Part II Western Capitals Long Chinese Mission: From Opium to COVID
Vaccine Credentials
We examine the virtually unbroken history between American power-brokers and
the highest echelons of power in China a history that harkens back to the
earliest days of capitalism, slavery, and the opium trade.
Mint Press
by Raul Diego
February 23rd, 2021
By Raul Diego
WASHINGTON In The Disarticulation of Pandemic War Propaganda, a
transparent attempt to frame China as the instigator of worldwide lockdown
policies was revealed to be the work of a group of self-styled
libertarian-minded individuals. Their links to the UK, the United States,
and Canadian governments tie a neat Pentagon-size bow around ongoing efforts
to demonize the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
The specter of communism, which worked well during the twentieth century
as an intimidation factor to break down protectionist policies and impose
oppressive debt regimes, is now being revived to resuscitate an economic
paradigm that is long past its sell-date.
Having nearly exhausted the bounty of the natural world, global capital is
now forced to create new markets out of thin air to continue its relentless
march toward oblivion. Abstractions like intellectual property will still
need to rely on the extraction of tangible goods like minerals and as it
has from the beginning the exploitation of human life.
In this second part of Dragons Blood Harvest at the Dawn of Human Capital
Markets, we will examine the virtually unbroken history between American
power-brokers and the highest echelons of power in China a history that
harkens back to the earliest days of capitalism, slavery, and the opium
trade and that established a permanent pipeline for the transfer of
technology and medical and scientific knowledge to China through Western
philanthropic organizations dating back to the early nineteenth century.
Towards the second half of the twentieth century, even as Chinas post-war
communist revolution seemed to diminish Western influence in the country,
these early links to American academic, scientific, and banking circles were
never completely severed. By 1971, diplomatic relations between the U.S. and
Maos China were officially restored, just in time for the wholesale
transfer of American manufacturing to China under the auspices of the
opening of the Asian continent.
Nearly half a century later, the best enemy money can buy to borrow
Antony C. Suttons relevant turn of phrase was sold to the American public
by Donald Trump, whose anti-China rhetoric during his presidential campaign
and policies of his admininstration would color the new Cold War with China
and usher in what independent researcher Alison McDowell has described as
digital chattel slavery. McDowell describes that slavery in terms of the
burgeoning blockchain-anchored human capital markets, which are anchored to
an emerging biosecurity state being rolled out under the guise of the
pandemic, covered in a later installment of this series.
Setting up the new Cold War
On February 10, the Department of Defense released a fact sheet announcing
plans to establish a China Task Force. It was to be headed by Defense
Secretary Lloyd J. Austin; advisor and former Executive Vice President of
the D.C.-based national security think tank Center for a New American
Security (CNAS), Ely Ratner; and 15 yet-to-be-announced civilian and
uniformed DoD employees.
The task forces unveiling came just days after Austin released a statement
addressing the Pentagons intention to reassess the U.S. militarys global
posture away from the counterinsurgency missions that have characterized it
since 2001 and back to a high-intensity war footing between nation-states.
In 2014, during his time as an associate political scientist at the RAND
Corporation, Ratner co-authored a research paper titled Chinas Strategy
Toward South and Central Asia, examining the threat posed by China to U.S.
interests in Central Asia. He concluded that no substantial threat existed.
Ratner and his co-authors dismissed Chinas show of strength in the region
as an empty fortress a reference to one of the 36 Chinese stratagems of
war (ostensibly devised in the Dynastic Era), which involve deceiving the
enemy through reverse psychology.
Ratners views seem to have undergone a transformation since he served as
then-Vice President Joe Bidens deputy national security advisor in 2015 and
as a Maurice R. Greenburg senior fellow for China studies at the Council on
Foreign Relations (CFR) in 2017.
Soon after Ratner joined CNAS, he began publishing far more hostile takes on
China. He decried the failure of Americas noble expectations of openness
with China, met by what he called defiance by Xi Jinping, and called for
clear-eyed rethinking of the United States approach to China without
concern for the potential risks of inviting a new Cold War.
In January 2019, Ratner issued a statement in his capacity as executive vice
president of CNAS praising Trumps aggressive trade policies against China
and putting forth a kind of draft of the whole-of-government approach, so
named in a follow-up report by CNAS one year later. That report, co-authored
by Ratner, was aptly titled Rising to the China Challenge and called for
that same whole-of-government approach that has now been adopted by the
Biden White House and enjoys enthusiastic bipartisan support.
