By Larry Romanoff
Global Research, November 16, 2019

The initial purpose of what began as Operation Overcast was to plunder Germany of all its scientific and industrial knowledge after World War Two. The plan was to steal documents and working samples, but the depth and breadth of German industrial knowledge proved much too complex to be usefully understood from a simple examination of documents. In spite of the immense trove of scientific, technical, and industrial knowledge confiscated from Germany, the US failed to benefit due to a lack of know-how. It became quickly apparent that the process would require an extensive debriefing of German scientists and technicians to obtain adequate working knowledge of German industrial and scientific theory and processes.

This realisation led to the immediate creation of vast internment camps containing all the scientists and technicians the Americans could take into custody where these people could be debriefed over time. When it became apparent that both plundering and debriefing would be insufficient, Operation Overcast became Operation Paperclip which involved the forcible transfer of countless thousands of these same individuals to the US.

Operation Overcast has been described as being “as massive a logistical enterprise as that of any major war campaign, involving enormous pre-planning and coordination that included literally dozens of government agencies and departments, ancillary groups like the Library of Congress, hundreds of US corporations and countless thousands of individuals.” It has been downplayed as a simple post-war immigration of German scientists and military personnel to the US, but it extended far beyond this. As in virtually every other area, American history has been revised, deleted, sanitised and Photoshopped to prevent the truth from escaping into the world at large.

Germany had been thoroughly looted after the WWI, including the confiscation of nearly all foreign assets belonging to German companies, (1) and plans were well under way to repeat the process long before the Second War ended. This time, instead of simply seizing German assets and stealing their patents throughout the world, the Americans concocted a grand plan with an almost savage determination to plunder the entire nation of Germany itself, to the maximum extent possible. This was Operation Overcast, the planning for which was completed at least two years before the war ended.

When Germany surrendered and the Americans entered the country in force, hundreds of teams of scientists and industrialists, military and other specialists, were often only minutes or meters behind the troops, in their determined effort to confiscate everything useful lest it be destroyed before their arrival. These hundreds of groups had been selected and prepared in advance, with experts in every specialised scientific, industrial, and military area, those who were best qualified to judge what material was useful or valuable in their fields. A few groups focused on military items, but by far the largest effort was by the TIIB, the Technical Industrial Intelligence Branch of the US Department of Commerce, whose task was to examine every possible segment of German industry and to collect any and all information including documents, patents, processes, prototypes, models, working samples, anything that might be of interest or use to American industrial firms. The TIIB sent many hundreds of commercial investigating groups to Germany, with each group reportedly confiscating millions of pages of documents and countless tons of equipment and product samples. Even the Library of Congress had its own specialised group, tasked with locating and confiscating all German books and journals that might be in any way useful to American corporations.

Every kind of German company of every size was targeted in this enterprise if it might possibly contain research or products of potential use to American companies. Further, all universities, research institutes, patent offices, laboratories of every kind, all government agencies, research councils, were stripped bare, as were every kind of library. This latter included not only public libraries but all those inside German corporations like I. G. Farben, Volkswagen, Dornier, Messerschmitt, Hoescht, and thousands of others. And not only the libraries, but the internal research facilities of these thousands of firms were emptied of all their research documents, publications, and proprietary information. Entire factories and physical production facilities were combed for anything of commercial value.

It was reported that even the Steiff stuffed animal factory was emptied of its patterns, proprietary books and documents, production methods, patents, and samples of teddy bears. The Americans literally took everything, reportedly coming in waves with one wave taking whatever the prior waves left behind, until factories, warehouses, libraries, universities, patent offices, were simply empty. The document haul alone was in the tens of thousands of tons. No one counted the number of samples, prototypes, working models, of vehicles, aircraft, military appliances, and vast numbers of commercial items, and the number of books stolen was likely in the millions.

Secrets by the Thousands

One of the few recorded instances of public documentation and acknowledgement of this massive theft was an article written by C. Lester Walker and titled, “Secrets by the Thousands”. (2) His article begins with the following:

“Someone wrote to Wright Field recently, saying he understood this country had got together quite a collection of enemy war secrets, that many were now on public sale, and could he, please, be sent everything on German jet engines. The Air Documents Division of the Army Air Forces answered: “Sorry – but that would be fifty tons (of documents)”.

Moreover, that fifty tons was just a small portion of what is today undoubtedly the biggest collection of captured enemy war secrets ever assembled. The collection is today chiefly in three places; Wright Field (Ohio), the Library of Congress, and the Department of Commerce. Wright Field is working from a documents mother lode of fifteen hundred tons. In Washington, the Office of Technical Services reports that tens of thousands of tons of material are involved. It is estimated that over a million separate items must be handled, and that they, very likely, contain practically all the scientific, industrial, and military secrets of Germany. One Washington official has called it the greatest single source of this type of material in the world, the first orderly exploitation of an entire country’s brainpower.”

Walker confirms that the US organised a colossal search for what it euphemistically termed “war secrets” but which was simply a treasure hunt for military, commercial and scientific knowledge that the US lacked. “To accomplish this task, various US agencies formed more than 500 intelligence groups, ranging in size from a few to a dozen or more individuals, which closely followed the invading US army into Germany with the intent of confiscating everything of value before the other Allied forces arrived. Most of these Joint Intelligence Objectives search teams were ordered to locate and confiscate industrial and scientific secrets in particular. According to Walker, these US heroes “performed prodigies of ingenuity and tenacity” in accomplishing their task. To some extent, he was correct. In one case the German Patent Office put some of its most secret patents down a sixteen-hundred-foot mine shaft, but the Americans found it and confiscated the entire contents as US “war reparations”.”

German citizens were forced by the Americans to sign documents testifying that they had turned over “all scientific and trade data, and if not, would accept the consequences” – which meant execution, and these were staff of commercial enterprises totally unrelated to military items. The US had photo crews and microfilm recording teams working 24 hours a day to document German inventions. Walker stated that at Hoechst alone, the Americans had more than 100 researchers who would “struggle feverishly to keep ahead of the forty OTS document-recording cameras which route to them each month over one hundred thousand feet of microfilm”. To put this into measurable perspective, the US was extracting several million pages of documents each month from Hoechst alone. Such was the scale of the US theft of German scientific and commercial secrets.

