather, it makes them horribly uncomfortable that this island is swarming with Americans and foreigners, which is truly offensive to them. And American listening posts. And American sensors. And actual American military advisers – similar to what went on with Ukraine – creeping assistance, more and more, of various kinds.  Read more →

“Edgar Snow was the first correspondent to penetrate into the heart of Communist China and to return to tell the tale. His book, planned and executed with meticulous care, is the most superb piece of reporting that I have ever read. It is the authentic, inside story of the Chinese Communists and of their relation to the Sino-Japanese War. The Communists and the war are more intimately connected than most people suppose.”
—The Atlantic

“He was the first foreign journalist to risk this trek to the forbidden Communist state in China’s West in the second half of the 1930s, when it was under heavy blockade by the Nationalist government. Snow invested a lot of time and energy in bringing an untold story out into the world…There is also much that is troubling about the book, especially Snow’s unquestioning, even adulatory, response to Mao’s story about the Communist past and present.”
—Julia Lovell, Five Books

“A journalistic scoop in 1937, this book has since become a historical classic. Snow’s sympathetic portrayal of the Chinese communists is somewhat naive, however, and it exposed him to widespread criticism during the McCarthy years.”
—Foreign Affairs

About the author

Edgar Snow (1905-1972) is by far best remembered for Red Star Over China. However, his earlier life was also one of some adventure and excitement. From Kansas City, he attended the University of Missouri and looked set for a career in Manhattan in advertising — until the Wall Street Crash. The Depression set him off for China in the hope of more opportunity — he was to stay 13 years, know just about everyone, Chinese or foreign, who was anyone, and marry Helen Foster, another American journalist working in China.

He spent time in the famine districts of northwest China, traveled the Burma Road, and explored Manchuria. Living in Shanghai initially, the couple moved to Beijing, where Snow taught journalism at Yenching University and started several left-wing magazines. In this way, they became acquainted with leftist students who eased Snow’s path to Yan’an.

After World War Two, Snow continued to write about China and Asia, invariably from a leftist perspective. In the 1950s, he encountered some trouble from Senator Joseph McCarthy and eventually moved to Switzerland. He returned to China in 1960 and 1964 to interview Máo Zédōng 毛泽东 and Zhōu Ēnlái 周恩来. In 1970, he stood next to Mao during the National Day parade in Beijing, during which Mao told Snow that he would welcome Nixon to China. Snow never saw that trip, dying the day Nixon arrived in China.

In 150 words

Edgar Snow made his way through Nationalist lines to Shanxi Province in June 1936, encountering a band of communists newly emerged, exhausted and decimated, after their 6,000-mile Long March. Snow found them developing the distinctive brand of communism that was to govern China during the Maoist era. Many of the men Snow interviewed in 1936 were the first-generation leaders of Communist China, and in particular he is credited with introducing Mao Zedong to a Western audience. Indeed, the best-known section of the book is Mao’s autobiography as related to Snow, which remains lauded in the P.R.C.

Takeaways:

Communists, over whose heads hung the sentence of death, did not identify themselves as such in polite — or impolite — society. Even in the foreign concessions, Nanking kept a well-paid espionage system at work. It included, for example, such vigilantes as C Patrick Givens, former chief Red-chaser in the British police force of Shanghai’s International Settlement.

Do the Reds really imagine that China can defeat Japan’s mighty war-machine? I believe they do. What is the peculiar shape of logic on which they base their assumptions of triumph? It was one of dozens of questions I put to Mao Tse-tung. And his answer, which follows, is a stimulating if perhaps prophetic thing indeed, even though the orthodox military mind may find it technically fallacious.

At last, after two weeks of hacking and walking over the hills and plains of Kansu and Ninghsia, I came to Yu Wang Pao, a big walled town in southern Ninghsia, which was then the headquarters of the First Front Red Army — and of its commander-in-chief Peng Teh-huai.

Great benefits have undoubtedly accrued to the Chinese Reds from sharing the collective experience of the Russian Revolution, and from the leadership of the Comintern. But it is also true that the Comintern may be held responsible for serious reverses suffered by the Chinese Communists in the anguish of their growth.

