 John Pilger is an internationally renowned journalist. He has reported on wars in Asia, the Middle East, Africa and the Americas during a career spanning seven decades. He has also produced over 60 award-winning documentary films. In 2016, his documentary entitled The Coming War on China revealed a historic buildup by US military forces in the Asia Pacific with a hostile intent towards China. John Pilger, can I ask you? It's been six years since your documentary The Coming War on China was first aired. The hostile tensions between the United States and China have increased dramatically although war has not happened yet. Do you still see the eruption of an armed conflict as being a grave danger? It's certainly a degree of danger. I don't think the two countries are as yet close to war, though what we're seeing is a whole series of escalations. Escalation and old work from the First Cold War is back again. So you see, instead of something being dealt with by diplomacy, by negotiation, it moves up to the next stage. And that's certainly what's happening with China. For example, just I think a week or so ago, President Biden signed into law a bill sent to him from Congress that would ban the Chinese from buying American semiconductors. Now, the United States dominates the world market in these powerful microchips, semiconductors, and its biggest customer by far is China. China uses them to progress its own tech industries or rather to protect, protest the American tech industries that it hosts. And China has some of the biggest companies in the world on its soil and they're mostly American, like Apple, for example. So in bringing in, I think blocking that trade in such a critical material, the US has escalated to the next stage. That doesn't mean to say that war is around the corner, but it's becoming increasingly more dangerous. Over the past six years, the United States, that is the White House, the Pentagon and the Congress, have published several strategic documents that increasingly label China as America's biggest long-term security threat. Now, what explains America's obsession with portraying China as an existential enemy or threat? What is this obsession about? What's driving the American fear of China? Well, it's a $64,000 question, isn't it? And it really has a history because, you know, who was it? Well, several have said it, Solzhenitsyn said it, that the West, as he put it, but he really meant the United States, was blinded by this sense of its supremacy. And Richard Faulk put it extremely well when he said it provided this, my paraphrase in this kind of divine right for the West, for the United States to have an entitlement. And that is so, that's so irrational, but it's so evident, it's so present in all of this. There is a history with China, and it's a deeply racist past. China, the Chinese are the only people who've been banned outright by a law of Congress from entering the United States for almost 100 years, right up to the early years of the Second World War. No Chinese was allowed to enter the United States without very special permission, and it was based simply on race. Why? Why has the US had this strange relationship with China? It regarded China as theirs, in the same way the British did around the time of the Opium Wars. But that was a more of a hard-nosed view, that the Americans took this dressed up there in imperialism in China with a kind of romanticism. They had people like the novelist Pearl Buck, her book, I think, a memory called The Sacred Earth, which was this massive bestseller in the United States. Missionaries flocked to China. China was ours. China was the place that we were civilizing. China also happened to be a source of extraordinary riches that poured into the East Coast establishment in the United States into some very famous names, such as Frank and Delano's grandfather, who was President Roosevelt's grandfather, Delano. These people made riches for the China, but wanted to hold China in their collective consciousnesses as a benign place, a place that we would civilize. Now, you know, this was a time of the most humiliating imperialism in China and of great filings. And I don't think the United States has ever really got over that. It's the fact that the Chinese in just over a generation rose to almost be their equal in so many ways. As I mentioned earlier, there's a ban now on semiconductors. I mean, we're even talking about that now. China has made itself into this technological giant, economic giant, not just the workshop of the world, but a scientific leviathan that is interested in one thing, actually, and that is trading and development. Its own development, which it conducts with its five year plans, with its historic lifting of poverty of millions out of poverty of millions of people that creation of an entire middle class. This is one of the great positive developmental upheavals in human history. It's extraordinarily really the achievement in China of what has happened in the last 30 to 40 years. All of it, though, is a threat to the dominant world power. They are threatened. They're still dominant in so many ways. They're dominant in so much of trade, of ownership, of corporate ownership around the world, and of course, military. But it has terrified them. Their place at the top has been challenged and is likely to be toppled. So trying to stop this, of course, if they can't stop it, but they might try and stop it in a way that produces something very reckless, and that is the possible war. The Chinese want war. It's the last thing they want. They worry about their great ally, Russia, having the war in Ukraine. So we have a very dangerous situation here. Taiwan today is a potential flashpoint. And do you see any comparison between Taiwan and Ukraine whereby the United States is massively arming Taiwan as a provocation towards China in the same way that Ukraine was massively armed by the United States over the past eight years and used as a provocation towards Russia? Do you see a comparison here? Yes. Well, it's being used as a comparison. And what it's doing is disturbing a relationship. What have they called it? What have they called it in international circles, international diplomacy, diplomatic language, creative ambiguity? I mean, China, as I understood it when I was last there, some years ago, was quite prepared to consider the One Nation, Two Systems one that has worked in Hong Kong. In spite of the recent attempts to, of many young Hong Kong ways to challenge it, it has worked in Hong Kong by and large. That's, you know, Taiwan, you stand in Shanghai Airport and look at the airport departures and arrivals. And there's one, there seems to be one every five minutes from Taiwan. There's no restrictions. Ironically, the company making the semiconductors that I mentioned, which the United States is now banning, is actually made in Taiwan. So the entwining of Taiwan, which unlike Ukraine is a homogeneous part of China, Ukraine is split between different peoples in the South and East. There are Russian speaking peoples with a different language and a different tradition. And so it is a country, something of a patchwork, but not Taiwan. Taiwan, they're Chinese, just like they are across the straits of Formosa. And the idea that China, that Taiwan is, I mean, Taiwan was a really terrible tyranny. It's held up now as an example of democracy under Chiang Kai-shek until his, and his, those who took over from him until the early 90s. But Taiwan's distinction is that it's