Western Territorial Double-Standards Against China (South Front)

 

NOTE: This version of the article was written for South Front. You can read it on South Front website: WESTERN TERRITORIAL DOUBLE-STANDARDS AGAINST CHINA.

This article was written by Luis Garcia, author of the book VENEZUELA: Westerners have lost the ability to reason!, and of numerous articles published on his website Nomadic Thoughts. He is the translator of the Portuguese version of Andre Vltchek’s book Por Lula: O Brasil de Bolsonaro (For Lula: Bolsonaro’s Brazil) and has also collaborated with authors like Tim Anderson, Vanessa Beeley, Eva Bartlett, Stephen Gowans, and several others in the translation of their articles into Portuguese.

 

Listen to the audio version of this article here:  

WESTERN HYPOCRISY  

In order to give credibility to their care about "democracy", "human rights, or "self-determination" needs in Taiwan, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, or Tibet, many Western humanitarians try to validate their supposed concerns by backing themselves with universal support based on their own Western beliefs system and set of values. By acting in this manner, such Western humanitarians calling for the independence of, let's say, Tibet, are no more than very biased and wicked agents of sinophobia, sycophants of their supposed cultural superiority, despite the fact they end out contradicting their logic and their actions when positing the Spratly Islands or the Paracel Islands are not Chinese due to distance (as if Aruba was nearby the Netherlands or the French Polynesia islands were located in the Mediterranean Sea). 

What does all this mean? Easy. Although absurd their claims for the independence of Chinese provinces and territories such as Taiwan, if they truly expect to be taken seriously by intellectually honest individuals, for instance, they should also have to start campaigning for the independence of New Caledonia and for the freedom of the pro-independence New Caledonian activists arrested in the jails of the occupier France. The same would have to apply to many other nations occupied by expansionist Western powers, namely the Kingdom of Hawaii, annexed and occupied by the US since 1893, against Hawaiians' will. 

If their main concerns were prosperity and quality of life of the Tibetans they supposedly care about, they should be happy to see the eradication of an anachronistic serfdom system imposed by the Lamas, nobles, and high-ranked officials, all of them condemning the remaining 95% of Tibetans to slavery, extreme poverty and starvation, modern crimes against humanity very well-explained and well-documented by Chris D. Nebe in is shockingly ignored documentary Tibet: The Truth. China, stabilized under communism, first brought education, access to shelter and food, dignity, and basic human rights until then completely ignored. Later, ever prospering China brought modernity, prosperity, and connections to the outside world (highways, airports, high-speed trains, etc.) to the peoples of Tibet.  

If the main concerns of all those self-proclaimed humanitarians in the West were "genocide", their main struggle should be about the rights of Chagos Island's inhabitants, 100% of them kidnapped and dumped in the slums of Mauritius's capital by the UK criminal regime, to free space in the islands to be rented to the US, where this also criminal regime installed some military bases. In his documentary Stealing A Nation, the great journalist John Pilger made the ultimate description of this horrendous genocide. 

 

If their main concerns were cultural genocide, mass brainwashing, concentration camps, widespread violence, widespread banalized sex exploitation of children and rape of women, depopulation, the plunder of resources, destruction of livability, and so on, they should definitely start fighting for the hopeless victims of North American, British, New Zealander and Australian systematized multi-genocides in Oceania. André Vltchek made an extensive report on all these unspeakable crimes in his book Oceania.

For instance, after having fully poisoned the Bikini Atoll and other neighboring atolls with at least 66 nuclear explosions, the US dares to occupy 11 of the Marshall Islands' islets with military bases, keeping the internal refugees of deadly radiation in the remaining tiny islets, packed in concentration camps from which they can only leave to work in irregular jobs in the US military bases in the nearby island... for slave-like salaries. 

Please check it by yourself:

If their main concern were cultural genocide they should rather focus on Indonesia "transmigrasi", the most efficient, well-organized, well-planned, and systematized cultural genocide ever in human history, taking place right now in the failed country named Indonesia, where I personally witnessed and documented the fast-paced cultural genocide of Sasak people in the Island of Lombok. "Transmigrasi" is also a genocide that already took the lives of hundreds of thousands of Papuans and Borneoans at the hands of one of the most vicious forces on Earth: the Indonesian army. 

