Power and Primacy¶
Metadata¶
- Author: A.B. Abrams
- ASIN: B07QQL3VCL
- ISBN: 1788746120
- Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07QQL3VCL
- Kindle link
Highlights¶
Direct European rule and near absolute Western dominance could change only with the end of the West’s longstanding monopoly on modern industrial and military capabilities, which came with the modernization of Japan in the late nineteenth century and the Soviet Union’s rapid Stalinist industrialization program in the 1930s. — location: 121 ^ref-29885
Imperial Japan and the USSR were key to facilitating the independence of numerous Asia-Pacific states – providing arms, ideologies and inspiration, which allowed Asian peoples to challenge the Western empires. — location: 127 ^ref-1993
The example set by Japan’s successes inspired nationalists across the region by demonstrating that the West could be confronted and defeated. — location: 135 ^ref-32716
the United States’ abolition of the People’s Republic of Korea by military decree and imposition of a military government run by leaders hand-picked by the U.S. military itself. — location: 148 ^ref-59614
By 1947 a communist victory, considered near impossible by all major powers in 1945, appeared imminent. — location: 1822 ^ref-53409
their only major foreign backer had been North Korea – as the Japanese imperial era Korean resistance which had gone on to form the new North Korean leadership had formed close ties with the PLA during their joint struggle for independence. The main contribution the Koreans provided however was manpower, as the small state did not have the funds or the industrial capacity to support the PLA. — location: 1833 ^ref-10821
Despite their overwhelming material and manpower advantages the Guomindang quickly saw their position deteriorate, leading to their eventual defeat. — location: 1836 ^ref-28796
The communists were seen to lead by example and took great care to portray themselves to the impoverished population as paragons of honesty, progressiveness and fairness. As a result, the people voted with their support, and not only did the rural populations support the PLA, but disillusioned Guomindang forces transferred entire divisions and their weapons to the PLA through mass defections. — location: 1849 ^ref-58506
American delegations which had visited Chinese communist territory noted the stark discrepancy with areas under the Guomindang. It was these differences which can be largely credited for the latter’s ultimate defeat. — location: 1859 ^ref-17627
He observed the lack of censorship which had been prevalent in Guomindang areas, and the sense of freedom in communist areas. ‘To the casual eye there are no police in Yenan,’ he reported of the communist controlled region by contrast to the nationalist police state. ‘Morale is very high … there is no defeatism but rather confidence.’ — location: 1864 ^ref-45663
Chiang Kai-shek had himself written in his personal diary in late 1948, by which time a communist victory appeared inevitable, that the Guomindang had failed primarily due to the corruption and ‘rot’ within its leadership. — location: 1871 ^ref-3758
For the United States a dependent client dictatorship, even ‘the world’s worst leadership,’ was far preferable to their interests than to a genuinely independent and popular communist government. — location: 1878 ^ref-48507
communist victory came as much as a surprise to the Soviet Union as it did to the United States. — location: 1895 ^ref-19795
Guomindang forces were forced to flee to Taiwan, taking with them numerous national and artistic treasures and the country’s entire gold reserve — location: 1904 ^ref-18954
The massacres are estimated to have killed up to 28,000 of Taiwan’s indigenous population. — location: 1907 ^ref-47132
Taiwan held by a U.S. aligned government the territory would become a key staging ground for the United States to wage a concerted campaign to undermine the Chinese government on the mainland, and would come to host American nuclear weapons and 30,000 military personnel. — location: 1910 ^ref-45594
The communist victory, in the United States widely termed the ‘Loss of China,’ came as the greatest blow to America’s foreign policy designs in the postwar era. — location: 1915 ^ref-60144
the CIA was working with the Western aligned Taiwanese forces ‘to train and drop teams of Chinese onto the mainland to develop resistance movements and gather intelligence.’ — location: 2004 ^ref-39930
