By He Zhuolun, Zhang Tianying, Wang Zhongkui

Speaking at the National Press Club in Washington, DC on February 23, US Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro stated US naval shipyards can't match the output of China. "They have 13 shipyards, in some cases their shipyard has more capacity -- one shipyard has more capacity than all of our shipyards combined. That presents a real threat," he said. And he went on claiming that "they use slave labor in building their ships", in the absence of any factual basis whatsoever.

However, the veracity of this claim was questioned. "China has a very large pool of available manpower and it wouldn't really make sense to use slave labor in a high-tech sector vital to their national security. This seems unfortunately common, that Navy leadership throws stones at real or imagined faults in Chinese shipbuilding rather than reckoning with US failures over two decades to conceptualize, design and build ships for its own navy, " said Blake Herzinger, a nonresident fellow and Indo-Pacific defense policy expert at the American Enterprise Institute.

From the so-called slave laborers picking cotton in Xinjiang in 2021 to the slaves building warships this time, unwarranted smears from the US politicians have been seen time and again, and behind such remarks about use of slaves is both a familiar trick and a long-standing US conspiracy.

As the head of the US Navy, Carlos Del Toro's remarks at the National Press Club, where he spread false information to stigmatize China in the hope of stirring up anti-China sentiment among the American public, reflects not only the usual practice of the US elites to blame and smear others, but also  his own ignorance and narrow-mindedness.

From the US Republicans labeling DPRK as a "slave state" to the so-called "Xinjiang slave cotton" to the current "slave warship," such an act of portraying itself as a "defender of freedom" and making irresponsible remarks through public figures on major occasions and then disseminating them through the US mainstream media has become a common trick to smear other countries.

But can this really work and last? A global online poll on the credibility of the US media shows that 84.12 percent of respondents believe that the credibility of the US media is rapidly declining. The US act of smearing other countries will eventually backfire on itself.

As for the remarks about the use of slaves, what we see behind them is a projection of US black history. The projection effect is a cognitive disorder proposed by the famous psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, which mainly refers to the phenomenon of projecting one's own feelings, will and characteristics onto others when perceiving and forming impressions of others, thinking that they also possess similar characteristics.

With the rapid expansion of the plantation industry in the American South since the 18th century, large numbers of blacks were trafficked into the US and subjected to forced labor, forced prostitution and debt bondage. According to statistics, by 1865, a total of 597,000 blacks were trafficked from Africa to the US. At that time, the total population of the US was about 5.2 million, which means that every five white people owned one black slave on average.

The slaves were paid nearly 20 times less than white workers, and endured unwarranted whipping and beatings. It was this bloody history of slavery that contributed to the current strength of the US. And repeating the so-called slave rhetoric over and over again to bash other countries only mirrors the US’s horrible history of slavery.

(The authors are from the National University of Defense Technology)