The Coming War With China (12A.)
Directed by John Pilger.
In cinemas across the country on Monday 5th with a Pilger Q&A beamed live from the stage of The Picturehouse Central in London. On Thursday 1st there's a preview at the NFT with a Pilger introduction.
There is something very reassuring about a John Pilger documentary: you know that all is wrong with the world, but wrong in the old, traditional, 20th century ways. All the things that we have so far always managed to muddle through one way or the other; rather than the confusing, barbarous, new fangled, post truth ways of the present. With Pilger, you also know where you stand – not as left wing as him. Which is why the title of his new film is so intriguing: for once you didn't know what stance he would take on it.
Of course, the war part he would be opposed to, but what would be his attitude to China, an oppressive one party state that has abandoned its communist ideology to embrace tacky consumerism to a Kardashian degree. I was a fool to wonder: in a Pilger film American Imperialism and Nuclear weapons are always the issues. Like the song in Casablanca, he's here to remind us that the fundamental things apply as time go by.
(If you miss it at the cinema, the film is on ITV on Tuesday 6th at 10.40. Pilger films are always on ITV at 10.40 on a Tuesday night – except in the 70s and 80s when they would have been on at 9.00. Prime time Pilger really is a different era.)
The case he wants to make is that America is priming for war with China, primarily because it is put out that China is doing the free market economy thing much better than they are. He then illustrates this a map of US military bases that effectively circle China.
And then having set out its line of attack in the opening five minutes, the film immediately takes a detour back to the post war atom bomb testing in the Pacific Marshall Islands and spends the next forty minutes outlining the USA's cavalier disregard for the environment and the lives of the people on that islands. This is shocking material about how a paradise that the US had been charged with protecting was devastated by their military programme, and its inhabitants used as guinea pigs in an experiment to find out about the effects of radiation. Probably the most repellant part is how the islander were moved back there, when the US government knew it was still dangerously radiated. Effectively they were being sent to their long term deaths. None of this really belongs in a film about war with China in the 21st century, but definitely belongs in a film somewhere.
The last part of the film is taken up with documenting protest groups on the Korean and Japanese islands of Jeju and Okinawa, opposing the building of new American bases, but the meat of the film is in the middle, a trip to Shanghai to discuss both the historical context of American antipathy to China, “The Yellow Peril,” and the state of China now, and the workings of a one party free market economy. Early on we hear the phrase, “Yes, there are issues with human rights,” and fear the wash, but in the time allotted to it, about 20 minutes, the film gives a fairly balanced overview of China's economic surge and the positive and negative effects of that social upheaval.
His argument that China means no harm to anyone is possibly disingenuous: there is no mention of the Great Firewall of China or the law case at the Hague with the Philippines about fishing rights in the South China Seas. Or actually there is, a mention about an American military base that has been built on the Spratly Islands, which are in the middle of the disputed area. The film has been hastily updated to include a mention of Trump, his rhetoric about China's “economic rape” of the US, but no mention or explanation of how China's role in globalisation has driven down wages. I can't imagine any of this would weaken his case – after all it is big global corporations that benefit from the cheap production costs in the East, while creating a useful demon for charlatan populists to rail against. Pilger has impeccable taste in High Horses, but once he's up and riding one, the blinkers are on and nothing is allowed to stop the gallop.
The point of a Pilger film is to get you to look at a bigger picture, to see the secret forces that operate in plain sight. The question is what to do with this information. Adam Curtis, a documentary maker who is both the opposite of Pilger, and yet surprisingly similar, introduced us to the notion of Oh Dearism, where the endless daily intake of bad news has made people so depressed, so despairing, that we have no sense of hope, no idea of what to do. In effect, being informed makes us powerless. At the end Pilger shows us the peaceful protests on Jeju Island and Okinawa, the exact same kind of peaceful protests that he's been documenting for half a century, and tries to chivvy us into action: come on, you can do, people have the power. But it all seems so ineffectual, so nothingy., so limp. Oh dear.