They should also wonder why in many European places, like the Kingdom of Britanny, incorporated in France in 1532, Europeans successfully executed conscious cultural genocides aiming at irradicating languages and traditions. In today's France and Spain, the cultural genocide, oppression, and persecution goes on in the Basque Country, where Basques are forced to learn French and Spanish to the detriment of their own language.
 

Even if their main concern were population ratios (many complain of the ratio of Chinese Han in Tibet and Xinjiang), they should be striking against Chile for having, in occupied Easter Island, more Chileans than native islanders. 

Following the same logic, Western humanitarians should fight against the 99% invaders to 1% natives in the US, instead of worrying about the 46.42% Uighurs to 38.99% Han in Xinjiang.

The examples of 21st-century Western colonialism, Western genocides, and cultural genocides throughout the world are endless, as equally endless is the Western hypocrisy of calling China imperialistic for its will to get Taiwan back, for having legal and internationally recognized jurisdiction over the autonomous provinces of Xinjiang and Tibet, or for controlling islands in the South China Sea 60 times closer to China than the Falkland Islands are to the UK.

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Instead of having Westerners blaming their own past and current imperial and genocidal crimes, we have constant bashing of China and Russia, two nations that, unlike the European nations, managed to keep alive their immense variety of ethnic groups plus their languages, traditions, religions, and lifestyles, while granting them access to modern education, modern facilities and modern infrastructures such as roads and railways. Instead of self-criticism, we get abhorrent nonsense like this:

The claims to Taiwan are not much stronger. The Qing Dynasty ceded Taiwan “in perpetuity” to Japan in the Treaty of Shimonoseki in 1895, and the Kuomintang took over in 1945 at the end of the Second World War. The People’s Republic has never, in fact, ruled the island. After losing to Mao Zedong, the Kuomintang, under Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, retreated to Taiwan in 1949 to claim the island as the consolation prize in the civil war."

[The Coming Collapse of China, by Gordon G. Chang]

Gordon's appalling contradictions are a perfect reflection of Western contradictions in matters of colonization and imperialism. After admitting Taiwan was Chinese until China was forced to cede it to Japan by the means of force (Japanese war of aggression and consequent treaty legitimizing the plunder of the defeated nation), the author posits that Taiwan was never Chinese, and ends admitting the defeated side of the Chinese civil war (KMT) ended out in Taiwan! Basically, Gordon tries to convince the readers that 1 plus 1 is 3 or 4, despite the fact he already typed 2, the correct answer.

In truth, and as the rather honest author A. B. Abrams explained in his book Immovable Object: North Korea's 70 Years At War with American Power,  the US indirectly stole Taiwan from China for very precise military and strategic reasons, seeking to military exploit Chinese territory to military counter China, while postulating that such Chinese territory in the hands of China would be a military threat to the US:

Denial of the strategically critical territory to China, with the protection of Guomindang remnants becoming official U.S. policy from June 1950 as General MacArthur among other hardliners had long advocated, played well into the hands of more extremist anti-communist elements in the American leadership.

PRC control of Taiwan would, according to prior statements by the general, allow American adversaries to deploy ten or twenty air groups, serve as a major forward operating base for submarines, and allow enemy forces to increase air efforts against American bases such as those on Okinawa by 100% as well as against Western-controlled shipping lanes.

He further warned that Beijing could provide bases on the territory to the Soviet Red Army, compensating for the latter’s overall weakness at sea and complementing its already predominant power on land, stating: 'Formosa [Taiwan] in the hands of the Communists can be compared to an unsinkable aircraft carrier and submarine tender ideally located to accomplish Soviet offensive strategy and at the same time checkmate counteroffensive operations by United States Forces based on Okinawa and the Philippines.'

He equated the importance of this asset as a base for aircraft alone to 'ten or twenty aircraft carriers.' Denial of this territory to the PRC was thus a major strategic benefit gained from the Korean War’s outbreak and a major loss for China and the communist world."