Republicans are eager to join in on the Cold War revivalism sweeping through
Washington. This was attested to by a telling spat that took place during a
House Armed Services Committee Zoom session in the summer of 2020 over a
relatively small item in the 2021 Defense Authorization Bill. Silicon
Valleys Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna was trying to transfer
approximately $1 billion from the $740.5 billion defense budget to a
pandemic preparedness fund. Specifically, he was trying to take it from a
$1.52 billion line item apportioned to Northrup Grummans $100 Billion
nuclear missile project contracted by the U.S. Air Force. The proposal
enraged Republican Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who blasted Khanna for suggesting
the money should go to a pandemic preparedness fund since, according to her,
the Chinese government, the Chinese Communist Party, is directly
responsible for the deaths that weve seen in the United States and around
the world, directly responsible for the economic devastation.
Cheney found it shameful that a member of the United States Congress
would propose diverting funds away from a nuclear deterrent device (of which
the USAF plans to buy 600) to a pandemic response initiative.
Cheneys tantrum ultimately saved Northrup Grummans down payment. But to
fully grasp the logic behind her reaction we have to go all the way back to
the beginning to what makes America what it really is and the driving
forces that have kept this nation at war for virtually every minute of the
twenty-first century.
The ground rules of free market capitalism
Long before Henry Kissinger took his poisoned olive branch to Beijing in his
infamous secret trip to open China to American commercial interests,
agents of colonialism had been reaping massive fortunes from illegal opium
smuggling operations carried out across the Asiatic continent as they drove
a stake into the heart of one of the worlds oldest civilizations in their
relentless quest for capital accumulation.
American drug cartel capos like Thomas Handasyd Perkins and his brother
James had started out in the slave business, trafficking human bodies on
commission between Boston and Cap-Français in Saint-Domingue (in modern-day
Haiti), in addition to commodities like flour and cod. The Haitian
Revolution made business even more profitable, as Perkins, Burling & Co.
became one of the main suppliers of food and ammunition for the French army.
The Perkinses moved on from the slave trade in 1793 to the far more
lucrative China trade,, which produced enormous profits for them and the
rest of the fledgling Eastern Establishment. Worthless U.S. banknotes, which
neither ports of call nor Chinese suppliers of the prized silks and teas in
demand throughout the Western world would accept as payment, had to be
substituted for with Turkish opium paste.
The Perkinses experience and their connections to a powerful Chinese
merchant known as Howqua made their ventures particularly successful so
much so that the Perkins-Howqua partnership was the sole focus of a 1821
inquiry by the British House of Lords into the inroads being made by
American smugglers into the Crowns massive opium trafficking business
through the East India Company.
East India Company opium
A stacking room in an East India Company opium factory circa 1850. Credit |
Wellcome Collection
The scale and scope of the Perkinses operation has been described by
Michael E. Chapman, associate professor of history at Peking University, as
a transnational conglomerate, operating at a supra-governmental level.
According to Chapman, the Perkinses ocean-faring business practices which
included spreading risk via cargo insurance, pooling investors for each
voyage, and apportioning capital across vessels laid down the ground
rules that underwrote American free-market capitalism.
Such ground rules werent entirely unprecedented in history and virtually
all of the free-market innovations mentioned by Chapman had already been
put into practice by maritime superpower Venice centuries earlier. But, the
British and their colonial cousins in the United States who were in many
ways directly descended from Venetian merchant traditions enjoyed advances
in shipbuilding, which made the frequency and volume of their exploits much
greater.
An obsession with the Far East was another idiosyncrasy they inherited from
their sea-bound forbearers, albeit couched in a much less romanticized view
of the Orient than that of the legendary son of Venice, Marco Polo.
Shooting down from the moral high ground
The colossal fortunes accrued by the Perkinses and other drug smuggling
magnates like Samuel Wadsworth Russell were sometimes funneled into
educational institutions like Yale and Harvard universities. The Boston
Athenæum, one of the nations oldest libraries, owes its existence to the
Perkins brothers, who donated the lions share of its initial funding; while
the notorious Skull & Bones Society at Yale was founded by William
Huntington Russell, cousin of Samuel Russell, who by that time had overtaken
the Perkinses to become the largest opium smuggler in China.
The celebrated academic institution located in New Haven, Connecticut, has,
in conjunction with Protestant missionaries, played a central role in
Americas relationship with China over the course of nearly two centuries.
Western medicine, in particular, was the vehicle used by
religiously-inclined foreigners motivated to convert the heathen masses of
China and the opium trade loomed large in their efforts. As the vanguard of
Western cultural penetration, Christian missionaries performed a crucial
function in the protracted entrenchment of American commercial interests in
Asia through the establishment of medical practices in Guangzhou and,
eventually, other parts of China.
