Published on Portside (https://portside.org/)
Climate Change.
War. Poverty. How the U.S.-China Relationship Will Shape Humanity’s Path.
Calvin
Cheung-Miaw and Max Elbaum
March
21, 2019
In
These Times
More than any
other bilateral relationship, what happens between the United States and China
will shape global politics and human civilization in the 21st century. The
success of efforts to combat climate change, avoid a humanity-threatening war
and build democratic, working-class movements in both countries largely hinges
on how Beijing and Washington manage their differences amid big changes in the
map of global power.
We
should prioritize the fight for a 180-degree turnaround in the U.S. stance
toward China, demanding that diplomacy and negotiation replace trade wars and
military encirclement.
Right now, things
are not looking good. Donald Trump's bellicose anti-China rhetoric and trade
war threats are only the most headline-grabbing manifestations of a dangerous
underlying trend. Observers across the spectrum of mainstream politics note
rising tensions: The Los Angeles Times reported in December
that U.S. policy toward China has shifted “from engagement to confrontation,”
and The Diplomat noted in January that that Washington's “new
consensus” is for “strategic competition” with Beijing. The opening sentence of
the Worldwide Threat Assessment issued by U.S. Intelligence Agencies
January 29 names “China and Russia” (in that order) as the most prominent source
of “threats to U.S. national security.” Michael Klare, long-time left analyst
of world affairs and professor emeritus of peace and world security studies at
Hampshire College, argued in February that “for all intents and
purposes, the U.S. and China are already at war with one another.”
Why is this
happening? And what can U.S. peace and justice activists do to push the
U.S.-China relationship in a different direction? Below we explore these
questions in hopes of sparking more debate within the left. We offer these
thoughts not as “China experts,” which we are not, but as anti-racist and
anti-militarist activists who believe it is urgent to demand that diplomacy
replace economic and military confrontation in U.S.-China relations, with the
ultimate aim of forging the international partnership necessary to take
effective action against catastrophic climate change.
U.S. global
hegemony and China's rise
Two key factors
underlie the twists and turns that have bought U.S.-China relations to their
current fraught state.
The first is
China's dramatic economic growth and steadily heightened technological and
military capacity since its turn toward “reform and modernization” in the
post-Mao era. China is now the second largest economy in the world and, by some
measures, is predicted to surpass the United States as number one in 10 to 20
years.
The second is the
determination by U.S. capital to maintain its global hegemony by any means
necessary even as its relative weight in an increasingly multi-polar global
economy declines. We saw this expressed in the “pivot to Asia” policy under
President Barack Obama, in response to China's rise as the most powerful “peer
competitor” to the United States since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Beijing's struggle
to control economic development
Back in the late
1970s, Washington took a positive stance toward China's new economic policies,
and was thrilled that Beijing signed on to its Cold War crusade against the
USSR. U.S. capitalists participated deeply in China's post-Mao economic
reforms, particularly after the nature of those reforms changed in the 1990s.
As Carl Walter and Fraser Howie describe in Red Capitalism, the
Chinese Communist Party sought in that decade to remake the state-owned
enterprises that anchored China's non-rural economy. U.S. investment banks
helped restructure those enterprises so that they functioned more like
corporations that could compete in international markets. China also
rapidly developed export industries based largely in the “special economic
zones” open to overseas investment beginning in the 1980s. Those industries
found a market in the United States, where neoliberal economic policy was—with
a few years' exception—producing wage stagnation and a corresponding appetite
for low-priced goods.
Not coincidentally,
by the 1990s, U.S. elites largely supported the strategy of constructive
engagement with China. In 2000, the Clinton administration gave China 'Most
Favored Nation' status and supported its entry into the World Trade
Organization. The then-dominant view within the U.S. capitalist class was
that China's moves toward economic liberalization would necessarily bring
political liberalization and incorporation of China into a U.S.-led economic
and geopolitical order.
