Antiwar writings

Renewable energy development is less important than stopping Chinese industry!

There’s a photovoltaic war to prove it – but China’s won it for now

Janet Yellen went to China and warned them there would be consequences if they didn’t adopt a market economy. There’s so many admissions in this little statement that shouldn’t go unnoticed. If the market system is the best and most efficient, as its proponents claim, why would Yellen complain about China using state subsidies or protections and interfering in it? Wouldn’t that just allow the US to use the market to win the game? If the market is the “cheat code”, as the gamers say, then how could China “cheat” by using non-market mechanisms? The flip side of the coin is also there. If the US, as its officials repeatedly cry, is desperate to stop the rise of China, why would they advise China to take steps (like market reforms) that should, according to market theory, only accelerate China’s rise? Perhaps it is because Yellen knows market reforms would actually destroy the basis of China’s growth and ensure its subordination to the US.

I want to talk about one of these Chinese industries that has grown up under state subsidy and protection that is – again according to Western environmentalists – very important in the struggle against climate change: photovoltaics (solar panels) and other renewable energy technologies.

There’s this video from a youtube channel called Tech Teller that outlines some details about the rise of China’s PV industry. The news hook for the video was the arrest of a Chinese PV executive, Pu Yonghua of Jiangsu Green Power New Energy, in Germany. It looked like Germany was going to pull a Canada (with the kidnapping of Meng Wanzhou of Huawei) and get into a pointless years-long conflict at US urging. But it looks like Pu Yonghua was released a few days later.

Tech teller’s video provides some “startling figures” about China’s dominance in PV:

-of 150,000 PV patents worldwide, Chinese companies hold 120,000 of them.

-The top ten PV companies in the world are all Chinese.

-Chinese PV has a market share of 60% in the US and peaked at 95% in the EU. EU’s domestic PV capacity accounted for 3% of market share there.

-200 countries are customers of Chinese PV products.

The EU’s attempt to raise its renewable energy use to reduce its dependence on Russian gas is ultimately a plan to transfer its dependence on Russia — to China.

China’s PV industry is so far ahead that the US and EU industries are going to have a lot of difficulty catching up. This despite, as the video tells, depraved and repeated attempts to stop China from developing by both the US and EU.

There are problems with PV, as environmentalists like Stan Cox have noted, including the mining footprint of rare earths and the use of fossil fuels in their production. But there is a Green consensus on the need to get off of fossil fuels and PV technology will be key to get there. The imperialist anxiety to stop the rise of Chinese industry conflicts with Green the green priority for a transition to renewables. It is another case of Western imperialism vs the environment. If you believe climate change is an existential issue for the species like nuclear war, you could use Chomsky’s phrase and consider it a choice between Hegemony or Survival.

Which do you think the US will choose?

AER 128: CAUKUZians speak out!

Arama Rata, independent Maori researcher, and Carl Zha of Silk & Steel podcast are both back! Carl reports on his lived experience as a survivor of the Prigozhin coup in Moscow; Arama outlines the anti-AUKUS speaking tour she is on with other journalists and activists; I continue my rant about the sheer plagiarism of Canada’s China panic using David Brophy’s book about Australia’s China panic. We conclude with the possibility of a regular meeting of CAUKUSZians (Canada + AUKUS + new Zealand)

Olivia Chow is right to raise property taxes

And there’s more to it even than addressing a municipal revenue crisis

Of all the cheap propaganda tricks in Canadian media, the cheapest has to be using unflattering photographic angles of politicians you’re trying to discredit. CBC’s recent one of Olivia Chow is incredibly cheap.

Just wanted you to know, CBC, we see you. We know the trick. We know you had better photos where Olivia Chow was, say, looking at the camera, or smiling, or looking relaxed. But you picked this one. Cheap, CBC!

But that’s not what I’m doing here today. This is another political economy post and I should just face facts that this mailing list is going to have a lot of economic analysis. There’s probably no anti-empire project without economic analysis, so let’s start.

Western politicians campaign on austerity. They promise to keep taxes low and therefore, implicitly, to keep public services on the edge of collapse. This formula goes across political parties and could be a durable feature of Western democracies. Where politicians do talk about expanding public health or education or anything else that’s good, they take pains to explain how they can do this magically without any tax increases or any sacrifice by anyone who’s been accumulating wealth over the decades. So, when Olivia Chow campaigned for mayor of Toronto on a small property tax increase, I knew it would make her media enemies and earn her a full-fledged Canadian freakout. Which is unrolling as predictably as a forest fire after a sustained dry weather spell. So, in this post, I’ll tell you something surprising about property taxes, and why they are important.

It isn’t just the “culture of cheapness” that has led, e.g., to the city’s animal services taking up to 5 days to collect a dead animal or the transit commission more or less proudly announcing simultaneous fare hikes and service cuts.

It is also that low property taxes do not lead to lower housing costs, but to much higher ones.

There’s a bit of data to confirm this: If low property taxes led to the city being an affordable place to live, Toronto, which has low taxes, wouldn’t be one of the least affordable in North America.

To understand this, as often occurs, we need Michael Hudson.

The one city that beats Toronto, the least affordable in North America, is Vancouver, and some years ago Michael Hudson gave a lecture in that city to talk about the real estate crisis. In that lecture, Hudson outlined an argument for raising the land tax. As property values increase, most of the property value increase is taken by the government to pay for services, rather than by those who get that property value increase now. Can you guess who that is? It isn’t even the landlords. It’s the banks.

In Hudson’s analysis, the value of property is set by how much a bank is willing to lend against that property. From the bank’s perspective, the ideal value of a property is one where the bank gets the maximum monthly payment from the mortgage-holder. And the ideal value of all real estate across a city is the one where everyone is paying everything they earn above subsistence to the bank – whether there is an intermediary landlord who is collecting rent, or an intermediary homeowner who is paying a mortgage, most of the money should be captured by the bank in the end. Maximizing the total amount the bank gets in mortgage payments will leave many people unhoused, it’s true, or having to commute from far to work or go to school in the city. Those social costs can be borne by society though – perhaps by the city, with its ever-declining revenue (and its ever-rising police budgets). Hudson’s claim was shocking to the audience, who asked several questions.

Won’t higher property taxes just be passed on to tenants though, as higher rents? When asked this, Hudson argued that the tax law could be written to make that impossible (there are already controls on how much a landlord can raise rents).

What about those who are betting their future on increasing home values? This one is tougher, but Hudson’s brutal answer is that that is a bad bet: betting on increasing home values is betting on increasing debt loads. It’s unsustainable. As Cory Doctorow wrote in a post about this topic, “But asset accumulation isn’t — and can’t be — a path to widespread prosperity. A middle-class that relies on increasing property values as a means to fund their kids’ university tuition, their own retirements, and the next generation’s down-payments sows the seeds of its own destruction.” Doctorow’s point — which I agree with — is that there is more meaningful security in unions and social democracy – “employment-based security” than there is in “asset-based security.”

If Michael Hudson is right, higher property taxes would reduce property values. Banks, realizing that some of what they’re now collecting as mortgage would be taken in taxes, would be willing to lend less against those properties. Is that such a disaster? “Lower property values” sounds bad, while “more people being able to afford living in the city where they work” sounds good — but they’re the same thing.

There is one other thing going on with mortgages that it would be remiss not to mention: that is that interest rates are being hiked and Canadian banks will be collecting a lot more in interest than they’ve been collecting. This, too, will lower the value of real estate as there will be fewer people able to afford these higher payments — lower effective demand. Unlike taxes though, these increases won’t be opposed by the media and they won’t make things more affordable, they’ll just price people out of housing by higher interest payments on lowered property values rather than pricing them out through lower interest payments on higher property values. They’ll also drive the economy into a recession, increase unemployment and misery. When that happens, you can be sure that the Canadian media won’t blame the banks and their games with interest rates and asset inflation: they’ll blame progressive politicians like Olivia Chow and modest property tax increases. Don’t be fooled.

