Sadly, Sinophobia and anti-Chinese racism are all too common in the Western media. In a 2012 column in The Sun, Jeremy Clarkson, a television presenter with a track record of making public racist comments (they're not charming 'gaffes'), compared synchronised swimmers with the 23 Chinese immigrants who drowned at Morecambe Bay in 2004, saying: 'Chinese women in hats, upside down, in a bit of water. You can see that sort of thing on Morecambe Beach. For free.' In recent years, meanwhile, there has been a boom in scarily-titled books (China: The Gathering Threat) and television documentaries (The Chinese Are Coming!) that present China as a threat to global stability, as though the US and UK were not themselves the world's leading exporters of imperialist violence.

Anti-Chinese racism even seems to have traction among those who would abhor racist comments about black people. I recently heard a senior academic ask a group of his colleagues whether Harrow (an area of north London) is 'how the Chinese say "hello"'. The same academic later proposed to the same group that Chinese students might be attracted to his institution if they were allowed to watch episodes of the 1970s Hanna-Barbera animation Hong Kong Phooey. I somehow couldn't imagine the same individual joking about calypso songs and bananas in the same carefree manner.

It is possible to see such phenomena as evidence of a resurgence of Sinophobia in recent years, correlating with the emergence of China as a global superpower. But it is also useful to remember that they are part of long tradition of colonial derogations of China (and Asia in general), as John Kuo Wei Tchen and Dylan Yeats's new book Yellow Peril!: An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear demonstrates. The book is a very useful sourcebook containing examples of well-known (e.g. the Fu Manchu franchise) and lesser-known cultural texts in which 'Chineseness' is demonized, as well as a wide range of anthropological and historical writing about Western Sinophobia from the Middle Ages to the present day. I highly recommend it for students, scholars and anybody with an interest in why public discourse about China has become so debased.

At the start of what promises to be a bumper year for crypto-patriotic television 'commemorations' of the First World War, the BBC has begun broadcasting its four-part documentary series Britain's Great War, fronted by Jeremy Paxman. Predictably enough, neither Paxman, nor the programme's interviewees (including Julian Fellowes, who delivered a paean to the brutal Lord Kitchener of Battle of Omdurman and Boer War infamy), offered many opinions to which Michael Gove or Max Hastings would object. You 'can't fail to be impressed' by the numbers of men who signed up for the war, enthuses Paxman, who also refers repeatedly to 'the war effort' - a phrase whose nominalized neutrality elides the chaos and murder that this 'effort' entailed.

Even less subtle is Paxman's interview in the second episode with two contemporary Clydeside unionists. When these men express their admiration for the Glasgow shipbuilders who struck against their profiteering owners during the war, Paxman responds by jovially dismissing the workers as 'difficult buggers'. In a similar vein, Paxman asks the relative of a conscientious objector who refused conscription whether such men were not 'just being awkward'. This is psychologism as historiography. Just as Paxman, in a recent interview, regarded Russell Brand's rejection of bourgeois electoral politics as an expression of apathy ('you can't even be arsed to vote'), he regards those who objected to war on principle as having an attitude problem. Clearly, these men needed to buck up their ideas. Indeed, the list of those too dense or perverse to get behind the war effort includes such irredeemable dunderheads as Bertrand Russell, Eugene Debs, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, all of whom were jailed for their opposition; what a bunch of losers!

It is in summing up his own attitude towards the 'conchies' that Paxman makes explicit his opinion about the war in a direct address to camera. Describing 'absolutist' objectors as 'cranks', he emphasizes that the war 'had to be fought' to save Europe from becoming a gigantic German colony. Yet the moral force of this argument would be easier to accept if Britain in 1914 had not presided over the most extensive empire in the world - a feat achieved by an unparalleled dedication to deadly force. But Paxo does not register Britain's history of colonial violence; he even opines that military conscription was a tough sell in Britain, since it contradicted the country's 'respect for individual freedoms'; these were, presumably, the freedoms that Britain was safeguarding through its pre-war terrorisation - including rape, torture and murder - of India, China and South Africa.

If the working-class perspective on the war is absent from Paxman's own commentary, it a structuring absence: Paxman often seems to be arguing against the anti-war position he knows many of his viewers will share. What else could people do, he asks exasperatedly, except join the 'war effort'? This is a rhetorical question, no doubt, but it is one to which Lenin had a fairly convincing answer: the working class had to turn the imperialist war into a class war by overthrowing the butchers who had led their friends and family members to the slaughter. And this is precisely what workers attempted to do, with tragically limited success, in Russia and Germany at the end of the conflict.

