New Cold War Archives - Invent the Future

Reds under the bed and in the tractors

In the following article, Carlos Martinez surveys a burst of anti-China stories in the British right-wing press – the Telegraph’s warning that Chinese chips in GPS-guided tractors could be used to spy on farmers and fitted with kill switches; the Times’ claim that Chinese-made wind turbines could be used to shut down Britain’s electricity supply; and the Telegraph’s discovery of a hotel near RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus with a good view of the runway.

In each case, he notes, the evidence is absent and the motive is never explained. Meanwhile every documented instance of weaponised supply-chain hardware – Stuxnet, the NSA’s intercepted routers, Nord Stream, the booby-trapped pagers in Lebanon – belongs to Britain’s Western allies rather than to China.

He also points to an instructive contradiction: in the same week that Chinese industrial policy was being described as a threat to national survival, both the Guardian and the Financial Times carried pieces arguing that Britain should be learning from it. The purpose of the hysteria, Carlos argues, is not to inform economic policy but to build support for the US-led New Cold War.

This article was first published by Friends of Socialist China.

If the right-wing media is to be believed, Britain is facing a systematic attack by the Communist Party of China.

On 4 September, it emerged that the perennial evil-doers in Beijing are hacking our tractors. The Coalition on Secure Technology, headed by the Labour MP Graeme Downie, warns that Chinese-made chips are standard in GPS-guided tractors, farming drones and irrigation systems, and that around 70 percent of the world’s cellular internet-of-things modules are made in China.

Beijing, we are told, could use this fearsome capability to harvest data on crop yields, production forecasts and livestock populations. All of this information is, of course, published by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), but it’s understandable that the Chinese would rather spend their time compromising combine harvesters in Lincolnshire.

We are further informed that the Chinese will likely have fitted kill switches to these tractors, albeit without any evidence or indeed any suggestion of a possible motive.

There is, as it happens, a documented case of a tractor manufacturer installing software locks: the US firm John Deere builds them into its machines, chiefly to stop farmers repairing their own equipment. That threat comes not from Beijing but from Moline, Illinois.

Just days earlier, the Times warned that those same sneaky Chinese communists may have inserted spying devices in our wind turbines.

Slander over solidarity: the BBC reports a Himalayan disaster

The following article by Carlos Martinez examines the BBC’s coverage of the catastrophic glacier collapse of 26 August, which sent a wall of ice, rock, mud and water down the river valleys straddling the border between Nepal and China’s Tibet (Xizang) Autonomous Region, killing well over a thousand people.

Rather than report on the disaster itself, or on its underlying cause in the accelerating warming of the world’s highest mountain range, the BBC’s China correspondent chose to run a story alleging that Beijing was suppressing footage of the event – footage which, as Carlos points out, had been released by the Chinese port authorities at Gyirong and was circulating widely on Chinese platforms. A massive rescue operation, with the direct involvement of China’s top leadership, becomes a “muted response”; Communist Party members being asked to assist their neighbours becomes evidence of authoritarian anxiety.

The article also takes apart the BBC’s assertion that Tibet was “annexed” by Beijing in the 1950s – a formulation at odds even with the declared position of the British government, which abandoned the colonial-era doctrine of “suzerainty” in 2008.

This article first appeared in the Morning Star.

On August 26, a glacier collapsed high on the Nepali side of the Himalayan range, sending a wall of ice, rock, mud and water down the river valleys straddling the border between Nepal and China’s Tibet (Xizang) autonomous region. Some 42 kilometres of road were wiped out, leaving helicopters as the only means of reaching survivors. At the time of writing, Nepal’s death toll has since passed 900, with more than 4,000 people missing; on the Chinese side, 16 have been confirmed dead, and 546 are reported missing.

This is the disaster that Laura Bicker, the BBC’s China correspondent, chose to report as follows: “Shocking footage isn’t being shown in China – and we know little about victims there.”

Numerous people in China immediately pointed out that the footage is, in fact, all over Chinese platforms. Indeed, the very video used in the BBC’s own report was released by the Chinese port authorities at Gyirong. So the sequence runs: the Chinese state published the clip; the BBC ran the clip; the BBC then published a story about how the Chinese state is suppressing the clip.

Several commentators have made another significant point: Chinese media does not operate on the principle of “if it bleeds, it leads.” You will not see grieving relatives and footage of bodies looped for 24 hours. The BBC treats the absence of disaster pornography as evidence of a cover-up rather than a different editorial culture.

The West wrote the book on forced assimilation. Now it’s accusing China.

