Calm has been restored at the Hong Kong International Airport on August 15. For two days previous, a violent mob touted by the U.S. and British imperialist press as “peaceful protesters” had occupied the airport and all flights were cancelled. 

During the two-day siege, they had beaten two men into unconsciousness. The first victim is a journalist for the Chinese news outlet, Global Times. His hands and feet were bound and he was tied to a luggage cart while he drifted in and out of consciousness and the ‘protesters’ blocked emergency medical personnel for four hours. 

Another man, suspected of being a policeman from mainland China was also beaten into unconsciousness. A Hong Kong policeman was attacked, kicked and punched until he finally drew his weapon out of fear for his life. Many of the protesters flew American flags and held signs appealing to Donald Trump.

While media in the U.S. has continuously referred to the protests as “peaceful,” and to the Hong Kong authorities response as brutal, the reality is the opposite. In one of the earlier actions, a mob vandalized the Hong Kong legislature by spray painting all over the interior walls and smashing windows. 

During another, a Hong Kong police station was attacked and lit on fire. Hurling bricks, gasoline bombs and defacing symbols of the Chinese revolution have been frequent. The initial reason for the protests was to demand that a proposed bill to institute an extradition treaty with the mainland, a routine law that exists in many countries, be revoked. The bill was allowed to die in the legislature, but the protests have continued, and their true anti-communist character is now much clearer. 

One protester reported to the New York Times how she was inspired by the “anti-Russian protests in Ukraine in 2014,” which led to the rise of a fascist government.

The current wave of protests have gone on since April, but grew in size and frequency in June and July. Numerous organizations with close connections to, and funding by, the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy have been happy to agitate against the ‘One country – two systems’ agreement. The NED is a de facto arm of the CIA.

But the anti-China protests are not the whole story. Western media have ignored Hong Kongers who oppose the U.S.-backed protesters. The Hong Kong Free Press reported on an August 17 of pro-Beijing rally of almost a half million in central Hong Kong. 

In the working class North Point neighborhood hundreds rallied at the Hong Kong Federation of Fujian Associations on August 10 with a message that anti-China protesters are not welcome in their neighborhood.

Hong Kong was seized from China in 1842 by the British in the first of the “Opium Wars,” fought by the British empire to impose the opium trade on China. For over a century China was ravaged by drug addiction and imperialist exploitation. 

In popular parlance before the revolution, the very name of China was synonymous with hunger. 

Since China’s 1949 revolution threw out the imperialists and began the task of building a socialist economy, drug addiction, homelessness, illiteracy, hunger and joblessness are distant memories. Some 800 million people have been lifted out of poverty in recent decades in what the UN acknowledges as a stunning achievement by any standard of social progress.

In the late 1980s, China allowed capitalist investment, in part to ameliorate the effect of U.S. sanctions. While basic industry has remained in the hands of the state, led by the Chinese Communist Party, a capitalist economy has grown rapidly alongside socialism. 

While the party still exercises a great deal of control over capitalist enterprises, the existence of big capitalists as part of Chinese society is far from without risk. 

After negotiations that lasted well over a decade, Hong Kong was repatriated with China in 1997 as a semi-autonomous region. By agreement, capitalism is to operate freely until 2047. 

Class divisions have actually deepened much more dramatically in Hong Kong than on the mainland, where living standards continue to improve. One part of the Hong Kong population has evolved into a very rich strata of capitalists. 

Hong Kong’s geographic proximity to mainland China has enabled its growth as a center for finance capital and a leader in global shipping. Hong Kong has among the highest percentage of billionaires in the world. 

But the working class has sunk deeper into poverty with the elderly and children enduring the worst poverty rates.

Separating Hong Kong from China has been a focus of an imperialist campaign ever since the 1997 repatriation. 

Keeping Hong Kong separate has been important to the U.S. operations against China for decades. One former CIA agent even admitted that “Hong Kong was our listening post.”

Not all U.S. meddling in Hong Kong has been behind the scenes. Chinese officials have expressed anger that the U.S. State Department has openly and arrogantly met with leaders of the turmoil. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo himself met with long-time anti-China activist Martin Lee in early May. On August 8, a U.S. diplomat stationed in Hong Kong was photographed meeting with protest organizers in the lobby of a luxury hotel.

China Daily made a detailed report, “Who is behind Hong Kong protests?” It gives China’s view of the events and points to the U.S. connections between NED and protest organizers. As the China Daily report shows, this connection was confirmed by former Reagan administration official and Hudson Institute senior fellow Michael Pillsbury, whom Trump refers to as the world’s leading expert on China: “We have also funded millions of dollars of programs through the National Endowment for Democracy … so in that sense the Chinese accusation is not totally false.”

An editorial in the mainland publication People’s Daily Online summed up: “The radical protesters intend to force the central government to give up governance over Hong Kong … and give the city back to the Western world. …

“The Chinese government will never allow extreme opposition and the West to pull Hong Kong into the anti-China camp, nor will it allow the city to slip into long-term chaos or become a base for the West to subvert China’s political system.”

China’s planning and state enterprises overcame 2007-2009 world capitalist crisis

Without state planning in the economy, China might have been dragged down by the 2007-2009 economic crisis. In June 2013, this author wrote an article entitled, “Marxism and the Social Character of China.” Here are some excerpts:

“More than 20 million Chinese workers lost their jobs in a very short time. So what did the Chinese government do?”

The article quoted Nicholas Lardy, a bourgeois China expert from the prestigious Peterson Institute for International Economics and no friend of China. (The full article by Lardy can be found in “Sustaining China’s Economic Growth after the Global Financial Crisis,” Kindle Locations 664-666, Peterson Institute for International Economics.)

Lardy described how “consumption in China actually grew during the crisis of 2008-09, wages went up, and the government created enough jobs to compensate for the layoffs caused by the global crisis,” this author’s emphasis.

Lardy continued: “In a year in which GDP expansion [in China] was the slowest in almost a decade, how could consumption growth in 2009 have been so strong in relative terms? How could this happen at a time when employment in export-oriented industries was collapsing, with a survey conducted by the Ministry of Agriculture reporting the loss of 20 million jobs in export manufacturing centers along the southeast coast, notably in Guangdong Province? The relatively strong growth of consumption in 2009 is explained by several factors.

“First, the boom in investment, particularly in construction activities, appears to have generated additional employment sufficient to offset a very large portion of the job losses in the export sector. For the year as a whole the Chinese economy created 11.02 million jobs in urban areas, very nearly matching the 11.13 million urban jobs created in 2008.

“Second, while the growth of employment slowed slightly, wages continued to rise. In nominal terms wages in the formal sector rose 12 percent, a few percentage points below the average of the previous five years (National Bureau of Statistics of China 2010f, 131). In real terms the increase was almost 13 percent.