Directed by John Pilger.
In cinemas across the country on Monday 5th with a Pilger Q&A beamed live from the stage of The Picturehouse Central in London. On Thursday 1st there's a preview at the NFT with a Pilger introduction.
There is something very reassuring about a John Pilger documentary: you know that all is wrong with the world, but wrong in the old, traditional, 20th century ways. All the things that we have so far always managed to muddle through one way or the other; rather than the confusing, barbarous, new fangled, post truth ways of the present. With Pilger, you also know where you stand – not as left wing as him. Which is why the title of his new film is so intriguing: for once you didn't know what stance he would take on it.
Of course, the war part he would be opposed to, but what would be his attitude to China, an oppressive one party state that has abandoned its communist ideology to embrace tacky consumerism to a Kardashian degree. I was a fool to wonder: in a Pilger film American Imperialism and Nuclear weapons are always the issues. Like the song in Casablanca, he's here to remind us that the fundamental things apply as time go by.
(If you miss it at the cinema, the film is on ITV on Tuesday 6th at 10.40. Pilger films are always on ITV at 10.40 on a Tuesday night – except in the 70s and 80s when they would have been on at 9.00. Prime time Pilger really is a different era.)
The case he wants to make is that America is priming for war with China, primarily because it is put out that China is doing the free market economy thing much better than they are. He then illustrates this a map of US military bases that effectively circle China.
And then having set out its line of attack in the opening five minutes, the film immediately takes a detour back to the post war atom bomb testing in the Pacific Marshall Islands and spends the next forty minutes outlining the USA's cavalier disregard for the environment and the lives of the people on that islands. This is shocking material about how a paradise that the US had been charged with protecting was devastated by their military programme, and its inhabitants used as guinea pigs in an experiment to find out about the effects of radiation. Probably the most repellant part is how the islander were moved back there, when the US government knew it was still dangerously radiated. Effectively they were being sent to their long term deaths. None of this really belongs in a film about war with China in the 21st century, but definitely belongs in a film somewhere.
The last part of the film is taken up with documenting protest groups on the Korean and Japanese islands of Jeju and Okinawa, opposing the building of new American bases, but the meat of the film is in the middle, a trip to Shanghai to discuss both the historical context of American antipathy to China, “The Yellow Peril,” and the state of China now, and the workings of a one party free market economy. Early on we hear the phrase, “Yes, there are issues with human rights,” and fear the wash, but in the time allotted to it, about 20 minutes, the film gives a fairly balanced overview of China's economic surge and the positive and negative effects of that social upheaval.
His argument that China means no harm to anyone is possibly disingenuous: there is no mention of the Great Firewall of China or the law case at the Hague with the Philippines about fishing rights in the South China Seas. Or actually there is, a mention about an American military base that has been built on the Spratly Islands, which are in the middle of the disputed area. The film has been hastily updated to include a mention of Trump, his rhetoric about China's “economic rape” of the US, but no mention or explanation of how China's role in globalisation has driven down wages. I can't imagine any of this would weaken his case – after all it is big global corporations that benefit from the cheap production costs in the East, while creating a useful demon for charlatan populists to rail against. Pilger has impeccable taste in High Horses, but once he's up and riding one, the blinkers are on and nothing is allowed to stop the gallop.
The point of a Pilger film is to get you to look at a bigger picture, to see the secret forces that operate in plain sight. The question is what to do with this information. Adam Curtis, a documentary maker who is both the opposite of Pilger, and yet surprisingly similar, introduced us to the notion of Oh Dearism, where the endless daily intake of bad news has made people so depressed, so despairing, that we have no sense of hope, no idea of what to do. In effect, being informed makes us powerless. At the end Pilger shows us the peaceful protests on Jeju Island and Okinawa, the exact same kind of peaceful protests that he's been documenting for half a century, and tries to chivvy us into action: come on, you can do, people have the power. But it all seems so ineffectual, so nothingy., so limp. Oh dear.
