Media in lockstep with 5 Eyes narratives over Beijing parade
Coverage of ex-leaders' attendance at the event marking imperial Japan's surrender was based around 'autocracy versus democracy' ideological spin.
Media coverage of this week’s military parade in Beijing, marking 80 years since the surrender of imperial Japan and defeat of fascism, was striking for both its ignorance and hostility.
New Zealand and Australian news outlets focused almost exclusively on covering criticism of former leaders who attended. Ex-New Zealand Prime Ministers Helen Clark and John Key accepted invitations, as did former Victoria state premier Daniel Andrews.
The Sydney Morning Herald featured a photo of Andrews on its front page posing alongside dozens of heads of state, including Chinese Premier Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un, with a headline reading: ‘Dan and his dictator mates’.
The ABC, in an analysis piece, questioned Andrews’ motives, asking why a luminary of the Australian Labor Party would sully his career legacy, as well as his reputation as a private citizen.
The state broadcaster, like other media, gave prominence to Liberal Party foreign affairs spokesman Angus Taylor’s questioning of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese over Andrews’ attendance. Taylor said Andrews had brought eternal shame to Australia by attending the anti-fascist commemoration, although Taylor seemed to have no issues with his country giving military and diplomatic support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
This week’s event offered an opportunity to recognise China’s role as an indispensable ally during World War II.
As former Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr observed, China’s bloody engagement with Japan stretched its forces and this would have likely prevented opportunities to attack Australia. Carr had attended talks surrounding the commemoration while in Beijing this week.
Japan’s invasion of China in 1937 resulted in atrocities like the Nanjing Massacre, indiscriminate aerial bombing campaigns, biological warfare, sexual violence, famine, forced labour and a scorched-earth policy.
Civilian and military deaths in China during the Sino-Japanese conflict were estimated to be between 15 to 20 million, enormous losses second only to the Soviet Union’s in its fight against Nazi Germany.
In a normal society where NATO imperatives have not bled into the body politic of society, informing media framing and political discourse, sending serving government ministers over would have been normal diplomatic protocol. Instead, former leaders attended to avoid the fallout.
Public broadcaster Radio New Zealand (RNZ) led predictably with criticism of Key and Clark for attending, with its digital story ‘Helen Clark, John Key at China military parade along with Putin, Kim’ rehashing comments made by arch China hawk and NATO-aligned think tank fellow, professor Anne-Marie Brady, in an opinion piece published in Newsroom. Brady warned of Chinese nefariousness and said the former leaders had “sent the wrong signals” by attending the Beijing event, as they offered legitimacy to dictators.
For Brady and other critics like Defence Minister Judith Collins, Key and Clark were disrupting NATO messaging about China being a dangerous strategic adversary that must be contained and isolated.
This week’s news coverage reflected a political and media elite captured by hegemonic narratives, unable to see the world in terms other than through the puerile and distorting lens of ‘autocracy versus democracy’.
Such an approach drastically lowers the standard of news and fails to offer the public any real sense of what is currently taking place in the world. RNZ’s digital story stated the parade had “capped a week of diplomatic grandstanding by Chinese President Xi Jinping and his allies against the West”. The simplistic summary was astounding for its lack of balance and context.
What came before the parade was an important summit of the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation (SCO), which brought together leaders representing 40 percent of the world’s population, while Xi’s address at the parade pointedly cautioned against a repeat of the mistakes that led to World War II.
The cutting-edge military hardware on display was itself a warning to the West that China would stand up to imperial aggression again.
Xi told a 50,000-strong crowd the world faced a choice of "peace or war” and that China would “never be intimidated by bullies”.
“Only when all countries and nations treat each other as equals, coexist in peace, and support each other can we uphold common security, eradicate the root cause of war, and prevent the reoccurrence of historical tragedies,” he said.
“Today, humanity again has to choose between peace and war, dialogue and confrontation, win-win cooperation and zero-sum game. The Chinese people firmly stand on the right side of history and the progress of human civilization. We will remain committed to the path of peaceful development and join hands with all peoples around the world to build a community with a shared future for humanity.”
