The following article by Carlos Martinez responds to the coordinated storm of condemnation that greeted the entry into force on 1 July of China’s Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress – a campaign that seeks to revive the discredited “Xinjiang genocide” narrative and extend it to Xizang (Tibet) and beyond.
Carlos examines what the law actually says, and contrasts China’s record on minority rights – rising life expectancy, the elimination of absolute poverty, and the protection and flourishing of minority languages – with the treatment of minority communities in the West.
He traces the long history of Western sponsorship of separatism in China, from the CIA’s two-decade Tibetan programme to the National Endowment for Democracy’s funding of exile groups today, and locates the current hysteria in the failure of the propaganda war: as polling shows steadily warming attitudes towards China, particularly among the young, the ideologues of the New Cold War are increasingly desperate to re-toxify China’s image. What China is building is strength through unity in diversity; what its adversaries want to see is disunity and disintegration.
On 1 July, China’s Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress came into force – the country’s first comprehensive national law on ethnic affairs, adopted by the National People’s Congress in March.
Within days, a remarkably well-coordinated storm of condemnation had been whipped up: denunciations from Washington and Brussels, a resolution in the European Parliament, and a wave of media coverage announcing that China had ordered its minorities to “assimilate”. The thoroughly discredited “Xinjiang genocide” narrative is being dusted off and relaunched – this time with Xizang (Tibet) added to the charge sheet for good measure.
On 1 July the Communist Party of China turned 105; three days later, on 4 July, the United States turned 250. In this article, Carlos Martinez asks what these two political projects – born of two very different revolutions – have contributed to the world.
This week features two anniversaries that, taken together, tell much of the story of our age. On 1 July, the Communist Party of China marked 105 years since its founding. On 4 July, the United States celebrates 250 years since the Declaration of Independence. The two milestones invite a comparison: what have these two political projects contributed to the world?
War and peace
The US was born in a revolution against empire and has spent much of its life building one. By one widely cited reckoning, the US has been at war for over 90 percent of its history – from the wars of continental conquest to Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Iran. It maintains around 800 military bases in 80 countries and spends over a trillion dollars a year on its armed forces.
The following article by Carlos Martinez responds to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s call at the recent EU summit for a new “Plaza Accord” to force up the value of the Chinese renminbi.
Carlos recalls how the original 1985 Plaza Accord was not a neutral rebalancing of trade but the deliberate kneecapping of an economic competitor – Washington strong-arming Japan, West Germany, France and Britain into driving down the dollar, plunging Japan into a “lost decade” of stagnation while failing to dent a US trade deficit that originated in Washington’s own model of high consumption and low savings, not in the exchange rate.
Carlos argues that China today cannot be treated as Japan was. Where Japan was a subordinate Cold War ally hosting tens of thousands of US troops; China is a sovereign socialist state with an increasingly prosperous domestic market of 1.4 billion people, an independent financial policy and a central bank that answers to no one in the West – it simply cannot be “Plaza’d”.
The article also takes aim at the language of “overcapacity”, which Carlos describes as a euphemism for European and North American industry failing to compete after nearly half a century of financialisation, privatisation and deregulation. Chinese competitiveness in electric vehicles, batteries and solar panels flows from a complete industrial system and sustained investment in technology – not from currency manipulation – and the EU’s tariffs of up to 35 per cent on Chinese electric vehicles are, he writes, “an act of self-harm disguised as self-defence”.
At the recent EU summit, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz declared the Chinese renminbi to be undervalued by as much as 30 per cent and floated the idea of a new Plaza Accord — a co-ordinated effort to force up the value of the currency, just as Washington did to Japan in 1985.
It is worth remembering how that story ended, because the history Merz is reaching for is not the cautionary tale he imagines it to be.
The Plaza Accord was not a neutral exercise in rebalancing trade. It was the deliberate kneecapping of an economic competitor. Meeting at New York’s Plaza Hotel in September 1985, the United States strong-armed Japan, West Germany, France and Britain into driving down the dollar.
Within two years, the dollar–yen rate had fallen by half. Japanese exports were hammered, capital fled into frenzied property and stock-market speculation, and when that bubble burst at the end of the decade, Japan was plunged into a “lost decade” of stagnation that stretched into a lost generation.
