Tonight: are we in danger from a deadly virus? It’s killing abroad but will it take hold in Britain? Are we prepared? And how can we stop it? Tonight: Dead Virus: Is Britain Prepared? ITV 2020
This is Wuhan: a Chinese city of eleven million people. In happier times a bustling metropolis. But now in the grip of a lethal illness. It’s called Coronavirus, and it has left a city bigger than London locked down. The streets are down, hospital jammed with the sick and in some cases the dying. ibid.
Thousands of people have now contracted the Coronavirus in China. At least 170 have died. The authorities there are desperately trying to contain it. ibid.
Wuhan, central China: with a population of 11 million, it’s biggest than greater London. This is where the Coronavirus began last December. In January, as it started spreading across China, the government took an unprecedented step: to lockdown Wuhan. Our World: Wuhan: Life Under Lockdown, BBC 2020
Recruitment of the Chinese Labour Corps began in 2016, a desperate attempts to fill the void in British manpower left by the Battle of the Somme. Impoverished Chinese peasants were recruited in their thousands from the country’s north-eastern provinces. They spent months on a journey that took them across oceans and continents, and arrived in Europe exhausted and disorientated. And they were assigned the War’s dirty jobs: digging trenches, lugging ammo, burying bodies. But as the War continued, many saw themselves propelled into new unexpected roles as skilled mechanics … Many stayed on afterwards to clear up the mess … and many succumbed to the Spanish Flu epidemic … Probably the most Forgotten of the Forgotten. David Olusoga, The World’s War: Forgotten Soldiers of Empire II: Martial Races, BBC 2014
Moa Zedong’s wife was going mad. She was called Jiang Qing. She live alone surrounded by pet monkeys. And nurses who she was convinced were conspiring against her. Those in charge of the revolution in China had completely marginalised her. She was too dangerous they thought to be allowed anywhere near her husband or power. They’d even sent her to Moscow to be locked in a sanatorium with real and imagined illnesses. But now Jiang Qing’s husband was facing disaster; the revolution had led to horror: thirty million people had died from starvation in the last three years. The other leaders wanted to get rid of him, and suddenly he called for her. Jiang Qing was an extraordinary person. Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head I: Bloodshed on Wolf Mountain, BBC 2021
There were powerful forces inside of her, she said, that drove her to power … A woman who never caves in … He was facing disaster and calling for her. ibid.
Jiang Qing came in secret … She was determined to stop them … was also convinced that these men weren’t really revolutionaries, they were actually ghosts from the past who without realising it were destroying the revolution. ibid.
The new revolution was going to be driven by her self-expression ad her imagination that had been stifled back then. The Unit of One was going to take over the revolution and reshape the minds the Chinese people. ibid.
Jiang Qing herself was driven by old hatreds and her own past … a crusade of revenge against her old enemies … ibid.
1966: China was sealed off from the rest of the world. But what they saw were hundreds of thousands of people steaming in from other cities and the countryside. By August 11 a million and half people had assembled in Tiananmen Square. Most of them were students and school-children. Then Moa Zedong appeared on the balcony above them. Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head II: Shooting & Fucking are the Same Thing
Moa and Jiang Qing suspended all school and universities, and really one hundred and twenty million students who were then sent out to find and destroy the demons that were hiding among those in authority. ibid.
By now China was almost in a state of civil war. Different groups of red guards were fighting running battles with one another in almost all the major cities. But Jiang Qing still believed that real power was almost within her grasp … Moa turned on Jiang Qing … His [Mao] only aim was to get rid of all his rivals in the party. Jiang Qing had been betrayed yet again. ibid.
All four: Jiang Qing, Afreni Shakur, Michael X and the German revolutionaries had all set out to try to confront their societies and change the structure of power … ibid.
One revolutionary was still not going to give up. Jiang Qing now joined with three others … they were known as the Gang of Four. ibid.
Mao Zedong had turned on her [Qing]: he brutally dismissed all her ideas and she began to realise that maybe he had been using her … Jiang Qing’s own sense of reality was beginning to dissolve … Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head III: Money Changes Everything
Many of those in power realised that the revolution had failed. ibid.
