Skip to main content

Entering the “Red Zone”: U.S. Steps up Military, Diplomatic, And Economic Warmongering Against China

Updated

Editors' note, February 13, 2023: The past two weeks have witnessed an incredible ratcheting up of tensions between the U.S. and China and, as part of that, has featured an escalation of warmongering coming from the U.S.

Two weeks ago, a Chinese balloon floated over the western state of Montana. It continued drifting high above the U.S. for several days, until it was shot down by a U.S. Air Force jet off the coast of South Carolina, under orders from President Biden. China said the balloon was a civilian airship, used for meteorology, which deviated from its intended path. U.S. military leadership described it as a “spy balloon.” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the Chinese balloon over the U.S. is “unacceptable and irresponsible” and a violation of U.S. sovereignty.

The balloon unleashed a frenzy of American chauvinism and world-class hypocrisy: people tracking the balloon; fascist calls for shooting it down—including from Donald Trump and other Republi-fascists; and outrage that China is encroaching on U.S. air space. In the U.S. media there was little to no mention of the vast spying the U.S. does on China with its satellites, air and naval crafts girding China, and frequent war exercises not far from China’s territorial waters. Nor is the possibility that this may well have been a weather balloon that drifted off course being given any credence at all—despite the fact that there is as yet no proof for the U.S. accusation.

This has persisted and grown louder in the past week. On Tuesday, Biden said in his State of the Union speech that “make no mistake about it: as we made clear last week, if China threatens our sovereignty, we will act to protect our country. And we did."

Then, this past weekend, the U.S. not only went on a propaganda offensive alleging that China was flying balloons over 40 different countries for “intelligence purposes” but also blew two unidentified objects out of the sky in Alaska and Canada, apparently flexing its muscles.

As we said last week, “whatever the truth of this balloon—whether it was for meteorological or surveillance purposes, whether it drifted off course or didn’t … this much is known and this much is clear and ominous: the U.S. imperialists are using this incident to ramp up a military confrontation with China and to whip up chauvinist anti-China/pro-war sentiment.” The U.S. at this point is clearly not stepping away from this tack, nor is it yet seeking dialogue with China. With all that in mind, we are reprinting last week’s analysis of the real character, the deeper roots and the extremely dangerous direction of this conflict.

Chinese balloon being shot down over Atlantic ocean

 

Photo: AP

First of All, Let’s Get Real About What’s “Unacceptable and Irresponsible”

Map of Indo-Pacific showing Australia, India, China, Japan

 

Map:  USINDOPACOM   

The U.S. and China are both heavily armed imperialist powers with vast numbers of nuclear weapons. (China has about 350, the U.S. has over 5,400.) A war between them could rapidly spiral into a conflict that would destroy most life on this planet. Now they have entered a dangerous new round of confrontations and threats that endangers the lives of tens of millions of people in Asia and ultimately all humanity.

To use the phrase of U.S. Secretary of State Blinken, it is this which is “unacceptable and irresponsible”!

The disparity between the U.S. and China is huge. The U.S. military operates over 750 bases in 80 countries. Many of these bases are adjacent to China’s eastern and southern borders; 53,000 U.S. troops operate in Japan alone. South Korea, another neighbor of China, has 73 U.S. military bases. The U.S. Navy, Air Force, Army, and Marines all have bases on islands in the Pacific, within close striking distance of China. More are being built.

China’s military presence worldwide, according to a May 2022 report by the Lowy Institute, an Australian think tank: “China has only one foreign base in the entire world, in Djibouti.”

Unacceptable! Irresponsible!

Taiwan is an island about 80 miles off the coast of mainland China.1 The vast majority of countries around the world recognize Taiwan as part of China; and the U.S. itself, when it finally recognized the People’s Republic of China in 1979, withdrew its diplomatic recognition of Taiwan. Yet now, Taiwan and the 80-mile-wide strait between it and China are two of the most dangerous flashpoints in the increasingly antagonistic U.S.-China rivalry, with Biden saying four times as president that he would send U.S. troops into Taiwan if China invaded. Meanwhile, the U.S. has repeatedly provoked and threatened China in the South China Sea around Taiwan. It has used its massive naval armada to “play nuclear chicken” with China—also a heavily armed nuclear power.2

Unacceptable! Irresponsible!

At about the same time that news of the Chinese balloon was breaking, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was in Manila, capital of the Philippines. Austin announced that the Philippines will now allow U.S. access to four more military camps, bringing the total to nine. This is not just to bolster the U.S. presence in a country which at some points is about 100 miles from Taiwan, but also to be able to respond more quickly to a “potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan.” BBC News said the arrangement gives the U.S. access to “a key bit of real estate which would offer a front seat to monitor the Chinese in the South China Sea and around Taiwan.… With the deal, Washington has stitched the gap in the arc of U.S. alliances stretching from South Korea and Japan in the north to Australia in the south.”

Unacceptable! Irresponsible!

