by Noam Chomsky
So I don’t think we should be asking the question “How do we improve relations with China?”—we should be asking other questions, like “What kind of relations do we want to have with China?” And when we talk about “China,” who exactly do we mean? China has a very wealthy sector now—businessmen, bureaucrats and others, the guys who make the decisions—and when the U.S. press talks about “China,” that’s who they mean. But there are plenty of other people in China too. So for example, you take these Southeastern sections of China which are supposed to be “economic miracles” and huge growth areas—yeah, they’re economic miracles alright, but a good deal of that growth is because of foreign investment, which means absolutely horrendous working conditions. So you have women from farms who are locked into factories where they work 12 hours a day for essentially nothing, and sometimes a couple hundred of them will be burned to death because there’s a factory fire and the factory doors have been locked so no one can leave, and so on and so forth. 32 Well, that’s “China” too—and the same is true of any other country. So which “China” are we talking about?
In fact, in this case there’s also a geographical split, there’s a geographical break between Southeast China, which is a big growth area, and Central China, where most of the population still lives, and where things are maybe even going downhill in terms of development and modernization. Well, the differences between those areas are so substantial that some China specialists suspect that China may just break apart into a more coastal area that’s part of the general East Asian growth area, with a lot of Japanese capital and overseas Chinese capital and foreign investment feeding into it, and then a big area with hundreds of millions of people living in it which is kind of like a declining peasant society—surely not part of the big growth rate, and maybe even declining. 33 So even within the geographical entity that’s called “China,” there are regions that are like completely different countries, and in some areas things could go back, as some suspect, even to the days of peasant wars and other things like that. So, again, you have to ask what exactly you mean by “China.”
And in fact, if you look still more closely, the big “economic growth” areas in China themselves are not so simple. So it turns out that a good deal of the economic growth in those regions is coming from cooperative structures, not from foreign-based investment—I mean, nobody’s really studied these cooperatives in detail, because China’s such a closed society, but they’re not private enterprise and they’re not foreign investment, they’re some other thing. But certainly they have been picking up, and they do have kind of a cooperative structure. And you don’t have to go to “lefty” magazines to find this out—there are articles about it in mainstream journals like The Economist and the Asian Wall Street Journal and so on. 34 Well, those cooperatives are a big part of the growth of Southeast China, and they represent very different interests from the foreign investment-driven industrial structures, with all their horrendously exploitative conditions. So that’s yet another “China.”
And like I say, within all the various “Chinas” one can identify, there always are different sectors of the population with differing interests: like, for people working in the electronics factories and toy factories in Guangdong Province, life is anything but pretty, they live under absolutely horrible conditions—but there’s also a managerial elite sector that is growing and getting rich at the same time. So I think the first step in figuring out what to do about policies towards something like “China” has to be to dismantle all the assumptions and presuppositions and biases behind the issues as they’re being presented by the institutions. And while I don’t think there are anything like simple answers, on some of these issues of conflict that you read about in the media now, I think it’s a very mixed story.
Take intellectual property rights. The Chinese leadership hasn’t completely accepted intellectual property rights, it hasn’t completely accepted these new developments to ensure that rich and powerful corporations have a monopoly on technology and information—so now the U.S. is using various sanctions against them to try to force compliance. Well, I don’t think I’m in favor of that. Like, I don’t think I want to improve those relations with China, what I would like to do is to dismantle this whole crazy system.
Or look at the fact that China is one of the only countries in the world that imprisons its population at roughly the same level as the United States—the United States is way in the lead of other countries that keep statistics on imprisonment, and while we don’t have precise statistics on China, from the work that’s been done by criminologists who’ve tried to make sense of it, it looks as though they’re roughly in our ballpark. 35 Well, is that a good thing—that they throw huge amounts of their population in jail like we do? I don’t think it’s a great thing. And it’s probable that their prison system is even as brutal as ours, maybe worse. Well, the U.S. government and U.S. power systems certainly don’t care about that—any more than they care about the fact that the United States is imprisoning its population at a rate way beyond anyone else in the world; in fact, that’s going up right now. So that can’t be why U.S. relations with China are bad.
There was some talk in the U.S. media a while ago about prison labor in China—but take a close look at that discussion. The only objection to prison labor in China that you heard was that the products of that prison labor were being exported to the United States—hence that’s state industry, and the U.S. never wants state industry to compete with privately owned U.S.-based firms. But if China wanted to have prison labor and export it somewhere else, that was fine. In fact, right at the time that the U.S. government and the media were making a fuss about Chinese prison labor, the United States was exporting products of prison labor to Asia: California and Oregon were producing textiles in prisons which were being exported to Asia under the name “Prison Blues”—didn’t even try to hide it. And in fact, prison production is going way up in the United States right now. 36 So there’s no objection to prison labor in principle, just don’t interfere with the profits of American-based corporations—that was the real meaning of that debate, when you got to the core of it.
