John Richard Pilger (; born 9 October 1939) is an Australian journalist and documentary film maker mainly based in the United Kingdom since 1962. Pilger has been a strong critic of American, Australian and British foreign policy, which he considers to be driven by an imperialist agenda. Pilger has also criticised his native country's treatment of Indigenous Australians. His career as a documentary film maker began with The Quiet Mutiny (1970), made during one of his visits to Vietnam, and has continued with over fifty documentaries since then.

Pilger's film The Coming War on China premiered in the UK on Thursday 1 December 2016, and was shown on ITV at 10.40pm on Tuesday 6 December and on the Australian public broadcaster SBS on 16 April 2017. In the documentary, according to Pilger, "the evidence and witnesses warn that nuclear war is no longer a shadow, but a contingency. The greatest build-up of American-led military forces since the Second World War is well under way. They are on the western borders of Russia, and in Asia and the Pacific, confronting China. Like the renewal of post-Soviet Russia, the rise of China as an economic power is declared an 'existential threat' to the divine right of the United States to rule and dominate human affairs".  "The first third told, and told well, the unforgivable, unconscionable tale of what has overtaken the Marshall Islanders since 1946, when the US first nuked the test site on Bikini Atoll" beginning an extended series of tests, wrote Euan Ferguson in The Observer. "Over the next 12 years they would unleash a total of 42.2 megatons. The islanders, as forensically proved by Pilger, were effectively guinea pigs for [the] effects of radiation". Ferguson wrote that the rest of the film "was a sane, sober, necessary, deeply troubling bucketful of worries". Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian wrote: "This is a gripping film, which though it comes close to excusing China ... does point out China's insecurities and political cruelties".  Although admiring the early sequences on the Marshall Islands, Kevin Maher in The Times was more dismissive. "Abandoning any interest in nuance or subtlety", Pilger claims "that American bases in the region are threatening China with a 'giant noose' around its neck". For Pilger, he writes, China is "a brilliant place with just some 'issues with human rights', but let's not go into that now" and his film's "lack of complexity is depressing".

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