For decades the U.S. has used its legions of spies and its vast technological, “intelligence,” and military arsenal to spy on China. U.S. spy satellites and planes circle the entire planet taking and sending back images and information, particularly of its adversaries Russia and China. All this has accelerated and expanded since Biden took office. In October 2021, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) established a China Mission Center to “further strengthen our collective work on the most important geopolitical threat we face in the 21st century, an increasingly adversarial Chinese government.” This mission center will deploy people with many skills and varied training around the world to “gather intelligence and counter China’s interests,” an anonymous official told the Washington Post.

Unacceptable! Irresponsible!

In this country, fear and hatred of Chinese people is being whipped up, not just by Trump’s flagrant racism, but with frenzied ignorance around the origins of COVID, the balloon incident, the proposed ban on TikTok (a Chinese-owned company already banned on U.S. government devices), and more. Fascists who control the Texas legislature are moving to ban ownership of property in Texas by Chinese citizens, businesses, and the Chinese government.

Unacceptable! Irresponsible!

A Strategic Challenge to U.S. Domination

Lloyd Austin said in December that China “is the only country with both the will and, increasingly, the power to reshape its region and the international order to suit its authoritarian preferences. So let me be clear: We will not let that happen.” The core of U.S. efforts to “out-compete” China is expanding and modernizing the direct U.S. military presence in South East Asia and preparing for conflict on and around Taiwan and the South China Sea.

China Is Neither Socialist Nor Communist—It Is a Capitalist-Imperialist Power

Despite its claim to be “socialist” and the fact that its ruling party calls itself “communist,” China is a capitalist-imperialist power. So why does it label itself differently?

Read more

For many years, China as a nation was oppressed by imperialist powers like Britain, Japan and the U.S. Internally, the vast peasant class was brutally exploited by landlords. Over 100 years ago, the Communist Party of China was founded to break these chains by making revolution and bringing forward a new society on the road to communism. That party led the Chinese people in truly heroic wars of liberation against imperialism and political forces within China that allied with imperialism. That revolution was led by the great revolutionary and communist theoretician Mao Zedong. The revolution finally came to power in 1949, after decades of sacrifice and struggle. That party, with Mao at the helm, led the Chinese people through 27 years of building a new socialist society. The new society broke the chains of imperialism and brought forward unbelievable improvements in people’s lives. You can go here to get a sense of this, but to take just one emblematic fact—during the period of socialist rule, the average life expectancy in China more than doubled. More than that, the new state power backed up women and other formerly oppressed groups in making radical changes. It gave support to a whole new morality, based on “serving the people”—not “looking out for number one.”

During that time, Mao led struggles against those in the party whose vision of revolution went no further than developing China into a “powerful country” and were more than willing to use capitalist methods to do so. Mao, by contrast, fought to move society in the direction of communism—a world fully without exploitation and oppressive divisions between people. During that time, Mao developed the scientific breakthrough that class struggle continues within socialist society, focused on the struggle between the capitalist and socialist road, and gets concentrated at the leading levels of the party.

When Mao died in 1976, those who aimed only to forge China into a powerful country within the imperialist system were able to carry out a coup. They imprisoned and even killed those who had followed the vision and program of Mao. But because Mao and revolution had tremendous prestige among the Chinese people, these counter-revolutionaries preferred to adapt the structures of the government and some of the ideology of the communist party to serve the aims of making China an imperialist power in its own right. And maintaining this socialist facade enables China to contend with Western imperialism in the global South and pursue its imperialist investment, trade, and loan activity under the guise of a “different kind of great power,” not interested in exploitation and domination.

The heroic and complex struggle waged by Mao is gone into and explained by Bob Avakian in this radio interview with Michael Slate. Go here to listen and here to read that interview. It is vitally important as these war moves between the U.S. and China speed up that people learn the real truth about the phony communism of the Chinese rulers. 

Close

This means not just increasing its already enormous military in that part of the world, it means making it more powerfully destructive, more capable of responding rapidly, and arming it with the most modern weapons technology.

The rivalry between the U.S. and China is escalating dangerously, and rapidly. U.S. leaders openly threaten and provoke China. Again, on four different occasions, Biden has said U.S. military forces will be directly involved in defending Taiwan in the event of a war with China. When she was speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi made a highly dangerous and deliberately provocative trip to Taiwan, which set off weeks of maneuvers and games of “chicken” by the U.S. and China navies. And now the current speaker, Kevin McCarthy, is planning a similar trip this spring, and the Pentagon has begun preparing for it.

On a recent tour of East Asia, Lloyd Austin announced:

  • more fighter jets and bomber deployments to South Korea;
  • an unprecedented post-World War 2 military buildup in Japan (now the third largest military spender in world);
  • new U.S. military bases in the Philippines, just south of Taiwan; and
  • closer military ties/coordination with the other members of the so-called "Quad" countries—Australia, India, and Japan.
See also in this issue:

Over the past several decades China has developed as a powerful imperialist power in its own right. China is developing its military and contending with the U.S. in pursuit of its own imperialist aims. It is challenging the U.S. not only in and around Taiwan, but the imperialist global order which the U.S. dominates. The contention is not just in Asia—there is contention and rivalry over control of raw materials and regions of Africa, over the weaponization of space, over high-tech production and markets, and more.

