{"id":12235,"date":"2020-09-08T02:20:50","date_gmt":"2020-09-08T01:20:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.socialism.in\/?p=12235"},"modified":"2020-09-08T02:30:27","modified_gmt":"2020-09-08T01:30:27","slug":"chinas-global-ambition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.socialism.in\/?p=12235","title":{"rendered":"China\u2019s global ambition"},"content":{"rendered":"
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CLARE DOYLE reviews a comprehensive account of China\u2019s Belt and Road Initiative and argues that the project is another form of imperialist expansionism.<\/h4>\n

Belt and Road: A Chinese World Order By Bruno Ma\u00e7\u00e3es
\nPublished by C Hurst & Co.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cChina\u2019s Belt and Road strategy is acknowledged to be the most important geopolitical initiative of the age\u201d, write the publishers of this fascinating book by Bruno Ma\u00e7\u00e3es. \u201cIt symbolises a new phase in China\u2019s ambitions as a superpower: to remake the world economy and crown Beijing as the new centre of capitalism and globalisation\u201d.<\/p>\n

In page after page of detail, the author leaves the reader in no doubt that China is in effect attempting to carry out a massive and meticulously calculated, high-speed, planned form of imperialist expansion that indeed rivals the growth of US, European and Japanese imperialisms over past centuries.<\/p>\n

<\/span>The author with apparent naivety denies that this is the aim of the project but accepts that it might be the result! He repeats the official propaganda about creating a \u2018Community of shared destiny\u2019 \u2013 Tianxia, a three-thousand-year-old concept \u2013 and seems to believe everything will lead to a harmonious new world order. But his own book reveals dramatic conflicts of interest, serious levels of exploitation \u2013 of natural and human resources \u2013 and a number of flashpoints for open military conflict as China is clearly aiming for world hegemony.<\/p>\n

Launched in 2013 as the \u2018One Belt One Road\u2019 project, the scheme envisaged an investment \u2018development strategy\u2019 linking seventy countries by land and sea. It now covers 138 countries and is worth trillions of dollars.<\/p>\n

In a recent TV documentary on the \u2018Belt and Road\u2019 phenomenon, Christoph Trebesh, a researcher at the Kiel based Institute for World Economy, explained: \u201cIt is driven by opaque, state-owned entities using market-based loan terms at high rates of interest and with strings attached, such as revenue from oil or copper sales\u201d. China lends more money, he maintained, than the next richest 32 nations combined. It is \u201cno different from other colonial powers, extending their power through trade, finance and the military\u201d.<\/p>\n

By 2017, the Belt and Road was enshrined in the constitution of the People\u2019s Republic of China. It is not a totally new idea. It harks back to China\u2019s long history as a trading nation and the \u2018Silk Road\u2019 that took its unique fabric to Europe, stretching from the Pacific to the Atlantic. The \u2018Belts\u2019, Ma\u00e7\u00e3es explains, consist of six economic \u2018corridors\u2019 on land and the \u2018Roads\u2019 are three sea routes. \u201cThe land element is called a belt to pinpoint that its ultimate goal is the creation of a densely integrated economic corridor rather than a transportation network linking two points\u201d.<\/p>\n

The communications, investments and loans that link China to Europe and South East Asia are already well developed. This \u201csupercontinent\u201d stretches from Lisbon to Jakarta, includes India \u2013 and encompasses two-thirds of the world\u2019s population and global economic output. His central contention is that \u201cwhoever is able to build and control the infrastructure linking the two ends of Eurasia will rule the world\u201d.<\/p>\n

Geopolitical rivalry<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cThe Belt and Road is the Chinese plan to build a new world order replacing the US-led international system\u201d. This is the essence of the modern-day Thucydides trap that so many commentators are now referring to \u2013 when Sparta feared the rise of Athens and went to war. The USA\u2019s dominant position in the world is undoubtedly under threat, a threat that the US ruling class will attempt to repel. It is by no means a certainty as to who wins.<\/p>\n

China has grown rapidly to become the number one global rival of the USA, even in its own back yard \u2013 Latin America. This book does not cross the Atlantic but, as an article in the New York Times explained in April this year, China \u201chas become the top trading partner of major economies including Brazil, Chile, Peru and Uruguay. Since 2017, 19 nations in the region have signed on to the Chinese government\u2019s Belt and Road Initiative, a multi-billion dollar network of investment and infrastructure projects\u201d.<\/p>\n

Bruno Ma\u00e7\u00e3es wrote this book in 2018 just as the trade war between the US and China was accelerating. \u201cThe ongoing dispute was initially centred around the country\u2019s trade deficit with China but quickly turned to \u2018Made in China 2025\u2019,\u201d he explains. \u201cThe confrontation started on April 3, 2018, with the US proposing 25% in added duties on 1,300 Chinese products, such as industrial robots and other machinery. This would impact $50 billion or 10 per cent of total US imports from China\u201d.<\/p>\n