IPE and MMT: a theoretical quibble

For both the podcast and a recent article on de-dollarization, I’ve been getting into some heavy duty political economy.

For both the podcast and a recent article on de-dollarization, I’ve been getting into some heavy duty political economy. One very valuable thread I’ve followed is sometimes called Indian Political Economy, or IPE. The tradition begins with Dadabhai Naoroji, who studied the way that the British Empire “drained” India. Naoroji’s best known book was the 1901 Poverty and un-British Rule in India, which is funny because in retrospect nothing is less un-British than draining India of all of its wealth (in several ways the book is a painful read, full of Naoroji trying to appeal to the better natures of the imperialists, but important as the beginning of a tradition!).

Today’s leading practitioners of IPE (unclear whether they’d identify as IPE since they’re really just P.E.s who happen to be from I and know a lot about I) include Utsa and Prabhat Patnaik, authors of such works as Capital and Imperialism and A Theory of Imperialism, both of which I used in the de-dollarization article. Utsa Patnaik’s research is where the figure of $45 trillion drained from India by Britain comes from. In Zak Cope’s book The Wealth of Some Nations, as well as research by Jason Hickel and his co-authors, you can read about the various mechanisms by which “drain” continues, to the tune of some $2 trillion per year, drained from the poor countries to the rich ones, year after year.

In the de-dollarization article there was a point that I wanted to make, that follows from IPE, which is the maintenance of the imperial currencies underlying the global economy – the gold standard in the British Empire and the dollar today – is based on the constant flow of free labor and commodities, of “drain” from the colonies (now neocolonies). If the Global South countries are able to carve out the ability to trade with one another without needing the dollar, as seems to be happening; and if the dollar isn’t replaced by another imperial currency regime, which it might not be… well, then the drain might also be coming to an end, which could be very good for the no-longer-drained countries who could then use those resources for some sensible combination of development and environmental protection.

None of which is really why I’m writing this post today. It’s instead to make a record of something I encountered in my research that didn’t fit into the article and doesn’t really fit anywhere, but is worth a short post of its own. Because in addition to using IPE, anyone trying to make sense of how money works in the economy will also encounter Modern Monetary Theory, or MMT. There is a very clearly written book by Stephanie Kelton called the Deficit Myth, but I was using a textbook called Modern Monetary Theory by Randall Wray. The point that MMTheorists make is that currencies are given force by taxes and are ultimately backed by states. This means governments don’t tax and spend, they create money and people accept and use the money because they know they can always use the money to pay their taxes.

Several consequences follow from this, the main one being that governments don’t need taxes or debt to create money. States are limited only by real resource and labor power constraints – the constraints of the real world. Debt ceiling debates, deficit scares, are all propaganda used for austerity politics. Inflation and deflation could both be managed by making sure the amount of currency issued matches the actual resources available in the economy.

This is all fine and a more realistic way of looking at money than the proponents of austerity. But Wray’s discussion of the history of money and of, for example, the gold standard, I don’t think holds up. Wray starts with a good point that accounting money preceds commodity (gold) money, meaning the earliest forms of money were actually debt marks in temple and palace records, and that gold came later. But then he asks, “what were coins and why did they contain precious metal? To be sure, we do not know.” Because coins and gold have been very important, Wray suggests that they became important for Athenian democrats who mocked the wealthy and powerful by using gold for something so sullied as coinage (pp. 156-157). I don’t think this is right, and I think the commitment to the point MMTheorists are making about the importance of state power in creating currency causes Wray to dismiss the whole role of gold in the imperial economy – as well as its historic role in imposing deflation and “drain”. Wray dismisses this all as a “monetary mess”: “The sovereign was always short of gold and silver,” which was “needed to conduct the foreign wars”, which made for a “nice vicious circle”. This “monetary mess”, Wray writes, “was resolved only very gradually with the rise of the modern nation state, a clear adoption of nominalism in coinage, and with abandonment of the long practiced phenomenon of including precious metal in coins.”

You all know I have many opinions about the British Empire. One opinion I do not hold is that it was full of idiots who created a “monetary mess”. They weren’t having a fit of absence of mind then and they aren’t doing so now. The gold standard then, and debt- and deficit-based global finance now, are shining examples of methods to drain wealth from the global south. The MMTheorists want to cut through the propaganda, which is fine. But to understand how the mechanisms work historically, why gold was – and remains – more than a “mess”, how the currency regime underlying the global economy is a tool for plundering the poor countries – for that, you’ll need IPE more than MMT.

Is China socialist?

Reading Ali Kadri’s 2021 book China’s Path to Development

In 2021, when China’s Path to Development: Against Neoliberalism was published, Ali Kadri was teaching at the National University of Singapore, which seems to me an interesting vantage point in East Asia from which to study world events. I had read Kadri’s 2019 book, Imperialism with Reference to Syria, which deserves (and might get) a newsletter on its own. I was very interested to see what a writer focused on US imperialism in the Middle East would have to say about China. With these two books, Kadri has made definitive statements on two of the burning questions of imperialism. In recent years, Syria and China have both preoccupied my mind and forced me to change some of my own views.

Let’s stick to the China book though, which tackles an important and divisive question for leftists: is the apparent US-China rivalry really a rivalry between two different systems? Or is it an essentially fake rivalry where Chinese elites, integrated into the capitalist system, are trying to get a slightly better share for themselves under US hegemony? The more I learned about China’s history with the imperialists, from the Opium Wars, the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion, to the 1911 revolution and beyond, the more the question was settled for me.

The question is settled for Kadri too, who is not one for halfway declarations or mealy-mouthed conclusions: China is socialist, and it is because of its socialist policies that it has had the developmental achievements that it has.

Neoliberalism as waste accumulation

For Kadri, the socialist approach is one where a state “holds ultimate control of production and property relations” and can make “autonomous” macroeconomic policies, regulating “macro-prices and its trade and capital accounts in ways that recirculate much of the social surplus for the benefit of society”. The alternative in this world is neoliberalism, which Kadri emphasizes is fundamentally about turning life — the living earth, human lives, other species, nature – to waste. The most devastating passages in Kadri’s books are about this ruthless, cold, calculating waste. “The destruction of the labourer along with the labour power he houses in his very being becomes itself an industry of destruction or waste.” Kadri’s descriptions of how capitalists operate are not for the faint of heart: “In the new factory of the world, living labour produces dead labourers with dead labour.” The death is ivsited upon the developing world by the imperialists, and it is subject to a simple, brutal equation, in inverse proportion to the “power that the aggressed masses exercise in self-defence.”

Kadri’s critique of eurocentric analysis

Kadri unleashes a harsh critique not only on the imperialist system but also on those intellectuals who justify it. “The western left,” Kadri writes, “was the cultural manifestation of the imperialist right and its weapons.” This western left “fought capital’s battles by inculpating the regimentation that the developing world deploys to fend off imperialism as ‘state capitalist’ practice. While contributing to imperialism’s… ideological edifice, it magnified the partial errors in the practice of Southern socialism to discredit it.” By doing so, “the western left turned Marxism into a white supremacist ideology.” According to Kadri, this means misrepresenting Marx himself, who “has been transformed into a liberal obsessed with the western machine and its voting system.” His conclusion: “the ideas propagated by western universities and other ideological apparatuses do more harm in a single day than all the peoples of the developing world pulling rank to keep imperialism at bay do in a century.” To Kadri, the bias towards critiquing global south states’ attempts at self-defence is at the root of much of the western left’s animus towards China especially.