On 1 July, China’s Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress came into force – the country’s first comprehensive national law on ethnic affairs. Within days came denunciations from Washington and Brussels, a European Parliament resolution, and a wave of headlines announcing that China had ordered its minority peoples to “assimilate”. CNN’s version: “China tells its ethnic minorities to integrate or face consequences.”

In this contribution to the international webinar China’s National Unity vs US Social Hierarchy, Carlos Martinez looks at the distance between what the law actually says and what we have been told it says. The law prohibits discrimination against any ethnic group, explicitly reaffirms the right of all peoples to use and develop their own languages, and requires the state to direct infrastructure, industry and public services towards minority regions. It continues a framework that in the West would be called affirmative action – preferential university admissions, bilingual education, protected minority-language broadcasting, autonomy arrangements, and exemption from the one-child policy throughout its existence.

“Assimilation”, meanwhile, is not a neutral word. It names specific and well-documented crimes: the residential schools of Canada and the United States, the stolen generations in Australia, forced adoption and conversion, languages beaten out of colonised peoples – including generations of Welsh schoolchildren punished for speaking their own. Applying that word to China takes an association rooted in Western colonial history and lets it do the work that evidence cannot.

The video also goes through the record the coverage leaves out – life expectancy in Xinjiang rising from around 30 in 1949 to 77 today, Uyghur population growth of 16 percent between 2010 and 2020 against 2 percent for the Han population, 420 poverty-stricken counties in ethnic autonomous areas lifted out of absolute poverty, minority-language publishing and schooling, and central government transfers flowing towards the periphery rather than away from it – along with the documented history of CIA and National Endowment for Democracy sponsorship of separatism, the strategic reasons Xinjiang and Xizang matter, and the warning of Yugoslavia.

The article this contribution is based on: Manufactured outrage: the truth about China’s ethnic unity law (Friends of Socialist China).

The webinar was organised by Friends of Socialist China, the United National Antiwar Coalition and the International Manifesto Group, with contributions from Chen Weihua, Jason Smith, Jacqueline Luqman, Arnold August and Sara Flounders.

Transcript

Comrades, thank you very much for inviting me, and thanks to the organisers for putting this event together.

Hawks dressed as doves: the Guardian’s case for a harder line on China

In the following article, written for the Morning Star, our co-editor Carlos Martinez takes apart a recent Guardian column by Simon Tisdall whose complaint, running through every paragraph, is not that the West has been too aggressive towards China but that it has not been aggressive enough.

Carlos works through the column point by point: the claim of Western “debilitating fatalism” towards a country already facing a tariff war, semiconductor export bans, AUKUS, the Quad, RIMPAC and a chain of US bases from Japan to Australia; Tisdall’s unfortunate choice of Wales as an analogy for language rights; the assertion of “brutal re-education camps” offered without evidence, source or argument, resting on the discredited work of Adrian Zenz and the arms-industry-funded ASPI; and the verdict that Xi is an “unelected autocrat”, delivered without reference to the five levels of People’s Congresses, the consultative apparatus that precedes their votes, or the satisfaction ratings that no Western government has approached in living memory.

The article’s conclusion is that this is liberal hawkishness in its purest form – deploring Trump in one paragraph and demanding his policy in the next – and that it is more dangerous than the honest belligerence of the right, because it recruits people of genuine conscience to a war they would otherwise oppose.

This article first appeared in the Morning Star.

Simon Tisdall’s latest column in the Guardian is a remarkable document. Its complaint, running through every paragraph, is not that the West has been too aggressive towards China, but that it has not been aggressive enough.

“A debilitating fatalism has taken hold in the west about China’s behaviour”, Tisdall writes. It is “as though Xi’s China is now seen as simply too big, too economically powerful and too militarily threatening to influence, let alone contain or control”. Britain, “culpably silent on human rights”, has failed to articulate a coherent China policy.

‘But at what cost?’: the Yangtze edition

The Economist has reported a striking piece of good news: fish biomass in the Yangtze has risen by more than 200 percent since 2021, reversing seven decades of decline, with a rare sturgeon spawning in the wild for the first time in two decades and finless porpoise numbers climbing again. The turnaround – confirmed by a peer-reviewed study – followed the largest freshwater fishing moratorium ever attempted, the closure of thousands of chemical factories, mass reforestation, and the compensation and retraining of some 200,000 fishermen.