The book is now particularly relevant in today\u2019s atmosphere of accelerating tensions, measures and counter-measures, sometimes described as a \u2018cold war\u2019, between capitalism\u2019s geopolitical giants, which make the \u2018truce\u2019 signed in January this year appear meaningless. Donald Trump has said \u201cwe could cut off the whole relationship!\u201d and talks of cancelling all dealings with Huawei \u2013 in an attempt to cripple the world\u2019s largest telecom equipment company and leader in 5G mobile technology. Trump does not speak for the entire US ruling class, but many sections want to see action taken to limit China\u2019s rise.<\/p>\n

China\u2019s history<\/strong><\/p>\n

At the beginning of his book, Bruno Ma\u00e7\u00e3es, who was Portugal\u2019s Europe Minister from 2013 to 2015, refers to China\u2019s long history as a trading nation stretching back millennia but says little about the hundred \u2018lost\u2019 years spent under the jackboot of Western and Japanese imperialism \u2013 the \u2018years of humiliation\u2019. Nor does he mention much about the decades following the victory of the revolution led by Mao Zedong in 1949 or the policies of Deng Xiaoping that changed the direction of China\u2019s economic policy from the late 1970s.<\/p>\n

He does give some stark statistics for China\u2019s spectacular growth rates in the most recent period. \u201cWhereas Great Britain took 154 years to double industrial output per person and the United States fifty-three years, China and India have taken just twelve and sixteen years respectively, and both with one billion people\u201d.<\/p>\n

The size of China\u2019s economy in purchasing power parity terms is now as great as that of the US. But this by no means implies that living standards are comparable. Premier Li Keqiang has just admitted that more than two-fifths of the population \u2013 600 million Chinese \u2013 are having trouble maintaining a basic living standard. With the huge blow to the economy inflicted by the coronavirus, this can be a cause of major problems for some time.<\/p>\n

In recent years, as China shed many of the elements of a state-owned, planned economy, individuals, well placed in the ruling \u2018Communist\u2019 Party, became owners of large swathes of banking and industry and grew rich\u2026 very rich. There are more than 300 billionaires or mega billionaires owning fast cars, luxury yachts and villas abroad, sending their children to European and US schools and universities.<\/p>\n

The present general secretary of the ruling party and the country\u2019s \u2018president for life\u2019, Xi Jinping, holds enormous power and is surrounded by compliant politburo members, keenly aware that their privileged position could be brought suddenly to an end in one of the periodic anti-corruption campaigns that Xi conducts. In a way, the whole system is corrupt.<\/p>\n

Public and state<\/strong><\/p>\n

The exact relationship between private, public and state ownership of companies is shrouded in mystery. The Chinese economy is now said to be 60% privately owned. In 2016 Ma\u00e7\u00e3es wrote for Carnegie Europe that \u201cmost large Chinese multinationals are not simply state-owned but are effectively managed with a view to goals and strategies defined outside the company and through political channels\u201d.<\/p>\n

The state capitalism of China is certainly of a very special kind. The memory of the \u2018great leader\u2019 of the 1949 revolution, Mao Zedong, is kept alive in spite of his fall from grace towards the end of his life, in order to maintain the myth that the present regime continues on a path to socialism from capitalism and landlordism.<\/p>\n

Mao and the CCP leadership, basing their rule on the example of the Stalin clique in the then Soviet Union, established a planned nationalised economy while suppressing any form of workers\u2019 democracy. But by the 1970s bureaucratic rule was stifling the economy and a section of the Chinese leadership allowed the re-emergence of capitalism in an attempt to overcome stagnation. This was the starting point of what became the state capitalist regime that exists today, a regime that still calls itself \u2018Communist\u2019 and declares \u2018socialism\u2019 to be its goal in an attempt to retain legitimacy in the eyes of the population.<\/p>\n

The Chinese state acts to defend elite rule utilising names associated with the struggles of the first half of the twentieth century. The more than two million strong army in China is called the \u2018People\u2019s Army\u2019, the state, the \u2018People\u2019s Republic\u2019.<\/p>\n

The \u2018Communist Party\u2019 and its subservient trade unions have a network of local members who virtually police the neighbourhoods, villages and workplaces. There are no free elections, no free press or media, frequent jailings and disappearances of critics of the government. Whole nations are suppressed, not least the Uighurs of Xinjiang in the west of the country. Semi-independent Hong Kong is now threatened with complete domination from Beijing.<\/p>\n

Foreign policy<\/strong><\/p>\n

Foreign policy is always an extension of national politics. Ma\u00e7\u00e3es gives a detailed picture of the way the \u2018Belt and Road\u2019 initiative has been driven forward, trampling on local sensitivities and interests. He enumerates the problems the essentially imperialistic grand plan has come up against literally along the way.<\/p>\n