“Third, the government continued its programs of increasing payments to those drawing pensions and raising transfer payments to China’s lowest-income residents. Monthly pension payments for enterprise retirees increased by RMB120, or 10 percent, in January 2009, substantially more than the 5.9 percent increase in consumer prices in 2008. This raised the total payments to retirees by about RMB75 billion. The Ministry of Civil Affairs raised transfer payments to about 70 million of China’s lowest-income citizens by a third, for an increase of RMB20 billion in 2009 (Ministry of Civil Affairs 2010).”

Lardy further explained that the Ministry of Railroads introduced eight specific plans, to be completed in 2020, to be implemented in the crisis. 

According to Lardy, the World Bank called it “perhaps the biggest single planned program of passenger rail investment there has ever been in one country.” In addition, ultrahigh-voltage grid projects were undertaken, among other advances.

Socialist structures reversed collapse

So income went up, consumption went up and unemployment was overcome in China — all while the capitalist world was still mired in mass unemployment, austerity, recession, stagnation, slow growth and increasing poverty, and still is to a large extent.

The reversal of the effects of the crisis in China is the direct result of national planning, state-owned enterprises, state-owned banking and the policy decisions of the Chinese Communist Party.

There was a crisis in China, and it was caused by the world capitalist crisis. The question was which principle would prevail in the face of mass unemployment — the rational, humane principle of planning or the ruthless capitalist market. In China, the planning principle, the conscious element, took precedence over the anarchy of production brought about by the laws of the market and the law of labor value in the capitalist countries.

Socialism and China’s standing in the world

China has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. According to a United Nations report, China alone is responsible for the global decline in poverty. China’s universities have graduated millions of engineers, scientists, technicians and have allowed millions of peasants to enter the modern world.

Made in China 2025

In 2015, Xi Jingping and the Chinese CP leadership laid out the equivalent of a ten-year plan to take China to a higher level of technology and productivity in the struggle to modernize the country. 

Xi announced a long-range industrial policy backed by hundreds of billions of dollars in both state and private investment to revitalize China. It is named “Made in China 2025” or “MIC25.” It is an ambitious project requiring local, regional and national coordination and participation.

The Mercator Institute for Economics (MERICS) is one of the most authoritative German think tanks on China. It wrote a major report on MIC25 on Feb. 7, 2019. According to MERICS, “The MIC25 program is here to stay and, just like the GDP targets of the past, represents the CCP’s official marching orders for an ambitious industrial upgrading. Capitalist economies around the globe will have to face this strategic offensive.

“The tables have already started to turn: Today, China is setting the pace in many emerging technologies — and watches as the world tries to keep pace.”

The MERICS report continues, “China has forged ahead in fields such as next-generation IT (companies like Huawei and ZTE are set to gain global dominance in the rollout of 5G networks), high-speed railways and ultra-high voltage electricity transmissions. More than 530 smart manufacturing industrial parks have popped up in China. Many focus on big data (21 percent), new materials (17 percent) and cloud computing (13 percent). Recently, green manufacturing and the creation of an “Industrial Internet” were given special emphasis in policy documents, underpinning President Xi Jinping’s vision of creating an ‘ecological civilization’ that thrives on sustainable development.

“China has also secured a strong position in areas such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), new energy and intelligent connected vehicles. … 

“Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) continue to play a critical role for the development of strategic industries and high-tech equipment associated with MIC25. In so-called key industries like telecommunications, ship building, aviation and high-speed railways, SOEs still have a revenue share of around 83 percent. In what the Chinese government has identified as pillar industries (for instance electronics, equipment manufacturing, or automotive) it amounts to 45 percent.”

Breakup of U.S.-China relationship inevitable

The tariff war between the U.S. and China has been going back and forth. It may or may not be resolved for now or may end up in a compromise. The Pentagon’s provocations in the South China Sea and the Pacific are unlikely to subside. The witch hunt against Chinese scientists is gaining momentum. 

The U.S. has just appropriated $2.2 billion for arms to Taiwan. National Security Adviser and war hawk John Bolton recently made a trip to Taiwan. The president of Taiwan, Tsai Ing-wen, made a recent stopover in the U.S. on the way to the Caribbean and is scheduled to make another one on the way back.

All these measures indicate the end of rapprochement between Beijing and Washington. This breakup between the two powers is not just the doing of Donald Trump. It flows from the growing fear of the predominant sections of the U.S. ruling class that the gamble they took in trying to overthrow Chinese socialism from within has failed, just as the previous military aggression from 1949 to 1975 also failed.

High technology is the key to the future 

Since as far back as the end of the 18th century, the U.S. capitalist class has always coveted the Chinese market. The giant capitalist monopolies went charging in to get joint agreements, low wages, cheap exports and big superprofits when China “opened up” at the end of the 1970s.  

But the stronger the socialist core of the PRC becomes, the more weight it carries in the world and, above all, the stronger China becomes technologically the more Wall Street fears for its economic dominance and the more the Pentagon fears for its military dominance. 

The example of the stifling of international collaboration on cancer research is a demonstration of how global cooperation is essential not only to curing disease, but also to the development of society as a whole. International cooperation is needed to reverse the climate disaster wrought by private property — none of this can be carried out within the framework of private property and the profit system. Only the destruction of capitalism can bring about the liberation of humanity. 

Marxism asserts that society advances through the development of the productive forces from primary communism, to slavery, feudalism and capitalism. Marx wrote: “The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist.” (“The Poverty of Philosophy,” 1847) And now the revolution in high technology lays the basis for international socialism.  

The bourgeoisie knows that the society that can advance technology to the highest degree will be triumphant in shaping the future. This is why imperialism, headed by the U.S., imposed the strictest blockade of the flow of technology to the Soviet Union, as well as the Eastern Bloc and China. This was done by COCOM, an informal organization of all the imperialist countries, which was created in 1949 and headquartered in Paris.

The main targets were the USSR and the more industrialized socialist countries, such as the German Democratic Republic, the Czech Republic, etc. Detailed lists were drawn up of some 1,500 technological items that were forbidden to export to these countries.

Marx explained that developed socialist relations depend upon a high degree of the productivity of labor and the resulting abundance available to the population (“Critique of the Gotha Program,” 1875). 

However, as Lenin noted, the chain of imperialism broke at its weakest link in Russia — that is, the revolution was successful in the poorest, most backward capitalist country. The result was that an advanced social system was established on an insufficient material foundation. This gave rise to many, many contradictions. The countries that revolutionaries correctly called socialist, were in fact really aspiring to socialism. Their revolutions laid the foundations for socialism. But imperialist blockade, war and subversion never allowed them to freely develop their social systems.

The great leap forward in technology in China today has the potential of raising the productivity of labor and strengthening the socialist foundations. It is this great leap forward that is fueling the “new cold war” with China and the real threat of hot war. 

Posted to lowwagecapitalism.com on July 26, 2019.

