Twenty-five years since the Tiananmen Square massacre
THREE VIEWS on Tiananmen and the nature of Chinese society
A DOSSIER / Second viewpoint
By the editors of wsws.org, information organ of the Social Equality Party (Trotskyst)
(2) Today marks the 25th anniversary of the Stalinist Chinese Communist Party’s bloody suppression of the months-long occupation of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square by students and workers. Independent analysts estimate that as many as 6,000 were killed and tens of thousands injured during the brutal crackdown in the square and surrounding working-class suburbs by 40,000 heavily-armed troops, tanks and armoured vehicles. Bloody reprisals against students and workers throughout China continued in the weeks and months that followed.
While the initial student protests began with calls for democratic reform in April of that year, opposition rapidly spread as sections of the working class and urban poor in Beijing and other cities began raising their own demands. An estimated 100 million people in 400 cities were involved in what became a nation-wide upsurge against the Stalinist Communist Party (CCP) regime.
Contrary to Beijing’s claim that the mass protests were a “counter-revolutionary rebellion”, the broad-based movement was driven by deep opposition to rapidly increasing social inequality and bureaucratic profiteering created by the CCP’s embrace of the capitalist market in 1978.
The US, Britain, Germany and other imperialist powers condemned the Tiananmen Square massacre, falsely equating the reactionary Chinese Stalinist regime with communism and socialism. Although the 1949 Chinese revolution ended direct imperialist domination and nationalised key sections of industry, leading to major social gains for the working class, the CCP was not a working-class Marxist party. On the contrary, the Maoist bureaucracy defended its own privileged existence on the basis of the reactionary nationalist program of “socialism in a single country,” which produced one economic disaster after another—from the Great Leap Forward in 1958 to the so-called Cultural Revolution in 1966, characterized by mass repression of the working class—and led inevitably to the restoration of capitalism and the opening up of the country to imperialist exploitation.
The bloody suppression of the Tianamen Square movement and associated protests, in fact, became a clear signal from Beijing to international finance capital that the police-military apparatus would guarantee investments against any challenge by the working class.
Global capitalism, notwithstanding its initial crocodile tears over the brutal crackdown, responded accordingly. A new flood of capital poured into China, with foreign direct investment inflows increasing from $4 billion in 1991 to $45 billion in 1997. At the same time, the CCP accelerated its program of capitalist restoration, transforming China into the largest cheap labour platform in the world and further enriching the country’s new bourgeoisie.
While the CCP crushed the Tiananmen Square movement and continues each year to mobilise its police state apparatus to prevent any commemoration of the event, arresting anyone—journalists, artists, students or workers—it fears may attempt to publicly refer to its brutal history, the Chinese government remains a regime of crisis.
Massive foreign investment and the integration of the Chinese economy into globalised capitalism have only heightened the social and political contradictions that gave rise to the massacre in the first place. Growth levels have slumped, unemployment is rising and total government, corporate and household debt is more than 200 percent of gross domestic product.
Social inequality is extreme and rapidly widening. The Chinese capitalist class, which boasts more than 350 of the world’s 1,800 billionaires, has enriched itself at the direct expense of the now 400-million strong working class. Strikes and protests have increased dramatically, with walkouts involving tens of thousands of workers erupting at Honda, Foxconn and hundreds of other transnational corporations in the past two years. According to official figures, “mass incidents” have doubled from 90,000 in 2006 to 180,000 in 2010.
While these disputes have centred on wages, working conditions and jobs, the spectre of Tiananmen Square and a politically radicalised working class continues to haunt Beijing. That is why the CCP spent more money on internal policing than on the military in the three years following the global financial crisis.
The crucial task facing Chinese workers, students and youth is the building of a genuine revolutionary leadership in the Chinese working class, which will seek to unite their struggles with those of the international working class.
The World Socialist Web Site is republishing below an article written by James Conachy that originally appeared on the 10th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. This analysis, which details the economic and political factors that produced the mass eruption of 1989, retains its validity today. It is of vital importance for the political clarification of the Chinese working class and the fight to establish of a Chinese section of the International Committee of the Fourth International—the world Trotskyist movement—in preparation for the revolutionary struggles that lie immediately ahead.
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Ten years since the Tiananmen Square massacre
Political lessons for the working class
Demonstrators being removed.
By James Conachy
[4 June 1999]
The news broadcasts on this day 10 years ago were filled with the images of tanks, blood and death on the streets of Beijing.
As the night fell on June 3, 1989, 40,000 soldiers of the 27th Peoples Liberation Army moved into China’s capital with orders to crush six weeks of demonstrations and protests by the country’s students and workers, and end their demands for political change.
In the preceding weeks, China, and Beijing in particular, had witnessed extraordinary events. A student occupation of Tiananmen Square became the focus for a rising working class movement. Independent Workers’ Autonomous Federations were active in numbers of cities. From May 20 the movement continued in defiance of martial law and the central government was divided and paralysed.
The paralysis was short-lived. Accounts by witnesses testify to the calculated terror employed by the military as it reclaimed the capital:
“…at one command, the soldiers raised their guns and fired one round at the residents and students, who fell to the ground. As soon as the gunshots stopped, other people rushed forward to rescue the wounded. The steps of a clinic near Xidan were already covered in blood. But the struggle at the intersection did not stop. Armoured vehicles ran over roadblocks, knocked over cars and buses. The unarmed people had only bricks… What they got in return was bullets… People dispersed and ran for their lives. Soldiers ran after them, guns blazing. Even when residents ran into courtyards or into the shrubbery, the soldiers would catch up with them and kill them”. [1]
“…Thick smoke and tear gas were bringing tears to everyone’s eyes. I met F. who told me how the first tanks had crushed the barricades, knocking people off the tops of buses that soon caught fire. By now the way was clear for trucks to move east one by one, the slowness of their advance suggesting that there must be battles somewhere ahead. The whole city of Peking seemed in a state of outrage and extreme agitation. On the side-streets off Changan Avenue, thousands of us rhythmically shouted in the intervals between gunfire: ‘You animals!’ ‘Li Peng—fascist!’ and ‘Go on strike!’ But the troops shot back, killing those who were not swift enough to squat down or move away or who simply took no heed of bullets. People were constantly falling to the ground and being taken to a nearby hospital, but the mood of indignation completely overwhelmed any feelings of fear”. [2]
“…many hundreds of people (not only students) appeared on the street. They ran after the trucks and shouted protest slogans. A few stones were thrown. The soldiers opened fire with live ammunition. The crowd threw themselves on the ground, but quickly followed the convoy again. The more shots were fired, the more the crowd got determined and outraged. Suddenly they started singing the Internationale; they armed themselves with stones and threw them towards the soldiers. There were also a few Molotov cocktails and the last truck was set on fire”. [3]
Such testimonies could be recounted a thousand-fold by the working class of Beijing. In their tens of thousands they used their bodies to reinforce the barricades and roadblocks that they had erected to defend their city and their political aims. Hundreds were gunned down on the streets, crushed beneath armoured vehicles or beaten or bayoneted to death as they sought to stem the advancing troops. Casualties were highest in the working class residential suburbs to the east and west of the Tiananmen Square. The exact number killed that night has never been tallied, but estimates range up to 7,000, with over 20,000 wounded.
