 we will open to your questions, which you can post in the chat at any time. I want to start with Danny Haifeng, who is a socialist, activist, writer, and political analyst. He's the Black Agenda Report contributing editor. He's also the co-author of American Exceptionalism and American Innocence, a People's History of Fake News from the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror. Danny is also one of the organizers of the global project, No Cold War. Thanks for joining us, Danny. Thanks so much for the introduction, Jody, and I am very glad to be speaking with such an esteemed panel, many of whom I call comrades and colleagues. So I'm just going to begin by talking about how U.S. aggression toward China is part of a long historical process and how race and empire are at the center of it. We've experienced more than 150 years now of yellow peril racism, which has colored the imagination of our movement and isolated many of our forces from one quarter of the planet. We must not forget how as early as the mid to late 19th century, when Samuel Gompers and other prominent labor leaders lobbied for racist immigration laws that targeted Chinese laborers fleeing from the opium wars which were thrust upon China by the western powers. U.S. gunboats helped protect unequal treaties that were produced by these wars. China to this day calls the century before its 1949 revolution the century of humiliation because over this century the country was left illiterate, malnourished, and impoverished. The U.S. would become the world's premier empire in 1945 only in 1949 to quote unquote lose China to socialism. The U.S. responded fiercely immediately sanctioning China from the world economy and moving to invade Korea and Vietnam to curb the overall socialist project going on around the world. For more than two decades the U.S. recognized Taiwan as China until normalization occurred between the two countries in 1972. U.S. imperialism's Cold War, the first Cold War, killed millions of people in the Asia Pacific in the name of containing communism. The U.S. waged its own racist war against socialism in U.S. borders through McCarthyist attacks and counterinsurgency campaigns. Chinese workers once deemed to be infected by backwards diseases and too impure to work on the holy shores of white America were now infected with an even more dangerous disease that of socialist revolution. Anti-communism and yellow peril racism continued into the post-normalization period. U.S. corporations enjoyed exploiting cheap Chinese labor so long as the expectation was that China would eventually adopt a western model of governance. This never happened and the longer that the U.S. and West's economic relationship with China has grown to be mutually beneficial the more we see the capitalist elite revive yellow peril anti-communism. The major spark for the rise of U.S. aggression towards China is the fact that U.S. imperialism is actually on a precipitous decline and China's planned economy a socialist economy is on the rise. COVID-19 has accelerated this process so it should come as no surprise that U.S. aggression has intensified immensely since the pandemic was first discovered. China's massive public and state intervention to protect the people saved millions of lives and to this day not 5,000 people in China have died from COVID-19. U.S. neoliberalism and imperialism has devoured its own public sector leaving hundreds of thousands dead from the pandemic despite being just a fraction of China's overall population. At no cold war we have taken a firm position against the many facets of U.S. aggression towards China. The U.S. is engaged in what we believe is a new cold war with China to disguise the fact that it simply cannot compete on the world stage without the intensification of endless war. The U.S. imperialism remains a quarter of the world economy but this is down more than 10 percent over the last two generations. A new depression for capitalism has economists projecting that China will surpass the U.S. by 2025 if not sooner in the GDP terms. This is the root of the U.S.'s dangerous war maneuvers in the South China Sea while the U.S. is sanctioning corporations like Huawei and screaming at the top of its lungs about human rights abuses. It would be a mistake to believe that only Trump's forces are engaged in the long struggle to contain China's rise. We can expect Biden to change the U.S. approach to China but not the overall trajectory. U.S. imperial domination must be defended at all costs and a racialized hubris is key to achieving this goal. We have to think about this a non-white country that possesses a quarter of the world's population in a socialist economic system is really a direct challenge to the gospel preached by U.S. imperialism. The gospel of there is no alternative to neoliberalism and the end of history theory which presumed capitalism has become a permanent and unchallenged fixture on the world stage. The desire to hold on to these theories is deeply woven into our popular culture here in the U.S. Take Aquafina is Nora from Queens for example, a popular television program of which Aquafina is seen as a leader in the inclusion of Asian Americans in the media. I'll just give you a spoiler alert for anyone who wants to watch the program. The final episode highlights China. One comes out of watching the final episode of this program with the idea that China is a repressive surveillance state incapable of any achievements beyond what is gifted to the country by the United States in the West. China's ascendance as a global power is mostly window dressing. Modern apartments are furnished with uncomfortable amenities. Chinese workers like Grace are nothing more than modern-day slaves working 24-7 to please Americans. Chinese tech corporations need Aquafina who's a 27-year-old millennial with no job experience to succeed in the global market. In a word, China and its people are inferior to the United States' way of life. American arrogance was quite literally on full display, not least because the episode was filmed in Taiwan without the permission of the local government. Aquafina and the rest of the corporate media often make these horrific and racist judgments when they could actually take a more balanced approach to China by considering the following trends. China leads the world in patent applications with tech giant Huawei filing the most patents per company for the third consecutive year. China leads the world in the production of renewable energy and has committed to becoming a carbon neutral country by 2060. Women's participation in the workforce has doubled since 1978 and nearly one-quarter of all representatives of the National People's Congress, China's highest political body, are women. Wages in China rose by 10% last year. In our November 23rd of this year, China declared victory in its war against absolute poverty. Our ears and eyes are shielded from the true character of China's rise and the complete barbarity of US imperialism's decline. Our major task from here is to counter anti-China sentiment with a broad-based peace campaign that makes self-determination a priority. It is absolutely imperative that we assess the validity of human rights claims against China, especially when their sources are often connected to the military industrial complex. Too many forget that the lies that led to the Iraq war and the carnage of it. And too many forget that there isn't a US war drive on the planet that isn't built on racist lies. China is no exception. But China is an exception in one major way. China is a competitor. China will not be bullied. It can't be bullied. A huge cost of rising anti-China sentiment falls at our feet. It is we who lose out on key opportunities to collaborate on the containment of COVID-19, the battle against climate catastrophe, and the struggle to eradicate racism and poverty when the US government is allowed to freely demonize the most powerful country in the world on the right side of these questions. In summary, our primary task is to oppose US wars and remind the masses that US imperialism is our primary enemy. But we also can't forget that revolutions are built on friendship and cooperation. US aggression towards China disrupts the very basis for friendship among the people of both countries and therefore should occupy absolutely no space in our movement for peace, justice, and liberation. Thanks so much again. Thank you so much, Danny. And thanks for all you do. I know that this is what you spend your time on and so grateful. So next, I want to introduce you to Teenz Chalk. She's an internationalist, activist, and artist trained in architecture. She's also been working with diverse working class movements across the global south and is currently based between Sao Paulo and Shanghai. Teenz contributes to popular political education projects, crafting designs towards a socialist future. She leads