While we can't exactly footnote an episode, we can offer you a bibliography of all the books and articles we touch on in the episode. To the best of our ability, these references are organized by topic and by when they are touched on in the show. So, without further ado, the freaks present to you:
Part I
Intro Music
- Higher Brothers – Made in China
Suggested Reading
Matt's Book Picks:
- William Hinton, Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village (1966)
- Some of Us: Chinese Women Growing Up in the Mao Era (2001)
- Yu Hua, China in Ten Words (2010)
- Maurice Meisner, Mao's China and After: A History of the People's Republic (1999)
- Rebecca Karl, Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth Century World, (2010)
- Rebecca Karl, China's Revolutions in the Modern World: A Brief Interpretive History (2020)
Matt's Recommendations for China News:
Brian's Book Picks:
- Joshua Horn, Away With All Pests: An English Surgeon in People's China, 1954-1969 (1970)
- Ruth Sidel, Women and Child Care in China: A First Hand Report (1972)
- William Hinton, The Great Reversal: The Privatization of China, 1978-1989 (1990)
- David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005)
Articles Discussed
- Matthew Van Duyn, "Communists Around Every Corner: The Ideological Weapons of the New Cold War," 7/20/2020
- Executive Order, "Executive Order on Protecting American Monuments, Memorials, and Statues and Combating Recent Criminal Violence," 6/26/2020
- Robert O'Brien, "The Chinese Communist Party's Ideology and Global Ambitions," 6/26/2020
China in the News
2008 Beijing Olympics
- Naomi Klein, "The Olympics: Unveiling Police State 2.0," Huffington Post, 8/7/2008
- Democracy Now, "Naomi Klein and Christian Parenti on How Beijing Olympics Highlight Globalization of Police State, Inequality," 8/15/2008
- FAIR, "Carrying a Torch for Anti-China Protests," 7/1/2008
- An example of the China discourse during the Olympics going on in the mainstream press
Orientalism & Communism
Anticommunists of all stripes used an orientalist framework to explain the rise of communism in the Soviet Union and later China. These explanations came into fashion after the public became aware of the Holocaust and it became untoward for anticommunists to return to their well worn claims of "Judeo-Bolshevism."
One of the first to move toward the idea of "oriental despotism" as a framework for understanding the Soviet state was Leon Trotsky in his 1940 unfinished biography of Stalin. In the first chapter, Trotsky dedicates the first several pages to laying out Stalin's racial heritage, deciding that Stalin "had the blending of grit, shrewdness, craftiness and cruelty which has been considered characteristic of the statesmen of Asia"
George Kennan later built on this thesis in his 1961 book Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin. He regales the reader his evaluation of Stalin's racial character, "He had certain well-known characteristics of the Caucasian mountain race to which his father is said to have belonged – an inordinate touchiness, an endless vindictiveness, an inability ever to forget an insult or a slight, but great patience and power of dissimulation in selecting and preparing the moment to settle the score."
The major work on the "Asiatic nature" of Soviet and Chinese communism, however, was Kurt Wittfogel's 1957 book Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power that argued that the Russian and Chinese people had Asiatic minds doomed to despotism because of ancient water projects (don't ask, it doesn't make sense). This book was a sensation and became mandatory reading in most political science programs. Later adherents like Richard Pipes would keep the oriental despotism myth alive and well in Soviet Studies late into the 1990s.
Human Rights Discourse
- Citations Needed – Human Rights Concern Troll Industrial Complex
- Jacobin, "Imperialists for 'Human Rights'" 12/19/2014
Uighurs and the War on Terror
- The Guardian, "Uighur Men Held for 12 Years Leave Guantanamo Bay for Slovakia," 12/31/2013
- In a 2019 piece, the Atlantic blamed the detention of Uighurs by the CIA on the wiley Chinese tricking the good intentioned Americans, proving that orientalism is alive and well. The Atlantic, "When China Convinced the US That Uighurs Were Waging Jihad," 3/19/2019
MLK Calling the US "the Greatest Purveyor of Violence in the World"
- MLK speech at Riverside Church, 4/4/1967
Sanctions and their Effects
- Citations Needed – The Sanitization of Sanctions
- ALAB Podcast – The Modern-Day Siege
Tankie Life & Culture
- Qiao Collective
- Jiang Zemin's Dank Meme Stash
- New Bloom, "The Qiao Collective and Left Diasporic Chinese Nationalism," 6/22/2020
- On the ways in which US imperialism impacted and shaped the North Korean state see Bruce Cumings North Korea: Another Country (2004) and The Korean War: A History (2011)
Outro Music
- Lupe Fiasco – Made in the USA
Part II
Intro News
- The Nation, "Homeland Security is Quietly Tying Antifa to Foreign Powers," 8/3/2020
- Here is a short piece I wrote back in 2015 on the police monitoring/infiltration of political movements: Counterpunch, "It's Time We Discussed Abolishing the Police," 8/25/2015
- Replies to the New York Times article on Chinese mystery seeds
- Ryan Grim's TikTok panic
Intro/Outro Music
- Cui Jian – Rock N Roll on the New Long March
The Obsession with Chinese Women
- 90 Day Fiance, a reality show about "mail order brides"
- The bizarro Facebook page "Libertarian Guys with Asian Wives"
- For more on the dilemma of women seeking to come to the US and the men seeking "trad-wives" who are purchasing their travel, see the collection: Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy
Kung Fu and the American Left
- Vijay Prashad, Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity
- The two movies we were talking about were: Once Upon a Time in China (1991) &Iron Monkey) (1993) – In the US release of the film the subtitles were edited to play down the anti-capitalist politics.
Neoliberalism in America and China
- David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism
Selling Drugs to Fund Imperial Projects
- For connections between US imperialism and the drug trade, see:
- Alfred McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade (2003)
- Alexander Cockburn & Jeffrey St. Clair, Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs, and the Press (1999)
- Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (2005)
End Matter
- The British monument Brian mentions is the Royal Marines Memorial
- The movie Matt mentions is Wolf Warrior 2 (2017) and the movie Brian mentions is The Great Wall) (2016)