Tokyo’s tormentors, meanwhile, failed to reap much from this harvest: the US goods trade deficit with Japan stood at around $46 billion in 1985 and, instead of shrinking, climbed past $55bn in both 1986 and 1987. The currency had been clobbered, but the imbalance remained.
The reason is that the imbalance never originated in the exchange rate in the first place. It grew out of the US’s own domestic economic model of high consumption and low savings, and out of the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency, which compels the US to run deficits in order to supply the world with dollars. No amount of bullying Tokyo could fix a problem made in Washington.
Why could Japan be treated this way at all? Because it was never a sovereign equal but a subordinate ally — a Western outpost in East Asia, permitted to grow rich as part of the cold war project of containing communism, but never permitted to seriously challenge its benefactors. When push came to shove, hosting tens of thousands of American troops and sheltering under the US security umbrella, Tokyo had no choice but to fold. The Plaza Accord is now near-universally regarded, even by mainstream economists, as an act of economic sabotage dressed up as co-operation.
In this article, Carlos Martinez examines how the “debt trap” narrative around Sri Lanka’s Hambantota port has completely collapsed. Originally published at Friends of Socialist China.
Hambantota, the deep-water port on the south coast of Sri Lanka, was for years the canonical example of what the Trump administration’s erstwhile vice-president Mike Pence labelled “debt-trap diplomacy” – the supposed Chinese practice of luring poor countries into unsustainable loans, then seizing strategic infrastructure when repayment failed.
Presenting a menacing, predatory China exploiting hapless developing nations to extend its reach and dominance, Hambantota became a top New Cold War talking point, propagated by Western journalists, Indian think tanks and Washington policy advisors alike.
However, the most obvious problem with the story was that it was patently untrue.
A succession of careful studies – by Chatham House, by Deborah Bräutigam at Johns Hopkins, and by Sri Lankan officials with first-hand knowledge of the negotiations – has now systematically dismantled the whole story.
First, the port project was not proposed by China. It was conceived in the 1970s by a Sri Lankan parliamentarian, D. A. Rajapaksa, and championed by his son, the future president Mahinda Rajapaksa. Feasibility studies were carried out by Canadian and Danish firms. Sri Lanka approached the United States and India for funding, and both declined. Only then did China step in, with the China Export–Import Bank (Exim Bank) lending and China Harbour Engineering as the contractor.
When Sri Lanka subsequently fell into debt crisis, this was driven not by Chinese lending but by Sri Lanka’s massive borrowing on Western-dominated capital markets – borrowing made cheap by post-2008 quantitative easing, then made suddenly expensive when the US Federal Reserve began winding down its programme in 2013. Chinese loans constituted just 9 percent of Sri Lankan government debt by 2016. The Hambantota loans specifically constituted 4.8 percent.
The 2017 concession agreement was painted as a debt-for-asset swap, but the reality was considerably less sinister: China Merchants Port leased the port for $1.12 billion in fresh investment, which Sri Lanka used to pay down its much larger Western creditors. Sri Lanka’s minister of ports at the time, Mahinda Samarasinghe, put it plainly: “We thank China for arranging this investor to save us from the debt trap”.
Sri Lanka’s debt trap was made on Wall Street, not in Beijing. As for the accusation that the Chinese military would use Hambantota as a naval base, that was always nonsense. The lease agreement explicitly prohibits the use of the port for military purposes. There have been no Chinese naval vessels at Hambantota, and the port is subject to US Coastguard inspections under the International Port Security scheme.
What has actually happened at Hambantota over the last few years? The port has actually become a major regional success.
Under the management of China Merchants Port – a state-owned operator with stakes in 42 ports across 25 countries, including Greece, Belgium and France – Hambantota has been transformed from a loss-making white elephant into one of the fastest-growing trans-shipment hubs in the Indian Ocean. By 2023 it was handling 700,000 vehicles, up 26 percent year-on-year. It has expanded its Sri Lankan staff from 300 in 2017 to more than 1,000 today. In November 2023 the Sri Lankan cabinet approved a $4.5 billion oil refinery to be built by Sinopec adjacent to the port – the largest foreign direct investment in Sri Lankan history.
