STUDY OPPORTUNITIES: Pupils of a boarding school at Tashi Kuergan Tajik Autonomous County, northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, go home after finishing their week. Local students enjoy free tuition and boarding (XINHUA)

The public has almost no alternative sources of information. What Noam Chomsky calls "manufacturing of consensus" is now close to sad but successful completion. Unless some people are very much determined to find alternative sources of information and unless they are skilled in searching for them (which is a tiny minority of the population even in Europe and North America), they will simply be spoon-fed lies repeated a thousand times, manipulative half-truths and clichés about China, about non-Western and even Western (a self-proclaimed 'democratic') world. They will not have to search for their own world view—it will be cooked and served to them as a pre-cooked meal.

Almost no place on Earth is free from propaganda produced by the global Western regime. In Africa where China offers great alternatives to Western plundering (by building schools, social centers, hospitals, government buildings, roads and railways), many people feel deep gratitude toward this enormous communist country that says "it wants to be a friend to the developing world." In Kenya I heard testimonies of hundreds of workers on Chinese projects saying that they were "treated like human beings by foreigners for the first time," and they "never had to negotiate wages with the Chinese bosses as they were offered three times higher salaries than they expected right from the beginning." The more positively China gets involved in Africa (or in Oceania or in many other places in the world), the more it has to face dark sarcasm and attacks of Western media outlets that pervert and drag through dirt all attempts to create an alternative world where solidarity and internationalism stand above pragmatic interests.

Newspapers in Africa and elsewhere are overzealously printing pieces tailored for local consumption but designed and paid for from abroad. Journalists who join the anti-Chinese choir get rewards—frequent trips abroad for "training," awards and visas to the West. The same is happening in Oceania and in Southeast Asia. The temptations are too great, the punishments for stepping out of line too harsh.

"People see concretely what China is doing," says Mwandawiro Mghanga, former Kenyan MP, member of Defense and Foreign Relations Committees, poet and prisoner of conscience under the brutal pro-Western regime of former dictator Moi. "If you travel throughout the country, you'll see Chinese constructing and building roads, stadiums and housing projects which are very good. They are also very closely involved with people in spite of all the propaganda being spread by the West. The reality of what China is doing is being seen and appreciated by our citizens. But there is great pressure on Kenyan Government not to cooperate with China. In fact, there is great hostility toward Kenya—the West is punishing this country for having relatively close ties with China."

That's the standard—the way we "democratically" rule the world (we force, corrupt and if we find it necessary—depose the governments), but you hardly hear it from local politicians. And God forbid, do not associate these practices with violations of human rights or with infringing democracy abroad!

During Moi's dictatorship, a regime that can be described as politically and economically very "pro-Western"), Mandawiro and tens of thousands of other Kenyan activists, opposition politicians and dissidents were savagely tortured. He stood firm, he fought for his country but he never received the Nobel Peace Prize.

Pramoedya Ananta Toer—the greatest Indonesian writer, who spent more than 10 years in Buru concentration camp—died without receiving a Nobel Prize for either peace or literature. Naturally, the concentration camp he was locked in was our own concentration camp—our ally Suharto who killed 2-3 million people after a 1965 U.S.-sponsored coup built it. Most of those killed were communists, people belonging to the Chinese minority, opposition intellectuals, atheists and teachers. Before he passed away, Pramoedya shared with me his Marxist ideals and the fact that for decades he was defending people of the Chinese minority in Indonesia. That had not qualified him for any Nobel Prize. He was not even a member of "civil society" or a pro-Western NGO!

None of the men and women resisting beastly military dictatorship in Chile ever came close to receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. Pinochet's men were killing and raping on our (Western) orders. Why would one of our institutions give more than a million dollars to those who would want to stop the carnage?

Western institutions simply do not make mistakes, or at least not too many. The art of manipulation had been perfected throughout the centuries. Philosophy, logic and the language itself have all been twisted, while analytical thought was discouraged.