War: What is it Good For?

When China Does it, it's good for everyone

A Civil War, two World Wars, the Korean and Vietnam Wars, a war on terror, two wars in Iraq, the War in Afghanistan, the war on Drugs, a war on homelessness, a coming war in Iran, a current trade War, and on and on it goes, it seems the USA has been involved in a lot of wars, they are both internal and external. I just searched two words: “War on...” and all these options turned up for me.

When I did the same search, slightly differently worded, “China’s war on...” I got a very interesting thing: China’s war on drugs, war on poverty, war on pollution, war on corruption. None of them involved mass killings, bombings in other countries or training of soldiers, police officers, Federal Agents or any other person to kill, they all focused on improvements.

You might have started start reading or watching this because you think I’m going to describe how China’s military is expanding at a worrying rate, how it’s being forceful in the South China Seas, how it’s threatening Taiwan with military take over and, if you are, I’m sorry, you’re on the wrong channel, this is not that kind of description at all. But if you stick around long enough, you’re going to find there is something very special about China and it’s not something we’re used to seeing, at least not since the earliest recordings of the Greek and Roman Empires started to record Western history.

This is about other wars - so, wherever you are, welcome to my take on China and in this one I’m going to look at the difference between China’s wars and in particular, the positive affect they have on people. However, in order to talk about China’s modern wars, we need to look back a little at where China stood historically.

Over the years I’ve lived in China I’ve had the understanding that the Chinese are not a warlike people, the country has been to war only once in my lifetime and it lasted less than a month. It was an invasion, it wasn’t an occupation, it had a purpose and it served the purpose - unfortunately many people on both sides died but fortunately, it’s never been repeated. China has expressed no interest in war - it’s expressed no interest in reopening the Civil War in which it lost political control of the island of Taiwan, the entire world recognises Taiwan is part of China and China is ok with that, it looks for, seeks and desires reunification but has expressed time and time again that it will not force that reunion - it has made clear however, it will never allow Taiwan to be taken away and, if anyone does attempt to take it away, then China will reopen the Civil War and it will fulfil its destiny of a unified country.

Before we get into the modern wars that China has fought, and is still fighting, let’s look at the history of China in the modern era - going back to the First World War, the first major global conflict after the fall of the Qing Dynasty. China was weak, it had been invaded and occupied and in places where there were no foreign influences such as Japan, the UK, the USA, Italy, Germany and others, there were still warlords, there were several potential leaders for the Nationalist Party and it seems none could agree the direction China should go.

China didn’t start, or even look for the first world war, it was already an occupied country and Germany was one of the occupiers, Japan was another, China was broken, its systems were torn apart, there was a government in Beijing there was another in Guangzhou, there was the occupying forces of the Japanese Imperial Army and a puppet government in the North East, Dongbei as we now call it, Manchuria as it was once known and Manchukuo as it was called then and there were various Warlords scattered around the country. It was not a good situation.

China was, to all intents and purposes in political chaos. When the First World War broke out China was neutral, when the US entered the war, they encouraged China to revoke their neutrality but the country didn’t really want to be involved in a Western War, what it did want, and eventually got, was the German sections back, however it didn’t get them at that time, because Japan held them and didn’t give them back until after they were defeated in the Second World War - this is just a very brief explanation of what China did because it brings us to a broader context of China’s nature and attitude to war.

The country had been, until the 1850s, the most powerful in Asia but it achieved that without wars, it achieved it through administrative excellence, neighbours such as Korea and Vietnam adopting Chinese ways and literally being protected, but when that protection was needed, Chinese power had already been lost - the British had taken Hong Kong, parts of Shanghai, the Japanese had taken what we now call Dongbei, the Germans, Italians and French all had their enclaves and China itself, although enriching many western countries, was a mass of poverty, without influence or power in the region. Japan had industrialised and taken over parts of China, some of it from the Russians who were going through their own problems at the time, and some of it from the Chinese who had no real means of resistance. As soon as war broke out, Japan sensed an opportunity to expand its holdings in China’s Mainland and took over all the German sites, the most important of which was Qingdao.

When China did eventually enter the 1st World War, it was as labourers not military. We all know about the massive complex of trenches which epitomise the Great War but we’ve either forgotten, or the history books have neglected to tell us who dug many of them - it wasn’t all Australians who earned the nickname diggers, nor was it the sappers who tunnelled under the trenches, it was Chinese labourers. As they were at the time a neutral country, they worked under a commercial arrangement. However, in February 1917, 500 Chinese laborers aboard the French ship Athos were killed when a U-boat torpedoed the ship and this encouraged China to revoke its neutrality, China declared war on Germany on August 14, 1917 and entered the war - but they still, at no stage sent soldiers.