Why this book should be on your bookshelf:

The debate around Snow and Red Star Over China has been a long and divisive one among Sinologists, China Watchers, and the Chinese Communist Paty. The CCP still lionizes Snow, most Western scholars think Red Star well worth close reading, and some think he was a patsy for Mao’s propaganda. There’s no doubt that Snow’s visit to Yan’an was closely stage-managed by the Party and that he saw nothing of the intense factional in-fighting taking place within the senior ranks that would work itself out, sometimes in deadly ways, over the next 20 to 30 years. Still, there is no denying Snow’s skills as a writer (and the largely unacknowledged input of Helen Foster-Snow as his editor throughout the project), his vivid recreations of the scene at Yan’an, his depictions of the genuineness of many Party members in wanting to improve the situation in China, and the extreme circumstances — the Long March, suppression by the Nationalists, war with Japan — that have formed the CCP worldview that lingers still today in terms of a tendency to isolationism, inability to seriously criticize itself, and continual factional disputes and purging.

What most people now take from Red Star Over China is the autobiography of Mao, his life as told to Snow. Snow, of course, could only ask questions based on his ultimately limited knowledge of the Party. The same applies to his ability to judge any answers or claims made by Mao. It’s hard not to see an element of performance in Snow, donning the cap with the five-pointed red star for photos, etc. Snow was to be among the first of many foreign journos to play at revolutionary in Yan’an.

The photos included in Red Star Over China are also interesting. Any selection of images to accompany such a book must also be read as part of the argument of the text. They are important in that these early photos of Mao are really among the only ones we have from that time — more came later, but Snow captured a rawer Mao. Mao’s image has been subject to much manipulation, change, and various uses, so these early images are important.

The entire book was a massive coup for Snow. But what story does it tell of Mao at Yan’an? Perhaps not entirely the one Mao told Snow or that Snow understood Mao telling him. Biography, history, reportage are all famously tricky areas. But it’s also important to remember that the Nationalists clamped down on any publicity or reporting about Mao, Zhū Dé 朱德, and the communists, making Red Star Over China’s impact even greater.

Today, Red Star Over China is read differently in China, Japan, Europe, and the U.S., given prevailing attitudes to China, communism, socialism, and Snow himself. He is venerated in China, though perhaps now in the West a little forgotten, except of course by students of China who invariably find their way to him early on in their reading. That’s not a bad thing — Red Star Over China can at times be a gripping read, inspiring to would-be journalists perhaps. But it is also an abject lesson in the pitfalls of access in China, and a reminder to try to understand when you’re seeing the wider picture and when you’re being fed a line.

Finally, and perhaps most remarkably, it is important to remember that Mao spent a lot of time with Snow. They talked for hours. The chances of that sort of relationship being built between a foreign journalist and a senior leader of the CCP today is, quite frankly, unimaginable. Read more

1. Talent at the Top: Only the brightest, most idealistic people are are admitted to politics–a policy unchanged in 2200 years.
2. Data in the Middle: policies are implemented, tracked, and optimized based on terabytes of data. The PRC is the world's largest consumer of public surveys.
3. Democracy at the Bottom: ordinary people, all unpaid amateurs, assemble twice a year to check the stats and sign off on new legislation. Policies need a minimum of 66% support to become law. That's why 95% of Chinese say the country is on the right track.

For decades, Western media have been narrating the same story about China being this brutal “dictatorship” whose people are killed at the hands of the criminal communist regime, giving the Tiananmen Square massacre as a prime example of the brutality of the Chinese government, wherein supposedly scores of students were killed at the hands of the People’s Liberation Army. However, a new book emerged proving that these claims are false and have no foundation to them except for Washington’s aspirations to tarnish the image of the Chinese Communist Party.

Atrocity Fabrication and Its Consequences: How Fake News Shapes World Order, a new book by A. B. Abrams, highlights that there never were any killings in the infamous Tiananmen Square back in 1989 as had been spread by Western propaganda for decades, and it was revealed that the entire affair was but a mere attempt at showing China as the villain in the geopolitical arena. The book underlines that no killings, let alone a massacre as is proclaimed, took place in Tiananmen Square.