Before the communist takeover the United States made their position on Tibet’s autonomy clear: ‘The Government of the United States has borne in mind the fact that the Chinese Government has long claimed sovereignty over Tibet and that the Chinese constitution lists Tibet among areas constituting the territory of the Republic of China — location: 2055 ^ref-19106
As the fourteenth Dalai Lama recalled, co-operation with the CIA against China ‘only resulted in more suffering for the people of Tibet.’ — location: 2127 ^ref-6058
The campaign, while potentially promising and a considerable drain on Chinese resources, ultimately floundered due to lack of support from the vast majority of the Tibetan population. — location: 2130 ^ref-10975
It is worthy of note that support for separatist movements in China began immediately after China became an independent People’s Republic in 1949 – not before. — location: 2143 ^ref-43417
West supported Tibetan separatism ‘not because they cared about Tibetan independence, but as part of their worldwide efforts to destabilize all communist governments.’ — location: 2145 ^ref-24500
‘human rights’ only become an issue raised against states which pursue independent policy contrary to Western interests, which at the time were mostly communist or communist aligned states. — location: 2147 ^ref-57097
This combined with threats of nuclear and biological weapons attacks (see Chapter 9), infiltration by saboteurs and hostile paramilitary forces meant that the country was always in a state of war. — location: 2155 ^ref-5024
The free and open society and approachable leadership described by political analyst John Service when he led the American delegation to the Chinese communists in 1944 could never last under such circumstances. — location: 2157 ^ref-57269
The immense scale of the security threat thus necessitated precautions which compromised the freedom of the Chinese people. — location: 2160 ^ref-53384
China under threat could never develop to its full potential, and into the free society which could have been an attractive model to much of Asia, due to the continuing war waged against it. — location: 2163 ^ref-63864
Without the context of the military incursions and threats as persistent as they were dire which the state faced ever since its formation, as well as the extreme hostility China’s communists faced from the United States during the civil war, the development of Chinese civil society and government can never be properly understood and can be easily misrepresented. — location: 2165 ^ref-43758
‘Democracy’ became a label for Western allies and client states in the postcolonial era. — location: 3531 ^ref-19921
Taiwan would by the end of the decade house American nuclear weapons little over 130 km from the coast of mainland China. — location: 4696 ^ref-45459
or their national treasures and gold reserves held in Taipei – funds much needed to modernize the country’s economy. — location: 4769 ^ref-59033
Essentially, according to U.S. intelligence, the Chinese did not endorse and had little to gain from war – regardless of who started it. — location: 4786 ^ref-13314
Had China actively sought to fight the United States in Korea they could have easily intervened in the opening months when U.S. forces were on the verge of being driven off the peninsula entirely and any small assistance to the North Koreans could well have tipped the balance. As it was China sought to avoid war at all costs, and did so only when it faced a serious threat and attacks from a relentless hostile force. — location: 5474 ^ref-15167
For those that dispute that the United States was ever a colonial power, in the Pacific alone one need only look to the annexation of the Philippines, Guam and Hawaii and the former status of Okinawa. — location: 10616 ^ref-21316
The Western Bloc revealed however that it was willing to sacrifice the free market principles it had long advocated to further its own strategic interests. — location: 10662 ^ref-41511
the rise of Asian economies, regardless of their political orientation, posed a fundamental threat to the West’s position and its global economic primacy. — location: 10708 ^ref-52021
the whims of secretive hedge funds could apparently cause mass poverty on the other side of the world.’ — location: 10722 ^ref-64493
How planned was this? Are Western countries as vulnerable? If so why not?
under immense Western pressure — location: 10729 ^ref-6648
What pressure, precisely?