the Art Department of Tricontinental Institute for Social Research and is a member of the Dongfen Collective. Thanks for joining Teenz. Thank you very much. I'm very delighted to be here. And thanks to the organizers for this event. So I'm going to share today, in a few minutes, some of the experiences we've had in a new project called the News on China. As the world was entering the pandemic, I moved back to China. And about seven months ago, a group of us international organizers and researchers started a project to fill a gap that we were seeing, especially from the perspective of social movements from the global south, about learning of China, what is happening beyond what the western of bourgeois media was telling us, and also a lot of the left media. And I know that oftentimes talking about China, everything seems quite big. Everything's in the billions or trillions, and it's quite hard to enter and understand. So this project began as a bit of a way to fill this gap with this weekly news digest, but also with a weekly video that we produce. Ultimately, what we're interested in is what lessons can we learn from China? What can we take back to our movements and organizations? And I'm going to start with looking at one of the headlines from this week, which Danny also mentioned, that China ends absolute poverty. This was the main headline of China this week. Well, what's behind that? So here's just some numbers, and I promise I won't go into too many numbers here, is that 80 million people were lifted out of poverty since 2013. So this was an ambitious mission of the Chinese government because they knew that for, in order to develop what they call moderately prosperous societies, they can't do that while they still have millions of people living in absolute poverty, but also understanding in a larger trajectory. And the last 40 years, 850 million people were lifted out of poverty in China. That's contributing to 76% of the global poverty reduction. But 850 million people, what does that mean? Well, that's the equivalent of two and a half United States. It's equivalent of the population of Latin America, the Caribbean and North Africa combined. It's the population of Europe, Canada, Australia, South Africa combined. It's a lot of people. It's kind of capital H history. It's a historical moment for humanity, really. So of course, fighting against poverty, how do we link it back to people who are on the ground in the community organizing to your social movements? It's all the stuff that we're fighting for. It's our main kind of banners that say our main rallying cries. It's talking about education, healthcare, housing, work. It's also about fighting to uplift women, peasants, people from the rural areas, migrants, the working class. So I'm going to share a little bit about some of the process of how they got here in the few minutes we have together. And as organizers, and this is a teaching, many people know that we have to start with organization and going to the people. And this is how the poverty alleviation project begins. It goes back down to the base to the people to try to figure out who they don't call it poor. They say poverty stricken because we know that being poor is not because of individual fault or fate of the poor, but it's something structural and historical. And some of these images I'm sharing is from a band, or I guess pulled off the air PBS documentary by Robert Lawrence Kewton called China's War on Poverty. So every family has a customized plan of developing a poverty alleviation plan. It's not just about family income. It's about has this person's son been skipping school? How many pigs does a family have? And with this, it gets collected into national system. 100 million people are in the system as they're trying to alleviate poverty. And all this information is constantly updated. So we know how is the son doing? Is he back at school? How are the pigs doing? This is recorded in a national system. And in the system, you have a categorization of understanding if people are, if they qualify for poverty relief, if they are listed as poor, if they've been lifted out of poverty, or if they've fallen back into poverty. But this relationship isn't just between the party officials and the families, but it's also amongst the communities they live in. It's amongst the neighbors too. And here we have one moment in a community assembly where also the neighbor is saying, no, he's got two children. They've been hiding money. They can't be poor. This is part of the kinds of debates and base building work that is not seen behind the headline. And in this process, the community goes through each family, each village does this to analyze the situation of each family and the progress to understand where's where, how are they in the process of poverty alleviation. This they call the democratic appraisal meetings. So I think it's quite interesting to see that democracy doesn't exactly look like the liberal sense of going to the ballot box every four years between party A or party B, but it also starts at the base level of how decisions are made, how participation is decided. And of course, no organization works without organizers. And an astounding number is that in the process, since 2012, 3 million cadre from the party have been deployed to these villages. They're sent for two years at a time, far from their families, and they can't get a promotion or leave the task until they finish their task. And just to understand, it's really remote areas. Two thirds of China is covered in mountainous and treacherous terrain. Just to give you an example, here there are people descending from the rural mountain villages. And in the process, 770 party cadre have actually died because they're living in the conditions that the people are living in. And I think in the news of, you know, the world's going to second, third, fourth waves, or even not finish their first waves with a pandemic, we know that China has been recovering. But a lesser part behind this is also the role of the organization, the role of the organizers. And a big part of the success is also because of how they organize at the community levels, what they call the neighborhood community organizations. It's part of this broad range of over 4 million grassroots party organizations. They go to every household, deliver supplies to temperature checkpoints, monitor what happened. A lot of this is actually documented in a publication in a study called China and Corona Shock by the track continental. So I would highly recommend you check that out if you want to learn more about that process. So we know that poverty alleviation isn't just about, you know, throwing money at a problem. It requires mass organizations, people go into the ground. But it's also about how to create those enduring elements of how people can come out of poverty, the jobs, housing, healthcare, education. So the first one is really about work. How can local economy be developed or small scale industries be developed? What tourism can be supported? Often linked to environmental projects. But in some places, this is the mountain that people were walking down in the picture before. There's just no possibility of developing. It's too remote. The land is too difficult to cultivate in the areas vulnerable to natural disasters. So there is also process of relocation that happens. And just to go quickly is that in the last four years alone, 9.6 million people have been moved to new communities built for them. This costs 91 billion dollars. And just as a quick comparison at the U.S. elections this year cost 14 billion. And it just makes us think what are what would be and the societies we could build of these kinds of resources were put towards then proving the conditions of people like these kind of communities, free housing, school, clinic, running water, electricity, even get a free TV. And of course, within that, there's also the challenge of work. You're taking people from the rural communities into urban settings for the first time. So education is a big part of it. Vocational schools, getting people training here in the same community. People are learning how to cook. But also university. There are now, compared to 30 years ago, 51% of people are in higher education. 