where Chiang Kai-shek, beaten, who was beaten by Mao's Communist army in 1949, where he fled and where he received an enormous amount of American money to fight Mao Zedong. That's its only distinction. Otherwise, it's part of China. Yes. But the systematic arming of Taiwan over since Obama's administration, the pivot to Asia, which you highlighted in your documentary, since Obama's administration and the pivot to Asia, several administrations have been arming Taiwan massively, multi-billion dollar weapons sales. Effectively, a part of China's territory under Beijing sovereignty, and yet the United States is arming that island territory, that breakaway territory with these massive farm sales. One does speculate that there is a deliberate provocation going on here to provoke China. Well, yes. I mean, you know, countries like Taiwan and Ukraine become false in the United States. They develop their own rather manic support among the really extreme elements in Congress and in the national security state in Washington, and in a big course, they see them as a vehicle to attack the great communist giant. You know, China, although for a period of time, China and the United States seem to be getting along extremely well, it's now back to being red China and the place where all dark events happen and so on. So that's the problem. So we witness extraordinary provocative events like the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, flying in there in defiance of a one China policy which her own government had long ago agreed to pursue. A straight provocation for the Chinese and you see the danger that really comes from all of this is that in China, and I saw the beginning of it, a state of siege develops. When I was there, six years ago, they were still scratching their heads and saying, why is this happening? Why are we seeing the beginning of such hostile acts, such provocations here and there? Well, of course, since then there's been so many provocations and China has this is you can see this fortress China developing. Now, that's that becomes dangerous because what it will do is develop its military. There is some suggestion it's already placed its nuclear weapons from low alert as they always have been now on to high alert. All of this is is unnecessary. There's no real dispute between China and the United States. The only dispute is how the United States reconciles with the fact that there is another economic power as great or almost as great as itself. No one is going to war with the United States attacking the United States. There's no there's no Chinese arms flowing into Mexico or into Canada to. It's the same. It's exactly the same. I mean, this the idea that you won reverses this. It's it's like Ukraine and Russia. Well, what's Putin on about? He's worried about having NATO on East Western borders. So what can you imagine having Russian forces on the border with Mexico in the United States? It's beyond consideration. We know what we know what happened with the Cuban missile crisis. So this these countries unnecessarily and I stress that word become flashpoints. Finally, we have midterm elections this week in the United States. And given that the US hostility towards China has prevailed in both Democrat and Republican administrations. What needs to happen in the United States beyond elections in order for its foreign policy to become less belligerent? And for the United States to adopt a normal cooperative and dare I say more peaceful international relations. What needs to happen in the United States to change it all around? Look, American foreign policy has always been like that. It's always been rapacious. At some periods it's been less rapacious than during others. Perhaps during the period of FDR of Roosevelt in the 30s. But once the Second World War has established America's great power, great military power, it has been a US foreign policy has run in a straight line and whoever president is irrelevant. And that includes Donald Trump. It doesn't matter because the way the system works in the United States is that it regards itself as the number one in the world with the right to control areas of the world. The right to control the sources of fossil fuel and of certain seas and lands and trade. The right to for its companies, its great corporations to dominate. This is a divine right. It doesn't have a right, of course. And I think going back to what we were originally talking about. It's really how, and I suppose an answer to your last question of yours, it's how the US copes with the emergence of a multipolar world. That is a world where there are, it's uneven, but there isn't one great power that dominates it all. There isn't a Britain running up the greatest empire on earth. There isn't the United States, let's say, in 1950. There is a different one. There is a powerful United States, but there is also a powerful China looking after its own sphere of influence. There is a Russia that has risen from the chaos of the collapse of the Soviet Union. And it deserves its own place. There is a Europe trying to sort out whatever Europe thinks it is. God knows these days. So this is, the jargon is, this is a multipolar world, not one dominated by one. In the past, the US has coped with change. There's no doubt about that. In the US, the architects of some of the nuclear treaties that George W. Bush tore up, I met a number of them, were extraordinary men. But whether those people, that era of, let's say, aggressive diplomacy can be reclaimed, I don't know. But at the moment, it's one of risk-taking. That's what's so reckless about what is happening now, the risks that are being taken. Last week, the Chinese President Xi Jinping called on the United States to enter into a cooperative relationship and to renounce the Cold War mentality. I think that seems to be the challenge. Can the United States renounce a Cold War mentality? I don't know the answer to that question. It's a bit, you know, can the Pope renounce Catholicism? I don't know. But I mean, there's a comparison there because, really, the United States acts in the world like the papacy did in the fourth and fifth century. This is, we are the force. We are the source of all knowledge, wisdom and power. It's extraordinary to hear it spoken in the 21st century, but it's there. Now, whether it can renounce that, I don't know. Countries like Britain, its closest ally, some would say closest vassal, but closest ally can play a part. But look at the chaos in Britain politically and the extremes that we now see reflected in the government in Britain. Europe can play its part. In other words, it's pressure from other countries. But at the moment, the US has got to the point where it has successfully intimidated its own sphere of influence and all those in it. So I'm not too hopeful. I think if Ukraine can be resolved peacefully and that the Minsk conferences, the spirit of those, gives some security to the Russians and allows for that war to stop, maybe. But look, I'm not a futurist, and I'm here guessing, and I don't really prefer not to do that. It's a volatile time. It's a disorientating volatile time. And with so many weapons now, the great beneficiaries, of course, are these merchants of death, the great arms companies. Something like $230 billion worth of weapons and arms have poured into this relatively small country of Ukraine this year. That's a shocking fact, and it's a very dangerous one as well. John Pilger, thank you for your insights. You're very welcome. Thank you.