One might wonder whether there is any real reason to worry about how the First World War is being spun in the media. James Heartfield writes in a recent article on the subject:

"Those arguing over the First World War will find out soon enough that there is neither the opportunity nor the danger that there will be an upsurge of nationalistic identification with the British war effort. The depleting forces of popular militarism are clear for all to see."

I'm not sure about this. Certainly, a third world war is not immediately on the horizon - and even if it were, it would likely be fought with nuclear weapons, conveniently dispensing with the need for a mass mobilisation of brainwashed, jingoistic conscripts, even if these could be created. Nevertheless, programmes like Paxman's - together with popular 'militainment' documentaries and dramas on television and campaigns such as Help for Heroes - have the general effect of instilling a sense of nationalism and rationalising the horrors of war in ways that serve to justify current imperialist adventures. For this reason, they must be clearly exposed for what they are: nationalist and militarist state propaganda.

When I was a teenager in the 1980s, China barely featured in the British media. In fact, despite being an avid television viewer, I can barely remember watching a single television programme about the country. For those of my generation, the media spectacle we craved was furnished by the United States in the form of hit television dramas and Hollywood films. For me and my sisters growing up, Americans assumed Brobdingnagian proportions in our imaginations, so much so that when I encountered a group of US pensioners on holiday in Aviemore in 1984, I distinctly recall being disappointed by their frail, 'ordinary' appearance. Had the television lied to me? Were Americans mere mortals, after all?

How times have changed. Hollywood may continue to exercise a powerful influence over our imaginations, but we all now know that America is dying and that the Chinese are our new overlords. Time, then, for the television documentarists to bring in the big academic guns to make sense of it all. Niall Ferguson’s recent three-part Channel 4 series China: Triumph and Turmoil attempts to understand the economic, political and social development of China. Ferguson's presentation is characteristically breezy and engaging; yet his analysis is undermined by its one-sided argumentation and its tendentious understanding of Chinese history.

Throughout the three episodes of the documentary, Ferguson consistently refers to Chinese people in the third person plural. Indeed, a nationalist and antagonistic ‘them’ versus ‘us’ framework structures Ferguson’s narrative and underpins the kinds of questions he asks. How do the Chinese think? What has kept ‘their’ society together for so long? Why do ‘they’ admire Mao? And how might all of this one day become ‘our’ problem? As these questions suggest, Ferguson assumes that nationality is the only category through which it is possible to distinguish the peoples of the world. But is it not possible that a worker in the UK has more in common with a worker in China than she does with her British boss? Such questions do not occur to Ferguson, who, as a self-confessed academic 'on the side of the bourgeoisie', tends to interpret geopolitical issues in terms of competing nation states and economies, rather than classes. There's also a good deal of cultural stereotyping going on here. The scene in which Ferguson scratches his head over the intricacies of the infamously arcane eight-legged essay, for example, put me in mind of the mock xenophobia of Karl Pilkington in Ricky's Gervais's An Idiot Abroad (these Chinese, you see, are just so darned inscrutable...).

Exploring the forces that have held China together as a nation over the past two thousand years, Ferguson finds the answer in autocracy. From China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, to the present, Chinese rulers have sought to stave off the threat of dòng luàn (turmoil) with the iron fist of repression. Yet autocracy, Ferguson believes, is antithetical to the smooth functioning of ‘free market’ democratic capitalism and the liberties it supposedly underwrites. Indeed, like an ideological Cold Warrior from the 1950s, Ferguson worries that the ‘individual freedom’ supposedly enjoyed in the West (you really do need to get out of that ivory tower, Niall) has too often been denied to Chinese people by their dictatorial leaders.

Ferguson is, of course, quite right to worry about the lack of freedom (not to mention outright oppression) experienced by ordinary people in China. But he does not explain how the existence of two or three almost identical political parties – the democratic façade of Western capitalist states – constitutes a political advance over China’s one-party system. And he overlooks the simple fact that the reproduction of the profit system depends precisely on autocracy: no democratic polity would last a day unless it was safeguarded by a dictatorship equipped with an arsenal of ideological and repressive apparatuses of surveillance and control.

The other elephant - or perhaps giant panda - in the room is the exploitative nature of capitalism. Whatever freedom capitalism may have brought to the ruling classes of the West, the economies of capitalist states are based on wage slavery and imperialist wars (such as the recent invasion of Iraq, which was endorsed by Ferguson). In fact, it is only by ending wage slavery that the majority of human beings will be able to enjoy the freedom Ferguson extols.