China after the Nixon rapprochement

The debate on the western left about whether China is socialist or not is based on analysis of what happened after China and the US reconciled in 1971 (including joint foreign policy projects like supporting the mujahadeen in Afghanistan 1978-1991), when Deng Xiaoping opened an era of market reforms after 1978, and when China joined the WTO in 2005. Do these changes not indicate that China has embraced capitalism, and neoliberalism? No, Kadri says, because the Chinese state continues to not only grow the economy but also to redistribute wealth. Kadri sees no discontinuity between the planning-driven economic growth of the Mao era (6% until 1977) and the market-reform era post-1980. The growth in the latter period “had roots in the social and productive infrastructure built under Mao.”

What are the actual policies that China uses, and could these be adopted by other countries? Kadri cites investment policy, including state ownership and management of the “inter-industrial input-output relations at social prices, which respect the value of direct producers while guaranteeing growth in industrial investment”; the use of “state-owned development banks” to “create the credit space into which the economy grows”, “entrapping the moneyed value chain within the national economy” through regulation. On the employment side, China includes “planning schemes correlating employment with existing spare capacity”. In agriculture, China engaged in a land reform which “enabled the working class to own wealth”, and slowed rural-urban migration through “government transfers from an industrial sphere benefiting from agricultural surplus and labour” to “re-capitalise” rural areas. China exerted control over agricultural prices, pumped new technology into the rural sector, and equalized wages.

It is these policies, and China’s ability to enact them, that make China socialist. By merely existing in this form, China causes panic to imperialists. “China hinders two operations of imperialism, the concentration and centralisation of capital.” For this reason, “US-led imperialism intensifies its offensive against China.” That ever-intensifying offensive means China has to always think about self-defence. “If China is to survive, it has to finance the national front as well as working classes far afield. It must fight back, and it is better to fight with a working class free of want as well as supersonic missiles.”

As I said at the top, Kadri’s ideas have applicability well beyond analyzing China. The idea that imperialism’s main product is waste has implications for environmental analysis, for example. Without Kadri, you might conclude that there are certain errors in the way we make things that could be changed with better or different technologies. With Kadri, you see that every techological choice in our system is designed to produce waste, and death. To whatever degree China has been able to win some policy freedom from this system, and help others do so, space is provided for policies that produce something other than death.

The last time the US tried to destroy China’s economy

Reading Shu Guang Zhang (2001). Economic Cold War: America’s Embargo against China and the Sino-Soviet Alliance 1949-1963.

Shu Guang Zhang is a US-based academic of Chinese origin – when he wrote the book, a specialist in US history at the University of Maryland. The book is from 2001, when US-China relations looked pretty different than they do now (and different from how they looked during the period he’s writing about). For those reasons it deserves special attention, because you can see how much of what is happening now with the ever-expanding (and perhaps ever-less-effective) US sanctions regime already happened before.

From 1839 until the Chinese revolution succeeded in 1949, China was colonized and partitioned. At that time, the US policy towards China was called the “Open Door”: whatever other imperialists forced China to accept, the US also wanted. There would be no favored imperialist in China.

In the Chinese civil war that pit the Guomindang (Nationalists) against the Communist Party of China, the US bet on the Guomindang against the Communists until the very end.

But when the Communists won the US didn’t see a viable military option against China. Instead, they would have to wield the “economic weapon”, which they hoped would work just as well. In the State Department’s 1948 Policy Planning Staff assessment, China would be “plagued” by an “implacable population pressure” dragging their standard of living downward. Even if they got Russian help, Russia would see them as “a vast poor house, responsibility for which is to be avoided.” They would be desperate for trade and therefore vulnerable to the economic weapon. China was headed rapidly for economic disaster, and would soon come begging to the US. And when they did, the US would say no. Lewis Clark from the US embassy to China wrote to Secretary of State Dean Acheson in 1949: “How fatal for us to permit ourselves to be enticed into assisting the Communists in their desperate need only to discover too late that they wanted our help solely during the interim and until they could get along without us.”

The US had already set up a system of export controls against the Soviet Union: since 1947, the goal was to use export control to deprive the USSR of advanced technology. The US created List 1A of goods with military potential and List 1B of goods with indirect military potential. Anyone trying to send these goods to Russia would need licenses from the Department of Commerce – and the US worked closely with its Western to make sure this embargo held.

Wouldn’t that just drive China and the USSR together? That didn’t worry the US all that much in 1949. Edmund Clubb, US consul-general in Beijing, said if China went to Russia they would quickly “learn how profitless was dealing with the USSR.” Sanctions would force the Chinese to “learn the hard way that they cannot get along without the West.” The US consul-general in Shanghai figured it would “suit our purposes” if the “catastrophic economic situation here would prove a costly drain on Soviet economy, and Chinese Nationalism should make it a thankless task.” Meanwhile the US could “sit with dignity on the sidelines, not necessarily needling Communists, but denying them many things they want badly.”

When China intervened in the US war on Korea in 1950, US officials felt they couldn’t trade with enemies lest the materials they sent be used to “kill our boys.” “The massive Chinese aggression”, they told the British, “confirmed our anxieties and removed our hopes.” In December the US put all trade under control: “we license no goods whatever for export to Communist China, we prohibit our ships and planes from calling at its ports… and we have frozen Communist Chinese assets within the United States.” Truman also set out to “enlist the cooperation and support of other nations” in taking “such measures as are feasible to prevent the flow to countries supporting Communist imperialist aggression of those materials, goods, funds and services which would serve materially to aid their ability to carry on such aggression.”

The CIA suggested a naval blockade and “a campaign of aerial and naval bombardment against selected ports, industrial capacity and storage bases” to “create unemployment and unrest, hinder industrial production and development, and create serious administrative problems”. These ideas were dismissed as infeasible. The US also realized it couldn’t impose a total embargo against China because it would put too much pressure on its allies. Negotiating the multilateral embargo against China proved difficult, with Britain – doing business through its Hong Kong colony (which only became part of China in 1997) – finding itself unable to leave so much money on the table. Worse, Britain feared, too much of this and China might take Hong Kong back even earlier! The result was a Hong Kong compromise, which rendered the whole sanctions regime rather leaky. What a predicament: sanctions needed to pressure China clashed with Britain’s need to make money through its Hong Kong colony and risked an early decolonization.

On the Chinese side, Mao and the Communists realized they would need to rely on Soviet help “for the interim” as they tried to build their own industrial base. The Soviets of course had immense worries of their own, and the result was a tense relationship in which resentments built over time. The story of these resentments and how they grew into the deadly Sino-Soviet split is told in Economic Cold War, as are the economic planning measures that China took in this period. To focus on the sanctions, I won’t summarize either of those right now, as interesting as both are.

Back to the sanctions: China had to develop trade routes and networks with the Soviet Bloc and any other countries that refused to join the US sanctions regime. China also had to try to recover the assets and trade goods that the US stole: imports China had already paid for in hard currency that weren’t going to come, goods China had already sent away for which the payments would never come. Because the dollar was already the currency of international transactions, China also had to resort to trade in barter. This, too, caused resentment since China didn’t feel the USSR was giving them good terms on barter deals. It did, however, start China’s long experience in how to do substantial trade with third countries without using the US dollar.

By 1953, the US made a special assessment that concluded that China had made “rapid progress in economic reconstruction” and that the sanctions “have not appreciably affected the Chinese Communist regime’s ability to consolidate its political position.” Worse, China was exploiting sanctions “in domestic propaganda as an additional indication of the implacable hostility of the West.” How dare they! US allies, including even UK, France, Canada, etc., were increasingly less keen on a total embargo. But in the face of this assessment, Secretary of State Dulles made the perverse strategic calculation that “the best way to get a separation between the Soviet Union and Communist China is to keep pressure on Communist China and make its way difficult so long as it is in partnership with Soviet Russia.” The logic is flawed: pressuring two countries is far more likely to drive them together than apart, which is what happened repeatedly in the course of US-China-Russia relations.

When the Sino-Soviet split finally did happen at the end of the 1950s, the US of course didn’t help, but the agency for the split can only be located in China and Russia – this wasn’t a split engineered or masterminded by the US, but an accumulation of difficult issues between the two countries. A momentous event, but I don’t think an inevitable one or one that the US can count on to repeat itself. The US was eventually able to take advantage of the split, much to the benefit if its imperialist plans! These years too are a story for another time, and not this newsletter. Instead, let’s draw some lessons.

