The Coming War on China

media release: When the United States, the world’s biggest military power, decided that China, the second largest economic power, was a threat to its imperial dominance, two-thirds of US naval forces were transferred to Asia and the Pacific. This was the ‘pivot to Asia', announced by President Barack Obama in 2011. China, which in the space of a generation had risen from the chaos of Mao Zedong's ‘Cultural Revolution’ to an economic prosperity that has seen more than 500 million people lifted out of poverty, was suddenly the United States's new enemy.

The build-up of naval forces would reinforce the US's already overwhelmingly superior military position in the region. Seldom referred to in the Western media, 400 American bases surround China with ships, missiles and troops, in an arc that extends from Australia north through the Pacific to Japan, Korea and across Eurasia to Afghanistan and India.

The Coming War on China is John Pilger's 60th documentary and arguably his most prescient. Completed in the month Donald Trump was elected US President, the film investigates the manufacture of a ‘threat’ and the beckoning of a nuclear confrontation..