CHINA’S state media have responded to Barak Obama’s Pentagon announcement that the US is turning its back on the North Atlantic, and therefore the NATO strategy of the previous 60 years, in order to concentrate its ‘focus’ on the Asia-Pacific region.
This turn is to specifically confront China and to build up a new military alliance with Japan, South Korea, Australia, Burma and India against the threat posed to imperialism by the economic development and potential of the Chinese deformed workers’ state.
However, in its editorial, the official Communist Party news agency Xinhua has sought to try and find something good to say about the US move, as if the US ruling class has not made up its mind about its purpose. This reflects the fact that the Chinese Stalinist leadership are continuing to prop up bankrupt US imperialism by buying its debt, to the tune of trillions of dollars.
With the world capitalist crisis deepening, the Chinese Stalinists do not want to lose their money, and therefore have an interest in trying to continue propping up the US, and of hoping for the best, that the US will recognise the role that China is playing and go easy on it.
This leaves out of account the real world. The US is being driven by the world crisis to seek to halt China’s advance by initially forcing it to revalue – raising the price of the Chinese yuan – and stymying all Chinese exports to the USA, thus ‘renewing’ US economic power.
The process however will not stop there. The weakening of China’s export-driven economy will create hundreds of millions of unemployed, and a situation which the US ruling class hopes to use to overthrow the Stalinist bureaucracy and restore capitalism in China. The US strategic military change is to aid such an intervention, to drive back the working class throughout Asia and restore the power of a weakening US imperialism.
The Obama cuts are a mirage – the military power of US imperialism is being readjusted. It continues to be bigger than the next 10 countries combined, including Russia, China, Japan, and the UK.
In contrast to the Xinhua position, the Chinese Communist Party’s Global Times newspaper put forward an alternative containment position, the plan B of the bureaucracy.
It states: ‘According to the officials of the Pentagon, the changes in strategy are mainly aimed at Iran and China. . . In front of such a US strategic adjustment, China should remain sober. Since it has become a firm strategic target of the US, its efforts to improve Sino-US relations have proved incapable of offsetting US worries over its rise. China can only use its strength to gain friendship from the US from now on.
‘The US and China are carrying out competition unprecedented in history. . . Dealing with the US containment attempts should be one of China’s diplomatic strategic goals.’
It adds: ‘The US strategic adjustment highlights Iran’s importance to China. Iran’s existence and its stance form a strong check against the US. . . China should come up with countermeasures. It should strengthen its long-range strike abilities and put more deterrence on the US. The US must realise that it cannot stop the rise of China and that being friendly to China is in its utmost interests.’ It concludes: ‘China should try to avoid a new cold war with the US.’
These are the echoes of the Stalinist Krushchev perspective of peaceful competition between communism and capitalism, with military development assuring a stalemate and security.
China has gone from an attempt at ‘communism in a single country’ under Mao, to today’s concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat presiding over ‘one state with two social systems’.
The role of Iran in future developments should not be underestimated. If Iran closes the Strait of Hormuz then China’s oil lines of supply will be cut, and the bureaucracy will have to rapidly decide which must be sacrificed: its immediate oil supplies, or its ally Iran.
The answer to the question of ‘Whither China?’ is the same as Trotsky’s answer to ‘Whither Russia?’ It is either forward towards socialism, as part of the spread of and the victory of the world socialist revolution, or back to capitalism, and a historic disaster.
The world revolution is the only way forward. Building sections of the Fourth International in every country to lead it to victory is the issue of the hour.
