On March 24, 2021, a high-profile article proclaiming âThere Will Not Be a New Cold Warâ appeared in Foreign Affairs, the flagship publication of the Council on Foreign Relations, the principal think tank for U.S. grand strategy. The author, Thomas Christensen, a professor of international affairs at Columbia University and former deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs in the George W. Bush administration, went so far as to acknowledge that âthe [Donald] Trump administration basically declared a cold war on China.â Nevertheless, no New Cold War, Christensen optimistically indicated, would actually materialize, since Washington under Joe Biden would presumably back away from Trumpâs extreme policies toward China given its âvital position in the global value chain.â Beijing could not be seen as an aggressive power in ideological or geopolitical terms, but was simply interested in economic competition.
Yet, what Christensenâs analysis excluded was any mention of the imperialist world system, crowned by U.S. hegemony, which is now threatened by Chinaâs seemingly inexorable rise and pursuit of its own distinctive sovereign project. In this respect, the Trump administrationâs prosecution of a New Cold War on China was no anomaly, but rather the inevitable U.S. response to Chinaâs rise and the end of Washingtonâs unipolar moment. Just as the United States declared a Cold War against the Soviet Union and China in the 1940s and â50s, as part of a grand strategy to secure its global hegemony in the immediate post-Second World War era, today it is declaring a New Cold War on China in the interest of maintaining that same imperial hegemony.
Indeed, days before Christensenâs Foreign Affairs article went to print declaring that there would be no New Cold War, the Biden administration made it clear that it not only intended to continue the New Cold War, but to accelerate it, pushing it to greater heights. This was evident in the first high-level bilateral talks between the United States and the Peoplesâ Republic of China following the election of Biden as U.S. president, held on March 18, 2021, in the Captain Cook Hotel in downtown Anchorage, with U.S. secretary of state Antony Blinken and national security advisor Jake Sullivan sitting across from Chinaâs director of the Office of the Central Commission for Foreign Affairs Yang Jiechi and Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi.
In the week prior to this high-level meeting, Washington had set the stage, signaling through its actions its intention to promote a hyper-aggressive Cold War 2.0 directed at China. Thus, on March 12, Biden met with the heads of state of Japan, India, and Australia, representing the new Quad military-strategic alliance led by the United States, widely seen as an attempt to construct an Asian analogue to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The Quad issued a joint statement the entire subtext of which was enmity toward China. On the same day, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission blacklisted five Chinese companies including Huawei. Late on March 16, less than two days before the bilateral talks with China were set to begin, the Biden administration renewed sanctions against twenty-four officials of the Chinese government, in response to the suppression of dissent in Hong Kong.
In a break with diplomatic protocol, Blinken started off the March 18 bilateral talks in Anchorage by bluntly stating that he and the U.S. secretary of defense Lloyd Austin had just returned from a meeting with their counterparts in Japan and Korea, two U.S. leading military allies that share many of Washingtonâs concerns with regard to China. Washingtonâs goal, he said, was âto advance the interests of the United States and to strengthen the rules-based international order.â He then entered into a direct challenge to Beijing, referring to âdeep concerns with actions by China, including in Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Taiwan, cyberattacks on the United States and economic coercion toward our allies. Each of these actions threaten the rules-based order that maintains global stability.â The United States was ready not only to be competitive, and in some areas âcollaborative,â with China, but also to be strongly âadversarialâ where necessary.
Sullivan followed up by pointedly referring to Bidenâs hosting of âthe Quad leadersâ summitâ the previous week, and the Quad military allianceâs security concerns in the Indo-Pacific, thereby foregrounding the warlike pact being formed in Asia against Beijing. He added that U.S. allies and partners had expressed âareas of concernâ with respect to Chinaâs use of âeconomic and military coercionâ in its âassaults on basic valuesâ and that the United States would welcome âstiff competitionâ with China, but that it was also, he intimated, prepared for full-scale conflict.
Yang responded by insisting that China firmly upheld âthe United Nations-centered international system and the international order underpinned by international law, not what is advocated by a small number of countries [as] the so-called rules-based international order.â âThe Chinese people,â he said, âare wholly rallying around the Communist Party of China. Our values are the same as the common values of humanity. Those are: peace, development, fairness, justice, freedom, and democracy.â He stressed the quite different conceptions of democracy represented by China and the United States. Contrasting Beijingâs foreign policy to that of Washington, both historically and in the present, he stated:
We do not believe in invading through the use of force, or to topple other regimes through various means, or to massacre the people of other countries.⊠The United States has exercised long-arm jurisdiction and suppression and overstretched [its] national security through the use of force or financial hegemony, and this has created obstacles for normal trade activities, and the United States has also been persuading some countries to launch attacks on China.⊠With [respect to] Xinjiang, Tibet and Taiwan, they are [each] an inalienable part of Chinaâs territory. China is firmly opposed to U.S. interference in Chinaâs internal affairs. We have expressed our staunch opposition to such interference, and we will take firm actions in response.
Yang insisted that Washington had no basis to lecture Beijing on human rights given its own record, as symbolized by the protests of the Black Lives Matter movement. âThe United States itself does not represent international public opinion, and neither does the Western world.â With respect to âcyberattacks,â he stated, âwhether itâs the ability to launch cyberattacks or the technologies that could be deployed, the United States is the champion in this regard. You canât blame this problem on somebody else.â
Wang, in turn, indicated that
China urges the U.S. side to fully abandon the hegemonic practice of willfully interfering in Chinaâs internal affairs.⊠And in particular on the 17th of March [the day before the meeting], the United States escalated its so-called sanctions on China regarding Hong Kong, and the Chinese people are outraged by this gross interference in Chinaâs internal affairs and the Chinese side is firmly opposed to it.⊠Just the other day, before our departure, the United States passed these new sanctions. This is not supposed to be the way one should welcome his guests [in these bilateral talks taking place in Alaska], and we wonder if this is a decision made by the United States to try to gain some advantage in dealing with China.
Blinken retorted by referring again to questions raised by U.S. allies and partners with respect to Chinaâs actions in violation of the rules-based international order. He emphasized Washingtonâs determination to build strategic alliances directed at China. Sullivan then touted U.S. technological prowess and its landing, a couple weeks before, of another rover on Mars, working with its allies in Europeâa comment designed to deflate in advance Chinaâs planned landing of its rover Tianwen [Questions to Heaven] 1 on Mars, to take place in May. He harshly criticized the Chinese delegation for its âlecturesâ and âlong, winding statements.â
Yang responded that he had âfelt compelled to make this speech because of the tone on the U.S. side,â in which the U.S. diplomats chose âto speak to China in a condescending way from a position of strength,â with all the appearance of having carefully âplannedâ and âorchestratedâ this confrontation. Wang followed by returning to Blinkenâs veiled reference to Japan and South Korea regarding their concerns about coercion from China. He indicated that it was not clear whether this was actually coming from these countries themselves or was simply a U.S. projection.
âFor an astonished press, witnessing the [entire] exchange,â as Thomas Wright, a Brookings Institution senior fellow, observed shortly after in the Atlantic, it âwas like being present at the dawn of a new cold war.â Indeed, as David Stilwell, former assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs under Trump, and Dan Negrea, senior associate of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote ten days later in the National Interest: âThirty years after the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the world finds itself in a new cold warâ centered on China.