Unfortunately, at the end of the war, China did not get their territories back, Japan had been an ally in that war and was colonising many parts of China, including Taiwan and all of the Dongbei region, the major powers saw nothing wrong with this, Japan couldn’t be punished, it was an ally, and because China was not a combatant, it wasn’t rewarded - what a disappointment that must have been to millions of Chinese.

This was reflected in the many protests that occurred during that Era. One of which, after China refused to sign the Treaty of Versailles, was what became known as the May 4th Movement. This is the moment that the Communist Party started to get legs, gather speed and strength, and become a power to be reckoned with.

World War two was very different for two reasons: by this time, China had, not one but two real armies, the Communist Party had built strength and the KMT needed to defend against it, which they seemed far more adept at doing than defending against the invading Japanese. So they both had militaries that could fight. And, or a period during the Second World War, they put aside their differences and fought a common enemy, the Japanese, which was the other important reason why this World War was different to the First one, the Japanese were now the enemy of the allies.

Over the two Wars, China was literally forced to take a side, in both cases, it picked the winning side to align with and in both cases, at the end of the war, it was dumped on by the other, more powerful nations. The benefit it got from being on the winning side of World War Two was getting its territories back from Japan, including the island province of Taiwan and, here’s a controversial take, Japan lost Taiwan, not because giving it back to China was the right thing to do, if that were the case, it would have been returned after the First World War, they only got Taiwan back because the US wanted to punish Japan, in my opinion, Taiwan would probably still be a Japanese colony if the Japanese had not bombed Pearl Harbor, if that were true, the KMT would have had nowhere to flee and there would not be an issue today with the One China Policy. That’s not to say that the People’s Republic of China would not fight to recover it, they most certainly would.

So, that brings me to the end of the history part - it’s time now to consider what China is doing in modern times, what wars they’re fighting and how they have either won them or are winning them.

The moment the CPC came to power they implemented several wars:

Of course there wasn’t a declaration of War on any of them, it’s the US that practices this barbaric naming convention but for the purposes of my audience I’m going to give them names, the first one was

The Human Dignity War:

One of the first pieces of legislation passed was “The Marriage Law of 1950” which explicitly:

Banned concubinage, child betrothal, forced marriage, and bride prices; it established free-choice marriage, monogamy, and equal rights for women; and it enabled women to initiate divorce, this had been unprecedented in many rural areas.

Although no law was passed, a “Notice on Prohibiting Foot binding” was circulated by local governments under central guidance in 1950–1951 meaning that no longer would any girl have her feet bound, it had been tried in the Republican Era and it was still continuing as a practice. It stopped that day. Punishment would be meted out to parents who tried to bind their daughter’s feet.

Another of the CPC’s most decisive early actions was the nationwide anti-opium campaign (1950–1952). On February 24, 1, 1950, the Government Administration Council (the PRC’s cabinet at the time) issued the “Directive on the Prohibition of Opium and Narcotics”*. This directive ordered:

An immediate ban on cultivation, sale, and use of opium, something the Republicans had never done; there was mass closure of opium dens; a rehabilitation program rather than punishment for addicts; and severe punishment (including the death penalty) for traffickers.

By 1952, the campaign was declared successful—China was widely regarded as having eliminated widespread opium addiction for the first time in over a century. This is one of the clearest examples of a centralized, morally framed “war” on a harmful old practices and something the US could easily learn from.

The Urban reform policies between 1949 and 1953) introduced labour regulations that prohibited “degrading” forms of personal service, what this meant was that no human being would ever be required to carry another human, all forms of degrading work were banned and this included prostitution which was effectively banned, there were no punishments but hundreds of brothels in Beijing alone and then across the country were closed down, the workers were encouraged to marry and return home, get jobs or were retrained to be factory, retail or service workers. It’s unlikely that prostitution will ever be eradicated in any society but to this day, it’s still illegal in China and where it operates now, it operates underground.

Perhaps the best way to frame this era, which took place over a short period between 1949 and was completed by 1953 is to divide it into four parts: the War for Human Dignity, which won so much respect around the world at the time but is completely ignored nowadays.