Now, in 2026, comes the next phase. In March, the Hambantota International Port Group signed a $108 million agreement with Shanghai Zhenhua Heavy Industries – the world’s leading manufacturer of port cranes – for six quay cranes, 16 rubber-tyred gantry cranes and 40 trailers. The new quay cranes will have a 72-metre outreach and a 65-tonne lifting capacity, enabling the port to handle the largest container vessels currently in operation. The investment will activate the port’s 1,300-metre container berth and lift annual capacity to around two million TEUs (Twenty-Foot Equivalent Units). Sri Lanka’s minister of ports has described Hambantota as “evolving into a modern, integrated port and industrial ecosystem capable of meeting the diverse needs of global maritime stakeholders”.
This is the Belt and Road Initiative in practice: massive long-term investment; transfer of technology; training of local workers; integration into a global logistics network; substantial revenue generation for the host country’s economy.
Sri Lanka’s ambassador to China between 2020 and 2023, Palitha Kohona, summarised the partnership: “It was not unusual that Sri Lanka, like many other developing countries, decided to work with Chinese companies due to China’s advanced skill levels, stunning technology and cost advantages. The Chinese role in Sri Lanka’s debt is grossly exaggerated and exploited mischievously for political advantage.”
You will not, of course, read any of this in the Western press. The same news organisations that carried out a multi-year campaign against Chinese “neocolonialism” have shown no interest whatever in the port’s subsequent transformation. Their interest in Hambantota was never journalistic; it was ideological. The story existed to serve a specific anti-China narrative. Once it could no longer be credibly sustained, the Western media simply moved on to the next anti-China story.
Who actually traps developing countries in debt? The IMF and the World Bank do. Wall Street’s bond markets do. The European Central Bank’s monetary policy does. The US Federal Reserve does. Across the Global South, more than three-quarters of external sovereign debt is owed not to other states but to private Western financial institutions – institutions with no obligation to consider the development needs of their borrowers, and every incentive to extract the maximum possible return. The track record of structural-adjustment programmes, debt-driven austerity and IMF-imposed privatisations across Africa, Latin America and South Asia over the last four decades is the actual story of debt and neocolonialism in our time.
The Belt and Road Initiative offers, by contrast, infrastructure, technology transfer, training and long-term investment on terms vastly more favourable than the major Western institutions have ever extended. That is why some 150 countries have signed up to it.
The BRI embodies three things that Western imperialism hates: the Global South’s emergence from dependency; the growing influence of the People’s Republic of China and its friendly, mutually beneficial relations with the rest of the developing world; and the emerging multipolar alternative to the Western-dominated global order. The Western media’s obsession with Chinese “debt traps” is thus nothing more than a demonisation campaign and a blatant act of self-projection.
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.
What follows below is the full text of a written interview with Carlos Martinez, conducted by the Global Times.
The interview deals with a wide range of issues, including the New Cold War on China, the nature of Chinese socialism, the Belt and Road Initiative, capitalist versus socialist democracy, and anti-China propaganda in the Western media.
An abridged version was published in the Global Times on 31 August 2023.
Could you please briefly introduce yourself to us? When did you start to study China? And what made you start to be interested in the country?
I’m an author and campaigner from London, Britain, with a longstanding interest in the socialist countries and global anti-imperialism. My first book, released in 2019, was about the reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union. I was involved in setting up the No Cold War campaign in 2020, and the Friends of Socialist China platform in 2021.
There were two main motivations for me to start studying China. The first comes from being a Marxist and wanting to understand how socialism is constructed in the real world. The second comes from being anti-imperialist and anti-war, and wanting to understand China’s role in the development of a peaceful and multipolar world.
The more I study China, the more I realise how poorly it’s understood in the West. In recent years, the anti-China propaganda in the media has been increasingly intense, corresponding to the rise of the US-led New Cold War. Many people have this absurd idea of China as some sort of authoritarian dystopia that’s intent on taking over the world. Many people believe the media’s disgraceful slanders about the suppression of human rights in Xinjiang, and so on.