To this day the Chinese government justifies its actions with the same contemptible lie put forward at the time by the 85 year-old “paramount leader” of Chinese Stalinism, Deng Xiaoping. In a speech on June 9, 1989, he denounced the movement his regime had drowned in blood as a reactionary “counter-revolutionary rebellion” aimed at the overthrow of the socialist system.
However there is no historical or factual substance to the claims that the Tiananmen Square massacre was the result of a confrontation between a communist government and a pro-capitalist movement. They can only be made by ignoring both the true nature of the Stalinist regime that ruled China and the complex character and demands of the movement that developed in China through the month of May 1989.
While there is no question that the vast majority of students and workers had illusions in Western-style democracy, they also held deep allegiances to the principles of social equality and social justice.
The movement of 1989 expressed the long pent-up discontent and hatred of a corrupt Stalinist bureaucracy that for 40 years had betrayed the hopes of the Chinese people for a truly just society, and for over a decade had been imposing a market economy on China, giving rise to unprecedented inequality and burgeoning new capitalist elite.
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The new bourgeoisie
Underlying the social tensions in 1989 was the economic and political impasse at which the Stalinist perspective of national self-sufficiency or “socialism in a single country” had arrived.
Leon Trotsky described the ruling bureaucracy of the Soviet Union as the “policemen of inequality”. The description is just as applicable to the bureaucracy spawned by Mao Zedong’s peasant movement after the establishment of the Peoples Republic of China.
Regulating the state-controlled production of a backward economy and protecting it from competition or penetration by the industry and commodities of the advanced capitalist centres—and ruthlessly suppressing any challenge to their grip on power from the working class—was a sizeable social caste of party and state officials. Their rule was based primarily on the peasant Red Army, and they were able to derive material privileges and benefits that, while not resting on any ownership of property, elevated them above the rest of society.
The 1980s witnessed the turn by the Stalinist bureaucracies in the USSR, Eastern Europe and China, confronting economic stagnation and collapse, to preserve their material interests through the restoration of private property relations and the re-integration of their countries into the world capitalist market—a perspective accomplished through the systematic destruction of the social gains and conditions of the mass of the population.
The prospect of capitalist restoration was celebrated throughout the capitalist west. Figures such as Mikhail Gorbachev, the head of the Soviet Union, and Deng Xiaoping in China, were feted as great visionaries and reformers. The Russian expressions perestroika (economic reform) and glasnost (political reform) were repeated in the mass media so often that they became household words. In 1985 both Time magazine and the National Review named Deng “man of the year”.
From 1979, Deng oversaw a stream of market reforms that opened up large parts of the country to the activities of transnational corporations and other private firms in Special Economic Zones, broke-up collective farms and reinstituted private control of land in the countryside, and abandoned central economic regulation and planning.
By the mid-1980s prices for a wide array of industrial and consumer products were being set by market forces and a “free market” of labour was in the process of being created through the ending of full employment guarantees, the undermining of life-time employment to workers employed by state-owned enterprises and the growth of the non-state sector of the economy.
The effect of the reforms was to enable a frenzy of wealth accumulation by the state and party bureaucrats, who were in a position to allocate land and contracts to themselves, establish business niches or engage in wholesale bribery and theft. Utilising their political power and connections, the “cadre” of the Communist party established themselves as an incipient capitalist class by the end of the 1980s.
A 1984 survey in one rural province, for example, found that party members made up 43 percent of the “prosperous” households, a figure that did not include their friends or associates. [4] A glimpse into how the party cadre became prosperous during the parceling-out of collective property is recounted in the study Chen Village :
“As party secretary, Qingfa got the lion’s share. There was a large grove of giant bamboo along the river; and rather than put it up for bidding, the [Party] committee agreed to let Qingfa take it for ten yuan. The grove was worth a hundred times that amount. He allocated to himself, free of charge, a hillock of honeysuckle planted in earlier years for the health clinic. He had the brigade rent bulldozers to relevel the land occupied by an unfinished dyke. Awarding himself the major portion of this land, he hired field hands to till it for him”. [5]
The spawning of a new rural bourgeoisie was overshadowed in the urban areas by far more lucrative opportunities, especially in ties and partnerships with foreign capital in the Special Economic Zones. Over 10,000 companies had what the British Economist journal described as “privileged links with party bureaucrats. Of these 134 can boast top officials—ministers or their equivalents—on their payroll”.
Most conspicuous were the children of the highest-ranking government officials, who were soon given the title of the “crown princes”. The sons of Deng Xiaoping and of Zhao Ziyang, the premier of China, were only the most prominent “crown princes” who by the late 1980s were associated with trading corporations that used state-derived funds for real estate speculation or the purchase and re-sale into the domestic economy of scarce consumer goods produced in or imported into the Special Economic Zones—with the profits flowing to highly-praised “socialist entrepreneurs”.
Facilitating the process was an orgy of borrowing by both national and regional governments, which pushed China’s foreign debt from next to nothing in 1979 to over $US50 billion in 1990.
Liu Binyan, a Chinese investigative journalist, described 1988—the year in which all of China’s coastal provinces were opened to the activities of private capital and bank credit controls were lifted—as the time when “members of the bureaucratic stratum, high and low, who had a firm grasp on their special privileges, initiated an unprecedented plundering of the Chinese economy, arrogating billions in public assets to themselves”. [6]
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The impact of market reforms
As the bureaucracy enriched itself, most of China’s population suffered the erosion of income security, social supports and purchasing power.
The breakup of the collectives and the odious allocation of property led to millions of former peasants being made landless. By 1989, unable to find employment in rural areas, more than 50 million people, mainly younger workers, were on a massive internal migration to the urban areas and Special Economic Zones for work. By the late 1980s grain production had begun to fall to crisis levels as entrepreneurs in the countryside converted land to other, more profitable uses.
The ending of central planning and price controls wrought havoc upon the Chinese working people. In a climate of rampant profiteering, hoarding, speculation and the uncontrolled growth in the money supply, the country was plagued with permanent inflation and shortages of foodstuffs and essential items.
In March 1988, party head Zhao Ziyang declared that the Chinese people had to “learn to swim in the sea of the commodity economy”. By the end of that year it was clear they were drowning.
The money supply had increased a staggering 50 percent in less than 12 months. The official inflation rate reached 19 percent—over 30 percent in the cities—and unemployment was growing. Industry was beset with shortages of energy and raw materials, leading to frequent shutdowns of plants and equipment. Agricultural production had fallen for the third year in a row, requiring the massive import of grain. National debt was spiraling out of control.
Faced with record budget and trade deficits as the direct result of its own policies, the central government imposed emergency austerity measures in the last months of 1988, which reversed the easy credit policies and slashed public spending. Across China the debt-driven boom of construction and industrial development collapsed, firms laid off workers and sought to cut wages and benefits, and governments at all levels reduced funding on education and social services.
In wide layers of the population this was the final blow to any lingering illusions in the market reforms or confidence in the regime. As 1988 ended, police reports were warning of “alarming increases” in workers’ strikes and public gatherings. All that was needed for a general social movement against the regime was the spark provided by the student movement of April 1989.
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Origins of the 1989 student movement
The major influences that shaped the student movement of 1989 can be traced back a decade earlier. After vigorously suppressing intellectual layers that attacked Stalinism from the left, the regime encouraged public debate that drew pro-market conclusions and lent ideological support to the reforms being undertaken. The general policy pursued by the state apparatus in the 1980s was to draw under its wings the educated and professional layers with the promise of improved living standards and heightened prestige—but not democracy.