Washington continued in the following weeks with its aggressive attacks on China:
- March 22: The United States, along with the European Union, the United Kingdom, and Canada, issued sanctions on four Chinese officials over alleged human rights violations in Xinjiang.
- March 24: The foreign ministers of NATOâs thirty states declared that they were ready to oppose the âauthoritarian threats to the rules-based international order,â in cooperation with their allies and partnerships in the Asia-Pacific, thereby singling out China as a common foe.
- March 25: A week after the bilateral talks, Biden in a press conference declared that âXi [Jinping, the president of the Peopleâs Republic of China], doesnât have a democraticâwith a small âdââbone in his bodyâ and referred to him as an âautocrat.â
- March 28: U.S. trade representative Katherine Tai announced that the United States had no intention of removing the tariffs that Trump had imposed on Chinese goods imported to the United States, affecting a majority of Chinese exports to the United States, and designed to get multinational corporations to delink their value chains from China.
- March 30: The Biden administration unilaterally accused China of âgenocide and crimes against humanity,â presenting this formally in its annual human rights report, though lacking any credible evidence to support its charges.
- April 8: Washington blacklisted seven Chinese supercomputing firms.
- April 30: The Biden administration arranged a public meeting between official U.S. State Department representatives and their Taiwan counterparts. This broke with the agreement with China, going back to the 1970sâknown as the Three Communiquesâaccording to which the United States would avoid all official contacts with Taiwan, which China considers to be part of One China, with two governing systems.
- May 5: The Group of Seven core capitalist nations, consisting of the United States, Japan, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Canada, presented itself as the global guarantor of the ârules-based international order,â strongly criticizing China over its domestic affairs.
- May 7: In a UN Security Council meeting chaired by Wang Yi, Blinken criticized China and Russia for flouting international law, and while not actually referring to China by name, which he has repeatedly accused of genocide, he stated: âAsserting domestic jurisdiction doesnât give any state a blank check to enslave, torture, disappear, ethnically cleanse their people, or violate human rights in any other way.â
- May 26: (1) Biden ordered U.S. intelligence agencies to investigate the laboratory theory of the origins of SARS-CoV-2 in China; (2) Kurt Campbell, coordinator for Indo-Pacific affairs on the National Security Council, Bidenâs Asia tsar, declared that âthe period that was broadly described as engagement [with China] has come to an end.â
In its first one hundred days, the Biden administration wasted no time in ratcheting up U.S. military pressure on China. From January to April 2021, U.S. military activity along Chinaâs borders increased sharply, with incursions of U.S. military ships in Chinese-claimed territorial waters rising by 20 percent and U.S. military aircraft incursions in Chinese air space growing by 40 percent. In March, Germany deployed a warship in the South China Sea aimed at China, with Washington welcoming âGermanyâs support for a rules-based international order in the Indo-Pacific.â In April, the United States sent an additional carrier strike group to bolster its forces in the South China Sea. Meanwhile, Britain is sending its Queen Elizabeth II carrier strike group into the South China Sea in a tilt to the Indo-Pacific. The United States currently has four hundred military bases and some 375,000 command personnel (military and civilian) in the Indo-Pacific encircling China, including more than eighty thousand troops stationed in Japan and South Korea.
Viewed in this overall context, the confrontation between Washington and Beijing in Anchorage, rather than simply constituting an angry exchange between irate diplomats, can be seen as revealing the basic contours of the U.S. imperial grand strategy with respect to China, along with the nature of Chinaâs strategic response. Washingtonâs insistence on what it calls a ârules-based international order,â in contrast to Beijingâs advocacy of a broad UN-based order of sovereign states underpinned by international law (traditionally referred to as the Westphalian system), is more than a dispute over phraseology. Rather, it stands for the current U.S. strategy of compelling China to comply with the hegemonic political-economic order imposed by an alliance of major powers under U.S. leadership, so as to âlock inâ current imperial power relationships. As China has indicated, if the ârules-based orderâ is âset by the US alone, then it cannot be called international rules, but rather âhegemonic rules.â⊠If it refers to rules set by the US and a handful of other countries, then it cannot be called international rules either, but rather âclique rules,â which run counter to the principle of democracy and wonât be accepted by the majority of countries in the world.â
In particular, the United States and the other capitalist economies at the apex of the world system, notably the triad of the United States/Canada, Western Europe, and Japan, are committed to preserving not only the hegemonic institutions forged in the Cold War era, such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, coupled with the system of U.S.-dominated military alliances, but also what is referred to as the post-Westphalian system or liberal international order that emerged during the era of ânaked imperialismâ from the 1990s to the present, made possible by the vacuum created by the Soviet Unionâs disappearance from the world stage and the resulting U.S. âunipolar moment.â During the post-Cold War era, a continuing stream of âhumanitarian interventionsâ in the affairs of other states have been carried out by the United States and its allies, generating an era of perpetual warâbeginning with the expansion of U.S. (and NATO) power in Eastern Europe with the dismemberment of Yugoslavia, as well as military interventions in the Middle East and Africaâin violation of the sovereignty of states. This new aggressive imperial posture has been legitimated in terms of the âresponsibility to protectâ and the promotion of âdemocracyâ and âhumanitarianâ valuesâas these are determined by the United States and other core capitalist powers, standing in for the ârules-based international order.â
The strategic objective of the New Cold War on China from the standpoint of the United States and its allies is not so much to contain China economically, politically, and militarily, which is not possible, but rather to find ways to constrain it, making it impossible for it to effect changes in the global order despite its emerging power position. The new imperial grand strategy is thus designed to replicate on a global scale (and in the thermonuclear age) the famous âgunboat diplomacyâ imposed on the Qing dynasty by the leading imperial powers during Chinaâs âCentury of Humiliation,â stretching from the Opium Wars up to the Second World War. This was symbolized above all by the British destruction of the emperorâs Summer Palace in 1860, designed to humiliate the Qing dynasty. In 1900, during the so-called Boxer Rebellion (Yihetuan Movement), the great powers invaded China in what was referred to as the Eight-Nation Alliance (then consisting of Britain, the United States, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy, Japan, and Russia), imposing their authority on the Qing dynasty and forcing further unequal treaties on the country. Part of the justification given at the time was that China needed to conform to international rules of trade and conduct.
In an analogous fashion to the treatment of China in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, China today, according to current U.S. imperial grand strategy, is to be economically, geopolitically, and militarily constrained by a broad alliance of imperial powers. The object is ultimately that of bringing about the demise of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and tightly binding China to the imperial order of global monopoly-finance capital, while reducing it to permanent subaltern status. The principal means of achieving this will be a system of unequal treatiesâthe rules-based international orderâimposed by a coalition of great powers, with the United States at the top.
