The idea of “Han supremacism” is nothing new. We have known for many years that the Han Chinese are deeply racist toward virtually all other ethnic groups.
But what this paper offers us is a glimpse into how the highest levels of the US government understand China and China’s outlook on the world.
Steve Sailer discusses the recently declassified report. Sailer begins by providing a little background on the man who commissioned the report, a longtime Deep Stater named Andrew Marshall, whom Sailer describes as “legendary”:
A formerly secret 2013 Pentagon report, The Strategic Consequences of Chinese Racism: A Strategic Asymmetry for the United States, argues “China is a racist superpower.” It makes for eye-opening reading on how both the Chinese people and the American deep state think.
This book-length paper, which was posted online as the result of Freedom of Information Act litigation and then discovered by Twitter user @s_decatur, is by an author whose name remains redacted. But we know for sure that it was commissioned by the legendary nonagenarian strategist Andrew Marshall.
This shadowy mandarin started his career as a machinist in Detroit during WWII, then joined the RAND Corporation in 1949 to do Dr. Strangelove-like nuclear war planning. Henry Kissinger brought him into the Nixon White House and in 1973 Defense Secretary James Schlesinger created the enigmatic Office of Net Assessment for Marshall to think deep thoughts like a terrestrial Hari Seldon about the future of superpower rivalries.
He served as Director of Net Assessment in a windowless suite of Pentagon offices for 42 years under thirteen secretaries of defense until his retirement in 2015 at age 93, when he was said to be the oldest federal worker ever. A Chinese general considered Marshall perhaps China’s wisest foe and referred to the ancient seer as “Yoda.”
Nobody outside the Pentagon knows all that much about his views—not even secretaries of defense were allowed to keep copies of his highest-level write-ups known as “net assessments.” Only one copy of each was printed and when the cabinet officer finished reading it, Marshall put it back in his safe.
Marshall died in 2019 at age 98. I wonder what happened to his safe.
But it is said that in the 1970s Marshall debunked the CIA’s contention that the Soviet Union was an economic dynamo and argued for bankrupting the USSR through defense spending competition. Then in the mid-1990s, he contended that Middle Eastern terrorists were a relatively minor distraction while America’s great rival in the 21st century would be China.
Marshall seldom spoke to the press, so his name went largely unknown. On the other hand, over his four decades in office, he commissioned something like $400 million in studies by national security intellectuals, many of whom enthusiastically testify to Marshall’s brilliance at asking the important questions.
Whether Marshall represented an exception to Cochran’s Rule that “There is no Inner Party”—that in modern America there’s no all-knowing O’Brien in 1984 or Mustapha Mond in Brave New World who understands how everything works—remains obscure. But this study of Chinese racism he ordered is at least more interesting than our usual discourse.
Delivered at the time of the Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia,” this 254-page report on how America should expose and exploit China’s deep-seated racism to win the competition for global influence, especially in Africa, cost taxpayers $262,600. The author’s name is blacked out, but is likely political scientist Bradley A. Thayer, currently at the U. of Texas, San Antonio.
I had never heard of Andrew Marshall until reading Sailer’s article. You have to wonder if there are still figures like him populating the ranks of the Deep State these days, or if the whole edifice has been taken over by woke liberals (like James Mattis and Mike Milley), affirmative action hires and people who only got hired because of family connections.
Given the degree to which American foreign policy and America itself have deteriorated over the past 20 years, it seems doubtful. Plus, due to the rise of wokeness and the dominant role corporate interests play in shaping US government policy, even if there are any Wise Chessmasters like Andrew Marshall still out there, their insights are probably ignored. It is abundantly obvious that the US government is no longer interested in, or perhaps even capable of, playing the “Great Game” of foreign policy.
Anyway, let’s continue to the excerpts from Marshall’s report:
“China sees itself as the center of the universe, all others are inferior, with varying degrees of inferiority. That is not an attractive model of winning allies and influence.”
…
“Other peoples and groups are seen to be inferior, with a sliding scale of inferiority. The major Chinese distinction is between degrees of barbarians, the “black devils,” the savage inferiors beyond hope of interaction and the “white devils” or tame barbarians with whom the Chinese can interact…. Lamentably, modern Chinese views on race are no better than they were in the past.”