Although U.S.
capitalists unquestionably benefited from China's economic reforms—think, for
instance, of the profits reaped by Apple—the Chinese government was able to set
several conditions on overseas investment. The huge size of the Chinese market
and the grip of the Communist Party on economic policy gave China almost unique
leverage in dealing with foreign capital. Writing for Foreign
Policy in August 2018, Jake Werner pointed out that China's
alleged “cheating” is more accurately characterized as using its considerable
muscle in a U.S.-dominated global economy that is at bottom a “rigged game”:
The huge and
rapidly growing China market convinced major foreign corporations to invest on
terms negotiated with the state rather than unilaterally imposing their
own conditions, as they did with manufacturing in Latin America or extractive
industries in Africa. Most prominently, China required foreign corporations
entering the domestic market to participate in joint ventures with Chinese
companies, which allowed domestic firms to learn the managerial and
technological practices of the developed world. China also established
regulations that secure favorable terms for Chinese enterprises licensing the
technologies of foreign firms.
While the issues
of trade balances and tariffs get media attention, U.S. elites'
economic grievances against China are largely based on Beijing's continued
restrictions on international capital, as highlighted by Werner. This has
influenced the leadership of both Democratic and Republican parties, who
apparently are preparing to criticize an anticipated settlement of the trade
war as too soft, because it does not eliminate Chinese regulations.
All of this comes
on top of U.S. capitalists' unease about the possibility that Chinese companies
will outpace the United States in technological innovation. Huawei has been in
the spotlight recently because the United States pressed Canada to
arrest one of its executives on charges that the company deceived U.S. banks
into violating sanctions on Iran. But this is largely a pretext. Huawei is
mainly a source of concern because it has been at the forefront of 5G wireless
communications, which is widely seen as crucial to the development of new
artificial intelligence technology and the military innovations that will
depend on it.
China has indeed
integrated into the global economy, but it has managed to do so on its own
terms as much as those set by the United States Rather than becoming
increasingly subordinate to Washington, Beijing has been able to maintain
considerable independence and economic initiative.
China flexes its
geopolitical muscle
As China's
economic clout has increased, its capacity to take political initiative and
develop its military strength has grown as well. Over the last decade especially,
Beijing has increasingly flexed its muscle on the regional and international
stage.
In Southeast Asia,
this has been clearest in the long-simmering tensions over the South China Sea,
which some term the West Philippine Sea. Several countries, including the
Philippines, Taiwan, Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam, oppose
China's claim of sovereignty over the strategically crucial and oil-rich
waterway. The Philippines brought its case before an international tribunal at
the Hague and secured a favorable verdict, but China refused to
participate in the proceedings and has rejected the ruling. In the meantime,
China has upped its military presence in the disputed area. It has constructed
new airstrips and military installations, sometimes accomplishing this by
enlarging the size of islands it controls and creating entirely new islands.
The United States, for its part, has conducted provocative naval
maneuvers both in the South China Sea and in the Strait of Taiwan. Here,
the postwar U.S. view of the Pacific as the American Lake collides with China's
determination to control a location that could—if push comes to shove—serve as
a strategic choke point for China's energy imports.
Globally, China
has spearheaded the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a massive infrastructure
development project encompassing 70 countries. The goal is to create six
different “economic corridors” that would integrate economies across Europe,
Africa, and Asia with each other and, of course, with China. The scope of this
initiative is so vast that some have compared it to the Marshall Plan, which
funded the reconstruction of Western Europe after World War II, but on
a global scale. The physical environment of the world will be utterly
transformed, as the BRI finances “bridges, railways, pipelines, hydroelectric
dams, highways, power grids” on a massive scale. Crucially, the key financial
drivers of the BRI are Chinese-led and multilateral banks that are not
dominated by the United States, such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment
Bank and the BRICS New Development Bank. In Latin America, Chinese banks have
provided $140 billion dollars in loans in the last decade. As the BRI
looks to expand to Latin America, we can expect ever-deeper connection between
the Latin American and Chinese economies.
Like any economic
initiative on this scale, the BRI has big geopolitical implications. Presently,
China's economy depends on the U.S. consumers. This is one reason some scholars
feel China is ultimately hemmed into a U.S.-led economic and political order.