The chief mechanism for defeating China was spelled out in 2017 by Harvard foreign policy analyst Graham Allison, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, in his book Destined for War: Can America Escape the Thucydides Trap?, a work highly praised by Biden, former U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger, and former CIA director and former commander of the U.S. Central Command David Petraeus. In Allisonâs words:
US forces could covertly train and support separatist insurgents. Fissures in the Chinese state already exist. Tibet is essentially occupied territory. Xinjiang, a traditionally Islamic region in western China, already harbors an active Uighur separatist movement responsible for waging a low-level insurgency against Beijing. And Taiwanese who watch Beijingâs heavy-handedness in Hong Kong hardly require encouragement to oppose reunification with this increasingly authoritarian government. Could US support for these separatists draw Beijing into conflicts with radical Islamist groups throughout Central Asia and the Middle East? If so, could these become quagmires, mirroring the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan where U.S.-supported mujahideen âfreedom fightersâ bled the Soviet Union?
A subtle but concentrated effort to accentuate the contradictions at the core of Chinese Communist ideologyâŠcould, over time, undermine the regime and encourage independence movements in Taiwan, Xinjiang, Tibet, and Hong Kong. By splintering China at home and keeping Beijing embroiled in maintaining domestic stability, the US could avert, or at least substantially delay, Chinaâs challenge to American dominance.
All of this is now New Cold War policy. Moreover, by attacking China with allegations of âgenocideâ and âcrimes against humanityâ in relation to its internal populations, the United States is able to justify its New Cold War on China, including its actual hybrid warfare, combining an array of political, economic, financial, technological, cyber, and more traditional overt and covert military means.
The âRules-Based Orderâ and New U.S. Imperial Grand Strategy
The foremost U.S. theorist of the rules-based international order is G. John Ikenberry, a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, whose work has had a strong influence on the Biden administration. In a famous 2004 essay on âLiberalism and Empire,â Ikenberryâalthough not denying that the U.S. past and present had often been characterized by imperial domination (even going so far as to cite leading left revisionist historians such as William Appleman Williams, Gabriel Kolko, and Joyce Kolko)ânonetheless argued strongly against those in U.S. foreign policy circles who believed that the United States should openly comport itself as an empire. A more effective hegemonic strategy, Ikenberry argued at the time, would be to utilize the unipolar moment to establish a rules-based international order that would secure U.S. and Western global domination as a fait accompli well into the future, even in the face of eventual declining U.S. power.
As Chinaâs historic rise became more apparent, Ikenberry wrote a 2008 essay for Foreign Affairs on âThe Rise of China and the Future of the West,â in which he insisted that the âglobalized capitalist systemâ and the Western liberal international order could only be preserved if direct U.S. hegemony gave way to the rules-based order enforced by the collective weight of the United States together with its major allies. In this way, an âAmerican-led liberal hegemonic orderâ could be secured indefinitely. As U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton put it, it was essential to prevent a more âmulti-polar worldâ from emerging by instituting in its stead a âmulti-partner world,â a set of U.S.-led alliances and partnerships that would guarantee Washingtonâs continued dominance in the twenty-first century.
This conception of a rules-based order as means of organizing a global counterrevolution found strong bipartisan support in the United States and, most significantly, within the Pentagon. For Trumpâs secretary of defense James N. Mattis (known as Mad Dog Mattis), speaking to cabinet secretaries and the joint chiefs of staff on July 20, 2017, âthe greatest gift the greatest generation left us was the rules-based postwar international order,â which he illustrated by pointing to âcolor representations of NATO, capital markets and various trade deals to which the United States is signatory,â standing not for international lawâcertainly not the UN systemâbut rather for the U.S./NATO-dominated liberal international and strategic order.
Thus, central to the whole conception of a hegemonic rules-based international order, according to Ikenberry, is the surmounting of a UN-based system geared to the sovereign equality of states and a polycentric world, and which includes China and Russia as permanent members of the Security Council. Instead, the rules-based international order is meant to codify the changes introduced in the 1990s, establishing the âcontingent character of sovereignty,â such that the great powers have a âa rightâeven a moral obligationâto intervene in troubled states to prevent genocide and mass killing. NATOâs interventions in the Balkans and the war against Serbia,â he wrote, âwere defining actions of this sort.â The doctrine of humanitarian imperialism based on âthe right to protectâ thus became key to the definition of the rules-based international order.
This notion of the contingent character of sovereignty was clarified by Richard Haass, former deputy secretary of state in charge of policy planning in the George W. Bush presidency and current head of the Council on Foreign Relations, who explained that the shift to more limited conceptions of sovereignty reflected the new hegemonic view that âsovereignty is not a blank check. Rather, sovereign status is contingent on the fulfillment by each state of certain fundamental obligations, both to its own citizens and to the international community. When a regime fails to live up to these responsibilities or abuses its prerogatives, it risks forfeiting its sovereign privileges including, in extreme cases, its immunity from armed intervention.â And when it comes to armed intervention, as Haass famously argued elsewhere, the United States is the self-appointed âsheriffâ of the international order, while the remainder of the triad is the âposse.â Although the United States has recently complained of Chinese aggression and its growing global threat, due to its one foreign military base located in Djibouti in Africa, Washington as the global sheriff has up to a thousand military bases spanning the entire globe, many of these surrounding China.
The doctrine of a rules-based international order has been used to justify the continual U.S./NATO military interventions and U.S.-sponsored coups directed at populations in five of the six inhabited continents since the 1990sâall in the name of the promotion of democracy and human rights. âLiberal internationalism,â Ikenberry, its strongest intellectual defender, indicates in his latest work, âis implicated in almost constant military interventions during the era of American global dominance,â while under neoliberalism, the economic counterpart of this has become a mere âplatform of rules and institutions for capitalist transactions,â invariably favoring the powers-that-be.
The Peopleâs Republic of China: An Emerging Sovereign Superpower
Commenting in January 1850 on the first stirrings of the Taiping Revolution (1850â64) in China, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels pointed to the birth of âChinese socialism.â European reactionaries with their armies, they indicated, might someday arrive at the frontiers of China only to âfind there the inscriptionâ:
République Chinoise,
Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité
Marx and Engelsâs extraordinarily prescient insight was a century premature. Six years after they wrote this, the British and French armies attacked China again in the Second Opium War, taking advantage of the disorder created by the Taiping Revolution to extend the European imposition of unequal treaties on China. Here they built on a process initiated by the British in the First Opium War in 1839, at the end of which China had been compelled to cede Hong Kong to Britain in the Treaty of Nanking in 1842. The Opium Wars introduced the Century of Humiliation in China that was to last until the victory of the Chinese Revolution in 1949 and the founding of the Peopleâs Republic of China. The period of humiliation is seen as having finally ended with Mao Zedongâs speech âThe Chinese People Have Stood Up,â on September 21, 1949, his opening address at the First Plenary of the Chinese Peopleâs Political Consultative Conference. On that occasion, Mao declared:
The Chinese people, comprising one quarter of humanity, have now stood up. The Chinese have always been a great, courageous and industrious nation; it is only in modern times that they have fallen behind. And that was due entirely to oppression and exploitation by foreign imperialism and domestic reactionary governments. For over a century our forefathers never stopped waging unyielding struggles against domestic and foreign oppressors, including the Revolution of 1911 led by Dr. Sun Yat-sen, our great forerunner in the Chinese revolution.⊠We have closed our ranks and defeated both domestic and foreign enemies through the Peopleâs War of Liberation and the great peopleâs revolution, and now we are proclaiming the founding of the Peopleâs Republic of China.⊠Ours will no longer be a nation subject to insult and humiliation. We have stood up.⊠Our national defense will be consolidated and no imperialists will ever again be allowed to invade our land.⊠Hail the founding of the Peopleâs Republic of China!