China is misunderstood even on the left: lots of people believe that, because China uses market mechanisms, or because there are some very rich people in China, that it can’t be socialist any more. But then how do we explain China’s achievements? China has raised living standards beyond recognition; it’s become the world leader in renewable energy; it’s gone from being a poor and backward country to being a science and technology powerhouse; it’s leading the global shift to multipolarity; its life expectancy now exceeds that of the US. All this is historic and unprecedented progress, on a scale which has never been achieved by any capitalist country. Why on earth would the left want to attribute these successes to capitalism rather than socialism?
Written to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the Korean Armistice Agreement, this book review by Carlos Martinez of IF Stone’s recently re-issuedThe Hidden History of the Korean War seeks to identify the lessons to be learnt from the so-called “forgotten war”, and to draw out parallels between the original Cold War in the Pacific and the New Cold War in the Pacific.
A shorter version of this review was published in the Morning Star.
The 27th of July 2023 marks 70 years since the signing of the armistice agreement at Panmunjom, finally bringing about a cessation of hostilities in a war that was extraordinarily destructive but which has been largely ignored.
As Bruce Cumings writes in his preface to I.F. Stone’s classic The Hidden History of the Korean War – first published in 1952 and recently reissued by Monthly Review Press – the Korean War is a forgotten war, “remembered mainly as an odd conflict sandwiched between the good war (World War 2) and the bad war (Vietnam).”
For those seeking to build a peaceful and prosperous future for humanity, the lessons of the Korean War must not be forgotten. Indeed re-reading The Hidden History it becomes clear that there are several crucial parallels with today’s world.
Stone’s meticulous investigation provides abundant proof that most of the key players in the US government and military actively wanted the Korean War; that it was the right war, in the right place and the right time in terms of US imperialist interests.
Top US generals have since admitted that their “police action” in Korea gave them just the excuse they needed to construct the military infrastructure of Cold War in the Pacific: a vast network of overseas bases; large-scale, long-term deployments of US troops in Korea and Japan; and the permanent stationing of nuclear warheads in the region.
The Korean War set the whole military-industrial complex in motion. It created the national security state. It was the first major test case for the Truman Doctrine of “support for democracies against authoritarian threats” and helped establish the US in its self-assumed role of global policeman. By forcing through a United Nations endorsement of its invasion, the US was able to establish its dominance of the UN-based international system.
Reading Izzy Stone’s reporting today, it’s striking the extent to which these mechanisms of Cold War still exist and are being used to wage a New Cold War. The military bases, the troop deployments, the nuclear threats that aimed to contain socialism and prevent the emergence of a multipolar world in the 1950s continue to serve the same purposes in 2023.
Stone’s book emphasises that peace was very much an option in 1950.
The Soviet Union of course wanted peace; having lost 27 million lives and sustained incredible damage to its infrastructure in the course of saving the world from Nazism, the Soviets needed space to rebuild. The People’s Republic of China also wanted peace; having only been founded in October 1949 after long years of civil war and struggle against Japanese occupation, the last thing the new state needed was to become embroiled in another war. (In the event, nearly 400,000 Chinese volunteers gave their lives fighting in Korea).
The US could have accepted the post-WW2 reality: that some countries had chosen the path of socialism, and that many other countries were throwing off the shackles of colonialism and seeking to explore an independent path to development.
The US could furthermore have accepted an emerging status quo in East Asia. Before the US invasion, the trajectory was for Korea to be united under a popular, communist-led government; for Taiwan to become part of the People’s Republic of China; for China to regain its rightful seat at the UN; and for US troops to be removed from Japan.
Such a configuration would have reflected the will of the peoples of the region, but it wasn’t consistent with Washington’s idiosyncratic vision of a “rules-based world order”. The major western powers, led by the US, rejected peace and chose containment, encirclement, blockade and war.
They chose a strategy of doing everything they could to weaken the socialist countries and the forces of national liberation and sovereign development. They chose the Cold War – which for the people of Korea, Vietnam, Angola, Nicaragua, Chile, and many other countries of the Global South was not cold at all.
Seventy years later, the “End of History” fever dream is over and the West is once again faced with a rising socialism and an irrepressible multipolar trend, at the centre of which is China. Once again there is a choice between peace and conflict.