Yet, as the following article argues, the magazine could not resist straining to make an ecological triumph sound sinister – branding China’s approach “eco-authoritarian”. It is the “but at what cost” genre in its purest form: the reflex of a worldview that cannot survive the admission that a socialist country is surpassing the West on both ecological and economic performance.

This article was first published by Friends of Socialist China.

The Economist has reported a remarkable and very welcome piece of news. Fish biomass in the Yangtze has risen by more than 200 percent since 2021, reversing seven decades of decline. A rare sturgeon has been observed spawning in the wild for the first time in twenty years. Finless porpoise numbers are up from a low of around 1,000 in 2017 to more than 1,400. And this is not Chinese state media talking: it comes from a study, published in the journal Science, by researchers in China, Canada, the United States and France.

How was it done? Through a ten-year commercial fishing ban across the river, its major tributaries and the lakes of its basin – the largest freshwater fishing moratorium ever attempted. Thousands of chemical factories were closed or relocated. Forests were planted on the upper reaches to hold the soil. Cities were “spongified” with artificial wetlands and permeable surfaces to absorb rainfall and filter stormwater. And some 200,000 fishermen were taken off the water, compensated and retrained for other work. A river that was being killed is coming back to life.

The Yangtze programme is one component of China’s ecological civilisation strategy – written into the country’s constitution in 2018 and pursued through the same instruments that have sustained China’s economy: long-term planning, massive public investment, and a state with the capacity to override short-term private interest in the name of a collective good. It is the same capacity that has made China the world’s undisputed leader in renewable energy, reforestation and electric transport.

But at what cost?

Having reported all this, the good people of the Economist search desperately for a way to make it sound sinister. “The Chinese Communist Party, once famous for pillaging from the natural world, has set to protecting parts of it”, the magazine concedes – before warning that the country’s “eco-authoritarian” approach, “top-down and intolerant of resistance”, “deserves scrutiny before being imitated”. This absurd framing drew an immediate backlash.

China is condemned for not listening to the fishermen – who wanted to carry on fishing – and to environmentalists – who want fewer dams. The complaint about dams is telling: hydropower is not only low-carbon but dispatchable, able to be ramped up on demand and, through pumped storage, to balance the wind and solar that cannot – which is precisely why it does work that would otherwise fall to coal. To oppose it in the abstract, without saying what should generate the electricity instead, is to lean in practice towards fossil-fuelled generation. So are we to understand the Economist would be happier with the status quo of a dying river, a collapsing fishery, a species on the brink of extinction, and a climate crisis that is accelerating because of the failure to decarbonise?

Such a line of reasoning brings to mind Michael Parenti’s observation, in Blackshirts and Reds, about the absurdity of Cold War propaganda:

During the cold war, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skilful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative.

If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike, this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them.

The article notes, almost in passing, that the fishermen who lost their livelihoods were given compensation and retraining. It does not mention that this is an awful lot better than what Britain’s coal miners got in the 1980s, or what the cod fishermen of Newfoundland got in the 1990s – communities that their own governments simply abandoned to their fate once they had ceased to be useful.

This is the “but at what cost” genre in its purest form. China eliminates extreme poverty; but at what cost. China builds the world’s largest high-speed rail network; but at what cost. China brings its greatest river back from ecological death; but at what cost. The real cost, evidently, is to Western hegemony – and to a worldview that cannot survive the admission that a socialist country is surpassing the West in both ecological and economic performance.

Manufactured outrage: the truth about China’s ethnic unity law

The following article by Carlos Martinez responds to the coordinated storm of condemnation that greeted the entry into force on 1 July of China’s Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress – a campaign that seeks to revive the discredited “Xinjiang genocide” narrative and extend it to Xizang (Tibet) and beyond.

Carlos examines what the law actually says, and contrasts China’s record on minority rights – rising life expectancy, the elimination of absolute poverty, and the protection and flourishing of minority languages – with the treatment of minority communities in the West.

He traces the long history of Western sponsorship of separatism in China, from the CIA’s two-decade Tibetan programme to the National Endowment for Democracy’s funding of exile groups today, and locates the current hysteria in the failure of the propaganda war: as polling shows steadily warming attitudes towards China, particularly among the young, the ideologues of the New Cold War are increasingly desperate to re-toxify China’s image. What China is building is strength through unity in diversity; what its adversaries want to see is disunity and disintegration.

This article was first published by Friends of Socialist China.

On 1 July, China’s Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress came into force – the country’s first comprehensive national law on ethnic affairs, adopted by the National People’s Congress in March.