In one year $600 billion had disappeared from the stock markets of these Asian nations, wealth that had been built with great effort by the peoples of these countries over several decades. — location: 10730 ^ref-36711
and effectively rolling back years of social and economic progress on the part of huge populations in that region, is a case in point.’ — location: 10807 ^ref-42009
Malaysia was notably an exceptional case, and by refusing to comply with the ‘advice’ of Western financial institutions to restructure and adopt neoliberal policies it was spared the worst of the crisis. — location: 10844 ^ref-16991
Other Asian governments relied heavily on advice from the IMF, having largely outsourced their decision-making to the fund in return for loans. — location: 10858 ^ref-13674
What was removed was nothing less than the ‘trade and investment protectionism and activist state intervention that were the key ingredients of the “Asian miracle,”’ according to political scientist Professor Walden Bello.43 With their own states unable to intervene in their interests, Asian peoples and economies were left entirely at the mercy of Western institutions. — location: 10884 ^ref-55071
Western credibility was torn to shreds when the financial tsunami struck Wall Street [2008]. Shamelessly abandoning the policy prescriptions they imposed on Asia, they decided their banks and companies like General Motors were too big to fail. — location: 10899 ^ref-46643
Chinese Economic Initiatives — location: 11703 ^ref-43552
U.S. President Eisenhower’s statement that the U.S. military should use nuclear weapons ‘as you would use bullets’ across the Chinese mainland should China threaten U.S. interests in the Taiwan. — location: 12159 ^ref-43299
extensive use of biological weapons including anthrax, bubonic plague and cholera among others during the Korean War, combined with these other factors, — location: 12161 ^ref-6388
Assistance for a Chinese nuclear ←556 | 557→program began immediately after the United States began to station nuclear missiles on Taiwan — location: 12177 ^ref-28953
The Western Bloc, led by the United States, would take extensive measures to counter the threat of an emerging independent Chinese state to their regional dominance. These measures, which commenced in the early 1950s, included a complete trade embargo, deployment of nuclear weapons to Taiwan, South Korea and Japan, and the rapid expansion of air and naval bases in the two countries to further encircle China. — location: 12916 ^ref-27285
Taiwan in 1954 and proceeded to deploy nuclear weapons to the territory to complete China’s encirclement. — location: 12929 ^ref-17495
There is little doubt therefore that if China was still the ROC, a close Western ally, all of its claims to the South China Sea – those currently derided by the West as threats to regional stability – would have been recognized. — location: 13972 ^ref-33926
The construction of airstrips in disputed territories had however first been carried out by Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia and the Philippines on Taiping, Swallow Reef, Spratly island and Thitu respectively. It was only afterwards that China began to construct its own airstrips on the islands. As Beijing officially claimed in 2015: ‘We have simply repeated what everyone else is doing.’ — location: 14026 ^ref-22063
CIA’s policy of supporting Islamist militant groups to further U.S. policy — location: 14550 ^ref-59863
With China’s rise posing arguably the greatest threat to Western primacy in modern history, surpassing that posed by the Soviet Union, and considering the success of support for Islamist groups in the past and the frequency with which the strategy has been employed, it remains highly likely that this will again be implemented. — location: 14554 ^ref-39243
preventative war, which had been rejected by all U.S. presidents throughout the Cold War as a sole pretext for military intervention, increasingly became an acceptable pretext by United States governments for military intervention from the early 1990s. — location: 14886 ^ref-38135
the purpose of the U.S. bombardment was to target living standards by destroying key infrastructure with precision guided weapons, such as oil refineries, electrical plants and transportation networks. — location: 14929 ^ref-16421
were the destruction of 80 percent of Iraq’s power generation capabilities and the crippling of its sewage treatment system. — location: 14930 ^ref-20732
American attempts to negotiate with the DPRK were neither genuine nor realistic, stating: ‘By ‘diplomacy’ the United States seemed to mean making unilateral demands on the North Koreans rather than anything resembling negotiation.’ — location: 15026 ^ref-13698
‘The Iraqi war shows that to allow disarming through inspection does not help avert a war but rather sparks it.’ — location: 15041 ^ref-56550
United States was guilty of the crime of genocide against the Korean people during the Korean War, — location: 15077 ^ref-10064
‘despite almost 40 years of Japanese occupation, the atrocities of U.S. imperialists [in 3 years] are still greater.’ — location: 15504 ^ref-58314
Just as Nazi Germany and their European allies killed up to 38 percent of the world’s Jewish population, targeting them indiscriminately,189 so too did the U.S. military and their own European allies indiscriminately target Korean civilians, cut off their food supplies, and kill up to 30 percent of the DPRK’s population. Both were genocidal and intended to kill millions more, with Nazi Germany intending to kill and starve tens of millions of Russians190 — location: 15580 ^ref-35346
the United States sought to target the dams and rice fields feeding millions of North Koreans, which would have caused a widespread famine and killed many millions more had it not been for an emergency food aid program provided by the USSR and China. — location: 15584 ^ref-25009
the West can and has come to terms with the crimes of the Third Reich, with which it today does not associate itself, but it fails to come to terms with the brutality and war crimes of the modern Western Bloc which emerged after 1945. — location: 15601 ^ref-27446
In the mindset of the West, North Korean grievances can never be acknowledged because they are so sure of the rightness of their causes and their history. As a result education regarding American war crimes will continue to be deemed ‘propaganda,’ — location: 15610 ^ref-33623
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