Today, the Peopleâs Republic of China remains focusedâthrough what is now seen as a century-long struggle, to culminate in 2049âon overcoming the remaining traces of what Mao called the âhistory of insult and humiliationâ going back to the Opium Wars. In doing so, it has initiated a course known as âChinaâs Dream,â enunciated by Xi in November 2012, but reflecting the entire path of Chinese postrevolutionary development. âOnly by upholding socialism with Chinese characteristics,â Xi has declared, âcan we bring together and lead the whole Party, the whole nation and the people of all ethnic groups in realizing a moderately prosperous society by the centenary of the CPC in 2021 and in turning China into a prosperous, democratic, culturally advanced and harmonious socialist country by the centenary of the Peopleâs Republic of China in 2049.â To this has been added the longer term objective of creating an ecological civilization and a beautiful China, with ecology seen as âthe most inclusive form of public wellbeing.â The first centenary goal, that of 2021, is now seen as fulfilled. But the second centenary goal still needs to be achieved. The centenary of the Peopleâs Republic of China, 2049, is to mark via âsocialist modernizationâ the ânational rejuvenationâ of China, having finally triumphed over the century or more of foreign and domestic oppression that produced the great divergence between China and the West.
Driven by this sovereign historical project, China has remained an enemy of imperialism and a strong, unswerving defender of the Westphalian system of state sovereignty, not only in terms of the original Peace of Westphalia and the UN Charter, but also backing the anti-imperialist objectives of the Third World Bandung Conference of 1955, which, based partly on V. I. Leninâs principle of the self-determination of nations, asserted the equal rights of developing countries, and the importance of a polycentric world. Xi articulated this anti-imperialist stance in 2017:
From the principles of equality and sovereignty established in the Peace of Westphalia over 360 years ago to international humanitarianism affirmed in the Geneva Convention more than 150 years ago; from the four purposes and seven principles enshrined in the UN Charter more than 70 years ago to the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence championed by the Bandung Conference over 60 years ago, many principles have emerged in the evolution of international relations and have been widely accepted. These principles should guide us in building a community of shared future for [hu]mankind.
Sovereign equality has been the most important norm governing state-to-state relations over the past centuries, and the cardinal principle observed by the United Nations and its agencies and institutions. The essence of sovereign equality is that the sovereignty and dignity of all nations, whether big or small, strong or weak, rich or poor, must be respected; their internal affairs brook no interference, and they have the right to independently choose their social system and development path.
Chinaâs anti-imperialist stance is tied up with its whole developmental path. Its extraordinary advance, including the more than quadrupling of its economy since the late 1970s and the recent elimination of absolute poverty, has been dependent not only on its growing integration into the world economy, but also, and no less importantly, on the limitations that it has been able to impose on the capitalist nature of that integration. Crucial in this regard is the existence of a number of key socialist-oriented elements distinguishing the Chinese system: (1) social ownership of land, which in the countryside is still partially managed collectively by village communities; (2) state control of money and finance; (3) state ownership of key sectors of industry, including banks, allowing for high rates of investment; and (4) a planning system, complementing the market economy, directed by the CPC by means of five-year plans. There is a continuing emphasis within the CPC on Marxist and dialectical conceptions, which are seen as keys to the fulfillment of Chinaâs sovereign project of the creation of a modern, developed âsocialist democracyâ with Chinese characteristics. A core element in Chinese revolutionary theory, practice, and conception of socialist democracy is the mass line, or the notion of âfrom the masses to the masses.â Together, these traits mark China as a postrevolutionary society that is neither entirely capitalist nor entirely socialist, but that is following an overall developmental path that holds open the possibility of continued movement toward the latter.
The internal dynamism of the Chinese economy, its highly developed infrastructure, and its low unit labor costs (often entailing extreme exploitation in export industries) has attracted enormous investments by multinational corporations, allowing China to become the new workshop of the world in what has been called the Third Industrial Revolution, based on digital technology. Due to the strength of its planning system, China was able to retain a larger portion of overall surplus value generated than in the case of most developing countries, and to create partnerships with multinationals that allowed it to acquire advanced technology.
While still a poor country, with per capita income one-fifth that of the United States, China has managed to move to the forefront of what Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, has called the Fourth Industrial Revolution characterized by new technologies that are designed to fuse the physical, digital, and biological worlds. It is Chinaâs technological prowess, its financial controls that limit the power of the U.S.-dominated imperial order, and its geopolitical assertion of a One China, which includes recapturing its historic territory, that have most disturbed the core capitalist countries. The United States and its chief imperial allies would like to see China tightly bound within what Thomas Friedman called the âgolden straitjacketâ of the prevailing globalized order, which is designed to place constraints on the political and economic freedoms of nations (particularly those outside the core), preventing them from going against the existing rules and relations of global power.
Part of the present rejuvenation of Chinaâs historical role as a civilization, as conceived by Beijing today, is the resurrection of the ancient Silk Road, a trade route that extended from China to South Asia and the Middle East all the way to Europe. In fall 2013, Xi proposed his vast One Belt, One Road project (known in the West as the Belt and Road Initiative) involving building a Silk Road Economic Belt, extending from South and Central Asia to the Middle East and Europe, coupled with a Twenty-First-Century Maritime Silk Road that would connect China to Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Europe via various sea lanes. In 2017, China further extended its Maritime Silk Road to Latin America. China was to be the principal initiator and founder of One Belt, One Road, providing the seed money, but other countries were invited to join with the financing and planning of infrastructure. Thirty-nine countries in sub-Saharan Africa, thirty-four in Europe and Central Asia, twenty-five in East Asia and the Pacific, eighteen in Latin America and the Caribbean, seventeen in the Middle East and North Africa, and six in South Asia are now affiliated with One Belt, One Road. All told, the Belt and Road Initiative encompasses 139 countries and close to two-thirds of the world population. As the Council of Foreign Relations noted to its chagrin, âXi Jinping invites heads of state to China for Belt and Road forums, contributing to the view that Beijing is an economic power on par with the United States.â
At the Anchorage meeting between the top U.S. and Chinese diplomats in March 2021, Blinken lauded the efforts of the present U.S. administration at gaining control of the COVID-19 pandemic. His Chinese counterparts were no doubt unimpressed. In May 2021, the United States has seen over six hundred thousand deaths from COVID-19, a mortality rate of over 1,800 deaths per million. In contrast, China had experienced less than five thousand deaths, a rate of 3 deaths per million. The Chinese government years before, at the highest level, had stressed the dangers of new pandemics emerging, and was consequently far better prepared. In 2017, Xi declared before the UN General Assembly: âPandemic diseases such as bird flu, Ebola and Zika have sounded the alarm for international health security. The WHO [World Health Organization] should play a leadership role in strengthening epidemic monitoring and in sharing information, best practices and technologies. The international community should step up support and assistance for public health in African countries and other developing countries.â Confronted with the emergence of a novel coronavirus (SARS-COV-2), the Chinese government made various false steps (at the local level) in the initial days, followed by the Chinese state attacking the epidemic full force, in cooperation with the population, which self-mobilized on the model of âpeopleâs revolutionary war,â involving self-organization in localities. This revolutionary mobilization in response to the epidemic was a resounding success, pointing to the internal solidity of the polity and the vast potential revolutionary protagonism of the Chinese people.
