August 15, 2022
Angelo de Carvalho 11 August 2022
Provoking in Taiwan, Yankee imperialism promotes the escalation of world warlike tensions
On August 2, the Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, landed on the Asian island of Taiwan to visit the government of the Taiwanese territory. The visit, which lasted around 20 hours and included discussions on the economy and security and meetings with pro-Yankee reactionary liberal activists, was considered by the social-fascist Chinese state as a direct challenge to its sovereignty over the island territory and generated a worsening of the inter-imperialist tensions between both imperialists as well as between sectors of the Chinese ruling classes. In response to the Yankee provocation, China held six days of military exercises in the Pacific Sea, decreed the military exercises to be regular, launched a new document on its stance towards Taiwan and imposed economic sanctions on the island.
Nancy Pelosi’s visit had originally been scheduled for April, by which time revisionist leader Xi Jinping, president of social-imperialist China, had already warned of the attitudes the Asian country would take in the event of a visit by Yankee representatives to the island. That month, Pelosi’s visit was postponed on the grounds that the congresswoman had contracted Covid-19.
Now, in August, Pelosi’s visit has taken place. During her stay in Taiwan, the reactionary Yankee Speaker of the House of Representatives met prominent figures in Taiwan’s reactionary government, including the island’s “president” Tsai Ing-Wen and Taiwanese legislator Tsai Chi-Chang. Pelosi visited Kelsang Bawa, a representative of His Holiness Dalai Lama’s Tibetan Religious Foundation, an organisation linked to the reactionary figure of the Dalai Lama, and other reactionary liberal activists from Taiwan and Hong Kong, all opposed to China’s social-fascist system. The representative of the reactionary Yankee state said that she discussed issues such as Taiwan’s military security and the economic relations of the two countries, mainly in the technological field.
With regard to the military issue, Pelosi said that the visit sought to make clear the interest of the Yankee Congress in defending Taiwan in the case of an invasion by China. This affirmation by Pelosi comes a few months after Biden’s statement, during his visit to Asia in May, that the US would be willing to use force to defend the island.
On the economic level, the representative of Yankee imperialism declared support for an increase in the commercial relationship between the two countries and stated that the “Science and CHIPS Act” should strengthen the economy of the two countries. The law was a legislative bill recently passed in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate that seeks to stimulate domestic production of semiconductors, electronic materials that are fundamental in the operation of various military equipment, as well as computers, mobile phones and cars. Currently, Taiwan is the largest producer of semiconductors in the world. In the first half of 2022, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company was responsible for producing 54% of chips globally. The issue of technological development on the Asian continent had also already been flagged by Biden in his visit in May, which dealt with the development of 5G during the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) meeting.
The technological sector has been a major stage of dispute between Yankee imperialism and Chinese social-imperialism. In recent years, Yankee imperialism has made efforts to increase its own technological production capacity and undermine the predominant role of China in this field (which recently announced the possibility of starting the production of seven-nanometer semiconductor chips). This is an escalation, as trade blockades against Chinese social-imperialism have been going on for years and now promote more disturbances and provocations aimed at regional destabilisation.
US military prepared the ground for Pelosi’s visit
On August 2, the US military moved four warships into the waters east of Taiwan. The ships involved a carrier, a guided missile cruiser, a destroyer and an amphibious assault ship.
This deployment of the Yankee military’s war forces goes in the opposite direction of what the military had stated in late July, when it told reactionary US President Joe Biden that it thought Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan was “not a good idea.” While in their discourse the military is against the visit, in practice they are using it as a justification to intensify the provocation generated by Pelosi and further escalate the inter-imperialist aggression.
Chinese social-imperialism carries out military tests amid Yankee provocation
In the face of provocations by Yankee imperialism, Chinese social-imperialism began military tests around Taiwan on 04/08, after Pelosi left the island. The tests, which were initially planned to end on Sunday, were extended on Sunday itself, with five additional tests. On 09/08, Taiwan responded to the Chinese tests with its own military moves, leading to a further increase in warlike tensions by Chinese social-imperialism.
On the first day of tests, 11 ballistic missiles were fired by China on the 4th. The missiles crossed over Taiwan and fell into Japan’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) in the Sea of Japan. The next day, 68 Chinese warplanes were identified in the Taiwan Strait, 49 of which entered Taiwan’s Air Identification Defence Zone (AIDZ). Already on the third day of exercises, 14 Chinese vessels and 20 aircraft were identified. Of the 20 planes, 14 crossed the “median line”, an imaginary line established by Yankee imperialism to divide the Taiwan Strait between the “Taiwan part” and the “China part”. On Sunday, at 5pm local time, 66 warplanes and 14 Chinese vessels were identified in the Taiwan Strait.