…
“[V]irulent racism and eugenics heavily inform Chinese perceptions of the world. United States decision-makers must recognize that China is a racist state, much closer to Nazi Germany than to the values upheld in the West…. The Chinese are comfortable using race to explain events and appealing to racist stereotypes to advance their interests. Most insidious is the Chinese belief that Africans in particular need Chinese leadership.”
…
“Most often, the Chinese do not even recognize their racism as a problem…. The Chinese are never going to go through a civil rights movement like the United States.”
Nothing too groundbreaking here, but the significance is that the US government is fully aware of China’s outlook on the world.
This is where it starts getting interesting:
Knowing that one is not alone, but is backed by over a billion others who share the same thoughts, cultural references, and attitudes is reassuring for each Han Chinese. In truth, they are a society with considerable social capital that Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam identifies as central to the prosperity of a community. It makes it far more likely that they will respond to government entreaties to support the nation as it advances or when it is challenged by domestic social or economic problems or by other states. Huntington identified the importance of this and lamented its loss in the United States.”
…
China does not face a “culture war” like the one currently taking place in the United States. There is no fundamental debate about the identity of the country, the principles it embodies, who belongs and who does not, and the direction in which the country should move. This gives the Chinese government a considerable advantage as a unicultural state in competition with the multicultural United States. In sum, it will be hard to cause a loss of confidence with the Chinese.
…
“The United States used to be a strong society that the Chinese respected when it was unicultural, defined by the centrality of AngloProtestant culture at the core of American national identity aligned with the political ideology of liberalism, the rule of law, and free market capitalism. The Chinese see multiculturalism as a sickness that has overtaken the United States, and a component of U.S. decline.”
Sailer doesn’t explicitly endorse this Chinese line of thinking in this article, but I’ve read enough of his articles to know that this is more or less how he views things as well.
Where I differ from people like Sailer is that I don’t take an inherently pessimistic view toward race relations.
I think diversity can be a strength of the United States, but it can also be a great weakness if it is exploited–and it is currently being exploited ruthlessly by our own ruling class, and it is greatly divisive at the moment.
The reason I believe diversity can be a strength is that it has the potential to unite people by more than just race. Patriotism has the potential to transcend race and unify people from all walks of life; “Americanness” and can be an even stronger bond than race, if promoted.
Maybe I think this way because I grew up in an era where race relations were more or less harmonious (or at least felt that way), and because my family did not come over to America on the Mayflower but instead came over around the turn of the 20th century–but I just believe that there’s something inherently noble and transcendent about American diversity and unity under the flag. It’s the idea that we can all live together in peace and harmony in this world.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t consider myself a globalist or a “citizen of the world.” I’m a patriotic American through and through, and I believe anyone who isn’t should get the hell out. I think we need to stop illegal immigration, and I don’t believe this country can handle mass, endless foreign immigration because there is a point where immigrants change America more than America changes its immigrants.
I just don’t think the idea of diversity is fundamentally misguided and doomed to fail. I think it’s been co-opted and misconstrued by people who hate America and hate white people, but I don’t think the idea of American diversity is fundamentally flawed.
But if you undermine and discourage patriotism, and convince people that America is rotten to the core, then absolutely our diverse nation can and will fracture and devolve into a balkanized state of ethnic strife.
The Chinese obviously know this. They know that America’s diversity can be exploited and turned into a great weakness. And so, you have to wonder, how much of a hand have the Chinese had in reducing America to its present sorry state?
More from the report:
“The Chinese will make appeals to Third World states based on “racial solidarity,” that is, the need of non-white peoples to unite against Western imperialism and racism.
The essence of the Chinese message to Third World states is a straightforward rhetorical query: Has the United States or the Europeans ever treated you as equals? In contrast, China portrays itself as an apolitical rising superpower that does business in your country, pays a fair price for your commodities, and builds your infrastructure with no strings attached.”
…
“Chinese racism retards their relations with the Third World…. [The] racial stereotypes of the Africans commonly found within Chinese society suggest that this population is backward and dirty, and prone to crime, particularly violent crime…. [These] beliefs, coupled with clannish and ruthless Chinese business practices, generate enormous resentment in the Third World.
Chinese racism provides empirical evidence of how the Chinese will treat other international actors if China becomes dominant.