• The new Cold War against China, Part 1

During the Cold War and the struggle that put the USSR and China on one side and imperialism headed by Washington on the other side, revolutionaries used to characterize the conflict as a class war between two irreconcilable social systems. 

There was the socialist camp, based upon socialized property, economic planning for human need and the government monopoly of foreign trade on the USSR-China side, and capitalism, a system of production for profit, on the other. 

That the two systems were irreconcilable was at the bottom of the conflict dubbed the Cold War. In light of the current sharpening economic, diplomatic, political and military conflict between U.S. imperialism and the People’s Republic of China (PRC), it is time to revive the concepts that were applied during the height of the Cold War.

Of course it is necessary to make modifications in these formulations with respect to socialism in China, with its mix of controlled capitalism and guided socialism.  

Nevertheless, the conflict between imperialist capitalism, headed by Washington, Wall Street and the Pentagon, and the Chinese socialist economic system, which has state-owned industry at its core and planned economic guidance, is becoming much sharper, and imperialism is growing more openly hostile. 

U.S. imperialism’s long-standing effort to overthrow socialism in China, Chinese capitalism notwithstanding, has been concealed beneath sugary bourgeois phrases about so-called “common interests” and “economic collaboration.”  But this kind of talk is coming to an end.

Washington’s first campaign to overthrow China — 1949-1975

This struggle has been ongoing since 1949, when the Chinese Red Army drove U.S. puppet Chiang Kai-shek and his nationalist army from the mainland as it retreated to Taiwan under the protection of the Pentagon. 

The conflict continued through the Korean War, when Gen. Douglas MacArthur and the U.S. high command drove the U.S. troops to the Chinese border and threatened atomic war. Only the defeat of the U.S. military by the heroic Korean people under the leadership of Kim Il Sung, with the aid of the Chinese Red Army, stopped the U.S. invasion of China.

The struggle further continued with the U.S. war against Vietnam. The war’s strategic goal was to overthrow the socialist government of Vietnam in the north and drive to the border of China to complete the military encirclement of the PRC. Only the world-historic efforts of the Vietnamese people under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh stopped the Pentagon in its tracks.

The Pentagon’s plans for military conquest failed 

With the rise of Deng Xiaoping and the opening up of China to foreign investment beginning in December 1978, Wall Street began to reevaluate its strategy. The U.S. ruling class began to take advantage of the opening up of China to foreign investment and the permission for private capitalism to function, which could both enrich U.S. corporations in the massive Chinese market and at the same time penetrate the Chinese economy with a long-range view to overturning socialism. 

U.S. multinational corporations set up operations in China, hiring millions of low-wage Chinese workers, who flocked to the coastal cities from the rural areas. These operations were part of a broader effort by the U.S. capitalists to set up low-wage global supply chains that integrated the Chinese economy into the world capitalist market. The U.S.’s recent sharp turn aimed at breaking up this economic integration with the Chinese economy, including the witch hunt against Chinese scientists and the U.S. Navy’s aggressive behavior in the South China Sea (called the Eastern Sea by Vietnam), is an admission that the economic phase of the U.S. attempt to bring counterrevolution to China has failed. 

China is now a growing counterweight to Washington in international economics, high technology, diplomacy and regional military might in the Pacific, which the Pentagon has always considered to be a “U.S. lake” ruled by the Seventh Fleet.

The attack on Huawei

A dramatic illustration of the developing antagonisms is the way the U.S. had Meng Wanzhou, the deputy chairwoman and chief financial officer of Huawei, arrested in Canada for supposed violations of U.S. sanctions against Iran — an outrageous example of imperialism exercising extraterritoriality. The Trump administration has also leveled sanctions against Huawei electronics, the world’s largest supplier of  high-tech operating systems in the world. Huawei employs 180,000 workers and is the second largest cell phone manufacturer in the world after the south Korean-based Samsung. 

The sanctions are part of the U.S. campaign to stifle China’s development of the latest version of data-transmission technology known as Fifth Generation or 5G. 

The Trump administration has barred U.S. companies from selling supplies to Huawei, which has been using Google’s Android operating system for its equipment and Microsoft for its laptop products — both U.S.-based companies. Huawei is contesting the U.S. ban in court. 

Meanwhile, as a backup plan in case Washington bans all access to Android and Microsoft, Huawei has quietly spent years building up an operating system of its own. Huawei developed its alternative operating system after a 2012 finding by Washington that Huawei and ZTE, another Chinese giant cell phone maker, were in criminal violation of U.S.“national security.” ZTE was forced to shut down for four months. (South China Morning Post, March 24, 2019)

But the conflict is about more than just Huawei and ZTE.

The new ‘red scare’ in Washington

The New York Times of July 20, 2019, carried a front page article entitled, “The New Red Scare in Washington.” A few excerpts give the flavor: 

“In a ballroom across from the Capitol building, an unlikely group of military hawks, populist crusaders, Chinese Muslim freedom fighters and followers of the Falun Gong has been meeting to warn anyone who will listen that China poses an existential threat to the United States that will not end until the Communist Party is overthrown.

“If the warnings sound straight out of the Cold War, they are. The Committee on the Present Danger, a long-defunct group that campaigned against the dangers of the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s, has recently been revived with the help of Stephen K. Bannon, the president’s former chief strategist, to warn against the dangers of China.

“Once dismissed as xenophobes and fringe elements, the group’s members are finding their views increasingly embraced in President Trump’s Washington, where skepticism and mistrust of China have taken hold. Fear of China has spread across the government, from the White House to Congress to federal agencies.” 

The Trump administration has opened up a tariff war against the PRC, imposing a 25-percent tariff on $250 billion worth of Chinese exports and threatening tariffs on another $300 billion. But there is much more to Washington’s campaign than just tariffs.

The FBI and officials from the NSC (National Security Council) have been conducting a witch hunt, continues the Times article, “particularly at universities and research institutions. Officials from the FBI and the National Security Council have been dispatched to Ivy League universities to warn administrators to be vigilant against Chinese students.” 

And according to the Times there are concerns that this witch hunt “is stoking a new red scare, fueling discrimination against students, scientists and companies with ties to China and risking the collapse of a fraught but deeply enmeshed trade relationship between the world’s two largest economies.” (New York Times, July 20, 2019)

FBI criminalizes cancer research

According to a major article in the June 13, 2019, Bloomberg News, “Ways of working that have long been encouraged by the NIH [National Institutes of Health] and many research institutions, particularly MD Anderson [a major cancer treatment center and research institute in Houston], are now quasi-criminalized, with FBI agents reading private emails, stopping Chinese scientists at airports, and visiting people’s homes to ask about their loyalty.

“Xifeng Wu, who has been investigated by the FBI, joined MD Anderson while in graduate school and gained renown for creating several so-called study cohorts with data amassed from hundreds of thousands of patients in Asia and the U.S. The cohorts, which combine patient histories with personal biomarkers such as DNA characteristics and treatment descriptions, outcomes, and even lifestyle habits, are a gold mine for researchers.

