I don’t post on China half as much as I’d like – events keep getting in the way – but I’ve opined as clearly as I can, in posts like this and this, that its rise offers the only credible alternative to barbarism. Many deny that barbarism, usually by their silence, while few of those who do see it are willing to look seriously into the possibility of China offering any way forward. 1 When I ask what in their view does offer a way forward, I hear nothing convincing. As I will keep saying:
… social democracy .. ‘vanguard’ revolutionary sects .. grass roots activism pace Occupy, XR etc – all have useful features but, each for its own reasons, zero chance of success of the kind and magnitude needed.
I say this so any reader serendipitously encountering this post knows my view on China. With that out of the way, let me introduce three short texts – one written, two videos – whose takes differ markedly from those more commonly on offer in the intensely propagandised West. 2
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I begin with a splendid piece of travel writing by a chap almost my age (but fitter) who’s ridden his bike thousands of miles through a China less travelled. As a once frequent itinerant in Asia myself, one who also wrote extensively of my experiences and encounters, I appreciate “Jerry’s take” – if you can find his surname do please let me know – for its own sake, but doubly so as an unabashed Sinophile.
I envy and applaud in equal measure.
Jerry’s take on China, May 7, 2025
I came onto social media for a specific purpose – it was to share my travels in China. Things developed and I became a defender of China, or more correctly, a defender of truth. I’m going back to where it all started but that isn’t going to change where it ended up.
Let me explain.
In 2014, with an Irish friend, who is still a friend but no longer in China, we took a bike each and with relatively little preparation, started a bike ride from the border of Macau then finished 57 days later at the border of Kazakhstan.
When I came back, I went into a four year spell of quite intense work, including three years as a senior manager in a British company here in Zhongshan and then almost 2 years as an IELTS examiner before retiring from full time work a little earlier than most in late 2018 at the ripe old age of 59. I opened a Twitter account in 2015 and didn’t use it until 2020. When I started to use it, I had two followers, one was the friend I was with when I started it, the other was my brother who I saw the following day and told I had started it.
By 2020 though, I had plenty of time on my hands and something I’d always imagined would be fun, was sharing my bike rides on the internet – discussing other aspects of China with people who had an interest and following other people on bikes through their journeys.
I hoped to get more followers than one of my brothers who, at the time had almost 700 – that was my only challenge – now that account has over 89,000 and increases by several hundred every month.
However, people started to follow me, not because of my takes on China but because I was posting about cycling in China and somehow, it all got skewed, it most certainly wasn’t my intention but it all became political. How this started was interesting. People would say to me as I posted photos in Xinjiang that it’s impossible to travel through Xinjiang, I’d reply no it’s not, here are some pictures of me there. Then they’d say, you must have had a guide and I’d say, no I didn’t, there were only two of us, then they’d say you must have had special permission and I’d say, no I didn’t, we just cycled into the Region from the Province of Gansu, no one stopped us, we rode into Hami, the first city in the region and I asked a police officer where foreigners can stay the night and he just pointed along the road and told me there are many hotels down there – he didn’t ask who we were, what we were doing or why we were in Xinjiang without proper authority, he just pointed along a road and we stayed in the first nice looking hotel we saw. Then they would say, well you must be paid by the CCP then! and my reply would be innocently and naively that I’m not but that didn’t stop the name calling – now I just say I wish I was and, if you can prove it, I’ll give you the entire contents of my bank account that you claim I’m paid into. Furthermore, even if I am paid, which I’m not, what difference does it make if you can’t prove me wrong? So there’s the challenge – get over calling me names and prove me wrong, by doing so, you discredit me and you win – by calling me names, you bring discredit to yourself.
Now that is indeed what I call a challenge. A tad defensive, perhaps, but I do similar too often myself to slight it on that count.
Back to bike riding, over my times in Xinjiang I’ve slept overnight in a culvert under the road, in an arid zone, not quite a desert, but pretty dry, in an abandoned quarry, even in a graveyard, I’ve slept on the floor of a restaurant storeroom and behind a service station as well as many more places, it’s impossible to travel across the Taklamakan desert or through the Tarim Basin on a bike in a day and yet, each time we’ve done it and arrived in a hotel at the other end, there hasn’t been a single I’ve ever been asked where we were yesterday. In fact not one time has a police officer ever asked where we’d been, they often asked what we were doing but they’re curious, not authoritarian. Not once has a police officer ever asked us to show what photos we’d taken or told us we can’t go to a place – it just doesn’t happen.