Acutely conscious that the market reforms would heighten the ever-present conflict between the bureaucracy and the working class, the dominant factions within the Stalinist party were resolute that any undermining of dictatorial rule would produce a power vacuum that could be filled by a challenge to its rule from below. The Solidarity movement in Poland during 1980-81 reinforced their fears.
Yet for considerable elements of the professional and intellectual petty-bourgeoisie, the market reforms did not deliver on the promises. Many had joined the ruling party, yet the parceling out of wealth took place amongst the established bureaucracy far faster than they could climb its ranks, and the inflation and economic turmoil affected all social layers.
Though genuinely outraged at the rampant enrichment of the upper echelons of the bureaucracy, the hopes for political reforms that emanated from the middle strata were intimately bound up with aspirations for a greater stake in the direction and benefits of capitalist restoration. The objective content of calls for freedom of the press and association were to establish weapons with which to curb the ability of the state apparatus to monopolise control over the emerging market economy and force it to open the door for other layers.
The demands for democracy were not therefore directed toward mobilising the Chinese masses, who in the final analysis the democrats feared as much as the regime, but to factions within the bureaucracy that sympathised with their aims and would promote their cause. This intellectual and political outlook exerted a heavy influence upon the students in 1989, the vast majority of whom were the children of either party officials or the professional petty-bourgeoisie.
The death on April 15, 1989 of the former party leader Hu Yaobang, who had been removed from office two years earlier after lending support to student protests for reform, provided the impulse for the expression of social grievances.
“The one who should not die, died. Those who should die, live,” became a popular slogan on the university campuses where the discontent about the direction of society was most radically expressed. Memorial meetings extolling the virtues of Hu Yaobang as compared to his counterparts, soon gave way to calls for increases in the education budget, a free press, the right to form student associations independent of the Communist Party and the rehabilitation of intellectuals discredited for various digressions.
The means for expressing the demands almost naturally became daily rallies in the symbolic centre of political protest in China—the massive Tiananmen Square in the heart of Beijing, which was the site of state monuments and around which the major government buildings were located.
After days of protests, and in defiance of an edict prohibiting the public from the Square on April 22 for the funeral of Hu Yaobang, tens of thousands of students filled the grounds of Tiananmen bearing banners demanding democratic reforms and an explanation as to why Hu Yaobang had been removed as party secretary-general.
Their demands were ignored. Increasingly radicalised, student representatives from 21 universities and colleges met the following day and formed the Autonomous Federation of Beijing University Students. A student strike was declared and a call made for the people to join them in demonstrations at Tiananmen Square until the government recognised and met with the student organisation.
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Workers Autonomous Federation
Alongside the students, the embryo of another movement had emerged, of a very different character and with very different political aims. Among the 100,000 people who assembled in Tiananmen Square on April 22 for Hu Yaobang’s funeral were the groups of young industrial workers who on April 20 had founded the Beijing Workers Autonomous Federation ( Gongzilian ).
The appearance of an independent workers’ organisation was announced in two leaflets distributed in the Square on that day. They directly addressed the class divide that separated the ruling regime and the working class.
One leaflet attacked the personal wealth of Deng Xiaoping’s children, among other condemnations of the privileges of the bureaucracy, and called for an explanation of the “shortcomings” of the economic reforms. The other denounced the “steady decline of the people’s living standards” which it blamed on the “long term control of a dictatorial bureaucracy” and demanded the stabilisation of prices. It concluded with the demand that would resonate widely amongst China’s workers—that the true wealth and incomes of government officials, and the sources of that wealth, be made public.
The appearance of the Workers Autonomous Federation, calling for a frontal assault on the privileges and positions of the apparatus, posed the very real threat to the regime in China of the “Polish model”—a mass working class movement challenging the very existence of Stalinist rule.
All party heads agreed that the student marches and demonstrations had to be brought to an end, especially the tentative efforts to bring into political activity wider layers of society. The cracks in state control and authority made by the students were early warnings of a flood of working class discontent.
On April 26 the government banned all demonstrations and rallies without approval, outlawed the making of speeches and the distribution of leaflets, and warned students against “going to factories, rural areas and schools”. The editorial in the state mouthpiece, the People’s Daily, defended the government stance with the headline: “It is necessary to take a clear stand against disturbances”. The editorial, which some claim was personally dictated by Deng Xiaoping, specifically referred to the accusations made against party leaders in the workers’ leaflets of April 22 as a “planned conspiracy” to overthrow the government, “taking advantage” of the genuine mourning of Hu Yaobang by the students.
The government decrees and the insinuation that the students were the puppets of other forces were met with anger and further defiance. Over 80,000 students from dozens of campuses marched to Tiananmen Square on April 27. In answer to the warning against going to the factories, student groups dispersed from the Square into the residential suburbs and staged street rallies late into the evening. Calls were made for a mass rally on May 4 to demonstrate for the demands of the student organisation.
A new element appeared in the march of April 27. Not only did large crowds of enthusiastic residents of Beijing line the streets to applaud and show support, but tens of thousands of workers marched alongside or behind the students. The events stunned the central government—both the defiance of the students and the sheer scope of the popular support they had been able to harness so rapidly. Their effect was to divide the regime as a raging internal conflict broke out over how best to diffuse the situation.
One faction, personified in Deng Xiaoping, called for the deployment of troops to restore order, a position that did not win immediate support. Layers of the state bureaucracy, led by the secretary-general of the Communist party, Zhao Ziyang, advocated making concessions to the students and the middle classes in order to build a base of support against the mounting opposition to the market reforms within the industrial working class.
Their model was Russia where Gorbachev, through the promises of glasnost, or political reforms, had consolidated the support of Russian intellectuals and professional layers for the restoration of the market. With Gorbachev scheduled to arrive in China on May 15 in the first visit of a Soviet leader for 30 years, Zhao Ziyang’s call for negotiations with the students prevailed.
The regime not only met with student representatives, but informed the media it had the freedom to cover the student movement. A debate between a high-ranking official and a student leader was televised live on national television. University budgets were increased. In a token gesture to placate the anger over official corruption, the import of limousines was banned. The issues raised by the students were elevated to the centre of political discussion in China.
The one demand on which the regime would not give any ground was that of recognising autonomous student organisations. To do so would legitimise the movements in the working class to establish independent trade unions and political associations.
In undertaking its concessions, the Stalinist bureaucracy based itself on the fact that in the main the students were the children of, and heirs to, the bureaucratic elite or the middle classes that aspired to enjoy similar privileges. From the standpoint of their class interests, a sizeable layer of students viewed with concern the increasing political activity of the working class.
Among intellectuals and students, Zhao Ziyang was being hailed as the possible Chinese Gorbachev. The march to Tiananmen Square on May 4 therefore had the character of a victory celebration gone wrong. The fact that 250,000 workers joined 60,000 students produced turmoil in the student movement. Distraught at the growing appearance on the streets of the working class, who drew no distinctions between different elements of the bureaucracy and directed their slogans against the social inequality caused by the market, a section of the students withdrew from political activity.
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Hunger strike
From May 4 a clear split took place among the students. New personalities came to the fore, such as Wang Dan, Chai Ling and Wuer Kaixi. Just as Zhao Ziyang believed he could use the students, they believed that the mass support of the population could be used as a lever to extract greater concessions and recognition from the state.