30 years ago was 3%. So it's a huge amount of government investment to make sure people are arriving there. And we're talking about 70% who are new first generation university students coming from rural peasant backgrounds. And that is a huge part of the poverty alleviation process. So just to wrap up here is that, you know, it's no wonder I think that this documentary where some of these images are from was pulled off the air in the U.S. Because behind the powerful headline of China ends absolute poverty is something, I think, quite worthwhile for us to open our eyes as socialists and as organizers, as people who care about humanity, really. And I think for us to learn is to keep an open mind. Because ultimately, the political system in China is as complex as the civilization is old. And it's a pretty old civilization of 4,000 years or more. So there's no sense of thinking that it could be exported into another context. And China doesn't really have that ambition. But I think as organizers, as militants, as people who are on the side of humanity, on the side of the working class, we have to look towards what we can learn when we hear a headline, you know, like that. It's beyond a headline. It's actually what we can do for hundreds of millions of people, improving their conditions and building that socials possibility. So that was a really quick overview. And I would, and it's a very humble beginning of a project, but I would recommend if you want to find out more, subscribe to our weekly digest. There's a video there. Help to kind of create this bigger dialogue that we're trying to do to learn about China with an open mind. So thank you very much again for having me here. Thank you, Ting. That was amazing. And all the work at Dongfang teaches us so much each week. I'll post in the chat of the Zoom, and we read if you can, and YouTube, so that we can all find our way there. It definitely will make you smarter. So next, I want to introduce you to Kenneth Hammond, who's a professor of East Asian and global history at New Mexico State University. Kenneth lived and worked in China for five years in the 1980s and has returned many times to teach at universities in Beijing and Shanghai. He was the founding director of the Confucius Institute at New Mexico State University from 2007 to 2015. He has worked throughout his career to promote greater knowledge of and understanding between Chinese and American peoples. Thanks for joining us, Ken. Thanks for having me here, and I want to say thanks to the People's Forum and, of course, Jodi and Code Pink for all the wonderful work that's being done. And I want to just echo what Danny and Ting have already said. You know, the depth of animosity between the United States and China is, you know, certainly a reflection both of the crisis of American hegemony, the anxiety on the part of the rulers in this country about losing their global dominance. But it's also a reaction to the achievements, the accomplishments that China is making. And Ting's, that was just a wonderful overview of the anti-poverty campaigns. I think this is all wonderful stuff. As an academic, I find myself in a particular situation. Jodi mentioned I was a founder of our Confucius Institute here at New Mexico State. And one of the things that's been most disturbing recently is the way in which this hostility, these attacks on China that are made in the media and by the government have been directed by the Trump administration. But again, this is one of these bipartisan initiatives against scholars and students and programs in American academic institutions that have been designed to promote greater knowledge and understanding between American Chinese people and to give American students at many, many different levels, the opportunity, for example, to study Chinese language, to be able to learn more about China, to be able to go there, and also to welcome scholars, students coming from China to the United States to be part of a mutually beneficial process of educational exchange. Last May, about May 20th, the Trump administration issued a new, what they called a strategic approach document to the relationship between the United States and China that laid out in many ways a lot of these attitudes of China as an enemy, China as not just a competitor, but really a hostile force, and all the sort of trite critiques of the nature of governance and civil society in China and all that. And they, it was a document that was designed to talk about what American policy towards China was going to be, but it included at a new level a real direct message that American academia was going to be part of this program, part of this anti-China initiative, and it really aimed to control both the production of knowledge and the circulation of information about China in ways that really create a lack of understanding, a lack of appreciation between the two countries. And that document and the policy orientation set out in it were really clear indicators of the direction in which American policy is going, but that's been matched. It's not just a sort of policy statement or theoretical statement, it's been matched especially in this year of 2020 by a series of very disturbing steps that have been taken. One is the attacks on Confucius Institute. So the Confucius Institute program is a program of cooperation between American institutions of higher education and Chinese partners. It has brought over the years, it's been running almost 20 years now in various places. It's brought over the years hundreds of teachers to America to work with college students, high school students, even primary school students to provide some basic education in Chinese language, history, culture, things like that. It's also provided scholarship resources for American students to go to China and have direct experience of learning and living there. Well, in 2020 many Confucius Institutes across the country have been shut down by their host institutions, and this has also been accompanied even more recently by the designation of Confucius Institutes by the State Department as foreign missions under control governments, which is simply not an accurate characterization. These are American academic programs that are operated in partnership with Chinese institutions of higher education. Our own Confucius Institute here at my school, New Mexico State University, was shut down last spring. For no real reason, we had good enrollments in classes, we were running successful programs, doing a lot of community outreach, providing educational support to the local public and private schools, but it was discontinued, and that has been a real, that's been a real disruption for many students who were developing an interest in things Chinese and Chinese language. That's only the tip of the iceberg though. Many Chinese scholars and researchers coming to the United States have found themselves targeted by the FBI, subject to investigation, a number have been arrested and placed under prosecution, although many of those cases have fallen apart once they got into court. But the sort of propaganda damage, you know, the headlines in the paper, Chinese scholars arrested on suspected links to military or things like that, these have been very damaging to the atmosphere in academic institutions. And in August, the University of North Texas actually expelled 15 researchers who had come from China in a variety of disciplines, all of whom had received funding from the China Scholarship Council, which is a government organization that provides funds for Chinese academics to travel internationally and engage in research, in many ways very similar to things like the National Endowment for Humanities or the Fulbright program here in the United States. The idea that academics in China who have any funding, any support from any government organization are somehow suspect is simply, it's simply absurd. And that's why most of these cases eventually have been falling apart. There's no real substance to these allegations, but they're designed to create anxiety and apprehension. The State Department has further gone to, they circulated a letter at the end of August to the governing boards of American institutions of higher education, basically calling on them to get with the program, to understand that academia was to be part of America's anti-China campaign, and that their institutions needed to do things like control course content, control the kinds of things that were being talked about, the kinds of public forums that were being held, and perhaps most disturbingly to call upon them to divest themselves of endowment funds that were invested in businesses, either Chinese businesses or American businesses operating in China, which would be, since China's economy at this point is the only growing economy in the major parts of the world, this would be devastating for a lot of American higher education institutions. So there's been this drumbeat of measures against Confucius institutes, Chinese scholars, Chinese students, putting pressure on American universities and colleges to divest from Chinese investments, things like that. That's all been done this year by the Trump administration, and of course we have a change of administrations coming, but there's been so much bipartisan calls, as Danny pointed out in the recent campaign, Biden sought, if anything, to present himself as tougher on China than Trump was being. So I don't think we have a lot of hope that this is going to change in the Biden administration. I think it's imperative for