The following is the text of a speech given by Carlos Martinez at an online meeting of the Scottish Trade Union Peace Network on 22 August 2024.
Many thanks for inviting me to join you.
I’m going to focus my remarks on China’s foreign policy, comparing that with the US and Britain’s foreign policy, and then discussing the dangers of this escalating New Cold War, which could all too easily end up as a hot war.
China aggressive?
China of course is framed in the Western media as an “aggressive” and “expansionist” power which is hell-bent on subverting the “rules-based international order”.
According to the NATO Heads of State summit in Washington last month, “China’s stated ambitions and coercive policies continue to challenge our interests, security and values”.
What’s the basis for this characterisation? I’m going to talk about some of common themes:
First, Taiwan. China is accused of undermining democracy in Taiwan and threatening imminent invasion.
The funny thing is that China’s position on the Taiwan question has not meaningfully changed in the last seven decades, and it’s entirely consistent with international law and numerous United Nations resolutions – not to mention the various joint agreements between the US and China.
Taiwan is a part of China. It was seized by Japan in 1895 and returned to Chinese control in 1945, at the end of World War 2, as agreed by Britain, the US, the Soviet Union and China at the Potsdam Conference.
In 1949, having lost in the Chinese Civil War, Chang Kai-shek and his people fled to Taiwan and set up a renegade administration, and the US positioned its Navy – the Seventh Fleet – in the Taiwan Strait to prevent the communist government from reuniting the country. But even then, Taiwan never claimed to be a separate country – the Kuomintang simply said that Taiwan was the real China and that the People’s Republic was the renegade. Indeed that idea is still part of Taiwan’s constitution.
So China’s very consistent position is that Taiwan is part of China. This position – the One China Principle – is accepted by more than 90 percent of the world’s countries, including the US and Britain. China has always said that it seeks peaceful reunification but that it reserves the right to use force in case of outside interference or a unilateral declaration of independence. Furthermore it makes the very reasonable point that the Taiwan issue is an internal matter for Chinese people on both sides of the Strait to resolve.
There is nothing particularly bellicose or unusual about such a position. Frankly, if you’ll excuse the slight provocation, China’s historic claim to Taiwan is far stronger than Britain’s historic claim to Scotland, but does anyone think Westminster would avoid the use of force if Scotland, backed and armed by Russia, say, were to unilaterally declare independence.
So nothing has changed with respect to China’s position on the Taiwan question. What’s changed is that the US and its allies, seeking to provoke conflict and undermine China, are increasing their support for separatist elements, are increasing their supply of weapons to the administration in Taipei, and are steadily rowing back on the One China Principle.
Biden has said multiple times that the US would intervene militarily if Beijing were to attempt to change the status quo by force – which goes directly against what was agreed by the US and China back in the 1970s when relations were re-established. It is essentially a way of signalling: we are building towards war against China, and Taiwan will likely be the flashpoint. And the way we plan to win public support for that war is by presenting it as a war to protect democracy in Taiwan.
Another popular accusation about China’s “aggression” is that it’s engaged in expansionism in the South China Sea, because it patrols its own waters, and because it has a number of complicated territorial disputes over control of an array of tiny uninhabited islands.
The details of the disputes are not particularly relevant for our purposes. These territorial disputes are inherited from previous generations and they’re not easy to resolve. For example, there are numerous disputes in relation to the Arctic Circle, between Canada, Denmark, Norway, Russia and the US. The disputes involving China receive relatively more attention because the US is attempting to leverage them to foment broader anti-China feeling in Southeast Asia and to present China in the most negative light possible.
Again, China hasn’t changed its position on these questions; there has simply been an escalation of anti-China propagandising by the West.
On the South China Sea, it’s worth mentioning that China’s definition of its borders was determined before 1949, before the founding of the People’s Republic. The nine-dash line defining China’s maritime borders was created by the Kuomintang government in 1947, and certainly didn’t cause any stir in Western capitals at the time. After all, China at that time was considered by the West as an important ally in the global war against communism.
The People’s Republic of China has not made a single new territorial claim. And although it patrols the South China Sea and works to protect its trade routes and to prevent any potential blockade being imposed by the US, it has never once impeded international trade.
So when the US carries out its so-called ‘freedom of navigation assertions’ in the South China Sea, it’s not because China is blocking navigation. China is not being aggressive; the US is being aggressive, and according itself the role of world policeman. The US has no jurisdiction in the South China Sea. Can anyone imagine what the US response would be if China carried out freedom of navigation assertions off the coast of California?
Then there’s the question of nuclear weapons. The media is full of alarmist reports about China’s expanding nuclear arsenal. But China has fewer than 500 nuclear warheads, compared to over 5,000 for the US.
China maintains a strictly defensive nuclear posture. Of all the nuclear powers, it is the only one to have a clear policy of no-first use, meaning that it will never use nuclear weapons other than in response to a nuclear attack.
It’s also the only nuclear power to guarantee that it will never use nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear country, meaning that it refuses to engage in the type of nuclear blackmail which the US specialises in.
China’s foreign policy
China has peaceful development literally written into its constitution. It maintains a nuclear deterrent because if it didn’t, the US realistically wouldn’t hesitate to wage war against it.
As I said, the US has over 5,000 nuclear warheads, does not have a policy of no-first use, is the only country to ever use nuclear weapons, has threatened to use them numerous times – including against China, during the Korean War – and has a record of waging wars around the world in pursuit of its own economic and geostrategic interests.
China’s whole outlook is very different. Hugo Chávez put it well:
“China is large but it’s not an empire. China doesn’t trample on anyone, it hasn’t invaded anyone, it doesn’t go around dropping bombs on anyone.”