The Communist Party protected Bodily Autonomy: by ending foot binding, prostitution, concubinage and forced marriage

They protected Social Equality: by removing sedan chairs, servant labor, guild hierarchies and what we know as Triads, the secret crime gangs which were prevalent and continued for many years in Hong Kong and Macau, possibly still do. They created Public Health & Rationality: by removing opium and eliminating many superstitions. And they imposed Legal & Moral Order: by eliminating private justice, secret societies, “immoral” entertainment

China had, within three years, effectively won the war on drugs, on prostitution, on organised crime and on labour relations, all of which provided for more Human Dignity but it didn’t stop there.

There was still abject poverty, pollution and there was corruption to be dealt with - the USA had declared that the KMT were one of the most corrupt governments they had dealt with, this is a matter of historical record but contained in US archives. So there was, already endemic corruption at grass roots levels which needed to be cleared out but, human nature, being what it was, when there’s a power vacuum, it’s usually filled with powerful people and corruption did not really get stamped out until recent years - that’s not to say there is no corruption at all, of course there will be, but there is no systemic corruption.

It’s well worth reading what China’s State Council Information Office puts out related to this, the most recent report was this month when they reported on what efforts they’d made in 2025. In their report they announced: “58 high-ranking officials under the supervision of the Communist Party of China Central Committee were probed last year. The crackdown on corruption has also intensified in areas impacting the daily lives of ordinary people. A campaign launched in April 2024 saw 433,000 low-ranking officials disciplined, with 14,000 referred for prosecution.” and, “In its ongoing efforts to track down corrupt fugitives, China has secured the return of 1,306 individuals who had fled abroad and also recovered illicit assets totaling 15.4 billion yuan (about 2.1 billion U.S. dollars) between January and November 2024. And, of course, we’ve seen it in action this week with the US reporting a senior general who was removed for corruption was actually leaking nuclear secrets - something I find extremely difficult to believe for a variety of reasons. I suspect there was nothing more than corruption involved and Washington Post reporting otherwise doesn’t convince me their anonymous sources, reported by persistently incorrect reporter Wei Ling Ling, will change my mind on that. I very much doubt the CIA got their hands on anything at all.

It’s clear that China is winning the war on corruption, meanwhile, the White house is selling pardons which not only enrich the president, they remove the ability for the government to collect restitution for crimes that were penalised - it’s a lot cheaper to buy a pardon, than it is to pay the fines or many major corporate and political criminals.

I don’t think the War on Corruption is won yet but there is not doubt it’s going better than China’s peers and is definitely an improvement on previous years.

China’s War on poverty is a long way from over too - we’re all familiar with the term Poverty Alleviation but that is a recent name given to the project, in the 1950s, it was simply referred to as Land Reform, the principle being a class struggle, and socialist construction, with the belief that poverty was not natural, but the product of feudalism, imperialism, and exploitation. Eliminate those systems, and you eliminate poverty. Therefore land reform was introduced.

People in the West decry China’s early attempts with throw away lines such as “you can never own anything in China” but that’s not at all true. we own our apartment and everything in it. The difference is that we get the land use for 70 years, at the end of 70 years, most of us won’t be around but if we are, or if our children live on the same land, it’s transferred to them on payment of an administrative fee,, a one off cost of a few thousand RMB to get the land name changed for the next 70 years. The land is ours for ever, as long as we live there and here’s the most important thing we don’t pay taxes to do so. Try skipping a few months of taxes in the West and find out who owns the land you live on. This, Land Reform, was perhaps the most important aspect of poverty alleviation the new Chinese government could have instituted

Poverty Alleviation as a project name, came later, with it more land reform to improve conditions but before that could happen, China needed to move from poverty as a country, in order to do so, it instituted more reforms, we came to know as collectivization in Rural Regions and the “Iron Rice Bowl” in the cities, effectively creating agricultural cooperatives while providing guaranteed employment, housing, healthcare, and education through work units or danwei in the cities.” Though not always successful, the system aimed to eliminate unemployment, homelessness, and extreme poverty and here’s a really interesting thing - China has, since 1949 never seen situations such as seen in India, Europe, Latin America and most of Asia - there are no slums, I’ll say that again because the moment I heard this I had to stop and think about it - there are no slums in China, there are no people living in makeshift or temporary shacks from waste materials - there are no slums in China and there have not been since the very early days of the PRC Founding - Until very recently, when the CPC told the Hong Kong government to do something about it, there were still slums there - by very recently, I mean as recently as last year.