us all as activists to do what we can to put pressure on the incoming administration, but I'm not sure that that's really going to change the deeper structural causes of this, of these policies. The wealthy elites that dominate and control our country are fearful of losing their global power. China's rise and the wonderful things that are happening there have to be portrayed as negative, have to be turned on their heads, and really characterized as a threat to America's interests and to the well-being of American people. What I hope forums like this will do and what I know all of us are working very hard to do is to push back against that and to use opportunities for education and use opportunities for communication with our colleagues, our friends on the other side of the Pacific to undermine these aggressive postures by the government and the media and to say that what we need is peace and cooperation. What we need is knowledge and mutual understanding. I think that if we can do that, we'll see that as the world is reconfigured and as these global relationships change, we can share in that. We can be part of a shared future of mutual prosperity rather than one of antagonism and hostility. Thank you very much. Thank you, Ken. That's such a great reminder of why it's going to be very important for us to be the education and also to expose the US for its repression when they're going to use repression as one of the lies that they spread. Thank you. Next, I want to introduce you to Mika Rksak. She's an educator and researcher at Pan Africa Today, a social justice organization based in South Africa. It coordinates educational work, solidarity campaigns, and a network building with social movements, trade unions, and people's organizations on the African continent. Also, she's a recent addition to the team at the Tri-Continental Institute for Social Research. Thanks for joining us, Mika. Thank you so much, Jodi. Can you hear me? I just switched to headphones. Alrighty. Thank you all. I'm so lucky to have had all these great panelists before me because you've done a lot of the legwork that cover some of the elements I was going to touch on. Just reinforces, I think, what we're all trying to build here in terms of informing people about the US aggression on China. I'm going to talk a little bit about Africa-China relations. I think this is important not only for, of course, for us in Africa, it's an important issue we continue to work and think about, but for the US audiences to understand that this is one of the many ways we've seen the US play out itself in other parts of the country, I mean, in other parts of the world, like in Latin America, like in the Caribbean. Essentially, part of the US aggression on China has been this kind of ideological warfare that has the media representing the China-Africa relations in a very negative and hostile light in order to portray the US as in a position in which it should be the one to come in, swoop in, and be the one that Africa should create more enduring and long-lasting relationships. So just a couple of things is, as many of you have heard in many different circles, the US has led this kind of misinformation media campaign for decades now that wants to paint China and specifically the Chinese state and the Communist Party in its typically racist fashion as this like mineral thirsty dragon. And these images we see all over the like newspapers and then African local newspapers and basically painted as having no interest whatsoever in the human development of African people. And this varies from kind of blurring the context or, you know, misleading us about what the context of a certain situation in Africa and with China has been to blatantly producing false information. And I just wanted to raise, in 2017, the New York Times had an article that was titled, Is China the New Colonial Power? And I'm going to just start off with some of the things it spoke about were blatantly wrong. And then later in the presentation that I'll share with you, let's think a little bit about this colonial power claim. So first off, it kind of claims that Chinese economic activity is entirely state led, that it's the CCP, it's the state that's coming in to Africa. We also hear this claim a lot about Chinese workers replacing African workers that they're the majority, they just import this Chinese model into Africa. And then also they often focus on how it's like entirely extractivist and trying to flood Africa with cheap commodities, and this kind of unequal predatory relationship. And funny enough, McKinsey, who's no friend of China per se, they put out a report in 2017, just a couple of weeks after this article was released, where they systematically debunked all of these things, showing how number one, there's this issue of China in Africa is not the Chinese state. It's a group of diverse actors, whether it's NGOs, whether it's private commercial interests, some of them good, some of them with exploitative labour practices, that is the case. But the Chinese state itself has been leading very progressive efforts that I'll talk about shortly. But one is that China and Africa means a range of diverse actors who have a range of diverse interests. Number two, and the report showed this, that of the, it was about 3000 Chinese firms in Africa that they interviewed in the manufacturing sector, 86% of the employees were actually locals, and 40% of the managerial staff were African locals. And it's true, there is still a disparity at managerial level, when there's an African, I mean, the Chinese project in Africa, that's true, but it's part of the kind of expertise they're trying to bring along. But in terms of the actual majority of the workforce, it tends to be African people. And all of the people who have spoken already have kind of showed why the US is leading this type of aggression. And for Africa specifically, and Danny spoke about this in terms of the world generally, for Africa specifically, China is their biggest partner. China is the biggest partner in terms of trade, where in 2018, I think China stood at 185 billion, whilst the US waned around 61 billion. And that was actually because they were diversifying their oil importation, were no longer getting so much from West Africa. Number two, and this is kind of the more worrisome thing I think for the US is politically, China and Africa are growing in terms of cooperation, in terms of collaboration, in terms of exchange. And many people see this in the kind of 20 year long, which celebrated its 20 year anniversary this year, the forum on China Africa cooperation. And we've seen various initiatives coming about like recently, there was a China Africa environmental cooperation center that was initiated, part of the kind of, you know, millennium goals to reduce coal production and things like that. But in terms of the long-sighted thing, and I think it's quite ironic that the claims of a colonial power often have a colonial logic behind it. Because what they fear of Africa, what they see with China and Africa is Africa standing on its own two feet in different parts of the continent. They fear in Africa that's not dependent on the US financial system. They see how the massive infrastructure investments are in fact allowing different African countries to meet the needs of their people. And this, if I can name a couple of things that in the last 20 years that have been like huge investments in Africa that have really helped the people itself is that China has built more than 6000 kilometers of railways and roads respectively in Africa. It has over 20 ports that's developed and 20 large power facilities and power is a huge issue in Africa right now and has been for the last 200 years due to colonialism. China's also as Ken had mentioned about scholarships over 120,000 government scholarships have gone out to Africans. They've also sent 21,000 medical workers to 48 African countries offering treatment to over 220 million people. And I don't think I've seen a US medical team arrive in Africa yet. Let me know if I missed it. But basically these are some of the things I want to highlight because then we get to this accusation of colonialism and I think we can all agree here on this panel is that number one, the accusation that it's a kind of predatory relationship does, firstly, completely undermines the agency of African people, completely takes away the accountability of the African states themselves who engage in these processes because ultimately it kind of takes the light away from the fact that we have our own corrupt governments. We have our own state agents who don't necessarily have the interests of the people. Number two is in terms of colonialism, as many of us can agree on colonialism and even neocolonialism, and I'll mention slightly how it changes, is about this foreign nation economically and politically dominating a territory for their personal