‘The Coming War on China’ Discloses America’s Secret Military History in the Pacific

Is China the “new enemy” of the United States?

“The Coming War on China,” a documentary by award-winning journalist and filmmaker John Pilger, seeks to answer this question. The film, made over two years across the Pacific, exposes how U.S. military buildup has encircled China in what one strategist calls “a perfect noose.”

Watch the trailer below:

“Using rare archive and remarkable interviews with witnesses, Pilger’s film discloses America’s secret history in the region – the destruction wrought by the equivalent of one Hiroshima every day for 12 years, and the top secret ‘Project 4.1’ that made guinea pigs of the population of the Marshall Islands,” a press release for the film says. “In key interviews from Pentagon war planners to members of China’s confident new political class, who rarely feature in Western reports, Pilger’s film challenges the notion and propaganda of China as the ‘new enemy’ of the United States.”

It’s a topic Pilger has covered before. “Like the renewal of post-Soviet Russia, the rise of China as an economic power is declared an ‘existential threat’ to the divine right of the United States to rule and dominate human affairs,” Pilger recently wrote. He goes on to detail how local communities are resisting U.S. naval buildup, a topic also covered in the documentary:

There are military aircraft constantly in the sky over Okinawa; they sometimes crash into homes and schools. People cannot sleep, teachers cannot teach. Wherever they go in their own country, they are fenced in and told to keep out.

A popular Okinawan anti-base movement has been growing since a 12-year-old girl was gang-raped by US troops in 1995. It was one of hundreds of such crimes, many of them never prosecuted. Barely acknowledged in the wider world, the resistance has seen the election of Japan’s first anti-base governor, Takeshi Onaga, and presented an unfamiliar hurdle to the Tokyo government and the ultra-nationalist prime minister Shinzo Abe’s plans to repeal Japan’s “peace constitution”.

The resistance includes Fumiko Shimabukuro, aged 87, a survivor of the Second World War when a quarter of Okinawans died in the American invasion. Fumiko and hundreds of others took refuge in beautiful Henoko Bay, which she is now fighting to save. The US wants to destroy the bay in order to extend runways for its bombers. “We have a choice,” she said, “silence or life.” As we gathered peacefully outside the US base, Camp Schwab, giant Sea Stallion helicopters hovered over us for no reason other than to intimidate.

“The world’s attention and fortunes are shifting east, and America’s dominance is ending. Once subjugated, scorned and impoverished, China is rising inexorably as the world’s banker, manufacturer and builder,” the documentary states. “Will all this be allowed to happen peacefully?”

A DVD of the documentary is available from Bullfrog Films.

—Posted by Emma Niles