Or, as the host of Bay Area415 explained, the control of Taiwan was a US tool to encircle China as the invasion of Vietnam was. In his words:

Like in Vietnam, we really don't care about Taiwan. It is more of convenience, it is a proxy for our military to get a good concave against China".

Please watch the video:

The simplest way to understand what the host of Bay Area415 exposed is to look at this map showing the unjustified, unfair, and partially illegal siege the US rogue state imposes upon China:

The situation of the Diaoyu Islands is one of the most outrageous examples of US imperialism against China. These Chinese islands, occupied by Imperial Japan until the end of WWII, were supposed to be given back to the Chinese administration after the defeat of the Japanese and the liberation of the countries and territories they had invaded. Instead, aside from setting free the most despicable Japanese criminals responsible for the Nanjing massacre, the killing of at least 20 million Chinese, the most draconian program on experiments on living human beings (Unit 731), and many other appalling crimes (read Redacted Reality - The Japan you refuse to acknowledge), the US decided to give the Chinese Diaoyu Islands to Japan, thus stealing the victim to compensate the aggressor in a very clear example of Western supremacy applied to the reshaping of world's map, and comparable to the contemporaneous injustices created by the French mandate and British mandate in the Greater Syria that resulted in the balkanization of Syria and in the creation of the artificial state of Israel. 

The most disturbing aspect of the Diaoyu Islands affair is that most human beings never heard about it, which is no surprise when one realizes how much energy the West spends censoring it, like mistranslating the movie Tricky Brains (made in Hong Kong) with subtitles missing the mention to Diaoyu Islands clearly said by the character, replacing it by the vague "our place".  

Nonetheless, this theft was very well exposed by Chris D. Nebe in his documentary Diaoyu Islands - The Truth.

Back to Taiwan, and to finish the issue, what else to say when even servants of the US rogue state like veteran US diplomat Chas Freeman realize and admit how right China is in its claims over Taiwan? To all those Westerners with (conscious or unconscious) supremacist mindsets preventing themselves from listening to Chinese perspectives on China issues, listening to Chas Freeman on Taiwan and Hong Kong might result in an epiphanic experience:

This excerpt can also be watched on VK (click here). The full interview can be watched on The Grayzone's YouTube channel (click here). 

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WESTERN DOUBLE-STANDARDS

If, in the perspective of many Westerners, places with hundreds of years of history as part of China (like Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, or Taiwan) are not part of China and deserve independence, and everyone has to acquiesce to such view of the world, well, in that case, it will be provided here a non-exhaustive yet long list of places occupied by Western countries that, by these same Western standards, definitely deserve independence. 

But, first of all, for all those Caucasians holding US, Canadian, New Zealand, or Australian passports (among others)... if they support the idea that Xinjiang is an Uiguristanand that Chinese Han settling in "Uigurs lands" is bad and that Han people have to "get out" of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, like Vox did in this video... well, in that case, what the hell are they doing in the US, Canada, New Zealand or Australia? They should be coherent and go back to their homeland! They should kindly go back to Europe, thus giving an end to their own hypocritical sinophobic rhetoric.

A clarification: the author of this article does not support such mass migration. The idea is only to expose the astonishing double-standards.

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Finally, let's give a deep look into the many colonies Western nations still occupy all over the planet, starting with the faraway coloniesof the US and several European nations in Central America, South America, Africa, and Oceania, and ending with adjacent and nearby colonies in Europe.

A few of these examples of faraway colonies were not inhabited before being colonized by Westerners, and the reader may find it unfair to have them included in this list. Yet, there is a good reason to have them mentioned here: to compare how far are those territories from Europe and the US, in comparison to the distance between China and its Spratly and Paracel islands in the South China Sea, which many in the West and in Asia claim not to be Chinese territories but rather Vietnamese, Filipino, Malay, Bruneian or, imagine, Taiwanese!