In the days before the parade, a meeting of the SCO in the northern city of Tianjin saw China and Russia outline a vision of a new international order, free from a Western imperial ‘rules-based’ system.
Like BRICS, the expanding 10-member SCO, which includes Russia, China, India, Iran, Pakistan, Belarus and most of central Asia, is working towards an alternative global financial and trading framework, not because it is “anti-West”, but because this offers a stability and fairness that the US hegemonic order doesn’t.
With an unrelenting genocide conducted against Palestinians in Gaza and moves to seize $300 billion of Russian assets held by the EU, the desire for an alternative multipolar system to ensure predictability and trust within the global community has grown.
“Global governance has reached a new crossroads,” Xi Jinping told the summit on Monday.
“We must continue to take a clear stand against hegemonism and power politics, and practise true multilateralism.”
Economic coercion by the West is a key driver of the speed and depth of change. The ability to exercise sovereignty while avoiding punitive treatment for doing so is highly sought after by nations in the Global South and it is not hard to see why.
According to research published in The Lancet Global Health, unilateral US and EU sanctions from 1970 to 2021 were associated with 38 million deaths. The research began with a study of sanctions imposed on Chile’s Salvador Allende government, designed to make its economy ‘scream’, according to US President Richard Nixon. Allende was eventually killed during a US-backed coup in 1973.
Most recently, Trump’s tariff scheme - the latest weaponisation of the financial system - is expediting global realignments.
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s presence and his side-line bilateral talks with Xi at the SCO is a case in point, after his country was hit with a 50 percent tariff for continuing to buy Russian oil in its national interests.
Modi and Xi announced after talks they would strive to resolve their differences. The two countries have seen periodic and deadly border skirmishes, the latest in 2020.
Xi said: “It is the right choice for both sides to be friends who have good neighbourly and amicable ties, partners who enable each other’s success, and to have the dragon and the elephant dance together”.
Modi said the countries would proceed “on the basis of mutual respect and trust”.
Photographs of Modi, Xi and Putin together in a diplomatic show of unity further underlined the counterproductive nature of Western coercion.
As the summit progressed this week, news broke that the Power of Siberia II pipeline, from Russia to China, would largely replace Moscow’s European market, after Western sanctions and an act of eco-terrorism that destroyed the Nord Stream pipeline. Western elites seeking to contain Russia compelled Putin to look eastwards and left the EU’s industrial base deeply compromised, after its decision to import expensive US liquefied petroleum gas instead.
These events reflect further fundamental shifts towards multipolarity and the inexorable decline of Western hegemony.
Most of the paupers at the global dinner party – for so long pickpocketed, denied food, beaten and lectured by the racist grandiose narcissists at the head of the table - have left to form their own table. Threats will not bring them back and may only stop the most servile and deluded from moving tables to join them, in “sovereign equality” as Xi puts it.
Yet media outlets, from their predictably shallow reporting this week, seemed oblivious to it all. It demonstrates how few journalists have a handle on the momentous developments now taking place, while the general public is fed stories of dangerous, autocratic regimes uniting in hatred towards the West.
Many repeated the “axis of upheaval” label given to the SCO and those involved in its engagements this week, apparently blind to the fact there exists no ‘order’ under the existing ‘rules-based’ system to upheave - that genocide, inequality and social instability, and perpetual war are its structural expressions.
With this level of insight, it seems likely Australian and New Zealand newsrooms will remain uncritical echo-chambers of Five Eyes narratives, promoting the ideological self-justifications of hegemony, as preparations for war against those leaving the table continue. The long-term consequences for the public could end up devastating.
The USA tariffs have caused Canada to significantly change its trading relationships. Canada was being bullied by America, they used to be politically close to America but now the relationship has changed.
If the USAs closest neighbour can change its allegiance, why wouldn’t the rest of the world.
NZ has strong financial ties to China, it’s in our best interest to maintain a civil and productive relationship
Our world is safer when power is shared
What a relief it was to read this well articulated post, thanks Mick! It amazes me that so many supposedly ‘informed’ commentators in Aotearoa and Australia can be so opposed to Israel’s genocide in Palestine but then just trot out the same old propaganda when it comes to China and Russia with zero nuance.