THE MAY 4TH MOVEMENT

British Orchestration of U.S.-China Conflict: Three Pertinent Cases

by Michael Billington

[Print version of this article]

This is an expanded version of the presentation made by the author to the weekly LaRouche Fireside chat on May 7, 2020. The full audio, including extended discussion with a live audience, is available here.

 

May 16—Russiagate has now been essentially defeated. The MI6 operatives and their accomplices in Obama’s intelligence community and the Congress have been identified, and many may soon face criminal charges for their treasonous coup attempt against the elected President of the United States.

But the British Empire will not easily give up. It greatly fears President Trump’s oft-stated intention and occasional concrete steps toward establishing friendly relations with both Russia and China, relationships that threaten the British imperial divide of the world into East vs. West.

With Russiagate sidelined, they have now unleashed an equally criminal and equally dangerous “Chinagate,” whipping up hysterical accusations against China, against China’s President Xi Jinping, and against the historic Belt and Road Initiative that is taking the Chinese miracle of the past forty years to the rest of the world in the form of vast infrastructure development—precisely what was denied the former colonies by the IMF/World Bank conditionalities following their independence.

Trump had established a close personal relationship with Xi Jinping, whom he called a “brilliant leader” and a “great man” as recently as August 2019, and was well on his way to resolving the vast trade imbalance (which Trump blamed not on China, but on the globalization policies of Bush and Obama).

The ‘China Virus’

But the attacks on China have escalated dramatically with the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, to the point that the world is suddenly careening towards war between nuclear armed states. Every accusation against China regarding its supposed responsibility for the pandemic—from the likes of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the China-phobe Peter Navarro, Director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, and from media and members of the Congress—is easily proven to be a fabrication. More important is to recognize that every one of these lies was initiated by British agencies representing the Empire’s desperate effort to prevent Trump’s intention to be friends with Russia and China.

In its December 26, 2019 issue, The Economist, a major voice for the Empire’s seat of power in the City of London, launched a campaign to turn President Trump against China:

Yet by instinct Mr. Trump is not a conventional hawk, if hawkishness is defined as objecting to the principles that guide China’s modern rise, from its authoritarian political system to its embrace of state capitalism, in which the government’s deep pockets and legal powers are used to create local champions while bullying or excluding foreign competitors. Indeed, Mr. Trump says that he does not blame China for trade cheating, calling its leaders smart…. Mr. Trump has pursued a narrower agenda: namely, reducing the trade deficit by pushing China to buy American goods, above all from farm states important to his re-election in November. [Adding hopefully:] In an American election year, when there will be no political downside to talking tough on China, events could push Mr. Trump into cold-war-style confrontations that he has avoided until now.

The British are not shy about announcing their imperial intentions.

Then look at the Henry Jackson Society, a London institution named after the American war-hawk, Senator Henry Jackson, who played a leading role in the formation of the neoconservative movement. The Henry Jackson Society includes both British and American neocons, including former MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove, who played a major role in Russiagate. The Society is something of a sister organization of the Atlantic Council in Washington. These are the people and organizations who insist that the U.S.-British special relationship has to rule the world in perpetuity. They agree with the House of Lords report, U.K. Foreign Policy in a Shifting World Order of December 2018, which argued:

Our alliance with the United States remains our top priority and cornerstone of what we wish to achieve in the world. [Warning:] Should President Trump win a second term, or a similar administration succeed him, the damage to UK-U.S. relations will be longer lasting.

It was this Henry Jackson Society which first launched a campaign to make China “pay” for all costs associated with the pandemic. Its report, “Coronavirus Compensation? Assessing China’s Potential Culpability and Avenues of Legal Response,” released on April 6, drew this headline in London’s The Mail on Sunday: “China Owes U.S. £351 Billion: Britain Should Pursue Beijing Through the International Courts for Coronavirus Compensation, Major Study Claims.”

This lunacy was quickly picked up in the U.S. press, and a week later was turned into draft legislation by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), who introduced the “Justice for Victims of COVID-19” bill to hold the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) responsible for causing the COVID-19 global pandemic.” Sen. Hawley’s website reported: “The bill would strip China of its sovereign immunity and create a private right of action against the CCP for reckless actions like silencing whistleblowers and withholding critical information about COVID-19” and “create the Justice for Victims of COVID-19 Task Force at the State Department to lead an international investigation into Beijing’s handling of the COVID-19 outbreak and to secure compensation from the Chinese government.”

