by Roberto Abraham Scaruffi
China Security, vol. 5 (1), Winter 2009.
It is the news of the day, of the year, of the century, of the millennium: on 26 December 2008, the Chinese Navy sent two battleships and a supply vessel to join the multinational forces mobilized against Somali pirates. China Security reserves its Winter 2009 issue for impressionistically discussing such a banal event and other aspects of the PRC imperialism.
Chinese bureaucracies and their subjects are insanely convinced, not differently form other imperial bureaucracies, of being the real world power with the mission of seeing its superiority accepted from whoever and whichever. The paranoid myth of a unique China has been carefully cultivated from Anglophone powers, as well as the myth of the millenary indestructible Chinese civilization and Empire.
China has never been a sea power. In fact, it has been reached and submitted from small European States had become sea powers, so world empires. Will China become now also a sea power? It claims itself with the slogan of the “multi-millenary civilization” ...fearful of seas, of waters.
Strategy is the subject of nothing, where everything is “strategic”, alias relevant, or eventually irrelevant for competitors just power cantors are ordered to declare useless for competitors what was and is “essential” for their bosses.
It is in the USA-UK nature to constantly create their enemies. Also by these ideological operations they do that. China, now exploited, and made a little stronger at the same time, is one of their present and future enemies. It replaced Japan, although Japan be, silently, even considerably stronger than China.
Inevitably, in a “Western” agitprop “logic”, China [PRC] is discussed. China is evaluated. Its present and its future are discussed and evaluated, on the basis of the US power. Are aircraft carriers indispensable to a world power? Are foreign bases indispensable? And intercontinental missiles and anti-missiles? Is nowadays a military navy indispensable? Is really relevant to operate inside a UN Security Council which always complied to US will on all key questions?
Military and “security” bureaucracies are bureaucracies as the other ones, obeying to law of progressive expansion. Their expansion, with its inevitable damages, is the reality. Whatever else are pretexts.
Financial-industrial-military complexes are progressive constructions where corruptions and ideologies adaptively intertwine with real needs. Ideologies, ideologies and ideologies are disseminated in this China Security issue. Human beings are just animals in constant need of justifications. They need to create and to diffuse stories, tales. Academicians call that “making sense”, alias suggesting and imposing opportunistic, convenient, interpretations of reality.
Call that “propaganda”. Such is “strategy”, “strategic studies”.
What is finally a State if not its profiteers and the subjects-slaves of State profiteers? Propagandists call that “fatherland”, and “patriotism” ...of its [idiotic] subjects-slaves in need of ideological narcotics for fulfilling their frustrations and insanities.
More than 1,3 billion subjects, although self-claimed Han at 91.5%, are decidedly too many for whatever functional entity. The same self-claiming of a Han race or nationality is clearly an ideological construction. A plurality of languages are actually spoken everywhere in China. “Central” Chinese (the so called common language, putonghua / pǔtōnghuà / 普通话 / 普通話) is a power's language, a minority language. Local diversification is hampered with the trick of a non alphabetic “central” language, also because a “central” alphabetic language would immediately explode in a variety of “local” languages. Clearly, local cultures and languages cannot been formalised in written languages since the central government of the official written language of more than 1,3 billion subjects.
It is evidently diffused world power interest to simulate the existence of a Chinese nation, so of a legitimacy for an artificial Chinese State. All discussions about China, even more “strategic” “analyses”, have this basic bias. They are basically ideological and false.
Really, 2,000 “Somali” pirates with 60 boats are such a world threat for justifying extraordinary operations? Who/which provides them with weapons? Independent weapons traders do not exist. Their electronic devices (radar) and boats are really not easily detectable from who-which detect whatever electronic signal of the world and can easily detect whatever movement overall in not so crowded spaces as seas are? Or is that simply the usual technique of provoking crises for justifying military expenditure wastes? The USA and their “allies”, not differently from their “enemies”, have scientifically destroyed Somalia and are preserving it without whatever State. Privateering is, apparently, just one of the consequences of such condition, although even privateering could not exist without some [international] power promotion and cover.
“Somali” piracy is in the same broad area which is core of the British Empire recruiting for “Islamic” fundamentalism. Yemen (as well as others) does not provide any cover for “piracy”? For “public opinions”, there is the show of “interventions” and of “multinational forces”.
China Security, vol. 5 (1), Winter 2009.