As the means of applying the maximum pressure and gaining the maximum exposure, the students adopted the proposal of psychology graduate Chai Ling who modeled herself on Mahatma Gandhi. She proposed a hunger strike by students at the monument to the Heroes of the Revolution in the centre of Tiananmen Square, where Gorbachev was scheduled to lay a wreath on May 15 under the full gaze of the world media.
On May 13, 500 students marched into Tiananmen Square and set up tents at the monument to begin their public hunger strike. In doing so they initiated what has been called the “Beijing Spring” and compared by some with the Paris Commune of 1871.
As the broader student movement began to dissipate, the working class of China adopted the student hunger strike as the focus for mass anti-government protest. By May 15 half a million students, workers and other Beijing residents had rallied in the Square. The character of the political movement in China qualitatively shifted to the left and was defined by the mass actions of the industrial working class and the growing role of the Workers Autonomous Federations.
From the time of its inception, the Beijing or Capital Workers Autonomous Federation, as it renamed itself, had conducted agitation, visiting factories to win support and recruit members. It had participated in the marches of April 27 and May 4, but out of caution, had not done so under an independent banner.
The decision by the students to occupy Tiananmen Square enabled the Federation to begin a public life in relative safety. Establishing a tent headquarters in the Square’s north-east fringe, it engaged in continuous propaganda among the ever-growing numbers of workers who came into the Square seeking political discussion and organisation.
The week of May 13-20 saw the largest demonstrations in China’s post-war history. On May 17 it is estimated that up to two million people marched through the centre of Beijing; the majority being workers and their families who walked beneath the banners of their work unit or enterprise; students from across China; peasants from nearby rural regions; teachers, public servants and journalists.
Thousands of workers joined the Workers Federation. A steady stream of delegates from factories and work units came to its headquarters to collect literature and donate funds. By the end of May it had 150 full-time organisers in Tiananmen Square, had adopted a constitution, elected leadership committees, established a workers guard to protect the students, was operating a printing facility and had erected a public broadcasting system that each evening drew massive crowds to hear political speeches. A treatise distributed in that week sums up the political outlook they expressed:
“The tyranny of the corrupt officials is nothing short of extreme…The people will no longer believe the lies of the authorities for on our banners appear the words: science, democracy, freedom, human rights and rule by law… We have conscientiously documented the exploitation of the workers. The method of understanding exploitation is based on the method of analysis given in Marx’s Das Kapital… We were astonished to find that the ‘peoples public servants’ have devoured all surplus value created by the people’s blood and sweat. The total value of this exploitation comes to an amount unmatched in history! Such ruthlessness and replete with ‘Chinese characteristics’.” [7]
The document called for an investigation into the “material consumption and use of palatial retreats” by, among others, Deng Xiaoping, Zhao Ziyang, Li Peng, Chen Yun, Wan Li and Jiang Zemin—and their family members. “Their assets should be immediately frozen and subjected to the scrutiny of a National Peoples Investigative Committee,” it stated.
“The people have acquired political consciousness,” it concluded. “They have recognised that there are only two classes: the rulers and the ruled… and that the political movements of the last 40 years have served simply as a political means of oppressing the people.”
As a byproduct of the Beijing events, Workers Autonomous Federations formed in major cities around China, including Changsha, Shaoyang, Xiangtan, Hengyang and Yueyang.
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Martial law
Within the bureaucracy the mass entry of the working class into struggle ended the debate over whether or not to use force. On the evening of May 20, Premier Li Peng declared martial law and Zhao Ziyang was placed under house arrest. One hundred thousand soldiers from the Beijing Military Region were ordered into the city.
The working class met martial law with mass action. Over a million citizens of Beijing assembled in the city centre on May 21 to protect the hunger strike, and again on the following days.
Summoned by the Workers Federation, the student groups and other independent bodies, workers barricaded the streets of Beijing leading to the Square. Youth on motorbikes were formed into early warning sentries. Mobile “dare-to-die” squads were established to move quickly to problem areas. When troops entered the outskirts of the city on May 23, thousands of workers and students marched out to meet the troops and explain what was happening in the city.
According to one account of the day: “The martial law that Li Peng and his gang has issued has thus far been rendered as useless as a blank sheet of paper. The soldiers are being persuaded by excited people and students; some of the persuaders are choking with sobs, while some soldiers shed tears in return. Quite a number of soldiers have driven their trucks away.” By May 24 the Beijing military units had been completely withdrawn from the city. The government feared they would join the workers. Mass demonstrations were taking place across China in support of Beijing.
Within Beijing itself all visible government authority had disappeared. Students and workers took over directing traffic, co-ordinating essential services and protecting property from criminal elements—though even the Beijing pickpockets declared a sympathy strike with the students. Production virtually halted as workers stayed away from work to take part in mass rallies.
On May 25 the Workers Federation and student groups organised a political demonstration of close to one million workers. The insurrectionary tone of the slogans and sentiments of the workers’ organisation had become more clearly expressed. A statement issued on May 26 read:
“Our nation was created from the struggle and labour of we workers and all other mental and manual labourers. We are the rightful masters of this nation. We must be heard in national affairs. We absolutely must not allow this small band of degenerate scum of the nation and the working class to usurp our name and suppress the students, murder democracy and trample human rights.”
Another statement declared:
“The final struggle has arrived…We have seen that the fascist governments and Stalinist dictatorships spurned by hundreds of millions of people have not, and indeed will not, voluntarily withdraw from the historical stage… Storm this 20th century Bastille, this last stronghold of Stalinism!” [8]
By this time the student movement was wracked by infighting over how long to continue the occupation of Tiananmen. Many Beijing students had returned to their campuses after the declaration of martial law and their organisation proposed withdrawing from the Square, a decision initially supported by Chai Ling and only overturned by the intervention of student bodies from outside the capital.
With each passing day, more and more of China was being drawn into political struggles. The almost accidental leaders of the students were overwhelmed by the scope of what was unfolding. However courageous, these were not people who had prepared politically, or psychologically, to lead a revolution.
There is no question that the actions of students like Chai Ling and Wang Dan in launching the hunger strike on May 13 were a critical factor in subsequent events. Yet their political perspective was based on hopes that a compromise would be forthcoming from the Stalinist state. Instead, a bloody confrontation loomed.
Sharp tensions came to dominate relations between the Workers Federation and the student organisations in Tiananmen Square. The students correctly sensed that the dominance the working class and its social demands now exerted in the political movement made discussions with the regime impossible, yet they were unwilling to support the limited measures the Federation suggested to extend the anti-government movement. On May 28, as the army closed in on the city, the student bodies rejected a proposal by the Workers Federation for a national general strike call.
Instead the central demand advanced by the student movement was that an emergency National People’s Congress be held to discuss the student demands for political reforms. This was a body comprised entirely of top party bureaucrats, whose material interests were bound up with the ongoing suppression of the Chinese masses.
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Crisis of political perspective
For two weeks Beijing was in the hands of its citizens. The regime, however, did not sit on its hands. With the concessions of Zhao Ziyang failing to rein in the students, Deng Xiaoping used the time to reassemble the nerve and unity of the Stalinist state for a bloodbath against the Beijing workers. Some 280,000 troops of the 27th Army, a unit based in peasant provinces and totally loyal to Deng, moved to the capital, arriving on June 1.
