Socialists and the Sino-American Cold War

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The Russian invasion of Ukraine did not press the pause button for the Sino-US imperialist Cold War, but accelerated the process of the Cold War

Vincent Kolo China Labour Forum

Larry Fink, chairman of BlackRock, the world's largest financial speculator, said: "The Russian invasion of Ukraine ended the globalization we had experienced over the past three decades." Until earlier this year, capitalists like Fink were talking about the cold war between the two superpowers, China and the United States, in the future tense, and now they are trying to keep up with the changing world situation.

But in fact, today's Sino-US conflict began ten years ago with Obama's "pivot to Asia" strategy. And Xi Jinping, who came to power in China in 2012, has adopted a more aggressive and nationalist foreign policy while dramatically escalating domestic repression and hard-line control. Xi Jinping has abandoned the pragmatic foreign policy of "hide our strengths and bide our time" since Deng Xiaoping, instead boasting and exaggerating China's capabilities. For example, despite hundreds of billions of dollars invested in biopharmaceuticals by China in recent years, the efficacy of domestically produced Covid-19 vaccines has been disappointing.

In 2018, under the right-wing populist Trump's presidency, the imperialist conflict between China and the United States escalated, triggering the largest trade war since the 1930s. After Trump's loss to Biden in the 2020 presidential election, we point to the fact that the Cold War will continue to escalate under the new administration; this is because the conflict is rooted in the objective process of the historic crisis of global capitalism, not in the governing Which capitalist party.

In the World Outlook resolution of ISA's 2020 General Assembly, we proposed that "the Sino-American conflict is now the main axis of the global situation". As the resolution articulates: "World capitalism is moving out of the era of neoliberal globalization that has dominated the past 40 years and into an era of 'geoeconomics' dominated by conflicting interests among imperialist powers."

The state precedes the market

Our views quoted above were put forward before the epidemic and the war in Ukraine, and the epidemic and war have accelerated these processes. Today’s world is further moving towards militarism and a more intense geopolitical power struggle. The economic development trend is determined by the aforementioned situation. rather than leading the situation. As a powerful tool of capitalism, the nation-state gradually replaces "market forces" in the dominant position. Military expansion and strategic deglobalization are major current trends. While Japan and Germany are typical national military expansions that are significant and worrying, the current problem is not just military spending.

China has the world's largest navy, with 355 ships, and launched its third and most advanced aircraft carrier, the USS Fujian, in June -- compared to the US Navy's 297 ships. Xi Jinping put forward the "2027 Army Centennial Goal" military modernization plan, aiming at the 100th anniversary of the founding of the army, the Chinese army will compete with the US military. Many commentators have warned that this may be the timetable for Xi Jinping's attack on Taiwan, determined to bring Taiwan under Beijing's control. However, China has not fought a naval battle for 100 years. And military experts warned that the attack on Taiwan would be more complicated than the Normandy landings in 1944.

The ruling classes in Europe and parts of Asia are creating a political climate of hysteria, while preparing to further plunder the working class in order to organize larger and more lethal armies. In countries all over the world, the "solution" of the capitalists and their governments is "to increase the arms"! Conditions of nationalism, hysteria, and disorientation were common in the early stages of the war. But social trends will inevitably shift as support for anti-war, anti-capitalist and internationalist alternatives grows.

The recent NATO summit in Spain, the G7 meeting in Germany, and the quadrilateral security dialogue in Japan were all historic, all of which meant that the coordinated countermeasures of the West had reached an unprecedented level of severity— The countermeasures are not only against Russia, but also against China. NATO's 2022 strategic vision included China as a "systemic challenge" for the first time, proving that weakening China is the most important long-term goal of US imperialism and NATO. British Admiral Sir Ben Key underscored this strategic priority in a recent speech, warning that "just focusing on the bears (Russia) risks not seeing the tigers (China)". Although there are few tigers in China, Sir Kee's intention to use tigers to refer to China is clear (obviously, leading the navy does not require any knowledge of zoology).