Studying this last episode of US-led economic warfare on China, what can we learn about what’s happening now? A few notes suggest themselves.

The US evaluated military and economic options and decided on the economic weapon because the military options seemed infeasible against China.
The US had difficulties cajoling its allies into taking economic and financial losses for the sake of punishing China.
China was able to develop and progress relying on its internal resources and on using trade methods that the US couldn’t reach (barter, trade with the Soviet Bloc, and the use of Hong Kong).
The Russia-China relationship fell apart on its own steam, and has dynamics independent of US desires or actions.

Which of these seem to still hold today? Which of these are subtly (or not subtly) different today? Here are some differences between that time and this one:

The US does not have the technological or economic advantages it had then.
The US doesn’t appear to have a viable military option but it might do it anyway (it might be an illusion but US Cold War planners seemed to have a slightly higher sense of self-preservation? Is that an illusion on my part?)
Russia and China seem to be getting along well – better perhaps even than they did in the early 1950s before the Sino-Soviet split!

That is it for now. I’ll be coming back to this book to talk about the split, the famine of 1958, and other things raised by it. Have a good weekend.

Strunk and White is a bunch of humbug and so is George Orwell

Anglo-Saxon words aren’t better than Latin ones, shorter isn’t better than longer, monosyllables aren’t better than polysyllables…

Despite spending most of my life writing, I have never won any awards or accolades for writing and have no reason to think that I am an especially good writer.

I say this not because I’m fishing for you all to tell me that I am actually not a bad writer etc., but to tell you that despite writing being an obsession of mine in which I read many how-to write guides, produce the occasional one or two myself as well as try to deconstruct writing I consider good (or bad) to reverse-engineer results, reaching the exalted heights of the greatest writers… hasn’t happened for me yet.

Worse than that, though, is the fact that not all writing advice that is out there is good.

Which brings me to today’s topic.

In the past, I have been bamboozled by a mainstream of writing advice that has been propagating through these how-to-write guides for decades. So bamboozled that I even recommended two of the best-known ones to students. I regret those recommendations, because I have discovered there is a hidden racist thread in that writing advice that does not stand up to scientific scrutiny.

Some decades ago, I found out that apparently everyone interested in improving their English writing should read two things: a short book called The Elements of Style by Strunk and White, and an essay called “Politics and the English Language” by George Orwell. I did so. I passed the references on to my students. I edited work that writers trusted to me with Orwell and Strunk & White in my mind. And I edited my own work that way. The result? Wasted years during which my writing suffered, especially when I wrote for academic audiences who have no interest in Strunk, White, or Orwell. I wasn’t getting rejections because I was a bad student of writing, but because I was too good a student of Strunk & White and of Orwell.

Strunk and White, Orwell, and their predecessors produce writing advice in short, simple rules – modeling, of course, the advice they give writers. You may have seen them. Here are a few from E.B. White (of Strunk & White): Use active voice instead of passive. Use the positive form instead of the negative. Omit needless words.

Orwell will tell you to avoid dying metaphors, operators like “militate against”, pretentious diction (science words, adjectives, old words, foreign words). He says:

“(i) Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. (ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do. (iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. (iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active. (v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. (vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything barbarous.”

If you are a sincere student who reads these essays and tries to implement them as I did, your writing will suffer. So will your readers. Because these pieces of advice, presented as universal truths about the english language, are audience dependent at best, and useless at worst. They aren’t even guidelines that are good in most situations but bad in others. They are just White preferences (and Orwell preferences). What they like to see. The style they like to write in.

Telling writers to write short simple sentences with monosyllabic words is older than Orwell or White, who probably got their material from American businessman Robert Gunning’s 1944 book, The Technique of Clear Writing. He has 10 principles: 1. Keep sentences short. 2. Prefer the simple to the complex. 3. Prefer the familiar word. 4. Avoid unnecessary words. 5. Put action in your verbs. 6. Write like you talk. 7. Use terms your reader can picture. 8. Tie in with your reader’s experience. 9. Make full use of variety. 10. Write to express not impress.

Gunning provides a list of 3000 words writers should stick to and includes a quantitative set of “readability yardsticks” for writers to use. He recommends writing to what he calls a “sixth-grade level” and recommends a “fog index”, a formula that combines sentence length and percentage of polysyllabic words (similar to the Flesch Readability Score and other such indices). Charles Kay Ogden, author of a book called Uncontrolled Breeding, or Fecundity versus Civilization (1916), provided a list of 850 “Basic English” words to stick to for readability.

Gunning also cites Herbert Spencer’s book The Philosophy of Style, which explained that “a reader brings to your writing limited mental power.” Spencer spread philosophies beyond those of writing style: he was big on measuring skulls to determine intelligence and wrote pieces of English prose like this one: “The forces which are working out the great scheme of perfect happiness, taking no account of incidental suffering, exterminate such sections of mankind as stand in their way. … Be he human or be he brute – the hindrance must be got rid of.”

Since we’re talking about Herbert Spencer, it’s time to return to what I mentioned earlier: a racist strain running through too much of this English prose advice. It has to do with a 19^th century obsession with the idea that pure Anglo-Saxon England was conquered by the Normans in medieval times and in addition to corrupting the pure vigorous Anglo-Saxon blood, the Normans corrupted the vigorous Anglo-Saxon language. This idea of getting back Anglo-Saxon racial purity through the use of short sentences filled with single-syllable words is explicit in the likes of Herbert Spencer and reproduced by White and Orwell etc., without acknowledging where the racialist passion for monosyllables comes from.

University of Chicago academic John Williams, in the 1995 writing book Style: Towards Clarity and Grace, talks about the Norman conquest and its effects on English – thankfully, without the racial nostalgia. Williams’s analysis is that because medieval English lacked words for translating and doing business and government, these words were imported from Latin and French. 16^th century Renaissance scholars brought in Greek and Latin for classical texts. The result is that 80% of daily words come from Anglo-Saxon, while in more technical fields, there are more French- and Latin-origin words. The result: Depending on what you’re writing about, it could simply be impossible to choose the single-syllable Anglo-Saxon word, which might not exist. As Williams quotes “there ys many wordes in Latyn that we have no propre Englysh accordynge thereto”.

In addition to racialist nostalgia, these style guides bring to the writer the advice given to every sales force: pander. But pandering ignores one of the main reasons that readers read: to learn new things, including new words! When I read, I look for writing that has as much new (to me) material in it as I can handle without getting overwhelmed. New words, new ideas, new combinations. I don’t pick up a book looking to read the same 850 words in the shortest possible sentences.

Anyway you can do propaganda in small words and short sentences just as well as you can in big words and long sentences (maybe better). Orwell inverts this reality in his “Politics and the English Language”, arguing that “plain english” is inherently less deceptive. “Bad writers… are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones,” he says. But this isn’t true. It took Trump’s mastery of plain english for liberals to take notice, but they eventually did.

If you’re not pandering and you’re not trying to recapture teutonic vigor the better to help your superior race rule the whole world, then all of the White-Orwell rules go out the window. Short words aren’t better than long ones. Short sentences aren’t better than long ones. Anglo-Saxon words aren’t better than Latin ones. Language is an infinitely creative system endowed to us by miraculous accidents of evolution over millions of years. How degrading to confine ourselves to 850 short words!

No, writing is a relationship between people. A social relation. To be meaningful, advice about writing is advice about this relation. You can be cynical about it and follow University of Chicago writing centre director Larry McEnerney, who tells graduate students

that the writer’s job is to solve a problem for the people with power in their field. You can follow Virginia Tufte and reverse-engineer hundreds of sentences to see what makes them good. The way I think about writing now is as a research phase where you find the resources you need, a first draft phase where, as McEnerney advises, you actually use the writing of the first draft to figure out what you think, and a revision phase where you rewrite the whole thing with your reader in mind.

