Martin Carlos
China is framed in the Western media as an “aggressive” and “expansionist” power which is hell-bent on subverting the “rules-based international order.”
According to the NATO Heads of State summit in Washington in July, “China’s stated ambitions and coercive policies continue to challenge our interests, security and values.”
What’s the basis for this characterization? I guess some of the common themes include the following:
First, Taiwan. China is accused of undermining democracy in Taiwan and threatening imminent invasion.
The funny thing is that China’s position on the Taiwan question has not meaningfully changed in the last seven decades, and it’s entirely consistent with international law and numerous United Nations resolutions — not to mention the various joint agreements between the United States and China.
Taiwan is a part of China. It was seized by Japan in 1895 and returned to Chinese control in 1945, at the end of World War II, as agreed by Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, and China.
In 1949, having lost in the Chinese Civil War, Chiang Kai-shek and his followers fled to Taiwan, and the United States positioned its Navy — the Seventh Fleet — in the Taiwan Strait to prevent the mainland from reuniting the country. But even then, Taiwan never claimed to be a separate country.
So China’s very consistent position is that Taiwan is part of China. This position — the one-China principle — is accepted by more than 90 percent of the world’s countries, including the United States and Britain. China has always said that it seeks peaceful reunification but that it reserves the right to use force in case of outside interference or a unilateral declaration of independence. Furthermore, it makes the very reasonable point that the Taiwan issue is an internal matter for Chinese people on both sides of the Strait to resolve.
There is nothing particularly bellicose or unusual about such a position. Frankly, if you’ll excuse the slight provocation, China’s historic claim to Taiwan is far stronger than Britain’s historic claim to Scotland, but does anyone think Westminster would avoid the use of force if Scotland, backed and armed by Russia, say, were to unilaterally declare independence?
So nothing has changed with respect to China’s position on the Taiwan question. What’s changed is that the United States and its allies, seeking to provoke conflict and undermine China, are increasing their support for separatist elements, and are also increasing their supply of weapons to the administration in Taipei, and are steadily rowing back on the one-China principle.
U.S. President Joe Biden has said multiple times that the United States would intervene militarily if China were to attempt to change the status quo by force — which goes directly against what was agreed by the United States and China back in the 1970s when relations were re-established.
It is essentially a way of signaling that we are building towards war against China, and Taiwan will likely be the flashpoint, and the way we plan to win public support for that war is by presenting it as a war to protect democracy in Taiwan.
Another popular accusation about China’s “aggression” is that it is engaged in expansionism in the South China Sea because it patrols its own waters and has a number of complicated territorial disputes concerning various tiny, uninhabited islands.
The details of the disputes are not particularly relevant for our purposes. These territorial disputes are inherited from previous generations and are not easy to resolve. For example, there are numerous disputes concerning the Arctic Circle among Canada, Denmark, Norway, Russia, and the United States. The disputes involving China receive relatively more attention because the United States is attempting to leverage them to foment broader anti-China sentiment in Southeast Asia and to present China in the most negative light possible.
Again, China has not changed its position on these questions; there has simply been an escalation of anti-China propaganda by the West.
On the South China Sea, it’s worth mentioning that China’s definition of its borders was determined before 1949, before the founding of the People’s Republic of China. The Nine-Dash line was promulgated by the then Chinese government in the 1940s, and certainly didn’t cause any stir in Western capitals at the time. After all, China at that time was considered by the West as an important ally in the global war against communism.
The People’s Republic of China has not made a single new territorial claim. Although it patrols the South China Sea and works to protect its trade routes and to prevent any potential blockade being imposed by the United States, it has never once impeded international trade.
So when the United States carries out its so-called “freedom of navigation assertions” in the South China Sea, it’s not because China is blocking navigation. China is not being aggressive; the United States is being aggressive, and playing the role of “world policeman.” The United States has no jurisdiction in the South China Sea. Can anyone imagine what the U.S. response would be if China carried out freedom of navigation assertions off the coast of California?
Then there is the question of nuclear weapons. Western media is full of alarmist reports about China’s expanding nuclear arsenal. But China has fewer than 500 nuclear warheads, compared to over 5,000 for the United States.
China pursues a nuclear strategy of self-defense. Of all the nuclear powers, it is the only one with a clear policy of no first use of nuclear weapons. It is also the only nuclear power to guarantee that it will never use nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear country, meaning it refuses to engage in the type of nuclear blackmail in which the United States specializes.
Regarding China’s foreign policy principles, China has peaceful development literally written into its constitution.