Within days, a remarkably well-coordinated storm of condemnation had been whipped up: denunciations from Washington and Brussels, a resolution in the European Parliament, and a wave of media coverage announcing that China had ordered its minorities to “assimilate”. The thoroughly discredited “Xinjiang genocide” narrative is being dusted off and relaunched – this time with Xizang (Tibet) added to the charge sheet for good measure.

The USA and the CPC – a tale of two anniversaries

On 1 July the Communist Party of China turned 105; three days later, on 4 July, the United States turned 250. In this article, Carlos Martinez asks what these two political projects – born of two very different revolutions – have contributed to the world.

This article first appeared in the Morning Star.

This week features two anniversaries that, taken together, tell much of the story of our age. On 1 July, the Communist Party of China marked 105 years since its founding. On 4 July, the United States celebrates 250 years since the Declaration of Independence. The two milestones invite a comparison: what have these two political projects contributed to the world?

War and peace

The US was born in a revolution against empire and has spent much of its life building one. By one widely cited reckoning, the US has been at war for over 90 percent of its history – from the wars of continental conquest to Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Iran. It maintains around 800 military bases in 80 countries and spends over a trillion dollars a year on its armed forces.

Why the Chinese working class won’t pay for Western neoliberalism

The following article by Carlos Martinez responds to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s call at the recent EU summit for a new “Plaza Accord” to force up the value of the Chinese renminbi.

Carlos recalls how the original 1985 Plaza Accord was not a neutral rebalancing of trade but the deliberate kneecapping of an economic competitor – Washington strong-arming Japan, West Germany, France and Britain into driving down the dollar, plunging Japan into a “lost decade” of stagnation while failing to dent a US trade deficit that originated in Washington’s own model of high consumption and low savings, not in the exchange rate.

Carlos argues that China today cannot be treated as Japan was. Where Japan was a subordinate Cold War ally hosting tens of thousands of US troops; China is a sovereign socialist state with an increasingly prosperous domestic market of 1.4 billion people, an independent financial policy and a central bank that answers to no one in the West – it simply cannot be “Plaza’d”.

The article also takes aim at the language of “overcapacity”, which Carlos describes as a euphemism for European and North American industry failing to compete after nearly half a century of financialisation, privatisation and deregulation. Chinese competitiveness in electric vehicles, batteries and solar panels flows from a complete industrial system and sustained investment in technology – not from currency manipulation – and the EU’s tariffs of up to 35 per cent on Chinese electric vehicles are, he writes, “an act of self-harm disguised as self-defence”.

This article first appeared in the Morning Star.

At the recent EU summit, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz declared the Chinese renminbi to be undervalued by as much as 30 per cent and floated the idea of a new Plaza Accord — a co-ordinated effort to force up the value of the currency, just as Washington did to Japan in 1985.

It is worth remembering how that story ended, because the history Merz is reaching for is not the cautionary tale he imagines it to be.

The Plaza Accord was not a neutral exercise in rebalancing trade. It was the deliberate kneecapping of an economic competitor. Meeting at New York’s Plaza Hotel in September 1985, the United States strong-armed Japan, West Germany, France and Britain into driving down the dollar.

Within two years, the dollar–yen rate had fallen by half. Japanese exports were hammered, capital fled into frenzied property and stock-market speculation, and when that bubble burst at the end of the decade, Japan was plunged into a “lost decade” of stagnation that stretched into a lost generation.

Tokyo’s tormentors, meanwhile, failed to reap much from this harvest: the US goods trade deficit with Japan stood at around $46 billion in 1985 and, instead of shrinking, climbed past $55bn in both 1986 and 1987. The currency had been clobbered, but the imbalance remained.

The reason is that the imbalance never originated in the exchange rate in the first place. It grew out of the US’s own domestic economic model of high consumption and low savings, and out of the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency, which compels the US to run deficits in order to supply the world with dollars. No amount of bullying Tokyo could fix a problem made in Washington.

Why could Japan be treated this way at all? Because it was never a sovereign equal but a subordinate ally — a Western outpost in East Asia, permitted to grow rich as part of the cold war project of containing communism, but never permitted to seriously challenge its benefactors. When push came to shove, hosting tens of thousands of American troops and sheltering under the US security umbrella, Tokyo had no choice but to fold. The Plaza Accord is now near-universally regarded, even by mainstream economists, as an act of economic sabotage dressed up as co-operation.

Sri Lanka’s Hambantota port and the complete collapse of the ‘debt trap’ narrative

In this article, Carlos Martinez examines how the “debt trap” narrative around Sri Lanka’s Hambantota port has completely collapsed. Originally published at Friends of Socialist China.