economic benefit at the kind of underdevelopment of the people. And I'm sure many of you know about Walter Rodney's book, The Underdevelopment of Africa. It systematically underdevelops the continent and contributes nothing in terms of technological or institutional development for the African people itself. And when it comes to the kind of imperialist claim, again, imperialism is about the same type of domination, but now less visible with a military and kind of financial powers coercing people into very harmful relationships. And I don't know how much time I have left, Jodie, I just want to check because I would like to quickly go over the history of Africa in terms of China-Africa relations is that whilst we were experiencing our liberation struggle and post-liberation where we had the US coming or US-led structural adjustment programs where basically huge international crediting agencies were basically coercing African governments into very harmful economic practices. And this basically gutted our public infrastructure, of course extracted all the kind of mineral wealth we had. And this kind of liberalizing process completely also further underdeveloped an enslaved African continent. And that's what imperialism is, everyone. That's what imperialism is. But what did Africa and China start off with? The birth of China-Africa relations were in the 60s, 50s, 60s just after China found its national liberation. And from the very start, it was about cooperation. The history of China and Africa started with the kernel of cooperation. And this is where China was a friend to many African liberation struggles from Algeria to South Africa where we had South African leaders going and visiting and some people getting trained there. Then when China started to develop itself, one of the biggest infrastructural projects ever created the Tanzan Railway, which basically connected Tanzania and Zambia, was developed in between the early 70s basically. And this was at a moment in which we found that A, the colonial powers are still fighting back to retain their kind of control of the territories and B, China's at a stage in which they don't necessarily have the same levels of development as we see now but are willing to invest in a kind of project that will allow for Tanzania and Zambia to build economic growth and exchange and in fact allow them to kind of steer away from and break away from the economic dependence they had on the apartheid regime, both in what was then Rhodesia, Zimbabwe and South Africa. And this was one of the kind of biggest projects we had at the time. And in fact, it's interesting because now the accusation is that no, you know, that wasn't a really great project because look how it's crumbling, but the crumbling is largely due to the fact that the current African governments don't maintain those kinds of projects and have in fact used US managerial stuff that they can't afford to maintain the project. So that's where those kinds of projects break down. But then in the 1980s, China started to then shift a little bit to agriculture and think about food sovereignty. And we saw a lot of state farming experiments coming up in Africa. And this again was about collaboration. How can we think about feeding our people, keeping in mind that China had gone through a famine of its own a decade and a half before. And so again, thinking about how do we sustain people in a moment in which most African states had just come out of national liberation and are struggling with again, the neoliberal policies that have been enacted in the late 70s. And by the time we get to the 80s and 90s, now China is seeing that perhaps and revising, realizing maybe some of these things aren't really working as best as they could. So this is where we see kind of commercial age starting to come in a little bit more, as China itself is getting its own internal development and building its own economy. But what we find again is a lot of these are a lot of these financial policies and financial exchanges that are happening just because of the amount in the size. It's often deemed an unequal relationship because it's considered this big power is giving these huge sums. And this is kind of a false idea of equal footing, when in fact China's given African countries, A, respect to the sovereignty of nations, never try to interfere on internal processes, B, a lot of the kind of negotiations around the nature of the agreement and the financing is largely established and agreed upon by the African government itself, that they have to sign on to those things. So we have to understand they take on the responsibility as African leaders. There's no kind of coercion on the part of you have to take this the way we've seen in the US relationship to Africa. And then a lot of the low interest or the loans, for example, are very much low cost much lower than you'd find in any kind of Brenton Woods agreement, which makes it easier to actually take out easier to repay. And a lot of these in 2015, it was estimated that 40% of Chinese loans paid for power projects, and 30% were modernizing transport and infrastructure. So all of this is just to kind of paint us very small and quick picture of the fact that in different stages, whether it was from national liberation to early infrastructure development to financing to today, the kind of big we have these billion dollar grants that are coming to Africa, they've all been premised on cooperation, human development, because ultimately China has had this shared experience of fighting imperialism of having to fight for a national liberation in the 21st, 20th century, in the 20th century. And I think that this is often underplayed. And it's only when China became such a big power in the last 20 years that there's been a visibility of the exchange going on with Africa. And of course, it's ramped up in scale, but the intentionality of trying to develop the African continent by sharing material infrastructure, public resources that allow African people to develop themselves is something that's not spoken about in all these narratives. I think I can probably stop on that. Oh my God, Mika, that was a teaching that I am so grateful for. I like how could I learn so much in such a short period of time? And somebody on YouTube said, Mika's kicking ass. I was just like, yes, I mean, we hear this argument about trying to colonizing Africa all the time. And you just made me smarter. And I know everyone else smarter. So useful. Thank you. You're a fantastic teacher. So now I want to move to Alice Slater, who is the New York director of Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and serves on the coordinating committee of Beyond War, World Beyond War, sorry. She's also been one of our allies of Code Pink ever since we started, one of my heroes. She's on the board of Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, the Global Council of Evolution 2000, and the advisory board of Nuclear Ban US supporting the mission of the international campaign to abolish nuclear weapons, which won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize for its work to in realizing the successful UN negotiations for a treaty for the prohibition of nuclear weapons. As a member of the Lawyer's Alliance for Nuclear Arms Control, she traveled to Russia and China on numerous delegations and engaged in ending the arms race and banning the bomb. Alice, thank you for joining us today. Thank you so much. I can't tell you how enriched I've been just listening to the prior speakers. I mean, I felt like I just got a PhD in US-China relationship. So I will tell you what I know about, which is China and the bomb. They are the best nuclear power on earth. They are the only nuclear power that promises we won't be the first to use them and keeps their bombs separated from their missiles. Whereas there are now like 14,000 nuclear bombs on the planet, 13,000 of them are in the US and Russia. And all the other countries, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Israel, France, UK have a thousand between them. China has between two and three hundred more heads. And meanwhile, the two gorillas on the block, the US and Russia sitting there with missiles pointed at each other on hair trigger alert, ready to go off in a minute. So China is such a wise player in this game. And they are the only country that announced we'll never be the first to use nuclear weapons and keep them off the missiles. Because it's not that somebody's going to actually push the button. Even somebody is not this Trump or whoever. The accidents, we've come close so many times. I mean, we had 36 airplane crashes carrying nuclear bombs. None of them ever went off. Two of them spewed a little plutonium in Palomarie, Spain, and Tule agreement. And at that time, Clinton's defense guide, Lee Butler, grounded all the airplanes. He said, this is ridiculous. They were flying 24 sevens. Meanwhile, we