The first Western-style hospital in China was founded by Peter Parker in
1835, fresh from obtaining his Medical Doctors degree from Yale Medical
School and ordained as a Presbyterian minister upon completion of his
theological studies at the same institution. Opened as an eye infirmary in
Guangzhou, the project was admittedly just a means to gain the trust of the
locals in order to sell them on the Judeo-Christian concepts Parker was
keener to impart. An initiative of a Christian missionary organization
called the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), the
medical venture proved to be more profitable than expected and the infirmary
was expanded to treat multiple diseases with the support of American
businessmen in the port city.
A brochure soliciting donations for Parkers Canton Hospital circa 1920.
Credit | Trinity College Digital Repository
Subsumed under the Medical Missionary Society in China three years later,
Parkers hospital depended heavily upon the contributions of American
businessmen the majority of whom were involved in the opium trade and
particularly dependent on the financial help of none other than the
Perkinses steadfast associate Howqua to keep its doors open. One exception
to Parkers opium-linked patrons was David Olyphant, co-founder of Olyphant
and Co., which engaged in the trade of silk and heavy fabrics and allowed
Parker to utilize the companys warehouse space in Guangzhou to house
patients.
Olyphant, however, was among a minuscule minority who opposed the opium
trade and, perhaps to his business ultimate detriment, did so vocally.
Other Westerners in China who may have harbored reservations about one of
the greatest evils afflicting Chinese society kept their misgivings to
themselves, including Chinas first missionary and founder of the ABCFM,
E.C. Bridgeman, who preferred that his views remain hidden from the public
given the political and economic consequences of broaching this most
delicate subject. Bridgeman eventually felt secure enough in his position
to openly challenge the opium trade, along with other missionaries in the
port city, but refrained from directly attacking the British and American
merchants responsible for the trade itself. After all, it was these same
merchants that funded the Protestant missionarys philanthropic ventures.
The re-education of China
Any attempts to curb the opium business were quashed by the foreign
interests and governments that drove it and the illicit drug continued to
flood China over the next several decades, leading to repeated clashes with
Western colonial powers known as the Opium Wars of 1839-42 and 1856-60.
Faced with the relentless destabilization campaign by British, French and
American forces, along with tacit approval and cultural subversion by
Christian missionaries, China would grow increasingly weak and succumb to
the demands of its enemies.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, the erstwhile kingdom had become
highly fragmented both geographically and socially. The British had managed
to tear Hong Kong away from China in the Treaty of Nanking at the conclusion
of the First Opium War and reliance on Guangzhou diminished as other points
of entry to the mainland were progressively granted.
Yale University, in tandem with the missionaries, continued to cultivate its
leading role as a purveyor of Western knowledge among Chinese nationals and
in 1850, Samuel Robbins Brown, an ABCFM missionary and Yale graduate,
brought a young man hed had under his tutelage since the age of 19 at the
Macau Missionary School to pursue a four-year college degree at the
Connecticut campus. Yung Wing became the first Chinese student to graduate
from an American university and would establish the Chinese Educational
Mission a program that placed Chinese students in schools throughout the
United States in the 1870s.
Chinese Educational Mission students
The first Chinese Educational Mission students arrive in Hartford circa
1872. Credit | Connecticut Historical Society
According to Yales website, these select pupils went on to become leaders
in fields such as engineering, diplomacy, and academia. One of these bright
lights, Tang Guoan, would become the first president of Tsinghua College
(today Tsinghua University), a prestigious institution of higher learning in
China and Xi Jinpings alma mater, which to this day maintains a close
relationship with some of the most powerful Western business leaders and
unsavory former government officials of our time.
The symbiotic relationship between Western and Chinese academic circles only
intensified as the nineteenth century drew to a close and, by the beginning
of the next one, these became more formalized through federal programs like
the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program of 1908. This program was the result
of a Congressional resolution intended to return a portion of the $333
million punitive settlement with which Western powers had collectively
saddled China after the Boxer Rebellion, but was instead used as a means to
effectuate American-directed reform in China by funding the education of
Chinese nationals in U.S. colleges.
In 1906, three Western Christian missions including the aforementioned
ABCFM, along with the London Missionary Society and the Medical Missionary
Association of London founded the Peking Union Medical College (PUMC) in
cooperation with the soon-to-be overthrown Qing government of China. Two
years after the Xinhai Revolution that put an end to Chinas Imperial
Dynasty, the Rockefeller Foundation assumed financial control of the PUMC
and carried out the transfer of Western science and medicine to China,
which included specialized technology and training methods as well as
funding staff member salaries, and which over the next four decades, would
amount to the creation of a new medical elite.
