Andre Damon
3 June 2019
In a series of provocative
actions, the United States is making clear it is prepared to fight a war to
block Beijing’s rise as an economic and geostrategic competitor.
The “cold war” between the
United States and China took a major step toward becoming a “hot” war over the
weekend at the annual Shangri-La defense summit in Singapore.
The Financial Times, not
known for hyperbole, wrote that “The growing dispute between the US and China on
trade and technology is increasing the risk of military conflict or outright
war.”
At the summit, representatives
of the Pacific nations that would be caught in the crossfire of such a conflict
warned of the imminent possibility of a new Pacific war.
“Our greatest fear, therefore,
is the possibility of sleepwalking into another international conflict like
World War One,” said Philippines Defense Minister Delfin Lorenzana. “With the
untethering of our networks of economic interdependence comes growing risk of
confrontation that could lead to war.”
US officials used the summit
to continue their efforts to encircle China militarily and strangle it
economically, with acting US Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan declaring China
to be “the greatest long-term threat to the vital interests of states across
this region.”
Just days earlier, Vice
President Mike Pence, addressing the graduating class at West Point, predicted
war in the Pacific, in Europe and in the Americas within the graduates’
lifetimes.
“It is a virtual certainty
that you will fight on a battlefield for America at some point in your life …
Some of you will join the fight on the Korean Peninsula and in the Indo-Pacific,
where North Korea continues to threaten the peace, and an increasingly
militarized China challenges our presence in the region. Some of you will join
the fight in Europe, where an aggressive Russia seeks to redraw international
boundaries by force. And some of you may even be called upon to serve in this
hemisphere.
“And when that day comes, I
know you will move to the sound of the guns and do your duty, and you will
fight, and you will win.”
The United States’ actions are
extraordinarily reckless and provocative. Seeing a challenge to its dominance,
it is seeking to use every tool at its disposal, including military force, to
compel China’s submission to its will. The United States is simultaneously
escalating conflicts around the world—including its regime change operation in
Venezuela and its dispatch of additional troops to the Middle East to “counter”
Iran—to shore up its flagging global hegemony through military means.
Chinese Defense Secretary Wei
Fenghe responded to the US threats with militarist bluster of his own, saying,
“Should anybody risk crossing the bottom line, the [People’s Liberation Army]
will resolutely take action and defeat all enemies.” He warned the United
States against encouraging Taiwanese separatism, declaring, “If anyone dares to
split Taiwan from China, the Chinese military has no choice but to fight at all
costs.”
The divisions between the
United States and China are centered on the Chinese state initiative called
“Made in China 2025.” The plan envisions a substantial expansion of Chinese
industry into high-value-added and high-technology manufacturing, areas
traditionally dominated by the United States and its allies.
In recent decades, Chinese
companies have made substantial developments in the high-technology sector,
including robotics, mobile phones and IT infrastructure. This development was
expressed most directly in the growth of Huawei, the Chinese mobile phone and
telecommunications firm, which was on track to become the world’s leading
smartphone maker by the end of the year.
Last month, the United States
moved to effectively destroy Huawei as a global competitor to Apple and Samsung
by banning US companies from selling it software and components. Google locked
the company out of the Android operating system and associated services, while
Broadcom and Qualcomm announced they would no longer sell the company chips it
needs to continue production.
The move enjoys broad
bipartisan support beyond the Trump White House. There is an emerging consensus
within the American ruling class that China must be prevented from becoming a
global technological, and thus military, peer of the United States.
The growth of US-China
tensions has overshadowed the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square
massacre. At the summit, Wei defended the bloody crackdown against the 1989
protests by workers and students, declaring the protests were “political
turmoil that the central government needed to quell, which was the correct
policy.”
He continued, “Due to this,
China has enjoyed stability, and if you visit China you can understand that
part of history.”
But three decades of
“stability”—the effective transformation of China into a gigantic sweatshop for
American and world capitalism—has come at a tremendous cost. China is not an
imperialist country. It remains dependent on foreign corporate investment and
finance. Now, it is once again in the crosshairs of a nuclear-armed United
States determined to go to any lengths to secure its global hegemony.
In the immediate aftermath of
the Tiananmen Square massacre, the International Committee of the Fourth
International wrote, “The repression in China is being carried out in the
direct interests of the imperialists. In attacking the Chinese workers, the
bureaucracy is acting as their agent, seeking to restore ‘labor discipline’ and
to repress the mass opposition of the working class to the policies of
capitalist restoration and the rampant exploitation and social inequality which
it has engendered.”
While publicly condemning the
massacre, the first Bush administration secretly made clear to the Chinese
government that the event was an “internal affair” and affirmed the value of
the Sino-American relationship “to the vital interests of both countries.”
The ICFI Statement continued,
“Imperialism gloats over the broken bodies of the Chinese workers, seeking to
exploit them for the purpose of crude anticommunist propaganda, while at the
same time calculating that the brutal state repression will translate into
higher rates of exploitation and even greater profits from the tens of billions
of dollars’ worth of direct investment and joint ventures already operating on
Chinese soil.”
This is precisely what
happened. Following Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Tour of 1992, in which he
encouraged Chinese entrepreneurs to “get rich,” US investment in China
ballooned, leading to a profit bonanza for American corporations, along with
the fantastic enrichment of the upper echelons of the Chinese Communist Party,
through the exploitation of the Chinese working class.
The arguments by leading Chinese
figures that an accommodation and partnership with US imperialism would offer a
peaceful road toward China’s national development have proven to be a pipe
dream.
If Chinese officials accept US
demands, it will be a massive blow to the Chinese economy, causing mass
unemployment and engendering protests and political turmoil. But to stand up to
the United States means, sooner or later, to fight a war between nuclear
powers, in which millions dead on both sides would be an optimistic scenario.
Thirty years after the
Tiananmen Square massacre, all the arguments that the laws of imperialism
identified by Lenin after the outbreak of World War I had been superseded by
globalization and technological development have proven false. The capitalist
system, riven by a new scramble for a re-division of the world, is hurtling
toward a new world war.
The only thing standing
between humanity and this catastrophe is the international working class. It is
urgently necessary for the workers of China, the United States and the whole
world to unify their struggles in a common fight against the capitalist system,
which is the root cause of imperialist war. This means building sections of the
International Committee of the Fourth International in China and all over the
world as the vanguard of a working-class movement against imperialist war.
Andre Damon
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