have them on submarines. We have them on missiles. And we're walking out of all these treaties with Russia when we have to work together to make this happen. And now Trump is trying to pull China in as if they're in equal to the nuclear hire between the US and Russia. And China's saying, no, and they're right. And I found this very interesting. We had this extraordinary negotiation in 2017. The UN voted for a treaty to ban the bomb. We banned nuclear and we banned chemical and biological weapons and land, but we never banned nuclear weapons. We had this dopey treaty called the non-colliferation treaty where five countries, the US, Russia, China, England, and France promised in 1970 to make good faith efforts to get rid of their nuclear weapons if all the rest of the world promised not to get them. And everybody signed except India, Pakistan, and Israel, and they got them. And then this treaty had this crazy bargain that if you sign promising not to get the bomb, we'll give you the keys to the bond factory because you got an inalienable right to peaceful nuclear power in this treaty. So North Korea got their peaceful nuclear power, walked out and made a bond. You know, we were afraid Iran was doing that, but they weren't. I mean, they were just, you know, but once you have the technology right now, we're selling it. Russia and the US are selling peaceful technology to Saudi Arabia, which never had nuclear panels. They want the bomb. But anyway, when we were negotiating the ban treaty at the UN, the US was boycotting it with all their NATO allies. We have what we call a nuclear umbrella where all of NATO, plus three countries in the Pacific, Australia, South Korea, and Japan of all places are under our nuclear umbrella that we're willing to use our nuclear weapons on the empty air. So all of those countries boycotted the ban treaty negotiations. And when they had to vote at the UN, whether to the negotiations to go forward, the Western countries, US, UK, France, and Israel voted no. China, India, and Pakistan abstained, which was very unusual. And North Korea voted yes, let's ban the bomb. I mean, did you see this on the front page of the New York Times? You know, they were sending out a signal. We want to get rid of our bonds. You know, we want you to get rid of them. So anyway, that's where we are. And right now the treaty has been signed by over 84 nations. 50 countries have just ratified it this month, which is what the requirement of the treaty to the prohibition of nuclear weapons to enter into force and become now nuclear weapons are unlawful. And it will be announced that it's 90 days from the time of the signing. So on January 22nd of 2019, 2021, it will go into effect and nuclear weapons will be unlawful, at least in those countries that signed and ratified it. Now, over 84 countries have signed and 50 have ratified, which is a little more complicated. But we're going to have this huge global celebration. They're going to light up the Eiffel Tower. We're trying to light up the Empire State like all over the world to announce that nuclear weapons are illegal and unlawful now. And even though the nuclear weapons states and their allies have been signed, the US keeps nuclear weapons in five NATO countries, Germany, Holland, Belgium, Turkey, and Italy. And those countries now that they're unlawful, people are demonstrating and illegally entering the weapons spaces and getting arrested, their parliamentary motions. And it's something, I mean, China could, I went to China, I love meeting with the Chinese People's Committee for Disarmament, so that we were very friendly with them during the 80s when we were trying to, you know, ratchet down the cohort and get nuclear testing stopped. You know, they were part of that. They participated in that. But I mean, imagine if they would take the lead and say we're going to sign the ban tree, because this is something that nuclear weapons states can sign and agree to get rid of their nuclear weapons when the others agree. So you're not really giving anything up. You're just promoting the idea that it's time to get rid of it. That's my hope for maybe changing. We can't do, I mean, we have to have this kind of meeting. So people are not demonizing China. I mean, I grew up in the 50s in 1954 at Queens College when we had McCarthy and the Cold War against Russia. We were so terrified of Communists. I mean, somebody offered me a pamphlet in the cafeteria at school with a discussion at the Communist Party of America. I was in terror. My heart was pounding with fear to hold something that said Communist Party women. I got home, I go up to the A4, I went to the Bronx in New York, walked directly to the incinerator, threw it down the chute without looking at it. That's how scared we were of Communists. And they're trying to do this now with China, to demonize China. We can't let that happen again. I learned so much when I went to Russia after Gorbachev came in, because did you know that they lost 27 million people to the Nazi onslaught? I don't see that reported every day. You know, I'm Jewish. We're always talking about the 6 million people that died in the hour. What about the 27 million Russians that died fighting Hitler in World War II? And every guy's walking around with his World War II medals on his chest over 60 and you see the mass graves in Leningrad. And my guide said to us, why don't you Americans trust us? And I was like being very arrogant saying, why don't we trust you? What about Hungary? What about Czechoslovakia? And I was during the and he looked at me with tears in his eyes that we had to protect ourselves from Germany. And I looked at him and I realized that he was telling his truth and we had been totally brainwashed, like they're trying to brainwash us now over China. This is the same capitalist elite that's running somehow the country and we're pretending that we that we're really electing a president. And we have to stay on Biden's back. He's no better than Trump on this issue. I mean, I'm really glad we got rid of Trump and in a way the progressives compromised by working for Biden. But we know we have to get on top of him now and see who wants to appoint in his government. I mean, we must get out in the streets to our Congress and make them do it. So anyway, I'll stop here. Thank you, Alice. Thank you so much. And thanks for bringing us into history. I think that's important because yes, we are watching something rise and, you know, close to McCarthyism. So it's really lovely of you to bring us into that history and for your lifetime of working to end nuclear weapons on the planet. So deep gratitude. I'm driven. So next we finish today with the Jay Prashad, who is a brilliant historian, journalist, commentator, author, and a Marxist intellectual. He is the founder and executive director of Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, the chief editor of Leftward Books, and chief correspondent for Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He's the author of over 30 books. The most recent is Washington Bullets. He is also on the advisory board member of the US campaign for the academic and cultural boycott of Israel, part of the global BDS movement. He's also one of the hardest working revolutionaries on the planet and manages to make more happen in one day than in humanly possible, and is one of the organizers of No Cold War. Vijay, thanks for joining us today. Jodi, it's great to be with you. And it's great to follow so many of my friends, Danny, Mika, Tingz, Alice, Ken, and basically to be on any platform that's hosted by you, Jodi, is a pleasure. So I'm glad to be here, a genuine pleasure. Today, as you said correctly, is the International Day in Solidarity with the people of Palestine. The day will be celebrated this year on the 1st of December, but I think it's important to recognize that this is the historic day of solidarity. We have a US government completely giving impunity, direct license to the Netanyahu government to do what it wants. The assassination of an Iranian nuclear scientist at this point is such a destabilizing event, which was probably concocted by Pompeo, Netanyahu, and the crown prince of Saudi Arabia during the visit to Saudi Arabia. So people be on alert. These people are very dangerous. They are very dangerous people. I don't often like to speak like this, Jodi, but these are dangerous people. This Cold War on China is really quite logical for the US elite. I think that's something we need to come to terms with. In 2009, Hillary Clinton, then Secretary of State, put it quite clearly. She said the rise of China makes it by definition an adversary. I mean, that's from the US Secretary of State, a liberal, Hillary Clinton. She says the rise of China makes it an adversary, not anything that China is doing to intimidate or impact upon US citizens. No, just merely the rise of China. There's a logic here, and I'm going