How did the U.S. succeed in manipulating the mainstream narrative and have millions upon millions of people believe that China initiated a mass murder of its own people—young college students—crushing them with tanks and shooting them down with machine guns? The answer is simple: the manipulation of public perception through the press. This could be done using media out of context and providing an incomplete version of the truth.

For example, the most infamous piece of media “documenting” the crime to ever exist is a video showing a tank marching onto a person alleged to have been a student, and right as the tank gets close enough to the young man and stops, the video is cut, with there being some text accompanying the video hinting or proclaiming that the tank went on to run over the protester. However, that could not be further from the truth. In reality, other protesters rushed to the scene and accompanied him from there as the tank was standing in place waiting for him to comply and get out of its way.

The book argues that all the acts committed by the United States were in a bid to “justify wars of conquest and exploitation” and generate multi-billion-dollar profits for the notorious military-industrial complex, as reported by CovertAction Magazine.

Abrams highlighted that the Tiananmen Square protests initially took place not as a push for Westernization or the downfall of the Chinese government. Instead, their primary focus was on reinforcing the principles of China’s 1949 Communist Revolution and addressing the issue of corrupt officials who had deviated from Maoist principles.

This movement encompassed not only students but also a significant number of workers, who exhibited a stronger anti-CCP stance. Their collective objective aimed at the establishment of a socialist democracy within the framework of the movement.

The book cited a cable from the U.S. Embassy in Beijing that WikiLeaks published in 2016. The leak included reports on the eyewitness account of a Chilean diplomat and his wife who were present when the PLA made it to Tiananmen Square to disperse the protesters. The pair made it in and out of the square numerous times without any harassment and observed no mass firing of weapons into the crowds. They never saw any use of lethal force, to begin with.

Moreover, the book cited former Washington Post Beijing Bureau chief Jay Mathews who, in 1998, admitted that “all verified eyewitness accounts say that the students who remained in the square when troops arrived were allowed to leave peacefully.”

It also cited Reuters  correspondent Graham Earnshaw, who spent the night of June 3-4 at the center of Tiananmen Square and reported that most of the students left the square peacefully with the remainder of them being persuaded to do the same.

As is customary, the main source the Western media used to claim that a massacre took place was an anonymous student from Qinghua University making claims to the Hong Kong press, who then made it to the British media.

Still, BBC‘s Beijing correspondent James Miles said there was no massacre.

Western reporting had conveyed the wrong impression and protesters who were still in the square when the army reached it were allowed to leave after negotiations.

The narrative was also completely spun out of proportion, with the perpetrators being painted as the victims of a crime that was never committed in the first place. The book underlined that those who did die in Beijing during the events lost their lives in street battles between the PLA and insurgents far from the square. Reports from the U.S. Department of State underlined that the unarmed PLA officers were attacked with petrol bombs, burning many alive.

Uyghurs, another ‘crime’ China committed

The hoax built around Tiananmen Square was a blueprint for U.S. media campaigns aimed at showing the Chinese government in a bad light, as Washington went on to accuse Beijing of perpetrating a genocide against the Uyghur people in Xinjiang province.

The book stressed that the claims about the so-called Uyghur genocide relied on nothing but hardline extremist U.S.-funded anti-China groups. Namely, they were funded by the CIA-affiliated National Endowment for Democracy, which was tasked with carrying out what the notorious spy agency had done alone under the covers for decades.

Amid the claims of Beijing genociding the Uyghurs, the Uyghur population in Xinjiang saw an increase of 25% between 2010 and 2018 instead of the population experiencing a contraction. Even facilities the West claimed to have been “concentration camps” in which Uyghurs were killed en masse and “brainwashed” or “indoctrinated” appeared to have been a logistics park, a regular detention center, and elementary and middle schools.

Xinjiang looks good, safe, and secure, and all the people I spoke with seemed happy about it, former London Metropolitan Police Officer Jerry Grey, who spent a lot of time traveling in Xinjiang, said.

