Socialist Action /June 1999
U.S. Imperialism Targets China
By NAT WEINSTEIN
The most important single event that crashed onto the center stage of
world politics last month was the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.
How does that bizarre incident-which the U.S. bipartisan capitalist government
is finding so hard to explain-fit into the total picture of the U.S.-NATO
war on Yugoslavia?
U.S. weapons manufacturers boast that their missiles are able to zero
in on a single building in a large city with bulls-eye accuracy. This gives
substance to the widespread belief in Belgrade reported elsewhere in this
newspaper that there are very few so-called "errant bombs."
How this "accident" was explained away by the highest U.S.
military and political spokespersons was more than incredible, it was tantamount
to an admission that it was no accident.
The explanation baldly asserted by the military and political spokespersons
for the U.S. government, that they had "mistakenly" used a seven-year-old
map of Belgrade even challenged the credulity of a retired American general
interviewed by National Public Radio.
This general, we were unable to catch his name, was interviewed shortly
after the embassy bombing. He declared the official explanation to be ludicrously
unbelievable to anyone who had the slightest knowledge of the extensive
information-gathering apparatus available to the CIA and other American
intelligence agencies and how they function.
The NATO command centers for bombing raids are equipped with computerized
maps projected on large screens, which are capable of easy updating with
the flick of an electronic switch. It is inconceivable that such maps are
not updated after each night's raids so that new targets can be selected
for the next night's raids.
In this light, the notion that the "mistake" was caused by
an outdated map is one of the more absurdly unbelievable lies yet to have
come off the moving lips of President Clinton.
The Yugoslav people, who surely are in an excellent position, based on
bitter experience, to make an intelligent assessment of what is intentional
and what is accidental didn't buy it. And the spontaneous outpouring of
hundreds of thousands of ordinary Chinese working people and students on
the first two days after the destruction of their embassy was testimony
that they didn't buy Clinton's alibi either.
But the tell-tale signs were evident that the Chinese government naturally
took advantage of imperialism's incredible "mistake" to advance
their own narrow goals by orchestrating a couple more days of not-so-spontaneous
demonstrations. However, it's clear that they were swept along by the mass
outrage, and couldn't stop the demonstrations had they tried.
The demonstrations were reportedly on the scale of those mounted in the
streets of Beijing, Shanghai, and other Chinese cities against the Stalinist
regime's bloody suppression of Tiananmen students 10 years ago. Neither
was the connection between the two events lost on the Chinese Stalinists.
Thus, fearful of it turning against them, they shut it off as soon as they
could.
In any event, the mass media in this country was compelled to take as
good coin the near-universal belief held by Chinese protesters that the
embassy bombing was no accident.
The embassy bombing also contributed significantly to undermining global
support for the war on Yugoslavia. It crystallized mass indignation at the
ever-increasing rate of so-called collateral civilian deaths and massive
destruction and has dealt Clinton and company a major setback.
Moreover, it undercuts one of American capitalism's favorite means for
blackmailing Chinese Stalinism into granting further major concessions to
U.S. capitalist penetration into the Chinese economy with its endlessly
repeated charge of human rights abuses in China. It's a classic case of
the pot denouncing the kettle for being black.
Chinese spies nab U.S. military secrets
Even more ridiculous, but serving exactly the same purpose-of smearing
the Chinese regime-is the propaganda barrage against its alleged theft of
secret U.S. nuclear and missile technology.
But what's so shocking about that? America's closest allies, the Israelis
and the British for instance, have been caught doing exactly the same thing.
The alleged shock and outrage expressed by America's capitalist politicians
at the revelation that China hires spies to steal secrets is pure hogwash
designed to wrench more economic concessions from China than it has already
granted!
The key spy in question, Wen Ho Lee, a Taiwanese nuclear weapons scientist
at Los Alamos National Laboratory, was accused of sending stolen atomic
secrets to the Chinese Communists. Inexplicably, however, although he has
been fired from his job, he has still not been indicted for any crime.
But even more incredible is the fact that before this "spy"
was discovered, a bipartisan Congressional committee found that two American
aerospace corporations, Hughes Electronics and Loral Space and Communications,
had "improperly advised" the Chinese on rocket designs in the
mid-1990s. They too remain unindicted although unlike poor Mr. Lee, they
admitted having actually handed over military secrets to the Chinese.
Worse yet, while they never charged Mr. Lee with doing it for money,
the two American corporations did it exactly for that reason.
These corporations had hired Chinese rocket companies to build rockets
to lift U.S. commercial satellites into orbit. Why? Because the Chinese
could do it cheaper, leaving higher profits for the two aerospace companies.
But when a couple of Chinese rockets exploded, destroying the very expensive
satellites owned by the U.S. corporations, the latter were authorized by
the U.S. Secretary of Commerce to hand over to the Chinese the "military
secrets" they needed to prevent such accidents and thus avoid any further
such losses.