FAR WAY COLONIES

USA - Actually not very far away from its mainland, in the Caribbean Sea, the US occupies Puerto Rico, Navassa Island, U.S. Virgin Islands, and a portion of Cuba named Guantanamo Bay. The US and its supporters claim Cuba leased it to the US, dishonestly ignoring the fact the contract (Cuban–American Treaty of Relations, 1903) has no validity because the then US-imposed puppet regime of Cuba had to choose between say "yes" or be militarily invaded by the US. In the same region, the US claims as its territory the banks of and Bajo Nuevo and Serranilla.

Then there's the Kingdom of Hawaii, annexed after the overthrow of its government by US nationals, and nowadays considered by the US as one of its states. Not far from Hawaii but 5,000 km away from the US West coast there is the Midway Atoll, in which the US built an island-military base (Sand Island) of the very kind of the ones the US criticizes China for having built in the Spratly and Paracelarchipelagos in the South China Sea. The Midway Atoll is part of the Northern Mariana Islands territory, under US administration. 

Still in the Pacific Ocean, the US controls many other islands and atolls, some of them also hosting US military bases: Johnston Atoll, Wake Atoll, Palmyra Atoll, Baker Island, Howland Island, Jarvis Island, and Kingman Reef.

Finally, the US continues to occupy the entire nation of Guam and part of the Samoan nation known as American Samoa.

To help understand the full extent of the US Empire, US journalist Abby Martin produced the very informative documentary "United States” to Imperial America: Our Hidden Empire.

Denmark - This tiny European nation still occupies the territory of the Inuit people known in the West by  Greenland, an island 50 times bigger than Denmark itself.

Norway - In the Artic, Norway controls Svalbard and Jan Mayen. In the Pacific, Norway controls Peter I Island, and in the (south) Atlantic Bouvet Island, both incredibly far away from Norway when compared to distances between mainland China and Taiwan or the Spratly Islands. 

The Netherlands - Thousands of kilometers away from Europe, in the Caribbean Sea, the Netherlands still occupies the nations of Sint Eustatius, Saba, Sint Maarten, Curaçao, Bonaire, and Aruba. These last three are only a few kilometers away from Venezuela and have naval bases used by the US rogue regime to threaten, blockade, and conduct military coup attempts against the Bolivarian nation.

United Kingdom - This European country is still in possession of a large network of colonies in all the oceans of the planet. In the Atlantic (and the Caribbean Sea), the UK occupies nations and territories like Turks and Caicos Islands, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, Tristan da Cunha, Ascension Island, Saint Helena, Montserrat, Falkland Islands, Cayman Islands, British Virgin Islands, Bermuda, and Anguilla.

In the Pacific, the UK occupies Pitcairn, Henderson, Ducie, and Oeno Islands,  

In the Indian Ocean, there is the infamous case of genocide being committed by the UK in the British Indian Ocean Territory (Chagos Islands). With all these appalling examples of colonization, the British come last in the right to criticize China's jurisdiction over Tibet or over islands in the South China Sea. 

New Zealand and Australia are committing slow-motion cultural genocides in their colonies in the Pacific, either by creating incentives for depopulation of Pacific nations ruled by them whose natives flee to the mother countries, either by incentives for the depopulation of independent nations under Anglo-Saxonic blockade whose natives flee to go work for slave-salaries in the depopulated ones under Australian and New Zealander sovereignty. André Vltchek already gave the full picture of it. 

Australia - Australia still occupies Norfolk Island, Christmas Island, Cocos Islands, Coral Sea Islands, Ashmore and Cartier Islands,  Heard Island, and McDonald Islands. 

New Zealand - In what they call the "realm of New Zealand", New Zealanders occupy the nations of Cook Islands, Nive, and Tokelau, and control a series of other islands throughout the South Pacific:

Portugal - Portugal still controls 2 archipelagos in the Atlantic, Azores and Madeira. After the Portuguese democratic revolution in 1974, led by communist and socialist forces, the US administration had a plan to make the Azores an independent country in order to keep its strategic Lages Air Base in the eventuality of seeing Portugal's mainland falling into the USSR sphere of influence. As Henry Kissinger declared at the time:

We have a contingency plan to take over the Azores (...) that would be stimulating Azores independence.”

Spain - Spain still controls the Canary Islandsin Africa, and also occupies several tiny territories in Morocco. 