Basic housing might have been considered, by todays standards as inadequate, in rural areas it probably lacked running water and even electricity until about 10 years ago but it was always available. Imagine those people attempting to criticise a country rising from poverty yet not one of them can point to a city that has slums like Dharavi in India or Rocinha in Brazil. The CPC, between 1949 and 1953, made certain that every person, no matter what their job, had somewhere they could call home and, to this day, although you can find people who live in the streets, there is not one person in China who can be classified as homeless.

Long before ‘poverty alleviation’ became a technical term measured in yuan or USD per capita, the Communist Party of China treated poverty as a political and moral condition. It was never considered a natural fact. From the moment it took power in 1949, its answer to destitution was never charity and indeed, many critics still use the fact that there are very few charities in China as a major factor of their criticism. However, the reason they are not in China is because they are not needed, what was needed was reform so charities would never be a way to ease poverty, the problem was never about easing it, it was always about how to eliminate it, that needed systemic transformation: take land from the few and give it to the many; abolish servile labor; guarantee work, grain, and shelter. And when illness threatened to plunge families back into poverty, it sent barefoot doctors, often peasant farmers themselves but trained as healers in first aid, vaccinations, acupuncture and antibiotics basically something like a district nurse might have done in the 70s in the UK. These, mostly men, literally walking into the remotest valleys to declare that even the poorest farmer deserved care over a million such “barefoot Doctors were trained and utilised. In this view, eradicating poverty meant eradicating the old order itself, and building dignity from the ground up.

Mao created, Deng reformed, Hu implemented and Xi Jinping delivered. We are watching a continuum of 70 years of solid progress to a state where the country is now recognised as one of the most liveable in the world.

By 2021, the entire country of China had, by World Bank standards and measurement, been lifted out of poverty, the battle was won but the entire War was not, the goal now is Rural Revitalisation, getting more people back into the farms but in jobs and trades that provide a decent income, and then equalising the income so that there is Moderate Prosperity for all. Given the track record so far, it’s highly likely that this will be achieved and can already be seen in the number of rural locations which are now tourist destinations - although there are many of them, one great example of this would be the Rice Terraces of Longji, in Guangxi, it is a mountainous region, steeped in historical poverty but one of the most beautiful parts of China, its iconic rice terraces are familiar to almost everyone who has any interest at all in China. The region is now a bustling tourist destination, there are coffee shops, tourist souvenir shops, there are restaurants and guest houses and tourists flock there at different seasons for different views. The farmers there now use machines, they are no longer subsistence farmers, they must tend to the terraces or tourists will stop coming but they do so now using modern machinery instead of back breaking work, they are also chefs or hosts in restaurants, their wives run guest houses, their kids work in services and the farmer’s job has changed from backbreaking subsistence farming to that of curators of living museums. That’s how China is doing it.

But much of that reduction and elimination of poverty came at an environmental price - critics are always happy to point out that China is dirty, polluted, the water is undrinkable and China creates more pollution than any other. What they don’t realise is how much work has gone on in the next War we’re going to talk about, the war on pollution, or the salvation of the environment in China and it isn’t a recently started war either - it was Hu Jintao who started this one.

By the early 2000s, China’s breakneck growth—fueled by Deng’s reforms—had lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, but at steep costs:

Environmental degradation, in 2004 when I arrived in China there was terrible air and water pollution. We could see it, feel it on our clothing, taste it in the air, there was severe soil erosion and China appeared to be doomed to the kind of environment Dickens wrote about in London 150 years prior. Like Dickens’ period there was rural and urban inequality, there was social dislocation where migrant laborers had few rights, even if they did have good paying jobs (for the environment in which they lived), they also had homes to live in that usually went with their jobs but they had no ability to bring up kids without either long periods of separation or returning to their hometowns in the countryside and a potential return to life of poverty.

In 2003, Hu Jintao introduced his policy of Scientific Development with the key principles being People-centered or “ren ben”. this meant a shift from obsessions with GDP growth to human well-being - it caused a shrinkage in the massive GDP growths that China had already achieved, double digit growth was no longer a target. Return on investment changed from being measured in RMB but measured in improvements to society. Another great criticism of China is that they’ve installed infrastructure where it isn’t needed, bridges to nowhere are not bridges to nowhere, they might be bridges to a remote mountain community of only a few hundred people but the bridge improves their lives, their lifestyles and their incomes, it also allows access to other infrastructure such as schools colleges, hospitals and even train stations so they are no longer a mountain community, they are a Chinese village with access to everything the city dwellers have. The acceptance of this policy in the 2007 Party Constitution and it’s implementation provided for balanced regional development and redirected investment from the wealthy East Coast to central/western provinces. Thus creating a more harmonious society, something very important in Chinese history, it addressed inequality and also dealt with rural corruption which had been causing social tensions. It created ecological responsibility at all levels of governance. Something which continues to this day.