China has become a major player in global affairs. It’s the largest trading partner of two-thirds of the world’s countries. It’s the second largest economy in the world in dollar terms. It’s taken the lead globally on poverty alleviation and on sustainable development. It’s on the cutting edge of advanced industry, of telecommunications, of artificial intelligence, of renewable energy and more.
Through mechanisms such as BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, China is promoting solidarity and shared development of the Global South. China is playing a positive role in promoting sovereign development in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, Central Asia, the Caribbean, and Pacific – regions that have been held in underdevelopment for centuries by the colonial and imperial powers.
What’s more, China is recognised globally for its consistent pursuit of peace. Where the West has stoked conflict in Ukraine, China has worked with all parties for a peaceful settlement. Where the US has stoked division in the Middle East, China has facilitated a rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia, thereby potentially clearing a path for an end to the horrific war in Yemen.
Can the West adapt to this new reality? Can it accept China’s rise? Can it accept that the countries of the world want to determine their own economic policy and their own foreign policy? Can it accept that the era of colonialism and imperialism is over? Can it accept that the idea of any one country being the “world’s policeman” really has no place in the modern world?
Can the West work with China, with Iran, with Russia and other countries to solve the major existential problems that humanity faces? Or will the US and its allies continue on the ruinous path of a New Cold War – and potentially a devastating hot war? Such are the defining geopolitical questions of our era.
The Hidden History of the Korean War is essential reading for those who are educating and organising towards peace; towards building a mass anti-war movement that our governments can’t ignore.
This is the text and video of a presentation made by Carlos Martinez at a 28 June webinar of the United National Anti-War Coalition, on the theme of US anti-China propaganda, a prelude to war. Carlos exposes the extraordinary hypocrisy and falsehood of the propaganda war that the Western powers are waging against China, and highlights how it is being leveraged to shift public opinion in favour of anti-China hostility.
He points out that the escalating campaign of China encirclement and containment is threatening to derail global progress on key issues, noting that “the future of humanity actually hinges on global cooperation to address our collective problems.” As such, Carlos calls on all progressive and peace-loving people to make campaigning against the New Cold War a core part of their work.
Other speakers at the event included Lee Siu Hin of the China-US Solidarity Network, Sara Flounders of the International Action Center, and Arjae Red of Workers World Party. The full webinar can be viewed on YouTube.
Dear friends, thank you so much for inviting me to speak at this important event. I’m very sorry not to be able to join you in person, as I’m currently in Guiyang, China, on a delegation.
The theme of today’s event, “Anti-Chinese propaganda, a prelude to war”, is closely connected to the rationale for writing my book, “The East is Still Red: Chinese socialism in the 21st century.”
I had two key aims in mind with the book.
One was to talk about socialism, about how China is a socialist country. So many people think that China used to be a socialist country and then became capitalist with the introduction of market reforms. I wanted to show that China remains a socialist country and that socialism provides the framework for its incredible successes in poverty alleviation, development, renewable energy, and so on.
And I wanted to say to the Western left – which tends to be a bit unsure about China – look, China’s achieved all these things, it’s raised living standards beyond recognition, it’s gone from being a technologically backward and oppressed country to being a science and tech powerhouse, it’s leading the global shift to multipolarity; why on earth would we want to ascribe these successes to capitalism rather than socialism? Let’s celebrate socialist victories, let’s uphold the history and politics of the global working class.
Hence ‘The East is Still Red’.
The second key aim in writing the book was to stand up to the propaganda war, which is part of a wider New Cold War against China, and that’s the focus of my talk today.
This work of standing up to the propaganda war is urgent. It needs to be a major focus for socialists, communists, progressives, for anti-war campaigners worldwide; really for anyone that doesn’t think “better dead than red” is a viable slogan for the 21st century.
Because the propaganda war is war propaganda.
It seeks to build the broadest possible public support for a New Cold War, for a campaign of containment and encirclement, and ultimately very possibly for a hot war.
Let’s get something straight. This New Cold War, this anti-China campaign, has absolutely nothing to do with human rights.
When the West throws disgraceful slanders at China over alleged human rights abuses in Xinjiang, does anybody seriously think they’re manifesting a hitherto secret fondness and respect for Muslim people and their religion?
Where was that sentiment when they killed over a million people in Iraq?
