“You have an expansionist Islam and you have an expansionist China. Right? They are motivated. They're arrogant. They're on the march. And they think the Judeo-Christian West is on the retreat.”

—Former White House chief strategist and white nationalist Steve Bannon (Source)

Whether they're stealing our elections, stealing our jobs, stealing our personal data, or even starting global pandemics, these days it seems like the “CCP” is lurking around every corner, plotting to destroy us… but are they?

Although anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about “Bolshevik Jews” are typically recognized for being the racist Nazi propaganda that they actually are, the equally insidious Sinophobic scaremongering about “Chinese Communists” is generally seen as permissible in modern Western Capitalist societies, both due to it typically being far more subtle in nature and also due to the fact that it can generally be rationalized by simply asserting that the PRC (People's Republic of China) somehow poses a threat to the United States, despite all of the evidence to the contrary.

This blog will explore the links between this third Sinophobic Red Scare and historical and present day rightwing extremism, racism, and colonialism, as well as debunking many of the lies frequently repeated in Western mainstream media about the PRC and the CPC (Communist Party of China) that help to fuel it.

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1. Nazism and Anti-Communism: Two Sides of the Same Racist Coin

Communism was antithetical to Nazism because communism prioritized class above nation and race. … As soon as the Nazis rose to power, they began targeting communists, both inside and outside Germany. In 1933, the first concentration camp opened at Dachau to hold political prisoners. The first prisoners were all communists. … As early as 1933—before the Nazi regime had made any significant moves against Jews or the disabled—German Communists were detained in mass arrests and tortured. Once the war began, the Commissar Order demonstrated the depth of Nazi fear and hatred of communism. Issued in June 1941, the Commissar Order directed German soldiers to “shoot on principle” all Soviet commissars (Soviet Communist Party officials) and POWs, in violation of international law.

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Throughout the 20th century, Fascists and white supremacists were always at the forefront of anti-Communist movements all over the world, just as Communists and Socialists were always at the forefront of anti-Fascist and anti-colonialist movements worldwide.

Here in the US, we can see this same pattern during both the first and second Red Scares. As early as the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan was actively going after suspected Communists, and the infamous anti-Communist senator Joe McCarthy was also a Hitler fanboy and an anti-Semite.

The 1920s saw a resurgence of Klan membership culminating in a membership peak of an estimated 4 million Americans. In 1930, a member of the Alabama KKK named John G. Murphy testified to the House Special Committee to Investigate Communist Activities that the Klan worked with the Birmingham police and the Federal Department of Justice by surveilling communists. According to Murphy, Klansmen would monitor meetings and report them to the local police, “who sent several men there” to arrest attendees.

In 1949, Paul Robeson and other musicians put on a concert in Peekskill, NY, which was attacked by a crowd of fascist thugs shouting “We’re Hitler’s boys” and “Go back to Russia, n****r.” The police allowed the mob to attack the progressives and send 140 to the hospital — Robeson claimed “perhaps no single event in the postwar anti-fascist struggle has had the same impact and importance as the incident of Peekskill.”

Gov. Dewey ordered an investigation, but put it in the hands of Fanelli, the man he had charged with the responsibility of seeing that what happened didn’t happen. Fanelli presented his information to a county grand jury. Its report absolved the police from blame in the first riot, ignored concert-goers’ charges that police stood by or even joined in the second riot, and devoted a great deal of space to pointing out the dangers of communism in Westchester. The concert organizers had provoked the riot for propaganda purposes, according to the report.

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During the 1930s, particularly after James A. Colescott of Indiana took over as imperial wizard, opposition to Communism became another primary aim of the Klan.

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For years, friends recounted how [Sen. Joe] McCarthy would pull out his copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, saying, “That’s the way to do it.” But, they were quick to add, that was just Joe being provocative. Now, the Malmedy hearings suggested a deeper-seated anti-Semitism. Why else would this one senator among 96 crusade to save the worst of Hitler’s shock troopers? Why single out Jewish investigators who, McCarthy claimed during the hearings, “intensely hate the German people as a race” and had formed what amounted to a “vengeance team?”

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As we can see here, the history of American anti-Communism and the history of American Nazism are one and the same, just as they are in eastern Europe, Latin America, Japan, and literally every other country and region of the world in which anti-Communist ideology establishes a foothold, and the present day demonization of the CPC here in the US and the collective West more broadly is merely the latest iteration of the same Fascist red scare propaganda of the 1920s.