“She was branded an oncological double agent.” 

The underlying accusation against Chinese scientists in the U.S. is that their research can lead to patentable medicines or cures, which in turn can be sold at enormous profits.

The Bloomberg article continues, “In recent decades, cancer research has become increasingly globalized, with scientists around the world pooling data and ideas to jointly study a disease that kills almost 10 million people a year. International collaborations are an intrinsic part of the U.S. National Cancer Institute’s Moonshot program, the government’s $1 billion blitz to double the pace of treatment discoveries by 2022. One of the program’s tag lines is: ‘Cancer knows no borders.’

“Except, it turns out, the borders around China. In January, Wu, an award-winning epidemiologist and naturalized American citizen, quietly stepped down as director of the Center for Public Health and Translational Genomics at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center after a three-month investigation into her professional ties in China. Wu’s resignation, and the departures in recent months of three other top Chinese-American scientists from Houston-based MD Anderson, stem from a Trump administration drive to counter Chinese influence at U.S. research institutions. … The collateral effect, however, is to stymie basic science, the foundational research that underlies new medical treatments. Everything is commodified in the economic cold war with China, including the struggle to find a cure for cancer.” 

Big surprise. A world famous Chinese epidemiologist, trying to find a cure for cancer, collaborates with scientists in China! 

Looking for the ‘reformers’ and the counterrevolution

For decades, the Chinese Communist Party has had changes of leadership every five years. These changes have been stable and managed peacefully. With each changeover, so-called “China experts” in the State Department in Washington think-tanks and U.S. universities have predicted the coming to power of a new “reformist” wing that will deepen capitalist reforms and lay the basis for an eventual full-scale capitalist counterrevolution. 

To be sure, there has been a steady erosion of China’s socialist institutions. The “iron rice bowl” which guaranteed a living to Chinese workers has been eliminated in private enterprises. Numerous state factories and enterprises have been sold off to the detriment of the workers, and in the rural areas land was decollectivized.

One of the biggest setbacks for socialism in China and one which truly gladdened the hearts of the prophets of counterrevolution, was the decision by the Jiang Jemin CCP leadership to allow capitalists into the Chinese Communist Party in 2001.

As the New York Times wrote at the time, “This decision raises the possibility of Communists co-opting capitalists — or of capitalists co-opting the party.” (New York Times, Aug. 13, 2001) It was the latter part that the capitalist class has been looking forward to and striving for with fervent anticipation for almost four decades.

But on balance, this capitalist takeover has not materialized. Chinese socialism, despite the capitalist inroads into the economy, has proved far more durable than Washington ever imagined. 

And, under the Xi Jinping leadership, the counterrevolution seems to be getting further and further away. It is not that Xi Jinping has become a revolutionary internationalist and a champion of proletarian control. But it has become apparent that China’s status in the world is completely connected to its social and economic planning. 

Posted to lowwagecapitalism.com on July 26, 2019.

• The new Cold War against China, Part 2

Protests in Hong Kong in recent weeks have been covered extensively by the corporate press in the Western imperialist countries. The protests were called against legislation proposed in Hong Kong that would put in place an extradition treaty with mainland China.

Hong Kong, an autonomous territory in China, was a British colony until 1997 and today continues to have a separate government and economic system from the People’s Republic. Hong Kong currently does not have a treaty to allow extradition to China. Most countries in the world have extradition treaties and passage of this amendment was considered to be routine.

Ian Goodrum, a U.S. journalist at the China Daily newspaper, told MintPress News:

“It’s unfortunate there’s been all this hullabaloo over what is a fairly routine and reasonable adjustment to the law. As the law reads right now, there’s no legal way to prevent criminals in other parts of China from escaping charges by fleeing to Hong Kong. It would be like Louisiana — which, you’ll remember, has a unique justice system — refusing to send fugitives to Texas or California for crimes committed in those states.”

The United States itself has such an extradition treaty with Hong Kong,  the U.S.-Hong Kong Extradition Treaty signed in 1997. The U.S. invoked that treaty to demand the extradition of Edward Snowden. Hong Kong officials at the time suggested that the U.S. botched its extradition request, which delayed the arrest warrant, allowing Snowden to board a flight to Moscow.

The U.S. press is now bellowing as if the proposed treaty with China is an injustice such as they have never seen, and U.S. politicians are falling all over themselves to lead the charge against it.

The extradition proposal has for all intents and purposes been dropped by the Hong Kong legislators, but the protests continue. The general thrust of the protests is in reality against Hong Kong’s relationship with China.

In 1842, Hong Kong was taken by the British Empire at the conclusion of a series of wars it fought to impose the opium trade on China. It remained a British colony for 155 years.

When Hong Kong was reintegrated with China in 1997 as an autonomous territory, the phrase used to describe the agreement was “one country – two systems.” In other words, the capitalist economy of Hong Kong would be allowed to remain — until 2047.

But the U.S. and other imperialist countries never really accepted that. The U.S. in particular has maintained a constant effort to separate Hong Kong from China once again. The U.S. has built major operations in Hong Kong aimed at mainland China.

Regardless of the slogans emblazoned on the banners of the Hong Kong protests, this uprising is not a result of widespread sentiment among the people of Hong Kong for sovereignty or separation from China. In fact, public opinion polls recently found that only 11 percent of people in Hong Kong support or strongly support being independent from China.

The corporate press speaks of the city of Hong Kong as a jewel of capitalism. It’s true that the capitalists in Hong Kong have grown very rich – in large part due to their proximity to the rest of China. It is a world center for finance capital and the global shipping industry. With a population of just over 7 million, Hong Kong is home to 93 billionaires – second only to New York City and more than the majority of countries in the world. Another one million are actually millionaires, about the same number of people who are reported to have been participating in the protests.

They are hostile to socialism and the social measures that have lifted hundreds of millions of people in mainland China out of extreme poverty and provided high standards of health care, education and modern infrastructure.

Hong Kong has one of the greatest levels of inequality in the developed world, with about 1.35 million — about 20 percent of the population — at or below the poverty line. One in five children live in poverty. Elderly people, 478,000 of them, suffer the deepest poverty. The price of housing compared to income is far worse than San Francisco or New York. More than 100,000 people live in tiny cubicles, often only 35 square feet, after landlords have divided up apartments into multiple spaces.

China, by contrast, is the fastest-growing large economy in the world. It has developed from a time of extreme poverty for the mass of its people to prosperity for the majority. China has lifted more than 800 million people out of poverty in just a few decades. The president of the World Bank admitted: “This is one of the great stories in human history, frankly.”

Since China’s revolution in 1949, the basic elements of the economy have been state-owned and integrated into socialist planning. However, after a great internal struggle, the ruling Communist Party decided in the late 1970s to allow capitalist ownership and investment in order to stimulate economic growth.

The results have been mixed and contradictory, with great successes and great dangers. Today, China is a contradictory society, with a rising capitalist class challenging the socialist planned economy.