Walker then proceeds to give readers “some outstanding examples from the war secrets collection” which included 1,000-watt micro-miniature vacuum tubes made of porcelain rather than glass, that were virtually indestructible, and a tenth the size of the best the US could make. He listed an apparently miraculous magnetic recording tape, and infrared devices for perfect night vision and a “remarkable diminutive generator which operated it”. He states that German infrared technology was so advanced that, according to US military sources, “German cars could drive at any speed in a total black-out, seeing objects clear as day two hundred meters ahead. Tanks with this device could spot targets two miles away. As a sniperscope it enabled German riflemen to pick off a man in total blackness. …It stepped up current from an ordinary flashlight battery to 15,000 volts.” Prior to these discoveries the Americans had no idea these items even existed, much less of how to design or manufacture them.

Walker listed an array of electronic items including remarkable condensers that appeared to be magic to American scientists, the manufacture of large sheets of synthetic mica, which was important for many manufacturing processes and which the Americans had never been able to make, in any size, but which immediately increased American cold steel production by 1,000%. The Germans had perfected the process of cold metal extrusion, which the Americans also could never do, and which now permitted US manufacturers to increase the production speed of many items by ten times.

Walker stated that the head of a military communications unit told him this one “war secret” alone would totally revolutionise dozens of American metal fabrication industries. He went on to state that “In textiles the war secrets collection has produced so many revelations that American textile men are a little dizzy.”

He relates discoveries of a German rayon-weaving machine (“discovered” by the American Knitting Machine Team that was scouring Germany) that increases production by 150%. There were looms that produced seamless hosiery for ladies, textile needle-making machinery that the American firms had never dreamt possible, a patented way to separate the wool from sheepskin leaving a perfect hide surface. One American dye authority declared, “It includes the production know-how and the secret formulas for over fifty thousand dyes. Many of them are faster and better than ours. Many are colors we were never able to make. The American dye industry will be advanced at least ten years.”

Patents, Theft of Intellectual Property (IP), Product Piracy and US-China Relations

Walker continues:

“In matters of food, medicine, and branches of the military art the finds of the search teams were no less impressive. And in aeronautics and guided missiles they proved to be downright alarming. … the Germans had discovered was a way to sterilize fruit juices without heat. Milk pasteurization by ultra-violet has always failed in other countries, but the Germans had found how to do it …”

His sources told him the Germans had invented a continuous butter-making machine, something the Americans had always wanted but couldn’t figure out how to do it.

Samples of the machines were immediately confiscated and shipped to the US dairy companies. The Germans had invented remarkable new ways of preserving food, and air conditioning and water reclamation so efficient that “German submarines could travel from Germany to the Pacific, operate there for two months, and then return to Germany without having to take on fresh water for the crew.”

Walker tells us as well that a US Army surgeon claimed German medical secrets, many of which were startling and revolutionary, would save American medicine “years of research”, items that included a process for producing synthetic blood plasma on a commercial scale, and substitutes for both blood liquid and adrenaline. These were also areas where the Americans had tried for years, and failed, but Walker then crowed, “Today we have the secret of manufacture.” And let’s not forget these were all categorised by the Americans as “war secrets”, this categorisation somehow justifying their theft. The Germans also had developed methods of reviving bodies in cases of complete standstill of heart and cessation of respiration, Walker noting that “Before our war with Japan ended, this method was adopted as the treatment for use by all American Air-Sea Rescue Services, and it is generally accepted by medicine today.” Likewise, the Germans had already discovered the medical importance of negatively-ionised air and methods of creating it.

Walker further proceeds to tell us,

“But of highest significance for the future were the German secrets in aviation and in various types of missiles. The V-2 rocket which bombed London, an Army Air Force publication reports, was just a toy compared to what the Germans had up their sleeve. When the war ended, we now know, they had 138 types of guided missiles in various stages of production or development, using every known kind of remote control and fuse: radio, radar, wire, continuous wave, acoustics, infra-red, light beams, and magnetics, to name some; and for power, all methods of jet propulsion for either subsonic or supersonic speeds. Jet propulsion had even been applied to helicopter flight. The fuel was piped to combustion chambers at the rotor blade tips, where it exploded, whirling the blades around like a lawn sprinkler or pinwheel.”

Walker goes on to mention supersonic rockets with speeds of almost 6,000 miles per hour with intercontinental range that could reach New York from Germany in about 40 minutes. He tells us, “Little wonder, then, that today Army Air Force experts declare publicly that in rocket power and guided missiles the Germans were ahead of us by at least ten years.”

Walker completes his article with examples of how “the American public”, i.e. American companies “are eating up” all this information, with hundreds of thousands of requests for documents on every conceivable commercial application. American companies like Bendix, Pillsbury, Pioneer, Pacific Mills, requested German patent and process information on record player changers, flour and bread production methods, insect repellent compounds, crease-resistant finishes for spun rayon. And of course Polaroid, the great American camera company obtained all its information from the exploitation of German photography and optics documents, as did Kodak after World War I, without which the company would have amounted to nothing.

Daniel W. Michaels wrote a series of informative and excellently-researched articles on this matter, one titled “The Great Patents Heist”, which is filled with detail and background. (3) Michaels was for decades employed as a translator of German for the US Department of Defense and the Naval Maritime Intelligence Center, and has much personal experience of the extent of this theft. John Gimbel also wrote a treatise titled, “Science, Technology, and Reparations. Exploitation and Plunder in Postwar Germany”, which was published by the Stanford University Press in 1990.

Michaels begins by stating,

“It is quite acceptable to American pride to acknowledge that immigrants have contributed to our prosperity and greatness. It’s a little harder to swallow that a good deal of our scientific lead and prosperity has come from simply seizing German patents and inventions after World War I, and far more so after World War II.”

He notes that the most creative period in world history may have occurred in Germany between 1932 and 1945, and that it was the theft of this German scientific research that fueled America’s post-war technology boom. It was Truman’s Executive Order 9604 – which, he notes, was also known as the “License to Steal” – that constituted what was perhaps the greatest robbery in the history of the World, the theft of all German intellectual property, products, processes and patents existing to that time.