China has declared that its COVID-19 vaccines constitute a âpublic good.â Already by April 2021 China had donated and exported 48 percent of its domestically manufactured vaccinesâdonating the vaccines to eighty countries and exporting to forty. The United States and United Kingdom had meanwhile shared their vaccines with zero countries, while insisting on maintaining international patent restrictions on the vaccines. By June 1, China had shared (exports and donations) 323.3 million doses of their COVID-19 vaccines with other countries, the European Union had shared 143.8 million doses, mostly with other developed countries, and the United States had shared a mere 7.5 million doses. Washington has accused China of âvaccine diplomacyâ and has suggested that it is breaking the rules-based order to âoutcompete the United States and its alliesâ in the international market for COVID-19 vaccines. China has geared up its production of COVID-19 vaccines to around five billion doses a year, most of which it plans to share as an international public good with the developing world.
Chinaâs Third Revolution and the U.S.-Led Global Counterrevolution
In his October 18, 2017, report to the Nineteenth National Congress of the CPC, Xi stated that âthe Chinese nation, which since modern times began had endured so much for so long [an allusion to the Opium Wars and the Century of Humiliation], has achieved a tremendous transformation: it has stood up, become better off, and grown in strength; it has come to embrace the brilliant prospects of rejuvenation.â For those aware of the history of the Peopleâs Republic of China, it was clear that Xi was speaking of the entire revolutionary process of national rejuvenation. Mao famously declared that, with the Chinese Revolution, China had stood up. The Deng Xiaoping era, often referred to as the second era in the process of national rejuvenation, was just as clearly about China becoming better off, through rapid economic development and integration within the capitalist world economy. The New Era, in the period of Xiâs leadership, has been directed toward constructing a strong, self-sufficient, and sustainable Chinese system, aimed at âbuilding a moderately prosperous society in all respectsâ by 2021, and âof moving on to all-out efforts to build a great modern socialist countryâ by 2049.
Each stage in the Chinese Revolution has meant a major shift in the revolutionary process, so that the Mao, Deng, and Xi periods are sometimes referred to as Chinaâs First, Second, and Third Revolutions. The âprincipal contradictionâ in the New Era (or Third Revolution), the surmounting of which is necessary if China is to achieve its objectives, according to Xi, is the âunbalancedâ or uneven and thus âinadequateâ nature of Chinese development, characteristic of the capitalist growth model. This is manifested in deepening class inequality, divisions between rural and urban areas, promotion of economic development at the expense of cultural development, and an unsustainable human relation to the environment. Hence, a socialist-motivated shift toward greater economic equality, national self-sufficiency, ecological civilization, rural revitalization, cultural development, and the forging of a âdual circulationâ model (designed to reduce Chinaâs dependence on foreign markets and technology) are all seen as crucial to Chinaâs emergence as a âgreat modern socialist society.â
The CPC leadership has continued to define China as âthe worldâs largest developing country,â albeit one in âthe primary stage of socialism,â thus emphasizing its direct connections to the Global South of which it sees itself a part. Its official international stance is dictated by the âfive principles of peaceful coexistence,â defined as: (1) mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, (2) mutual nonaggression, (3) mutual noninterference in each otherâs internal affairs, (4) equality and mutual benefit, and (5) peaceful coexistence. Although China as an emerging global power has been increasingly accused of setting a new agenda and seeking to overturn the existing rules-based international order imposed by the core capitalist states, this, rather than presaging anarchy or âmight makes right,â as indicated by Blinken at the March 18 bilateral meetings, has largely taken the form of a strong defense of the concept of sovereign equality, which necessarily goes against the structure of the existing imperial system.
The path forward in Chinaâs Third Revolution will not of course be easy, and what Xi has referred to as the âprincipal contradictionâ in the form of uneven development is evident in vast struggles taking place at all levels in the societyâand in Chinaâs external relations.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that Chinaâs Third Revolution has been greeted by the United States and the other core capitalist powers with a combination of disbelief, shock, and anger. Unaccustomed to thinking historically and dialectically, relying on mere formalistic frames of analysis, and believing in the inevitable triumph of capitalism, the dominant ideology in the West has been one quite literally of âthe end of history.â The idea that Chinaâs sovereign project would eventually lead to a critical challenge to, rather than absorption within, the existing capitalist and imperialist order was thus scarcely entertained in Washington. As Kurt M. Campbell, former assistant secretary of state for East Asia and Pacific Affairs in the Barack Obama administration, and Ely Ratner, Bidenâs nominee for assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific security affairs, wrote in âThe China Reckoning: How Beijing Defied American Expectationsâ in Foreign Affairs in February 2018, the notion that âU.S. power and hegemonyâ would fail to âmold China to the United Statesâ likingâ was until recently completely foreign to the U.S. establishment. Even more shocking was the discovery that Chinaâs New Era, associated with Xi, would begin to look in many ways more like the revolutionary China of Mao than the reform era of Deng.
The enraged response of the U.S. power elite to Chinaâs undeterred pursuit of its own sovereign project has been to launch the New Cold War centered on China (also encompassing its allies like Russia and Iran). This is now seen in U.S. ruling class circles as a new war for hegemonyâthough minus any genuine historical analysis, which would require an honest assessment of imperialism past and present. Rather, Allisonâs Destined for War, which directly influenced Biden, drew its supposed historical frame, not from a conception of the capitalist world system, or from an understanding of the imperial imposition of unequal treaties on China. Instead, it turned to a transhistorical law of conflict associated with the ârealistâ perspective on international relations, derived from Thucydides, the ancient Greek historian of the Peloponnesian War, who wrote in 411 BCE: âIt was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.â
In contrast, from a Marxian perspective, any meaningful assessment of hegemonic transition in the context of the modern world must be seen as a product of the internal dynamics of the capitalist world economy, which has been characterized throughout its history by the imperialism of the core directed at the periphery and by periodic wars over imperial hegemony: the only âanswerâ that the capitalist system is capable of providing to the question of world power.
Reflecting this logic, the New Cold War on China initiated by the United States seeks to draw together the leading imperial capitalist states in a global alliance aimed at binding Beijing, together with its allies and the entire periphery of the capitalist system, to the rules-based international order controlled by the triad, while at the same time keeping the Chinese economy, the motor of world economic growth, going. China, it is recognized, is too big simply to be conquered, and too big economically to be allowed to fail. What is required, therefore, according to the ruling Washington Consensus, is a counterrevolution unleashed by the reigning powers directed at reimposing a new global set of unequal treaties on China, along with the bulk of the developing world. The object is less to contain than to constrain China. Ultimately, such a strategy is to be backed up by military force. This was what Bill Clintonâs secretary of state Madeleine Albright was to call âassertive multilateralism.â For Hillary Clinton, speaking at Chatham House on May 6, 2021, it is essential in this context for the United States to âtake back the means of productionâ from China to ensure that the latter is kept in a perpetual subaltern state.