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2. Painting the Yellow Peril Red: the Racist Origins of the Third Red Scare

The United States and China fought a bloody but undeclared Korean War in 1950-1953. Over 36,000 American soldiers were killed, most of them in fighting the Chinese inside Korea. Anti-Chinese sentiment escalated, with increased popular fear of communist espionage because of the Chinese Civil War and China's involvement in the Korean War. During the era, suspected Communists were imprisoned by the hundreds, and some ten or twelve thousands of them lost their jobs. Many of those who were imprisoned, lost their jobs or were questioned by committees, had a real past or present connection of some kind with the Communist Party. However, for the vast majority of them, their potential to do harm to the nation and the nature of their communist affiliations were both tenuous. Among these victims were Chinese Americans, who are often viewed with suspicion of being affiliated with the [CPC].

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Although the WWII-era internment of Japanese Americans has received plenty of media coverage in recent years following Donald Trump's xenophobic travel ban during his first term in office, the persecution of Chinese Americans during the Second Red Scare has received far less media attention, despite the fact that the same Sinophobic racism and anti-Communist hysteria that were responsible for it are still present to this day.

The fact of the matter is that there is a long history of Sinophobic racism here in the US that predates even the first Red Scare of the 1920s, as well as a long history of us committing atrocites against the people of East Asia, which (following WWII) particularly took the form of ruthless wars of aggression against East Asian nations who were freeing themselves from the yoke of Western colonialism and neocolonialism through Communist revolutions.

The Vietnam War was a war like no other in terms of brutality, hatred, and utter destruction. Both the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and their countryside guerrilla allies, the National Liberation Front (NLF) more commonly known as the Viet-Cong (VC) as well as the Americans and their South Vietnamese counterparts showed little to no mercy to each other as well as the millions of civilians caught between them.

America would bring to bear the infinite firepower of its arsenals and drop nearly 3.5x more ordnance on the hostile North and friendly South than all explosive ordnance detonated during the Second World War by all nations combined. In the Quang Tri province alone, it was estimated 99% of all infrastructure was completely destroyed by American B-52 raids.

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That is an excerpt taken from an excellent blog written by my good friend MrPwong right here on Paint, and I strongly encourage anyone here interested in learning more about the evils that were committed against the people of Vietnam during the Vietnam war to read it.

Anyway, we've already gone to war against both Korea and Vietnam—both East Asian Communist nations just like China is—and so the Chinese have every right to fear American aggression in the Asia-Pacific region. Meanwhile the PRC has never bullied or oppressed other countries the way that we here in the US routinely do to this day, nor have they ever committed the same sort of heinous war crimes that we committed against them and their Korean allies during the (technically still ongoing) Korean war.

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3. Make America Hate Again: Chinese Invasions, Chinese Election Theft, and Other Racist Fairytales

"There are certain Chinese coming in that are really disturbing," Gatestone Institute senior fellow Gordon Chang said on "Mornings with Maria" Monday. "Packs of Chinese males of military age, unattached to family groups pretending not to speak English. These are probably saboteurs who are coming in on the first day of war with Asia."

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Ever since the historic election victory of former US president Barack Obama in 2008, there has been a steady increase in racist red scare propaganda here in the US. And given that the PRC is the only remaining Communist superpower in the world, it should surprise nobody that this racism would shift in a Sinophobic direction over time (like in the Fox Business article that I quoted above), as the Chinese bogeyman succesfully replaces the Soviet bogeyman of the 20th century as the #1 threat to our “rules-based international order”.

Such propaganda is (just as in years past) predominantly coming from the far right here, leading to ridiculous Sinophobic conspiracy theories such as the aforementioned Chinese invasion hoax and the Chinese election theft hoax, and it is also consistently weaponized by Republican politicians and rightwing media outlets against their fellow rightwing authoritarians in the Democratic Party here, as can be seen in the ridiculous Red Scare nicknames “Beijing Biden” and “Comrade Kamala”.

The fact of the matter is that Communist is a dirty word here in the US, and it has been consistently ever since the first Red Scare of the 1920s. Although anti-Semitism and Russophobia certainly still have their place in rightwing identity politics, the former now mostly takes the form of Islamophobia due to the rise of Zio-Nazism in the West, while the latter has declined due to the obvious fact that Russia is no longer a Communist country.

