British researcher exposes Western propaganda against China

[Music] hello everybody welcome to talk it out with me lee jin jin so today my guest is carlos martinez from london he is the organizer of no cold war campaign today we're going to talk about many issues his personal experience traveling across china at the china propaganda in the west and the reason of founding no cold war campaign thanks very much jing jing for having me on the show my name is carlos martinez i'm based in london england i'm an activist and campaigner and and writer and researcher i'm one of the founders of the no cold war campaign and you don't think that china is a like authoritarian ruthless cruel regime that oppress people no i mean this is a caricature this is this is what you think about china if all you would if all you came across was kind of the the western media portrayal i went to china myself in december 2019 for three weeks as part of a silk road tour actually um so a few of us went to beijing to xi'an to don juan to urumqi you know there were some of us on the tour from britain from london some from the us different places in the u.s but mainly new york and chicago and i think everybody was really struck by how modern and how clean and how nice um the the chinese cities are and how good the quality of life is one thing that really struck us immediately was that you can walk around beijing all day to different suburbs and you won't see homelessness you won't see people who don't have access you know to to anywhere to live whereas if you're to go to new york and step on the metro at any station you will immediately see numerous homeless people in you know in new york city alone which is not a massive city there are there are literally tens of thousands of people who don't have anywhere to live so it's incredible to to see a place like beijing or xi'an or or guangzhou or shanghai which are part of the developing world but they've been able to solve a major problem that faces humanity and you know i'm my father's from india i've been to delhi many times i've been to mumbai i've been to cochin and other other cities in india and the the picture's completely different because you see very stark poverty um so yeah it was it was really interesting to go to china and i i would strongly encourage people to visit china because what you see in reality was 100 different from from the portrayal that you get if you read the bbc or if you read the guardian or if you watch sky news or whatever for example we went to xinjiang we went to urumqi we did we walked freely around arumchi and and also the muslim quarter in xi'an we certainly didn't see any evidence of kind of religious oppression or ethnic oppression in urumqi one sees mosques everywhere in fact i believe that xinjiang has per cap one of the highest number of mosques anywhere in the world um we walked freely like not just in the tourist areas not just in the central area um we saw hundreds of chinese muslims wearing like distinctive uighur clothing headscarves included for many women um people going about their lives without any indication that they were living like in fear of persecution we we ate in uyghur restaurants where we had halal foods one you couldn't have pork there obviously you couldn't have alcohol there um so i mean what's true is that levels of security in a room cheer much higher than other places we visited um you walk through metal detectors and you have your bags x-rayed and things like that which is of course response to the wave of terror attacks starting in the 1990s but the impression that we got is that people accept that heightened level of security on the basis that along with other things along with the poverty alleviation efforts along with education efforts it's actually been successful in preventing terrorism and allowing people to live safely and allowing people to live in peace so that's that's kind of the big difference that we noticed in in urumqi compared to say beijing or xi'an um but certainly as i said you know you can walk around a long time in urumqi really trying to see some kind of evidence of religious oppression and you'll be frustrated you won't see that the impression from the real trip to china was completely different from what the what the media was portraying when you were like before you came to china yeah 100 um for example you walk around all day in beijing from one side of the city to another and you know if you say anything bad about the chinese communist party then you're going to be in a prison within five minutes but that's that's the you know it's a ridiculous caricature but that's actually the idea that people have about china that it's just an extremely repressive society and people don't have any kind of individual rights they have you know that there's a human rights crisis in china whereas actually you've got um a tremendous level of individual freedom there and human rights are improving all the time um and as as um kishore mabubani who's a singaporean diplomat wright sees he's got a book out recently called has china one he says well one thing you can say for sure about human rights in china and individual freedoms is that today's chinese population have much better human rights and much greater individual freedoms than chinese people have ever had in history so let's at the very least recognize that even if there are problems the trajectory is a very positive and a very impressive one like in one way capitalism is failing in dealing with issues like equality poverty alleviation or racism yeah well um that's so in i