China/Black legend

China/Black legend (black legend)
Interest of	• Frank Dikötter • Adrian Zenz

While the Chinese government certainly has done many immoral things, there is also a black legend built around China, where everything is interpreted in the worst possible meaning. In the West, all information about China is filtered through corporate media and corporate publishing houses. The CIA was very active in this work during the Cold War, an effort that has not stopped since then, as part of the Encirclement of China.

A black legend is a historiographical phenomenon in which a sustained trend in historical writing of biased reporting and introduction of fabricated, cherry picked, exaggerated and/or decontextualized facts is directed against particular persons, nations or institutions with the intention of creating a distorted and uniquely inhuman image of them while hiding their positive contributions to history.

Black legends propaganda often has some of its basis in real events, genuine atrocities and cruelty, but it often employed with lurid and exaggerated depictions of violence, while ignoring similar behaviour by other powers.

Tibet

Also the other Chinese government, Taiwan, claims that Tibet is a part of China. The CIA encouraged and military aided a doomed rebellion in the early 1960s.

1959-1961 famine

The "Great Chinese Famine" was a period between 1959 and 1961 in the history of the People's Republic of China (PRC) characterized by widespread famine. The trick in this case is firstly to inflate the number of fatalities by various statistical calculations, up to 55 million, a number often repeated as though it were a given fact. While, clearly, 1960 was an abnormal year with about 8 million deaths in excess of the 1958 level, it can be noted that this peak official ‘famine’ death rate of 25.4 per thousand in China was little different from India’s 24.8 death rate in the same year which was considered quite normal and attracted no criticism.

Also other elements of a black legend are employed, like taking facts out of historical context (it was the last of many big famines in 20th century China; there was a U.S. total trade embargo; and ascribing motives of greed and cruelty to the leadership, instead of dire strategic necessity.

Tienanmen square

The "Tienanmen square massacre" in 1989 is far more nuanced that the official narrative in Western corporate media, and has much in common with a failed attempt at regime change. And more soldiers and police than "peaceful demonstrators" died those days on Tienanmen square.

Debt diplomacy

From the 2000s, China was accused in Western corporate media of luring countries in the global south to become debt slaves with large infrastructure projects. This is a case of projection, accusing others of doing what the World Bank as standard operating procedure for 70 years. As of 2022, there are no cases, among the hundreds of loan arrangements, of Chinese state-owned lenders actually seizing a major asset in the event of a loan default.

Xinjiang

While there are attempts to forcibly integrate the largely Muslim province into mainstream China, including use imprisonment, the scale of the repression is hugely exaggerated by propagandists like the ASPI and Adrian Zenz.

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