Instead of thinking of writers as pretentious Latins who don’t use enough simple vigorous Anglo-Saxon words, think about writers as working to reach specific readers with their language. Then you will understand more about how propaganda works than Orwell wanted you to. When the New York Times says that a missile “finds” cafe patrons watching soccer, that’s not because they’re too stupid to use the active voice: it’s because they are connecting with NYT readers, who want to know what is happening in Israel/Palestine in a way that is palatable to their pro-apartheid commitments. Thinking of this as bad writing by stupid writers leads to feelings of smug superiority. That’s fine where Orwell lives but it’s a luxury we (ie., the anti-apartheid side in this case) cannot afford. Time to dump Strunk, White, and Orwell.

Subimperialism and multipolarity

Brazil’s dilemma

[NOTE: This article was produced by Globetrotter and is published in many of the usual places, but was mainly intended to have a permanent home at the Independent Media Institute’s Observatory, a place for articles that aren’t tied to the news cycle where readers can get into concepts (like, for example, subimperialism!) At my blog, I hosted an article by a colleague, Mandisi Majavu, where he blasted the concept’s analytical value back in 2005 in the South Africa context. I had always intended to come back to it and 18 years later I finally have, after seeing the term pop up in my re-reading of Galeano last year. I found the concept to have been developed through thinking about Brazil, and I wanted to mention the main theorist of the idea that I was able to find, Ruy Mauro Marini… and it helped me think about where Brazil might be headed today…]

A look at sub-imperialism and multipolarity in Brazil historically and into the future.

In the Open Veins of Latin America Eduardo Galeano described an 1870 genocidal war of regime change waged on Paraguay by a Triple Alliance of its neighbors, Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil, on behalf of British imperialism. The target, nationalist president Solano Lopez, died in battle. The country lost 56,000 square miles of territory. Paraguay’s population was reduced by 83.3 percent.

By the end, Galeano wrote: “Brazil had performed the role the British had assigned it.” Before the intervention, “Paraguay had telegraphs, a railroad, and numerous factories manufacturing construction materials, textiles, linens, ponchos, paper and ink, crockery, and gunpowder… the Ibycui foundry made guns, mortars, and ammunition of all calibers… the steel industry… belonged to the state. The country had a merchant fleet… the state virtually monopolized foreign trade; it supplied yerba mate and tobacco to the southern part of the continent and exported valuable woods to Europe… With a strong and stable currency, Paraguay was wealthy enough to carry out great public works without recourse to foreign capital… Irrigation works, dams and canals, and new bridges and roads substantially helped to raise agricultural production. The native tradition of two crops a year, abandoned by the conquistadors, was revived.”

After the war: “it was not only the population and great chunks of territory that disappeared, but customs tariffs, foundries, rivers closed to free trade, and economic independence… Everything was looted and everything was sold: lands and forests, mines, yerba mate farms, school buildings.”

Summarizing all this, Galeano wrote: “Paraguay has the double burden of imperialism and subimperialism.”

“Subimperialism,” Galeano continued, “has a thousand faces.” Paraguayan soldiers joined an intervention against the Dominican Republic in 1965, under the command of a Brazilian general, Panasco Alvim. Paraguay “gave Brazil an oil concession on its territory, but the fuel distribution and petrochemical business [was] in U.S. hands.” The U.S. also controlled the university, the army, and the black market as well, of which Galeano wrote: “Through open contraband channels, Brazilian industrial products invade the Paraguayan market, but the Sao Paulo factories that produce them have belonged to U.S. corporations since the denationalizing avalanche of recent years.”

Elaborating on Brazil’s sub-imperial function since 1964, Galeano wrote: “A very influential military clique pictures the country as the great administrator of U.S. interests in the region, and calls on Brazil to become the same sort of boss over the south as the [U.S.] is over Brazil itself.”

Ruy Mauro Marini Analyzes the Phenomenon

It is perhaps no coincidence that the leading scholarly authority on sub-imperialism is the Brazilian scholar Ruy Mauro Marini. Mauro’s 1977 article was published shortly after Galeano’s book. To understand “global capitalist accumulation and subimperialism” some background on the theory of imperialism set out by Lenin is in order, and more recent books like Zak Cope’s The Wealth of Some Nations and Patnaik and Patnaik’s A Theory of Imperialism teach the theory eloquently.

The key concepts are unequal exchange and value transfer, magical processes through which the wealthy countries exchange smaller amounts of labor for larger amounts of labor from the poor countries. The mechanisms are many: patent regimes, Western corporate control of Global South resources, denomination of oil and other commodities in U.S. dollars, IMF and Western-bank loan terms and draconian rescue packages, Western arms sales and military training programs—all backed up by the threat of sanctions, coups, invasions, and “color revolutions,” which happen frequently enough to remind Global South governments to stay in line.

In Imperialism, Lenin described the pressure on wealthy countries to “go imperialist:” winners in the Western domestic market invariably consolidate and tend towards monopoly; these winners are invariably coordinated increasingly through banks and financial interests; throwing new investments in to a mature market brings lower returns than they can get in newly opened ones, so the financiers seek colonies to get high returns on their growing piles of capital; the colonies also address their interests in labor and raw materials that are cheap (or ideally, free, through theft).

Mauro shows how this dynamic can lead to sub-imperialism if the context is right. Sub-imperialism, he writes, is “the form assumed by the dependent economy when it reaches the stage of monopoly and finance capital,” and it has two basic components.

The first is a “relatively autonomous” expansionist policy that functions under the overall umbrella of U.S. hegemony.

The second is what Mauro calls a “medium” organic composition of capital. To explain this concept an example comparison will suffice: an economy with a high organic composition of capital is one where workers use advanced, costly machinery that itself required a lot of labor to produce (the word “composition” refers to how much so-called “dead labor” went into the machines on which the “living labor” is now laboring). These are the workers in the vacuum labs making nanometre-precise computing chips. An economy with a low organic composition of capital is one where workers labor with their hands or simple tools, cutting sugar cane with machetes as day laborers. Their work is called “unskilled” and their wages are proportionately lower.

In 1977, Mauro argued that in Latin America, only Brazil had both the medium organic composition and the relatively autonomous expansionist policy. But what about today? And what about in other regions?

Generalizing the Concept

Are there sub-imperialists in South Asia? Pakistan exercises its ambitions in Afghanistan under U.S. hegemony. Imran Khan was overthrown in a coup for withdrawing support for the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan; his successors have worked hard to prove their subordination to the hegemon. India meddles in the affairs of its small neighbors like Bhutanand does so under U.S. hegemony; Western corporations certainly have an immense footprint in both India and Pakistan.

In the Middle East, Saudi Arabia and Turkey qualify as sub-imperialists though both showcase how each sub-imperialist is a special case. In Africa, South Africa has been analyzed as a sub-imperialist and tiny Rwanda could well qualify as a Central African version.

Who doesn’t fit? None of the U.S. Five Eyes partners (Australia, New Zealand, Canada, or UK) nor Japan, nor Israel, since all are high-income countries with higher than “medium” organic composition of capital.

Nor do China, Russia, or Iran fit the sub-imperialist mold. They may exercise hegemony—or contest it—in their regions, but they do not do so under the umbrella of U.S. hegemony.

This brings us back to Brazil and to the changes in the world since the writings of Mauro and Galeano on sub-imperialism.

Sub-Imperialism and Multipolarity

Until very recently, unilateral U.S. hegemony was the basic fact of world affairs.

No one could contest the U.S. invasions of Grenada, Panama, Iraq, or Haiti or its destruction of Yugoslavia and Libya. But Russia and Iran did contest the U.S. plan to dismantle Syria in 2015.

