The Chinese 'paper' or 'document' referred to in this report may lead the reader to think this is a leaked document from Chinese military, but in fact it's a published book and here is its full text if ANYONE is interested to know about this 'secret'. gnews.org/wp-content/upl…
In effect, you don't have to be someone from the US State Department to get hold of this prized 'document'. Nor do you have to be a cyber expert to verify 'the authenticity of the paper.' Anyone can 'locate its genesis on the Chinese internet'. If you want a hard copy,
it's still available from the Chinese online bookstore Dangdang, though the price has somehow had a 10-fold increase (from 50RMB to more than 500RMB). search.dangdang.com/?key=%B7%C7%B5…
And many Chinese readers have posted their various comments on this book here: book.douban.com/subject/317162…
While in the book "Chinese military scientists discussed weaponising SARS coronaviruses" (the title of The Australian report), but the title leaves out the crucial information: they discussed the possibility of other countries' or terrorists' weaponising SARS coronvairuses.
It reads like a conspiracy theory book, but it got this wild idea from the author Xu Dezhong's accidental discovery of Michael J. Ainscough's 2002 paper “next-generation bioweapons”, which predicted 'the Third World War... will be biological' full text: fas.org/irp/threat/cbw…
Xu was really spooked by this 'discovery'. Out of shock, he added Chapter 4 '当代基因(人制人新种病原体和致病基因)武器及其施放‘ (Contemporary Genetic [New Species of Man-Made Pathogen and Pathogenic Gene] Weapons and Their Release) to the book at the last minute (see Preface).
But this Australian news report somehow attributes that prediction to the 'Chinese document' which 'predicted a third world war would be fought with biological weapons.' Now this report, and the new book 'What Really Happened in Wuhan', effectively did what Xu Dezhong did
to the Ainscough paper. While Xu used a US military paper as a smoking gun to argue the 2003 SARS inflicted on China was a foreign conspiracy, this report and the new book use Xu's book as a smoking gun to argue COVID-19 might be China's inside job. It has now come full circle.
Oh, that lovely zero-sum mentality of 'winning' - does everything have to have a winner, a top dog? Apparently yes, according to American politicians and strategists, and that winner always has to be the United States. Much of US China policy makes sense in this context.
"China has an overall goal... to become the leading country in the world, the wealthiest country in the world, and the most powerful country in the world. That’s not going to happen on my watch" Joe Biden whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/…
"I’m not content that a Chinese citizen can count on a dramatically better standard of, let’s say, train travel than a U.S. citizen. I think Americans should always have the best." Pete Buttigieg whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/…
The eyes of #HRW, are like what John Locke calls 'understanding', which, 'like the Eye, whilst it makes us see, and perceive all other Things, takes no notice of it self: And it requires Art and Pain to set it at a distance, and make it its own Object' (rather unlikely ATM).
Very well, albeit too late - wish Pompeo were Secretary of State in 1960s. But never mind, there're still US 'gifts' that keep on giving: "America dropped three times more ordnance over Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia than all sides did during World War II." nytimes.com/2018/03/20/opi…
"Estimates are that at least 350,000 tons of live bombs and mines remain in Vietnam, and that it will take 300 years to clear them from the Vietnamese landscape at the current rate." "For the Vietnamese, the war continues.
Loss of arms, legs and eyesight are for the more fortunate ones. Others have lost their family breadwinners, or their children.... Nearly 40,000 Vietnamese have been killed since the end of the war in 1975, and 67,000 maimed, by land mines, cluster bombs and other ordnance."
As far as I can see, the 'China's assertiveness' narrative (a gentler, easier-to-swallow version of the previous 'China threat' narrative) was designed to create fear (of China) and division in the region, fear and division which was largely absent there until roughly 2009-2010.
In 2000 China proposed a free trade area with ASEAN. Framework agreement was signed in 2002. Between 2003-2008, trade with ASEAN grew from US$59.6 billion to US$192.5 billion. One IPE expert noted at a 2007 conference that China hadn't gotten one step wrong in dealing with ASEAN.
Sometimes I wonder if we've really travelled that far from the blatant anti-Chinese racism of the past in this country. As some Australian scholars pointed out, Chineseness played a central but largely negative role in the formation of Australian identity since Federation.
Helen Irving: "while there was doubt about the meaning of citizenship when Australia federated, there was one certainty amidst the doubt and that was that Australian citizens were not going to be Chinese. The Immigration
Restriction Act made this clear.
... The Chinese were thus used to identify the type of citizenship the Australian nation would not embrace…‘The Chinaman’ was the starkest example of what ‘Australian’ was not." Today of course such overt racism and discrimination against Chineseness has waned, but its never
This seems to be a case of mutually self-fulfilling prophecies at work: each side claims to be defensive against a foreign threat, and that 'defence' in turn is seen by each other as threatening which justifies further 'defence' preparation which then confirms mutual fear.
Simply insisting that one's own is peaceful whereas the other is completely offensive is just disingenuous. However, 'at least in Asia' (let's be honest, mostly on China's 'doorsteps'), doesn't China have a slightly more credible case than the US when it claims to be defensive?
Unless of course China, seen as the Other and mainly an object, isn't treated as equally human and thus doesn't deserve to have its subjectivity or its own security concerns. In that case, only 'we' are entitled to have concerns. Yet doesn't this border on wishful thinking?