To say that these conditions puts the worldâs population in an era of almost unprecedented danger would be an understatement. No New Cold War can take place without a nuclear arms race and increased danger of thermonuclear war. China, whose nuclear warheads are in the low 200s, compared to the 1,400 deployed nuclear warheads of the United States, is seeking to double its number of warheads by 2030. The United States, for its part, is currently committed to spending $500 billion on its nuclear forces alone over the next decade, $50 billion a year. This includes $100 billion on its so-called Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent, a land-based nuclear missile system designed to replace the aging Minuteman III Intercontinental Ballistic Missile system. The Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent missiles will be capable of traveling six thousand miles with greater throw weight and accuracy, each one carrying a warhead twenty times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
The world survived the Cold War. We do not know if it will survive the New Cold War. Twenty-first-century humanity is now faced, in every sphere of its existence, with an inescapable choice: âruin or revolution.â
Notes
- â© Thomas J. Christensen, âThere Will Not Be a New Cold War,â Foreign Affairs, Mach 24, 2021. On the Council on Foreign Relations and the Biden administration, see Laurence H. Shoup, âThe Council on Foreign Relations, the Biden Team, and Key Policy Outcomes,â Monthly Review 73, no. 1 (May 2021): 1â21.
- â© Christensen, âThere Will Not Be a New Cold War.â Most of Christensenâs arguments rely on the unspoken assumption that a New Cold War would take exactly the same form as the old Cold War. This is of course a misnomer. History does not repeat itself in that way.
- â© For a persuasive depiction of the prevailing imperialist order, see Cheng Enfu and Lu Baolin, âFive Characteristics of Neoimperialism,â Monthly Review 73, no. 1 (May 2021): 22â58.
- â© âHow It Happened: Transcript of the U.S.-China Opening Remarks in Alaska,â NIKKEI Asia, March 19, 2021.
- â© âQuad Leadersâ Joint Statement: âThe Spirit of the Quad,ââ White House, March 12, 2021.
- â© âUS-China Relations in the Biden-Era: A Timeline,â China Briefing, May 13, 2021.
- â© âUS Sanctions 24 China and Hong Kong Officials Ahead of Talks,â S. News, March 17, 2021.
- â© âHow It Happened.â
- â© âHow It Happened.â
- â© âHow It Happened.â
- â© âHow It Happened.â
- â© Thomas Wright, âThe U.S. and China Finally Get Real with Each Other,â Atlantic, March 21, 2021.
- â© David Stilwell and Dan Negrea, âWanted: Alliance Networks for a New Cold War,â National Interest, March 28, 2021.
- â© âUS-China Relations in the Biden-Era.â
- â© âBiden: Chinaâs Xi Jinping Doesnât Have âa DemocraticâŠBone in His Body,ââ USA Today, March 25, 2021.
- â© âTrade War: Biden Administration Not Ready to âYankâ China Tariffs, but Open to Talks,â Forbes, March 28, 2021; âBiden Has Left Trumpâs China Tariffs in Place,â CNN, March 25, 2021; John Bellamy Foster and Intan Suwandi, âCOVID-19 and Catastrophe Capitalism,â Monthly Review 72 no. 2 (June 2020): 14â15.
- â© âIn Report, Biden Administration Formalizes Genocide Declaration in China,â Seattle Times, March 30, 2021. To say that charges of genocide are false is not of course to deny that repression has taken place. But the issue remains the former. Claims of Chinese âgenocideâ in Xinjiang constitutes one of the most extreme instances of the Big Lie propaganda technique in modern times. Although repression has been exercised by China in its Xinjiang Autonomous Region in response to terrorist activity in the region, the evidence points to a reality far removed from anything resembling genocide. See âXinjiang: A Report and Resource Compilation,â Qiao Collective, September 1, 2020; âThe Xinjiang Genocide Determination as Agenda,â Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, April 27, 2021; Kim Petersen, âDoes the West Repeating Claims That China Committed Genocide in Xinjiang Reify It?,â Dissident Voice, February 22, 2021. Even the Council of Foreign Relations has noted that what indications of repression there are hardly fit the definition of genocide in the Geneva Convention. John B. Bellinger III, âChinaâs Abuse of the Uighurs: Does the Genocide Label Fit?,â Council on Foreign Relations, February 3, 2021. For an informative discussion of conditions in China today, see Keith Lamb (interviewed by Alexander Norton), âAll the Questions Socialists Have About China but Were Too Afraid to Ask,â Challenge, May 24, 2021.
- â© âUS-China Relations in the Biden-Era.â
- â© âChina Slams U.S.-China Meeting as Biden Flexes New Diplomatic Muscle Against Beijing,â S. News, May 3, 2021; Peter Beinart, âBidenâs Taiwan Policy Is Truly, Deeply Reckless,â New York Times, May 5, 2021; Xi Jinping, The Governance of China, vol. 1, 2nd ed. (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2018), 2; Xi Jinping, The Governance of China, vol. 3 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2020), 26.
- â© âG7 Foreign and Development Ministersâ Meeting: CommuniquĂ©,â European Union External Action, May 5, 2021.
- â© âU.S., Russia, China Poke Each Other at UN Security Council,â Reuters, May 7, 2021.
- â© âBiden Orders Review of COVID Origins as Lab Leak Theory Debated,â Reuters, May 27, 2021; âBidenâs Asia Czar Says Era of Engagement with China Is Over,â Bloomberg, May 26, 2021.
- â© âChina Says US Increasing Military Activity Directed at It,â Associated Press News, April 29, 2021; âU.S. Military Activity on Chinaâs Borders Has âSharply Increasedâ Since Biden Took Charge,â Morning Star, April, 6, 2021; Sam LaGrone, âS. Carrier Strike Group, Amphibious Warships Massed in South China Sea as Regional Tensions Simmer,â USNI News, April 9, 2021; Rick Rozoff, âInternational Law vs. Rules-Based International Order: China, Russa Call for UN Security Council Summit,â Anti-Bellum, March 23, 2021; âThe US Has a Massive Presence in the Asia-Pacific,â The World, August 11, 2017.
- â© John Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), 97â98, 144, 207, 234, 273; Joe Biden, âWhy America Must Lead Again,â Foreign Affairs 99, no. 2 (2020); Stephen M. Walt, âChina Wants a Rules-Based International Order, Too,â Foreign Policy, March 31, 2021. On China and the Westphalian system, see Xi Jinping, The Governance of China, vol. 2 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2017), 590.
- â© âForeign Ministry Spokesperson Wang Wenbinâs Regular Press Conference on May 6, 2021,â Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Peopleâs Republic of China, May 6, 2021.
- â© See John Bellamy Foster, Naked Imperialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006).
- â© Diana Johnstone, Foolâs Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002); Jean Bricmont, Humanitarian Imperialism: Using Human Rights to Sell War (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006); Horace Campbell, Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2013).
- â© âForeign Ministry Spokesperson Wang Wenbinâs Regular Press Conference on May 6, 2021.â
- â© Matt Schiavenza, âHow Humiliation Drove Modern Chinese History,â Atlantic, October 25, 2013; Xi, The Governance of China, vol. 2, 269â70. Chinese narratives do not emphasize the notion of the Century of Humiliation, since this history is well known and painful, preferring to allude to it indirectly, or referring to the Opium Wars. The emphasis is rather placed on rejuvenation. The notion of Chinaâs Century of Humiliation is, however, a central coordinate of U.S. military discussions of China. See Elizabeth C. Economy, The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 3; Major Daniel W. McLaughlin, âRewriting the Rules: Analyzing the Peopleâs Republic of Chinaâs Efforts to Establish New International Rules,â Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs: The Department of the Air Forceâs Professional Journal for Americaâs Priority Theater, March 8, 2021.