In the second episode (‘Maostalgia’), Ferguson meets groups of Chinese citizens dedicated to the celebration of Chairman Mao. The professor is perplexed. Visiting a restaurant whose patrons indulge in songs and dances with a Cultural Revolution theme, he turns in open-mouthed astonishment to the camera, noting breathlessly that:

"I’ve never seen anything crazier than that in my life. It’s just surreal. It’s as if you walked into a German restaurant and saw everybody standing on the chairs singing the Horst Wessel Song and waving swastikas! Or if you went into a restaurant in Moscow and everybody was dressed up as Stalin or gulag guards […] Just take a look at this madness!"

Ferguson refers repeatedly to the ‘airbrushed’ nature of official history in China. ‘In the case of Mao’, he notes disapprovingly, ‘there’s a huge difference between the man and the myth’. Ferguson has a point here. It is perhaps surprising that the man responsible for so much chaos and death and who spoke of 'painting portraits on the blank canvas of the people' should be feted as a hero of the people. But while many older Chinese people have little nostalgia for Maoism, Mao is a useful channel for nationalist ideology in contemporary China. The official line in China is that Mao was '70% right and 30% wrong' (the Great Helmsman dropped the ball with the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution) and the Chinese leadership understands that presenting a continuity between contemporary and Mao-era China helps to bind the Chinese people to their nation and their leadership - and papers over the appalling and widening gap between rich and poor. In recent years, even Chiang Kai-shek, Mao's arch enemy and once an officially reviled figure, had been rehabilitated as a national hero for his role in resisting the Japanese.

In any case, one needn’t travel to China to find such a dichotomy between reputation and reality. After all, in the land of Ferguson’s birth, Winston Churchill – a racist warmonger and a mass murderer – is today revered by many, including the overwhelming majority of the British ruling class, as a hero. Airbrushing is a something of a feature of capitalist propaganda and is hardly exclusive to China.

Ferguson cannot understand why nobody he meets in China is prepared to acknowledge the contradiction inherent in their belief that Mao, whom he calls a ‘hardline Communist’, is the father of capitalist China – and his incomprehension on this point reveals profound historical and political confusions. Ferguson believes that China was – and to a certain extent remains – ‘communist’ and that Maoism represented a disastrous departure from capitalism. In fact, however, Maoism arose only after the proletarian movement of the 1920s had been drowned in the blood of the Shanghai working class. The Maoist 'communism’ which Ferguson believes underpinned the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution was nothing of the sort (you don't become a communist just by calling yourself one, any more than I can become Paris Hilton simply by changing my name to hers). The working class played no part whatsoever in Mao's 'revolution'. Rather, Maoism was a variant of Stalinism which concretised itself as a form of state capitalism (Ferguson himself acknowledges that Mao replaced the old ruling class with a new one). The notion that Mao's totalitarianism had something to do with communism is as laughable as it is mythical, however much it has become a commonplace of bourgeois historiography.

Ferguson’s is a simple but effective strategy of attributing the horrors of China’s capitalist past to ‘communism’. This is, appropriately enough, a version of the ‘No True Scotsman’ fallacy: capitalism, Ferguson asserts, brings freedom – so if Maoism led to catastrophe, well, then it must have been something else. And that’s not all. While Ferguson busily denounces the madness of Maoism, he says almost nothing about the horrors of capitalism – both East and West – today. That looks like airbrushing to me, Niall.

In the third episode, Ferguson turns to the military situation, worrying that the growing military power of the Chinese state and the increasing nationalism of the Chinese population might be exploited by the Chinese in the event of a slowdown in domestic growth. Again, so far as it goes, this is a reasonable point to make and it is one that has been echoed by Marxist commentators on China. In fact, nationalist sentiment in China is regularly stoked in the media - as, for example, in the ongoing multilateral dispute over the Spratly Islands. But it is important to put this into geopolitical perspective: it is the US - not China - that has by far the largest and most belligerent military presence in the world and the US is currently increasing its activity in the Pacific as part of its 'return to Asia' policy.

Ferguson also takes a look at cyber-activism among Chinese nationalists and meets the members of the notorious anti-CNN group, whose work raises concerns about Sinophobia in Western media. The points raised by activists such as anti-CNN are haughtily dismissed by Ferguson; but they are rooted in reality. Anti-Chinese sentiment is a widespread feature of Western media coverage of China, as the reporting of the Tibet protests and the Olympic flame incidents in 2008 attests. In fact, Ferguson's own documentary is itself just the latest in a growing number of rather one-sided media representations of China - representations which, taken together, reflect a huge nervousness among Western elites about the global economic influence and growing military might of China.