The US today makes a great show of protecting intellectual property while disclaiming any past or present efforts to obtain by clandestine or dishonest measures the IP of other nations, desperately insisting its espionage and other efforts deal only with ‘terrorism’ or national security issues. These denials can be easily dismissed as outright lies when faced with these revelations and the subsequent Project Echelon. Truman’s Executive Order 9604 provided for the seizure of “scientific and industrial information, including all information concerning scientific, industrial and technological processes, inventions, methods, devices, improvements and advances” discovered in Germany, and “regardless of its origin”.

“One of the largest hauls of classified information harvested by the Allies came from laboratories and plants of IG Farben, whose vaults contained secret industrial information on, among others, liquid and solid fuels, metallurgy, synthetic rubber, textiles, chemicals, plastics, drugs and dyes. Several U.S. Army officers stationed in the Farben Building after the war commented that the value of the files and records confiscated would (from that source alone) have been sufficient to finance the war.”

Michaels also noted that among the great aeronautical discoveries were “the papers describing the sweptback wing and providing considerable wind-tunnel data which showed clearly that the sweptback plane had superior speed properties near the speed of sound. These data were the first of their kind.

Schairer (a Boeing engineer) quickly wrote to his Boeing associates to stop work on the Mach 1 transonic plane with the straight wing which they had designed, telling them of his find. He microfilmed the data and used them when he got back to Seattle to design the B-47, the first U.S. sweptback bomber….”

Michaels again:

“The theft of intellectual property is not new, but the extent and ruthlessness of what the “wannabe” superpowers did in Germany from 1945 to 1948 was unprecedented. The United States … literally stole the entire extant store of German patents, designs, inventions and trademarks. Germans, who were not forthcoming in informing the U.S. Occupation Forces of the existence and location of such records could be imprisoned, punished and even threatened with death for “insufficient reporting”. When World War II ended, America’s elite determined that the United States would not lapse back into its prewar depressed state, but rather would revitalize its economy and have a first-class military and industrial establishment. To this end, Germany’s advanced military hardware, aeronautical and industrial secrets would simply be confiscated and transplanted in America … reinvented and stamped “Made in the U.S.A.”.

To ensure that the Allies would have an insurmountable head start in exploiting the patents, the Germans were even forbidden to use or refer to their own inventions after they were confiscated. The German Patent Office was closed by the Allies and (when it reopened), the first number assigned was 800,001, indicating that some 800,000 original patents had been looted by the Allies.

Germany had been deprived of all prior IP in existence to that point and, by its deliberate exclusion from the international Patent Union, could not patent or exploit any new discoveries. All new German inventions or scientific discoveries were simply confiscated by the US and, thanks to the massive and overwhelming infiltration of the US’ Project Echelon embedded in Germany (and throughout Europe), American espionage would quickly discover any new German inventions. To make the situation permanent, in May of 1955, the Americans, “aware of the improprieties involved in their seizure of German industrial secrets”, forced Germany to sign the ‘Paris Agreement’ and “to renounce all claims or objections to Allied actions during the occupation”. The so-called “agreement” stated:

“The [German] federal government shall in the future raise no objections against the measures which have been, or will be, carried out with regard to German external assets or other property, seized for the purpose of reparation or restitution, or as a result of the state of war, or on the basis of agreements concluded, or to be concluded by the Three Powers with any other Allied countries, neutral countries or former allies of Germany.”

The Second Wave – Forcible Emigration

The original intent was to steal documents and working samples, and to debrief scientists wherever necessary to obtain working knowledge of theory and processes. Since the extent of necessary debriefing could not reasonably be known in advance, the plan was to gather up all German scientists, technicians, and skilled workers and, to prevent their dispersion, to imprison them in concentration camps until they could be fully debriefed and all useful information extracted. However, German knowledge was far in advance of anything imagined by the Americans, and it was realised almost at the beginning that simple confiscation and debriefing would be hopelessly insufficient. As one example, the US military located and shipped home the components for more than 100 newly-manufactured but still unassembled V-2 rockets, but discovered they had no idea how to assemble the pieces nor any understanding of either the scientific principles or the mechanics of how the rockets functioned.

From this one dilemma and so many others in so many industrial areas, the Americans realised that, just as occurred after World War One, they were so far behind Germany they weren’t able to even understand, much less utilise, much of what they had stolen. They then realised they had no choice but to relocate to the US many thousands of captive scientists, engineers and technicians, and eventually a great many skilled craftsmen as well. As one author noted,

“The American experience of virtual hopelessness in deciphering Germany’s wartime rocket program alone, quickly led to the solution of confiscating not only the documentation and products but the people as well, for hundreds of other scientific, military and commercial processes.”

This was when Operation Overcast morphed into Operation Paperclip. It hasn’t received notice in the historical narrative, but these deportations were forcible. The alternative presented was a trial and probable execution as war criminals, the US having essentially full authority and discretion to make these determinations and thus leaving the victims with little choice. These relocations were not only forcible, but abrupt, with only one day’s notice in many cases:

“On orders of Military Government you are to report with your family and baggage as much as you can carry tomorrow noon at 1300 hours (Friday, 22 June 1945) at the town square in Bitterfeld. There is no need to bring winter clothing. Easily carried possessions, such as family documents, jewelry, and the like should be taken along. You will be transported by motor vehicle to the nearest railway station. From there you will travel on to the West. Please tell the bearer of this letter how large your family is.”

The first personnel transfers were of military specialists, but all subsequent waves were of purely commercial interest, the Americans forcibly importing scientists, technicians, skilled workmen and specialist craftsmen in virtually every industry, including steel, metal fabrication, glass, porcelain, printing, dyes and fabrics, electronics, musical instruments, auto manufacturing, aircraft design. The list is almost endless.

In 1987, Tom Bower wrote a book titled “The Paperclip Conspiracy” (4) in which he detailed the extent, and the value, to the US military alone, of the importation of these German scientists. He listed scores of dramatic German achievements that had been far beyond the ability of the US at the time: advanced aircraft power plants, guided missile control, in-flight refueling, high-temperature alloys, precision optics, infra-red detectors, new diesel engines, new fuels and lubricants, a wind tunnel running at Mach 8, which was three times the speed and ten years ahead of the best American effort, high-altitude reconnaissance and mapping, acoustic weapons. He further noted the American military opinion that the Germans had “made contributions of an unusual and fundamental nature” in the realms of equipment design and development, generators, microwave techniques and crystal structures. In a review of this book, Publisher’s Weekly wrote, “Bower’s revelations are individually shocking and cumulatively devastating . . . will appall readers.”

