Decoding Falsehoods: our 21st century Chajusong.
Hello, I’d like to thank Juyeon and the other organizers for having me speak on what I think are some very controversial and nuanced subjects regarding the Hong Kong protests and the Uyghur detainment in Xinjiang. When we spoke last week, we had a good conversation about mainstream media biases and distortions around China, which I think we all agreed needed to be unpacked. But before I jump in, I do want to give respect to the Tongva people whose land I am residing upon in San Gabriel Valley on Turtle Island.
This is to say that we are still in the midst of a colonial struggle. It has different names now—post-colonialism, free-market capitalism, neoliberalism—but it is still a colonial struggle against the slavery, genocide, theft, fraud, and exclusion that the American empire historically systematizes, and I am tremendously motivated by the decades-long international struggle to resist this imperial project. The old colonial powers have a Sacred Trust to end colonialism in all its forms, yet we all still live under in its shadow.
So the title of this talk is Decoding Falsehoods: Our 21st Century Chajusong. I just recently came across this term and asked Juyeon if I could include Chajusong in the title because it is so appropriate at this time. It is related to Juche, which constitutes the idea of independence and autonomy, but in this text that I want to share, Kim Il Sung spoke about Chajusong in a speech he gave in 1986 to the DPRK Central Committee and it was in regard to the Non-aligned movement.
This is the age of Chajusong. The people who were once oppressed have emerged as masters of the world and are pressing forward with history. With the tide of the age of Chajusong the imperialist colonial system is finally being eliminated from the world; the peoples of many countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America have achieved political independence and are making rapid advances along the road of creating a new life.
Of course, he said that in 1986, before the collapse of the Soviet Union, when North Korea had a higher GDP than South Korea, and during that time, there was a beautiful idea of a non-aligned movement finally growing out of the shadow of colonialism. The Soviet collapse, however, also collapsed the idea of Chajusong, but that’s not the end of the story…
Fast-forward a generation, and we are in that time of emerging once again—emerging out from the shadow of neoliberalism. And if we lay out the spirit and meaning of Chajusong and update the terminology of colonial with neoliberalism and revise the language of sovereignty in this period of globalization towards a revised regionalism, or shared localism, Chajusong is very much the spirit of today, and I for one, feel that in my heart. But it is a lot to unpack…
And so with all that said, I feel like I can address Hong Kong and Xinjiang.
Okay, so where to start…
The Hong Kong protests are not anti-colonial ambitions and if anything they have appropriated the discourse of the decolonization struggle to promote neoliberalism and privatization. In other words, it is a little like the Arab Spring, which sought to bring “democracy” into the middle east. But to be clear the Arab Spring may have promoted democracy, but the objectives were much more insidious in that its ambition was to set forward a neoliberal MEFTA in the MENA—a US–led Middle East free trade agreement among the Middle East and North African countries. Hong Kong is already ground zero for neoliberal economic policies in the region, and according to China’s constitution, China cannot interfere with that, but it can begin to create alternative economic changes in Hong Kong. One of the big ones is changing the investment dispute settlement system or ISDS (investor–state dispute system) to be more fair and equitable. In the world of trade and free trade agreements as with the Korea-US FTA, ISDS is a very narrow reading of investment agreements that privilege investors over the courts. And China is creating an alternative system based on mediation rather than arbitration. This means that other considerations—like COVID-19—can be considered when investment agreements cannot be met. It’s straightforward, mediation is friendlier to States, or to citizens, than arbitration where the letter is the law.
But just to be clear, the HK protests are not about investment agreements, but the western international banks and the investment regime, are heavily resistant to changes in the Hong Kong financial system. And this is also true in China. Many of the small provincial banks in Guangzhou and Fukien enjoy the privileges of these Hong Kong banks and the settlement system. These are not the heavily regulated State-owned banks that have to account for international law, Environmental and Social Responsibility agreements, or consent processes. Some of these are triad banks. When you hear about Chinese banks creating havoc in the Pacific, for example, these are not the state-owned banks doing that. Hong Kong protects these banks and China is trying to reel them in, but this loophole around jurisdiction and extradition means something else in this context.
Mainstream media biases and distortions—
When it comes to China, it’s always existed—but in the present form, I would say it started around 2014, shortly after the BRICS Fortaleza Declaration.
So some back story:
The thing is because there is so much information built upon misinformation, that in order for any of this to make sense, we have to go really far back to get a foundational understanding of where and how the US and the colonial powers have come to position their policy making. For example, We can go back to the 1919 nine-powers treaty that took advantage of the fall of the Qing dynasty and sought to have the 8 imperialist powers—the ninth being a co-opted bastardization of Dr. Sun Yat Sen’s Kuomintang that Chiang Kai Shek subverted—as this essentially created an open-door policy that sought to privatize China’s resources and industries. Or we could talk about the roots of colonialism in China with the Opium wars, or the imperialism of Japan and the atrocities of Nanking, all of which leads to the success of the People’s Republic of China. We can look back at how the US kept the PRC out of the UN until they no longer could in 1971, and once the members voted for China’s membership, the US opportunistically raced to China to open a new friendship door for trade… For China, this did not erase the nearly 20-year blockade and embargo that led to the death of maybe 20 million people, which the West blames on Mao, but really, just as with North Korea, it was the US starving China when it had its massive drought. We can also talk about the Sino-Russia confrontation, which participated in this blockade.