Inexperienced politically and lacking a political perspective outside of opposition to the existing regime, the workers’ leaders advanced no alternative to, and deferred to, the student bodies. The workers of China knew in their life experience what they were against—Stalinism and capitalism—but they were not able to articulate any perspective for an alternative social order.
Decades of domination by Stalinism and the active suppression of genuine Marxism in China meant there was no revolutionary socialist, that is, Trotskyist, tendency in the working class. No organisation within the country could spontaneously advance the program that was implicit in the actions and sentiments of the Chinese working class—a political revolution to overthrow the Stalinist regime and introduce major reforms into the economy for the benefit of the working class.
Posed before the working class was the necessity to take political power through the establishment of a workers’ government and to extend its authority and influence throughout the country. A statement issued by the International Committee of the Fourth International, the world Trotskyist movement, on June 8 elaborated this perspective:
“The Chinese Stalinist bureaucracy has already proceeded far down the road of capitalist restoration and therefore the political revolution in China today will have major social implications, first and foremost the necessity for the working class and its revolutionary party is to expropriate the class of capitalists sponsored by the bureaucracy, together with the foreign multinationals…
“What remains of China’s planned economy must be reorganised from top to bottom… Production must be placed under the control of factory committees, freely elected by the workers, and the quality and pricing of commodities should be put in the hands of a democratically organised consumers’ cooperative.
“Such a political revolution…would create the greatest shock waves of social revolution throughout Asia and internationally. Breaking the Stalinist straight-jacket of ‘socialism in one country’ and linking up its forces to those of the workers of Asia and internationally in the common struggle to put an end to imperialism, the Chinese workers would create the real foundations for developing socialism in China as part of the development of world socialism.” [9]
The aftermath of Tiananmen Square
While defiant to the end, without an independent perspective it was only a question of time before the politically and physically disarmed workers of Beijing would confront the full brunt of state reaction.
The first tanks that entered Tiananmen Square on the morning of June 4 targeted and crushed the tent headquarters of the Workers Autonomous Federation, killing the 20 or more leaders still coordinating resistance to the military.
The military subjugation of the capital was the signal for a reign of terror throughout China. Spontaneous demonstrations that erupted across the country, as the news of Beijing spread, were dealt with in brutal fashion, with hundreds more workers and students killed.
Some 40,000 people were arrested in June and July alone, the majority being members or contacts of the Workers Federations. Dozens of workers were sentenced to death and executed, in some cases by public firing squads. Hundreds of workers remain in detention today. The repression extended to the deepest levels of Chinese society with all citizens of Beijing required to participate in “self-criticisms”, recounting their “mistakes” during April and May.
The majority of students were treated somewhat differently. The hunger strikers and several thousand students who had remained at the monument to the Heroes of the Revolution as the troops stormed through Beijing were negotiated with and permitted to return to their campuses physically unscathed. The majority of the student leaders were then smuggled into exile. Those students who were arrested were generally given relatively light sentences. Beijing University enrolments were cut for several years but then returned to normal.
The class content of the Tiananmen Square massacre is most graphically demonstrated however by the response of the western politicians, media and corporations. The wave of condemnation and revulsion expressed in June and July of 1989 soon gave way to the far more practical considerations of profit.
Once it was clear the Stalinist regime had stabilised the political situation, the demonstration that it would pursue its market reforms by utilising the most repressive measures against the working class was positively welcomed in the émigré Chinese business community and the major corporate boardrooms around the globe. Tiananmen Square was like a global advertisement for investment—in China, no opposition to exploitation and oppression is tolerated.
From 1990 on, investment flowed into China at exponential levels. In 1994 more investment entered the country than in the entire decade from 1979-1989.
The most literal example of the crocodile tears shed for the victims of Tiananmen came from the then Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke. He burst into tears on national television in 1989 at the scenes in Beijing. His departure from politics several years later saw him emerge as a leading consultant for corporate investment into China, fully exploiting his intimate personal ties to leading Stalinist officials.
With the working class subdued and a generation of young leaders killed, imprisoned or in exile, the regime has been able to accelerate the restoration of the capitalist market, relatively free of mass political opposition. The 1990s have seen the virtual completion of the processes initiated in 1979. The bulk of state-owned firms will have been restructured as private concerns or closed down by the end of next year. Processes well underway will soon see the majority of economic activity opened to foreign competition and ownership. The 1999 National People’s Congress elevated private property to equivalent status with state-owned industry. It was the final constitutional act of restoring the primacy of capitalist social relations and ending the fiction that China is some form of communist society.
A new upsurge of the Chinese working class against the new bourgeoisie is however inevitable and there are numerous social indicators that it is brewing. In this struggle workers will have to confront the same essential political issue that emerged in 1989—the necessity for an independent political perspective from that of the petty-bourgeois democrats. Courage and determination are not enough. A revolutionary socialist party must be built in the Chinese working class. Its basis is to be found in the heritage of Leon Trotsky and the International Committee of the Fourth International.
.
Notes:
[1] Beijing’s Unforgettable Spring, Liu Binyan and Xu Gang, describing events at the Xidan intersection, 2 km west of Tiananmen Square, pp. 59-60
[2] Beijing Diary, by Lu Yuan, p. 16
[3] Amnesty International Report, August 30, 1989
[4] The Deng Xiaoping Era: an inquiry into the fate of Chinese socialism 1978-1994, by Maurice Meisner, p. 315
[5] Chen Village: The recent history of a peasant community in Mao’s China, Anita Chan, Richard Madsen and Jonathon Unger, cited in The Deng Xaioping Era p. 316
[6] China’s Crisis, Liu Binyan, p. 79
[7] The Deng Xiaoping Era: an inquiry into the fate of Chinese socialism 1978-1994, by Maurice Meisner, p. 446
[8] Cited in Workers in the Tiananmen protests: The politics of the Beijing Workers Autonomous Federation, by Andrew G. Walder and Gong Xiaoxia, first published in the Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, No 29, Jan 1993
[9] “Victory to the Political Revolution in China!” Statement of the International Committee of the Fourth International, published in the Fourth Internationalmagazine, Vol 16 No 1-2, June 1989, p. 8
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The US Empire is in Decline
Krauthammer is right, but there’s no need to mourn the waning of the world’s most dangerous hegemon.
Neocon columnist Charles Krauthammer sees America’s decline in new pacts between China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin
I was shocked to find myself in almost perfect agreement today with a recent column by the neoconservative pundit Charles Krauthammer.
Usually Krauthammer has me groaning, but yesterday his column nailed it.
He was writing about what he correctly observes as the end of “American hegemony” in the global political sphere.
As Krauthammer lays this “grim” picture out, six years of President Obama’s weak-kneed foreign policy, “compounded by” his “proposed massive cuts in defense spending, down (sic) to pre-Pearl Harbor levels,” have allowed a revanchist Russia and a newly aggressive China to make “an open challenge to the post-Cold War, US-dominated world that Obama inherited and then weakened beyond imagining.”
Krauthammer cites as his main evidence of this “major alternation in the global balance of power” the deal just struck between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping, who, during a visit to Shanghai last week by the Russian leader, inked an agreement for Russia to sell some $400 billion worth of its natural gas to China over the next 30 years. The deal would include the building of a $70-billion pipeline from Russian gas fields in Siberia to China’s industrial heartland, and would “deflate” a threat made by the US and Europe during the current Ukrainian crisis to end Europe’s reliance on Russian gas.