- â© S. Stavrianos, Global Rift (New York: William Morrow, 1981), 309â32; Dong Wang, âThe Discourse of Unequal Treaties in Modern China,â Pacific Affairs 76, no. 3 (2003): 399â425. It would be wrong, as Wang Hui has argued, to say that modernization in China was propelled by the shock of the Opium Wars. Rather, China was already undergoing its own modernization process. Wang Hui, The End of Revolution (London: Verso, 2009), 126â29.
- â© Ironically, this imperialist notion was perhaps best expressed by George Bernard Shaw in his drafting of Fabianism and Empire: A Manifesto by the Fabian Society, where Shaw declared that Britain was correct in its imperialist wars designed to enforce âinternational rights of trade and travel.⊠If the Chinese themselves cannot establish order in our sense, the Powers must establish it for them.â George Bernard Shaw, Fabianism and Empire: A Manifesto of the Fabian Society (London: Grant Richards, 1900), 44â47.
- â© See John Bellamy Foster, âChina 2020: An Introduction,â Monthly Review 72, no. 5 (October 2020): 1â5.
- â© Graham Allison, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape the Thucydides Trap? (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), 224â25.
- â© Vijay Prashad and Jie Xiong, âWhy Xinjiang Is Emerging as the Epicenter of the US War on China,â Peopleâs Dispatch, April 17, 2021; ââWipe Out Chinaâ: US-Funded Uyghur Activists Train as Gun-Toting Foot Soldiers for Empire,â Grayzone, March 31, 2021.
- â© On the bogus, evidence-less âgenocideâ and âcrimes against humanityâ charges directed at China with respect to Xinjiang, and the relation of this to U.S. imperial grand strategy, see Max Blumenthal, âXinjiang Shakedown: U.S. Anti-China Lobby Cashed in on âForced Laborâ Campaign that Cost Uyghur Worker Their Jobs,â Grayzone, April 30, 2021; Gareth Porter and Max Blumenthal, âUS State Department Accusation of China âGenocideâ Relied on Data Abuse and Baseless Claims by Far-Right Ideologue,â Grayzone, February 18, 2021.
- â© Michael Hirsh, âWhy Liberal Internationalism Is Still Indispensable and Fixable,â Foreign Policy, December 5, 2012.
- â© John Ikenberry, âLiberalism and Empire: Logics of Order in the American Unipolar Age,â Review of International Studies 30, no. 4 (2004): 611; Ikenberry, A World Safe for Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), 297; William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York: Dell, 1972); Gabriel and Joyce Kolko, The Limits of Power (New York: Harper and Row, 1972).
- â© See âAustraliaâs Security and the Rules-Based Order,â Lowy Institute, March 12, 2021.
- â© John Ikenberry, âThe Rise of China and the Future of the West,â Foreign Affairs 87, no. 1 (2008): 32â34.
- â© Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan, 281.
- â© Hillary Clinton (speech, Council on Foreign Relations, Washington DC, July 15, 2009), quoted in Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan, 325.
- â© Robert F. Worth, âCan Jim Mattis Hold the Line in Trumpâs War Cabinet?,â New York Times Magazine, March, 26, 2018. Trumpâs policy from the start was to engage in a New Cold War with China, while reaching a dĂ©tente with Russia. In the end, the bipartisan result was to attack both China and Russia, treated as a two-headed monster, but with the New Cold War with China as the principal directive of the administration. Although Mattis, as Trumpâs secretary of defense, sought to weaponize the notion of the rules-based international order, Trump himself did not subscribe to the notionâand was strongly opposed not only by Mattis but also by Blinken, Bidenâs now secretary of state, on that basis. Steve Bannon, Trumpâs White House advisor, referring to Mattisâs presentation, reportedly stated: âif you stood up and threatened to shoot [Trump] he couldnât say postwar rules-based international order.â âAustraliaâs Security and the Rules-Based Orderâ; Antony Blinken, âBannonâs Vision of the World Isnât What Makes America Great,â Foreign Policy, February 28, 2017; John Bellamy Foster, Trump in the White House (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017), 32, 51â52, 84â85.
- â© Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan, 247; Samuel Moyn, âSoft Sells: On Liberal Internationalism,â Nation, October 3, 2011, 43.
- â© Richard Haass, âSovereignty: Existing Rights, Evolving Responsibilitiesâ (lecture, Georgetown University, January 4, 2003), quoted in Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan, 249. On Haass, see Foster, Naked Imperialism, 97â106.
- â© Foster, Naked Imperialism, 115â16; Richard Haass, The Reluctant Sheriff: The United States After the Cold War (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1997), 54, 93.
- â© Kurt M. Campbell and Ely Ratner, âThe China Reckoning: How Beijing Defied American Expectations,â Foreign Affairs 97, no. 2 (2018); Nick Turse, âDoes the Pentagon Really Have 1,180 Foreign Bases,â Guernica, January 9, 2011; âUS General Warns China Is Actively Seeking to Set Up an Atlantic Naval Base,â The Hill, May 7, 2021; John Reed, âSurrounded: How the U.S. Is Encircling China with Military Bases,â Foreign Policy, August 20, 2013; Economy, The Third Revolution, 213.
- â© Ikenberry has recently argued that the new opening to so-called humanitarian interventions is itself built on the Westphalian system of the sovereignty of states. But this goes against the widespread sense that these interventions, which have led to continual warfare under U.S. auspices since the 1990s, constitute in fact a fundamental change in the international order, identified with the notion of the rules-based international order. Perhaps because of the conflict that this poses for Ikenberryâs own conception of liberal internationalism, he has, in his latest work, largely abandoned the term rules-based order that he himself did so much to promote, and that is now associated with a system of liberal-interventionist hegemony enforced by the United States and its allies. Ikenberry, A World Safe for Democracy, 298.
- â© Ikenberry, A World Safe for Democracy, 245, 253, 276.
- â© Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 10 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 266â67, 672â73. Compare Samir Amin, âChina 2013,â Monthly Review 64, no. 10 (March 2013): 25. On the Taiping Revolution, see John Newsinger, âThe Taiping Peasant Revolt,â Monthly Review 52, no. 5 (October 2000): 29â37.
- â© Marx was perhaps the foremost European critic of the Second Opium War. See Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, On Colonialism (New York: International Publishers, 1972), 112â25, 212â25, 231â49; Samir Amin, âForerunners of the Contemporary World: The Paris Commune (1871) and the Taiping Revolution (1851â1864),â International Critical Thought 3, no. 2 (2013): 159â64.
- â© Amin, âChina 2013,â 25â26.
- â© Mao Zedong, âThe Chinese People Have Stood Up!â (opening address, First Plenary Session of the Chinese Peopleâs Political Consultive Conference, Beijing, September 21, 1949), available at china.usc.edu.