We can also reframe the collapse of the Soviet Union as the event that launched neoliberalism and the new world order. This was a game changer to the international investment regime and led to the changes in economic order through the World Bank, the IMF, and the creation of the WTO, which China was barred from until 2001 when the US could no longer keep China out of. This unipolarity was hatched in a meeting called the Washington Consensus, which included the OECD members at the time—aka the old colonial powers. This period really marks the moment when the US became the dominant economic power. And this continued through 9/11 and through all the ongoing military occupations and came to a spectacular crash in 2008 with the financial collapse. Greed, financial deregulations, or legalized fraud and hegemony were unsustainable. Period. That’s the end of the story.
Really, neoliberalism consumed nearly every country in the Soviet sphere as it allowed the US and its privatization-based neoliberal allies incredible new economic powers and rule-making. This brought about the rise of Hong Kong, Seoul, Taipei, and Singapore. Literally, it was as if half the world had a fire sale and privatization initiatives and oligarchies ruled.
So if this is the backdrop to trade and globalization as we understand it today, you can see how China and Russia are both absolutely pivotal to changing the system and the fact that they are scapegoated and the object of tremendous media biases, distortions, and downright fabrications, begins to unfold.
Neoliberalism really should’ve died in 2008, but the fact is that they have been on life support since. Global investors have been trying to keep this neoliberal privatization and financialization on life support—and we can see this with the amount of debt that the OECD countries face. From the perspective of debt alone, these are failed states, and I have argued from the moment the coronavirus began, that the failure of the global economy is not COVID-19, it is that the neoliberal economies are running on fumes. We see this disconnect in real time with massive wage disparities and the way the stock market has become a very poor indicator of the country’s economy.
Okay so now I think I should talk about BRICS
In 2014, the BRICS and that included
Brazil Roussef US-backed regime change Bolsonaro
Russia, Putin
India, PM Singh to Modi
China Hu Jintau to Xi,
South Africa President Zuma US-backed regime change Ramaphosa
BRICS sought to create a new non-aligned movement
Ukraine pres. Yanukovich from EU to EEU
ALBA Bolivarian Alliance/ Mercosur/ Unasur
Bolivia Evo Morales to Jeanne Anez
Ecuador Correa to Lenin Moreno
As we see with Venezuela. Maduro, Trump tried to impose Guaido as the president, which saw in real-time, how the US resorts to trumped-up corruption charges and uses lawfare as a motivator for regime change.
South Africa South African Customs Union/ but now Africa succeeds with AfCFTA, which Ramaposa was not a part of until later. Under Zuma, however, He would’ve been one of the drafters. Same with Qaddafi. In fact, Qaddafi had often dreamed of this African Union, and maybe it took his execution for Africa to move forward with this agenda.
I bring all of this up because this is the global struggle of Chajusong.
And so with Hong Kong… here we have an ex-British colony, perpetuating the same capitalist neoliberal rules of the UK raising a generation of students as anti-communist, with all the same educational anti-communist trappings as we have in the US, if not more. And the HK protests are not an anti-colonial uprising in the least, they are a breakaway backed by the US and the neoliberal partners—the very same ones that recognize Guaido as the legitimate leader of Venezuela, the same countries that supported the coup in Ukraine because Yanukovich was walking away from the EU and seeking to be part of the EEU. The whole thing with Trump calling out Biden’s son Hunter, for being a partner in Burisma Holdings a private energy holding company, which privatized Naftogaz, the state oil company— was a travesty, because again we’re talking about neoliberal power-grabbing, undermining real democratic institutions.
The TPP is absolutely a China containment and obstruction policy. As someone who has been following policy changes regarding the TPP since even before Bush announced joining, I have seen the language regarding this partnership change from being a pathfinder agreement for building a “Free-Trade Area of the Asia Pacific” to being a bully cooperation that sought to penetrate and liberalize access to China’s market to being a cooperation that now seeks to obstruct both the Silk Road as well as the Maritime Silk Road.
The 2008 financial collapse should be seen as a failure and rejection of the Reagen/Thatcher neoliberal experiment, particularly when now, the collected GDP of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) partnership exceeds the combined economies of the TPP.
When you include the 82 countries (with 20 prospective members) who’ve signed MOUs with the new China-led AIIB, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (an alternative to Japan’s ADB), the TPP will have little effect on winning back the hearts and minds of countries who view the incredible disparity embedded into the US economic system with fear and mistrust.
The statistical information that this article does not address is debt. As the US percentage debt-to-GDP is around 106%, approaching 18 trillion dollars, China’s percentage debt-to-GDP is 23%, only about $3.5 trillion. The lack of systemic debt is what kept developing countries solvent during the financial collapse, and the advanced economies (represented by OECD rules) are less able to leverage debt on the equity of developing countries as they used to. Facing its own structural adjustment, the US has little choice but to deregulate its own federal environmental and labor policy to extractive industries and the neoliberal corporate elite.