The so-called 'sixth generation' of Chinese cinema is rich in poignant realist storytelling and subtle political critique - even if this critique is often aimed at the relatively soft target of Mao's Cultural Revolution (Wang Xiaoshuai's 11 Flowers) and its aftermath (Gu Changwei's Peacock). Slightly more daring, perhaps, are Jia Zhangke's films, which document the economic and socio-political changes that have impacted on the lives of ordinary people in China in more recent times. The interview above contains an informative and well-illustrated introduction to the industrial and biographical context, political themes and distinctive visual style of Jia's output.

A report on BBC Radio 4's flagship news programme Today this morning (10 March 2011) covered the news that the Dalai Lama, while retaining his position as Tibet's 'spiritual leader', is stepping down from his political duties, partly in order, it is said, to give greater breathing space to the democratic leadership of the Tibetan government in exile.

John Humphrys interviewed two people for the feature: China-Tibet expert Isabel Hilton and the Dalai Lama's representative in London, Thubten Samdup. Looking ahead, Hilton pointed out that the Chinese will most likely to try to 'interfere' with the identification of the next incarnation of the Lama and will try to choose their own 'puppet', 'someone who they can manipulate'. Humphreys conjectured that this might mean that Tibetans were 'fighting a losing battle'. Samdup, naturally, praised the Dalai Lama for having kept the Tibetan 'issue' in the public eye (which it certainly has been - consider the amount of fuss made in Western media about China's role in Tibet, while the far worse Indian oppression in Kashmir - to take just one example - is ignored).

The one-sidedness of even this brief report is striking. Hilton's analysis was both eloquent and accurate as far as it went. But can one imagine British news reports using these same terms - 'puppet', 'interference', and 'manipulation' - in relation to Western states, which also interfere in other countries and manipulate their own regional puppets? And can one imagine the BBC extending its scepticism about China to the Dalai Lama, a CIA-sponsored nationalist reactionary who believes that the rich deserve their wealth because of their good deeds and who supported the invasion of Afghanistan and the bombing of Yugoslavia in the 1990s (those seeking a fuller portrait of his holiness should consult Michael Parenti's trenchant polemic God and his Demons)? But perhaps this is asking too much. After all, as the Chinese understand very well, the Dalai Lama is an invaluable ally of the Western political apparatuses in their endeavour to tame, if not quite slay, the rising dragon of the east. 

In recent years, the British media’s treatment of China and the Chinese has been less than friendly. BBC2’s recent two-part documentary The Chinese Are Coming! (8 and 15 February 2011) seems to have been yet another exercise in China bashing. The first episode began in upbeat mode with presenter Justin Rowlatt acknowledging China’s stupendous economic growth. And the programme was not without comic relief: its Louis Theroux moment came in the second episode when Rowlatt met a motley group of imbecilic US Sinophobes who objected to the teaching of Mandarin in a Californian school. Nonetheless, the programme painted a highly negative view of the global influence of China. While Rowlatt managed to avoid the phrases ‘yellow peril’ and ‘Fu Manchu’, one of the most prominent words in his voiceover was ‘threat’.

The programme followed China’s economic expansion in Africa (episode one) and the Americas (episode two). Rowlatt claimed that China’s production of cheap goods was ‘raising standards of living for us all’. But while the programme's argument had a veneer of formal balance, its judgement on China was damning, especially as the documentary progressed. China, we were told, is devastating the African environment. China opposed the British sanctions against Zimbabwe. China has a ‘dubious’ human rights record. And as Rowlatt noted in the documentary’s final section, China is developing weapons whose capabilities exceed what is required for its defence (as Rowlatt’s interviewee, the US Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Michèle Flournoy, warned, China must abide by ‘international law’ and respect ‘the rules of the road’).

All of this, we might acknowledge, is more or less true; but some context is in order here: environmental destruction is endemic to capitalism, not just China; the sanctions against Zimbabwe have had appalling consequences for that country’s population; and as for China’s record on human rights and military aggression, the scale of the US operations in Iraq and Afghanistan make China’s domestic oppression and military adventures look tame by comparison. As the geographer Emma Mawdsley has recently written in an article in Political Geography, the West is 'a most unsatisfactory arbiter of what "responsible power" should look like'. Indeed, for much of the world, the question is not so much when are the Chinese coming, but when is the US leaving.

The one-sidedness of the programme’s argument is not accidental. The Chinese Are Coming! illustrates how the capitalist media are locked into a nationalist worldview that permits criticism of powerful competitor states, but which cannot acknowledge the fundamental inhumanity of the capitalist system itself.