The Russian invasion of Ukraine was the first item on the agenda of all these meetings. However, the quadrilateral security dialogue is an exception, as the involvement of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has required the United States, Japan and Australia to send some different messages. India refuses to take sides against Russia, in part out of fear that being anti-Russian will bring Putin closer to China. China has been lobbying Russia for years to cut arms sales to India, which has a longstanding border dispute. Part of Xi’s plan to support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in essence is to use it as a bargaining chip against India, giving China access to Russian military technology, including nuclear weapons.

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Another purpose of imposing severe sanctions on Russia, which has actually been excluded from the world economic system, is to warn China that the West may have a showdown with China in the future; at the same time, this is also a rehearsal for future sanctions against China. When sanctions against China begin, the world will be affected to a completely different degree than it is today. China's economy is ten times the size of Russia's and is vital to global supply chains, trade and financial flows. The boss of a large Western company told the Financial Times: "If sanctions against Russia are applied to China, the economy of China and the world will be doomed."

Both sides want to avoid or delay that, but both are also preparing for that day to come. Even Henry Kissinger, who negotiated Mao-era China into the Western camp during the U.S.-Soviet Cold War, agrees that today's capitalist China cannot be made "hegemonic"—though Kissinger also warns, The potential for conflict between China and the United States is "comparable to the First World War".

The impact of the Ukraine war has enabled US imperialism to muster more of its allies on its anti-China strategy. While differences remain, such as the German government still entangled with China and Russia in the eyes of the Biden administration, they have narrowed considerably compared to the positions of governments before the February invasion.

The new situation has also brought a windfall to the U.S. military industry. Days after Russia invaded Ukraine, the German government decided to increase its military budget from 47 billion euros in 2021 to 100 billion euros in 2022, and immediately purchased 35 US F-35 fighter jets capable of carrying nuclear weapons (estimate 40 billion euros). The U.S. energy industry will also reap huge gains as Germany and Europe move away from Russian oil and gas. LNG shipments from the U.S. to Europe tripled in the first four months of the year compared to the same period in 2021.

NATO and its allies

For the first time, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand were invited to the NATO summit in Madrid. This is not just a warning to Beijing, but to further strengthen military collaboration between these Indo-Pacific countries and NATO. So while the Xi regime's wishful thinking may be aiming to profit from Russia's confrontation with the West, Xi will end up losing more than Putin because the Chinese economy is at much higher risk.

This process is linked to a broader process of deglobalization and the formation of two hostile camps, in which China risks being squeezed out of markets in key industries and denied access to new technologies. American tech billionaire Vinod Khosla predicts that the "techno-economic war" between China and the United States will last for 20 years. The U.S. already has tight controls on strategically important technologies like 5G and semiconductors, and those controls will only expand. The U.S. Congress is considering bills aimed at increasing scrutiny of U.S. investment in numerous Chinese business sectors and funding U.S. production of semiconductors, rare earths, advanced batteries, and industries where China is dominant or the U.S. is vulnerable to supply chain disruptions .

Trump's regulatory offensive against Chinese telecom giant Huawei has plunged Huawei into a deep crisis. Without access to the latest chips due to U.S. sanctions, Huawei's position in China's domestic smartphone market has fallen from No. 1 to No. 6 since 2018, with sales falling 64% over the past year. To make matters worse, Huawei was forced to scale back its operations in Russia, one of its few growth markets, to avoid triggering Western sanctions.

The "blacklist of Chinese companies" established during Trump's administration has become a template for the United States' economic warfare in the Cold War. During the Biden administration, the blacklist continued to expand, with Chinese media saying there are currently 260 Chinese companies; more than 100 Russian companies were added in February.

Cut tariffs?

"Further escalation (of the Sino-US technology war) is possible." Pei Minxin, a Chinese-American commentator, believes, "If the United States persuades the European Union and Japan to restore the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (CoCom) to prevent technology Flowing to China - a prospect made more likely by the outbreak of the Ukrainian war - China will have no chance of winning the technology race with the United States."

