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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Nov. 6, 1997
issue of Workers World newspaper
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Editorial: Stand by China

It’s not easy being president of the United States.

This week, for example, Bill Clinton had to exude praise for capitalism in his meetings with Chinese leader Jiang Zemin—while the stock markets were yoyoing in every direction. Was Clinton getting briefed about the market meltdowns in one ear while trying to listen to a translation of Jiang’s remarks in the other? When he talked about the importance of China opening up and letting the markets decide everything, did he look away so as not to see the skepticism in the Chinese leader’s eyes? Obviously, he had to cut out the part in his remarks where he would hold up the Asian "tigers" as examples for China to follow.

Clinton was practicing how to act stern with China on human rights and prison conditions while demonstrators in Boston were desperately trying to stop a death-penalty law in their state. In fact, all Clinton’s well-rehearsed scolding of China was understood on all sides—by the president, by Jiang and by the media—as a cynical ritual meant to cover the Democratic president from his critics on the right so that the more mundane business of trade and other agreements could proceed.

U.S. big business wants it both ways with China. Boeing wants to sell its planes there. Intel wants it to buy computer chips. Philip Morris wants to market its cigarettes. But they all want to diminish China as a world power, tear pieces off if they can, and make sure that China’s modernization does not strengthen its socialist state property. It’s the job of President Clinton and the foreign policy establishment to facilitate commercial relations with China while also letting the Pentagon, the CIA, and the other agencies of imperialist aggression do their thing.

Their thing is to wage a new Cold War against China. The rhetoric of the military and the right becomes more shrill all the time. China is now "the greatest military threat to democracy"—even though it has no troops or bases abroad. It is "proliferating" nuclear technology around the Third World. Tibet and other parts of China must be "liberated."

Foreign Affairs magazine, which speaks the mind of the top U.S. capitalist establishment, ran an article last spring entitled "The Coming War with China." Other voices are demanding the U.S. tighten its military encirclement of China, and are indignant when the Peoples Republic does anything in its own defense.

According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Peoples China, with four times the population of the U.S., has a military budget one-eighth the size of the Pentagon’s. It’s got 149 strategic nuclear weapons compared to the U.S.’s 7,150. It has 17 ICBM’s compared to the Pentagon’s 580. It has no aircraft carriers, no long-range strategic bombers, and one ballistic missile submarine.

What China has is people, so its army is large. But that army’s posture is completely defensive.

Yet the anti-China propaganda blitz is so heavy right now that many in this country are probably convinced that China presents a real danger to them.

The progressive movement, which should have learned something by now from the disastrous consequences of Washington’s Cold War against the USSR, can cut through all this jingoistic nonsense and tell it like it is: China is a great country still struggling to overcome underdevelopment. One of every four of our fellow humans is Chinese. Colonialism and imperialist war have killed millions of Chinese in this century.

Only the Communist-led revolution that triumphed in 1949 after decades of struggle and suffering was able to overcome the feudal landlords, imperialist stooges and warlords and put China on the path of social development. The workers and peasants there are our class brothers and sisters. The state that represents them came directly from their great revolutionary struggle. It’s not a puppet of imperialism nor has it been taken over by the capitalist counter-revolution, as happened in Russia.

Progressives and workers’ representatives here have no business joining in with the right wing in anti-China protests. If they do it in the name of supporting workers’ rights in China, that’s even worse because the architects of the bash-China movement are anti-worker to the core.

What’s the alternative the imperialists want in place of China’s system? Just look at Russia to find out. That’s what their "multi-party democracy," their "free enterprise system," their "return to a civil society" amount to. It’s the destruction of everything built up over decades by the Soviet peoples: their industry, their health-care system, their schools and universities, their scientific institutions, their multinational society, their sovereignty.

Anyone with social consciousness in the United States, of all places, has a duty to clearly stand with China against those who would want to reduce it to yet another imperialist satellite.

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