Where was that sentiment when they destroyed Afghanistan, turning a quarter of its population into refugees and imposing brutal poverty on the rest?
Where was that sentiment when they bombed Libya into the Stone Age?
Where’s that sentiment today as they wage a disastrous proxy war against Iran in Yemen, creating the most severe humanitarian crisis in the world?
If they’re concerned about Muslims being placed in prison camps and denied their human rights, the first place they need to look is their illegally occupied corner of Cuba, that is, Guantanamo Bay.
When the West spreads outright lies about the suppression of Tibetan or Inner Mongolian language and culture, does anyone seriously think they’re standing up for the rights of indigenous peoples and for the preservation of precious human history?
How many indigenous languages are taught in US schools? To what extent is indigenous culture – and righteous resistance against colonialism – celebrated in US society? When was the last time native rights were upheld over drilling rights? Why does the US Congress seem more concerned with preserving Tibetan heritage than shutting down the Dakota Access pipeline?
These anti-China stories – all of which can be and have been comprehensively debunked – have nothing to do with upholding the principles of freedom, democracy and justice.
Those are the principles that are invoked. Those are the sentiments that are manipulated. Do you support freedom for Tibetan people? Do you oppose genocide and cultural genocide? Do you oppose debt traps in Africa and Latin America? If so, you should be anti-China, that’s the message; that’s the way of manufacturing consent, of persuading people to take a reactionary pro-imperialist position whilst feeling like they’re standing on the side of justice.
But it’s not the side of justice. It’s a campaign of demonisation, forming part of a hybrid war against socialism, against sovereignty, and against multipolarity.
It’s part of the New Cold War, part of the Project for a New American Century. There’s nothing progressive about it. It’s the politics of Donald Trump, of Joe Biden, of Mike Pompeo, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld.
It’s the politics of a decaying US-led empire doing everything it can to prevent that decay, to maintain its hegemony, to prevent the emergence of a different kind of world.
In that sense, the New Cold War actually has a lot in common with the original Cold War.
What was the Cold War about? Historians sometimes talk about it in grandiose terms, as a “clash of civilisations”; an ideological battle between capitalism and communism, ending with the triumph of so-called liberal democracy and the end of history.
The reality is very different. It was a long-term campaign engineered by the US and its close allies to contain and roll back socialism; to contain and roll back decolonisation; to contain and roll back the economic emergence and political sovereignty of the Global South.
The Soviets certainly never wanted a Cold War, never wanted an arms race, never wanted a system of entrenched hostility.
They wanted and called for peaceful coexistence. Having heroically defeated the Nazis and liberated Europe from the yoke of fascism, they wanted and needed breathing space to rebuild. But the imperialists wouldn’t give them that breathing space. Instead they did whatever they could to suffocate the country that had sacrificed 27 million lives in the fight against the Hitlerite war machine.
Similarly the Chinese never wanted a Cold War and hoped for peaceful coexistence with the West. The Chinese also sacrificed millions of lives in World War 2, fighting against a horrifyingly brutal Japanese invasion and occupation. But the US made it clear from the start that it would never accept Chinese socialism.
And by the way the Cold War wasn’t all that cold. It wasn’t cold for the 3 million people that lost their lives in Korea between 1950 and 1953 – a war fought exclusively in the interests of US geopolitical advantage, so the US could have a military foothold in the region from which to permanently threaten China and the Soviet Union with nuclear annihilation.
The Cold War wasn’t cold for the 4 million people that lost their lives in Vietnam between 1965 and 1975 – another war fought exclusively in the interests of US geopolitical advantage, so the US could encircle China and prevent the peoples of Southeast Asia from choosing a socialist development path.
Millions more lost their lives in coups, proxy wars and invasions from Indonesia to Brazil, from Chile to Angola, from Nicaragua to Iran. The US, the CIA, the State Department, had a hand in all of this. Sacrificing millions for the sake of preserving what is bizarrely referred to as the rules-based world order.
That’s the same rules-based world order that Biden and Blinken talk incessantly about today.
What they don’t say is that these rules are written in Washington DC; they’re rules that protect the interests of the US capitalist class. These rules are enforced by the US military and the mechanisms of economic coercion. They’re enforced with the help of dollar hegemony, as well as 800 overseas military bases, a military budget of around a trillion dollars a year, 5,500 nuclear warheads, a total commitment to the military-industrial complex.