“Uyghurs in China have been growing faster than the majority Han Chinese in part because they weren’t subject to the one-child policy, they have 20,000 mosques built […] Uyghur children can get into top universities easier than Han Chinese, and have halal foods prepared for them in canteens and they have a prayer area on campus,” Daniel Dumbrill, a Canadian businessman and Chinese political analyst said.

“Portraying an adversary as committing particularly egregious crimes, especially when one intends to initiate military action or other hostile measures against the adversary, has consistently provided an effective means of moving public and international opinion and justifying [US imperial] actions,” Abrams said in his book.

Yugoslavia

The book also shed light on the U.S. propaganda focused in the 1990s on Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic, a socialist who sought to keep Yugoslavia together, accusing him of genocide in Kosovo and elsewhere.

Milosevic, a socialist, aimed to maintain the unity of Yugoslavia and prevent its fragmentation. This effort was driven by his desire to counteract Western nations’ potential expansion of influence and the establishment of U.S. military bases in a strategically vital area.

Interestingly, the most severe instances of ethnic cleansing during the war were actually executed by the Croats through Operation Storm, a plan devised by the CIA.

The Clinton administration additionally provided support to the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which sought to establish an ethnically homogeneous Albanian state. This endeavor involved targeting Serbs and other minority groups.

Financing from the drug trade played a significant role in sustaining the KLA, leading the State Department to label it a “terrorist organization”. The NATO North Atlantic Council identified the KLA as the primary instigator of violence in Kosovo.

The narrative of genocide and the Serbs running concentration camps once again heavily relied on the testimony of an individual who openly admitted to not witnessing any killings—propagandist reporter Roy Gutman. This account was eventually discredited when a British journalist visited an alleged death camp, discovering that the inmates had voluntarily sought refuge from the nearby conflict in surrounding villages.

Yugoslavia was a highly successful state that united numerous contemporary Baltic nations under the banner of communism, and it met its demise when the United States and NATO waged a war against it, killing hundreds of civilians in the notorious bombing campaign it launched on the country in order to “sow democracy” there.

Syria

The same man who was one of the main reasons behind the collapse of Yugoslavia was almost able to do the same with Syria. Gutman played a major role in another similar war launched over a decade later against Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad.

The propaganda effort pushed by Gutman was similar to the one he peddled earlier, with it including the mass murder of people at the hands of the government without any evidence backing up these claims.

Western media and regimes falsely accused Al-Assad of carrying out attacks with chemical weapons against his own people while the attacks were likely carried out by U.S.-backed terrorists.

Back in November, the Grayzone website published a series of leaks that expose how senior officials of the OPCW censored this explosive finding in the Syrian city of Douma.

In its investigation, the website stated that “in the early days of the OPCW’s investigation of an alleged chemical attack in Douma, Syria, expert toxicologists ruled out chlorine gas as the cause of death for more than 40 civilians reported at the scene.”

The Korean War: Another ‘atrocity’

The Korean War, a war peddled by the United States that wound up splitting one people into two, was presented to the public as a “humanitarian intervention” aimed at rescuing the local population from communist forces. To establish this narrative, the Pentagon sponsored a propaganda film, titled The Crime of Korea narrated by Humphrey Bogart. This film falsely attributed atrocities committed by the South Korean government, with U.S. support, to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

This narrative gained traction within the U.S. media and significantly bolstered the perception of the war as “morally justified”. An influential Timemagazine column titled “Barbarity” furthered this perspective by describing a communist massacre in Taejon, which subsequent investigations revealed was actually perpetrated by South Korean troops allied with the U.S.

Charles E. Potter, Chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Korean Atrocities and appointed by Senator Joseph McCarthy, notorious for McCarthyism, which was responsible for the persecution of anyone even thought to be affiliated with any leftist organization or held any left-wing beliefs, emphasized the inhumane acts committed by U.S. adversaries. He recounted gruesome incidents, such as a “Red Chinese” nurse using garden shears to sever a GI’s toes without anesthesia and American POWs being subjected to torture with bamboo spears and confinement in small iron cages until death, with maggots infesting their eye sockets.