- â© Xi, The Governance of China, vol. 1, 37; Xi Jinping, The Governance of China, vol. 3, 14; Allison, Destined for War, 122.
- â© Xi, The Governance of China, vol. 1, 6â22; Xi, The Governance of China, vol. 2, 269.
- â© Xi, The Governance of China, vol. 3, 6, 20, 25, 417â24.
- â© Xi, The Governance of China, vol. 3, 20; Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
- â© Vijay Prashad, âThe Internationalist Lenin: Self-Determination and Anti-Colonialism,â MR Online, August 10, 2020.
- â© Xi, The Governance of China, vol. 2, 590.
- â© Ikenberry, âThe Rise of China and the Future of the West,â 26; âWhat Does It Mean to Eradicate Absolute Poverty?,â Qiao Collective, December 3, 2020; âChinaâs Economic Development in 40 Years,â China Daily, accessed June 4, 2021.
- â© Amin, âChina 2013,â 14â28; Foster, âChina 2020â; Wang Hui, Chinaâs Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 2016), 140; Xi, The Governance of China, vol. 2, 311â17, 352â58. Xi indicates in the foregoing pages his admiration for Robert Heilbronerâs Marxism: For and Against (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980). See also Xi, The Governance of China, vol. 3, 96â98.
- â© Amin, âChina 2013,â 26; Paul M. Sweezy, âPost-Revolutionary Society,â Monthly Review 32, no. 6 (November 1980). Chinaâs political-economic system is sometimes referred to as âstate capitalist.â Amin adopted this term, for the sake of argument, as a useful but somewhat misleading designation, recognizing that it tended to oversimplify. For Amin, state capitalism was a necessary phase in the development of socialism for developing countries. What mattered was the particular character of state capitalism, which in the Chinese case was seen as part of the long route to socialism. More recently, the âstate capitalistâ designation for China has been embraced by the Council on Foreign Relations. Others, such as Lowell Dittmer, an East Asian specialist at Berkeley, refer to Chinaâs present reality, particularly in the Xi era, as âan adoptive Chinese form of state socialism, with limited (and closely monitored) capitalist characteristics.â Neither characterization quite captures the complexity of the current Chinese social formation, which the Chinese leadership refer to as a society in the primary stage of socialism. See Amin, âChina 2013,â 20; Robert D. Blackwill and Jennifer M. Harris, War by Other Means (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 36â37; Lowell Dittmer, âTransformation of the Chinese Political Economy in the New Era,â in Chinaâs Political Economy in the Xi Jinping Epoch, ed. Lowell Ditmer (Singapore: World Scientifixa Publishing, 2021), 6â8.
- â© John Bellamy Foster and Robert McChesney, The Endless Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012), 155â83; Intan Suwandi, Value Chains (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2019), 42â67.
- â© Peter A. Petri, âTechnological Rivalry,â in China 2049, ed. David Dollar, Yiping Huang, and Yang Yao (Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 2020), 278â301; Amin, âChina 2013,â 24, 27.
- â© Klaus Schwab, Shaping the Fourth Industrial Revolution (New York: Currency, 2018); âComparing United States and China by Economy,â Statistical Times, May 15, 2021; âHow It Happenedâ; Xi, The Governance of China, 523.
- â© Thomas Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York: Anchor, 2000), 101â11. For China, its historic territory includes not only Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan, but also islands in the South China Sea that were long recognized as belonging to China. See âHistorical Support for Chinaâs South China Sea Territorial Stance,â Maritime Executive, August 10, 2019.
- â© David Sacks, âCountries in Chinaâs Belt and Road Initiative,â Council on Foreign Relations, May 24, 2021; Xi, The Governance of China, vol. 1, 315â24; Xi, The Governance of China, vol. 2, 544â49.
- â© âHow It Happened.â
- â© âReported Cases and Deaths by Country or Territory,â COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic, Worldometer, accessed June 1, 2021.
- â© Xi, The Governance of China, vol. 2, 594.
- â© Wang Hui, âRevolutionary Personality and the Philosophy of Victory: Commemorating Leninâs 150th Birthday,â Reading the China Dream (blog), April 21, 2020.
- â© âWhy Chinaâs Vaccine Internationalism Matters,â Qiao Collective, April 8, 2021 [updated June 2021]; âEU Vaccine Exports Outstrip Number of Shots Given to Its Own People,â Bloomberg, April 14, 2021; âEU Vaccines: Millions Exported to Rich Countries, Less to Poor Countries,â Brussels Times, May 8, 2021.
- â© âUS Secretary of State Antony Blinken Talks to FT Editor Roula Khalaf,â Financial Times, May 4, 2021; âState of the Order: Assessing February 2021,â Atlantic Council, March 16, 2021.
- â© âChina Close to Producing 5 Billion COVID-19 Vaccine Doses Per Year,â CGTN, April 21, 2021.
- â© Xi, The Governance of China, vol. 3, 12.
- â© Xi, The Governance of China, vol. 3, 12.
- â© Economy, The Third Revolution, 10â12.
- â© Xi, The Governance of China, vol. 3, 20. The translation in the text here follows an earlier official translation of Xiâs speech, which used the term principal contradiction rather than principal challenge. See Xi, âSecure a Decisive Victory in Building a Moderately Prosperous Society in All Respects and Strive for the Great Success of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era,â Xinhua, October 18, 2017, 16.
- â© Xi, The Governance of China, vol. 3, 20; âWhat We Know About Chinaâs âDual Circulationâ Economic Strategy,â Reuters, September 15, 2020.
- â© Xi, The Governance of China, vol. 3, 13, 79. In recent years, it has been frequently charged by Western power elites and media that China has instituted predatory loans in Africa and other developing countries, designed to acquire assets from these countries. However, a study at Johns Hopkins University showed the opposite to be true, demonstrating that China is more lenient with respect to lending and conditionalities in interactions with developing countries than Western financial institutions and governments. See Kevin Acker, Deborah Brautigam, and Yufan Huang, âDebt Relief with Chinese Characteristicsâ (working paper no. 39, China Africa Research Initiative, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, June 2020).
- â© âHow It Happened.â
- â© Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).
- â© Campbell and Ratner, âThe China Reckoningâ; Orville Schell, âCrackdown in China: Worse and Worse,â New York Times Magazine, April 21, 2016.
- â© Allison, Destined for War, vii.
- â© Immanuel Wallerstein, The Politics of the World-Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 37â46.
- â© Rick Rozoff, âNATO Headquarters: Foreign Ministers of One Billion People Throw Down Gauntlet to China, Russia,â Anti-Bellum, March 24, 2021; Rozoff, âInternational Law vs. Rules-Based International Orderâ; Haass, The Reluctant Sheriff, 54, 93; Clinton quoted in Danny Haiphong, âOff the Rails: New Report by Coorporate-Funded Think-Tank Reveals How Profit-Driven Moteives Drive New Cold War Against China,â Covert Action Magazine, June 5, 2021.
- â© Jeremy Kuzmarov, âWhatâs Behind the Biden Administrationâs New $100 Billion Nuclear Missile System?,â Covert Action, March 9, 2021; âDefense Primer: Ground Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) Capabilities,â Congressional Research Service, November 10, 2020.
- â© Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Ireland and the Irish Question (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1971), 142; Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 153.
Source: Monthlyreview.org