The Rockefeller dynasty
The wealthiest of Americas newest crop of plutocrats, John D. Rockefeller,
had developed lucrative business interests in the Far East through his oil
company and, like his predecessors, bolstered these through philanthropic
contributions to missionary outfits in China. The Boxer Rebellion and
growing resentment of the Western presence in China moved the robber baron
to redouble efforts to restore American tutelage in the Asian country.
In 1908 on the advice of his most trusted advisor, Baptist minister
Frederick T. Gates, and future University of Chicago President Ernest DeWitt
Burton Rockefeller funded a program called the Oriental Education
Commission at the university, itself a Rockefeller-funded institution.
The Commissions report determined that the establishment of an educational
program in China would bring about the desired social revolution by
inculcating Western moral and political standards in the Chinese people. The
initial recommendations were tweaked by Gates to circumvent the perfectly
justified animosity of the Chinese to the Wests concepts of morality and
society. In order to clear this hurdle, Gates proposed an alternate
approach: to use medicine to do what we had failed in our attempt to do in
University education.
Not without opposition by those who believed a university project was a
better bet, the newly-established Rockefeller Foundation would make the
first of many investments in medical programs for China, in part to avoid
too much scrutiny from the U.S. government into its foundation and, as John
D. himself presciently described the choice, to focus on medicine as a
nonpartisan work and one which would interest all of the people regardless
of the government change.
Rockefeller's Oriental Education Commission
Members of the Rockefellers Oriental Education Commission visit Chengdu,
China in 1909. Credit | University of Chicago Photographic Archive
The China Medical Board (CMB) was created by the Rockefeller Foundation in
1914 to grant assistance to medical schools in China, which were all
operated by the Protestant missions like the ABCFM and their British and
Canadian counterparts established since the early nineteenth century. In
1917, the CMB purchased the Peking Union Medical College campus for $200,000
and inaugurated the pre-medical program of the new PUMC.
The institution remained under the control of the Rockefeller Foundation
until Mao Zedong nationalized it in 1951 and merged with the Chinese Academy
of Medical Sciences (CAMS) six years later. While Chinas communist
revolution might seem like a watershed moment that closed off Western access
to and influence over Chinas scientific and medical establishment, John D.
Rockefellers confidence that his investment would survive regardless of
the government change is supported by a 2015 paper published by the
University of Cambridge, which looks at how PUMC remained a prominent
symbol of Western medical science and education in China from 1949, when
the Peoples Republic of China was established, through 1985.
The Cambridge study reveals how it was the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA),
itself, that took on the task of protecting PUMCs position as the premier
establishment of Western biomedicine in China, despite the strong criticism
of any form of Western imperialism that was so prevalent during the early
years of Maos reign. In addition, the guiding tenets of the CCPs health
policy, as delineated by Mao in 1950, contradicted PUCMs own foundational
tenets. In order to reconcile this inconsistency while maintaining the
schools methodologies and Western approach to medicine, an anti-imperialist
discourse was promoted at the institution and its name was changed several
times. But, according to the papers author, Mary Brazleton, no significant
reforms were carried out at PUMC and, until the cultural revolution of 1966,
the institution continued to operate much as it had before 1949.
Red Scare on life support
Just four years later, Richard Nixons secretary of state, Henry Kissinger,
made his secret trip to China and started down the road to a Sino-American
rapprochement that would in time fully restore the Wests presence in the
communist nation. The scientific and medical elite envisioned by
Rockefellers philanthropic venture would reassert itself, as well, with a
growing level of cooperation between Chinese and Western research
scientists.
Economic cooperation with communist China would also receive a major and
much-needed boost through yet another Rockefeller creation called the
Trilateral Commission, a policy group formed and chaired by John D.s
grandson, David, which would begin rebuilding the Western commercial
networks in China that had atrophied over the course of Maos revolution.
Though billed as an organization to foster closer cooperation among Japan,
the United States, and Western Europe, the Commissions fundamental purpose
was to keep communist China afloat and pave the way for American
manufacturing firms to exploit cheap Chinese labor slave labor, in some
cases by moving operations from more expensive (and organized) labor in
the United States and Mexico.
By the time Jimmy Carter was elected president and had appointed no fewer
than 17 Trilateral Commission members to his administration, China had
started to recover from the brink of collapse. A series of contracts with
Western companies including deals with Ingersoll-Rand, Boeing, and U.S.
