Beware passivity propaganda: China and the Left in the times of Trump 2.0

by Gerald Roche

Every day of the second Trump presidency brings new, disgusting surprises. Many people are, rightly, feeling disoriented by the constant onslaught of very bad, and quite often incredibly weird, news. However, we need to go past the noise to the signal beneath: the driving forces of racism, misogyny, ableism, transphobia and all the other forms of violence that give structure to the erratic, far Right agenda we see unfolding before us.

One reason we need to do this is so we can be alert to the more subtle and counter-intuitive impacts of the second Trump presidency, particularly with the way that it will co-opt and weaponize sections of the Left against itself. My aim here is to look at one example that we saw during the first Trump presidency, and that I expect will proliferate again: the spread of what I call passivity propaganda (a term inspired by Irene Bruna Seu’s work on passivity generation).

Passivity propaganda is the lowest hanging fruit on the propaganda tree. To succeed, it just needs to convince you to do nothing. Passivity propaganda asks you to not help people you will never meet, in a place on the other side of the world, where you will almost certainly never set foot. It’s a small ask, and it works.

Here’s two typical examples.

Far away, a protest breaks out. Crowds amass in the streets, calling for freedom. Protestors take to social media, calling for support. As your thumb hovers above a post to share it, a passivity propagandist appears, saying: ‘This is fake news!’

Another example: a report is released, by some journalists, or a non-profit organization, or a team of academics. It details abuses and atrocities, targeting a group of people simply because of who they are. The authors call for visibility for the victims, and accountability for the perpetrators. As you prepare to spread the news, a passivity propagandist appears, saying: ‘Don’t be fooled by these lies!’

Passivity propaganda always appears to block an appeal. The sociologist Stanley Cohen explains what an appeal looks like: ‘Look at this! Listen to what we are telling you. If you didn’t already know about it, now you have no excuse for not knowing. If you don’t care about it, you should. Something can be done. You can and should do something.’ A successful appeal might ‘get the message across’, ‘wake people up’, or ‘get through to them’. It might even drive people to take action: to donate money, educate themselves, or protest.

Passivity propagandists want appeals to fail.

Passivity propaganda is produced by all sorts of people across the political spectrum. There is, of course, plenty of passivity propaganda on the Right, encouraging us to sit back and enjoy the status quo as it grinds the vulnerable into dust and hurtles us towards social implosion and ecosystem collapse. However, what I want to talk about here is our own passivity propaganda – a particular type of Left passivity propaganda. I’m talking about the passivity propaganda of pseudo-anti-imperialism.

Unpacking pseudo-anti-imperialism

Pseudo-anti-imperialism adopts a US-centered view of the world. Only the US is an empire, and anti-imperialism means only opposing the USA. Opposing the USA, in turn, involves supporting states that are considered viable challengers to its hegemony, such as Russia, China, and Iran. Within this logic, anything that reflects negatively on these challenger regimes is always and only support for US empire. The role that passivity propaganda plays here is to prevent people on the Left from responding to appeals that might make Russia, China or Iran look bad.

There is a long tradition of writing against pseudo-anti-imperialism from Left perspectives. Scholar and trade-unionist Rohini Hensman has produced the most detailed and sustained analysis of pseudo-anti-imperialism in her book Indefensible: Democracy, Counter-Revolution, and the Rhetoric of Anti-Imperialism. Hensman offers us a very useful definition of pseudo-anti-imperialism: ‘Genuine anti-imperialists oppose all imperialisms, while pseudo-anti-imperialists oppose some while supporting others.’ Her book offers a historical overview of the development of pseudo-anti-imperialism, from debates in the Soviet Union, up to an analysis of the conflict in Syria. She also situates the arguments of pseudo-anti-imperialists within broader debates about imperialism on the Left, and suggests that promoting democracy and internationalism can counter the harmful effects of pseudo-anti-imperialism.