to try to explain what that means. But please keep that in mind, that line from Hillary Clinton. Jodi mentioned that Fuying, who's the vice minister, vice foreign minister, had a very good piece in the New York Times just a few days ago. I highly recommend it. In it, she has two sentences that are almost a direct response, in a way, to Hillary Clinton from 2009. Fuying writes, the United States believes that China craves world hegemony. That's what she says the United States believes. Then this is what she says. She says China sees, now remember, this is the vice minister, vice foreign minister of China. She is writing in a capacity as one of the senior most people in the Chinese government. She says, China sees the United States as trying to block China's way forward and as hindering its people's pursuit of a better life. This is how the Chinese see this Cold War. China sees, well, why would Fuying write this? Because 11 years ago, Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state, said that the rise of China makes it by definition an adversary, not an attack by China, not Chinese ships coming near US shores, not Chinese nuclear weapons. None of that. Merely its rise, she says, by definition makes it an adversary. So Fuying is quite correct to write that China sees the United States as trying to block China's way forward. The development of China, in other words, please keep this in mind. I think it's an important point for us to recognize. China has made tremendous advances as things pointed out regarding poverty alleviation. But to be honest, that's not what the United States elite fears. Nor does the United States elite mind if the Chinese government opens the country up for US multinationals to come and take advantage of Chinese labor. They don't mind that. In fact, they like that. They have enjoyed that since the reform era opened in 1978. The United States elite neither minds poverty alleviation in China nor do they mind if China opens the door and allows US companies to take advantage of Chinese workers. Where the problem lies is that the People's Republic of China has utilized the maximum gains that the Chinese revolution has produced to advance science and technological development inside China. So much so that the Chinese science and tech sectors are now a generation, perhaps two generations ahead of US science and tech in some crucial, crucial fields such as artificial intelligence, such as telecommunications, such as robotics, which is why no CEO from Silicon Valley, not one of them, have complained about the Cold War against China prosecuted first by Obama. And I'm going to come back to that. And then by Trump, not one. When the head of Apple went to Trump and had a conversation about the tariffs, his only complaint was that Apple's competitor, Samsung, was not being hit by the tariffs and that Apple was being hit by the tariffs. He didn't complain about the trade war because Silicon Valley wants the full power of the US state military diplomatic information war, etc. to give them an economic advantage because guess what Silicon Valley no longer, no longer dominates in science and tech no longer United States no longer is the leading scientific and tech power in the world. Now, I'm not saying China is the leading scientific and tech power. Let's not exaggerate things. But China has certainly developed in certain sectors to the point that there is great trepidation in sections of Silicon Valley, in sections of the US military, particularly US military that's worried about artificial intelligence, internet of all things and so on, which would impact US dominance on the battlefield. You know, we at Tricontinental produced a red alert, which you can download for free in God knows how many languages now. It's called the US imposed hybrid war on China. It's our ninth red alert. And we go over the material. If you, you know, want to see some of the material about which I'm speaking, that's exactly where you should go to look for it. Now, this point about the fact that, you know, we have a change in administration in the United States, let's take a deep breath and look at this for a minute. It was Hillary Clinton who said in 2009 that merely the rise of China, merely the rise of China by definition makes it an adversary. I want you to really breathe in her line. The rise of China by definition makes it an adversary. You know, this goes back to Dick Cheney's stuff in the defense policy group part B during the Bush administration number one, when they talked about US hegemony must be permanent. This goes back to the project on the American of the American century, you know, which once again came out with this idea that American primacy and exceptional leadership of the world has to be permanent by definition. Hillary Clinton says by definition makes China an adversary. Just its rise in science and tech guys. I want you to pay attention to this. It was Obama who in 2012 initiates the pivot to Asia. It was Obama that pivot to Asia was a big military buildup around China. Obama miscalculated because he decided to go after both China and Russia at the same time, which is what has brought China and Russia together. Their economic relations have increased their military and security relations have increased. Just a few weeks ago, Vladimir Putin, president of Russia was asked, would you sign a military treaty with China? And his answer is very illustrative. He said, it's not necessary. He said, we don't need a military treaty with China. We don't need it. But if it becomes necessary, we'll do it. But we don't need it. We don't need it because they have on the one side in 2008 settled their border dispute. And secondly, their relations are so close now they don't actually need to sign a treaty. If we do, he said we could. The United States miscalculated in 2012. And it's paying for that miscalculation because Eurasian unity is very strong both militarily across northern Asia with China and Russia and then in southern Asia through the Belt and Road Initiative. It's very strong. The United States has miscalculated, which is why Trump expanded this war on China by moving in the direction of a direct front to trade war. The United States walked out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which was designed by Obama to damage China's relations, economic relations with the region. Remember, I said the United States is miscalculated because just recently China signed the RCEP treaty, which brought 30% of the world's people into a free trade area, which includes most of Asia, including New Zealand and Australia and Japan. This is very important because this is the Five Eyes Intelligent Network. It's also the Quad. It's the military strategic partnership between India, Japan, Australia and the United States. It's a military treaty to basically squeeze China. All of this is done by the United States, not by China. That's why we are saying the United States is imposing a war on China. China doesn't want a war. Fuyen's editorial makes this very clear, but so does Xi Jinping's statements, the President of China. He said on many occasions, we don't want a war. We don't want a conflict. You are imposing a conflict on us. Friends, I want you to think about something, about language. We talk about the Vietnam War. There was no Vietnam War. There was a U.S. war imposed on Vietnam. We talk about an Iraq war. There was no Iraq war. There was no war happening in Iraq that the United States happened to stumble upon. That's what the language leads you to believe. It was a U.S. illegal war pushed by George W. Bush and people like Joe Biden against the population of Iraq. There is no Israel-Palestine conflict, friends. There is no Israel-Palestine. That makes it seem like it's parity between two parties. There is the occupation of the Palestinian people by the Israeli government. There is no Korean war. There is no China war. Be careful of the language. There is no U.S.-China conflict. There is no U.S.