In a BBC news article on 21 November 2005 titled, “Project Paperclip – Dark side of the Moon” (5), Andrew Walker detailed how 60 years ago these imported German scientists provided the US with cutting-edge technology in which it still leads today. In addition to the items covered in Tom Bower’s book,

Walker lists “supersonic rockets, nerve gas, jet aircraft, guided missiles, stealth technology and hardened armor” as just a few. Walker argues, as do most others, that Germany’s Horten Ho 229 was the first stealth aircraft, complete with radar-absorbing skin and single-wing shape, and that the US-based Northrop B-2 stealth bomber (at $2 billion each) is virtually a clone of the German design from 1944.

After the uncounted tens of thousands of the most useful knowledge candidates had been transferred to the US, there was still an enormous remainder being maintained in these concentration camps – widely known as “Eisenhower’s Death Camps” – individuals who had been debriefed and for whom the Americans had no further need. I believe it was Michaels who noted there was at one point a plan by American General R. L. Walsh, known as the German “Urwald-Programm” or jungle program, which was a massive plan to scatter and resettle these Germans in small numbers as widely as possible anywhere and everywhere in the Third World, as one way to prevent Germany from ever again forming a critical mass of industrial knowledge. (6) In the end, those ‘debriefed and not especially valuable’ millions were either executed outright or starved to death, totaling some 12 million Germans, a large part of the content of Bacque’s “Other Losses”. (7) It should be noted, as Bacque has done, that the death by starvation of the many millions of German civilians was a planned and deliberate process. (8) (9)

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Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He can be contacted at: 2186604556

Notes

(1) The US military entered every country with a German corporate presence and claimed ownership of all German assets.

(2) Harper’s Magazine, October, 1946. I would note here that I have seen several claims that this issue of Harper’s is unavailable publicly in print form, that even in libraries or other collections that contain every issue of Harper’s since inception, this one issue is missing. I was told this article is available online from Harper’s, for a price, if you know the title and publication date. The issue is of course that there are few people alive who would be aware of the existence of this article and even fewer who could specify the precise title and date of publication.

(3) The Great Patents Heist

(4) The Paperclip Conspiracy: The Hunt for the Nazi Scientists

(5) BBC: “Project Paperclip – Dark side of the Moon”

(6) This was part of the Deep State’s Morgenthau Plan, meant to complete the total destruction of Germany by permanently deindustrialising the country, to turn Germany into Europe’s dairy farm and potato patch. The intent was to forever deprive the country of not only its best scientific minds, but also of this entire second and third tier of scientific intellectuals, technicians and skilled workers, to prevent a German attempt to rebuild itself after the war.

(7) Bacque was a popular Canadian author, his short stories, novels and articles appearing regularly in all the prominent media but, after publishing “Other Losses”, he was blacklisted and destroyed in Canada. No newspaper or magazine would return his calls, and all publishers refused contact with him. He was excoriated in the US media as a fraud, even though his research was impeccably detailed and his book carried an introduction and testimony from prominent and high-ranking American military officers. Almost no one in North America is aware of his extraordinary historical discovery since his books have been virtually banned on the continent. By contrast, his many books on this subject have been a major hit in Europe, having been translated into I believe now 15 languages, documentary movies have been made of his discovery and he is widely recognised in Europe as a prominent and respected historian.

(8) It now seems that the popular photos we have all seen, of piles of emaciated dead bodies, were not of Jews killed by Germans (as we have been told) but of Germans killed by the Americans. An undetermined number of those incarcerated and killed were women, and more than a few were children.

(9) The only shortage of food in Germany was caused by the Americans who forbade all external food shipments to Germany after the war, and it was widely announced that anyone attempting to smuggle food into the camps would be shot on sight.

By Larry Romanoff
Global Research, October 24, 2019

China as a nation has the longest and by far the most vast record of inventions in the history of the world. It is now reliably estimated that more than 60% of all the knowledge existing in the world today originated in China, a fact swept under the carpet by the West.

Joseph Needham, a British biochemist, scientific historian, and professor at Cambridge University, is widely rated as one of the most outstanding intellectuals of the 20th century. Chinese students visiting at Cambridge repeatedly informed him that Western scientific methods and discoveries discussed in his classes originated in China centuries before. Needham was so intrigued that he became fully fluent in Chinese, then travelled to China to investigate. He discovered voluminous evidence of the truth of those claims and decided to remain in China to write a book to document what he deemed a discovery of great importance to the world. Needham never completed his task of cataloguing the history of Chinese invention. His one book became 26 books and he died in 1995, with his work still continued today by his students. One good introduction to this topic is Robert Temple’s summary of Needham’s work. (1)

We were all taught in school that the printing press with movable type was invented in Germany by Johannes Gutenberg in about the year 1550. Not so. China not only invented paper but also the printing press with movable set type, which was in common use in China 1,000 years before Gutenberg was born. Similarly, we were taught that Englishman James Watt invented the steam engine. He did not. Steam engines were in widespread use in China 600 years before Watt was born. There are dated ancient texts and drawings to illustrate and prove the Chinese discovered and documented “Pascal’s Triangle” 600 years before Pascal copied it, and the Chinese enunciated Newton’s First Law of Motion 2,000 years before Newton.

The same is true for thousands of inventions that the West now claim as theirs but where conclusive documentation exists to prove that they originated in China hundreds and sometimes thousands of years before the West copied them. It was not for nothing that Marco Polo is described in China as “Europe’s great thief”. The next few paragraphs are adapted mainly from information in Temple’s book, which I strongly recommend.

The Chinese invented the decimal number system, decimal fractions, negative numbers, and the zero, so far in the past that the origin is lost in the mists of time. The Chinese tracked sunspots and comets with such detail and accuracy that these ancient records are still used as the basis for their prediction and observation today. The Chinese were drilling for natural gas about 2,500 years ago, wells 4,800 feet deep, with bamboo pipelines to deliver the gas to nearby cities. The Chinese pioneered the mining and use of coal long before it was known in the West. Marco Polo and Arab traders marveled at the “black stone” that the Chinese mined from the ground, that would burn slowly during an entire night.