told you that in 2019 late in 2019 i went to beijing for the first time and in that same year a few months earlier i went to new york for the first time and it's really interesting to see the contrast the us is one of the world's richest countries and it's kind of the almost the spiritual home of capitalism if you like you know it considers itself as being the quintessential successful advanced capitalist democracy and yet there's a huge proportion literally tens of millions of people who live in in abject poverty who don't know where the next meal is coming from there's hundreds of thousands of people who are who are homeless who don't have a roof over their heads racism is an enormous problem incarceration is an enormous problem you know there's the us has more than two million people in prison which is by far the highest incarceration rate in the world their actual incarceration rate the number of people per capita in prison is is six or seven times higher than it is in china but the media portrays china as a prison nation and they portray us as the land of the free um so it's difficult to understand the discrepancy and the contradiction there because um because it's you know if you were to go on the numbers if you were to look on the data and the facts then you would have to say that it's the us that's the prison nation and while the african-american the black population only constitutes i think around 10 of the us population overall they constitute between 40 and 50 of the prison population which gives you a very good indication of how racism runs throughout society society um if you look at the the number the homeless population and the population that live in poverty it's overwhelmingly african-american or latino or indigenous the treatment of the indigenous peoples of the americas continues to be utterly horrific you know people are herded into reservations if you look at the difference in life expectancy between indigenous people and white people in the us it's you know maybe 15 years difference in life expectancy you know there would be mass world worldwide hysterical outrage if the difference between the life expectancy for han chinese and uyghurs was 15 years um i mean but it isn't um so you know the capitalism has got these enormous problems that even very wealthy countries can't solve and as i said to you before the one of the first things we noticed in beijing coming from new york and coming from london is okay one one doesn't see homeless people one doesn't see people begging on the streets well i can walk outside of my front door and i would have to go maybe 30 meters before i saw someone um that i saw someone who was living on the streets to many people they're probably going to be very surprised knowing there are people like you guys that are outside of china that are not chinese but are willing to speak up for china um fight against the u.s government's aggressive actions and statements towards china and some probably some people probably gonna guess well you guys probably are just founded by chinese government to speak positive things about china so can you tell us what was the reason yeah i mean i think probably from outside um from outside the west it's difficult to understand how much sort of ideological pressure there is um and there's this mainstream narrative that is able to construct essentially fake news about china and it's it's the same process that had people believing that iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that it could attack london or washington within 45 minutes there's these are established methods of building a public consensus to build public support for attack you know in this case in terms of all the kind of basically pretty hysterical propaganda around xinjiang and around taiwan and around the south china sea and around hong kong it's about building support for the new cold war it's about building support for this process of military escalations rearmament of japan um the placing of the thad missile system in guam and in south korea the construction of military bases all around the pacific you know the us has 800 military bases um and your their number one target is containing china and preventing a system whereby u.s hegemony is broken and we move to a more to a more democratic and multi-polar system of international relations so essentially the u.s administration in particular is very much focused on preventing that from happening and demonizing china and pursuing a new cold war is is a part of that and britain in particular is joining with that especially after brexit we're in a situation where britain very much needs to have strong close economic relations with the us and and that essentially means kind of outsourcing its foreign policy and and you know allowing its foreign policy to be written in washington rather than in london yeah i think the eu there are still contradictions there in terms of the relationship between continental europe and china but the the eu is able to act with much more independence because it's much less reliant on the us but unfortunately with britain you can see in terms of offering the bno passports to hong kong um to hong kong residents so offering residency to hong kong residents in terms of um cutting huawei out of the 5g infrastructure at this point you know we're taking our instructions from the us so there is there is this huge pressure and when you go when you go against that mainstream narrative which has become very powerful and that and that is really targeted on progressive ideology you know people who want human