Reports that Biden is considering possibly rolling back some of the tariffs Trump imposed on Chinese goods in 2018 do not contradict a tech war with China. If that happens, the reductions in tariffs are likely to be minimal, perhaps removing less than 3 percent of tariffs that fully cover more than $300 billion worth of Chinese goods. Its purpose is to ease inflationary pressures on the U.S. economy ahead of the mid-term elections in November, but such tariff cuts alone may have little impact on inflation.

The conflicting narratives amply demonstrate the power struggle between the Treasury and Commerce departments within a Biden administration, and that any reduction in tariffs could open up the president to attacks from both sides of Congress for being soft on China. Not only in China, but everywhere in the world, fanatical nationalism is a constraint on policy adjustments by governments. Current U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen appears to support some "realignment" of tariffs, arguing that tariffs are not particularly effective as a weapon against China and that more "strategic" tariffs are needed. So this debate is about how to be more "skillful" to put pressure on the Chinese economy, nothing more.

Sino-European Relations

For most of the past decade, Beijing hoped that under the de facto leadership of Germany, the European Union would maintain a "strategic neutrality" in the Sino-U.S. conflict. This hope is based on the belief that German capitalism will not do anything to harm Germany's annual exports to China of more than $100 billion. But Xi Jinping's hopes of rescuing the EU-China relationship from the Sino-American Cold War began to dash long before the Ukrainian war.

A tense stand-off between China and the EU over Xinjiang put the China-EU Comprehensive Investment Agreement (CAI) in vain last March. If the agreement is ratified, it would be a major diplomatic breakthrough for Beijing and a push back against Washington. But now CAI is stillborn. This year, the German government has put financial and political pressure on its biggest companies, including automaker Volkswagen, citing China’s human rights abuses in the Muslim-majority region of Xinjiang.

The Xinjiang issue was used to demonstrate Berlin's new tough attitude towards China and towards German capitalists in order to force the investment and supply chains of these German companies to "diversify" and stop being unilaterally dependent on China. It's a new global trend that mirrors the policies of the United States and other countries, whose governments increasingly use "national security" as an excuse to dictate investment decisions by private companies. This approach can be said to emulate some features of the Chinese model.

Such a "statist" approach was unthinkable in the heyday of neoliberal globalization. But today, ruling classes everywhere need to assert their state power in order to survive in what Martin Wolf, deputy editor and chief economic commentator at the Financial Times, describes as a "new age of disordered worlds". It is this, rather than concerns about repression and torture in Xinjiang, that has forced Germany and other Western economies to stop increasing their economic interdependence with China. This decoupling from China’s economy is still in its early stages, but it is accelerating, as some of Mr. Xi’s critics in the party have warned, blaming his “endless” alliance with Putin.

In fact, this decoupling process began almost a decade ago, driven by a variety of other factors, including rising wages for Chinese workers compared with other Asian and even Eastern European economies. But in the first half of this year, 11,000 foreign companies were deregistered in China, compared with 8,000 newly registered foreign companies last year. Everbright Securities estimates that between September 2021 and March 2022, about 7% of Chinese furniture orders, 5% of textile products and 2% of electronic products are "lost" to Vietnam and other countries. These trends have been overshadowed by a temporary boom in Chinese exports during the Covid-19 pandemic, but as that boom is now fading, we are likely to see a "hollowing out" of Chinese manufacturing - similar to what happened in Japan three decades ago Happening.

democratic rights

The U.S.-led camp described its stance on Ukraine as defending "democracy" against "authoritarianism". The same hypocritical position can be seen on Xinjiang and Taiwan issues. Sino-Russian imperialist propaganda relies on aggressive nationalism (China's "Wolf Warrior Diplomacy"). They accuse the West of trying to weaken and destroy the motherland, using "democracy" as a means of attack. Workers, anti-war and pro-democracy activists, LGBT+ people and feminists - all those who oppose the government have been labelled "foreign forces". The words and deeds of these nationalist propaganda are aimed at becoming a powerful country and taking back "territory stolen by foreign enemies". Marxists and ISA oppose all imperialist powers or groups and their propaganda. We warn that supporting either camp, or that one imperialism is less dangerous than another, can have disastrous consequences for the workers' struggle against capitalism.