China had printed paper money almost 1,500 years ago, done in ways to prevent counterfeiting. Wrapping paper, paper napkins and toilet paper were all in general use in China 2,000 years before the West could produce them. They were the first to invent and develop a full mechanical clock with a true escapement, many centuries before the Swiss had done so. The Chinese invented an ingenious seismograph still in use that tells not only the severity but the direction and distance of earthquakes. The Chinese invented hot-air balloons, the parachute, manned flight with kites, the wheelbarrow and matches. They invented hermetically-sealed laboratories for scientific experiments. They invented belt and chain drives, the paddlewheel steamer, the helicopter rotor and the propeller, the segmental-arch bridge. They invented the use of water power and chain pumps, the crank handle, all the construction methods for suspension bridges, sliding calipers, the fishing reel, image projection, magic lanterns, the gimbal system of suspension. China not only invented spinning wheels, carding machines and looms, but was the world’s leader in technical innovations in textile manufacturing, more than 700 years before Britain’s 18th century textile revolution.

Chinese expertise with fine porcelain was so advanced millennia ago, that even today it is admitted their ability has never even been equaled in the West, much less surpassed. The Chinese discovered not only magnetism but magnetic remanence and induction, as well as the compass. They invented gunpowder, smoke bombs, the cannon, the crossbow, plated body armor, fireworks, flamethrowers, grenades, land and sea mines, multi-stage rockets, mortars and repeating guns. China had irrigation canals that were also used for transport, and the Chinese invented the canal locks that could raise and lower boats to different levels 1,500 years before the Americans built the Panama Canal. China has earthquake-proof dams functioning today that were built around 250 BC.

A millennium ago, the Chinese conceived and developed the science of immunology – vaccinating people for diseases like smallpox, knowing how to extract and prepare the vaccine so as to immunise and not infect. They discovered the circadian rhythm in the human body, blood circulation and the science of endocrinology. The Chinese were using urine from pregnant women to make sex hormones 2,000 years ago, understanding how they acted on the body and how to use them. Many centuries-old Chinese medical books still exist, documenting all this and much more. Around 1550, China compiled a huge 52-volume Chinese Traditional Herbal Medicine encyclopedia that described almost 2,000 herbal sources and 10,000 medical prescriptions. Among them is chaulmoogra oil, which is still the only known treatment for leprosy.

China designed and built the world’s largest commercial ships, which were many times longer and ten times larger in volume than anything the West could build at the time. In the late 1500s the largest English ships displaced 400 tons, while China’s displaced more than 3,000 tons. Western ships were small, uncontrollable and fragile, and useless for travelling any distance. Thousands of years ago, Chinese ships had watertight compartments that permitted them to continue journeys even when damaged. Moreover, Chinese ships not only had multiple masts, but China invented the luff sails which permit us to sail almost into the wind, just as sailboats do today, and were therefore not dependent on wind direction for their travel. Their luff sails contained sewn-in bamboo battens that keep the sails full and aerodynamically efficient, as racing sailboats use today. The Chinese invented the ship’s rudder – something the Europeans never managed to do, able to steer themselves only with oars, and European sails permitted them to travel only in the direction of the wind, which meant a ship would have to remain in place, sometimes for months, awaiting a favorable wind.

Chinese maps were the best in the world, by orders of magnitude, for more than a millennium, and the precision of their maps became legendary, being far in advance of the West. The Chinese invented Mercator projections, relief maps, quantitative cartography and grid layouts. China had compasses and such extensive astronomical knowledge that they always knew where they were, could plot courses and follow them by both compass and star charts, and could sail wherever they wanted, regardless of the wind direction. As Needham pointed out, China was so far ahead of the Western world in sailing and navigation that comparisons are just embarrassing. It was only when the West managed to copy and steal China’s sailing and navigation technology that it was able to begin travelling the world and colonising it. James Petras wrote, “It is especially important to emphasize how China, the world technological power between 1100 and 1800, made the West’s emergence possible. It was only by borrowing and assimilating Chinese innovations that the West was able to make the transition to modern capitalist and imperialist economies.” (2)

China was 1,000 years ahead of the West in anything to do with metals – cast iron, wrought iron, steel, carbon steel, tempered steel, welded steel. The Chinese were so skilled at metallurgy they could cast tuned bells that could produce any tone. Long before 1,000 A.D., China was the world’s major steel producer. I believe it was James Petras who noted that in about 1,000 A.D. China was producing about 125,000 tons of steel per year, while 800 years later Britain could produce only 75,000 tons. (1) The Chinese invented the blast furnace, the double-action bellows to achieve the necessary high temperatures for smelting and annealing metals. They invented the manufacture of steel from cast iron. Thy excelled in creating metallic alloys, and very early were casting and forging coins made from copper, nickel and zinc. The entire process of mining, smelting and purifying zinc, originated in China. The Chinese developed the processes of mining itself, and the concentration and extraction of metals.

China was highly advanced in agriculture, having invented the winnowing fan and the seed drill, making an easy process of tilling, planting, and harvesting. Europeans and Americans were still seeding crops by scattering grain from a bag, a greatly wasteful practice that necessitated saving 50% of each year’s crop for seed. China developed scientifically efficient plows that have never been equaled and are still used all over the world today. They invented and developed animal harnesses and collars that first permitted horses to actually be used to pull loads. Europe had no efficient plow, and their only way of harnessing animals was to put a rope around their necks, which succeeded only in the animals strangling themselves. The Chinese invented saddles and the riding stirrup. China’s food production was orders of magnitude ahead of the world for more than 1,000 years, its advances in agriculture the enabling cause of Europe’s agricultural revolution that first permitted it to begin feeding itself adequately. The Chinese were wearing fine silk and cotton clothing and using toilet paper while centuries later Europeans were still wearing animal skins.