Hong Kong is an imperialist base of operations against China, encouraging the growth of the capitalist class in China, which threatens the foundations of socialism. It is in this context, including the U.S. trade war and military buildup against China, that the Hong Kong protests must be seen.

The imperialist powers — the U.S., Europe, Japan — have provided extensive political, financial and media support to the Hong Kong protests.

Anti-China agitation in Hong Kong has been funded and guided by branches of the U.S. government’s semi-clandestine National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

The NED was set up by the U.S. government as practically an arm of the CIA. At its beginning, one of the NED’s founders told the Washington Post, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” It was founded during the Reagan administration when the CIA itself was so rocked by its “dirty tricks” having been exposed, that they needed a new vehicle with a soft reputation to continue their work.

The NED has supplied several million dollars to some of the nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and other organizations in Hong Kong, says Louisa Greve, vice president of NED programs for Asia, the Middle East and North Africa.

Some of the most influential organizations in the current protests – the Hong Kong Journalist Association, the Civic Party, the Labour Party and the Hong Kong Democratic Party are tied to two branches of the NED in Hong Kong — the Solidarity Center and the National Democratic Institute.

While intelligence agencies like the NED keep their operations mostly secret, some others are more open. That includes House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who said in a statement that the U.S. Congress would have had to “reassess whether Hong Kong is ‘sufficiently autonomous’” if the extradition law were to pass. Ultra-imperialist U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo went to Hong Kong in May and met with Martin Lee, one of the leaders of the protests. And a whole gang in the U.S. Congress has introduced a bill to bolster the anti-China movement in Hong Kong. The Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, if passed, could authorize sanctions and travel restrictions against officials in Hong Kong that do not go along with their anti-China campaign.

A recent open letter encouraging the Hong Kong protests was endorsed by some 70 NGOs in Hong Kong, and was signed by the directors of Amnesty International, the Human Rights Watch and the Hong Kong Human Rights Monitor.

Maybe that’s why none of the protests Hong Kong have raised the issue of extreme poverty in Hong Kong or demanded the kind of socialist progress that has almost completely ended poverty in China. The working class in China is moving forward, infrastructure is improving, science and technology are making tremendous progress compared to the rest of the world, there is no measurable illiteracy, and life expectancy is comparable to and improving faster than the most developed capitalist countries.

Even as we defend Bolivarian Venezuela and oppose U.S. war moves against Iran, progressive forces around the world have to stand firm against this reactionary campaign aimed against the majority in Hong Kong as well as People’s China.

Yes, a picture is worth a thousand words. But what happens when the words that the pictures are shouting out do not fit their intended use? In that case, the narrator has to supply the words, urging, “Don’t believe your lying eyes.”

An excellent example comes from the corporate media narrative of the incidents that occurred in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Once again the corporate media are dusting off their anti-communist campaign of blatant lies and misinformation to sell the U.S. government’s line about supposed massacres carried out by the Chinese Communist Party 30 years ago.

Since 1989, however, irrefutable evidence — from Wikileaks documents to eyewitness reports — has exposed the blatant falsehoods promoted as gospel truth by Western capitalist governments and their loyal media.

So this time around, the rehashing of the lie had to be tweaked a little — not with actual evidence, but through implication only, sometimes using photos to carry on the “massacre” narrative.

Let’s start with the Wall Street Journal. In the May 30, 2019, issue, the foreboding headline read: “Images Hidden for 30 Years — Liu Jian took memorable photos around Tiananmen Square in 1989. Then he tried to forget them.”

Liu Jian’s photos were taken at the end of May 1989, right before the so-called massacre in Tiananmen Square. At the time, media like the Washington Post, on May 21, 1989, were saying troops were “sent into the streets to crush the student movement.” (Archived article accessed at DC Public Library)

Here are the most (implied) haunting examples of the 11 photos presented, with captions supplied by the Wall Street Journal:

Students worked to build the Goddess of Democracy statue in Tiananmen Square, around May 28.

This caption doesn’t mention that the buses were provided by the government to shelter the protesters when it rained, along with crews to help clean up the square while it was being occupied to keep conditions sanitary.

Here are more supposedly dramatic photos taken of protesters with soldiers. However, the drama is more dependent on the creative interpretation of the caption:

I just don’t see it. Having been in many face-offs with robocops at protests here in the U.S., where the police try to look more like pitbulls than human beings — sorry, pitbull lovers  – all I see here are protesters holding hands and dialoguing rather than holding off some imminent attack by military vehicles.

The fact is that if you scour the mainstream media, you can find not one photo or video of anyone shot or trampled by a tank in Tiananmen Square.

Fabrications exposed, narrative changes

Journalists who helped perpetuate the massacre myth began confessing in 2009. Two years later, Wikileaks exposed cables showing the U.S. government, just a few days after June 4, 1989, had evidence of the fabrication. So the narrative began to evolve.

However, up until that point — for a period of 20 years! — the story of the “massacre in Tiananmen Square” was carried as one unified declaration of truth coming from the New York Times, CNN, the Washington Post, the BBC and other Western corporate media — and, unfortunately, repeated by folks on the left who shouldn’t have been so gullible.

Once the truth began leaking out, some journalists, feeling the weight of what was finally being exposed, started admitting that they had lied or withheld the facts about Tiananmen Square.

Here’s one such admission, reported on CBSNews.com on June 4, 2009, from Richard Roth. In 1989, Roth was the CBS News correspondent covering events in Beijing on June 3 and 4. He had been briefed by anchor Dan Rather about the approved narrative of events at Tiananmen Square before Rather went on to broadcast these fabrications to the world:

“Dawn was just breaking. There were hundreds of troops in the square, many sitting cross-legged on the pavement in long curving ranks, some cleaning up debris. There were some tanks and armored personnel carriers. But we saw no bodies, injured people, ambulances or medical personnel — in short, nothing to even suggest, let alone prove, that a ‘massacre’ had recently occurred in that place.

“Later, being debriefed on-air by Dan Rather, I recall making an effort to avoid using the word ‘massacre.’ I referred to an ‘assault’ and an ‘attack.’ I reported what I saw; I said I hadn’t seen any bodies. Admittedly, I’ve never made a point of trying to contradict a colleague on the air; I’ve simply stuck to my own story, because I’ve believed it’s true.”

And if he didn’t make a point of “trying to contradict a colleague on the air,” it was undoubtedly because he cared about his career over any journalistic ethics regarding the truth.

What inspired Roth’s outbreak of journalistic conscience two decades later? It may have been another recanting that occurred two days earlier by BBC correspondent James Miles, who said: “We got the story generally right, but on one detail I and others conveyed the wrong impression. There was no massacre on Tiananmen Square. …

“Towards midday on 4 June, amid reports of widespread casualties, I wrote in another draft that ‘many of the deaths occurred at Tiananmen Square, not only from gunshots, but also from being crushed by tanks, which ploughed relentlessly through any obstacle in their way.’”