Gilbert Achcar, a socialist and political theorist, has written about what he calls ‘the anti-Imperialism of fools’ in relation to conflicts in North Africa and the Middle East. He traces the roots of Western ‘political confusion about the meaning of anti-imperialism’ across the Cold War and into the present, examining how it has impacted decisions to support or oppose different factions in conflicts in Libya and Syria. He argues that in order to parse these debates fairly, we need to focus on peoples’ right to self-determination, and adopt a consistent stance of opposition to imperialism by all states.

More recently, we have seen an important contribution to these discussions from Kavita Krishnan, women’s activist and former politburo member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist) Liberation. Writing in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Krishnan has argued that fascists and authoritarians have co-opted the Leftist rhetoric of multipolarity to justify aggression and ongoing colonialism by Russia and China. For these states, ‘multipolarity’ simply means that they should be left alone to carry out their programs of violence. Krishnan calls on us to abandon the rhetoric of multipolarity as ‘the language of tyrants,’ and to reorient our moral compass towards the victims of genocide and other forms of state violence.

In the work of these and other authors, much more space has been given to exploring Russia’s place in the logic of pseudo-anti-imperialism. Here, I want to turn my attention to passivity propaganda produced by pseudo-anti-imperialists that deflects attention from state violence in China. We saw a lot of this in the first Trump presidency, and we’re going to see more of it this time round.

China, pseudo-anti-imperialism, and passivity propaganda

China provides a useful case study of pseudo-anti-imperialist logic because the modern Chinese state is an imperial project, by any meaningful definition of the term. The China of today is 1.4 billion people in a land mass just slightly smaller than Europe, speaking around 300 languages. It is a continent, not a country. China’s borders were largely established during a spate of imperial expansion that took place in response to Russian colonization of Siberia and Central Asia, and was fueled by silver and spuds stolen from South America by the Spanish and Portuguese. Despite losing control of ‘outer’ Mongolia, this empire largely escaped dismemberment by the United Nations due to a loophole that allowed land-based empires to survive decolonization. As a result, over half of China’s landmass is occupied territory of colonized peoples: Tibetans, Uyghurs, Mongolians, and others. Colonial boarding schools, mass incarceration, criminalization of dissent, structural and interpersonal racism, false accusations of terrorism, and a host of assimilatory policies are the tools of contemporary colonialism in China.

All of this is enabled and justified by widespread passivity propaganda from pseudo-anti-imperialists.

I’ve long been aware of low-level, background passivity propaganda in Leftist circles, because I’m a Leftist and a critic of the Chinese state. Having lived in China, and researched minority language politics, I’ve seen Chinese state violence firsthand. Over the years I’ve encountered passivity propagandists telling me that supporting decolonization in Tibet makes me a CIA stooge, or part of a George Soros color revolution.

But passivity propaganda aiming to deflect criticism from China clearly went into overdrive during the first Trump presidency in 2017, when news of the growing Xinjiang crisis began appearing. Later, as Trump rolled out his trade war, and then the pandemic hit, Left passivity propaganda ramped up, driven by a tortuous new form of pseudo-anti-imperialist logic. If Trump, a white-supremacist at the helm of the US empire, was against China, then any criticism of China, from red-baiting Rightist tirades to Leftist appeals against state violence, must be Sinophobic imperialist apologia.

A few examples will demonstrate this dynamic.

In June 2020, when Ash ‘literally a communist’ Sarkar appealed for people to support divestment from companies that were complicit in oppressing Uyghurs, passivity propagandists piled on: ‘for a commie, you sure do love spreading western propaganda about one of the only established communist states in the world’; ‘​​Shameful anti-China propaganda directly from the White House via the CIA playbook’; ‘you've swallowed a serious volume of sinophobic propaganda here’; ‘This is pathetic regurgitation of imperialist propaganda. Shame on you’; ‘Fake news’; ‘Fuck you’; ‘Shill’.