Few people in the West are familiar with China’s Armillary Spheres. These wonders of the world, cast in bronze several meters in diameter and beautifully decorated with dragons and phoenixes, are some of the oldest and most accurate astronomical observatory instruments in existence, some created more than 3,500 years ago when the Western countries had no knowledge of such things. They determine and measure the positions and equatorial ecliptic and horizontal coordinates of celestial bodies, the positions and daily motions of 1,500 stars and constellations, and much more. When the Western Forces invaded China in the late 1800s, they were so captivated that they plundered most of these treasures and the centuries of data from the ancient observatories, disassembling the instruments and removing them to Europe, returning some to China as part of the Treaties after the First World War.

It leaves one speechless to learn the vast extent of Chinese inventions that existed hundreds of years and often millennia, before they appeared in the West. Needham published not only ancient Chinese texts that can be accurately dated, but photos of old drawings that clearly depict all of these items. This isn’t a simple matter of gunpowder and fireworks, but of discovery that encompasses the entire range of human knowledge, all of which has been consciously hidden from the Western world. Needham made his discoveries in the 1940s, but neither Western education nor the media have ever referenced or acknowledged them. These are not mere claims; the evidence is conclusive and available for examination but the West has thoroughly erased China from the world’s historical memory.

The West Really Hates China!

Myth and Misrepresentation

Western historians have distorted and ignored China’s dominant role in the world economy until about 1800. There exists an enormous amount of empirical data proving China’s economic and technological superiority over Western civilization for the better part of several millennia. Given that China was the world’s supreme technological power up to about 1800, it is especially important to emphasize that this is what made the West’s emergence possible. It was only by copying and assimilating Chinese innovations and China’s much more advanced technology that the West was able to make the transition to modern capitalist and imperialist economies. Until then, China was the leading trading nation, reaching most of Southern Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Europe. China’s innovations in the production of paper, book printing, firearms and tools led to a manufacturing superpower whose goods were transported throughout the world by the most advanced navigational system. Moreover, banking, a stable paper money economy, excellent manufacturing and high agricultural yields resulted in China’s per capita income surpassing that of Great Britain until about 1800.

Not only this but, as James Petras pointed out, “… the majority of western economic historians have presented historical China as a stagnant, backward, parochial society, an “oriental despotism”.” China was never thus. During the 13th century, Marco Polo described China as vastly wealthier and more advanced than any European country, and leading European philosophers such as Voltaire looked to Chinese society as an intellectual exemplar, the British notably using China as their model for establishing a meritocratic civil service. (3)

A first thought when reviewing this research is that the world must have seemed very primitive to China 500 years ago, truly “third world” at the time. When Zhang He and others conducted their voyages of exploration, they must have been disappointed in what they found. The rest of the world had no paper or printing, no mathematics, no science, little medicine of note, almost no metallurgy to speak of, a most primitive agriculture, no manufactures of any worthy kind, no porcelain, no spinning wheels or weaving looms to make clothing. From reviewing the history of Chinese invention, one develops an increasingly strong feeling the Chinese looked at the world and found nothing of interest in all those societies that were centuries, and in some cases millennia, behind China in almost every way. One can easily theorise this is the reason China closed itself off from the world at that time, concluding that other nations were so backward that little would be gained from prolonged contact. One can imagine they returned home and closed the door, perhaps planning to return in another 500 years to see if things had progressed. With the addition of detail, this is most likely how events transpired.

What China didn’t expect, was the West stealing all these ideas, turning them into weapons of colonisation and war, returning to the nation that was the source of that knowledge, and invading it to colonise, to steal resources, and to enslave and massacre the population. China’s interest was always only exploration and trade. The Chinese were never expansionist or warlike, wanting only to protect their own borders from invasion from the North. China was quite unprepared for the violent nature and savage brutality of the White man who sailed the world, invoking his God’s blessing on his countless atrocities. Coupled with a weak domestic government and the inventiveness of the Baghdad Jews in using opium to reap billions while enslaving a nation under the protection of the British military, we have the severe downward swing for 200 years.

Two Great Historical Tragedies

The above summary doesn’t even begin to adequately catalog of the extent of Chinese invention, of the sum of China’s discoveries and contributions to the modern world. But unfortunately, much of China’s total sum of knowledge and history of invention is lost to the world forever. A large part of the recorded knowledge of China’s history was destroyed in one of the greatest acts of cultural genocide in the history of the world – the looting and burning of China’s Summer Palace, the Yuanmingyuan, which contained more than ten million of the finest and most valuable historical treasures and scholarly works from 5,000 years of Chinese history. What could not be looted was destroyed, and the entire massive palace burned to the ground. This wanton theft and utter destruction of one of the world’s greatest collections of historical knowledge was engineered by the Rothschilds and Sassoons in retaliation for Chinese resistance to their opium. (4) (5)

This is an aside, but the destruction of the Yuanmingyuan was done for the same reason that the Allies bombed Dresden to rubble during the Second World War. Dresden had no military value but it was the spiritual and cultural heart of Germany, its destruction meant “to open a wound in the German soul that would never heal”. For precisely the same reason, the American ‘deep state’ was savagely determined to drop the first atomic bomb on Kyoto, also the heart and soul of Japanese culture. Kyoto was protected by Providence, with heavy overcasts of clouds that preventing the bombers from locating it with sufficient accuracy, forcing them to their alternates of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

But in terms of the destruction of a literary recording of culture and invention, there was perhaps an even greater crime against the history of Chinese knowledge – the destruction of the library and the Yongle Dadian at the Hanlin Academy. (6) That encyclopedia of 22,000 volumes written by more than 2,000 scholars over many years, contained much of the total of 5,000 years of Chinese knowledge, invention and thought. The British carried all those books outdoors, poured fuel on them, and burnt the entire collection to ashes. Only God knows what was lost in this tragic destruction, ordered by the same drug dealers as punishment for refusing opium, meant to break China’s will by striking at the very heart of the nation’s culture in the wanton destruction of something of such inestimable value as to leave an open wound that would never heal. Only about 150 volumes survived the incineration, 40 those residing today in the US Library of Congress, which has no intention of returning them to China.

Darwinism at its Finest

Westerners today justify their unacknowledged appropriation of Chinese knowledge and subsequent claims to ownership on some variant of the proposition that the Chinese invented those things, but never developed or capitalised on them, but the claim is invalid self-serving nonsense since my invention is mine whether or not I choose to develop it. The claim is also untrue.

