The US think tank CSIS has released a report about Chinese media in South East Asia. The framing is "interesting" to use a nice word, blatant racist is more accurate, but we'll get to that. The accusation of CSIS is that China had "weaponized the information space across the Indo-Pacific to undermine regional support for the United States". This is wrong on so many levels: 1. The US is the outsider to the region. The US has no border to South East Asia, the closest is the state of Hawaii, which the US annexed and colonized against the will of the local population who became a minority on their own islands. If there are US citizens living in South East Asia, they are small minority expat groups, religious fanatics, and sadly time and again so-called sexpats who go there to buy access to young women for little money. Compare this to the Chinese: their diaspora goes back at least to the Ming dynasty over 400 years ago. Chinese communities exist throughout South East Asia for much longer than the US even exists. Some have assimilated, some still speak Chinese, others still use written Chinese to this day. All of them know where their origins and ancestral homeland are, many maintain family ties for centuries. Others connect with the Chinese mainland through cultural identity such as studying Confucian classics like the Zhu Xi school of thought from Wuyi region in Fujian province. China has a very long border with South East Asia, from the Myanmar-Laos-Vietnam borders with South China to the South China Sea. China has been a part of South East Asia relations since human memory, and definitely much earlier than when European colonizers started drawing the borders that are largely still in place today. 2. CSIS automatically jumps from "Chinese media" to "disinformation" to "against the US". The US literally bombed half South East Asia when they illegally attacked Vietnam but bombed far beyond the Vietnamese borders. In Indonesia the US is behind gruesome massacres to the level of ethnic cleansing, both in the Suharto anti-communist campaign with a million Indonesians killed where the US provided names of targets to Suharto's military, and during invasion and occupation of East Timor, where the US armed and supported the invaders. As with all US military bases, there are frequent reports of rape without justice against the offenders from the Philippines, and the list goes on. There's really no "disinformation" needed to remind South East Asians of the endless amount of violence, exploitation and crimes committed by the US in the region. If anything, one would need a constant barrage of disinformation to keep South East Asians somewhat positive towards the US. 3. And that US disinformation isn't theoretical: Voice of America is a US state-run medium very active in the region, and so obvious propaganda, it was forbidden to send its programs into the US until 2013, as not to propagandize US citizens. It's content has always been fiercely anti-Chinese and anti-communist. And we haven't even begun talking about NGO based propaganda and local media paid and trained by US institutions like the NED. So, why does CSIS get it so completely wrong? Because they are paid to get it wrong. The finance is obvious: Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon the big US weapons makers who profit directly from war, as well as the usual suspects like Gates Foundation, Rockefeller, Soros and others. The US government doesn't pay CSIS, so they say it's not US propaganda. What they don't say is that the people who pay CSIS are the same people who pay to decide who is in the US government. The US government isn't at the top of the pyramid. But CSIS belongs to the same people who are in real control of the US empire. Of course they wouldn't want Chinese language media to talk about this fact.