Then the same Henry Jackson Society held a virtual conference on April 20, which this author attended, where the general theme could be characterized as, “My God! The Chinese are winning! They’re winning the hearts and minds of the countries in Africa and South America and Asia, because they’re building infrastructure. They now have the Health Silk Road, where they’re helping them to build up some health care capacity. We have to stop them! People think they’re doing this for benevolent reasons, but we know that they’re actually out to take over the world.” A few days later Tucker Carlson wailed on his Fox News show, “By the time this pandemic has played out, China plans to rule the world.” Absolute hysteria, psychosis. It’s as mad as McCarthyism.

The Empire’s Niall Ferguson

Then there is Niall Ferguson. Ferguson is a very well-known British professor and historian. He taught at Oxford, then went on to Harvard; now he’s at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, California. He’s famous for his 2002 book, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power, in which he praises the British Empire for all that is good in the world, and advises the U.S. to follow its model:

[T]he story of the Empire has many lessons for the world today—in particular for the United States as it stands on the brink of a new era of imperial power, based once again on economic and military supremacy.

It is this proud spokesman for Empire who on April 5, in the London Sunday Times, launched the “Big Lie,” Goebbels-style, knowing his slavish followers in the European and American press would report it as Gospel Truth from the great man. Ferguson asks of China:

After it became clear that there was a full-blown epidemic spreading from Wuhan to the rest of Hubei province, why did you cut off travel from Hubei to the rest of China—on January 23—but not from Hubei to the rest of the world?... As far as I can tell from the available records, however, regular direct flights from Wuhan continued to run to London, Paris, Rome, New York and San Francisco throughout January and in some cases into February.

Immediately most of the world press repeated this lie, asserting it was a proven fact, that China was intentionally infecting the rest of the world with a deadly virus—which would truly be an act equivalent to war. President Trump repeated the lie, as did Pompeo and Navarro and others, repeatedly. The usually sensible military commentator, Col. Pat Lang, raged:

I now consider the CCP and the Chinese government to be enemies of the U.S. that are engaged in an undeclared war against the Unites States. The present pandemic is merely one theater of that war.

The only problem is that the entire story was fabricated by Niall Ferguson, to drive the U.S. into the hands of the British Empire’s desired conflict with China. Daniel Bell, a professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing who had once taught with Ferguson, wrote to him to get the evidence, and received back FlightStats records of flights from Wuhan in January and February. A simple reading of the statistics showed that the post-January 23 flights never left Wuhan! He confirmed that fact in the Chinese language records. A lie which could start a war—

NSC’s Matt Pottinger and the May 4th Movement

The worst, and the last of these lies that I’m going to review here, is that of Matthew Pottinger, who is now the top National Security Advisor to President Trump on China. Pottinger—the son of former Assistant Attorney General J. Stanley Pottinger, who conspired with Henry Kissinger in the early 1980s in setting up the “Get LaRouche Task Force”—speaks Chinese fluently. On May 4th, Matt Pottinger gave a video presentation to a conference at the University of Virginia, entirely in Chinese with English subtitles, in honor of the May 4th Movement, the uprising in China in 1919 following the Versailles Treaty ending World War 1.

Despite the fact that China officially supported the British against Germany, the Versailles Treaty nonetheless refused to return Shandong Province, which had been a part of Germany’s “sphere of influence,” to Chinese sovereign control, but gave it to Japan as a prize. The Chinese were shocked and outraged.

Why did Pottinger give his speech to an American audience in Chinese? The presentation was, in essence, an open call for insurrection within China. He delivered his speech in Chinese, to directly address the Chinese people; calling on them to rise up against the “authoritarian Confucian dictatorship of the Communist Party of China.” Not only was it full of lies about what’s going on today in China, but it was also based on lies concerning the May 4th Movement in 1919.

I believe it’s important to examine what actually happened in 1919 during the May 4th uprising. The Chinese had been dragged into World War I on the side of the British, against the advice of Sun Yat-Sen. Sun Yat-Sen, who had led the 1911 revolution that overthrew the Qing Dynasty and ended the Imperial System in China, had been trained in the American System and Hamiltonian economic principles when he was schooled by Americans in Hawaii at the end of the 19th Century.

He then went back to China, leading the Republican Revolution of 1911. His organizing program, called the “Three Principles of the People,” came directly from Abraham Lincoln’s concept of “government of the people, by the people, and for the people.” His writings explicitly educated the Chinese people in the economic principles of Alexander Hamilton, the national “directed credit” policies which built America into an industrial power. He understood the evil of the British Empire, but also understood the difference between Hamilton and the slavery system supported by the Jeffersonians.

But the Republican revolution faltered, as warlords asserted their power—one even tried, unsuccessfully, to restore the Monarchy. The country was not unified around Sun Yat-Sen’s movement; but he was nonetheless viewed as a hero and had a considerable following.