For his part, current US president Donald Trump is personally guilty of both stoking Sinophobic hatred and using Red Scare tactics against his political opponents, but given that even “Beijing Biden” was willing to call the president of another nuclear-armed superpower a “dictator”, it is quite obvious that the Third Red Scare—and the existential threat that it poses to us all should it lead us into yet another anti-Communist war of aggression in East Asia—is much bigger than just one man or one political party here, it is systemic.

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4. Anti-Colonialism, Peacemaking, and True Democracy: the Legacy of the Communist Party of China

“Our congress should call upon the whole Party to be vigilant and to see that no comrade at any post is divorced from the masses. It should teach every comrade to love the people and listen attentively to the voice of the masses; to identify himself with the masses wherever he goes and, instead of standing above them, to immerse himself among them; and, according to their present level, to awaken them or raise their political consciousness and help them gradually to organize themselves voluntarily and to set going all essential struggles permitted by the internal and external circumstances of the given time and place.”

—Chairman Mao Zedong, Quotations from Mao Tse-tung

While the US has a long and bloody history of genocide, slavery, torture, and constant wars, the People's Republic of China does not, and China has (contrary to all of the Red Scare propaganda pushed by the Western bourgeois media) actually done a lot of good in the world, especially since the New Democratic Revolution of 1949 that saw the CPC rise to power.

I will now debunk the most pervasive, dangerous, and defamatory lies about the PRC propagated by the Western bourgeois media, as well as to show the positive impact that the CPC's leadership has had on both China and the world as a whole.

4.1 “China is a dictatorship, not a democracy”

Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich--that is the democracy of capitalist society. If we look more closely into the machinery of capitalist democracy, we see everywhere, in the “petty”--supposedly petty--details of the suffrage (residential qualifications, exclusion of women, etc.), in the technique of the representative institutions, in the actual obstacles to the right of assembly (public buildings are not for “paupers”!), in the purely capitalist organization of the daily press, etc., etc.,--we see restriction after restriction upon democracy. These restrictions, exceptions, exclusions, obstacles for the poor seem slight, especially in the eyes of one who has never known want himself and has never been in close contact with the oppressed classes in their mass life (and nine out of 10, if not 99 out of 100, bourgeois publicists and politicians come under this category); but in their sum total these restrictions exclude and squeeze out the poor from politics, from active participation in democracy.

—Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, The State and Revolution

Western imperialists have a long history of using the bogus notion that they are “spreading democracy” to justify their never-ending wars of aggression against the (usually black and brown) people of the world, and they use this same imperialist rhetoric to vilify their geopolitical rivals like China, by calling them things like “Communist dictatorships” or “authoritarian regimes”.

The reality is that the PRC is actually a democracy. That's right, China is democracy, although their version of democracy is obviously quite a bit different than ours, so allow me to try to explain what I mean here.

In our so-called “democracy”, people vote for politicians who are members of 1 of our 2 rightwing political parties—the Democrats and the Republicans—to supposedly represent then at various levels of government. In order to win their elections, these politicians sell their souls to lobbyists that help fund their political campaigns, and then upon winning their elections they proceed to carry out the policies that these lobbyists want them to enact, rather than those that the majority of the people they claim to represent want.

Chinese democracy, by contrast, prioritizes the interests of the people—hence their nation's full name being the People's Republic of China—and in order to help explain how China's democratic system works, here are some excerpts from " rel="nofollow">the Chinese Constitution.

Article 1 The People's Republic of China is a socialist state governed by a people's democratic dictatorship that is led by the working class and based on an alliance of workers and peasants.

The socialist system is the fundamental system of the People's Republic of China. Leadership by the Communist Party of China is the defining feature of socialism with Chinese characteristics. It is prohibited for any organization or individual to damage the socialist system.

Article 2 All power in the People's Republic of China belongs to the people.

The organs through which the people exercise state power are the National People's Congress and the local people's congresses at all levels.

The people shall, in accordance with the provisions of law, manage state affairs, economic and cultural undertakings, and social affairs through various channels and in various ways.

Article 3 The state institutions of the People's Republic of China shall practice the principle of democratic centralism.

The National People's Congress and the local people's congresses at all levels shall be created through democratic election and shall be responsible to the people and subject to their oversight.

All administrative, supervisory, adjudicatory and procuratorial organs of the state shall be created by the people's congresses and shall be responsible to them and subject to their oversight.

The division of functions and powers between the central and local state institutions shall honor the principle of giving full play to the initiative and motivation of local authorities under the unified leadership of the central authorities.