This so-called “global order” is a horror show for most of the world’s people, one with 160 million child laborers, brutal exploitation of billions, sex trafficking, tens of millions of refugees, and all kinds of backward oppressive relations between different groups of people. And now there is the threat of an incredibly destructive, possibly world-ending war over who will control it.

Both have incredibly destructive nuclear arsenals. Hair-trigger encounters between them occur regularly. Any one of these encounters could quickly spiral to a whole other level, and just as quickly set off a chain of events that engulfs tens of millions of people, and threatens the entire planet. Two important truths to keep in mind: one, what China is doing and has done is dwarfed by the crimes of U.S. imperialism3, 4; two, the imperialist rulers of the U.S. are our oppressors and our task is to oppose what they are doing.

Unacceptable—This Imperialist Dominated World

“Bipartisan consensus” that the U.S. must step up its confrontation with China illustrates how both the Democrats and the Republi-fascists are parties of the imperialist ruling class—parties of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Joe Biden is driving forward a program that insanely puts the entire planet at risk, not because he is a particularly bloodthirsty person but because the economic/political system he serves—capitalism-imperialism—requires it. That system answers to one law: expand or die. And it is that law which is now driving forward this insane contention.

The urgent truth of the following statement by Bob Avakian comes through in spades:

We can no longer afford to allow these imperialists to dominate the world and to determine the destiny of humanity. They need to be overthrown as quickly as possible.”

—From the Bob Avakian Interviews on The RNL—Revolution, Nothing Less!—Show

 

Bob Avakian on Biden, Putin & Xi Jinping: Imperialist Gangsters and the Need for Revolution!
An excerpt from The Bob Avakian Interviews on The RNL—Revolution, Nothing Less!—Show.

_______________

FOOTNOTES:

1. In 1971, a United Nations resolution recognized the People’s Republic of China (PRC, sometimes referred to in the U.S. media as “mainland China”) as the sole legal government representing all of China. In 1979, the U.S. recognized the PRC as the government of China., and today only 14 governments recognize Taiwan. [back]

2. Revolution articles on Taiwan and the contention over it are here and here. [back]

3. The U.S. has about 750 military bases in 80 countries worldwide; China has one. [back]

4.  See the Revolution series “American Crime.” [back]

DONATE to revcom.us. 
DONATE to the revolution.

DONATE

From the genocide in Gaza, to the growing threat of world war between nuclear powers, to escalating environmental devastation… the capitalist-imperialist system ruling over us is a horror for billions around the world and is tearing up the fabric of life on earth. Now the all-out battle within the U.S. ruling class, between fascist Republicans and war criminal Democrats, is coming to a head—likely during, or before, the coming elections—ripping society apart unlike anything since the Civil War.

Bob Avakian (BA), revolutionary leader and author of the new communism, has developed a strategy to prepare for and make revolution. He’s scientifically analyzed that this is a rare time when an actual revolution has become more possible, and has laid out the sweeping vision, solid foundation and concrete blueprint for “what comes next,” in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America.

The website revcom.us follows and applies that leadership and is essential to all this. We post new materials from BA and curate his whole body of work. We apply the science he’s developed to analyze and expose every key event in society, every week. Revcom.us posts BA’s timely leadership for the revcoms (revolutionary communists), including his social media posts which break this down for people every week and sometimes more. We act as a guiding and connecting hub for the growing revcom movement nationwide: not just showing what’s being done, but going into what’s right and what’s wrong and rapidly learning—and recruiting new people into what has to be a rapidly growing force.

Put it this way: there will be no revolution unless this website not only “keeps going” but goes up to a whole different level!

So what should you give to make 2024 our year—a year of revolution?
Everything you possibly can!
DONATE NOW to revcom.us and get with BA and the revcoms!

Your donations contribute to:

  • Promotion of BA on social media and the Bob Avakian Interviews on The RNL—Revolution, Nothing Less!—Show
  • Strengthen revcom.us as an accessible, secure, robust website able to rise to the challenge of meeting the extraordinary demands of navigating the storms and preparing for revolution in this pivotal, unprecedented year
  • Fund revcoms to travel to national “hotspots,” where extreme contradictions are pulling apart the fabric of this country and creating the possibility of wrenching an actual revolution out of this intensifying situation
  • Expand the reach and coverage of revcom.us
  • Printing and distribution of key Revcom materials including the Declaration “WE NEED AND WE DEMAND: A WHOLE NEW WAY TO LIVE, A FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT SYSTEM” and the Proclamation, “WE ARE THE REVCOMS (Revolutionary Communists)”

More ways to donate

DONATE