However, the accounts presented by Potter contradicted the testimonies of American and British POWs, who indicated that their treatment by captors was generally decent, although they had to attend lectures on communism.

Meanwhile, U.S.-run POW camps subjected DPRK and Chinese prisoners to severe brutality. These inmates were massacred for singing revolutionary songs and subjected to violent coercion to renounce repatriation to their homelands. This strategy aimed to score Cold War propaganda points by portraying defection to the West as a desire born out of the perceived superiority of its political-economic system.

The campaign of propaganda against the DPRK extended well into the 21st century, with increasingly extravagant made-up tales to portray the country in a negative light. Many of these stories were propagated by DPRK defectors, some of whom were influenced or incentivized by South Korea and possibly the CIA.

Shin Dong-hyuk, a defector, collaborated with Washington Postcorrespondent Blaine Harden to write a highly successful book Escape From Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West. However, this account was later revealed to be a fabrication.

Yeonmi Park, another defector, who charges a speaking fee of $12,500 on Western media outlets, even made the ludicrous claim that her friend’s mother was executed for watching a Hollywood movie.

Lee Soon-ok, yet another defector, testified before a House committee in 2004 that she had witnessed Christians being tortured and burned to death in DPRK political prisons. However, the head of the North Korean Defectors’ Association, Chang In-suk, contradicted this, asserting that Lee was never a political prisoner.

Abrams noted that fabricated reports about DPRK state executions of prominent figures often coincided with the surprising reappearance of these supposedly deceased individuals on camera.

In a CNN report from May 2015, it was alleged that DPRK leader Kim Jong Un had ordered the poisoning and killing of his aunt, Kim Kyong Hui. However, Mrs. Kim appeared in public in January 2020, highlighting the inaccuracy of the claim.

Abrams suggested that these false defector testimonies and biased media coverage were embraced in the West due to the “self-gratification” they provided, seemingly affirming the notion of Western superiority over the least Westernized state. Additionally, they often served as justifications for hostile policies, including economic sanctions, against the DPRK.

The book talks about the demonization of the Russian and Vietnamese governments, as well as that of Libya and Iraq in a bid to validate the Gulf War, while also revisiting numerous cases of U.S. propaganda aimed at subverting its foes while giving impetus to itself and its beliefs in a bid to uphold the unipolar system that it has been trying so hard to keep propped up—to no avail. The recounting of the countless crimes committed by the United States comes as no surprise to many as the latter has done so for decades, and continues to do so, exploiting its hold on the media to give itself the moral high ground over its geopolitical enemies. Monthly Review. Amazon.

The ISC (Needham) Report

The Report of the International Scientific Commission for the Investigation of Facts Concerning Bacteriological Warfare in Korea and China (the ISC report), published at the height of the Korean War, validated claims by North Korea and China that the US had launched bacteriological warfare (biological warfare, BW) attacks against both troops and civilian targets in those two countries over a period of several months in 1952.
   

The most vilified document of the 20th Century.

The report’s release in September, 1952, brought a withering international attack. It was roundly denounced by American and British politicians of the highest rank, ridiculed by four star generals, accused of fraud by celebrated pundits, misquoted by notable scientists, and scorned by a compliant Western press. Charges were made against the quality and truthfulness of its science. Its “unstated” political agenda was denounced. The ethics of interviewing captured US pilots was excoriated and its authors were publicly flayed as communist dupes. The report was red baited in the US halls of Congress and deemed unpatriotic to read, and therefore went unread and deliberately forgotten over the years, which has been the fate of Korean War history in general. In subsequent decades, volumes placed in American university library collections were quietly and permanently removed from circulation.
   
When the rare copy came up for auction, it was discretely purchased and disappeared from public view. This critical 67 year old truth commission document from the Korean War was slipping towards oblivion. For these very reasons, historians and truth seekers should exalt the wondrous rebirth of the ISC Report from near extinction with the publication of this new electronic edition. We welcome the sunshine that re-publication brings to a shadowy and suppressed chapter of American Cold War history. (from the introduction by Thomas Powell) 800 pages.  $9.99.