I’ve crossed the Nanling mountains, the Qingling Mountains and the Tianshan mountains on a bike, I’ve crossed the Pearl River multiple times, the Yangtze River, or Chang Jiang as it should be called three times and the Huang He, the Yellow River twice. I’ve taken a ferry across the Bohai Sea and cycled through at least 12 provinces and regions including Heilongjiang in the far northeast, Hainan in the Deep Southeast, Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, Gansu and Xinjiang in the North and West – I think it’s fair to say, I’ve seen a fair bit of China and we stop every 20-30 kilometres for breaks and chats with locals, it’s just as fair to say, I’ve met a lot of Chinese people in their own environments – when we get out of the comfort zones of Tier one and two cities, we certainly learn about the way people live in rural China.
Before moving on, let me acknowledge that I encountered the above piece, as I have a good many others, through Jan Oberg and the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research (TFF). Nice one, Jan.
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Though resurfacing on YouTube two days ago, my next offering is an oldie. How old I can’t say, but I believe I first saw it close to a year ago. I don’t share Yanis Varoufakis’s distaste for what he calls China’s authoritarianism:
in 2023 Michael Hudson published The Collapse of Antiquity. It advances a simple thesis. In the early civilisations of Sumer, it explains, a new king would start his reign by cancelling debt. Why? Because interest on debt rises exponentially while wealth production – from which debt is paid – can at best rise logarithmically. The inexorable logic is therefore for power to accrue to a creditor oligarchy. The forgiveness of debt derailed this tendency, but the new king had to be powerful enough to force it through. To put this in today’s terms, he had to be the very thing liberals (labouring under the delusion ours is a democracy rather than a creditor oligarchy) condemn in a Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping. He had to be An Authoritarian. How else could the king break the destructive – and ultimately self destructive – power of the oligarchs?
Broken: the implicit contract between the rulers and the ruled. Part 2 of 2
As with his belief that the EU can be reformed, 3 Yanis is given to following diagnoses of spell-binding cogency with dreamlike remedies. But in all other respects this eight minute exchange sees him bang on the nail, and with his customary panache.
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If you thought soya beans worthy but dull, think again. This video, also eight minutes long, uses that lowly legume to show how Donald Trump’s tariff wars – see my four recent posts on these, starting here – and Beijing’s quietly decisive response are badly hurting a major part of Mister Tangerine Man’s support base.
Enjoy the rest of your day of rest.
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- There are no guarantees, mind. One, US elites unwilling to surrender hegemony may take us all out rather than cede to China. Two, China may lose control of its finance capitalists, so far successfully subordinated to state planning. For elaborations on this, see my three posts: Why read Michael Hudson?
- Unless we believe that class rule ended with universal suffrage (a notion which bears not the slightest interrogation, so it falls to our news media and wider ideological apparatus to see that it doesn’t have to) and that skills of mass persuasion acquired in advertising are scrupulously eschewed in the more overtly political sphere (ditto) it should surprise no-one (yet does) that Western ‘democracies’ are the most propagandised societies ever. On balance it’s cheaper to fool a people for the most part well fed than it is to constantly intimidate them, but it does require effort. As Caitlin Johnstone put it two years ago:
Western civilization is dominated by a power structure that has invested more heavily in “soft power” (mass-scale psychological manipulation) than any other power structure in history. It pervades our media, our internet services, our art — literally all of mainstream culture.
The politicians lie, the news media lie, the movies lie, the internet lies, the advertisements lie, the shows between the advertisements lie. They lie about our world, they lie about our government, they lie about what’s important, how we should think, what we should value, and how we should measure our level of success and worthiness as human beings. That’s what you get when you live in a civilization that’s made of lies, under an empire that’s held together by lies.
You Don’t Have To Choose Between Happiness And Being Informed
- My contempt for the EU should in no way be read as endorsement of Brexit, its manner and timing a disaster for British working people.