BRITAIN should resist becoming a “cheap vassal state” of the United States following along with the new cold war on China, journalist and film-maker John Pilger said at the weekend.

Mr Pilger told an online meeting organised by Greater Manchester Stop the War Coalition that the cause of the new cold war was the US determination to remain the world’s only superpower.

“When you hear some of the American politicians and the so-called experts [rail against China], it is about saying ‘how dare they challenge Western superiority ... how dare they challenge our divine right to do as we wish in the world?”

Australia, like Britain, was being pressed into unthinking support for President Donald Trump’s aggression against China, he said, which is “the incentive of the current campaign of vilification of China. We’re at a stage where we have to ignore almost everything in the media about anything — but almost certainly about great geopolitical issues like China. Because there’s nothing there but ‘China bad, China bad’ all the time.”

Stop the War’s Stephen Bell said the US attacks on China could not be separated from the Trump administration’s hostility to international co-operation as shown by its withdrawal from multilateral agreements such as the Paris accord on climate change and the Iranian nuclear deal.

And he condemned the “grotesque sight” of Hong Kong’s last British colonial governor, Chris Patten, “trying to lecture the Chinese people on democracy. When Patten had power over Hong Kong he wielded it without any mandate. In 156 years of British power in China, not a single Chinese person had a single vote on the exercise of that power.”

Mr Bell told how his late father was stationed in Shanghai as a sergeant-major in the British army in 1927, when the Chiang Kai-shek government, with British backing, massacred communists and trade unionists to break the city’s strong labour movement. “My father’s job was to guard the British factories” during the slaughter, he explained, saying this experience “offers a better understanding of British-Chinese relations.”

Author Jenny Clegg warned that US-China relations “now pose the most serious threat to world peace.

“Under Trump, the United States has withdrawn from treaty after treaty ... the arms control framework is being ripped apart, dangerously increasing the risk of nuclear war.”

The full meeting may be watched online at https://mstar.link/stopthewar