Hambantota, the deep-water port on the south coast of Sri Lanka, was for years the canonical example of what the Trump administration’s erstwhile vice-president Mike Pence labelled “debt-trap diplomacy” – the supposed Chinese practice of luring poor countries into unsustainable loans, then seizing strategic infrastructure when repayment failed.

Presenting a menacing, predatory China exploiting hapless developing nations to extend its reach and dominance, Hambantota became a top New Cold War talking point, propagated by Western journalists, Indian think tanks and Washington policy advisors alike.

However, the most obvious problem with the story was that it was patently untrue.

A succession of careful studies – by Chatham House, by Deborah Bräutigam at Johns Hopkins, and by Sri Lankan officials with first-hand knowledge of the negotiations – has now systematically dismantled the whole story.

First, the port project was not proposed by China. It was conceived in the 1970s by a Sri Lankan parliamentarian, D. A. Rajapaksa, and championed by his son, the future president Mahinda Rajapaksa. Feasibility studies were carried out by Canadian and Danish firms. Sri Lanka approached the United States and India for funding, and both declined. Only then did China step in, with the China Export–Import Bank (Exim Bank) lending and China Harbour Engineering as the contractor.

When Sri Lanka subsequently fell into debt crisis, this was driven not by Chinese lending but by Sri Lanka’s massive borrowing on Western-dominated capital markets – borrowing made cheap by post-2008 quantitative easing, then made suddenly expensive when the US Federal Reserve began winding down its programme in 2013. Chinese loans constituted just 9 percent of Sri Lankan government debt by 2016. The Hambantota loans specifically constituted 4.8 percent.

The 2017 concession agreement was painted as a debt-for-asset swap, but the reality was considerably less sinister: China Merchants Port leased the port for $1.12 billion in fresh investment, which Sri Lanka used to pay down its much larger Western creditors. Sri Lanka’s minister of ports at the time, Mahinda Samarasinghe, put it plainly: “We thank China for arranging this investor to save us from the debt trap”.

Sri Lanka’s debt trap was made on Wall Street, not in Beijing. As for the accusation that the Chinese military would use Hambantota as a naval base, that was always nonsense. The lease agreement explicitly prohibits the use of the port for military purposes. There have been no Chinese naval vessels at Hambantota, and the port is subject to US Coastguard inspections under the International Port Security scheme.

What has actually happened at Hambantota over the last few years? The port has actually become a major regional success.

Under the management of China Merchants Port – a state-owned operator with stakes in 42 ports across 25 countries, including Greece, Belgium and France – Hambantota has been transformed from a loss-making white elephant into one of the fastest-growing trans-shipment hubs in the Indian Ocean. By 2023 it was handling 700,000 vehicles, up 26 percent year-on-year. It has expanded its Sri Lankan staff from 300 in 2017 to more than 1,000 today. In November 2023 the Sri Lankan cabinet approved a $4.5 billion oil refinery to be built by Sinopec adjacent to the port – the largest foreign direct investment in Sri Lankan history.

Now, in 2026, comes the next phase. In March, the Hambantota International Port Group signed a $108 million agreement with Shanghai Zhenhua Heavy Industries – the world’s leading manufacturer of port cranes – for six quay cranes, 16 rubber-tyred gantry cranes and 40 trailers. The new quay cranes will have a 72-metre outreach and a 65-tonne lifting capacity, enabling the port to handle the largest container vessels currently in operation. The investment will activate the port’s 1,300-metre container berth and lift annual capacity to around two million TEUs (Twenty-Foot Equivalent Units). Sri Lanka’s minister of ports has described Hambantota as “evolving into a modern, integrated port and industrial ecosystem capable of meeting the diverse needs of global maritime stakeholders”.

This is the Belt and Road Initiative in practice: massive long-term investment; transfer of technology; training of local workers; integration into a global logistics network; substantial revenue generation for the host country’s economy.

Sri Lanka’s ambassador to China between 2020 and 2023, Palitha Kohona, summarised the partnership: “It was not unusual that Sri Lanka, like many other developing countries, decided to work with Chinese companies due to China’s advanced skill levels, stunning technology and cost advantages. The Chinese role in Sri Lanka’s debt is grossly exaggerated and exploited mischievously for political advantage.”

You will not, of course, read any of this in the Western press. The same news organisations that carried out a multi-year campaign against Chinese “neocolonialism” have shown no interest whatever in the port’s subsequent transformation. Their interest in Hambantota was never journalistic; it was ideological. The story existed to serve a specific anti-China narrative. Once it could no longer be credibly sustained, the Western media simply moved on to the next anti-China story.