This is expected. They’re shrewd operators. They know how to take advantage of prevailing attitudes toward white people.
But again: I wonder to what extent the Chinese have had a hand in stoking this anti-white rage that they are presently taking advantage of.
If America’s foreign policy “elite” was smart, it would portray China as the New Colonial Power, especially in regard to Chinese activity in Africa.
But our foreign policy “elite” is not smart. They will do the bidding of their corporate paymasters, who in turn cater to China at every opportunity because of China’s massive domestic market of 1.4 billion people.
This is why the media largely does China’s bidding: because most of the channels on your television are owned by an entertainment company that is ultimately beholden to the Chinese box office.
ABC News is owned by the Walt Disney Corporation, and Disney is hugely beholden to China. They even de-emphasize black people on movie posters when marketing their movies to the Chinese market. Look at the Star Wars poster for America:
Finn is prominently featured on the right side of the poster.
And now look at the Chinese version
Finn is basically hidden.
CNN is owned by Warner Media (which is in turn owned by AT&T, although maybe not for long). WarnerMedia is a massive entertainment company that also relies heavily on China’s market.
News Corporation, Fox News’ parent company, no longer owns 20th Century Fox, the Hollywood film division, (it was sold to Disney) but for many years, Fox News also had that conflict of interest when it came to China, as 20th Century Fox relied on the Chinese box office.
China has almost completely captured the American entertainment industry, and because most of those movie studies are owned by larger corporations that also own the US media, the US media has effectively been captured by China as well.
Anyway, if the American foreign policy “elite” was smart, it would use China’s racism against it, however, as @s_decatur (the person on Twitter who filed the FOIA request to make this Pentagon report public) pointed out astutely:
The 2013 report argued that the U.S. had a significant “soft power” advantage [over China] in that “it is not a racist state.” Unfortunately, the U.S. ruling class spent most of 2020–2021 proclaiming that the U.S. definitely *is* a racist state—so this advantage may have been lost.
It’s almost as if our elites are doing China’s bidding.
Sailer concludes:
But the problem with getting the press to focus on Chinese racism is that the Chinese aren’t white, and the Great Awokening’s anti-racism isn’t against racism, it’s against whites.
Hence, antiwhite racists in America don’t have to look to the government of China for support when they can get billions from American corporations.
The Chinese seem to sense that they aren’t good at positive propaganda, like the British or the Israelis are, so they concentrate on discouraging criticism in the Saudi manner, such as by buying off Hollywood and the National Basketball Association to not say anything bad about China.
The American press would rather instead obsess over Russia as a dreaded white country, even though Putin runs an enthusiastically multiethnic empire. For example, his defense minister Sergey Shoygu is an East Asian from Tuva, home of the throat-singers, and Putin promotes mass immigration from ex-Soviet Muslim nations in Central Asia.
As The Strategic Consequences of Chinese Racism makes plain, the great Chinese advantage over both the United States and Russia is that it’s less of an empire and more of a nation-state.
In summary, it’s not clear whether the wily Marshall intended this document more as a guide to how to exploit China’s faults or as a disguised warning of America’s increasing self-destructiveness.
Sailer makes a lot of good points here, but again, I think it’s important to point out that diversity does not have to make America weak.
Our ruling class has chosen to make diversity America’s weakness. Whether this is because they are in thrall to China or because they are simply short-sighted, power-hungry morons who care only about the immediate domestic political benefits (i.e., dividing the country) of doing so is anyone’s guess. It’s probably a combination of the two.
But here’s my final point: why do we have to be locked into some zero-sum competition with China? Why does it have to be Us Or Them, Only One Can Survive, This Town Ain’t Big Enough For The Both Of Us?
The whole idea behind this 254-page Pentagon report from 2013 was to better understand China, so that we could “defeat” them or “outmaneuver” them.
Why does it have to be that way?
Why can’t we accept a multipolar world, where China controls its sphere of influence, we control ours and the Russians control theirs?
Why is it so imperative that we be the global hegemon, and without an equal anywhere in the world?
Andrew W. Marshall, as brilliant as he may have been, was at the end of the day a Cold Warrior and a product of that era. When the Soviet Union collapsed, he and many like him went looking for the next Soviet Union for America to enter into a New Cold War with.
This is precisely the type of thinking we need to move past in America today.