“The Coming War with China”

February 6, 2023

JOHN PILGER, jpilger2003@yahoo.co.uk, @johnpilger
Pilger is a journalist and filmmaker whose documentaries include “The Coming War on China” for ITV which came out in 2016.

He said today: “The U.S. reaction to an alleged Chinese spy balloon over Montana adds the absurd to its usual firehose of anti-China rhetoric. Instead of negotiating the balloon down to earth — i.e. talking to the Chinese — Washington sent up a couple of fighter planes and shot it down. That’s the news. What is almost never news is that the U.S. has some 400 military bases effectively surrounding China, from Australia, all the way up through the Pacific islands, to the Philippines and to Japan and Korea. The Japanese island of Okinawa is a floating launch pad 400 miles from the Chinese industrial heartland.

“How long will the rest of the world tolerate this constant provocation to war or, as an official in Washington put it, ‘this noose.'”

Pilger notes the U.S. uses drones to monitor China and low-draft ships probe its waters.

The South China Morning Post reported in 2021: “U.S. to make greater use of drones to spy on China, experts say.”

Just last week, CNN reported: “U.S. military to gain expanded access to Philippines bases in efforts to counter China.”

“The Coming War on China” is a “warning that nuclear war is not only imaginable, but a ‘contingency,’ says the Pentagon. The greatest build-up of NATO military forces since the Second World War is under way on the western borders of Russia. On the other side of the world, the rise of China as the world’s second economic power is viewed in Washington as another ‘threat’ to American dominance. To counter this, in 2011, President Obama announced a ‘pivot to Asia’, which meant that almost two-thirds of all U.S. naval forces would be transferred to Asia and the Pacific, their weapons aimed at China.”