Last week I published an article discussing former Ambassador Chas Freeman, one of America’s most highly-regarded professional diplomats of the last half-century. Very early in his career, Freeman had been the personal interpreter for President Richard Nixon during his historic 1972 trip to China and meetings with Mao, and that country remained one of his areas of special expertise.
During subsequent decades, Freeman served as our ambassador to Saudi Arabia at the time of the Gulf War and was afterward appointed as an assistant secretary of defense. Then in early 2009, the Obama Administration nominated him as chairman of our National Intelligence Council, responsible for assessing and aggregating the findings of our 17 different intelligence agencies, and then providing the final report to our president and other top leaders. But the Israel Lobby regarded Freeman as insufficiently loyal to the foreign nation that they served, so their activists successfully mobilized to block his appointment.
Despite his very distinguished record of accomplishment, Freeman was rarely interviewed by our media so I was only slightly aware of him. However, over the last year he had become a regular guest on several YouTube channels and he greatly impressed me with his knowledge and acumen, prompting me to publish that piece quoting long sections of his extremely sensible views on our troubled relationship with China.
- Ambassador Chas Freeman on Our Cold War Against China
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • December 9, 2024 • 7,500 Words
In that article I noted the vital role played by the Internet, whose video platforms and social media distribution channels now provided the entire world with access to views and ideas that had routinely been blocked by the gatekeepers of the traditional electronic media.
Under different political circumstances, someone like Freeman might have spent the last couple of decades as a top foreign policy advisor to our president, but despite his knowledge and eminence only the Internet transformed him from a name barely known to me into someone whose views I carefully followed on a weekly basis. And much the same had happened with many other individuals, including leading academic scholars and national security experts such as Jeffrey Sachs, John Mearsheimer, Ted Postol, Ray McGovern, Larry Wilkerson, and Douglas Macgregor.
Despite all of this, I only belatedly recognized that the power of this same Internet can also enormously magnify the impact of ordinary, apolitical citizens, whose personal experiences can potentially inform our understanding of major geopolitical controversies.
As Freeman noted, over the last few years our Cold War with China has become increasingly frigid, and although it still remains confined to battles over economic and trade issues, there are some dangerous risks that it might turn hot over Taiwan or the South China Sea. Two years of increasingly severe American restrictions upon the export of our advanced microchips or Western chip-fabrication equipment to China have finally provoked strong retaliation. China heavily dominates the processing of certain vital raw materials, so they have banned the export of these to our own country, an action with potentially serious impact.
A major flashpoint in this growing international confrontation came in January 2020 when top officials of the outgoing Trump Administration joined their counterparts of the incoming Biden Administration in both declaring that China was committing “genocide” against its Muslim Uyghur population of Xinjiang province, with the New York Times and our other leading media outlets endorsing and heavily amplifying those explosive accusations.
Such enormously grave charges soon led many Western companies to ban the use of Chinese products from Xinjiang, a decision that outraged China and prompted economic retaliation.
Both at the time and afterward, I regularly ridiculed those accusations, emphasizing that they seemed based upon no solid evidence and greatly reminded me of the false claims of Saddam’s WMDs that that been used to launch our ill-fated Iraq War. Indeed, none of the world’s many Muslim countries took those claims seriously, with the only supporters being the population of the heavily brainwashed West. And after Israel began its massive campaign to annihilate Gaza’s Palestinians, I noted the huge apparent differences between these two alleged “genocides.”
What made these accusations about Xinjiang seem so totally absurd was that the huge province was completely open to both Chinese and foreign tourists, who regularly traveled there in large numbers, attracted by its scenic vistas and interesting Muslim Turkic culture. The notion that China was committing a “genocide” in a region constantly crisscrossed by tourists seemed like the most mindless sort of dishonest propaganda, aimed at the gullible and the dim-witted.
During several years of this ongoing controversy, I failed to consider that video-loggers had become an important part of the Internet, and that some of these specialized in the stories of their foreign travels. But a commenter recently posted a couple of such videos on one of my articles, and clicking the links I discovered the easy availability of such direct personal evidence about Chinese society.
There are a multitude of such channels, and I recently spent a couple of days exploring the China content of two of them. Nothing I saw much surprised me, but I think that our relations with that huge country would greatly improve if more Americans did the same.
I’m not sure of her last name, but the eponymous host of Katherine’s Journey to the East seems like a very pleasant young woman from the Virginia suburbs of DC. Six years ago, perhaps out of a spirit of adventure, she decided to attend Nanjing University for her masters degree in Environmental Engineering, and except for occasional visits back home she has lived in China since then, and might remain there indefinitely.
She is an ardent environmentalist and having become completely fluent in Mandarin, she works for a Chinese company in that field. But during the last three or four years she has also spent a good deal of her time producing personal videos on roughly a weekly basis, and I’ve now watched about two dozen of these, which usually run around 10-20 minutes each. She documents her travels and other activities, and does so in a very sincere and ingenuous manner. Aside from her love of nature, hiking, and other environmentalist sentiments, she seems almost completely apolitical, or at least I never saw anything that suggested otherwise.
Nearly all these videos are in spoken English, but they usually provide both Chinese and English subtitles. Most get hundreds of comments, and casually examining some of those threads suggests that the bulk of her audience consists of Westerners but with a substantial Chinese minority.
Over the years, her channel has accumulated 132,000 subscribers and her videos seem to average about 50,000 views each, though the most popular have reached 400,000. For an ordinary individual focusing on her personal activities, those seem like very substantial numbers, probably comparable to the viewership of many professional cable-television hosts although Katherine obviously lacks their distribution and promotion. I feel confident that she provides a far more honest and realistic view of ordinary life in China than any of the synthetic, ideologically-driven propaganda-products created by television professionals subject to the dictates of their executives.
For the last several years she had been living and working in Hangzhou, a large city of nearly 12 million and the capital of Zhejiang province. But she had always been fascinated by rural Chinese villages, and about a year ago she finally got an opportunity to move out to one of them.
Except for her videos covering her recent visit back home, virtually everyone she shows is Chinese, and I never saw the slightest indication that she ever encountered anything other than a friendly, welcoming atmosphere everywhere she went. Urban amenities throughout the country seemed absolutely on a par with America’s most prosperous cities, but much of the design and planning appeared far superior, with stretches of natural parkland often breaking the monotony of the numerous large buildings, and those were also tastefully varied in style.
My initial interest had been on matters relating to the Uyghurs and Xinjiang, and I quickly noticed that her current boyfriend came from that ethnic group. Partly as a consequence, a number of her videos over the last few months have shown scenes from her visit to that region and her interactions with the local Uyghurs. I think they are well worth watching for the evidence they provide on that inflamed international controversy.