When the Chinese invented paper and printing, books became widespread throughout China, as with the weaving of cloth and development of textiles. China employed its inventions in unlimited ways for the benefit of Chinese society. What they did not do is file patents, convert everything to privately-owned IP, and transfer their ingenuity from social benefit to private profit. Criticisms of China’s use of its inventions are not so much negating a lack of application but the absence of commercialisation, these Western justifications implying that any nation not immediately striving for profit maximisation of its discoveries is morally negligent, the theft of those discoveries then justified by those who would use them more properly. This is the bank robber taking the high moral ground by claiming he put the money to better use than the bank would have done.

To have foregone private commercialisation was neither a character flaw nor a behavioral fault, but a reflection of the pluralistic and socialistic nature of the Chinese people, the same reason that even today China’s patent and IP laws and regulations are so much less aggressive than those of the US. Put simply, China has never been as capitalistic or as individualistic as the West. It is part of the greatness of the Chinese nation that this immense population engaged in millennia of stunning research, discovery and invention and freely distributed those fruits throughout the nation. This emphasis on the greater good and overall benefit to society rather than individual profit, is fundamental to the natural humanity of the Chinese people, and cannot be permitted to be destroyed by the sociopathic Western model so forcefully promoted today on the basis of a fictitious moral superiority.

The West chooses to ignore the fact that the 200-year hiatus in China’s innovation was due almost entirely to their own military invasions, when the West was ravaging and destroying the nation. China’s development, social progress, and invention, ceased only from the invasions by both the Americans and Europeans, and most especially with the Jews’ vast program of trafficking in opium in China.

Perhaps of more direct interest is that China’s lag in current technology is, more than anything else, an unfortunate accident of fate that occurred during a blip in time. After Mao evicted all the foreigners and China shook off the effects of 200 years of foreign interference and plundering to begin the transition to an industrialised economy, this was precisely when the world of electronics and communication exploded. It was during that brief period of a couple of decades that computers, the Internet, mobile phones and so much more, were conceived and patented by the West. Virtually the entire process passed China by, because during that brief period the nation was entirely enveloped in the fundamentals of its economic and social revolution, and in no position to participate. China’s lack of patents and IP in the field of electronics today is due neither to Western superiority nor Chinese lack of innovation, but to Western aggression. The accumulation of American and European patents was in no way due to Western supremacy in innovation but to the absence of the Chinese.

The Present and the Future

China’s Inventiveness has not ended. With China recovering and once again taking its rightful place in the world, it is continuing where it left off 200 years ago. Ignoring the historical setback, Chinese companies are simply by-passing the earlier stages of innovation by foreign firms and proceeding to subsequent stages where the field is open and foreign patents have not precluded innovation and development.

If we examine the fields where China lags today in terms of patents and IP, it is primarily in those areas of science that progressed during that brief period where China was unable to participate. As soon as China found its footing, innovation continued unabated as it had for thousands of years. China missed the computer and Smartphone patents, but was perfectly timed for the solar panel revolution and quickly emerged as the world leader – at which point the US imposed tariffs of 300% on Chinese solar panels in an attempt not so much to kill China’s export sales but to prevent the accumulation of funds for further R&D. In any area not pre-empted by IP restriction, China’s innovation has soared – usually to world leadership.

Despite US accusations of China copying foreign technology, China’s high-technology achievements were entirely home-grown because the US has been so determined to hinder China’s rise that by 1950 it engineered an international embargo on all scientific knowledge and on almost all useful products and processes to China, including legislation that Chinese scientists cannot be invited to, or participate in, American scientific forums, while bullying other Western nations into doing the same. In October of 2019, all Chinese scientists and space technology companies were denied visas to attend the weeklong International Astronautical Congress in Washington, far from the first time such has occurred.

We hear much in the Western media about China demanding technology transfers as a condition of corporate residence in China, but this is mostly propaganda. No doubt expectations for technology and knowhow transfer do occur, since China doesn’t want to spend the rest of its life making toasters and running shoes but, since entry to the Chinese market is a gift of billions in profits, it is perfectly sensible to attach a price to it. However, one must keep in mind that no foreign company is conducting cutting-edge commercial or sensitive military research, or manufacturing quantum computers and hypersonic missiles in China. Any technology actually available for transfer would be almost entirely in consumer goods, and hardly constitute great value or threats to US ‘national security’. And, in virtually all of the cutting-edge fields and industries such as quantum computing, 5-G telecom or solar energy, China has already surpassed the US.

A Brief List of Recent Chinese Innovation

In 2015, Chinese engineers announced the world’s first quantum communications network, a 2,000 kilometer system linking Beijing and Shanghai with data transmission encoded by quantum key distribution. In August of 2016 China launched the world’s first quantum communications satellite, and succeeded in test communication with the country’s existing ground stations. In September of 2016, Chinese scientists achieved the world’s first quantum teleportation between independent sources, delivering quantum information enciphered in photons between two locations.

In 2014, researchers at Nankai University in Tianjin developed a car with a working brain-control unit, with sensors that capture brain signals permitting humans to control the automobile with their minds. In 2016 China launched a fully-operational space lab to conduct the first ever brain-machine interaction experiments in space. Chinese scientists believe brain-computer interaction will eventually be the highest form of human-machine communication, having developed this process much farther than any Western nation and holding nearly 100 patents.

In 2015, high school students from Tianjin won an International gold medal for the creation of a microbe biological battery. Such attempts in the past have failed due to poor performance and limited usefulness, but these students conceived the idea of combining several types of bacteria into one biological power cell, with each bacterium having specialised responsibilities based on its own unique functions. Their tiny multi-bacteria cell reached over 520 mV, and lasted over 80 hours. Scaled up, their biological battery was able to generate as much power as a lithium battery, with a much longer life and producing no pollution. These are Chinese high school kids.

In 2015 Chinese scientists succeeded in modifying a human embryo to permit the changes to persist through future generations, something that had never been accomplished before, to alter human DNA for removal of dangerous or undesired genes from future generations. Chinese researchers are developing the technology and processes to make 3D-printed skin a reality, custom-made skin for burn patients, printed according to their wounds. The country leads the world in cat-scan technology, in DNA mapping and synthesising, and many medical fields such as laser eye surgery and cornea transplants.

