The West's Anti-China Memetic Narratives

Construction and Deployment of Pseudo-Informational Memetic Threat Narratives

Pseudo-informational narratives and their associated, and constituent, replicating conceptual and schematic memes can easily become fixed in people’s consciousness, memory, and cognition (Deacon, 2004; Podos et al., 2004). Propagandists and political narratologists rely upon this, just as religious institutions and monarchs have done (albeit less theoretically formally) throughout history (Benford, 2002; Mcbeth et al., 2007; Sterelny, 2018; Vicario et al., 2016).

The usual confirmation and cognitive biases contribute to the cognitive embedding of pseudo-information: rather than deploying critical thought, people believe what makes them comfortable emotionally, what fits with their preconceptions, and what affirms their dearly held beliefs. Both the absence of critical thinking capabilities as well as defective metacognitive processes and habits, help to embed propagandist threat memes as high-order (consciously articulated and seated in the pre-frontal cortex and associated high level cognitive processing centres) pseudo-informational cognitive representations (Mahmood et al., 2016; Thompson et al., 2011; Wright, 2002).

Evolutionary psychology of the emotions and cognition provides a good explanatory basis for why such memes are so easily consumed and established as doxastic and pseudo-epistemic content. The misinformation of such memes can serve pragmatic social and emotional purposes conducive to local survivability. It does not matter if what one believes does not track reality, so long as it tracks the reality that it makes one socially acceptable and makes one feel emotionally and socially secure pursuant to a healthy level of function.

Moreover, people are not good at distinguishing information source sets that are pseudo-informational (essentially – fictional or partly fictional) or misinformational, from proper informational sources. This is especially the case where it is necessary to discern the informational fidelity and quality of multiple upstream information sources. At minimum, information consumers fail to distinguish a set of sources all fed by one common source, from a set of sources fed by multiple independent upstream sources (Yousif et al., 2019).

Historical scientists and anthropologists have long known about this problem, as have journalists and archaeologists. Publicly verifiable source checking and cross validation is essential for all sciences. It is a significant part of the basis of the recent crisis in replication and reproducibility in the psychological science. Not enough replication studies are attempted to verify sources and experiment quality, and information sources that do not fit the experimental objectives are discarded (Schooler, 2014; Simmons et al., 2011).

Perception of symbolic threat and realistic threat, when combined with misinformation and flawed epistemic beliefs, can markedly influence behaviour. Once such targeted misinformation takes root via metacognitive and cognitive information processing, it can easily interact with existing trait anxiety in persons with trait anxious pathologies, and can induce, and interact with, state anxiety in healthy persons (Bishop, 2009; Egloff & Hock, 2001; Graham et al., 2009; MacLeod & Mathews, 1988). There are other interactions with emotional intelligence, general intelligence, and personality type. However, for the most part, anxiety will come to be associated with perceived threat, and repetition and saturation (in the media, for example) drive this dynamic further.

One notable feature of propagandist misinformation is that it is double-edged with respect to anxiety. It is designed to induce uncertainty when uncertainty will produce stress and ego depletion. At the same time it is designed to induce certainty with respect to false threats, or misinformation about threats. This is commonly achieved by promoting the illusion of intergroup and out group threat (Riek et al., 2006). If propagandist meme-makers and political narratologists can make people fear with certainty that another group desires to harm them, and that this will make the future of the propaganda consumer uncertain, then the propagandist has won a double victory over the minds of the target audience of intended meme and narrative consumers.

The Western Anti-China Threat Narrative and Memes

The US and Australia's current Anti-China propaganda narratives are rooted in the pseudo-information of other narratives and ideological memes, including (but not limited to) those embodying/encapsulating:

1. Anti-socialist moral panic and symbolic threat

2. Anti-atheist moral panic and symbolic threat

3. Economic and symbolic threat status promoted by Australian (and British and US) powerful establishment agents (AKA the threat to Australian sovereignty narrative)

In very practical terms, all three of these are so misinformational in their recent construction and presentation by Australian politicians and anti-China commentators that the beliefs that they promote can be correctly described as delusional. The fact that they are also designed, in accordance with the descriptions in the previous section, to produce anxiety, also means that the resulting beliefs can be technically called paranoid.

(1) is an overly simplistic re-hashing of the yellow-perilist and McCarthyist rhetoric and concepts of the Cold War of the late 20th Century. Those ideas form the basis of a well-established set of misinformational Western ideological anxiety memes. It is a narrative that embodies blatant pseudo-informational fear mongering, increasingly pursuant to war mongering in the irresponsible and irrational speeches of the doctrinally atavistic, and evidently delusional, Michael Pompeo (pseudo-information is essentially fiction, whereas misinformation can be a mixture of fact and fiction, and both can incorporate noise).