That “one detail” was a doozy. Let’s just say you out and out lied, James. Miles tries to cover this up with: “There was no Tiananmen Square massacre, but there was a Beijing massacre.”

So, after 20 years, the story goes from absolutely, for sure, being a massacre in Tiananmen Square, to now being a massacre outside of the square in Beijing.

This new take has become the latest unified tale evolved to fit the uncooperative facts that came to light.

WikiLeaks publishes U.S. cables

There were, in fact, shots fired outside of the square, and there were hundreds killed according to Chinese government and medical sources. But not all of those shots fired were from soldiers and not all of those killed were protestors. No photos, videos or any evidence exists of a massacre or of soldiers firing indiscriminately on civilians.

The document published by WikiLeaks, dated July 12, 1989, was leaked to the media in 2011. It’s a cable from James R. Lilley, then U.S. ambassador to China, and puts events in a different context:

“During a recent meeting, a Latin American diplomat and his wife provided Poloff an account of their movements on June 3-4 and their eyewitness account of events at Tiananmen Square. …

“Gallo [a diplomat from Chile] said that he essentially was allowed free passage around the square, even when sighted by troops. …

“He said although he was seen, the troops paid no attention to him and he eventually passed back and forth across troop lines a couple of times. Another Chilean diplomat who stayed around Xinhuamen at Zhongnanhai had a similar experience. …

“He said that most of the troops which entered the square were actually armed only with anti-riot gear — truncheons and wooden clubs; they were backed up by armed soldiers. …

“Gallo said wounded, including some soldiers, continued to be brought to the Red Cross station. …

“Although gunfire could be heard, Gallo said that apart from some beating of students, there was no mass firing into the crowd of students at the monument. When Poloff mentioned some reportedly eyewitness accounts of massacres at the monument with automatic weapons, Gallo said that there was no such slaughter. Once agreement was reached for the students to withdraw, linking hands to form a column, the students left the square through the southeast corner.”

Why was force used by the Chinese army? After all, weren’t the students all nonviolent and unarmed?

If fact, there were plenty of photos supporting the Chinese government’s statements that soldiers were being attacked and killed and weapons were being taken by the so-called “peaceful” protesters. None of those photos were given prominence, if published at all, by mainstream media TV, radio or news publications. Photos like these:

Or these, showing the use of Molotov cocktails and other methods by “peaceful” protesters to set tanks, buses and soldiers on fire after beating and stripping, then hanging them:

The pictures of stripped, hung and burned soldiers are too graphic to show without a warning, but here is where they can be seen at this article from Voltaire Network.

Working toward regime change

Knowing that the Voice of America had made technical and staffing arrangements allowing broadcasts to be repeated frequently over Chinese airwaves, U.S. officials may have believed that giving an impression that a civil war had started in China would further the overall aims of regime change.

That would explain the unusual and very temporary coverage of violence by the students in the Washington Post on June 5, 1989 (from the archive at DC Public Library):

“An indication of what may lie ahead for China can be seen in the venom with which Beijing residents turned on a people’s army that had moved against the people. … As columns of tanks and tens of thousands of soldiers approached Tiananmen, many troops were set on by angry mobs who screamed, ‘Fascists.’ Dozens of soldiers were pulled from trucks, severely beaten and left for dead.

“At an intersection west of the square, the body of a young soldier, who had been beaten to death, was stripped naked and hung from the side of a bus. Another soldier’s corpse was strung up at an intersection east of the square.”

Today, you won’t find any mention of that violence in the commemoration articles by the Post or any other corporate media, since now the unified “truth” is that the protesters were peaceful and unarmed.

Next: CIA influence — not all protesters were the same

Twenty years ago — on the night of May 7-8, 1999 — the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, was deliberately bombed by the U.S. Air Force.

This war crime was committed during the 78-day-long bombing of then-socialist Yugoslavia by NATO. Three Chinese journalists were killed. At least twenty were injured.

Ambassador Pan Zhanlin escaped being killed only because the bomb that crashed through the roof of his residence didn’t explode.

The bodies of newlywed journalists Xu Xinghu, 31, and Zhu Ying, 27, were found under a collapsed wall. They wrote for the Communist Party daily newspaper Guangming (Enlightenment).

Forty-eight-year-old Shao Yunhuan of the Xinhua news agency was also killed. Her husband, Cao Rongfei, was blinded.

While it was one or more U.S. Air Force B-2 stealth bombers that attacked the embassy, it was the CIA that picked the target. The CIA director, George Tenet, later testified that the embassy bombing was organized and directed by his agency.

This liar claimed satellite images showed “no flags, no seals, no clear markings,” when in fact all three were present.

Why did the U.S. do it?

The CIA chose to bomb the embassy because the U.S. military-industrial complex wanted to launch a war on China. They viewed President Bill Clinton’s murderous bombing of Yugoslavia as a poor substitute.

After the Soviet Union and the socialist countries of Eastern Europe were overthrown — with the exception of Yugoslavia — the Pentagon wanted to destroy the People’s Republic of China.

In 1996, Clinton had already used aircraft carriers in a military provocation against China, ostensibly over the stolen Taiwan province. But that wasn’t enough for the military. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1996 was Gen. John Shalikashvili, whose father had been a general in Hitler’s SS.

The attitude of a major section of the ruling class was shown by the Republican Majority Whip of the House of Representatives, Tom DeLay, who bragged how he physically confronted the ambassador of the People’s Republic of China to the U.S. during a filming of Meet The Press:

“So he’s coming off the stage and I’m going onto the stage and I intentionally walked up to him and blocked his way. … I grabbed [his] hand and squeezed it as hard as I could and pulled him a kind of little jerk like this and I said: ‘Don’t take the weakness of this president as the weakness of the American people.’  And he looked at me kind of funny, so I pulled him real close, nose to nose, and I repeated it very slowly, and said, ‘Do-not-take-the-weakness-of-this-president-as-the-weakness-of-the-American-people.’”

Defend Venezuela’s Embassy

The attack on the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade was answered by hundreds of thousands of Chinese students demonstrating against U.S. imperialism. Even Boris Yeltsin — whom the U.S. had re-elected in 1996 — felt compelled to send troops to Yugoslavia at Pristina airport on June 12, 1999, a month after the embassy bombing.

Later that same year was the “Battle of Seattle,” where thousands of union workers and students confronted the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. People around the world saw the brutality of Seattle’s cops.

But it was world finance capital trying to squeeze blood out of a stone throughout Latin America that provoked the biggest fightback. Hungry people in Buenos Aires stripped supermarkets of food and Argentina was forced to cancel debt payments.

Latin American declared ¡Basta ya! to the neoliberal program of cutbacks and misery.  Hugo Chávez Frías was elected Venezuela’s president on Dec. 6, 1998, and inaugurated on Feb. 2, 1999.