-China conflict. There is only a U.S. conflict which it is imposing on China. The Chinese people don't want this conflict. The Chinese government doesn't want this conflict. Currently, the U.S. government and the elites want a conflict with China. I very much beg the people of the United States of America on this break with your government. You must come out publicly. You must come out vocally. You must write in your local newspapers. You must call people who represent you in Congress. The people of the United States of America must break with their elites on this conflict. It is the most dangerous conflict of our time. So I am begging you. I don't do this often. I am begging you. Don't sit and take this lightly. It is time for you to stand up and speak out. It is time for you not to allow your government to prosecute a war which is going to be a disaster for humanity. Thanks a lot. Thank you, BJ. Wow. All right. So that's exactly why we're here today is to learn how to be engaged. And so we're going to open it up for some questions. We have about 10 minutes left. I'm so sorry. But you can see from what BJ said there is a work to be done and there was a lot of information to impart and there's a lot more out there for you to access at the tricontinental, at Pivot to Peace, at No Cold War, at Code Pink. So we hope that this has wet your appetite to learn more and to engage more. And next week at the same time at the People's Forum we'll give you ways to engage. But right now I want to open it up for questions. Mika, there's one for you. How does Africa.com benefit African people in countries? If they're referring to Africa.com, I think it's Africa. So I mean with regards to Africa, it doesn't. This is, you know, it basically is the Africa command, which is, I think it was like in mid-2000s, 2007 or 2006, officially came to Africa. And actually it was Vijay some years ago who brought a lot of our attention to the fact that how convenient is it that not only US military forces as well as like French military personnel just happen to be in Agadez, one of the areas in which there's like a huge uranium deposit, it just happened to build or start to build a huge drone operation center. And it's all under the guise of counterterrorism attacks. And you see this across the African continent is that where there's a military presence by the US, it's very close to a lot of the US capitalist interests, the big corporate interests, whether it's mining, whether it's in terms of sources of power generation. So at the moment, I would say in the interest of time, Africa does not benefit the African people, but allows the US to retain a certain not only in terms of physical capacity to enforce certain decisions, but also this kind of omnipotence of the US ever watching ever present. And that even though it's changing, and there was a recent survey that was published around what's Africa's opinion of China, is even though there is still a predominance idea that the American model of development is still favored broadly, is growing acceptance and encouragement of China's way of development. So if the US is retaining that presence, which is actually declining, luckily for us, and we're seeing also China take a bigger role in terms of peacekeeping, although they come for low risks because they're not here to kind of gun down the enemy. So in short, Africa, not good for the African people, a form of imperialism, neocolonialism, and we support the Black Alliance who supports us by saying Africa or Africa get out of Africa. Thank you. So looking, one of the questions is what approach should we take to building a mass American movement against US imperialism and aggression? What slogans and what forces are most likely to join in with us? So everyone represents a different organization that hasn't been working on this. I'm going to start with Danny because he's one of the, with DJ, one of the organizers of No Cold War, that's a global movement. I've also posted in the chat one of the places I forgot to mention, which is the Chow Collective, which has some great information. And there have been many webinars like this before, but maybe Danny, you could start. Well, we could start by building a broad based campaign for peace. I think that's really where we need to start and connecting this campaign for peace with really the interests of working people, ordinary people, oppressed people here in the United States in the West. There's a big disconnect right now between the movement for peace and the growing material demands that people have in a depression-laden economic system in the US and West. So there's a lot of efforts that need to be done there. And you can start by going to No Cold War and signing our statement and promoting it because our campaign is really a broad campaign to bring the question of the New Cold War against China back into the broader peace movement and to build a peace movement that truly is international because we can't really have a peace movement that's just centered in the Imperial Corps or just centered in the Global South because I think accountability really rests on the shoulders of the people who live inside of the imperialist countries. Thanks, Danny. And maybe Ken, I'll move to you next. And so you can tell us a little bit about how we can access the information and the amazing activism you're doing out of pivot for peace. Sure. Well, pivot to peace, we have a website which I think is peace pivot, all one word, peacepivot.org. We have a lot of, we have articles, we have links to other sources, we have some frequently asked questions about China and the U.S.-China relationship. So that's probably the best place to go for our work. There was a question earlier in the chat about whether there was any pushback in academia. And I should mention one organization there which is called Concern China Scholars, which is a very diverse group. There are a lot of different perspectives within that group, but they are very concerned with the particular attacks on academic freedom and freedom of exchange of information and things like that. So that's, that is a group that's out there as well. Thank you. And there's a question, let's see, Vijay, is there anything else you want to talk about, about organizing or groups where they could find more information? Okay, cool. So next there's a question on how do you believe the COVID pandemic shifted geopolitical balance of China and the U.S.? Vijay, can I call on you because you wrote a lot about this. Okay, okay, fine. The first thing I'd like to say is that John Ross and I have been writing a series of articles on, well, various issues, but we did do one on the U.S. and China in the immediate aftermath of the COVID, the smash that the COVID made on the economy. And if you look at the IMF's projection for next year's growth from 2020 to 2021, 60% of global GDP is going to be contributed by China next year, 60% of global GDP. This is a moment for collaboration. It's clear to everybody, plain as daylight, that the Chinese government and Chinese people were able to break the chain of infection of COVID-19. It's not just the government, it's massive community organizing through neighborhood committees, there's a wrong idea of China. This goes back, by the way, to GWF Hegel in the early 19th century, that somehow in China, it's all state and there's no people, that the people don't act. It's got a flourishing civil society where there are neighborhood groups, all kinds of community groups and there's a Communist Party which is separate from the government. It's not identical. Pompeo, Trump and all that are trying to make it identical. It's not identical. Anyway, they were able to break the chain of infection. That's very clear. The United States will perhaps by the end of the year see 300,000 people dead. It's a catastrophe. It's unbelievable that such a rich country with so much wealth, with political infrastructure and so on, was not able to do anything, couldn't test the population, couldn't do contract tracing, couldn't do anything. It's a complete disaster. So why not draw lessons from the country that has been able to break the chain of infection? This is the moment for human collaboration, not for this kind of intense turning on each other, imposing a war on China and so on. So what I would say is the world is looking at this, the world is judging. The world sees the Cuban doctors. As Mika pointed out, there are Chinese doctors. We don't see doctors coming from the United States elsewhere. This is clear as daylight to people around the world. So why not for the American people put pressure on this government to collaborate, to somehow bring people in to break the chain of infection? Your own people seem to be either incompetent or they don't have the infrastructure. You privatized everything to hell and therefore people just are dying in the streets essentially. Something is wrong with the system. People just look out of the window and see in other parts of the world. In Vietnam, a very poor socialist country, barely anybody has died there because they have public health, they have a disciplined population. South Dakota, North Dakota, learn from Vietnam. Thank you, Vijay. Thank you so much. So I'm sorry that we finished this lovely 90 minutes together. We'll get to more questions next week if you want to join us again. I want to just thank Danny and Ken and Alice and Tingz and Mika and Vijay and Rita for having our tech backs. Please encourage you to study, to learn more, to engage and next week we'll learn how you can be engaging. There's lots in the chat to follow up on Pivot for Peace. Alice, thanks for bringing us up the world beyond war that is always trying to end war globally and always. And until next week, do all you can for peace and to work to stop imperialism on the planet. Thank you. Peace out.