It's hard to match such hypocrisy. The real reason for the media campaign
against China has nothing to do with military secrets. It has to do with
American imperialism's desperate need to get China to open up its economic
infrastructure to a gradual takeover by American corporations, banks, and
other financial institutions.
It all boils down to profits
The Chinese Stalinist regime, like their counterparts in eastern Europe
and Asia, is deeply committed to their goal of restoring capitalism in China
and transforming themselves from a parasitic caste into a class with a legal
right-something they presently do not have-to own the wealth they siphon
off from state-owned industry and from the country's natural resources.
That's a main reason why the bureaucratic castes in these degenerating
workers states are likened to the robber barons of 19th century America
and it is why they so desperately seek to become a property owning class.
After all, the Chinese masses can take their property back any time they
get it into their collective heads that they have been and are getting robbed
blind.
Moreover, it cannot be a bloody conflict since, unlike in capitalist
countries in which the capitalist classes have a significant measure of
support in the most prosperous layers of the petty bourgeoisie (i.e.,
small capitalists), the objective basis for such support for capitalism
in the degenerating workers states is virtually insignificant.
China, of all the bureaucratized and degenerating workers states, has
been able to make the greatest progress toward capitalist restoration. But
unlike the former Soviet bloc countries, which have generally suffered a
large decline in industrial production, China has expanded its productive
capacity significantly. That's largely because China was the most undeveloped
of those countries that carried through a socialist revolution.
But like its counterparts in Europe, the Chinese bureaucracy and their
allied neo-capitalist entrepreneurs are getting rich and morphing into capitalists
while the great majority in China, as in Eastern Europe, are suffering a
decline in their living standards.
It's no surprise that all the bureaucratized workers states attempting
to metamorphose into market-driven capitalist states are required to give
away control over their economy, bit by bit and chunk by chunk, in order
to gain entry into the world capitalist market and ultimately make the transition
to capitalism.
But Chinese Stalinists, like their counterparts in Eastern Europe, know
that every concession they make brings them a step closer to coming under
the complete domination of world imperialism. That's why they must trade
away, little by little, control over their economy in exchange for access
to world trade on capitalist terms.
Sooner or later, they know, their economies will come under imperialist
control, or they will be wrecked, as has already happened most decisively
in Russia.
Just think of what will happen to these states in flux between capitalism
and socialism as well as all the weaker economies of the world when the
currently deepening economic crisis breaks down into a global depression!
The parasitic Stalinist ruling castes are swept along their hopeless
trajectory because of what they are-an entirely self-serving privileged
bureaucratic elite seeking to become independent of the constraints their
social system imposes on their privileges.
But they are caught between a rock and a hard place. In order to be free
of these constraints, the Chinese bureaucracy must buy their freedom by
selling their country and its 1.1 billion inhabitants bit by bit into the
slavery of imperialist capital-that is, toward becoming not a powerful and
independent class of Chinese capitalists but essentially a neo-colonial
class of compradors. That is, they can only become small-time capitalists
completely dependent on imperialist capital.
On the other side of this equation we see what appears to be a schizophrenic
alternation by Clinton and his bipartisan cohorts between the wooing and
the bashing of China.
This strange, crazy dance between portraying China as a friendly and
welcome trading partner one day, and a deadly enemy the next, however, reflects
the fundamental fact that despite their best intentions, both bureaucrats
and capitalists are based on social systems that cannot peacefully coexist
except for brief historical moments and not without sharp confrontations.
But there is another factor of potentially far greater force in the equation
represented by these mutually incompatible social systems. And that is another
far more sharply opposed conflict of interests between the working class
in these degenerating workers states and the bosses and bureaucrats inside
and outside the countries in which they live.
And then there is the working class in the world's capitalist countries,
whose class interests are similarly counterposed to that of the world's
capitalist class. And the fact should also be obvious that the class interests
of workers everywhere are essentially identical.
So far, the death agony of world capitalism, which began almost exactly
100 years ago, has mostly taken the form of uninterrupted wars and preparations
for war, and has only been punctuated by colonial and socialist revolutions.
The pace of war has been accelerating as the global capitalist economy
sinks deeper into economic crisis. Indications are that all these manifestations
of a dying social order-the endlessly alternating sequence of economic and
military crises-are converging and coming to a head.
The only alternatives before the human race today are world socialism
or capitalist barbarism. And the barbarism Karl Marx warned of 150 years
ago is not somewhere in the future, it is now!
But there is no cause for pessimism. The world working class and its
natural allies, all those victimized by the profit system and its wars,
have shown that they have the power to change the world. The challenge,
the necessity, the opportunity to do just that is before us. It can be done
and it will be done!
Socialist Action /June 1999 |