He describes a determined strategy to build ports, trade parks, rail and road routes and highways as well as seaways across Eurasia and into Africa. This is power politics on a grand scale while<\/s> involving huge elements of state lending and investment, paving the way for private as well as state-financed Chinese ventures to expand and capture world markets \u2013 literally striding the globe like a colossus.<\/p>\n

China has built new ports stretching from Hambantota in Sri Lanka, through to Gwadar in Pakistan. The project in Gwadar now involves the building of a $10 billion model city. \u201cA quiet fishing village may soon become a new Dubai\u201d. As elsewhere, such a city exemplifies the \u2018combined and uneven development\u2019 described by Leon Trotsky in his work Permanent Revolution. So too does the Belt and Road project in Pakistan with the most modern of technology being used building bridges and railways through the countryside where semi-feudal relations of obeisance to prosperous landowners still hold sway.<\/p>\n

The rapid construction of a container port in Doraleh, Djibouti saw China actually force an already existing rival port out of existence and establish not only a massive container terminal but China\u2019s first overseas military base. The \u2018People\u2019s Republic\u2019 has designs on African countries and their natural and human resources \u2013 the projected building of a rail link from Djibouti through Cameroon to Nigeria is nothing short of a neo-colonialism of a very special kind.<\/p>\n

China, like any imperialist power, is out to dominate markets and grab precious raw materials vital to the production and sale of Chinese products. About 54% of the global supply of cobalt for batteries comes from the Congo. Chinese imports from there in 2017 totalled $1.2 billion and the second biggest importer, $3.2 million. Ma\u00e7\u00e3es writes: \u201cChina is not interested in producing batteries. It wants to control the electric vehicles market\u2026Who rules the electric car market commands the world\u201d.<\/p>\n

For many years China has had pre-eminence in shipping and container ports. Now new ambitions to dominate trade routes are tied to the opening up of a \u2018Northern Road\u2019 through Siberia and the Arctic to northern Europe.<\/p>\n

Ma\u00e7\u00e3es speaks of the Chinese state\u2019s Machiavellian methods of building allies within the EU, including amongst reactionary regimes in Hungary and some of the former Stalinist states of Eastern Europe. It has established vast business interests in the Mediterranean \u2013 in Greece, Italy, and Turkey. Giant companies like Alibaba challenge Amazon in the European battlefield.<\/p>\n

It is no coincidence that the Belt and Road project was announced during a speech that Xi Jinping gave to university students in Kazakhstan in 2013. It was an obvious place to start a drive through Central Asia, exploiting the country\u2019s precious natural resources, setting up vast industrial and trading hubs, taking advantage of a dictatorial political system and employing small armies of English \u2018experts\u2019.<\/p>\n

In China\u2019s \u2018home\u2019 region of South East Asia, there are long-standing tensions over China\u2019s control of the vital Malacca Straits amongst other issues. Many rival projects established by Japan, \u2018flying under the radar\u2019, actually exceed those of China. India\u2019s role as defender of smaller nations in its orbit is a complication for China as well as longstanding border conflicts between them. India regards the China-Pakistan corridor as a major threat to its national security.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor South China littoral states\u201d, writes Ma\u00e7\u00e3es, \u201cthe spectre of Chinese naval and coast-guard assets patrolling vital shipping sea lanes and waters adjacent to these ports may actually dissuade them from participating in the scheme lest it be seen as jeopardising their own territorial and maritime claims\u201d.<\/p>\n

Clashes are inevitable. China\u2019s relations with governments abroad has nothing in common with socialist internationalism, let alone the higher stage of socialism known as communism, which it professes, totally hypocritically, to be moving towards at home. If anything, China\u2019s relations with its hundreds of creditor countries and firms around the world are another, higher stage of imperialism!<\/p>\n

The blowback<\/strong><\/p>\n

China sees under-developed economies as virtual colonies hooked up to its superior political and economic power. They provide raw materials on the cheap, a market for Chinese technology and goods, and are forced to repay loans at interest rates even higher than those demanded by western imperialism through the IMF and the World Bank!<\/p>\n

During the Covid-19 crisis the Chinese authorities have made it clear that they may countenance a repayment \u2018holiday\u2019 but very few defaults, if any, on the hundreds of billions of dollars\u2019 worth of loans to countries \u2013 half of which are considered high-risk debtors. In a number of countries, as Ma\u00e7\u00e3es himself points out, China takes real estate, assets, ports or airports as collateral.<\/p>\n