The Bolivarian Revolution had begun.

Twenty years later, U.S. imperialism’s latest attempt to turn back the clock in Venezuela to the time when it was a colony of Big Oil and Nelson Rockefeller is sputtering.

Just like the CIA-directed bombing of China’s Embassy in Belgrade, the current attack on Venezuela’s Embassy in Washington, D.C., by the State Department and Secret Service, is an international crime.

Whenever you hear the State Department or the capitalist media attacking any country for violating “the freedom of the press,” remind them of the three Chinese journalists who were murdered in Belgrade: Xu Xinghu, Zhu Ying and Shao Yunhuan.

The best way to honor their memory is to continue to defend Venezuela’s Embassy. Hands off Venezuela!

China is using so-called market socialism models in its Silk Road initiatives in Asia, Africa and Latin America, sending some state-owned enterprises, but also private Chinese capitalists, abroad to set up companies engaged in building infrastructure.

The capitalists are motivated by profit, not social justice. However, unlike Western imperialist investors who are given free rein by their countries of origin to do whatever makes a profit, the Chinese capitalists are under the control of the Chinese government — a government whose financial, major utilities, oil, commercial and transportation industries are state owned. Any capitalist enterprise must be compliant with the state, not the other way around.

China’s so-called market socialism is really a partial ideological retreat. It comes from imperialism’s constant military threats and economic war against both China and the former USSR.

But our movement must recognize the difference between China’s engagements with Asia, Africa and Latin America versus the Western imperialist engagements there. Not to do so would only fuel anti-communism and benefit especially U.S. imperialism, by hiding the fact that China and the U.S. have irreconcilable differences in relation to which social classes they represent.

China’s significant investments in Africa since 2000 are a very real threat to imperialism as a whole and especially U.S. imperialism. It’s not only the hundreds of billions of dollars being invested, but the type of investment. China’s investments allow for the development of infrastructure and a real improvement in the economies of these countries.

Any improvement in the economy that affects the living standards of the people, that helps remove the stifling, debilitating, oppressive cloud of extreme poverty, is key to building self-determination and liberation.

We know that the development of the working class and productive forces is an important aspect of building socialism. But we also know that building socialism without a Soviet Union to counter violent U.S. imperialist embargoes and economic sabotage is even more challenging, especially for developing countries, which are therefore dependent on capitalist investment.

China can’t yet make up for the former USSR’s counterbalance to imperialism’s attacks on Africa and Latin America. But it seems willing to protect its investments and partnerships with military force, for example by supplying military means or funds to the African Union’s military unit, or by placing Chinese troops in South Sudan to protect the oil pipelines, which had been sabotaged by U.S.-supported rebel forces.

Last July, China set up its first military base overseas in the East African country of Djibouti, to establish an outpost capable of keeping an eye on the main U.S. Africom base there. China now has improved aircraft that can reach speeds of Mach 10, defying radar. Its qualitative leaps in the technology of encryption can potentially defy any National Security Agency surveillance.

All this must keep the monopoly bankers and industrialists who run this country up all night in a cold sweat. The U.S. especially will do everything it can to discredit and vilify China.

In reporting on China’s role in Africa, the bourgeois media scour the continent to find the most egregious examples of Chinese company injustice, hoping to paint all Chinese relations in Africa with the same brush. They especially like to talk about the Chinese privately owned Collum coal mine in Zambia, although the top four copper mining companies in Zambia are headquartered in Canada, Switzerland and India.

In 2000, five Chinese brothers asked the Zambian government to reopen a low-quality coal mine that had been shut down as not profitable. With capitalist production, when your product is inferior to that of your competitors, it’s impossible to maintain profits to the satisfaction of investors/creditors without cutting wages, safety standards and benefits while increasing speedup and ignoring ecological concerns.

The company was cited for severe air pollution and contaminating the water supply of nearby communities. The Mine Workers Union of Zambia complained that workers were being beaten by bosses while government officials and police were paid off to look the other way.

So in October 2010, hundreds of miners protested. Two Chinese supervisors began shooting. No one was killed — a pellet gun was reportedly used — but two people were critically injured and 11 miners were wounded.

By 2012, the workers were fed up and held another protest. This time a Chinese manager was unintentionally killed. However, no charges were brought against the workers and the Zambian government seized the mine.

In 2015, the government returned the mine to the Chinese owners with the warning that it would be taken again if safety and environmental violations arose.

Chinese companies in Africa get all the publicity, but little is said about Canadian-owned First Quantum Minerals, one of Zambia’s top four mining companies.

From 1980 on, Zambia was unable to fight strong-arm tactics by Canada, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank regarding First Quantum Minerals. Economic aid essential for Zambia’s survival was threatened. So in 1990, the country was forced to privatize its nationalized copper mines and companies like First Quantum could buy them cheaply. The country was also forced to let a former vice president of the Bank of Canada become governor of the Bank of Zambia.

This guaranteed long-term poverty for Zambian workers as the Canadian government reinforced every crooked deal made by its majority holding companies, like First Quantum.

Yan Hairong, associate professor at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, explained the difference between the Canadian government’s attitude and that of China. Instead of demanding no action be taken against the anti-worker crimes of the company, the Chinese government welcomed the nationalization of the Collum company by Zambia. And it ordered Collum to pay injured workers thousands of dollars each. It then forced the owners to make a public apology to the entire workforce at the mine.

The Canadian government and First Quantum Minerals, on the other hand, set up a systemic guarantee of poverty in Zambia — yet no major headlines vilified Canada or its company.

Colonial or imperialist relationships are about politically and economically controlling a country to steal its resources and deny its ability to develop independently. That also requires a military force.

Some privately owned Chinese companies may exhibit chauvinism and even different forms of exploitation towards their workers in Africa. This does not automatically equate to colonialism, especially when it does not continue and create the underdevelopment that African scholar Walter Rodney exposed in 1968 with his groundbreaking and authoritative book: “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.”

Rodney wrote: “In the first place, the wealth created by African labor and from African resources was grabbed by the capitalist countries of Europe; and in the second place, restrictions were placed upon African capacity to make the maximum use of its economic potential — which is what development is all about.”

U.S. military moves in Africa since 2008 are definitely part of its neocolonial plans and also threaten naked colonialism.

In a 2015 Black Agenda Report, Nick Turse of TomDispatch wrote: “In remote locales, behind fences and beyond the gaze of prying eyes, the U.S. military has built an extensive archipelago of African outposts, transforming the continent, experts say, into a laboratory for a new kind of war.”

China’s engagement is of a different nature. Zimbabwe Herald reporter Lovemore Chikova wrote about 2015 and 2016 loan packages negotiated between China and Zimbabwe.

They included $5 billion for free aid and interest-free loans. China would train 200,000 technical personnel and provide 40,000 training opportunities for African personnel in China.