In May of 2019, a Chinese start-up launched a revolutionary AI chip with the computing power of eight NVIDIA P4 servers but up to five times faster, with half the size and 20% of the energy consumption, and costing 50% less to manufacture. Shanghai’s Fudan University developed a transistor based on two-dimensional molybdic sulfide, meaning computing and data storage happen together in a single cell, perhaps eliminating silicon-based chips which are at their limit. DJI Technology, founded by a Chinese university student, has become in only a few years the global market leader in small consumer drones, and already attracting American sanctions for being too successful in an area the US wants to control. The country produces nearly 40% of the world’s robots, with vastly improved core technologies, and is the world leader in 5-G technology.

Chinese engineers created a supercomputer seven times faster than America’s Oak Ridge installation, the first in the world to achieve speeds beyond 100 PetaFlops, powered by a Chinese-developed multi-core CPU and Chinese software, while displacing the US with the most supercomputers in the top 500. Upon the revelation of China’s super-fast supercomputer, authorities reported the NSA had launched hundreds of thousands of hacking attacks, looking to steal the technology for China’s new microprocessors.

China’s megaproject engineering skills are already legendary, with the longest sea bridges, the longest tunnels, the largest deep-water ports. China has built the world’s longest and highest glass bridge in Zhangjiajie, hanging between two steep cliffs 300 meters above the ground, and which set 10 world records spanning its design and construction. The Three Gorges Dam is the world’s largest, with 5-tier ship locks which can contain the world’s largest ships, and also a shiplift for smaller vessels which is the largest and most sophisticated in the world. China has formulated plans to build an electron collider, four times as long (100 Kms) and operating at more than seven times the energy capacity of the European CERN. In 2015, Chinese scientists completed the 500-meter radio telescope, by far the largest in the world with more than ten times the area of the American installation in Puerto Rico.

In 2014, architects in Amsterdam began work on what was to be the world’s first completely 3D-printed house, a costly enterprise requiring three years. At exactly the same time in Shanghai, a Chinese company completed ten 3D-printed houses in less than a day, at a cost of less than $5,000 each, using recycled construction and industrial scrap as the ‘ink’. I have seen these homes; large, elegant, multi-story European-styled structures, and so sturdy they can withstand earthquakes up to level 8 on the Richter scale.

We know about China’s fabulous high-speed trains, but few outside China are aware of the intense high quality of the HSR network, built with the highest standards in the modern world, including stability. When traveling by train I sometimes place a coin on its edge on the windowsill, and I have video of the coin remaining stable for four or five minutes before it finally falls over – and this is at 300 Kms per hour. Shanghai has a high-speed Maglev train (430 Kms/hr), while many cities have low-speed Maglevs (200 Kms/hr), and Chinese engineers are ready to produce commercially a 600 Km/hr Maglev. The same pace of development is true of the nation’s urban subway systems. I have lost the source for these figures, but the city of London needed 147 years to build 408 Kms. of subway lines, New York City 106 years for 370 Kms., Paris 110 years for 215 Kms, while Shanghai needed only 20 years to build 500 Kms.

It has escaped attention that these achievements were not sudden, but developed from a deliberate plan in execution for 30 years, though it is only recently that many of these efforts are bearing fruit. More importantly, China accomplished this from a third-world industrial base while under a total Western embargo on technology transfer. Chinese scientists have developed nuclear energy plants, put men into space, photographed the entire surface of the moon, built a space station, designed and launched a private GPS system. We have Chinese-designed and built deep-sea submersibles, and the country is rapidly developing its own aircraft industry. Today, with its science and technological base so much more advanced, and with education spending increasing at nearly 10% per year, and very high R&D expenditures, invention and innovation can only increase.

A Closing Note

One of the most persistent myths propagated about China, a claim without a shred of supporting evidence, is that Chinese lack creativity and innovation due to flaws in their educational system. We have seen the accusations hundreds of times: China’s educational system teaches only rote memory while stifling innovation, the Chinese unable to conceptualise or innovate, knowing only how to achieve high test scores but not how to think. Here is Carly Fiorina speaking, the former CEO of H-P: “I’ve been doing business in China for decades, and I will tell you that yeah, the Chinese can take a test, but what they can’t do is innovate. They’re not terribly imaginative. They’re not entrepreneurial. They don’t innovate. That’s why they’re stealing our intellectual property … innovation and entrepreneurship are not their strong suits. Their society, as well as their educational system, is too homogenized and controlled to encourage imagination …” (7) The claim is complete rubbish for more reasons than I have room to account here.

In 2015, Eva Dou reported in the Wall Street Journal of a study by McKinsey who claimed that China had made all the “easy” innovations, like making products better and cheaper, but that “the country has limited success stories in ‘more challenging’ types of innovation that rely on scientific or engineering breakthroughs.” McKinsey’s conclusions are not supported by the evidence listed here. (8)

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Larry Romanoff is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Notes

(1) Robert Temple, The Genius of China: 3,000 Years of Science, Discovery, and Invention; https://www.amazon.com/Genius-China-Science-Discovery-Invention/dp/1594772177

(2) James Petras; China: Rise, Fall and Re-Emergence as a Global Power; Some Lessons from the Past

(3) Ron Unz; The American Conservative; April 18, 2012; China’s Rise, America’s Fall; Why Nations Fail; https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/chinas-rise-americas-fall/

(4) China Remembers a Vast Crime – The New York Times; https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/22/arts/22iht-MELVIN.html

(5) Peking’s Summer Palace destroyed; https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/pekings-summer-palace-destroyed

(6) “The Destruction of a Great Library: China’s Loss Belongs to the World; https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ552559

(7) Ex-HP CEO Carly Fiorina says Chinese ‘don’t innovate’; Time; https://time.com/3897081/carly-fiorina-china-innovation/

(8) Chinese Innovation: Now Comes the Hard Part, Says Study; https://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2015/10/22/chinese-innovation-now-comes-the-hard-part-says-study/

The original source of this article is Global Research
Copyright © Larry Romanoff, Global Research, 2019