But it’s not just hammer and sickle reply guys who push passivity propaganda. Often, it is peddled by people with far more influence.

Take, for example, an incident in August 2020 when we saw passivity propaganda coming from Nick Estes, author of Our History is the Future and host of the Red Nation podcast. In response to a tweet claiming ‘China is a settler colonial state’ and outlining similarities between the US and China as colonial powers, Estes quote-tweeted: ‘Orientalism is a helluva drug. Just say no.’ In the ensuing flurry of replies, he claimed that the original tweet was ‘racist,’ and aligned with ‘growing anti-China warmongering.’ In response to an appeal for an analysis of China as a colonial power, Estes promoted passivity.

In another example, in April 2023, musician, film director, and communist Boots Riley decided to share his views on Tibet: ‘b4 China and its democratic reforms came in, the Dalai Lama and other Lamas controlled enslaved serfs, and kidnapped kids to force them into his personal dance troupe.’ Over the next few days, he continued to argue, link-bomb, and share screenshots of interesting posts he’d found on Quora, to justify China’s invasion and occupation of Tibet. Any efforts to promote decolonization, independence, or freedom for Tibetans, he said amounted to ‘bringing back the Lamas – the former slaveowners – as the rulers.’

Bringing us into the present, we find blogger Caitlin Johnstone declaring that ‘only pathetic bootlickers spend their energy criticizing China.’ Caitlin had an image of the Tiananmen tank man as her Twitter banner back in 2016, but has since had a conversion experience, and has spent several years churning out passivity propaganda, co-authored by her husband Tim Foley. The story promoted here is simple and repeated often: everything negative about China is a lie, part of an ‘anti-China narrative’, serving only to prepare the way for an eventual US war against China.

The mechanics of passivity propaganda

So, now we’ve seen a few examples of passivity propaganda, and we understand its underlying pseudo-anti-imperialist logic, let’s dive into the mechanics of how it works, drawing on academic research into propaganda. Remember that passivity propaganda has a simple aim. It wants you to reject an appeal: to do nothing in response to a request for you to do something. It uses several well-established techniques to achieve that aim.

First of all, passivity propaganda works by sowing doubt. This technique was first perfected by the tobacco industry, and is now widely associated with climate denialism. As Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway point out in their book Merchants of Doubt, it was developed by Right-wing pro-business lobbies in the US during the Cold War. Passivity propaganda doesn’t really need to present a convincing alternative to the facts that are used to support an appeal, it just has to make you pause long enough for the appeal to move out of view, carried away by the endless torrential stream of our social media feeds.

However, it’s important to note that when passivity propaganda does present facts, those facts are often true. Like most propaganda, passivity propaganda doesn’t necessarily deceive by spreading lies. It deceives by promoting misleading interpretations of real facts. Boots Riley’s arguments are a good example of this. Did some Tibetans own slaves? Yes, they did. Does this mean that advocating Tibetan decolonization promotes slavery? It absolutely does not.

While sowing doubt and offering misleading interpretations of actual facts, passivity propaganda also often undermines appeals by ‘shooting the messenger’. This involves targeting the person delivering the appeal as an unreliable source, typically by claiming that the source is either incompetent or insincere. Look at the responses to Ash Sarkar above.

Like all propaganda, passivity propaganda works by appealing to our emotions. Most propaganda uses fear and hate, but joy and love are also used. Passivity propaganda, however, primarily provokes emotions like contempt, disgust, scorn, or disdain. They combine a negative appraisal with a hint of pity, all targeting the source of the appeal, thus diverting our sympathy from the victims of state violence. At the same time, the propagandist, and anyone who successfully resists the appeal, is made to seem superior. Passivity propaganda therefore works by giving people a little self-esteem boost whenever they reject an appeal, making them feel like they’ve outsmarted someone.