In addition, the aid prioritized modernizing agriculture with technological expertise, machinery, training and teams of experts.

As Walter Rodney pointed out, increasing technology in agriculture is one of the most essential prerequisites for development in Africa.

I spent a few weeks in Sudan and Egypt. In Sudan, I saw an area for refugees that was many acres wide and long, as far as I could see. Families were living in mud huts in over 110 degree temperatures with no electricity, hospitals or stores in sight.

When our son was a toddler and got a fever, we could easily go to the corner store and get ibuprofen, a thermometer or Pedialyte. And we didn’t have to worry about U.S. drones flying overhead. Not so for many in Africa.

When we’re talking about development, it’s not about getting the latest consumer goods or trendy stuff or incorporating a Western lifestyle — we’re talking about attaining the basics for survival. Basics whose denial, as Walter Rodney illuminated, was not a lifestyle choice of African people, but a derailment of their natural progress by European colonialism.

By clarifying the character of China’s intervention in Africa, contradictions and all, we can be in solidarity with those voices in Africa representing the genuine people’s movements on the continent who are determined to arise, “no more in thrall.”

The lying bigot in the White House wants us to hate the People’s Republic of China. Trump claims that China is ripping us off. How so?

China isn’t the only country that runs a trade surplus with the U.S. The U.S. had a trillion dollar trade deficit in 2017. Uncle Sam imported $2.4 trillion of goods while exporting $1.4 trillion. (U.S. Census Bureau) Only $505 billion of goods was shipped from China.

In every year since 1975, the U.S. has imported more goods than it has exported. That’s the result of deliberate deindustrialization.

Wall Street pulled the rug from much of U.S. manufacturing. Banksters and insurance companies found it much more profitable to speculate in real estate, particularly constructing luxury gentrified housing, and to exploit workers first in low-wage Southern states, then to other lower-wage countries.

It wasn’t China that shut down nine of the ten GM plants in Flint, Mich. Or three Detroit factories in the mid-1980s, eliminating more than 10,000 jobs. Or the five North American factories that GM plans to “idle” in 2019, once again throwing thousands of workers, their families and communities into crisis and uncertainty. Why?

Now GM is chasing the dream of selling its cars to the 1.4 billion people in China, where wages and living conditions are rising. The capitalist system demands continual expansion. GM will build those cars in China, not Detroit, Texas or Mexico.

U.S. finance capital smashed its dependence on Black labor in historically militant, urban centers like Detroit using plant closings and automation. Back in 1970, African Americans accounted for a quarter of U.S. autoworkers and steelworkers.

Vince Copeland described steel as “the most basic and crucial material in the construction of modern civilization.” (Workers World, May 9, 1975) Copeland was a militant communist leader of steelworkers in Buffalo, N.Y.)

While the population of the U.S. has increased from 212 million people in 1973 to 326 million in 2017, domestic steel production decreased in the same period from 151 million short tons to 90 million.

Even considering 34.6 million tons of steel imports ― only 2 percent from the People’s Republic of China ― that’s still a big drop in per capita domestic steel use.  The result is a decaying infrastructure.

The only rail line west from New York City crosses the Hackensack River over Amtrak’s 108-year-old Portal movable bridge. The bridge frequently gets stuck open, yet plans to replace it have been delayed for years.

“China has stood up”

China had endured over a century of colonial subjugation when, proclaiming the victorious revolution, Mao Zedong declared “China has stood up,” on Oct. 1, 1949, announcing the birth of the People’s Republic of China.

In the 19th century, Britain actually launched the so-called Opium Wars against China in order to force the country to buy drugs. Right behind Britain were U.S. big-time opium merchants like Warren Delano, a grandfather of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The Chinese Revolution ended this humiliation. Universal literacy has been achieved, including for people belonging to minority nationalities reading their own languages.

China graduates 1.3 million engineers a year, a million more than the U.S. figure. (Boston Globe, May 22, 2017) While, in the U.S., Portal bridge gets regularly stuck open, China has built more miles of high-speed rail than the rest of the world combined.

The Chinese Revolution was a tremendous victory against racism.

According to Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon had plans in the early 1960s to kill 300 million Chinese people in a nuclear war. (TheRealNews.com, Nov. 9) Earlier, during the U.S. invasion of Korea, tens of thousands of Chinese volunteers ― including Mao Anying, Mao Zedong’s eldest son ― died fighting alongside their Korean comrades to defeat U.S. Gen. Douglas MacArthur.  

So why did the U.S ruling class agree to trade with China?  

It was a case of divide and conquer. U.S. markets were opened to China with the aim of splitting the socialist camp, which in the 1970s extended from Berlin, in Europe, to Ho Chi Minh City, in Asia, as well as Cuba, Southern Yemen, Ethiopia and other African countries.

Wall Street wasn’t seeking to help China but rather to defeat the Soviet Union. The USSR’s overthrow was a tragedy just like the overthrow of the Reconstruction governments in the U.S. South, which empowered the Ku Klux Klan.

When all is said and done, the Pentagon has never given up on defeating China. Hundreds of U.S. nuclear missiles are aimed at it. The U.S. continues to keep Taiwan province from reuniting with the People’s Republic.

Friendship not hate

Putting tariffs on imports won’t bring any factories back. The resulting higher prices will be a wage cut for millions of workers.

Automation alone has destroyed millions of union jobs in the U.S. Capitalist decay and union busting have done the rest.

China bashing is poison and will inevitably lead to racist attacks on Asian Americans. The Chinese American Vincent Chin was beaten to death in Detroit on June 23, 1982, because of Japan bashing by the capitalist owned media.

Like the African American Sean Bell, whom the cops fired 50 shots at, Vincent Chin was killed on what was supposed to be his wedding day.

Malcolm X described in his autobiography how much the Chinese Revolution inspired him while he was locked up in jail. Mao Zedong welcomed to China the Black revolutionaries Mabel and Robert Williams, who had led armed self-defense against the Klan in Monroe, N.C.

The Haymarket Martyrs ― George Engel, Adolph Fischer, Albert Parsons and August Spies ― were hanged in Chicago’s Cook County Jail on Nov. 11, 1887, because they fought for the eight-hour workday. Exactly 56 years earlier, Nat Turner, the leader of a great insurrection of enslaved Africans, was hanged in Virginia.

It was only through the international cooperation of workers that the eight-hour workday was won in many countries. It was British workers who stopped English landlords and capitalists from militarily intervening on the side of the slave masters’ confederacy during the U.S. Civil War.

We need the same type of solidarity today. The U.S. labor movement needs to establish ties with the 300 million member All-China Federation of Trade Unions, not unite with GM and other corporations and banks whose sole objective is expanding their control over the world and profits.

China bashing will not stop a single eviction, foreclosure or utility cutoff in U.S. neighborhoods. Attacking China will not stop any more killings by police or free any of the 2.2 million poor people in jail.

Our enemy is in the corporate boardrooms, not China.