Global call is for US to stop being a threat to peace

Back in November 2012, I condemned the documentary Death by China based on the book Death by China: Confronting the Dragon－A Global Call to Action by Peter Navarro, then a professor at University of California-Irvine and now director of the White House National Trade Council and an assistant to US President Donald Trump.

I equated the movie to "hate speech" because its key points are China is bad in every respect; China is stealing American jobs, killing its babies with unsafe toys, and its army is preparing to kill Americans. I also called the movie "garbage" and "akin to World War II Nazi propaganda" that "should never have made it to the screen".

Sadly, slandering of China has become a favorite pastime for some US politicians, as exemplified by Donald Trump in his 2016 campaign. The HuffPost Entertainment's hilarious video Donald Trump Says 'China', in which China is mentioned 234 times, has been viewed 14.58 million times on YouTube.

For US politicians, defaming a rising China can be done at no cost to themselves, and can help energize and mislead their often less informed voters. Few US news organizations are bothered to conduct any fact checks of what they say.

That's why US politicians never tire of scaremongering about China. That's why Vice-President Mike Pence could deliver a speech targeting China redolent of the rhetoric of the Cold War at the Hudson Institute in Washington on Oct 4, a ludicrous speech that described everything China does as evil. And that's why Secretary of State Mike Pompeo began his talk in Mexico City on Oct 18 by backstabbing Chinese investment in Latin America.

The accusations that China's investment in Latin America is neocolonialism and Chinese loans in Africa are all debt traps not only betray the facts on the ground, they are insulting to those sovereign African and Latin American nations by assuming they don't know what they are doing.

The fake Bloomberg story on Oct 4, the day Pence spoke at Hudson, about Apple and Amazon products containing a Chinese spy chip could well be part of this political campaign. Apple, Amazon and Super Micro executives have all demanded Bloomberg retract the story written based on sheer speculation.

These are just some of the latest cases in which an all-out smear campaign is being conducted against China by the US.

Let me make clear that I am not claiming that China does not make mistakes or never does anything wrong. Like many developing nations, China is in the middle of a long learning process. Learning from the rest of the world has contributed hugely to China's success over the past 40 years, and China should welcome honest criticism so it can improve its development path.

But to describe everything China does as evil, as Pence did, or to denigrate China in a third country, as Pompeo did, is simply indecent behavior, especially for national leaders.

Fortunately, Chinese leaders have not demonstrated the same trait as these US politicians. Few national leaders in the world do.

Yet that does not mean they could not give a long－and factual－list detailing the hideous track record of the US, which would include the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq and the thousands of innocent civilians killed as "collateral damage" in US military drone strikes.

China, despite all the accusations by the US, has never done anything remotely as destructive to world peace as the US war in Afghanistan, which is now in its 17th year and has become the longest war in US history.

Global polls, including by Gallup, have shown repeatedly over the years that the US is considered the greatest threat to world peace. It's clearly time for these narcissist US politicians to look at themselves more carefully in the mirror.

The author is a columnist at China Daily. chenweihua@chinadailyusa.com