When Yemen voted against the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 1990, they were told that it was “the most expensive vote they ever cast” and punished economically. But by 2022 many countries remained neutral in the Russia-Ukraine War despite Western demands that they support Ukraine. India and China ignored Western demands that they refuse to buy Russian energy, expanding a series of options for trading commodities in currencies other than the U.S. dollar. African countries need not beg Western commercial banks for development finance: they can examine Western offers side-by-side with the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative. In 2023, China brokered a peace deal that restored relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

These developments reveal a historical change from a unipolar to a multipolar world order. The world has been under unipolar Anglo-American hegemony since the 1750s. There were world empires prior to that (notably the Spanish and Portuguese) but China and India each had around 25 percent of the world economy even at that time; a few centuries earlier, before the devastation of the Americas, the world was even more multipolar, if much less globalized.

If we are indeed moving away from the unipolar historical pattern, current sub-imperialists have some re-thinking to do: the U.S. umbrella is not what it once was.

Sub-Imperialism or Multipolarity? Which Way for Brazil?

With Lula (Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva) back in the president’s office in Brazil as of 2023, the country faced this precise dilemma. In his previous tenure, Lula acted as both a multipolarist and a sub-imperialist. An early proponent of multipolarity (before the moment had even arrived) through his advocacy of BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) and of Latin American integration, Lula’s Brazil played the sub-imperial role as well, leading the morally compromised and disastrous UN mission to take over the U.S. occupation of Haiti. Some of the military officers who led the Haiti occupation helped overthrow Lula’s party in the coup that led to his jailing and eventually to Bolsonaro’s destructive presidency.

Bolsonaro was certainly, symbolically sub-imperialist: he saluted the U.S. flag and marched under the Israeli one. But most of his time in office was characterized by a disastrous COVID-19 response, genocidal policies against Indigenous peoples, and a general incoherence on foreign policy. Bolsonaro participated in a regime change stunt in Venezuela but tried to stay out of the Russia-Ukraine war.

Lula returned to office in a context of weaker domestic left-wing movements but a stronger multipolar context. Lula’s Brazil voted with the West in the condemnation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine but Brazil was told by Russian diplomats that Russia understood the vote.

There are economic considerations beyond the organic composition of capital that can drive Global South leaders back into the criminal arms of the U.S.—dependence on natural resource exports and foodgrain imports are tendencies that are difficult to reverse, especially in democracies like Brazil that are vulnerable to coups or regression when the right-wing returns to power.

Perhaps Brazil will be the vanguard of multipolarity in the Americas, or the sub-imperialist agent undermining BRICS from the inside. The changing world includes possibilities never contemplated by Galeano, Mauro, or Lenin.

Justin Podur is a Toronto-based writer and a writing fellow at Globetrotter. You can find him on his website at podur.org and on Twitter @justinpodur. He teaches at York University in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

Some basics of journalism to evaluate these CSIS stories

Have professional guidelines been followed here?

Since the Canadian media engulfed itself in a Sinophobic panic fueled by some probably racist CSIS leaker and credulous reporters (that I have referred to previously as CSIS-GM) a small number of people in independent media have tried to create some kind of response. While we have at least a couple of good pieces in e.g. The Canada Files and in Passage, we are definitely talking about, if not voices in the wilderness, honourable exceptions to a dishonourable unanimity. There is no debate going on here, at least not yet.

On the other hand, there is nothing that upsets a monopolist more than the slightest sign of a crack in their racist wall of anti-China coverage. And so it is that we are treated not only to the unfolding defamation campaign against Chinese-Canadians, but also to several of the most fervent of the campaigners sniveling – because of the lack of credulity in these little pockets of twitter about what CSIS-GM is selling – about how the public doesn’t understand the complexity of journalism.

Like the ungrateful public that refuses to understand how what looks like food prices being driven up by monopoly is actually much more complex, the ungrateful public refuses to understand how what looks like fiction from a racist spy agency is actually the apogee of professional journalism. If they only knew.

Shall we take up the challenge? Shall we pick up the gauntlet thrown down by the Canadian media? Perhaps we can take a look at some foundational resources for journalists, from the place you know all Canadian journalists look for foundational resources – the US.

How does the CSIS-GM reporting of the past few months stack up against, for example, the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics? Here are some principles from the code for you to compare with the behavior of the Canadian media in recent weeks. They include:

Verify information before releasing it.
Consider sources’ motives before promising anonymity.
Diligently seek subjects of news coverage to allow them to respond to criticism or allegations of wrongdoing.
Provide access to source material when it is relevant and appropriate.

In recent years there have been real journalists and sources who have suffered real persecution by the US and its allies for reporting within the above code of ethics. Wikileaks, after a painstaking process of harm reduction to ensure no danger would come to US spies and military personnel, published whole troves of source documents – the Iraq War Diary, the Afghan War Diary, Cablegate – so that the public, journalists, researchers could do their own analysis and their own verification on the documents directly. The source, Chelsea Manning, was punished severely and the publisher, Julian Assange, is in jail, his life in danger. Edward Snowden, after getting himself to safety, came out in his own name and defended his decision to become a source on the NSA’s universal surveillance program.

Meanwhile the CSIS leaker was given space in the Globe and Mail to defend his honor as well – to defend, that is, his decision to engage in political manipulation and defamation behind a cloak of anonymity. He will continue to be defended by the journalists who published his narratives and by the spy agency that employs him, even as Assange languishes in prison.

Let’s go over now to the Comittee of Concerned Journalists. There we find similar ideas about sources and verification, which is “a consistent method of testing information — a transparent approach to evidence — precisely so that personal and cultural biases would not undermine the accuracy of their work.” How is that working out in Canada? Also in the CCJ principles you will find the idea of publishing in the public interest: “journalists must continually ask what information has most value to citizens and in what form.” The more the CSIS-GM leak material that seems by perfect coincidence to vindicate their approach and assumptions, the more it’s revealed that the goal is narrow political and personal agendas and not what “has most value to citizens”.

A third resource. While I wouldn’t want to imply that Associated Press follows its own ethics, it too has guidelines that are being mocked by the CSIS-GM operation.

“ Under AP’s rules, material from anonymous sources may be used only if: 1. The material is information and not opinion or speculation, and is vital to the report. 2. The information is not available except under the conditions of anonymity imposed by the source. 3. The source is reliable, and in a position to have direct knowledge of the information.”

If the CSIS-GM information has passed these tests, there is no way to know it from the story. It doesn’t look like information (#1 failed) and the source says things that make absolutely no sense (#3 failed). With #1 and #3 failed there’s no way to even think about #2, since some of the leaks sound like pure inventions.

Like any other important endeavour, journalism involves both skill and insight that develop over time and practice. Verification, for example, is a complex method. Seeing with your own eyes is better than hearing from a witness; two witnesses are better than one, but not all that much better if they coordinate their stories before talking to you. Documents are good but can be faked. How much trust you can put into, e.g., a Wikileaks cablegate cable depends on how much you know about what was going on at the time, how well the information fits with what else you know, the nature of the official denial, the motivation of the leaker and of the publisher. How to make a judgment about what is in the public interest and how to balance that with how well you were able to verify and how timely it all is (why now?). Infinite possibilities to do good work emerge from a fairly simple set of principles.

Violating the principles leads to bad work – which is what has happened here. The social damage, as I’ve said before, is just beginning.

Multiculturalism is over in Canada – it’s back to Sinophobia

How a rogue spy and two reporters are breaking the fragile system for integrating immigrants

Breaking Canada-China science connections as prologue

The death throes of Canadian multiculturalism began on February 2023 over China-Canada science connections. Canada’s Innovation Minister said Canadian universities shouldn’t do research with China’s military, as 50 of them have since 2005. “I am not happy and it’s unacceptable,” Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne said, quoted in a February 2 Globe and Mail article “Ottawa vows to curb research with Chinese military scientists”. Champagne reminded Canadians that there are new national-security reviews for scientists since 2021 – also designed for China. Michael Chong, the foreign affairs critic with the Conservative party, called for a ban to all research collaboration with China’s military.