Ma\u00e7\u00e3es, after declaring that \u201cgeopolitics has triumphed\u201d, writes that \u201cblowback against the Belt and Road followed almost immediately upon its initial successes\u201d. He lists opposition from the US and India and a range of South Asian countries pushing back against Chinese capitalism\u2019s ambitions including Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam and Myanmar. Some proposed schemes have been rejected as too exploitative or downright insulting. In some cases, Chinese labour has been \u2018imported\u2019 rather than employ local workers. Little wonder that anti-Chinese sentiment has deepened.<\/p>\n

Huge tensions have developed between China and Australia \u2013 a country extremely dependent on China for trade and investment. Australia and New Zealand have both complained about political interference and there has been blatant Chinese financing of reactionary political forces in Sri Lanka and elsewhere.<\/p>\n

When it comes to the European end of the Belt and Road schema, China has made huge inroads into the market. \u201cEU-Asia trade in goods is consistently more than double transpacific trade and as much as three times Transatlantic\u201d. It involves giants like Alibaba and Huawei, joint ventures in Italy and elsewhere, and even high-speed railway developments.<\/p>\n

As the present crisis has followed a decade of slow growth, some European powers aiming to protect their own industries have engaged in a war of words as a prelude to pulling out of deals wherever they can. Others like Italy and East European nations are content to take advantage of what appears to be a more friendly approach to loans and investment and see China as a counterweight to countries like the US, Germany and France.<\/p>\n

New proxy colonial wars are in the process of formation as the big powers back different forces. A new inter-imperialist war between the two giants on the world stage is spoken of with some trepidation by serious capitalist commentators. Ma\u00e7\u00e3es well understands that \u201ca war for hegemony\u201d is rendered impossible by nuclear weapons. The use of ballistic missiles is not on the cards, but skirmishes, even bloody localised wars, can be envisaged in areas like the South China Sea.<\/p>\n

Utopia<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ma\u00e7\u00e3es sees all the potential points of conflict around the world, yet the last pages of his book are devoted to describing a utopia that comes out of the blue as a seamless progression from \u2018Belt and Road\u2019 to a space-age paradise! This is the author who links his narrative with the myths and legends of China\u2019s past. It is also a fairy tale, a fiction that he bases on the idea of the rise of China as the most advanced civilised nation on the planet.<\/p>\n

Despite its high growth rates up to now, it is not at all certain that China will overtake the US in terms of economic and even imperial might, but China is clearly capitalist in motivation and practice and this is the basis for rivalry and tensions between them. Capitalism means competition for markets and spheres of influence, it means oppression and wars.<\/p>\n

Ma\u00e7\u00e3es is literally living in a dream world and glossing over all the conflicts and contradictions he has himself described. No wonder the book has in some quarters been classified as \u2018history\/fiction\u2019. China may rival the US as a global imperialist power but this will not proceed without enormous conflict and cyclical crises that characterise capitalism on a world scale.<\/p>\n

Ma\u00e7\u00e3es writes that \u201cfinancial crises now decide the fate of nations, their rise and fall, and these critical moments for building the future have a way of arriving unannounced\u201d. This was before the present devastating Covid-19 pandemic. The simultaneous crises in all the world\u2019s major economies will test the viability of China\u2019s Belt and Road project and Ma\u00e7\u00e3es\u2019 contention that it will affect every element of global society, from shipping to agriculture, the digital economy to tourism, politics to culture.<\/p>\n

The Belt and Road initiative is entirely geared to what\u2019s in it for Chinese capitalism. Competition with foreign companies for raw materials and markets around the world inevitably brings it into conflict with governments \u2013 rival capitalist powers, above all the US, and smaller powers who resent the dominant role that China is playing in their own economies and in their politics. The author of this book speaks himself of \u201cChina\u2019s neo-colonial designs\u201d being enhanced by the onerous levels of debt mounting up in the comprador-ridden economies.<\/p>\n

Far from a peaceful road to an ideal, capitalist world, the future holds a period of intense turmoil \u2013 ferocious struggles between the classes \u2013 exploited against exploiters, workers and poor against the bosses and landowners, nation-states against nation-states in intense now open, and now covert, battles for superiority and survival. Capitalism can only be swept from the planet by a movement of workers and young people on an international basis determined to see through a revolutionary struggle for socialism and genuine communism.<\/p>\n

Only the defeat of capitalism in all its forms will establish a world order without barriers to the free movement of peoples from one side of the world to the other, without superior and inferior nations or classes \u2013 neither an American nor a Chinese world order. Communism means production according to everyone\u2019s ability and distribution according to everyone\u2019s needs. But a utopia can only be built on this planet on the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, of socialist democracy, democratic planning and decision-making in all spheres of life.<\/p>\n

Reading Bruno Ma\u00e7\u00e3es book can open the reader\u2019s eyes to the extent of China\u2019s grand imperialist plan for the world. Reading Marxist and socialist material is vital for building a workers\u2019 movement that fights to transform it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n