Who actually traps developing countries in debt? The IMF and the World Bank do. Wall Street’s bond markets do. The European Central Bank’s monetary policy does. The US Federal Reserve does. Across the Global South, more than three-quarters of external sovereign debt is owed not to other states but to private Western financial institutions – institutions with no obligation to consider the development needs of their borrowers, and every incentive to extract the maximum possible return. The track record of structural-adjustment programmes, debt-driven austerity and IMF-imposed privatisations across Africa, Latin America and South Asia over the last four decades is the actual story of debt and neocolonialism in our time.

The Belt and Road Initiative offers, by contrast, infrastructure, technology transfer, training and long-term investment on terms vastly more favourable than the major Western institutions have ever extended. That is why some 150 countries have signed up to it.

The BRI embodies three things that Western imperialism hates: the Global South’s emergence from dependency; the growing influence of the People’s Republic of China and its friendly, mutually beneficial relations with the rest of the developing world; and the emerging multipolar alternative to the Western-dominated global order. The Western media’s obsession with Chinese “debt traps” is thus nothing more than a demonisation campaign and a blatant act of self-projection.

Build global mass opposition to the New Cold War

The following is the text of a speech given by Carlos Martinez at an online meeting of the Scottish Trade Union Peace Network on 22 August 2024.

Many thanks for inviting me to join you.

I’m going to focus my remarks on China’s foreign policy, comparing that with the US and Britain’s foreign policy, and then discussing the dangers of this escalating New Cold War, which could all too easily end up as a hot war.

China aggressive?

China of course is framed in the Western media as an “aggressive” and “expansionist” power which is hell-bent on subverting the “rules-based international order”.

According to the NATO Heads of State summit in Washington last month, “China’s stated ambitions and coercive policies continue to challenge our interests, security and values”.

What’s the basis for this characterisation? I’m going to talk about some of common themes:

First, Taiwan. China is accused of undermining democracy in Taiwan and threatening imminent invasion.

The funny thing is that China’s position on the Taiwan question has not meaningfully changed in the last seven decades, and it’s entirely consistent with international law and numerous United Nations resolutions – not to mention the various joint agreements between the US and China.

Taiwan is a part of China. It was seized by Japan in 1895 and returned to Chinese control in 1945, at the end of World War 2, as agreed by Britain, the US, the Soviet Union and China at the Potsdam Conference.

In 1949, having lost in the Chinese Civil War, Chang Kai-shek and his people fled to Taiwan and set up a renegade administration, and the US positioned its Navy – the Seventh Fleet – in the Taiwan Strait to prevent the communist government from reuniting the country. But even then, Taiwan never claimed to be a separate country – the Kuomintang simply said that Taiwan was the real China and that the People’s Republic was the renegade. Indeed that idea is still part of Taiwan’s constitution.

So China’s very consistent position is that Taiwan is part of China. This position – the One China Principle – is accepted by more than 90 percent of the world’s countries, including the US and Britain. China has always said that it seeks peaceful reunification but that it reserves the right to use force in case of outside interference or a unilateral declaration of independence. Furthermore it makes the very reasonable point that the Taiwan issue is an internal matter for Chinese people on both sides of the Strait to resolve.

There is nothing particularly bellicose or unusual about such a position. Frankly, if you’ll excuse the slight provocation, China’s historic claim to Taiwan is far stronger than Britain’s historic claim to Scotland, but does anyone think Westminster would avoid the use of force if Scotland, backed and armed by Russia, say, were to unilaterally declare independence.

So nothing has changed with respect to China’s position on the Taiwan question. What’s changed is that the US and its allies, seeking to provoke conflict and undermine China, are increasing their support for separatist elements, are increasing their supply of weapons to the administration in Taipei, and are steadily rowing back on the One China Principle.

Biden has said multiple times that the US would intervene militarily if Beijing were to attempt to change the status quo by force – which goes directly against what was agreed by the US and China back in the 1970s when relations were re-established. It is essentially a way of signalling: we are building towards war against China, and Taiwan will likely be the flashpoint. And the way we plan to win public support for that war is by presenting it as a war to protect democracy in Taiwan.

Another popular accusation about China’s “aggression” is that it’s engaged in expansionism in the South China Sea, because it patrols its own waters, and because it has a number of complicated territorial disputes over control of an array of tiny uninhabited islands.