One Canadian research fellow said that “Everyone recognizes the importance of academic freedom but Canadian researchers should be thinking within their souls, not partnering with Chinese researchers who maybe are helping to develop military equipment.” What will these Canadians find in their souls?

It didn’t take long for Champagne to give these souls a nudge, announcing the ban Michael Chong had asked for on February 14. “Grant applications that involve conducting research in a sensitive research area will not be funded if any of the researchers working on the project are affiliated with a university, research institute or laboratory connected to military, national defence or state security entities of foreign state actors that pose a risk to our national security.” In case you were wondering, the shifty category of “foreign state actors that pose a risk to our national security” does not include the US, UK, or Israel – military research with these partners continues, of course.

Indeed to try to substitute “the US” or “Israel” for China anywhere in this story would render it incomprehensible. When a group of Palestinian students started a lecture series asserting that Israel was an apartheid state, it was denounced by every mainstream Canadian politician including Trudeau himself and official parliamentary motions. As this very story unfolds a disabled, Black NDP candidate, Sarah Jama, is under attack for criticizing Israel when she was a student activist. Israel, apparently, might be a “foreign state actor”, but no one thinks it “poses a risk to our national security” – on the contrary, Canadian politicians must be vetted and disqualified if they are critical of Israel.

Chinese Canadians must prove they are loyal to Canada and not China; Canadian politicians must prove that they are with Israel and not the Palestinians.

The Globe and Mail didn’t stop with mere government declarations. They got quotes from CSIS, Canada’s spy agency, and also a report from a “US strategic intelligence company Strider Technologies Inc” that stated that “Researchers at 50 Canadian universities… have conducted and published joint scientific papers from 2005 to 2022 with scientists connected to” China.

No questions asked about why a US strategic intelligence company is studying Canada-China research connections for these guardians of Canadian sovereignty.

Fife, Chase, and their CSIS source break the 2021 election story

On February 13, Robert Fife and Steven Chase published a story in the Globe and Mail “CSIS warned Trudeau about politician’s alleged ties to China.” In this story, the reporters cite “two national security sources” making accusations against a Canadian Liberal Party politician Michael Chan, saying that CSIS “has a dossier on Mr. Chan that contains information in the 2019 and 2021 federal election campaigns and meetings with suspected Chinese intelligence operatives.” This dossier made by the intelligence agency has now been entered into the public record. Chan fired back hard: “Your own statement to me about a recent briefing by CSIS to Prime Minister Trudeau, serves only to ignite xenophobia and cause continued, unwarranted and irreparable damage to my reputation and the safety of my family,” he said.

He added: “CSIS has never interviewed me regarding their false and unsubstantiated allegations. However, I am aware that they have conducted intimidating interviews with my friends and acquaintances and then instructed them to keep their mouths shut.”

That might have been the end of it, but the story has legs. What follows in Fife & Chase’s report – and in the growing scandal in Canada – is a narrative where every sentence begins or ends with the phrase, “CSIS believes”. Michael Chan met with Chinese diplomats, who CSIS believes are “suspected intelligence actors”; “security sources” told Fife & Chase that they had told the prime minister’s office that Chan should be “on your radar”. They briefed the prime minister on “foreign interference, tactics and Chinese tradecraft.”

Reporter Robert Fisk said, in the run-up to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, that all newspapers should change their name to “US officials said”, since their reporting relied solely on unnamed US officials using their newspapers to generate support for the war. Perhaps the Globe & Mail should change its name to “CSIS believes.”

Fife & Chase repeat a set of sinister phrases, all citing back to their source in CSIS who is leaking them “top secret” information – a cachet that adds undeserved weight to their assertions: “CSIS has repeatedly warned that China has been conducting foreign interference operations in Canada, including efforts to influence the political process.” They quote CSIS director-general of intelligence Adam Fisher: “They are not necessarily relying on trained agents. They use cutouts. They use proxies. They use community groups. They use diaspora organizations and community leaders,” he said. They quote Cherie Henderson CSIS assistant director of requirements “They will use whatever avenue they can to achieve their objectives”. The story’s sourcing is principally their unnamed CSIS leaker, backed up by official statements… also by CSIS officials. The total impression given by this set of quotes is that an informed Chinese Canadian who effectively pushes back against Canada’s belligerence towards China will automatically become a prime suspect for Chinese collusion.

Michael Chan protested to Fife & Chase that he is a “loyal Canadian” – a phrase with historical resonance for anti-racists. Chinese Canadians must prove their loyalty – ideally, by publicly denouncing the Chinese state.

Then, the bombshell on February 17, 2023. Fife and Chase again, in a report titled “CSIS documents reveal Chinese strategy to influence 2021 election.” This breathless story reports as if established fact that China was working for the Liberals and against “Conservative politicians considered to be unfriendly to Beijing”. The basis of Fife & Chase’s story is the usual: “The full extent of the Chinese interference operation is laid bare in both secret and top-secret Canadian Security Intelligence Service documents viewed by The Globe and Mail.”

Fife & Chase call it “an orchestrated machine” run by the “Chinese Communist Party leadership in Beijing” to use Canadian organizations “while obfuscating links to the People’s Republic of China.”

From February on, the Globe and Mail with its reporting duo of Fife & Chase, its TV network, and its CSIS source, have worked to create a national media scandal. Let’s call this network CSIS-GM.

As with the 2014 Trojan Horse Affair in Britain or the Dreyfus Affair 100+ years ago in France, the flimsy basis of the accusations isn’t questioned. The Trojan Horse Affair and Dreyfus Affair were based on outright fake documents. In contrast, Fife & Chase and their paper, the Globe and Mail, are working with a secret faction inside CSIS in ways that will incite racist attacks on Chinese Canadians and they do not appear to care. If they cared, their standards for evidence would be much higher.

Since the CSIS leaker is anonymous, we don’t know his goal. Here’s a guess for what this CSIS-GM operation could accomplish: better Canadian state control and monitoring of contact between Canadians, especially Chinese Canadians, and Chinese people. The unelected and unaccountable CSIS retains its personnel and infrastructure regardless of who is in the Canadian parliament. With centralized control over Canada-China contacts, CSIS will make a better asset for its real master, the US, in the latter’s ever more aggressive and dangerous confrontation with China.

Interlude 1: A reminder of the major problem with Canadian elections

For Canadians worried about whether electoral outcomes reflect the popular will, there are some real questions. Why is health care being privatized when no Canadians want or voted for that? Why did the Green Party – a minor party nowhere near power – seem to self-destruct when a pro-Palestine candidate made a good showing in the leadership race?

Canada’s wealthy donors and corporate lobbies certainly have their say through electoral financing, though they have to work creatively around spending limits. More powerful, though, is the revolving door of corporate boards and the chance to own privatized businesses, with former Ontario premier Mike Harris in the Long-Term Care business, a Toronto public school board leader being part owner of a private school, former Toronto police chief Julian Fantino cashing in on legalized marijuana, etc.

The parties’ processes of vetting candidates also helps ensure a unanimity of ideology. When, for example, candidates with a pro-Palestine past (something that usually only happens on the left, ie., in the NDP, like the aforementioned Sarah Jama) become controversial, they are purged by the party apparatus. This has been going on for years and perhaps decades – I wrote about it in 2015.

Perhaps even more important is the intense concentration of Canadian media. The Canadian Media Concentration Research Project reported in 2021 that “The top six Canadian companies—Bell, TELUS, Rogers, Shaw, Quebecor and the CBC— accounted for 69% of network media economy revenue last year; in contrast, the “big six” US-based Internet giants’ combined revenue in Canada of $14.5 billion gave them a 15.3% market share.” What Canadians see and read come from six Canadian and six US corporations, all of which share the same view of the world and of the place of various peoples in it. Good thing we’ve banned Chinese-owned TikTok, right?