Under Hu, who in my opinion is the most underrated of China’s leaders, there was an Abolition of Agricultural Tax in 2006 which ended 2,600 years of farm levies and returned about 100 billion RMB directly to rural households, he also created a Rural Cooperative Medical Scheme in 2003 which was the precursor to universal health coverage and provided medical insurance for over 800 million rural residents by 2008. He went even further in 2006 when he created a 9 year Compulsory Education Law which fully funded rural schooling, including boarding and transportation costs for remote students.

Hu also expanded the Minimum Livelihood Guarantee or Dibao nationally to cover urban and rural poor. These weren’t just welfare programs—they were structural investments in human dignity, aligning with the earlier themes of the War for Human Dignity as anti-poverty tools

Given that China is now the leading manufacturer and installer of sustainable energy, it’s improved the equality between the rural and urban regions, its created clean skies, clear waters and lush green regions, it’s fought the desert, re-greened arid zones, reforested and rehabilitated a damaged economy, it’s reached carbon peak several years early as is on target to almost certainly be carbon neutral well before the target date of 2060. All because of Hu Jintao.

Whilst still ongoing, China has most assuredly won the war on pollution and ecology and in doing so, has increased the lifestyles as well as the life expectancy of its people.

Better education, better use of land, better ecology and environment, better lifestyles, better health and better wealth are all as a result of China’s wars. more than a billion people are living better lifestyles.

There’s another story we can look deeper into but will be the topic of a different video in the future and that’s a comparison between the USA’s War on Terror, where more than a million have died so far, where tens of millions have been displaced, thrown into poverty and now live as refugees, with China’s War on Terror where millions were re-educated, de-radicalised, rehoused and retrained, where no bombs were dropped and the region, Xinjiang, is now the safest part of China attracting millions of tourists a month. We need to ask ourselves how many tourists are visiting Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Nigeria, Somalia, or anywhere else the US has designated as a haven for terrorism and dropped bombs. The simple fact is, the more bombs you drop, the more enemies you create, the more opportunities you offer, the more friends you make and that’s the difference between China’s wars and Western wars.

USA’s war on drugs has imprisoned millions, it’s enriched a few families who import and manufacture the products causing addition, it’s paid for and continues to pay for black operations by its intelligence services, which leads to more wars.

USA’s war on terror has killed millions and displaced millions more, It continues to enrich the executives, shareholders and investors in weapons manufacturers and has led to total control of the nation’s foreign policy by a few rich industrialists.

The USA’s war on corruption has enriched a few and pardoned those who can afford it, and led to a complete industry that has been legalised and now referred to as lobbying. It’s possible for a rich technocrat to literally tell the President, I’ll give you $100 million dollars if you select my pick as your vice president

USA’s war on pollution does not help the environment, it enriches the oil industry, the oil industry enriches the weapons industry and the weapons industry enriches the military. The government uses its army not to defend its country but to defend the interests of its largest industries, the ones that argue they need to go to the most dangerous parts of the world, without realising, or perhaps they do, that those areas are made all the more dangerous because they’re trespassers there and stealing the resources from the locals.

The USA’s war on education didn’t improve the education standards of the country, it actually reduced them, to the point where Harvard University declares “its scary how far behind American kids have fallen”. Not only have they fallen far behind in kids, they’re dropping out of the top rankings of universities, and those who do qualify for university can’t generally afford it. China gives free university to minorities, it has affordable university for everyone and welcomes foreign students into its system, the US is closing international places, it’s increasing fees because there are less foreign students to pay and it’s making education so bad that half the country can’t read a book written for a 10 year old. China’s education changes conversely, under Mao, has been described as “The Single Greatest Educational Effort in Human History”.

Let’s be honest here, if it’s war you want, China has experience, it has wins and runs on the board but if its lifestyle improvements and a better standard of living, then every country can learn from China.

This is why the future belongs to China and why its critics are running out of anything other than racism and lies to criticise the country.

*《关于严禁鸦片烟毒的通令》