In the struggle for the liberation of oppressed nations and nations, imperialism has never been an ally, nor have they stood on the side of the democratic rights of the masses. Political freedoms such as the right to vote, organize, freedom of speech, and the right to strike that currently exist in Western capitalist democracies (but are completely absent in China and are constantly suppressed in Russia) were and still are through mass pressure and The struggle is won, not the benevolence of the ruling class.

America's onslaught on abortion rights has exposed Washington's attempt to occupy the "democratic" high ground. In recent years, Western capitalist countries have launched wave after wave of attacks on civil liberties and trade union rights. In a state with bourgeois democracy in form, the capitalist state apparatus itself is not the defender of democratic rights. Trotsky explained that if the working class is not yet capable of overthrowing capitalism, they must defend bourgeois democracy against fascist or authoritarian reactionary attacks. "However, the workers cannot defend bourgeois democracy by means of bourgeois-democratic methods (popular fronts, electoral coalitions, coalition governments, etc.), but must use their own methods, the methods of revolutionary class struggle." Situation, 1937).

"Good dictator?"

Working people can never count on the capitalist state, the courts, the police or the bourgeois army to defend our democratic rights. The democratic rights that exist in Western capitalist countries are the result of struggle and the balance of class power in society, not something written in laws or constitutions. Only an international mass struggle, led by a rejuvenated workers' movement to replace capitalism with genuine socialism, can ensure genuine democratic rights. This is the only force that can end wars and national oppression. Socialists stand firmly against the Orwellian state repression of capitalist regimes such as China and Russia, and stand with the working class in these countries, which is the only force capable of truly fighting dictatorships.

When NATO needs Turkey's approval for Sweden and Finland to join, the leaders of these "democracies" choose to curry favor with cold-blooded dictator Erdogan, who is preparing for a new war against the Kurds and crackdown on unions , women's and LGBT+ rights.

The same stunning double standard was manifested in Biden's recent visit to Saudi Arabia, where he shook hands with dictator Mohammed bin Salman. Biden boasted during his campaign two years ago that he would see Saudi Arabia as a "banished (Indian caste, pariah)", but now he needs a chance at a time when the Russian oil embargo hits global markets. an oil supply agreement. The same goes for Blinken's July assignment, where he needed to convince Thailand's military dictator General Prayut, because Washington didn't want to see Thai authorities turn entirely on China's side.

clear analysis

The conflict between Chinese and American imperialism is interspersed with almost every movement and struggle that takes place around the world. We saw this factor in Myanmar last year, on the one hand, the coup launched by the military has the support of Beijing and Moscow, and on the other hand, there is an amazing resistance struggle and mass strikes by a section of youth and workers, unfortunately , they began to expect Western pressure and even the so-called international intervention to help them defeat the junta. It's a cruel fantasy that can only be confused in the struggle. The same thing happened in different forms during the massive pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong in 2019 and again in Thailand the following year.

In the changing global environment caused by the new Cold War, these experiences offer important political lessons. In the above example, the idea of the lesser of two evils prevailed in the movement, causing part of the masses to lose their way and causing the struggle to take a sharp turn. Also in countries such as Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, parts of the labor movement and left-wing forces will be disoriented and divided because of these complexities. Of course, this is also a wake-up call for China's nascent labor movement.

During the Cold War, two imperialist blocs exploited an already volatile world situation and further polarized it for a geopolitical victory, posing serious dangers to workers and youth. The situation is so dangerous even if there is no other hot war equal to or worse than the Ukrainian war. A clear vision, analysis and program, rejecting the lesser of two evils and nationalism, taking an internationalist and working-class stance, standing firmly against all capitalist and imperialist governments, is the key to ensuring that the oppressed are not reacted The only way to be destroyed by inclination.