Thread by @caitoz

What We're Really Seeing With All These Anti-China Narratives

"Why are we being told that China is dangerous over and over again day in and day out all of a sudden, while, for example, Israel's constant bombing of Syria gets nary a mention?"
caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/what-were-re…

There's a great viral thread going around with a small sample of the virulent anti-China headlines the mass media have been churning out, putting forward the inconvenient suggestion that this is one possible answer to this question by the New York Times:

https://twitter.com/isgoodrum/status/1372203410297032716?s=20

Rania sums it up well:

https://twitter.com/RaniaKhalek/status/1372600820450041860

it's important to think critically about WHY we are seeing these narratives as much as whether those narratives are true. Why are we being told that China is dangerous over and over again all of a sudden, while, for example, Israel's constant bombing of Syria gets nary a mention?

Negative mass media coverage of empire-targeted governments always far exceeds negative coverage of empire-aligned governments on the same issues, like nonstop coverage of protests in Hong Kong while ignoring protests in France, Gaza, Chile, Haiti etc
fair.org/home/with-peop…

The repetition of these negative stories has more of an effect than the contents of the stories themselves because of something called the illusory truth effect, an odd cognitive bias which leads our minds to mistake info we've heard repeatedly for fact.
caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/03/26/the…

Just by repeating something over and over again, our minds can be tricked into believing that what we have heard is a verified fact and not a completely unconfirmed assertion.

This is why more and more people are accepting the narrative that China is a "genocidal regime", for example. There's no more proof of the claim that China is committing genocide than there was a year ago (in fact the claim is far more discredited now),
thegrayzone.com/2021/03/17/rep…

...but because the mass media have been repeating it endlessly you're hearing far more people bleating that claim.

https://twitter.com/caitoz/status/1372617610269888515?s=20

Not only does the empire have every motive in the world to lie about China as it prepares to surpass the US economy in a few years, it has every motive in the world to lie about Xinjiang specifically due to its unique role in China's rise and the easily exploited divisions there.

After the fall of the USSR the neoconservative notion that the US must maintain unipolar planetary hegemony at all cost became the prevailing mainstream orthodoxy at the heart of the empire. China is the ultimate threat to this hegemony. As Michael Parenti has written:

Because hot conflict is taken off the table in cold war confrontations between nuclear powers, planetary-scale propaganda campaigns take on a much more prominent role to pave the way for each new escalation. That's what we're seeing in all this promotion of anti-China hysteria.

You can understand the establishment China narratives by grasping just two points:
1) We are in a slow-motion third world war between the US and its allies and the nations which have resisted absorption into this alliance.
2) Propaganda is used to move this slow-motion war along.