Sun Yat-Sen had warned that if China joined the war on the side of the British, then even if the British won, China would not join in the benefits of victory, but would be chopped up and passed out to others, which is exactly what happened, as Shandong Province was handed over to Japan, sparking the May 4th revolt. Hundreds of thousands of people poured out onto Tiananmen Square, demonstrating against this colonial treatment. The potential that Sun Yat-Sen’s movement would succeed through this ferment in establishing an American System Republic was very clear to the British.

Now, what did Matt Pottinger have to say about this? Did he mention Sun Yat-Sen? Not a word. The only person he mentioned was Hu Shih. He acknowledges that Hu Shih was trained by a Columbia University professor named John Dewey. We have long identified John Dewey as one of the most destructive figures in American history. He was the guru of the so-called “pragmatist movement,” where pragmatism means, “Don’t worry about the truth, just do what you need to do to get the result you want.” Dewey was also a fierce opponent of Classical education. He considered Classical education to be a waste; in fact, he advocated “de-schooling.” Why go to school? You need to “learn by doing,” not by studying books, and certainly not ancient books written by dead people.

This was a policy that found its ugly realization 45 years later in the Cultural Revolution, when Chinese schools were shut down and the students were sent to the countryside to “learn from the peasants.”

One of Dewey’s leading students at Columbia was Hu Shih. After the May 4th revolt, John Dewey went to China; his translator and guide was Hu Shih.

What does Pottinger have to say about all this? He said, “Hu Shih was the example of somebody standing up against the evil Confucian bureaucracy.” Pottinger did not hide that he was speaking about today as well. He said that Taiwan is the example of the kind of “democracy” we need; not the “autocracy” on the Mainland. Of course, this is an open attack on the “One-China, Two Systems” policy which has been the fundamental basis of U.S.-China relations and cooperation since the re-establishment of relations in the 1970s. To reject the One-China policy has always been considered a casus belli by Beijing.

Pottinger said: “Who are the Hu Shihs of today?” Then he listed a number of dissidents, people who have been supported by the “color revolution” institutions in the West, such as the National Endowment for Democracy and the George Soros networks. He even said that the Hu Shihs of today are “the millions of Hong Kong citizens who peacefully demonstrated for the rule of law last year.” I’m sure all of you have seen videos of the black-clad, hooded terrorists who were setting fire to Hong Kong and attacking police. These were not peaceful demonstrations; this was an anarchistic revolt, which these institutions hoped would be turned into an effort to bring down Beijing and China as a whole.

Then Pottinger says—and this is very important, remember, this is the top advisor to the President of the United States on China in the National Security Council:

As the May 4th movement today marks the inaugural year of its second century, what will be its ultimate legacy? Will the movement’s democratic aspirations remain unfilled for another century? Will the core ideas be deleted or distorted through official censorship by the Communist Party? That’s what the Communist Party would like to do. [Then, directly attacking Confucianism:] Hu Shih and his people were a broadside against the Confucian power structure that enforced conformity over free thought.

This is an open call for insurrection, for regime change. So, this is virtually a call for war, or at least a color revolution. It is also an open cultural war against the core of China’s Confucian heritage, a heritage recognized by the greatest minds of the Christian renaissance of Europe, especially Gottfried Leibniz, as compatible with the fundamental tenets of Christianity.

The Empire’s Right-Left Attack on Sun Yat-Sen

John Dewey was an American, but his deployment to China was a British move. When the British saw that the May 4th Movement could provide Sun Yat-Sen the opportunity to transform China into an American-style republic based on Hamiltonian economics, and based on the moral principles of the American Revolution—they went to work to stop it.

They sent their two top agents, Bertrand Russell directly from England—Bertrand Russell, who LaRouche long identified as the most evil man of the 20th Century—and John Dewey from Columbia University, who was actually deployed by the House of Morgan. His trip was paid for by the Morgan banks, while Dewey wrote reports on the trip in a Morgan-linked publication, The New Republic. J.P. Morgan was an American, but he was essentially a British banker, living in London and functioning as a key part of the British banking aristocracy, i.e., the British Empire.

Russell first travelled to Russia in 1920, three years after the 1917 Russian Revolution. He praised the Bolsheviks and essentially said, we don’t want communism in England, but it’s great for you Russians. Then he went to China where his message was: you need Bolshevism; you need a communist government. It’s not good for us, but it’s great for you. You need to get rid of this Confucian ideology. Confucianism is the cause of China’s backwardness, he said—not British colonialism, not two Opium Wars with British gunships, not British control of China’s finances and trade for the past century—it was the fault of Confucianism. Russell taught classes in Beijing that Mao Zedong attended. Chen Duxiu, the founder of the Communist Party in 1921, is believed to have attended these classes, while he was also an associate of Hu Shih.