Often, the self-esteem boost of rejecting an appeal comes with a strong dose of anti-intellectualism – a cornerstone of fascist ideology and propaganda. Like book-burning Nazis or conservatives railing against ‘cultural Marxism’, passivity propagandists often attack academics and journalists as a collective. The self-confidence of the passivity propagandist is given precedence over the knowledge, experience, or expertise of public intellectuals (for example, the ability to read source materials in relevant languages).

This fascist trope fits snugly with other reactionary dimensions of passivity propaganda. In their efforts to suppress appeals, passivity propagandists make widespread appeal to what political theorist Albert Hirschman, in his book The Rhetoric of Reaction, called the ‘perversity thesis’. This argument, typically used by conservatives, claims that any effort to remedy a condition will only make it worse. We see this, for example, in the claim that Sarkar’s call to oppose Uyghur oppression would actually promote imperialism.

Manufacturing Consent in the 21st century

Sowing doubt, making misleading interpretations of facts, shooting messengers, provoking contempt, engaging in anti-intellectualism and evoking the perversity thesis are the primary mechanisms that passivity propaganda uses to influence you as the target of an appeal. It aims to inhibit action and discourage you from responding to the appeal. But passivity propaganda also works on another level, to shape public discourses that make future appeals less likely to succeed, while also inhibiting others from making similar appeals. To understand how this works, we have to look at the idea of flak, as discussed by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in their book Manufacturing Consent.

I’m somewhat reluctant to draw on this source, because Herman is a serial genocide denier, and Chomsky has a patchy record in this regard. However, I think there are good reasons to look at this work. Pseudo-anti-imperialists often reach for Manufacturing Consent to justify their passivity propaganda. A close reading of their favorite tome reveals something important about the logic of pseudo-anti-imperialist propaganda. But for that to work, we need to bring this book into the twenty-first century.

Manufacturing Consent was published in 1988. Focusing on the Cold War, Herman and Chomsky’s book argued that US corporate media functioned as regime propaganda by projecting a biased view of events to the American public. This bias was generated by five ‘filters’: centralized ownership, reliance on advertising revenue, dependence on sources produced by government and lobbyists, flak (negative public feedback), and anti-communist fear-mongering. The aim of presenting this biased view was, as the book’s title suggests, to manufacture consent for US conflicts abroad (of the sort documented by Vincent Bevins in his book The Jakarta Method).

Herman and Chomsky’s book offers no indication that either of them saw the epochal events of the late 1980s and early 1990s coming: the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the emergence of a new world order. Nor did they seem to see the massive technological upheavals that were approaching. Instead, they conclude their book by discussing the revolutionary potential for community radio and cable TV to contest mainstream media bias, completely overlooking the transformative potential of the internet that was emerging at the time.

We have to take these political and technological developments into account if we want Herman and Chomsky’s arguments to apply today. The media ecosystem of today is infinitely more complex than the legacy landscape dominated by TV and newspapers that Herman and Chomsky describe. We now have a plethora of new platforms and mediums, and instead of a handful of US corporate media outlets competing for American advertising dollars, we have a multitude of voices competing for the harangued and harrowed attention of global publics: Russia Today, Al Jazeera, China Global Television Network, Rappler, Press TV, and Breitbart, Breakthrough News, and Greyzone, to say nothing of Joe Rogan and Russell Brand.

The idea of a single media conglomerate manufacturing consent for only one state makes no sense in this new reality. Instead, we need to think about multiple agents, competing to manufacture consent in service of a host of different interests. And that’s where flak comes in.

Flak, Herman and Chomsky tell us, refers to ‘negative responses to a media statement or program,’ and can take the form of ‘complaint, threat, and punitive action.’ They show how, during the Cold War, flak helped produce biased media reporting that manufactured consent for US aggression. Flak today works the same way on social media, but serves much more diverse interests. Although it can support US agendas and manufacture consent for US interventions, it can also produce bias that enables, condones, and conceals the violence of other states, thus manufacturing consent for their agendas. When passivity propagandists try to block appeals from or for victims of state violence, they are generating flak that manufactures consent for that violence and enables it to continue.