rights you know with you we all want human rights you know um people who want their not to be you know for example genocide of muslim people then if you say well this is fake news then you can easily be accused of saying oh well you're someone you're you're denying genocide you're someone who who hates muslim people you're you're you're engaging in islamophobia you know never mind that you might have spent your whole political life fighting against islamophobia and fighting against the genocidal wars that have been waged against muslim countries by britain and by the us in afghanistan in iraq in syria in libya um or you know or for the rights of palestinian people but now because you're not buying into this fake news narrative then all of a sudden you know there's a lot of pressure on you that you're a genocide denier and that you're against muslim people and muslim traditions and beliefs um so yeah that is that is a lot of pressure and you know almost any time i say something like i do a tv appearance or write an article defending something or saying something positive about china i i do see how powerful this propaganda skill is in western media and i cannot feel from what i saw on twitter or facebook a large amount of people in the west genuinely believe there are genocide or there are concentration camps in xinjiang there are systematic rape in xinjiang so you read those news as well but how how do you judge the whole situation your uh freedom of speech and independence of the press is considered a very important thing but that kind of masks the fact that the press there's an ownership structure around the media you know i can't just set up a major news website you know that requires millions and millions of pounds um so you know even the so-called independent press it's still a capitalist press and it's still um it's still pushing a narrative that suits particular interests and in britain those are tied to the interests of the british government and the british ruling class in the u.s the press is tied to the interests of the u.s government and the american ruling class so i'm used to reading in a in a critical way and i feel like people should really read more critical read more critically because we all recognize now that what was said about the weapons of mass destruction in iraq was a lie and we all recognize now that what was said about libya before nato launched this war was a lie um so we don't have to look back very far in history to see that there's this pattern where the media pushes forward a particular narrative that as i said before um around a specific piece of foreign policy in in those cases uh uh full full-scale wars in iraq or afghanistan or libya or syria or yugoslavia in this case around the cold war with china you started local war after the trip from china yeah that's right we launched no cold war in i think april or may last year and the background was that there was this increasingly hysterical and dangerous anti-china campaign that was being led by the us government and the media and you know the hostility to china in western policy circles has been increasing for a number of years as basically as it becomes clear that china is on its way to becoming a major power and it poses some kind of threat to to us dominance to us hegemony the pivot to asia was initiated for example by the obama administration the trade war had been in place for two to three years um the u.s has been stoking tensions in the south china sea and engaged in um an escalation or a china encirclement campaign for a long time but the trump administration really took the hostilities to a higher level and especially with the pandemic i think the republicans essentially realized that there was a pretty good chance that they were going to lose the election if hundreds of thousands of people died from the from the pandemic which they have um so they escalated their attacks on china in in frankly a very racist way in order to try and get support and you know they were failing to contain the pandemic so they decided to try and focus people's attentions on this big external enemy of china so we had the attempts to blame the pandemic on china referring to it as the china virus or the wuhan virus there were diplomatic attacks such as closing the consulate in houston stepping up the propaganda war in terms of xinjiang and hong kong in particular so last year it felt like that this new cold war against china was increasing in intensity and and here in the west i think it felt that we needed a more coordinated response from those of us who are against war and who understand that it's not actually a good idea to to demonize and attack another country you know the most important reason ultimately is that you know whether we're in london or or new york or beijing we're all the same species we're sharing the same planet we share the same natural resources and we face a lot of the same problems you know these problems pandemics climate change war poverty they require cooperation coordination and they can't be solved in the context of military threats relentless propaganda diplomatic hostility as a campaign we really believe that those major problems we face in the world have to be solved at a global level and that any kind of cold war stands in the way of that and we stand for global cooperation mutual understanding and against decoupling against cold war

Channel: CGTN

Views: 339,430

Keywords: CGTN, News, Society, China, UK, politics

Id: y30SZSSzXRk

Length: 19min 45sec (1185 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 27 2021