The BRI will allow China to dramatically reduce its dependence on the U.S.
consumer market. Simultaneously, it gives other smaller and weaker countries
more leverage in dealings with Western capital: They now have an alternative
direction to turn for investment and trade, even as many grapple with concerns
about negative effects of a large Chinese presence in their
economies. These two developments represent a growing threat to U.S. dominance:
China not only weakens a main source of Washington's current leverage over its
policies but gains the potential to anchor an alignment of many countries in
counter-balancing U.S. power.
Washington's goal
of “overmatch”
During the
post-9/11 years, Washington was preoccupied with the so-called “War on Terror”
and its disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. When the U.S. foreign policy
and military establishment came up for air to take stock under Obama, their
consensus was they were behind the curve in assessing where the most serious
threat to U.S. global hegemony really lay. The result was Washington's “pivot
to Asia” and, more recently, the explicit turn in China policy from
a engagement to confrontation. Michael Klare describes the result:
Even before Donald
Trump entered the Oval Office, the U.S. military and other branches of
government were already gearing up for a long-term quasi-war,
involving both growing economic and diplomatic pressure on China and a buildup
of military forces along that country’s periphery. Since his arrival, such initiatives
have escalated into Cold War-style combat by another name with his
administration committed to defeating China in a struggle for global economic,
technological, and military supremacy.
As it wages this
struggle, Washington has some powerful weapons to deploy. A key one is its
economic ace card: the special status of the U.S. dollar in the world economy.
But this status is thoroughly interwoven with U.S. military might. The
combination is aptly described by Ho-fung Hung in The China Boom:
Although the U.S.
share of the global economy and its political influence around the world have
been dwindling since the 1970s, its residual geopolitical dominance has been
sustained by the continuous hegemonic status of the U.S. dollar in the
international monetary system. This continuing status enables the United States
to borrow internationally at low interest rates so that Americans are able not
only to live but also to fight beyond their means. The perpetuation of the
dollar's hegemony since the abolition of the gold standard in 1971 has been
supported by the U.S. military's global supremacy.
Concerning
military supremacy, the Trump administration makes no secret of its fundamental
goal. The first comprehensive statement of the administration's doctrine, the
National Security Strategy document released in December 2017, gave it a
catch-phrase title: “overmatch,” defined as overwhelming capabilities
“in sufficient scale to prevent enemy success and to ensure America's sons and
daughters will never be in a fair fight.”
“Overmatch” is
already more than words on paper. In January, the first in a new generation of
U.S. nuclear weapons rolled off the assembly line. As James
Carroll wrote in February for The Nation, “Fulfilling the
Trump administration’s quest for nuclear-war-fighting 'flexibility,' it isn’t
designed as a deterrent against another country launching its nukes; it’s
designed to be used. This is the weapon that could make the previously
'unthinkable' thinkable.” Washington is simultaneously upping its
cyberwarfare capacities. Although the cyber-conflict with Russia gets more
headlines, it's noteworthy that Vice President Mike Pence
declared last October, “What the Russians are doing pales in comparison to
what China is doing.” In the proposed budget Trump sent to Congress
last week, he called for a 5 percent increase in military spending—even more
than the Pentagon had requested—while demanding big cuts in domestic programs
like education and environmental protection.
Dangers and
prospects
To say all this is
dangerous is an understatement. The costs of a ramped-up trade war would fall
hardest on the working classes in both U.S. and China—and if it leads to a
global downturn, on workers and the poor across the globe. Calls to “get tough
on China” are, at bottom, ways of shifting blame for people's economic woes
away from the U.S. corporate elite. As Tobita Chow explained in July
for In These Times, they tap into and reinforce the anti-Chinese
racism long present in U.S. politics and marginalize even the idea of
solidarity between workers in both countries. And the multi-front Cold War
described by Michael Klare means constant tension, with the very real
danger that an initially small flashpoint conflict could escalate into
full-scale, even nuclear, war. Short of short open conflict, constant tension
between Washington and Beijing increases the influence of nationalism,
militarism and authoritarianism in both countries, which almost inevitably
translates into increases in domestic repression of popular movements, as well
as austerity.