So what you want to do on every issue, I think, is to extricate yourself from the way the discussion is being presented in the official culture, and begin to ask these kinds of questions about it. I mean, U.S. power doesn’t care much if the Chinese leaders murder dissidents, what they care about is that the Chinese leaders let them make money—and I don’t think that is something which ordinary people in the United States ought to buy into. I mean, China’s a very complicated, big story, and I don’t think there’s anything like a simple answer as to what should be done in terms of U.S. relations: like anything else, you just have to look at all the various subparts. But the first step, I think, as with everything, is to reframe in your mind what’s really going on, remind yourself what the real issues are, and not get trapped in discussions you don’t want to be part of in the first place.
Indonesia’s Killing Fields: U.S.-Backed Genocide in East Timor
WOMAN: Noam, a little earlier you mentioned the East Timor massacre. I’m an organizer on that issue in Canada, and it seems to me that some encouraging things have been happening in the big picture on that in the past few years, in terms of maybe pressuring Indonesia to withdraw and stop their extermination sometime in the future. Do you agree with that kind of optimistic assessment at all?
[Editors’ Note: Indonesia finally was forced to hold a referendum in which the East Timorese voted for independence in September 1999. The following discussion of the media, the great powers, and popular activism—given before those events—provides critical background.]
Well, it’s very hard to quantify, but I think you’re right. I mean, I don’t know Indonesia that well myself, but people who do, like Ben Anderson [American professor], say they definitely find something positive taking place there. I hope so—but you know, it’s really up to us what happens in East Timor: what happens there is
going to depend on how much pressure and activism ordinary people in the Western societies can put together.
First of all, does everybody know the situation we’re talking about? Want me to summarize it? It’s an extremely revealing case, actually—if you really want to learn something about our own society and values, this is a very good place to start. It’s probably the biggest slaughter relative to the population since the Holocaust, which makes it not small. And this is genocide, if you want to use the term, for which the United States continues to be directly responsible.
East Timor is a small island north of Australia. Indonesia invaded it illegally in 1975, and ever since they have just been slaughtering people. It’s continuing as we speak, after more than two decades. And that massacre has been going on because the United States has actively, consistently, and crucially supported it: it’s been supported by every American administration, and also by the entire Western media, which have totally silenced the story. The worst phase of the killing was in the late 1970s during the Carter administration. At that time, the casualties were about at the scale of the Pol Pot massacres in Cambodia. Relative to the population, they were much greater. But they were radically different from Pol Pot’s in one critical respect: nobody had any idea about how to stop the Pol Pot slaughter, but it was trivial how to stop this one. And it’s still trivial how we can stop it—we can stop supporting it.
Indonesia invaded East Timor in 1975 with the explicit authorization of Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger [the American President and Secretary of State]. 37 Kissinger then at once (secretly, though it leaked) moved to increase U.S. weapons and counterinsurgency equipment sales to Indonesia, which already was about 90 percent armed with U.S. weapons. 38 It’s now known from leaked documents that the British, Australians, and Americans all were aware of the invasion plans in advance, and that they monitored its progress as it was unfolding. Of course, they only applauded. 39
The U.S. media have real complicity in genocide in this case. Before the invasion, news coverage of East Timor had in fact been rather high in the United States, surprisingly high actually—and the reason was that East Timor had been part of the Portuguese Empire, which was collapsing in the 1970s, and there was a lot of concern back then that the former Portuguese colonies might do what’s called “moving towards Communism,” meaning moving towards independence, which is not allowed. So before the invasion, there was a lot of media coverage of East Timor. After Indonesia attacked, coverage started to decline—and then it declined very sharply. By 1978, when the atrocities reached their peak, coverage reached flat zero, literally zero in the United States and Canada, which has been another big supporter of the occupation. 40
Around that same time, the Carter administration moved to send new supplies of armaments to Indonesia, because their army was running out of weapons in the course of the slaughter. By then they’d killed maybe a hundred thousand people. 41 The press did its job by shutting up about what was really going on—when they did have coverage, it was just repetition of grotesque lies by the State Department and Indonesian generals, a complete whitewash. In fact, media coverage to this day has always completely wiped out the U.S. record: the strongest criticism you’ll ever find is, “We didn’t pay enough attention to Timor,” or “The U.S. didn’t try hard enough to get Indonesia to stop its atrocities” or something like that. 42 It’s kind of like saying the Soviet Union didn’t try hard enough to bring freedom to Eastern Europe, or they didn’t pay enough attention to it—that was their problem.
