Henry Jackson Society Conference Attempts To Mobilize the World against China

April 21, 2020 (EIRNS)—The Henry Jackson Society (HJS) in London—the central British intelligence think tank, parallel to the Atlantic Council in Washington, running the Empire’s frantic campaign to stop President Donald Trump’s effort to build friendly relations with Russia and China—held a virtual forum Monday on countering China, titled “The Atlantic Alliance During a New Age of Great Power Competition.” Its theme: The British must bring the Western world together to confront the authoritarian dictatorship in China, which is using technology, medical support, and infrastructure building to subvert the Western world and impose their form of social control on the rest of world.

Their speakers: John Hemmings, the founding Director of Asian Studies at HJS and a professor at the Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Asia Studies; Theresa Fallon, founder and director of the rabid anti-Russia and anti-China Centre for Russia Europe Asia Studies in Brussels; Jakub Janka, Executive Director of European Values, a Prague-based group trying to stop China’s 17+1 infrastructure projects in Eastern and Central Europe.

While they all admitted that China’s massive infrastructure building, their rapid move to provide medical support against the coronavirus, and their highly effective and cheaper advanced technology (especially Huawei’s 5G) is “winning hearts and minds,” they insist it is all a trick to impose China’s authoritarian dictatorship on the world. Serbia, Hungary and Italy were repeatedly targetted as having fallen for this dastardly ploy. The U.K., they said must somehow be turned around regarding Boris Johnson’s refusal to ban Huawei.

Janka listed China’s supposed “four objectives in Central and Eastern Europe”: force countries to break relations with Taiwan; let Huawei’s 5G in, to spy on everyone; stop all complaining about human rights in Hong Kong, Xinjiang, or China generally; and force them to blame someone other than China for the COVID disaster. He compared what China is doing on COVID-19 to the Russians getting “caught” shooting down the Malaysia plane MH flight 17 over Ukraine—“shift the blame to everyone else.” China is “like an occupying force,” using “political blackmail in Central and Eastern Europe” to break up Europe and the EU.

The reason for pushing Huawei’s 5G systems, said Hemmings, is not just commercial, but they want to establish total social control in Europe as they have in China, through cell phones and cameras, monitoring each person’s every move and punishing those who fail to follow orders. The Belt and Road, he said, is aimed at establishing “total control over what we do and say.” The “insidious intervention of CGTN” into our lives is worse than the Russian “bots and Facebook ads” which interfered in Western elections.

What is to be done? We must form a “Trans-Atlantic consortium,” said Hemmings, to keep out Huawei, to prevent the Chinese takeover of our technology and industries. We must have “collective diplomacy,” especially since Chinese ambassadors have become “belligerent,” all “trying to impress Xi Jinping” by becoming nasty towards the West.

China is taking advantage of the economic decline in the West due to the COVID-19 crisis by buying up our industries and technology, whined Fallon, just as they took over 15% of our ports when world trade was suffering. The “Health Silk Road” is using medical help to force countries to do what they say—“if the West doesn’t improve governance,” she intoned, “China will step in.”

Janka summed it up: “This is a new Cold War, whatever else you want to call it, between China and the Free World. It’s already here.”