This rules-based order is about protecting profits. Protecting access to the resources, markets, land and cheap labour of the Global South.
Really nothing to do with freedom, democracy, justice and human rights.
So today, when they wage a trade war on China, when they impose sanctions on Chinese solar energy materials, when they try to cut China out of advanced semiconductors, when they try to ban Huawei and TikTok, when they kidnap Huawei’s CFO, none of this is done in support of human rights; it’s done in support of imperialism, of domination, of profit.
When they construct a nuclear pact – AUKUS – between Britain, the US and Australia; when they provide military aid and diplomatic support to Taiwanese separatists; when they build a new military base in North Australia; when they place nuclear-enabled warplanes in the region; when they conduct their RIMPAC military exercises; when they place missile defence systems in Guam and South Korea; when they try to turn the Quad into a sort of Pacific NATO; when they encourage Japanese re-armament; none of this is done in support of peace; it’s done in support of hegemony and bullying.
And it’s increasingly clear that there are elements in the US ruling class that recognise that Cold War tactics aren’t working, that it’s too late to prevent China’s rise, that it’s too late to prevent the emergence of a multipolar, multilateral world – and that are therefore preparing for a full, armed confrontation – most likely with Taiwan as the trigger.
So this is what we’re up against. This is why we have to reject and oppose the propaganda war. This is why we have to debunk anti-China slanders.
The immediate dangers are serious enough. The future of humanity actually hinges on global cooperation to address our collective problems. Climate change is a global issue that can only be solved on a global basis. The same goes for pandemics. The New Cold War gets in the way of the cooperation we desperately need, and as such presents a serious – even existential – threat.
Only slightly less immediate is the danger of a full-scale war between nuclear powers, the potential consequences of which are terrifying.
This is what’s at stake. It’s urgent we make campaigning against the New Cold War, against the propaganda war, against the escalating campaign of China encirclement, a core part of our work, as people who love peace, as people who love justice, as people who want humanity to prosper.
The following is a slightly updated version of an article by Carlos Martinez in the Global Times, published on 22 February 2023.
A year ago, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin met in Beijing at start of the Winter Olympics, issuing a joint statement that called on the West to “abandon the ideologised approaches of the cold war”. The statement expressed their shared opposition to the further expansion of Nato and emphasised the need for “long-term legally binding security guarantees in Europe”.
President Xi said the two countries were “working together to bring to life true multilateralism.” A year later, with the horrifying proxy war between Russia and NATO dragging on, the people of the world are living – and dying – with the consequences of the US and its allies’ stubborn refusal to join the path of multipolarity.
With the benefit of hindsight, the Ukraine crisis has acquired a certain tragic inevitability. Russia had made its red lines perfectly clear over the course of many years: that Ukraine must never become part of Nato; that Nato’s expansion must end; that Ukraine must never be allowed to be used as a launching pad for war on Russia; and that the national rights of the Russian-speaking peoples of Eastern Ukraine must be respected.
As John Wojcik wrote in the left-wing US journal People’s World in January 2022, what happens in Ukraine is of critical importance to the survival of Russia. “From Napoleon to the Kaiser to Hitler, Russia has been invaded too many times from Europe, and it is understandably determined to maintain a militarily non-aligned buffer zone on its border.”
It was within the West’s power to prevent the current war, and it remains within the West’s power to put a stop to it now. Unfortunately the leading Western power, the US, has only a marginal interest in helping to bring about peace in Europe. If the US wanted peace, it could have supported Ukraine in adopting a path of military neutrality and building friendly and mutually-beneficial relations with both East and West. But the US privileges hegemony over peace, and has therefore constantly meddled in Ukraine with a view to exploiting its people and geography to project imperial power against Russia.
Carlos Martinez talks to Midwestern Marx about the conflict in Ukraine, NATO’s ongoing war against Russia, cultural development in the Soviet Union, the Soviet collapse, China’s role in combatting climate breakdown, the nature of China’s reform and opening up, the 20th National Congress of the CPC, and possibilities for the future of working class internationalism.