It was a classic British right-left operation—Bertrand Russell’s “left” opposition to Sun Yat-Sen’s American System, while John Dewey, with Hu Shih, was creating a so-called “democratic” opposition to Sun. But he didn’t mean democracy in the sense of American-style republicanism. He meant British-style parliamentary democracy.

Eugenics and Margaret Sanger

To give a sense of how really evil Hu Shih and this crowd were, not only did he advise John Dewey when Dewey was in China from 1919 to 1921, he also was the interpreter and guide for Margaret Sanger when she came to China in 1922, selling racist eugenics. Sanger’s name is paraded about by some people as a hero in the women’s movement, because she was one of the initial supporters of birth control. But why did Margaret Sanger support birth control? When she came back from China, she praised the awakening in China to the need for “selective methods.”

Keep in mind, this is 1922. In America, we had the Chinese exclusion laws, which made it illegal for Chinese to come to America, at least to the West Coast, for nearly half a century—one of the most racist periods of American history. Here is Margaret Sanger:

The menace of indiscriminate immigration, the fertility of the unfit, and the increasing burden on the healthful and vigorous members of American society of the delinquent and dependent classes, together with the growing danger of the abnormal fecundity of the feeble-minded, all emphasize the necessity of clear-sightedness and courageously facing the problem and the possibilities of birth control as a practical and feasible weapon against national and racial decadence. [emphasis added]

Eugenics—race science—that’s what this was. That’s what they called science. When Hu Shih said we want democracy and science, he meant eugenics; just like today’s climate change “science,” which is not science, it’s anti-science. Perverse, Malthusian, genocidal anti-science.

That’s what Matt Pottinger is openly supporting today, to overthrow the Chinese regime. You can see why the Chinese are angry about this, and what we have to overcome.

Spirit of Bandung

I want to review a second case of the British intervening to make sure that the U.S. and China never collaborate. It is the case of the Bandung Conference in 1955. You all are familiar with the fact that President Franklin Roosevelt openly told Winston Churchill that we were not fighting World War II to save the British Empire, nor the colonies ruled by the French, nor the Portuguese, nor the Dutch. After the war, FDR said, we were going to use American System methods to build these countries the way we were building the U.S. during the 1930s under Roosevelt’s New Deal, through American System directed credits.

The problem was that Roosevelt died before the war was over. A little man came in, President Harry Truman, who was the initial purveyor of McCarthyism, before McCarthy—the anti-China and anti-Russia hysteria in the United States called McCarthyism was actually run by this little man, Truman, who was a puppet of Wall Street, run by the British. Instead of preventing the return of colonialism, Truman turned the U.S. Navy over to the British and the French and the Dutch and the Portuguese, to help them retake their colonies. The excuse was, “Well, we have to, because otherwise they will be taken over by Communists, and we can’t allow the Communists in.”

We had, as a result, 30 years of bloody colonial warfare, in a period which could have, in fact, been a period of development and progress. The first war as a result of all this was waged by the Indonesians, who, under the leadership of Sukarno, after years of war against the Dutch, who were aided by the British, were able to throw the Dutch out and establish an independent Republic of Indonesia.

Soon after he had succeeded in that war, President Sukarno—along with Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Gamal Abdel Nasser or Egypt, and a few others—sponsored an “Asia-Africa Conference” in the city of Bandung, on the island of Java, Indonesia. He called this the first conference of the former colonial nations, held without the presence of their colonial masters. Sukarno put it this way: “This is the first meeting of the colored peoples of the world.” This was 1955 in Bandung. Which gave rise to the “Spirit of Bandung.” Their purpose was to advance the anti-colonial fight, but the immediate purpose of that meeting was to prevent what they saw as the looming threat of a U.S.-China war. The invitation to that meeting read as follows:

The desire of the five sponsors is to lay a firm foundation for China’s peaceful relations with the rest of the world. Not only the West, but also with the other areas of Southeast Asia.

That referred to the concern in some Southeast Asian countries that China was supporting insurgency movements. Remember, this was 1955. In 1954, just a year earlier, the Vietnamese, under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh, had overthrown the French colonialists at Dien Bien Phu. Ho Chi Minh was a Communist, but as he said in his writings, over and over again, “I am a Communist, but I am primarily a nationalist.”

At the end of World War II, Ho Chi Minh wrote eight letters to President Truman, with the aid of U.S. OSS operatives, saying, please, come and take over our country from the French and help us gain our independence, the way America is granting the Philippines their independence. But the little man Truman never responded.

