While many in America are familiar with Russiagate hysteria, they might not entirely see the hypocritical irony connected to it. Considering Russia’s true influence on our elections turned out to be minuscule, and the fact that Hillary Clinton likely invented the narrative to beat Trump in 2016, the Democratic Party is clearly projecting.
In 2021, the Democrat-majority Senate passed a bill titled the “Strategic Competition Act” aimed at curtailing China’s dramatic rise. Since 1949, China has risen out of abject poverty and desolation, resulting from two world wars, a civil war, and countless famines, and become a prosperous nation. Beijing has yet to spend a single Yuan on war since 1979, while America has known war nearly without a break since declaring independence in 1776.
The Strategic Competition Act sets aside hundreds of millions of dollars in funds for media initiatives targeting China and its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). BRI is China’s $1 trillion-plus plan to create a modern Silk Road. In ancient times, the Silk Road connected people from Asia to Europe; now, China’s ambitions are even greater. Beijing seeks to help encourage development and connect people all over the world, from South America to Africa and the Middle East.
Instead of joining the Belt and Road Initiative, the Senate seems to think it wiser to spend $300 million in order to spread propaganda regarding its “negative impact” on participant countries. In the global free market supposedly secured by our massive military, why cannot Washington compete with the Belt and Road Initiative using its own comprehensive plan for a world trade network? Why resort to weaselly tactics that make truly progressive-minded Americans embarrassed for their country’s behavior internationally?
“When I was a cadet, what’s the cadet motto at West Point? You will not lie, cheat, or steal or tolerate those who do. I was the CIA Director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. We had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment,” Mike Pompeo, former CIA Director and then-Secretary of State said during a speech in 2019.
It should come as no surprise why Vladimir Putin’s labeling of the United States as, “the empire of lies,” is resounding in an increasing number of places throughout the world. So often we hear about “Russian propaganda” or “Chinese propaganda” but what does it look like in the trenches behind ‘enemy’ lines in this new US-Sino cyberwar? What does it look like behind the Great Firewall?
“You can’t even be patriotic on Chinese social media. They will attack you, call you brainwashed and report you. I don’t dare to comment anymore,” one Chinese netizen commented. “Not only that but I think they are manufacturing tensions with diaspora now that people can see IP addresses on comments.” In an attempt to regulate social media, many Chinese websites will now display the country a commenter is from. Many of the more toxic accounts purport to be outside of the Chinese mainland, leaving many in China confused by the hostility from Chinese speakers abroad.
“Many odd myths about living abroad are commonly spread. People even say that the homeless in the west choose to be homeless. I don’t understand why they say this,” they added. Does it remind you of the “glory” of the American experiment?
The United States has a long history of using the media to push its agenda abroad. As media transforms and changes, social networking sites rise to prominence and influence young people, so do the tactics of information warfare. Do not be ignorant of the tools of our oppressors. America has an army of think tanks, collaborative journalists, and troll farms of our own – hundreds of millions of dollars worth. Instead of investing in those countries’ infrastructure or the welfare of their people, these dollars are spent spreading lies about places our leaders have never respected. And why this money is going abroad while Americans are suffering from so many social ills at home is another issue entirely.
More worrisome, however, is just how much of this money is aimed not only at influencing Chinese people themselves, including to promote unrest in Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong and elsewhere in China, but also to spread lies about China in BRI participant countries. To be clear, the United States is spending money exclusively meant to reorient the minds of people in places like South America and Africa against their countries’ Chinese investors. If this disinformation accomplishes its goal – where does it leave these people?
Nearly half a billion people in Africa have electricity because of Akon’s Africa Lighting Initiative, also known as Lighting Africa, thanks in large part to a $1 billion loan from China. Akon explained China’s investment in Africa in an interview in 2020:
“China has such a huge economy that China itself is not big enough for. They need a place or a partner to expand that economy because China alone can’t do it, and their relation with the US, as you can see, is getting worse and worse every day. Even the US clearly is nowhere near big enough, so they needed either India or Africa to create the partnership.
The reason why Africa became the biggest concentrated market for China is because we share the same cultures when you look at history. You look at the way we live, the way we raise our children, a lot of it is very very similar. So they can really relate to the culture in Africa. 35 years ago China was in the same exact position that Africa was today. Which is really deep but they created a system that allowed them to figure out a way to move it so now China has all these factories, all this product they can’t keep, all of that shit stored up in what’s-names but they also need to expand that audience too as far as who all this product is going to. So Africa can utilize a majority, at least 90 percent, of the stuff that’s being created in China today because of that culture and because of collaboration.
So, what’s China doing? They’re creating instead of buying. They’re just bartering. They’re saying, OK, listen, to keep our factories running, to keep this and that going, we need resources from Africa. We can’t live without the resources but in return we want to be able to build infrastructure, you know, schools, roundabouts, bridges, and things of this nature. So that serves two purposes for Africa and for China. Mainly, one, it gives China the distribution routes that they need to be able to create opportunities to sell more goods, distribute more goods, ship out more goods to a brand new audience. And two, it gives Africans the infrastructure that they need to be able to set up a basic economy to gain enough revenue to even be able to afford that stuff. So it’s a win-win situation when you look at it right.”
During COVID, stories emerged of Africans in China being blamed for spreading the coronavirus and being unfairly barred from certain restaurants or hotels, shortly after the first outbreaks. When asked about these stories Akon said:
“I think the internet has a way of exploding certain things to make it look way bigger that it naturally is. It is no different from the Starbucks situation with them saying that they’re prejudiced because a worker in there didn’t want to serve coffee to a black person before a white person and all the Starbucks now is tainted with that same comment. So, I think in China it was similar because with one or two incidents like that I don’t think it can override as much good that China’s done in Africa as a whole. China’s done more in Africa than anywhere. I don’t care, you could say UK, America, Germany. I don’t care who you call. No one’s done more work in Africa to benefit Africans than the Chinese.
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When I go to China, I’m treated like royalty. When I’m out there I’ve never had any bad treatment, it’s always been respect. In China it’s different how they treat people. So that’s why when I see things like that I know a lot of that is sometimes propaganda and because China has so much advantages in Africa and has so much control, from a standpoint of relationship, there are a lot of countries that are getting very jealous of China being so forward in Africa that these things are created to start destabilizing the relationship between Africa and China.”
In the context of the enormous good China is providing for places like Africa, our government’s shift towards Asia and its hypocritical spoiler campaign should be seen for what it is – utter embarrassing toxicity aimed at China, Africa and the rest of the developing world.
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