Author’s Note: If you want to understand the horrendous conditions that led directly to the Socialist Revolution of 1949 China – I suggest you read JG Ballard’s excellent book entitled ‘Empire of the Sun’. I, like the main character in the book, am a Sinotised Westerner. Of course, I am not middle-class and neither did I live as an ‘Imperialist’ in British-controlled China. No. My story is a little different to that of Bourgeois ‘Jim’ and his opulent ‘White’ lifestyle of the Shanghai ex-pats. My family is working-class, and we have mixed with ordinary (Hakka) Chinese people – a side effect of British ‘Imperialism’ primarily in Hong Kong (and the New Territories). However, there is a convergence of interest and experience, so to speak. We straddle two-worlds and have become a perfectly integrated example of both (each in our own way – although I am more ‘Chinese’). This all goes to show that tyranny is merely a matter of intent. The ‘White’ Westerners (all types of Europeans including the British – and the Americans) slowly but surely attempted to bleed China dry over as long a period as possible, aided and abetted by the Chinese ‘Nationalists’ led by the traitor Chiang Kai-Shek! Chinese women and girls who worked for Westerners as ‘Servants’ were often expected to engage in sexual activity with their ‘White’ British employees – and anyone who knew them. This is why JG Ballard continuously talks of ‘Eurasian’ women (and sometimes ‘men’) – the product of these illicit couplings. Off-spring firmly rejected by the Whites – but taken-in by the Chinese with no questions asked. JG Ballard was always taken by surprise when meeting an apparently ‘White’ European compatriot who would crouch down and start eating rice from a bowl using chopsticks (as I do) – whilst chattering away is some Chinese dialect or other! This ‘Eurasians’ was a by-product of British sexual decadence and racism in China!
By way of contrast, the oppression of hundreds of years of Western oppression in China was compressed by the Imperial Japanese into just a few decades. The tyranny the Imperial Japanese displayed was both quick and brutal. China was to be bled-dry quickly when using the Imperial Japanese model. After-all, the Imperial Japanese had to catch-up with regards to the easy pickings enjoyed by these interloping non-Asians! For the Imperial Japanese, it was the ideology followed by the Fascist Italians and Nazi Germans that served as their preferred model of social engineering. How ironic it was, then, that whilst rejecting the imperialist Western presence in Asia – the Imperial Japanese were perfectly happy to imitate that other Western ideology of ‘Fascism’! After WWII, the conquering Americans would impose a right-wing liberal democracy (and predatory capitalism) upon a defeated Japan that guaranteed a permanent anti-Socialist orientation that preserved many aspects of the ‘fascist’ attitudes employed by Imperial Japan. One consistency of this baton-passing has seen the quite natural ‘anti-China’ attitudes of the Imperial Japanese preserved into a very modern context in contemporary Nippon! Whereas China was to be hated because its people represented an ‘inferior’ race – today China is to be hated because its people choose to be ‘Socialist’. The irony is that regardless of whether a Chinese person pursues a ‘capitalist’ or a ‘Socialist’ path – all Chinese people are still ‘Chinese’ – and are therefore considered racially inferior by both Westerners and Japanese alike! ACW (23.2.2024)
The Empire of the Sun is not, of course, in an exclusively Marxist sense – ‘historically materialist’ – although the observations preserved within it do prove that Marx and Engels were both absolutely correct. Rather, ALL genuine science – be it Proletariat or Bourgeois – operates from the position that the material world (as a real thing) has prominence over the spiritual (a contrived thing) – and indeed is responsible for it. How strange then, it is, for the general view of the world to be viewed as the other way around (the ‘inverted’ Bourgeois world as defined by Feuerbach and Marx). For many ordinary people not engaged in the wonders of modern scientific endeavour – it is a routine assumption that the physical world somehow emerges from an unseen spiritual underpinning – although no credible evidence has ever been produced to justify such a view. Western imperialism was able to spread around the world because of the successes of the Enlightenment (logic and reason) and the Industrial Revolution (constructive physical endeavour) – two staunchly ‘material’ happenings – despite the latter being primarily psychological and former entirely physical in nature. Both turned human perception and labour away from the ethereal and toward the practical. Thoughts in the human mind no longer ‘imagined’ sky-spirits operating unseen somewhere ‘out there’ in the universe – but produced well-thought-out (logical) patterns of human behaviour that redefined the outer world.
These material developments gave the Europeans a tremendous physical advantage over all the other cultures of the world, which, by comparison, operated within distinctly pre-modern modes of expression. When a group of heavily armed Westerners appeared within non-European cultures – they could easily kill as many natives as possible until they decided to change their behaviour to stop the destruction. This is how non-Europeans were forcibly converted to Christianity. Whereas material sciences built the ships and developed the fire-arms that empowered the colonial Europeans – these people resorted to ‘lying’ about this process and falsely attributed such developments to an unseen sky-spirit (God) – a sky-spirit that had not previously bestowed any such developments upon his faithful flock after thousands of years of enforced worship. Indeed, the documentary evidence is that the reliance upon theology absolutely ‘prevented’ this process of scientific and industrial development from occurring. Whenever the threat of logical science raised its ugly head – the watchful Church Authorities were always quick to sentence such individuals to an abrupt – but highly painful – public death.
JG Ballard’s biographical novel – ‘Empire of the Sun’ – demonstrates how the Imperial Japanese put an end to Western (and Christian) dominance not only throughout China, but throughout Asia. When the captured Westerners – who had lived the most opulent of lives within a starving China – were placed in austere Prisoner of War Camps, their pretences to physical and spiritual superiority came crashing down after a week on half-rations. Belief in a Christian God meant absolutely nothing – as in such filth and deprivation – illness, injury and lack of nutrition reduced everyone to exactly the same level of desperation, hopelessness, and depression. Many Europeans, whilst undergoing just a little deprivation of the luxury and deference they were used to – fell into a stupor and a type of memory loss from which they never recovered. The victory and dominance of the Imperial Japanese in China (and throughout Asia) was in reality a defeat of European racism. The Imperial Japanese proved to the Europeans they had replaced, that through the fascism of Nippon, a non-White people could be just as dominant and racist. What the White people had inflicted on the population of Asia – the Japanese inflicted upon the defeated Europeans.
The Imperial Japanese, exercising their control of the material world using the products of logic and reason applied to the industrial process, inflicted a hideous and racist attack not only against the Europeans, but also against the people of Asia. Millions upon millions of Chinese people were raped, tortured, maimed, and murdered! Whilst the White European were taught a severe lesson by the Imperial Japanese, what the Imperial Japanese unleashed upon the Chinese, Koreans, Philippine people, and many others – staggers belief. By the comparison, and despite the routine cruelty, the Imperial Japanese treated the Europeans with a greater consideration than they did their non-White prisoners. Not only this, but the indirect presence of the Imperial Japanese caused immense famine and drought through large swathes of China. Things were so bad that thousands of starving Chinese people congregated outside the Prison Camp featured in Ballard’s book – hoping to gain entry on the grounds that they might be fed! The Imperial Japanese would occasionally gather Chinese women and girls (including children) and distribute these now ‘prisoners’ throughout the population of soldiers guarding the Camp. After a night of being raped, these female Chinese prisoners were then taken to a central spot in the Camp (without being fed) – so that the European prisoners could watch the ceremony of the Imperial Japanese soldiers ‘clubbing them to death’. The Japanese Camp Commandant thought this ritual boosted morale amongst the European prisoners – whom he considered to be ‘spiritually lazy’!
SANGHA KOMMUNE (SSR) 