Sukarno described the Bandung Conference in 1955 as a continuation of the American Revolution. The coming together of African and Asian countries out of colonialism, he said, is continuing the fight that was launched in 1776 by the American Revolution.

President Eisenhower, despite opposition from his own cabinet, sent a message of support to this meeting saying, “This meeting is providing an opportunity at a critical hour to voice the peaceful aspiration of the peoples of the world to exert a practical influence for peace where peace is now in grave jeopardy.”

Indeed, we were on the verge of war with China. The McCarthyites were claiming that China was infiltrating America, subverting our institutions and so forth—very much like McCarthyites Mike Pompeo and Christopher Wray are saying today. The reason for the Bandung Conference was to bring together the Non-Aligned nations, the nations that were not part of the U.S. bloc or the Soviet/China bloc; the West bloc or the East bloc. They said, let’s have a new world that’s based on cooperation and peace.

China’s Prime Minister Zhou Enlai, second only to Mao in the Chinese hierarchy, attended the Bandung Conference. Both Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping—who led China’s reform and opening up after the horror of the Cultural Revolution—were in France in the early 1920s, working and studying. It was in France that they joined the communist movement, not in China. Zhou always represented that faction of the Communist Party of China which strongly supported science and technology and collaboration with the West. So, Zhou Enlai came to the Bandung Conference, and it was there that the attending nations adopted the “Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence”: sovereignty, territorial integrity, non-interference in internal affairs, mutual non-aggression, and peaceful coexistence.

This was the basis for what became the Non-Aligned Movement, and the key purpose was stopping a war. Zhou Enlai pledged that China would not support insurgencies in places like Thailand. They would support nationalists fighting colonial powers, as in Vietnam, but they would not support insurgencies against independent nations, whether they called themselves communist or not. There was hope that there would be peace with the United States—and Eisenhower’s support for the Bandung Conference was reason for hope that a peaceful resolution with the U.S. was possible.

Unfortunately, you had the Dulles brothers surrounding Eisenhower—Allen Dulles as CIA chief, and John Foster Dulles as Secretary of State—who were Wall Street lackeys supporting the British policy. They hated Russia and China, hated the so-called communists, hated Sukarno. “Either you’re with us or against us,” they said.

How did the British respond to the Spirit of Bandung? They were horrified, and they moved quickly to subvert it. They worked with people like the Dulles brothers in the U.S. to try to bring down Sukarno, arming several attempted insurgencies which failed.

When John Kennedy was elected President in 1960, he openly supported Sukarno, just as he supported other nationalists around the world. He refused to accept the idea that every nationalist fighting against the colonialist powers was necessarily a communist enemy of the United States. He absolutely refused to send the Army into Vietnam. He had allowed the CIA and intelligence agents to go in to try to counter some of the communist insurgency in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, but he had made it clear that he was not going to allow the U.S. military to replace the French in Vietnam the way the British wanted him to.

In fact, he made it clear to his associates that he was going to make peace with China in his second term—which, of course, he never reached. His support for Sukarno was just another piece that made the British hate what Kennedy was doing.

So, how did they respond? They killed Kennedy in 1963. They had killed Ngo Dinh Diem, the President of Vietnam who was Kennedy’s friend, just days earlier, turning Vietnam over to puppet military leaders, and launched the Vietnam War in 1964. Then, in 1965, they carried out one of the most vile, genocidal atrocities in modern history, in which literally hundreds of thousands of Indonesians were slaughtered by radical Muslims who were provided with machetes and sent out to kill so-called “communists”—the majority of the population who supported Sukarno. This was how the British responded to their perception of “danger” that the U.S. might be drawn into collaboration with China and with Russia.

The Schiller Institute Conference of April 25-26, “Mankind’s Existence Now Depends on the Establishment of a New Paradigm,” showed that leaders of China, Russia, Europe and the U.S. can work together for the common aims of Mankind, demonstrating very clearly to the President and to the world that it is possible to bring about the coalition of these great powers to counter this British imperial policy. Trump is being dragged into the anti-China policy, possibly being convinced that to get re-elected, he has to be anti-China. We must demonstrate that there is a constituency in America that sees through this dangerous ploy.

This is a moment of truth; the threat of war is enormous. And yet, people are being stripped of their delusions—the pandemic and the economic crisis demonstrate that we have allowed our nation to become stripped of its economic resources; culturally destroyed through drugs, the counterculture, and ugliness. People are open to a deeper idea of what we are as a nation, and what people are as human beings. But nothing less than that is going to work.