And remember, the U.S. role in all of this has never been a secret—it’s in fact been acknowledged very frankly. For instance, if you read the memoirs of our U.N. ambassador at the time of the invasion, Daniel Patrick Moynihan—who’s greatly praised for his defense of international law, incidentally—he says: “The Department of State desired that the U.N. prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. This task was given to me, and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success.” Okay, then he goes on to describe the effects of the invasion, which he was fully aware of: he says, in the first couple of months it seemed “some 60,000 persons had been killed … almost the proportion of casualties experienced by the Soviet Union during the Second World War.” Alright, that’s the Nazis, and that’s Moynihan, the great advocate of international law. 43 And he’s right, that’s how it happened: the State Department wanted things to turn out as they did, and he ensured that they did. Moynihan’s at least being honest, let’s give him credit for it.
Another thing that’s never reported, though it’s completely public and was perfectly well known at the time, is that one of the main reasons why the Western powers supported the invasion was that there’s a huge offshore oil field in Timor’s territorial waters, and before 1975 the Australians and the Western oil companies had been trying unsuccessfully to make a deal with Portugal to exploit it. Well, they hadn’t had any luck with Portugal, and they figured an independent East Timor would be even harder to deal with—but they knew that Indonesia would be easy: that’s one of our boys, we’ve been running it ever since the huge massacre there in 1965 that the West applauded, when they wiped out the Communist Party and killed maybe 600,000 people. 44 So for instance, leaked diplomatic records in Australia show that right around the time of the invasion, top Australian officials said that they would do better with an Indonesian takeover, and that Indonesia should be supported. 45 Again, I have yet to see a word about any of this in the U.S. media.
And actually that exploitation has been proceeding rather nicely: Australia and Indonesia signed a big treaty to start extracting Timorese oil [in December 1989], and right after the Dili massacre in 1991 [in which Indonesians killed hundreds of unarmed Timorese protesters at a funeral], the big Western reaction—apart from sending additional arms to Indonesia—was that fifteen major oil companies started exploration in the Timor Sea oil fields. Happily for Chevron, there are apparently some very promising strikes.
Well, to get back to your question: even though this virtually genocidal massacre has received almost no coverage from the U.S. press, a very small number of people started working on the issue—literally it was a tiny group of activists, probably not more than a dozen. 46 And finally, after a few years, they’ve gotten somewhere: around the early 1980s, just through constant pressure and organizing, they managed to get the media to start reporting on Timor very occasionally. The coverage has been highly selective, and it still always excludes the crucial role that the United States has played, both in providing arms and in giving Indonesia the diplomatic support they’ve needed to maintain the occupation over the years—but there has been some. 47 And they’ve gotten some Congressmen interested, mostly conservative Congressmen, incidentally. Wider public pressure began to develop; the East Timor Action Network was started—and there has been a real change, just thanks to this small, indeed growing, number of activists.
In 1992, the pressure actually got to the point that Congress passed legislation banning U.S. military training for Indonesian officers because of their “human rights violations,” which is putting it pretty mildly. That put the Clinton administration in kind of an embarrassing position, but they got out of it alright: they announced that the law didn’t mean what it said, it only meant that the United States couldn’t train Indonesian military officers with money from the United States itself, but if the Indonesians paid for the training themselves—say, with money we gave them from some other pocket—that would be fine. With rare delicacy, the State Department picked the anniversary of the invasion to announce this interpretation, and although Congress protested, it went through. 48
Nevertheless, the legislation was a very important development, and I think it’s a sign of a real change that could take place, as you suggest. I mean, with enough popular pressure, this is one of those issues that could turn around: the Indonesians could pull out, they may well be close to it.
In fact, if we’re talking about activism, this is a very revealing
case—because if you can organize successfully on an issue like East Timor, you can do it on almost anything. It’s a pretty hard topic to get people interested in, you’d think, yet popular pressure here has forced things to the point of at least symbolic gestures by the U.S. government—and symbolic gestures on the part of the United States are very important. Remember, everyone in the world is scared shitless of us: we’re a brutal terrorist power of enormous strength, and if you get in our way, you’re in trouble. Nobody steps on Uncle Sam’s toes. So when the United States Congress makes a symbolic gesture like banning military-training aid or banning small-arms sales, the Indonesian generals hear it, even if they can get whatever they want from some other country, or even from Bill Clinton in the end.
Mass Murderers at Harvard
Actually, let me give you another example of the kinds of things that have been happening on this—this one is really relevant, it shows you can really do things. In Boston recently there was a court case, in which an Indonesian general was sued by the mother of a boy who was killed in the Dili massacre in 1991. Her name is Helen Todd, which explains why the suit went through, if you can figure that part out. …
What happened is, in November 1991, some Indonesian troops in East Timor opened fire on a funeral march with their U.S.-supplied M-16s, and killed about 250 people. That’s fairly routine there, actually, but this time the Indonesians made a mistake: a couple of Western reporters were there filming it all, and they managed to bury the videotape in an open grave and have it smuggled out of the country a couple days later. The Indonesian soldiers also nearly beat two American journalists to death, so this one became pretty difficult for the international media to ignore. 49