Producing flak relies on a logic of scale: a few voices crying in the wilderness is not flak. Instead, passivity propaganda requires masses of people to produce flak, and so it actively aims to build community at the same time that it crushes appeals. We can turn to classical theories of propaganda to see how this works, with the work of French sociologist Jacques Ellul, and his book Propaganda.

Ellul makes a few simple contrasts that show how propaganda builds community. First, he presents a distinction between political propaganda which aims to spread a straight-forward political message, with sociological propaganda, which works more subtly to create and entrench group norms. Passivity propaganda is sociological insofar as it aims to create group norms that systematically reject appeals from certain sources. Secondly, Ellul contrasts agitation propaganda, which aims to drive people to action, with the propaganda of integration, which aims to stabilize, unify, and reinforce group structure. Passivity propaganda, in these terms, is a form of integration propaganda. Finally, he contrasts vertical propaganda, which emerges from a centralized source, with horizontal propaganda, which is exchanged amongst members of a group: passivity propaganda belongs primarily in the second category. So, in addition to blocking appeals, passivity propaganda builds community by creating norms, integrating individuals, and strengthening horizontal bonds.

And this is where we can start to see why passivity propaganda is so problematic for the broader Left. Passivity propaganda creates a community of Leftists whose primary aim is to discourage people from responding to appeals from victims of state violence. This goal is corrosive to one of the most fundamental, widely-shared values across the Left: solidarity.

Against passivity propaganda

The appeals for acknowledgment, action, and material support that passivity propaganda aims to crush, are appeals for solidarity. In his book Direct Action: An Ethnography, the late David Graeber describes solidarity as ‘a freely chosen decision to defer to the motives or imperatives of others.’ Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Astra Taylor see solidarity as ‘the recognition of our inherent interconnectedness, an attempt to build bonds of commonality across our differences… forging new communities, developing shared visions, and building power to push for social change.’ These definitions of solidarity focus on difference, deference and interconnection. They ask us to consider how everyone’s liberation is bound up in each other’s. No definition of solidarity I’ve come across asks us to abandon the oppressed and attack people who stand with them. Instead, it’s supposed to be peace among ourselves, and war to the tyrants – presumably that means all tyrants.

In place of solidarity, passivity propaganda offers us what the political theorist Norman Geras has called a ‘contract of mutual indifference’:

‘If you do not come to the aid of others who are under grave assault, in acute danger or crying need, you cannot reasonably expect others to come to your aid in similar emergency; you cannot consider them so obligated to you. Other people, equally, unmoved by the emergencies of others, cannot reasonably expect to be helped in deep trouble themselves, or consider others obligated to help them.’

This is the opposite of solidarity, and it has no place on the Left.

Passivity propaganda also has another pernicious impact on the Left. In defending state violence and authoritarian politics, pseudo-anti-imperialist passivity propaganda also restricts the horizons of liberation that we are able to imagine and work towards. Instead of encouraging us to imagine worlds without domination and violence where we can all be free, passivity propaganda creates justifications for authoritarianism and normalizes violence against minorities and dissidents. It sustains the idea that some people simply have to be sacrificed on the altar of the common good. Whenever we allow ourselves to be persuaded by passivity propaganda, we are therefore not only working against our most important political values – we are also putting up barriers to our own liberation.

What, then, should we do in the face of passivity propaganda and its corrosive program? The answer lies in more solidarity and less cynicism: more mutual-defense and less indifference. We must refuse to abandon those who are assaulted by state violence, no matter where in the world they are, and direct our solidarity to people, not states. Our solidarity, our internationalism, and our care for each other will make us all stronger, and help us imagine a world of real freedom for all of us. In the unsettling years to come, we will likely need all the strength and imaginative excellence we can muster.

Gerald Roche is a political anthropologist, and lectures in linguistics at a university on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Federation. You can find him online at @geraldroche.bsky.social