France - The French regime and its vast network of colonization of many nations of this world who deserve independence, seek independence, yet are continuously repressed by this imperial and colonial regime.  

In Africa, France occupies the nations of Réunion and Mayotte.

In South America, France occupies the nation of French Guiana. 

In the Caribbean Sea, France occupies the nations of Guadeloupe, Martinique, Saint Martin, and Saint Barthélemy

In North America, France occupies the islands of Saint Pierre and Miquelon.

In the Pacific, France occupies many nations organized under a culturally genocidal set of administrative regions that put many native peoples under the rule of a sole colony, like in the case of French Polynesia (Tahiti). Still in the Pacific, the French regime also occupies the nations of New Caledonia and Wallis and Futuna, 

Finally, France disputes the sovereignty of Vanuatu's uninhabited islands, namely Matthew Island and Hunter Island, in a pure example of arrogant colonialism that claims that territories nearby an independent Oceanic nation should rather belong to a European country 17,000 Km away! Chauvinism goes as far as what the French citizen Eric Vuillermoz did, adding the French flag to photos of Hunter Island on Google Maps.

Finally, there is a group of nations claiming parts of the very remote Antarctica. Besides the claims of relatively close nations like Chile, Argentina, New Zealand, and Australia, the European nations of France, Norway, and the United Kingdom also believe to be the owners of parts of Antarctica. Brazil and Uruguay also have unofficial claims over Antarctica. China doesn't!

ADJACENT AND NEARBY COLONIES

Like in China, there's a complex multitude of ethnic groups living inside countries ruled by other dominant ethnic groups, such as Gypsies,  Turks in Macedonia, Hungarians in Romania, Gagauz people all over Eastern Europe and the Balkans, or the ethnic Serbians living inside the entity Republika Srpska inside Bosnia and Herzegovina. If all this is possible in Europe, why isn't it the case for China?

If one looks carefully, it is possible to find in European nations what Westerners accuse China of doing: to absorb entire nations into a larger and internationally recognized country. For instance, Brittany or Basque Country in France. Galicia, Catalonia, or Basque Country in Spain. In Scandinavia, the Sápmi nation is occupied by Norway, Sweden, Finland, and the Russian Federation. And so on, as there is a big quantity of similar cases all over Europe. 

So, why can't Inner Mongolia or Xinjiang be part of China, as many Western netizens and their friends in places like India and East Asia claim nowadays?

More importantly, there are still real examples of European colonies in Europe. European nations or part of European nations ruled by other European nations.  Italy rules over Sicilyand Sardinia. France rules over the nation of Corsica. Denmark rules over the Faroe Islands. Spain occupies 2 territories of its African neighbor of Morocco: Ceuta and Melilla. Conversely, the United Kingdom still occupies the southern tip of Spain: Gibraltar. The United Kingdom also occupies part of Ireland (Northern Island), the Channel Islands on the coast of France, and, incredibly, still claims full sovereignty over 2 portions of Cyprus: Akrotiri and Dhekelia. 

Given all this, how can Western nations criticize China's claims over its historically Chinese island of Taiwan, directly stolen by Japan and later indirectly stolen by the US?  

We could still check the historic territories lost as punishment after defeat in world wars, like the Romanian territory ceded to Bulgaria, or German territory ceded to Poland. There are many other examples. No one is claiming here those lands should change hands once again. No, the point is: given all these Western discrepancies, how dare Westerners say Taiwan is not China just because the US decided to interfere in the Chinese civil war between the CPC and the KMT? And how come China, a victim yet a winner of WWII, unlike the victim Poland that received German territory, rather lost territory to the aggressor, as is the case of the Diaoyu Islands?

A final provocation for all those who love to love India and love to hate China: how come the supporters of the balkanization of China never call for the balkanization of a very diverse India comprising 28 states and 8 union territories, with extremely different ethnic groups divided by several different religions and a multitude of different languages and cultures?

For all the reasons above, yes, China has legitimate sovereignty over Taiwan, Inner Mongolia, Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Diaoyu Islands, Spratly Islands, and Paracel Islands. 

Luís Garcia