Can a concentrated media, careful ideological vetting, and a wealthy class that can offer the riches of Croesus to retired politicians who have done them good service have any influence on elections? Should Canadians worry about that? Never mind! Focus on Chinese interference, says CSIS-GM.

CSIS-GM accusations grow

Back to our story. By February 20th Fife & Chase, with the same CSIS sourcing – remember the phrase: “secret and top-secret Canadian Security Intelligence Service documents viewed by The Globe and Mail “, were describing an ever-more terrifying system of “ Chinese government espionage that employs blackmail, bribery and sexual seduction, with the country even enlisting the Bank of China in its foreign-influence activities.” What they called an “orchestrated machine”, three days later was a “a broad Chinese strategy to interfere in Canada’s democracy and gain influence over politicians, corporate executives, academics and vulnerable Chinese Canadians.” A national security expert, Akshay Singh, sounded a frightful alarm: “It’s about different levels of government. It is about academia. It is about civil society and it is about private enterprise.” The Chinese, it seems, were everywhere.

On February 21st, Fife & Chase’s reporting had won results. Their report that day, “Committee to probe Chinese interference in 2021 election”, described how a parliamentary committee would convene on Chinese interference. Opposition parliamentarians demanded the committee investigate the 2021 election based on Fife & Chase’s “shocking revelations.”

The same day the Globe and Mail’s editorial board began to drive the political line for the scandal. “Stand up to China, Mr. Trudeau.” The editors asserted that Canadians didn’t care about the spy agency leaking “top secret” information, but about the Chinese undermining democracy. Apparently the Globe and Mail editors thought Canadians valued precisely what the Globe and Mail had given them and Canadians weren’t suspicious at all of the CSIS leaker or the corporate media pushing the story. The paper collaborating with the spy agency to generate suspicion of all Chinese Canadians cast itself as the victim in the editorial because Trudeau had said the CSIS reports, whose “top secret” status was hyped up by the Globe and Mail to add energy to their story, shouldn’t have been leaked.

CSIS-GM counter Trudeau’s threat to investigate the leaker – with another leak

Fife & Chase stepped up the game again on February 28 breaking another story, again from their CSIS source:

“The source said the Canadian Security Intelligence Service captured a conversation in 2014 between an unnamed commercial attaché at one of China’s consulates in Canada and billionaire Zhang Bin, a political adviser to the government in Beijing and a senior official in China’s network of state promoters around the world.

“They discussed the federal election that was expected to take place in 2015, and the possibility that the Liberals would defeat Stephen Harper’s Conservatives and form the next government. The source said the diplomat instructed Mr. Zhang to donate $1-million to the Trudeau Foundation, and told him the Chinese government would reimburse him for the entire amount.”

The Trudeau foundation provides scholarships and has nothing to do with elections. It is named for the current prime minister’s father, who was also prime minister of Canada decades ago. The foundation returned the donation days after the story broke.

Interlude 2: A review of the difference between evidence and intelligence

Perhaps we should review the different standards of evidence. To meet the standards of a court of law, evidence has to be very good, since someone could go to jail based on it. To meet the standard of publication, evidence also should be good, since lives and reputations could be ruined. Intelligence agencies, meanwhile, are allowed to give their briefings in secret because they can then assess threats and probability freely without worrying about destroyed reputations or innocent people going to jail. They can produce reports that would be libelous (false and defamatory) if published but might be useful for a government scanning the horizon for threats to sovereignty. What they should not be allowed to do is hide behind anonymity to spread secret evidence, inciting racism against a whole group of people who, according to multicultural theory, are as Canadian as Fife & Chase or their CSIS leakers.

Some Canadian intelligence officials have tried to sound some warnings about the difference between evidence and intelligence, but the scandal keeps growing.

At any given moment, if the political climate is right for it, the publication of intelligence materials as established fact will be enough to cause a public scandal.

In the case of this CSIS-GM operation, this is bigger than an intelligence agency leaking their threat assessments to a corporate media monopolist to challenge an election outcome.

The end of Canadian multiculturalism

There’s more at stake because Canada has a history of Chinese Exclusion, of anti-Chinese racism, and a recent history of multiculturalism which is now coming to an end.

Beginning in the 1970s (with the current prime minister’s father) multiculturalism was the framework for integrating immigrants into Canada and has always carried both an anti-racist and a sinister element. It is based on the belief that people from any country of origin could become as “Canadian” as the British colonists who seized it in the name of the English Crown. The resulting Canada would be a “mosaic of cultures”, not a melting pot that pressures people to sever ties with the old country and assimilate as happens in the United States.

On the sinister side, the multicultural idea is used to try to lower the special status of First Nations down to the level of any other part of the mosaic and hide the fact that they retain sovereignty over the land. If Canada is to be a mosaic, immigrants would have to be invited by First Nations on their terms, not by the state that stole their land.

Canadian multiculturalism is also used to weaponize diasporas for campaigns against their home countries, wherever those home countries are in the crosshairs of the US. These diaspora communities of the mosaic are assumed to have homogeneous politics as regards foreign policy: their visible leaders and their community media are of course vocally against the Chinese government, but also pro-US sanctions and wars, anti-Communist, against Palestinian sovereignty, etc.

Multiculturalism was strained by the War on Terror decades as Canadian police and informants infiltrated Muslim communities and entrapped them in terror plots the same way the FBI did in the US, but Canada didn’t go as far as the UK did with its Trojan Horse Affair. Sinophobia in Canada has a much deeper tradition, with race riots in British Columbia and the Chinese Exclusion Act.

CSIS-GM are working towards an open parliamentary inquiry on Chinese interference. This would be like the McCarthy inquiry for Canada. And as James Bradley noted in his book The China Mirage, McCarthyism in the US did indeed begin as an anti-China initiative. So we’re back full circle. A simple protectionist measure has been debated: expelling Chinese diplomats. The problem with that, Canada’s foreign affairs minister said, was that China would then expel Canada’s diplomats, which would “harm Canada’s ability to have ‘eyes and ears’ on the ground in China.” (that’s from a March 10th report by… Fife & Chase). What a colonial dilemma for poor Canada, who needs to maintain its “eyes and ears” to spy and interfere in China and cannot risk losing this access even to protect Canadians from alleged Chinese spies and interference!

After last weekend’s removal of the Toronto MPP Vincent Ke from the caucus of the Ontario Tories – under the pressure of unnamed intelligence sources pushing against all in Canada who were born in China, or have Chinese connections, through the instrument of willing media operatives – a respected reporter on party politics, Chantal Hébert, could not help but call this what it is. Canada’s latest yellow-peril purge was becoming a “witch-hunt,” she told CBC (as it operates in Quebec), “and not just a political witch-hunt but a witch-hunt to which the media is contributing.”

“At what point,” she joined a usually servile media corps in asking, “does one stop being an investigative journalist and start being the secretary of a source that dictates to us things that we don’t verify . . . ?” In other words, even journalists who accept as given the need for a new Cold War patriotism against China are starting to feel some palpable unease. “Think on it well,” Hébert warned her colleagues: “we know where it starts, but do you know where it ends?”

If the Globe and Mail and CSIS get the national scandal they are working to generate, it will be the end of multiculturalism in both its positive and negative aspects. Minorities, starting with Chinese-Canadians, will be made to understand just how conditional the multicultural embrace really is. As both living standards and educational institutions in China continue to improve (ending Canada’s joint research will have absolutely no negative effect on China’s progress), Chinese people will increasingly avoid Canada. Chinese firms will be kicked out of the Canadian surveillance capitalism market so that work can be done by American and Israeli firms. Maybe that, and not some narrow partisan advantage gained by questioning the government’s electoral legitimacy, is the desired endgame of this campaign.

Whatever the real CSIS-Globe and Mail game is, it is a dangerous one that is already out of control. Chinese Canadians are the target – but the whole thing will not end well for Canada.