Krauthammer also pointed to President Xi’s call for a new Asian region security system that would link China, Russia and (gasp) Iran — an arrangement which, if implemented, he warns could “mark the end of a quarter-century of unipolarity and … herald a return to a form of bipolarity — two global coalitions: one free, one not — though with communism dead, not as structurally rigid or ideologically dangerous as Cold War bipolarity. Not a fight to the finish, but a struggle nonetheless — for dominion and domination.”
Setting aside Krauthammer’s breathless horror at this new “bi-polar” global political environment, and his ideologically-blinded description of the US/NATO “side” as “free” as opposed to the Russia/China “side’s” being “not free” (and adding the observation that actually a $400-billion deal over 30 years is really not that big a thing, working out to just over $13 billion a year), there is much here that does accurately portray what is happening.
Missing from Krauthammer’s analysis, typically, is the history behind this development.
US global domination, which could be said to have begun with the collapse in the early 1990s of the former Soviet Union, was destined to be a short-lived affair. By 1990, the Soviet Union had been bankrupted by President Reagan’s massive military spending campaign, and the USSR’s political and economic implosion did leave the US, by default, as the world’s last and only “superpower,” but left unremarked was that this country’s massive military spending had also effectively hollowed out the US economy. And instead of turning inward at the end of the Cold War, and investing in a revitalization of America’s crumbling physical, social and educational infrastructure, which might have rectified things, the problem was instead made far worse by two more decades of a continuous war economy, driven by the very neoconservative ideology that Krauthammer still espouses.
Wars were launched: first the Persian Gulf War against Iraq in 1990-1 (which continued until the 2003 invasion of Iraq with the maintenance of “no-fly zones” over parts of Iraq), then the Bosnian and Kosovo wars in the mid and late ‘90s, followed by the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. And as if that was not enough, a fake “War on Terror” was launched to convince the gullible American public of the need for continued massive military spending.
Instead of shrinking the bloated US military, successive presidents — George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and finally Barack Obama — all kept increasing military spending to the point that this country under President Obama has been spending as much on its military as the rest of the world combined — well over $1 trillion a year when debt on the military budget and the costs of medical care for cashiered soldiers are added in. And to make things worse, the US has, since Korea, been losing its wars, or at best reaching embarrassing stalements. And that is hardly the kind of thing designed to instill fear in potential adversaries.
At the same time that the US empire was bankrupting itself through extravagant military spending, it has been relentlessly throwing its weight around everywhere in the world, subverting or trying to subvert democratically elected governments in places like Nicaragua, Panama, Grenada, Haiti and Venezuela, and even seeking to undermine governments in states like Russia, Ukraine and Iran.
Something had to give, and as Krauthammer correctly notes, something finally has given.
America’s bluff is being called.
Fed up with the clumsy bullying that characterizes American foreign and economic policy, angered by the imperial over-reach of America’s National Security Agency, and emboldened by the weakness of both the American dollar and America’s bloated, bureaucratic and over-stretched military (as evidenced by its inability to defeat minimally armed and trained patriotic forces in Afghanistan and Iraq), Russia and China, and perhaps Iran too, are realizing that they “don’t have to take it anymore.”
While Krauthammer didn’t mention it, even NATO, that Cold War relic that the US had been using as a fig leaf since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990 to cover its aggressive policy of encirclement and gradual subversion of Russia, is now showing signs of terminal collapse. The European public and their elected officials are angry at Edward Snowden’s revelations about massive NSA spying on its purported “allies.” Meanwhile, the latest effort to enlist Europe in a program of economic sanctions against Russia over its annexation of Crimea have fallen flat, with France refusing to stop selling advanced military equipment to Russia and with Germany balking at any serious economic sanctions against one of its largest trading partners.
Increasingly, Russia, China, Brazil and other large developing economies are separating themselves from the dollar-based global financial system, undermining the last mainstay of US hegemony — the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.
Krauthammer correctly sees the US in “retreat” and “decline” as a global power.
Where he goes wrong is in seeing this as “Obama’s choice.”
Obama really had no choice. The decline of America as global hegemon has been the result of choices made by Washington leaders dating back really to the 1960s and the disastrous war against the people of Vietnam, or perhaps even earlier, to the US-orchestrated Korean War.
History is replete with empires that crumbled under their own hubris and ambition, and the United States is no different.
The only real disagreement I have with Krauthammer is in his seeing this decline of US empire as a tragedy. Looking at the incredible death, destruction and grotesque waste of resources that can be directly attributed to the US and its imperialist program since the end of the Second World War, I can only see its demise as a positive thing.
Source URL: http://thiscantbehappening.net/node/2331
America, an Irresistible Force, Confronts China, an Immovable Object
By Michael Payne
Photo credit: U.S., China and the world by worldnewscurator.com
A tale of two countries: some years ago China and the U.S. were traveling down the same road, with America in the lead, when they came to a fork in the road. The U.S., saw the sign marked “military dominance”, and rushed down the left branch. China, after studying both options, traveled down the right branch marked “Economic supremacy.”
This tale accurately describes how China and America are rapidly heading in totally opposite directions, with two different objectives and two distinctly different strategies. China is using its resources to become the world’s #1 economic power while those of the U.S. remain largely concentrated on remaining the world’s military superpower.
What we have here is a growing confrontation between these two world powers and their opposite philosophies in critically important regions of the world, specifically, Eurasia and Central and South Asia. Now while this would appear to be a struggle for supremacy between China and the U.S. recent events are making it very clear that far more is involved.
There is another player in this geopolitical chess game. Russia has now joined with China, thus forming a very powerful alliance to resist the U.S.’s intentions in this resource rich region of the world. Either one of these countries would present the U.S. with a formidable challenge to achieving its objectives but, together, they could be considered an immovable obstacle.
If we think more deeply about what is going on and how this situation has reached this tenuous point, the reasons become quite clear. For some time now the U.S. has been attempting, with its NATO partners, to encircle Russia with its military power. And more recently it has also decided to follow that same strategy relative to China when President Obama initiated his Asian Pivot to begin the process of encircling China with military power. Good luck with that.
Just recently, reacting to the mounting influence of the U.S. in Ukraine affairs, Russia’s President Putin, without causing any military confrontation, greatly strengthened his country’s alliance with Crimea and, thereby, assured Russia’s continuing control over its strategic naval base at Sebastopol, as well as its access to the Black Sea and beyond. While this clever chess move was being made the U.S. and NATO could only stand by and watch.
So while the U.S. pursues its objective of encircling China and Russia with military power those two adversaries are reacting to these moves with their own counter-strategy, that is, encircling the U.S. interests across Eurasia and Central Asia with their growing economic power. They have no intention of challenging America with military power because they are not about to ignite a world war but they are doing it with the force of their economic power that they strongly believe is a far better strategy.
What we have here could be accurately described as: America, the irresistible force confronts China and Russia, two immovable objects. Now let’s take a look at how these two distinctly opposite geopolitical strategies are working and the probability of success for each.
Everything the U.S. does in these increasingly important regions of the world revolves around military power; from Afghanistan to Pakistan in the southern Asian region, to the alliance with NATO countries to the West and those in between. China, on the other hand, is concentrating on positive and constructive development projects in various countries, making friends, not enemies.