Yes, China has become a major power. It’s the world’s second largest economy. Its people live far better than they used to. It’s a science and technology powerhouse. It’s successfully pursuing modernisation.
That process of modernisation was a violent one in the West. It relied on colonialism, slavery, war, plunder, domination. The same processes that made Europe and North America rich, made Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean and the Pacific poor.
And having won this advantage, the West – these days led by the US – seeks to maintain it through force. That’s why the US maintains over 800 overseas military bases. That’s why it maintains tens of thousands of troops – and nuclear weapons – in Japan, South Korea, Guam and Okinawa. That’s why NATO went to war against Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Yugoslavia. That’s why the US waged genocidal wars against Korea and Vietnam. That’s why the US and its allies continue to wage proxy wars even today in Ukraine, in Yemen, in Syria.
There’s a tendency to see China’s rise and assume that it will follow the same aggressive trajectory as Europe, Japan and the United States. And yet China’s rise has been remarkably peaceful. It hasn’t been at war in over 40 years.
China doesn’t have a global infrastructure of hegemony – foreign bases, troops and weapons stationed in other countries. China has one overseas military base, in Djibouti, with the sole purpose of protecting its trade ships from piracy.
By the time Britain or the US were at China’s current stage of development, both were engaged in endless wars of conquest and domination. Both built relationships of outright subjugation with the countries of the Global South.
China follows an entirely different approach to international relations, with the reason that its economic rise has followed a fundamentally different logic. It has never been based on dominating the land, labour, resources and markets of the rest of the world. It has never been driven by the expand-or-die logic of capital.
China is on the cusp of being a high-income country, but China doesn’t wage wars of domination. China doesn’t interfere in other countries’ internal affairs. China doesn’t threaten other countries or engage in destabilisation. China doesn’t impose unilateral sanctions or economic coercion.
Much is made of China’s economic power, and yet its loans and investment throughout Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and elsewhere are generally speaking welcome, because they come with a low rate of interest, there’s no conditions of austerity (unlike the IMF’s notorious structural adjustment programs), and because they’re used to fund crucial infrastructure projects that are allowing countries to break out of underdevelopment after centuries of colonial and neocolonial exploitation.
For example, with Chinese finance and support, Ethiopia opened the first metro system in sub-Saharan Africa a few years ago.
With Chinese finance and support, Bolivia launched a telecoms satellite that provides connectivity to the whole country – the poorest country in South America.
China built the new African Union headquarters in Addis Ababa, a gift from the Chinese government.
The same with the new headquarters of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.
Then contrast China and the US when it comes to the Middle East. The US and its allies have fought devastating – genocidal – wars in order to control the natural resources of that region.
In Iraq there’s a popular saying: “the US bombs, while China builds”. In no area of life is that more true than with schools. The US bombed literally hundreds of schools during the Iraq War. China is currently building literally thousands of schools in Iraq.
In Ukraine, the US did everything it could to bring about this conflict, and now it’s doing everything it can to keep the conflict going – to “fight Russia to the last Ukrainian”. China, in coordination with Brazil, the African Union and others, is leading efforts to find a solution to the crisis based on dialogue and negotiation.
What about the tragic situation in Gaza, where over 40,000 people – and in all likelihood at least twice that – have been murdered by a brutal apartheid regime, using weapons in large part supplied by the US and Britain. The Western powers could have stopped this genocide in the space of a day if they’d cut off the supply of weapons to Israel, if they’d imposed sanctions on Israel.
China is increasingly recognised as the credible peace broker in relation to Palestine. It’s been a loud and consistent voice in the international community condemning Israel’s onslaught and demanding an unconditional ceasefire. It insists on the restoration of the fundamental national rights of the Palestinian people, and, very significantly, recently mediated an agreement between 14 Palestinian resistance movements, with the rationale that Palestinians need the maximum level of unity if they’re going to win their rights.
So this idea that China is an aggressive power, or that one can put an equals sign between Chinese and US foreign policy, simply has no reasonable basis.
Encirclement
Meanwhile, we’re seeing the US and its allies pushing a New Cold War, along with an escalating campaign of containment and encirclement of China.
This includes economic, diplomatic and propaganda aspects, including sanctions, a trade war, the chip war and other attempts to prevent China from modernising, tariffs, and so on.
But it also includes a significant military component: the increasing presence of NATO warships in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait; the creation of AUKUS, the nuclear pact between Britain, the US and Australia, with a clear objective of confronting China; the defence agreements between the US, Japan and South Korea; the installation of new US military bases in the Philippines; encouraging the remilitarisation of Japan; increasing the transfer of weapons to Taiwan; and deploying the Terminal High Altitude Area Defence system in South Korea and Guam.
‘Cold Wars’ sound relatively benign, relatively innocuous, but they can turn hot, and the US and its allies are actively putting the pieces in place for this New Cold War to turn hot. Meanwhile the original Cold War wasn’t particularly cold in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, Angola, Brazil, Chile, Nicaragua, and elsewhere. Many millions of people lost their lives, and whole countries were destroyed, within this framework of Cold War.
Fight for peace
The vast majority of the people of the world don’t want war, hot or cold. What we need is global cooperation.
Humanity faces serious existential threats in the form of climate breakdown, pandemics, antimicrobial resistance, and the possibility of nuclear war.
To face up to these threats, we need to work collectively and within a framework of multipolarity, the UN Charter, and international law. The US’s insistence – and unfortunately this a bipartisan phenomenon, please don’t think Kamala Harris is going to save us – on maintaining its hegemony, on pursuing a Project for a New American Century, is a serious impediment to securing a safe future for humanity.
As such, it’s crucial and urgent that that progressive and peace-loving people the world over join hands in building global mass opposition to this insanity.