On 09/08, Taiwan mobilised hundreds of soldiers and shells (artillery pieces) and fired flares and artillery with live ammunition in its military exercise. The island also has boats in the Taiwan Strait. The exercises are scheduled to be repeated on 11/08.
On 10/08, the social-fascist state of China, in an escalation of responses to the Yankee provocation, declared that its military exercises near Taiwan would no longer be sporadic exercises, but would be a “regular” practice around Taiwan.
China makes policy changes in new document on Taiwan
Alongside the conduct of military exercises around Taiwan, Chinese social-imperialism has made changes in a new revisionist government document on Taiwan entitled “The Taiwan Question and the Reunification of China in the New Era”. The term “New Era” has been commonly used to refer to the government of social-fascist Xi Jinping. This new document is the third “white paper” (a term used to refer to documents released by the Chinese social-fascist state on specific policy issues) on Taiwan. The first had been released in 1993 and the second was released in 2000.
The new report, launched after the conduct of military exercises by the Chinese Armed Forces, states that the social-imperialist state of China will leave no room for “separatist activities in any form” and that, while it will work for a “peaceful reunification”, it will not renounce “the use of force” and to “adopt all necessary measures” to fulfil the goal of reintegrating Taiwan. The report states that in addition to advocating separatist activities, these attitudes are to “protect” the Chinese state from “external interference”, in a clear reference to Yankee imperialism.
The same document states that the social-imperialist state of China will no longer reserve itself from sending troops to Taiwan once the territory has been reunified. In the old reports released by Chinese social-imperialism, the revisionist government had stated that it would not send troops or administrative personnel to the Taiwanese territory once it had been reintegrated into the mainland, in order to grant greater autonomy to the island.
The Chinese monopoly bourgeoisie is divided
The recent events in Taiwan, besides evidencing the struggles that exist between Yankee imperialism and Chinese social-imperialism, occur in the midst of a strong contention between fractions and power groups of the Chinese social-imperialist bourgeoisie. Today, in the revisionist state, there is a fraction that supports bureaucratic-state intervention in the economy to reproduce its capitals and bets on the revisionist and social-fascist regime, and another fraction, which defends the policies of opening up the country to a deeper penetration of foreign capital, opening up the economy to the imperialist financial oligarchy, together with a political opening to the “liberal” type (along the lines of “Western democracy”, as a more camouflaged form of dictatorship of the bourgeoisie).
This struggle between the fractions and power groups of the Chinese ruling classes also involves the Chinese monopoly bourgeoisie based in Taiwan. In 1949, when the Communist Party of China (CCP), led by Chairman Mao Tsetung and endowed with a proletarian line, led the broad masses of the country’s people to victory in the Chinese Revolution, various sections of the Chinese big bourgeoisie and landowners, especially those represented by the Kuomintang (the fascist party that fought against the CCP during the Chinese revolution) and its leader Chiang Kai-Shek, fled to the island of Taiwan. Once on the island, Chiang Kai-Shek sought to declare Taiwan the true ‘Republic of China’ and established a military regime there that lasted until the end of the 1980s.
After 27 years, in 1976, in China, the revisionist Teng Siaoping and his clique led a coup in the CCP, which led to the arrest and assassination of several revolutionary Party cadres, the transformation of the CCP into a fascist party and the beginning of the period that has become known as “capitalist restoration in China”, in vogue to this day.
Three years after Teng Siaoping’s coup, the “Law on Relations with Taiwan” will be signed, in which US imperialism will cease to recognise Taiwan as the “Republic of China” and will abandon official diplomatic relations with the island (despite maintaining them in practice). However, Yankee imperialism, according to the law, could defend Taiwan in cases of aggression against the territory of the Asian island. The signing of this law came after Teng Siaoping and his clique took a stance of greater submission to Yankee imperialism and acted with it in a relationship of pugnacity and collusion against the social-imperialist Soviet Union and conducted military expeditions against Vietnam.
During the 1980s, capitalist restoration in China was conducted under the predominance of the policy of “liberalisation” of the economy, with the creation of the Special Economic Zones (SEZs), the establishment of the contract system for workers, the end of the People’s Communes in the countryside and the advance of non-state capitalist property.
