'China offers vital alternative to West'

NEW YORK - "China is not perfect", but it is an alternative to a world dominated by the West, said US filmmaker Andre Vltchek.

Vltchek, who is also a novelist and political analyst, has been discovering places that are rarely covered by the mainstream Western media, and exposing disparities in today's world.

One of his articles, titled The West Perfecting its Techniques to Hurt China, was recently translated and published in People's Daily, a major Chinese newspaper.

"The West has absolutely no interest in human rights in China or anywhere else. How could it, considering that it is violating them on basically all continents, worldwide?" he wrote in the commentary posted a year ago on Znet, a website focusing on politics from a left-wing perspective.

Vltchek told China Daily in a recent interview that he still holds the same views today.

A naturalized US citizen born in Leningrad in the former Soviet Union, Vltchek grew up in what used to be Czechoslovakia before coming to New York at a young age to study film.

Vltchek believes that the complicated mix of blood that flows in his veins and his friends from different races and cultures, common to many US immigrants, has made him what he is today.

Currently producing a film for the United Nations on the world's biggest refugee camp, Dadaab, in Kenya, Vltchek has traveled to and worked in more than 140 countries.

He was a war correspondent in the 1980s and 1990s and reported from conflicts in countries including Bosnia, Peru, Sri Lanka, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and East Timor.

"If the world did not have China, there would be no alternative left," he said.

"China is not perfect. But it is the most peaceful big nation on Earth."

However, Vltchek doesn't expect "perfection" from China, as it is a country with a huge population and its own problems.

He called for "pluralism" in a Western-dominated world order, and said he supported China and Russia's veto on Oct 4 of a European-backed UN Security Council resolution, which threatened sanctions against Syria amid clashes in the country.

"What would happen if there would be no China? Europe would draft another UN resolution and a few weeks later, Syria would be bombed and destroyed in the same fashion as Libya was," Vltchek said.

A just and fair new international order has been the common aspiration of many developing countries. In 2003, China and Russia issued a joint declaration advocating a multi-polar world.

Currently based in Indonesia, Japan and East Africa, Vltchek is currently completing a book on Indonesia's coup in 1965.

The book, Archipelago of Fear, written for Pluto Publishing House in London, follows Indonesia from 1965 to the present.

Commenting on Vltchek's book Oceania, published in 2010, US linguist Noam Chomsky said that it evoked "the reality of the contemporary world".

"He has also not failed to trace the painful - and particularly for the West, shameful realities to their historical roots," said Chomsky.

Another of Vltchek's novels, Point of No Return published in 2005 in English, and in 2010 in French, shows the world through the eyes of a war correspondent.

Vltchek is also working on a 1,000-page novel called Winter Journey that describes the state of the world in which we are living through the eyes of disgruntled "globalized" left-wing intellectuals.