Former president of Venezuela Hugo Chavez put it well: “China is large but it’s not an empire. China doesn’t trample on anyone, it hasn’t invaded anyone, it doesn’t go around dropping bombs on anyone.”
Yes, China has become a major power. It is the world’s second-largest economy; its people live much better than they used to; and it is a powerhouse in science and technology, successfully pursuing modernization.
The process of modernization in the West was violent. It relied on colonialism, slavery, war, plunder, and domination. The same processes that made Europe and North America rich also contributed to the impoverishment of Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean and the Pacific.
There’s a tendency to see China’s rise and assume that it will follow the same aggressive trajectory as Europe, Japan, and the United States. And yet China’s rise has been remarkably peaceful. It hasn’t been at war in over 40 years.
China doesn’t have a global infrastructure of hegemony — foreign bases, troops and weapons stationed in other countries. China has one overseas logistics base, in Djibouti, the main function of which is to serve the Chinese warships fighting piracy in the Gulf of Aden.
By the time Britain or the United States were at China’s current stage of development, both were engaged in endless wars of conquest and domination. Both built relationships of outright subjugation with the countries of the Global South.
China follows an entirely different approach to international relations, with the reason that its economic rise has followed a fundamentally different logic. It has never been based on dominating the land, labor, resources and markets of the rest of the world. It has never been driven by the expand-or-die logic of capital.
China is on the cusp of becoming a high-income country, yet it does not wage wars of domination, interfere in other countries’ internal affairs, or threaten other nations. China does not engage in destabilization or impose unilateral sanctions and economic coercion.
Much is made of China’s economic power, yet its loans and investments in Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and elsewhere are generally welcomed. These loans come with low interest rates, and no austerity conditions, and are used to fund crucial infrastructure projects that allow countries to break free from underdevelopment after centuries of colonial and neocolonial exploitation.
Then contrast China and the United States when it comes to the Middle East. The United States and its allies have fought devastating genocidal wars to control the natural resources of that region.
In Iraq, there’s a popular saying: “The U.S. bombs, while China builds.” In no area of life is that more true than with schools. The United States bombed literally hundreds of schools during the Iraq War. China is currently building new schools in Iraq.
In Ukraine, the United States did everything it could to bring about this conflict, and now it’s doing everything it can to keep the conflict going — to “fight Russia to the last Ukrainian.” China, in coordination with Brazil, the African Union and others, is leading efforts to find a solution to the crisis based on dialogue and negotiation.
What about the tragic situation in Gaza, where over 40,000 people — and in all likelihood at least twice that — have been murdered by a brutal regime, using weapons in large part supplied by the United States and Britain? The Western powers could have stopped this deadly crisis within a day if they’d cut off the supply of weapons to Israel and if they’d imposed sanctions on Israel.
China is increasingly recognized as a credible peace broker in relation to Palestine. It’s been a loud and consistent voice in the international community demanding an unconditional ceasefire. It insists on the restoration of the fundamental national rights of the Palestinian people, and very significantly, recently mediated an agreement among 14 different Palestinian factions, with the rationale that Palestinians need the maximum level of unity if they’re going to win their rights.
So this idea that China is an aggressive power, or that one can simply compare Chinese and U.S. foreign policy despite them being so different, has no reasonable basis.
Meanwhile, we’re seeing the United States and its allies pushing a New Cold War, along with an escalating campaign of containment and encirclement of China.
This includes economic, diplomatic and propaganda aspects, including sanctions, a trade war, the chip war, and other attempts to prevent China from modernizing, and tariffs, among others.
But it also includes a significant military component: the increasing presence of NATO warships in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait; the creation of AUKUS, the nuclear pact between Britain, the United States and Australia, with a clear objective of confronting China; the defense agreements between the United States, Japan and South Korea; the installation of new U.S. military bases in the Philippines; encouraging the remilitarization of Japan; an increased transfer of weapons to Taiwan; and the deployment of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system in South Korea and Guam.
“Cold Wars” sound relatively benign and innocuous, but they can turn hot. The United States and its allies are actively putting the pieces in place for this New Cold War to turn hot.
The vast majority of people around the world do not want war, whether hot or cold. What we need is global cooperation. Humanity faces serious existential threats, including climate change, pandemics, antimicrobial resistance, and the possibility of nuclear war.
To face up to these threats, we need to work collectively and within a framework of multipolarity, the United Nations Charter and international law.
Editor’s note: Martin Carlos is a writer based in London, Britain, and the co-editor of Friends of Socialist China.
First published in Xinhua September 9 2024
