The U.S. war drive against China – What it means for workers

By Sharon Black

Oct. 1, 2024, marks the 75th anniversary of China’s earth-shaking revolution, which broke the chains of feudal slavery and imperialist domination.

The Communist Party of China, under the leadership of Mao Zedong, commonly known as Chairman Mao, both inside China and among the world’s oppressed, did what was considered near impossible.  The revolution ended China’s “Century of Humiliation,” which began with the British imperialists’ First Opium War in 1839.

Widespread famine, floods, and forced labor, as well as severely shortened lifespans, marked the era of imperialist domination.  China’s huge landmass and difficult terrain made it seemingly impossible to unite the diverse population, including its numerous ethnic groups.

In 1949, only 20% of the population could read, and the life expectancy was 35 years.  China was primarily a rural peasant economy; its working class was tiny in comparison. There was almost no industrialization or education. But by 1975, the revolution had increased life expectancy to 65.5 years.

The newly founded People’s Republic of China, under the banner, “Women hold up half the sky,” abolished arranged marriage, child brides, and concubinage.  The status of women was uplifted and enshrined in the 1950 Marriage Law and the Land Law.

In the last 75 years, progress for the masses and China’s working class has been remarkable.

In 2012, China’s President Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the CPC Central Committee, vowed to eradicate the vestiges of extreme poverty by 2020. Despite the additional challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Chinese government proudly proclaimed the eradication of extreme poverty on November 23, 2020.

The World Bank, indeed no friend of the Communist Party of China, declared that China has lifted over 850 million people out of poverty. “By any measure, the speed and scale of China’s poverty reduction is historically unprecedented. With this, China has contributed close to three-quarters of the global reduction in the number of people living in extreme poverty.”

China is now a world scientific power.  It has built high-speed trains and affordable electric cars, reduced pollution and carbon emissions, and engaged in space exploration. The People’s Republic of China’s accomplishments have spanned the gamut from health care to education and sports.

China is the world’s second-largest economy by nominal GDP (Gross Domestic Product), behind the United States, and since 2017 has been the world’s largest economy when measured by purchasing power parity (PPP).

GDP is the monetary market value of all final goods and services made within a country during a specific period.  What is not measured by this standard is how that is distributed.

PPP is an alternative way to measure GDP that takes into account the differences in the cost of living between countries. It adjusts the GDP figures to reflect the actual purchasing power of a country’s currency. When measured by PPP, China’s economy has been larger than that of the United States since 2017. The cost of living in China is generally lower than in the United States. This means that the same amount of money can buy more goods and services in China than in the U.S.

The development of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) by China, in contrast to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which demands austerity and cutbacks for loans, has contributed to the developing countries of the Global South.

The BRI is aimed at building infrastructure that links land and sea.  In Africa, this includes railways in Kenya, an electric railway in Ethiopia, and hydropower stations in Uganda. Washington, which does not contribute to local development, mainly ships weapons and war munitions to Africa, building AFRICOM — the U.S. Africa Command, a unified combat command of the Pentagon.

Global class war and China

Revolutionary change and the struggles of the working class don’t happen in isolation; international events and global pressures influence them. The same applies to the material conditions that shape them.

What the Communist Party of China and the Chinese working class have faced, whether through external or internal pressure, trade wars, attempts at dismemberment, military threats, or hot war, can best be described as a global class war. This struggle primarily pits U.S. imperialism against the working class worldwide, especially in countries intent on building socialism and liberating themselves from imperialist control.

The approach of U.S. monopoly capitalism has not, at any moment, adopted a hands-off policy regarding building socialism in China, nor, for that matter, anywhere else in the world. They are for intervention against socialism everywhere.

It’s important to underscore that in the decades preceding the success of the 1949 revolution, the United States military and government were already playing a role in attempting to defeat the Chinese communist revolutionaries by supplying arms to the reactionary Kuomintang.

Both the bloody Korean and Vietnam wars were equally about containing, encircling, and strangling China, along with defeating the liberation aspirations of the Korean and Vietnamese people.

The Pentagon visited unfathomable destruction on both northern Korea and Vietnam. It bombed North Korea to rubble and engaged in carpet bombing and deforestation in Vietnam.  An estimated 2.5 million Koreans lost their lives, and the estimated deaths of Vietnamese range from 1 to 3 million. The people of both the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam successfully moved heaven and earth to rebuild.

The 1989 reactionary Tiananmen Square “student rebellion” characterized as a massacre by the West and later exposed as a lie might possibly be described as a much earlier attempt, failed as it was, at “color revolution” (the name given to Western-backed attempts at regime change starting with the Rose Revolution in the country of Georgia in 2003).

Throw in the Dalai Lama and the CIA-led “Tibetan independence movement,” and the Falun Gong project, and you can see the pattern of lies meant to turn all manner of sympathy against the CPC and direct efforts to divide and dismember the People’s Republic of China.

The key to China’s ability to hold off counter-revolution and to weather imperialist schemes is that the Communist Party of China and its government, backed by the People’s Liberation Army, have continued to hold state power in the name of the working class. China continues to have a planned economy based on the state-owned infrastructure.

Today’s heightened danger

The present decade has brought bigger challenges. The maneuvers by U.S. imperialism have been increasingly more dangerous and point in the direction of a hot war centered around Taiwan. The U.S. NATO proxy war against Russia and the increasing regional war in Western Asia, with Palestine as its central flash point, should be seen as one.

What undergirds and fuels this crisis is the contraction of monopoly capitalism.  More than ever, the U.S. economy relies less on production for use and more on spending and development for what is popularly called the military-industrial complex.  The capitalist banking system is intertwined with these developments.  It is the super fuel for inflation and the deepening impoverishment of the broader working class, making larger war inevitable.

Lenin’s thesis on imperialism is more important than ever. The drive toward war is independent of political administrations or individual intentions, regardless of how venal or corrupt.  As the global capitalist crisis deepens, the U.S. imperialist system is propelled toward wider war.

Our role in the “belly of the beast” is clear.

The global working class, including U.S. workers, who increasingly embody a diverse collective of nations, must be united in solidarity with the working class of China.

The vast majority of the people of the United States have nothing in common with the multi-trillion dollar bankers and war profiteers who are promoting the war buildup against China.

This book, “The U.S. War Drive Against China: What it means for workers,” is an effort to expose the increasing danger of a U.S. war against China and to reveal the real enemies of the working class.

This article was originally posted at http://www.struggle-la-lucha.org . Please check this website to find out when this book is available.