China is following a concrete plan to build, construct, and expand its economic presence all over the world and especially in these regions; some might refer to what they doing as building an economic empire. As a recent article in the Asian Times article states, “It’s building not one, but myriad Silk Roads, far-reaching webs of hi-speed railways, highways, pipelines, ports, and fiber-optic networks across huge parts of Eurasia. These include a Southeast Asian road, a Central Asian road, an Indian Ocean ‘maritime highway’ and even a high-speed rail line through Iran and Turkey reaching all the way to Germany.”
For those who are not familiar with the term Silk Road here’s a definition from thefreedictionary.com: “An ancient trade route between China and the Mediterranean Sea extending some 6,440 km (4,000 mi) and linking China with the Roman Empire. Marco Polo followed the route on his journey to Cathay.”
What China is doing, its relentless march to world economic supremacy, is reminiscent of a quote from an old horror movie when the really scary main character makes this statement, “Step by step, inch by inch.” That’s China, low key but relentless in advancing its economic agenda. Meanwhile the U.S. government goes around the world acting like a bull in a china shop, from one military confrontation to another, seemingly obsessed with spreading its military presence.
Here’s an article that indicates that China is now in the process of implementing its 12th Five Year Plan. Talk about planning ahead, China seems to be following a technique that has been commonly used in the corporate world called Management by Objectives, which is self-explanatory. Does America have a Five Year Plan? Well, based on this government’s reactive rather than proactive way of doing things, I would venture to say that such planning is non-existent.
Trying to encircle China and Russia with military power is most certainly a totally misguided plan and strategy which might be called biting off far more than you can chew. Or it might be like trying to wrestle a crocodile and an alligator at the same time. When in American history have we seen a foreign policy that is, by its very actions, not only helping to creating a close alliance between two adversaries but seems to be greatly strengthening it at every turn?
Russia and China are using their economic powers and growing mutual cooperation to convince numerous countries to side with them, enticing them with Russia’s massive energy resources and China’s developmental prowess; making these countries dependent upon them and, thereby, cementing relationships; and with every one of these steps they take they are diluting America’s influence in the region.
As the U.S. increases its efforts to try to intimidate China and Russia the alliance between them becomes stronger and stronger. Here’s a linkto an article which reports on a monumental agreement by which Russia will be supplying China with natural gas worth $400 billion over 30 years. This is but one of many such trade agreements to follow between China, Russia and the other members of the BRICS group which also includes India, Brazil and South Africa, all of which are intended to be conducted with currencies other than the U.S. dollar.
China is, unquestionably, on the rise; it has a clear vision for the future and it wisely uses its resources to strengthen its interests all over the world. America is caught up in a state of stagnation with a dying manufacturing sector, and a hollow, lifeless economy. The U.S. government no longer has a vision for the future; it cannot see the handwriting on the wall that says, “Stop”, you’re going the wrong way, reverse direction before it’s too late.
So what is the lesson to be learned in this confrontation between great powers? It’s simply this. In the short term military hubris may dominate but, in the longer term, economic supremacy will prevail.
—M.P.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A Powerful Long-term Alliance Between China and Russia Is Unnerving Washington
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A specter is haunting Washington, an unnerving vision of a Sino-Russian alliance wedded to an expansive symbiosis of trade and commerce across much of the Eurasian land mass — at the expense of the United States.
And no wonder Washington is anxious. That alliance is already a done deal in a variety of ways: through the BRICS group of emerging powers (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa); at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Asian counterweight to NATO; inside the G20 [4]; and via the 120-member-nation Non-Aligned Movement [5] (NAM). Trade and commerce are just part of the future bargain. Synergies in the development of new military technologies beckon as well. After Russia’s Star Wars-style, ultra-sophisticated S-500 [6] air defense anti-missile system comes online in 2018, Beijing is sure to want a version of it. Meanwhile, Russia is about to sell [7] dozens of state-of-the-art Sukhoi Su-35 jet fighters to the Chinese as Beijing and Moscow move to seal an aviation-industrial partnership.
This week should provide the first real fireworks in the celebration of a new Eurasian century-in-the-making when Russian President Vladimir Putin drops in on Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing. You remember “Pipelineistan [8],” all those crucial oil and gas pipelines crisscrossing Eurasia that make up the true circulatory system for the life of the region. Now, it looks like the ultimate Pipelineistan deal, worth $1 trillion and 10 years in the making, will be inked as well. In it, the giant, state-controlled Russian energy giant Gazprom will agree [9] to supply the giant state-controlled China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) with 3.75 billion cubic feet of liquefied natural gas a day for no less than 30 years, starting in 2018. That’s the equivalent of a quarter of Russia’s massive gas exports to all of Europe. China’s current daily gas demand is around 16 billion cubic feet a day, and imports account for 31.6% of total consumption.
Gazprom may still collect the bulk of its profits from Europe, but Asia could turn out to be its Everest. The company will use this mega-deal to boost investment [10] in Eastern Siberia and the whole region will be reconfigured as a privileged gas hub for Japan and South Korea as well. If you want to know why no key country in Asia has been willing to “isolate [11]” Russia in the midst of the Ukrainian crisis — and in defiance of the Obama administration — look no further than Pipelineistan.
Exit the Petrodollar, Enter the Gas-o-Yuan
And then, talking about anxiety in Washington, there’s the fate of the petrodollar to consider, or rather the “thermonuclear” possibility that Moscow and Beijing will agree on payment for the Gazprom-CNPC deal not in petrodollars but in Chinese yuan. One can hardly imagine a more tectonic shift, with Pipelineistan intersecting with a growing Sino-Russian political-economic-energy partnership. Along with it goes the future possibility of a push, led again by China and Russia, toward a new international reserve currency — actually a basket of currencies — that would supersede the dollar (at least in the optimistic dreams of BRICS members).
Right after the potentially game-changing Sino-Russian summit comes a BRICS summit in Brazil in July. That’s when a $100 billion BRICS development bank, announced in 2012, will officially be born as a potential alternative to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank as a source of project financing for the developing world.
More BRICS cooperation meant to bypass the dollar is reflected in the “Gas-o-yuan [12],” as in natural gas bought and paid for in Chinese currency. Gazprom is even considering marketing bonds in yuan as part of the financial planning for its expansion. Yuan-backed bonds are already trading in Hong Kong, Singapore, London, and most recently Frankfurt [13].
Nothing could be more sensible for the new Pipelineistan deal than to have it settled in yuan. Beijing would pay Gazprom in that currency (convertible into rubles); Gazprom would accumulate the yuan; and Russia would then buy myriad made-in-China goods and services in yuan convertible into rubles.
It’s common knowledge that banks in Hong Kong, from Standard Chartered to HSBC — as well as others closely linked to China via trade deals — have been diversifying into the yuan, which implies that it could become one of the de facto global reserve currencies even before it’s fully convertible. (Beijing is unofficially working for a fully convertible yuan by 2018.)
The Russia-China gas deal is inextricably tied up with the energy relationship between the European Union (EU) and Russia. After all, the bulk of Russia’s gross domestic product comes from oil and gas sales, as does much of its leverage in the Ukraine crisis. In turn, Germany depends on Russia for a hefty 30% of its natural gas supplies. Yet Washington’s geopolitical imperatives — spiced up with Polish hysteria — have meant pushing Brussels to find ways to “punish” Moscow in the future energy sphere (while not imperiling present day energy relationships).