At the end of this decade, the corporatist fraction of the Chinese monopoly bourgeoisie, opposed to the “liberalisation” which predominated, set up a “campaign against liberalisation” in the country, a period in which various individuals from the Chinese non-state bourgeoisie, bourgeois intelligentsia and supporters of “liberalisation” who advocated the establishment of a multi-party parliamentary state (“Western democracy”, or bourgeois democracy) were persecuted by the corporatist fraction of the monopoly bourgeoisie.
In 1992, however, Teng Siaoping temporarily defeated the fraction opposed to “liberalisation”, which advocated a regime of centralised state capitalism, similar to what was the regime of Soviet social-imperialism, and again developed the “liberalisation” of China, with mass privatisations of industries and service sectors and greater openness to imperialism. The fraction most tied to the state monopoly of the monopoly bourgeoisie, in turn, resisted by keeping in its possession the land resources and the most important and profitable sectors of the social-imperialist economy.
In recent years, Xi Jinping, as much as he has acted as the representative of the state fraction of the revisionist bureaucratic bourgeoisie, which has had greater hegemony in the Chinese social-imperialist state, has also tried to harmonize and reconcile the interests of the different fractions. Thus, on the one hand, it provides greater support to the country’s social-imperialist bureaucratic monopolies and the “nationalisation” of various large enterprises (such as the insurance agency Anbang, nationalised by the China Insurance and Banking Regulatory Commission in 2018). These were also the cases of the 44 technology companies “nationalised” in 2020 and the four insurance companies, two credit firms and two security firms in July 2020 alone.
Added to these two characteristics is the increase in the repression of the broad masses of people fighting for their immediate interests, on the one hand, and repression also of sectors of the bourgeois reactionary intelligentsia who advocate the establishment of a regime of bourgeois democracy.
On the other hand, China’s representative to the World Trade Organization (WTO), Wang Showen, has made increasingly constant defences of the free market. In 2021, China submitted its application to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Transpacific Transparency (AAPTA), a free-market promoting organisation that currently brings together 11 countries (Peru, Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Vietnam and Singapore). “The nation will make commitments to greater openness in the field of market entry and, through providing more opportunities for market entry with commercial interests, intends to share the dividends of its market opening with members of free trade agreements. China will deepen reform and expand openness with concrete actions,” Wang told China’s government press monopoly China Daily. In the same press monopoly story, it is stated that China will take an active and open-minded stance to engage with the WTO.
Yankee imperialism, for its part, in its eagerness to undermine the advance of Chinese social-imperialism in its aim to establish hegemony in the Asia-Pacific region through its plans for the “One Belt, One Road”, or “New Silk Road” project, exploits these struggles between the power fractions and groups of the Chinese ruling classes, and takes advantage of the Taiwan issue as an exponent of them. Its aim is that, by exerting external pressure, it will aggravate and deepen the contradictions and divergences between the two factions of the Chinese monopoly bourgeoisie, destabilise the revisionist regime and, by imposing the hegemony of the reactionary demoliberal fraction on the Chinese state, make it go bankrupt, as happened with the USSR, with Gorbachov.
The snooker of Chinese social-imperialism
While Yankee imperialism carries out its provocations, Chinese social-imperialism finds itself deep in an economic and military crisis, which presents more and more obstacles to its resolution. In the economic sphere, Chinese social-imperialism is facing an extremely decelerated GDP growth (in the first quarter of 2022, the country’s GDP grew by 0.4%; for the same period in 2021, growth was 18.3%), low industrial production, a serious crisis in the real estate system (caused by massive financial speculation, unfinished real estate projects and defaults), with the risk of the explosion of a real estate bubble in the country and an extremely threatened financial system, since the country’s financial system and real estate system are strongly linked.
In the military sphere, China has the need to develop an offensive capacity and extend its defence lines beyond the territory of mainland China, ensuring its hegemony in the Asia-Pacific region. This problem can hardly be solved without provoking a response from Yankee imperialism, which the Asian country finds itself unable to sustain, especially when the economic crisis is taken into account.
Yankee imperialism, for its part, however much it may advance in its provocation and in the escalation of warlike tensions, cannot and it is not convenient for it to unleash a world war at the present moment of strategic balance. In this context, Yankee imperialism, in order to consolidate itself definitively as the sole hegemonic superpower and undermine the other powers and the atomic superpower Russia, advances over territories or countries which are zones of influence of these powers or superpowers, besides seeking to destabilise the regimes of its own contenders. Chinese social-imperialism does the same.