In China as Mao approached death, Jiang Qing was still determined to take his place as the leader. But there was one person equally determined to stop her; he was called Deng Xiaoping. ibid.
She later tried to commit suicide by hitting her head against the wall. ibid.
Money would replace the old monetary dream … To reassert China’s power … another force … a kind of mass-consumerism driven by goods so cheap … You didn’t believe in anything any longer apart from the money. His allies in this would be the Western banks and their new system of global lending. ibid.
She [Jiang] refused to recognise the court. She continually attacked the judges. The judges she said were hypocrites: they all followed Mao’s ideas. They were only turning on her to sav themselves … ‘It is right to rebel.’ Deng showed her no mercy. Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head IV: But What if the People are Stupid?
Soon over a million protesters fill the square. But the government refused the students’ demands for democracy. And the movement started split. The radical faction began a hunger strike to try and force the government to respond. ibid.
Deng Xiaoping was now all powerful. The new China he had created was growing rapidly building vast factories to send goods to the West. He had got rid of all Jiang Qing’s revolutionary dreams … What did it [China] believe in apart from money? Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head V: The Lordly Ones *****
A multimillion-dollar film including British actors … The Opium War … What the Chinese were alleging in their campaign was historically accurate, but what they didn’t know was that the opium trade had also had powerful consequences inside Britain itself. It had started to undermine the self-confidence of the British empire, and introduce a dark and corrosive fear into the heart of British society. By the middle of the nineteenth century those who ran Britain were already aware of the horrors created by the slave trade. ibid.
What the Chinese were doing was using their money to create a safe bubble wrapped around the United States that would stabilise the system and so keep China safe. But in the process the Chinese money would create the biggest consumer and property boom ever in history. And lead America into a protected dreamworld that was increasingly detached from the reality outside. ibid.
What had been buried or forgotten was any guided ideology. Any confident story about what this was all for. Instead, money had filled the void … ‘A massive land grab … Today in China land is extremely valuable. Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head VI: Are We Pigeon? Or Are We Dancer?
Sons of businessmen and daughters of officials got a head start that was equivalent to an entire lap or two around the track. I think it is inevitable that people like me would lose the race. So that made me think, why do I even try? Zhiyuan Zhang, replying to Insider Asia, follower of ‘lying flat movement’
President XI Jinping has said he wants to restore glory to the people of China. To achieve this goal, tens of thousands of people are working for a shadowy branch of the Chinese Communist Party, called the United Front Work Department. Governments around the world have uncovered secret Chinese influence operations infiltrating their systems. Has Chinese influence become interference, espionage, stealing technology and know-how? China’s Magic Weapon, BBC 2021
President Xi has called the United Front a magic weapon to realise China’s ambitions. ibid.
And so it comes to pass that in November 1950 Chinese forces pour into North Korea and change the entire complexion of the war. Tony Robinson, Britain’s Forgotten Wars V: Korea, Channel 4 2021
We reveal new evidence of vast prisons in China’s north west. How China’s security services are reaching beyond their borders in terrifying efforts to silence critics. Shocking testimony of forced sterilisations. And the desperate hunt for people missing in China’s detention system. Dispatches: China: The Search for the Missing, Channel 4 2022
By the year 2000 Communist China will be a ‘superpower’ built by American technology and skill. Antony C Sutton
In December 1949 Stalin was to be 70 years old. Just a couple of months earlier in October ’49 Germany had been divided. NATO blocked Stalin’s power to the West. Messengers from Moscow II: East, BBC 1995
Mao respected Stalin; he had no reason to trust him. ibid.
Mao accepted the treaty terms out of weakness. After decades of war China was exhausted and his enemies were still at large. ibid.
1950: Communist North Korean troops invaded South Korea. ibid.
It was the Chinese who saved North Korea. ibid.
Krushchev now saw Mao as a danger to peace; Mao saw Krushchev as a traitor to Communism. ibid.
The Great Leap Forward as a disaster. Food supplies collapsed … The greatest single catastrophe of the twentieth century. ibid.