Steel had helped to revitalize its failing infrastructure. Sweet insider
deals, further illustrating the hypocrisy of American capitalists, were also
there for the taking, one example being the soft-drink monopoly in China
given to major Carter supporter, Trilateral Commission member, and Coca-Cola
CEO John Paul Austin.
Henry Kissinger, Chou-En-Lai
Kissinger, left, and Chinese premier Chou-En-Lai drink a toast in the Great
Hall in Beijing, Nov. 10, 1973. HWG | AP
Rockefellers own Chase Manhattan Bank and Citicorp (in which the
Rockefellers also had important interests) benefited the most from the
Trilateral era, which lasted well into Reagans time in office. The latter
bank highlights the very real historical links between modern-day American
plutocracy and its ignominious origins in the slave and opium trade. Nearly
a century after T.H. Perkins Co. had dumped its first illegal drug shipment
in Guangzhou, James H. Perkins namesake and grand-nephew in 1929 became
chairman of National City Bank, which later reorganized as Citicorp in 1967.
Well into the twenty-first century, the mission to rescue red China is
complete and its relationships with the pinnacles of Western oligarchic
power have been restored to shining beauty. Less than a decade ago,
Blackstone CEO Steven Schwartzman founded a scholarship program at Tsinghua
University to educate the next generation of global leaders, boasting a
star-studded advisory board featuring former French President Nicolas
Sarkozy, indicted in 2016 on corruption charges; Nixons back channel man
to China, Henry Kissinger; and none other than insider hatchet man of the
2008 subprime mortgage debacle Henry Hank Paulson, who also shares an
honorary membership in another Tsinghua University program with the former
CEO of AIG a company, holding a major stake in Blackstone, that was the
linchpin of the great recession that set the stage for the rise of the
fourth sector.
The not so New World Order
Founded as American Asiatic Underwriters in Shanghai in 1919 by Cornelius
Vander Starr, American International Group (AIG) has never strayed too far
from its government spook origins. Vander Starr was an American intelligence
asset who collaborated extensively with the Office of Strategic Services
(OSS), the precursor to the CIA. His New York office space doubled as
intelligence fronts and he was U.S. Air Force Commander Claire Lee
Chennaults chief handler, having been a U.S. Air Force pilot whod been
tasked with putting together a covert, OSS-funded, 100-plane bomb wing to be
flown by American and Chinese mercenaries against Japanese targets during
WWII. The Flying Tigers, as the bomb wing is known, was initially intended
to prop up the Western-backed government of Chiang Kai-shek, but would
eventually partner with RAF squadrons to protect British colonies in
Southeast Asia as well.
Vander Starrs protégé, Maurice Hank Greenberg, would take over Starrs
insurance business as the companys CEO in 1968 and transform it into the
global powerhouse it had become just prior to the 2008 financial crisis,
when its stock had reached stratospheric levels. During his tenure,
Greenberg continued the firms strong focus in China and would, in turn,
become one of the most important figures in the reopening of China after his
old friend Henry Kissingers trip to Beijing in 1971 served to land him the
first foreign insurance contract with China.
In 1987, Greenberg appointed Kissinger to be chairman of AIGs International
Advisory Board, while he went on to establish deep ties with the Peoples
Republic of China, sitting on the International Advisory Council of the
China Development Research Foundation and the China Development Bank.
Despite admitting to massive accounting fraud in 2017 and plundering his
retirement plan as revenge for his 2005 ouster, Greenberg remains on the
Advisory Board of the Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management
alongside Paulson.
AIG was the center of the 2008 credit default swap (CDS) storm. The biggest
insurance and investment firm on the planet had the largest exposure because
it had bought all of the risk when it insured the CDS transactions of banks
and pension funds all over the world. So, when the house of cards came
tumbling down and AIG began defaulting on every claim, the fate of the
global financial system rested on its shoulders.
Outrage over Wall Streets irresponsibility was met with a promise to
conduct its business in a more responsible manner and the idea of ethical
investing was born. In reality, the concept wasnt so new. Protestant
missionaries in China had tried their best to place an aura of righteousness
over the depraved capitalist instincts of their merchant compatriots, but
the ruse never quite prospers.
At the end of the day, it all comes down to closing the sale and if that
means disgraced British Prime Minister and Schwarzman Scholar advisory board
member Tony Blair has to go out and hawk COVID-19 vaccine credentials to
convince you to buy in, then as will be made clear in Part III of this
series thats exactly what hell do.