National Security Agency director Robert O’Brien, 2020
U.S. fantasies of expansion, commercial dominion, and military prowess have long hinged on a premise of Pacific exceptionalism. Couched in the millenarian language of manifest destiny, the Pacific region and its multitudinous ecosystems, cultures, peoples, and nations have been vacated in favor of an
aqua nullius that frames the region as an empty space designated for U.S. possession by divine providence.
This manufactured Pacific
idea what David Palumbo-Liu describes as a “repository of the American imaginary” has borne many names.
3 Amid the nineteenth-century annexation of Hawai‘i and the colonization of the Philippines, politician Whitelaw Reid heralded the ultimate conversion of the Pacific into an “American Lake.”
Monthly Review | The New Cold War on China monthlyreview.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from monthlyreview.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
I. home
When Anar Sabit was in her twenties and living in Vancouver, she liked to tell her friends that people could control their own destinies. Her experience, she was sure, was proof enough.
She had come to Canada in 2014, a bright, confident immigrant from Kuytun, a small city west of the Gobi Desert, in a part of China that is tucked between Kazakhstan, Siberia, and Mongolia. “Kuytun” means “cold” in Mongolian; legend has it that Genghis Khan’s men, stationed there one frigid winter, shouted the word as they shivered. During Sabit’s childhood, the city was an underdeveloped colonial outpost in a contested region that locals called East Turkestan. The territory had been annexed by imperial China in the eighteenth century, but on two occasions it broke away, before Mao retook it, in the nineteen-forties. In Beijing, it was called New Frontier, or Xinjiang: an untamed borderland.
On April 1, 1969, delegates to the Ninth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party convened in the Great Hall of the People on the western flank of Tiananmen Square. The hall had been constructed as one of the Ten Grand Edifices 十大建築 hastily constructed to celebrate the first decade of the People’s Republic of China in 1959. It was used for major meetings of the socialist party-state ever since.
Enemies of the twenty-year-old Communist regime in Beijing were everywhere. In the atmosphere of extreme paranoia that marked the Cultural Revolution years (from its ideological inception in 1964 to its denouement in late 1978), unless something appeared in the pages of the
El régimen de Xi Jinping detuvo a un ejecutivo de Tencent, la empresa más valiosa de China infobae.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from infobae.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.