What does all this
mean for the left? There are important debates on the nature of China's social
system and the impact of its geopolitical and global economic strategies. But
regardless of one's position in those debates, the U.S. left has a critical
role to play in galvanizing opposition to the growing clamor for confrontation
in U.S.-China relations. We can do this. But we need a vision and practice that
speaks to both humanity's common interest in sheer survival and the global
working class' interest in a just and non-exploitative society.
We should
prioritize the fight for a 180-degree turnaround in the U.S. stance toward
China, demanding that diplomacy and negotiation replace trade wars and military
encirclement. We should call for a switch from the goal of “containing
China” to the goal of forging a U.S. China partnership that would take common
action against climate change and support a global campaign to address extreme
poverty worldwide. This China-focused effort would be one component of a
campaign to de-escalate all global conflicts, and turn to diplomacy over
military force. Such a campaign should push the U.S. government to abandon
pursuit of hegemony in favor or acceptance of the fact that we all live in a
multi-polar world where, as Martin Luther King declared in 1983, “We must
learn to live together as brothers [sic] or perish together as fools.”
Making progress on
this front will be a challenge, not least because of the barrage of punditry
and dominant media framing about China, which focuses exclusively on (often
legitimate) grievances and problems—and presents a one-sided picture of a
complex society. On top of this, the Trump-dominated GOP and anti-China
Democrats are the ones with the most clout on U.S.-China relations.
Despite these
obstacles, there is a basis for building a broad-front campaign to redirect
U.S.-China relations for the sake of the planet and its inhabitants. Such a
campaign's demands would be consistent with the principle of the Green New Deal
on a global scale, would recognize that the United States and China are the
world's largest emitters of carbon dioxide—China due to the size of its
population, the United States due to its per-capita pollution levels. A
successful international effort to avert catastrophic climate change depends on
joint action by the two countries.
Within all
working-class and social justice movements, it’s vital to bring
internationalism and anti-racism to the fore and stress how a decrease in
tensions between states sets more favorable conditions for democratic rights
struggles and working-class movements in all countries. An important part of
this effort is forging direct ties between workers in the United States and
those in China, as well as other countries. The last few years have seen a
crackdown on independent labor organizing under Xi Jinping and fewer chances
for international worker-to-worker interaction. But their common interests
remain: Both U.S. and Chinese workers confront many of the same
transnationals. And because Beijing's crackdown is directly connected to
greater tensions with Washington and fears that the
United States will try to take advantage of protests in China to
undermine the Chinese government—as the United States has done in so
many other countries—fighting to reduce U.S.-China tensions will ultimately
benefit Chinese workers.
Gaining ground
here is obviously a difficult process. But in the context of a surging
resistance to Trumpism that includes newly combative layers of workers and a
growing socialist contingent, possibilities exist that were unimaginable even
five years ago.
We don't have time
to waste. Towards the end of the U.S.-USSR Cold War, Soviet leader Mikhail
Gorbachev called for “a new way of thinking” whereby all countries, despite
major ideological and political differences, would recognize that our
collective security was imperiled by the threat of nuclear war, environmental
devastation and violence produced by the extreme impoverishment of hundreds of
millions of people. Gorbachev's call for common action against those threats
was overwhelmed by the failure of his attempt to restructure Soviet
society, as well as by the wave of capitalist triumphalism and U.S. aggression
following the Soviet collapse. But all those dangers remain. Indeed, we are 30 years
further down the road toward climate catastrophe, global inequality is greater
than it was in the 1980s, and Washington is now producing nuclear weapons that
are more likely to be used than ever. And this time, it is the U.S.-China
relationship which will largely decide what path humanity takes.
Calvin Cheung-Miaw
is with the Left Inside/Outside Project, and an editor of Organizing Upgrade.
Max Elbaum is
author of Revolution in the Air, recently reissued by Verso Books, and an
editor of Organizing Upgrade.
Reprinted with
permission from In These Times. All rights reserved.
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"The master class
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The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
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