Article 34 All citizens of the People's Republic of China who have reached the age of 18, regardless of ethnicity, race, gender, occupation, family background, religious belief, level of education, property status or length of residence, shall have the right to vote and stand for election; persons deprived of political rights in accordance with law shall be an exception.

Article 35 Citizens of the People's Republic of China shall enjoy freedom of speech, the press, assembly, association, procession and demonstration.

Article 36 Citizens of the People's Republic of China shall enjoy freedom of religious belief.

No state organ, social organization or individual shall coerce citizens to believe in or not to believe in any religion, nor shall they discriminate against citizens who believe in or do not believe in any religion.

The state shall protect normal religious activities. No one shall use religion to engage in activities that disrupt public order, impair the health of citizens or interfere with the state's education system.

Religious groups and religious affairs shall not be subject to control by foreign forces.

IK that's a lot to unpack there, and I obviously didn't cover everything written in the entire Chinese Constitution here, but the key things to point out here are that China holds democratic elections in which “all citizens of the People's Republic of China who have reached the age of 18... shall have the right to vote and stand for election” (Article 34), and that (just like in our own Constitution) certain rights are guaranteed to the Chinese people in it, such as freedom of speech (Article 35), freedom of religion (Article 36), etc.
(The amount of overlap between the rights covered in their constitution and the rights covered in ours is actually kinda shocking, TBH.)

Now, the Chinese Constitution references something called the “people's democratic dictatorship” in Article 1, which (to those unfamiliar with Marxist terminology) may sound like an oxymoron, as a dictatorship is typically thought of as being the exact opposite of a democracy in Western bourgeois democracies.

In order to make sense of this term, one first needs to understand the Marxist-Leninist concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat:

The dictatorship of the proletariat, sometimes abbreviated as DotP, is a guiding principle applied in the transition to communism from capitalism. It facilitates economic development to a level at which communism can be implemented, and prevents counter revolution and sabotage from the international and domestic ruling classes.

As the state exists to assert the rule of one class over another, all class society is a dictatorship; the issue that generally drives the class struggle is who is the ruling class. As such, the DotP is not a dictatorship in the liberal, bourgeois sense of the term but a neutral qualifier as to the owner of state power.

(Source)

If read in this context, the meaning of this term becomes much more clear: the “people's democratic dictatorship” referenced in Article 1 of the Chinese Constitution is simply a term used to assert who wields the ultimate power in Chinese society: the people.
(Kinda like the whole “we the people” thing in our constitution, lol!)



Rather than allowing an elite ruling class to have a monopoly on political power like they do here in the US and other Western bourgeois democracies, political power in the PRC resides with the common people—the peasant and the working class, rather than millionaires and billionaires who can afford to buy politicians.

4.2 “China wants to take over the world”

“In the face of the profoundly changed international landscape and the objective need for the world to rally together like passengers in the same boat, all countries should join hands in building a new model of international relations featuring cooperation and mutual benefit, and all peoples should work together to safeguard world peace and promote common development.”

—President Xi Jinping, The Governance of China

It is the height of hypocrisy for the US to call any other nation on Earth—including Russia and China—“expansionist”, “imperialist”, or any other equally ridiculous terms that apply ten thousandfold to itself, and China's foreign policy is (like that of all anti-imperialist nations) one of peacemaking and diplomacy, rather than engaging in constant economic and proxy wars against other nations.

One good example of this is the historic peace deal that China recently helped negotiate between Saudi Arabia and Iran; another is their involvement in negotiating peace between Russia and Ukraine; and yet another is their mediation of Palestinian reconciliation.

Now I know what you're thinking: what about them wanting to invade Taiwan? Or those territorial disputes in the South and East China Seas?

First of all, Taiwan Province is a part of China, so them “invading” Taiwan would be comparable to the US invading Hawaii—except that Taiwan is a heckuva lot closer to mainland China than Hawaii is to the continental US.

As for what's going on in the South China Sea, China is going out of its way to avoid conflict there, and the same goes for the disputes in the East China Sea as well, despite the fact that China has perfectly legitimate security concerns in both.
(And in Taiwan.)

The fact that war hasn't broken out between any of the countries involved in these disputes is a testament to the restraint being exercised by all of the parties involved—including China—and as is usually the case with disputes such as these, the proper course of action for great powers like the US who aren't directly involved in the disputes would be to follow the example of global peacemaking set by the Chinese, and to help mediate talks between those who are directly involved, rather than choosing a side and spurring them on to take further and further aggressive actions as we have done far, far too many times in the not-so distant past.