It has been abundantly clear to economic theorists since the late 1980s that the project of engagement initiated by Deng Xiaoping has resulted in a Communist China with a very different economic structure and outlook to the old Soviet Union, but with all of the technological capabilities of the CCCP (Soyuz Savietski Satialitseskik Respublic, or Union of Soviet Socialist Republics). It is far more reasonable to adduce that the real reason for so much neo-McCarthyist chagrin expressed in the Western media is the jealousy of the Western capitalist establishment.

The very late 20th century’s Cold War socialist bogeyman mastered capitalism on a global scale. China was encouraged - required, in fact - by the West to do so (often to the detriment of Chinese people working in conditions and for pay that Western companies would never have been able get past regulators in the West.) China has mastered the global and domestic economic prowess that was demanded of it, and exceeded expectations with astonishing, rapidity, discipline and drive. However, China didn’t abandon its socialist political and ideological mores as was – rather arrogantly - expected by Western theorists, ideologues, and politicians. For this the West seeks to punish China.

It is this status of playing by the rules on an uneven playing field and winning that is the real root of the Western establishment’s bemoaning of China’s rise. Not theft of IP, nor threat of some kind of regional dominance, but ideological and cultural (and especially religio-cultural) robustness.

(2) is just as deeply ingrained in the Western psyche as the misinformational socialist threat-meme, and forms a deeply-ingrained, and deeply bigoted, religio-cultural basis of the associated moral panic and symbolic threat memes. The continuous, and undeniably infantile, faith-fundamentalist rhetoric of the US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo has left little doubt about the anti-CPC qua anti-atheist nature of this misinformational threat narrative.

The admixture of ancient, arcane, deeply bigoted, and bizarre pseudo-informational religious doctrinal memes with contemporary nationalist, technocratic, economic and political narratives makes for an embarrassing and dangerous misinformational repertoire. The CPC are godless, says Pompeo, deploying his deeply bigoted and delusional religionist memes, and so they don’t deserve respect. China must be surrounded, contained, and – essentially – conquered.

Pompeo’s insane Christian crusade-like discourses would be comical, if it weren’t for the current activities of the US military and navy in the South China Sea. The associated ‘surround and contain’ rhetoric of the US and her allies has been so constant and derogatory as to be deeply dehumanising of the CPC membership. It is far more worrying than the false and misinformational narratives propitiated by the US State Department about the true basis and nature of the much needed anti-terror re-education facilities of Xinjiang.

(3) is a more recent addition to the other two pseudo-informational fear narratives. It is so crude as to be transparently desperate and careless. It essentially boils down to the claim that China wants to steal all of the West’s stuff, like some global-marketplace red-masked bandit. Associated claims of IP and technology theft have been openly and successfully debunked, and mocked and derided by Chinese diplomats, Western commentators, and by a vast on line army of voluntary ‘wu mao’. The latter group are proud to point out that often claims of IP theft involve technologies that, in China, are well developed and accompanied by advanced technical sophistication and massive infrastructure (China’s high speed rail system, for example) while the US and Commonwealth have no equivalent developments domestically.

Was Australia really expecting China to not ever retaliate for all of the defamatory political posturing and duplicitous bigotry that they’ve been subjected to? (Not to mention the presence of the Australian navy in the South China Sea as part of the US’ red-perilist and highly intrusive sabre-rattling initiative.) Apparently so. However, this seems to simply indicate that Australian politicos and propaganda-narrative spin doctors have bought and believed their own delusional pseudo-informational narratives. Not a good look, but perhaps to be expected from a nation whose elected Prime Minister belongs to a mega-cult whose members believe that they can speak to what they believe are actual angels in unknown languages.

China’s recent space program successes and robotic arrival on the moon really should have put paid to such nonsense already. If it turns out that the claims of optical quantum supercomputing are veracious too, then it’s really game-over despite any of Michael Pompeo’s lunatic spin. Demonising and misinformational memetic propaganda narratives don’t withstand such concrete outcomes at all well, and so fear mongering by way of misinformational anxiety memes is the only option left.

One can only hope that a new US Biden administration will bring sobriety and sensitivity to US-Sino relations. The withdrawal of the US navy and task force from the South China Sea would seem to be a necessary first step to repairing relations damaged by continuous bigotry, name calling, and – perhaps most worryingly – duplicity - on the part of the West. However, Australia’s links to, and continued political subservience to, its Commonwealth master Great Britain, suggest that the nation is perhaps far more vulnerable than even the US to a set of stubborn racist and religious anti-China bigotries: bigotries which keep resurfacing in the British media and political sphere, with a British commentator recently calling for the re-acquisition and carving up of China’s territories by a new 8 nation alliance.

The persistent fact is China that is not demonstrating any of the colonialist and imperialist tendencies that have been the hallmark of Western nations for the last half-millennia. China’s main sin is its prosperity and its refusal to acquiesce to religious bigotry and ideological and cultural bullying. Bullies and bigots do not like to be resisted, but it is what they need, and deserve. It is the right thing to do.

References

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