There’s a consistent rumble in Brussels these days about the possible cancellation [14] of the projected 16 billion euro South Stream pipeline, whose construction is to start in June. On completion, it would pump yet more Russian natural gas to Europe — in this case, underneath the Black Sea (bypassing Ukraine) to Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovenia, Serbia, Croatia, Greece, Italy, and Austria.
Bulgaria, Hungary, and the Czech Republic have already made it clear that they are firmly opposed to any cancellation. And cancellation is probably not in the cards. After all, the only obvious alternative is Caspian Sea gas from Azerbaijan, and that isn’t likely to happen unless the EU can suddenly muster the will and funds for a crash schedule to construct the fabled Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline, conceived during the Clinton years expressly to bypass Russia and Iran.
In any case, Azerbaijan doesn’t have enough capacity to supply the levels of natural gas needed, and other actors like Kazakhstan, plagued with infrastructure problems, or unreliable Turkmenistan, which prefers to sell its gas to China, are already largely out of the picture. And don’t forget that South Stream, coupled with subsidiary energy projects, will create a lot of jobs and investment in many of the most economically devastated EU nations.
Nonetheless, such EU threats, however unrealistic, only serve to accelerate Russia’s increasing symbiosis with Asian markets. For Beijing especially, it’s a win-win situation. After all, between energy supplied across seas policed and controlled by the U.S. Navy and steady, stable land routes out of Siberia, it’s no contest.
Pick Your Own Silk Road
Of course, the U.S. dollar remains the top global reserve currency, involving 33% of global foreign exchange holdings at the end of 2013, according to the IMF. It was, however, at 55% in 2000. Nobody knows the percentage in yuan (and Beijing isn’t talking), but the IMF notes that reserves in “other currencies” in emerging markets have been up 400% since 2003.
The Fed is arguably monetizing [15] 70% of the U.S. government debt in an attempt to keep interest rates from heading skywards. Pentagon adviser Jim Rickards, as well as every Hong Kong-based banker, tends to believe that the Fed is bust (though they won’t say it on the record). No one can even imagine the extent of the possible future deluge the U.S. dollar might experience amid a $1.4 trillion Mount Ararat of financial derivatives. Don’t think that this is the death knell of Western capitalism, however, just the faltering of that reigning economic faith, neoliberalism, still the official ideology of the United States, the overwhelming majority of the European Union, and parts of Asia and South America.
As far as what might be called the “authoritarian neoliberalism” of the Middle Kingdom, what’s not to like at the moment? China has proven that there is a result-oriented alternative to the Western “democratic” capitalist model for nations aiming to be successful. It’s building not one, but myriad new Silk Roads [16], massive webs of high-speed railways, highways, pipelines, ports, and fiber optic networks across huge parts of Eurasia. These include a Southeast Asian road, a Central Asian road, an Indian Ocean “maritime highway” and even a high-speed rail line through Iran and Turkey reaching all the way to Germany.
In April, when President Xi Jinping visited the city of Duisburg on the Rhine River, with the largest inland harbor in the world and right in the heartland of Germany’s Ruhr steel industry, he made an audacious proposal: a new “economic Silk Road” should be built between China and Europe, on the basis of the Chongqing-Xinjiang-Europe railway, which already runs from China to Kazakhstan, then through Russia, Belarus, Poland, and finally Germany. That’s 15 days by train, 20 less than for cargo ships sailing from China’s eastern seaboard. Now that would represent the ultimate geopolitical earthquake in terms of integrating economic growth across Eurasia.
Keep in mind that, if no bubbles burst, China is about to become — and remain — the number one global economic power, a position it enjoyed for 18 of the past 20 centuries. But don’t tell London hagiographers; they still believe that U.S. hegemony will last, well, forever.
Take Me to Cold War 2.0
Despite recent serious financial struggles, the BRICS countries have been consciously working to become a counterforce to the original and — having tossed Russia out [17] in March — once again Group of 7, or G7. They are eager to create a new global architecture to replace the one first imposed in the wake of World War II, and they see themselves as a potential challenge to the exceptionalist and unipolar world that Washington imagines for our future (with itself as the global robocop and NATO as its robo-police force). Historian and imperialist cheerleader Ian Morris, in his book War! What is it Good For?, defines the U.S. as the ultimate “globocop” and “the last best hope of Earth.” If that globocop “wearies of its role,” he writes, “there is no plan B.”
Well, there is a plan BRICS — or so the BRICS nations would like to think, at least. And when the BRICS do act in this spirit on the global stage, they quickly conjure up a curious mix of fear, hysteria, and pugnaciousness in the Washington establishment. Take Christopher Hill as an example. The former assistant secretary of state for East Asia and U.S. ambassador to Iraq is now an advisor with the Albright Stonebridge Group, a consulting firm deeply connected to the White House and the State Department. When Russia was down and out, Hill used to dream of a hegemonic American “new world order.” Now that the ungrateful Russians have spurned [18] what “the West has been offering” — that is, “special status with NATO, a privileged relationship with the European Union, and partnership in international diplomatic endeavors” — they are, in his view, busy trying to revive the Soviet empire. Translation: if you’re not our vassals, you’re against us. Welcome to Cold War 2.0.
The Pentagon has its own version of this directed not so much at Russia as at China, which, its think tank on future warfare claims, is already at war [19] with Washington in a number of ways. So if it’s not apocalypse now, it’s Armageddon tomorrow. And it goes without saying that whatever’s going wrong, as the Obama administration very publicly “pivots” to Asia and the American media fills with talk [20] about a revival of Cold War-era “containment policy” in the Pacific, it’s all China’s fault.
Embedded in the mad dash toward Cold War 2.0 are some ludicrous facts-on-the-ground: the U.S. government, with $17.5 trillion in national debt and counting, is contemplating a financial showdown with Russia, the largest global energy producer and a major nuclear power, just as it’s also promoting an economically unsustainable military encirclement of its largest creditor, China.
Russia runs a sizeable trade surplus. Humongous Chinese banks will have no trouble helping Russian banks [21] out if Western funds dry up. In terms of inter-BRICS cooperation, few projects beat a $30 billion oil pipeline in the planning stages that will stretch [22] from Russia to India via Northwest China. Chinese companies are already eagerly discussing the possibility of taking part in the creation of a transport corridor [23]from Russia into Crimea, as well as an airport, shipyard, and liquid natural gas terminal there. And there’s another “thermonuclear” gambit in the making: the birth of a natural gas equivalent to the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries that would include Russia, Iran, and reportedly [24] disgruntled U.S. ally Qatar.
The (unstated) BRICS long-term plan involves the creation of an alternative economic system featuring a basket of gold-backed currencies that would bypass the present America-centric global financial system. (No wonder Russia and China are amassing as much gold as they can.) The euro — a sound currency backed by large liquid bond markets and huge gold reserves — would be welcomed in as well.
It’s no secret in Hong Kong that the Bank of China has been using a parallel SWIFT network to conduct every kind of trade with Tehran, which is under a heavy U.S. sanctions regime. With Washington wielding Visa and Mastercard as weapons in a growing Cold War-style economic campaign against Russia, Moscow is about to implement an alternative payment and credit card system not controlled by Western finance. An even easier route would be to adopt the Chinese Union Pay system [25], whose operations have already overtaken American Express in global volume.
I’m Just Pivoting With Myself
No amount of Obama administration “pivoting” to Asia to contain China (and threaten it with U.S. Navy control [26] of the energy sea lanes to that country) is likely to push Beijing far from its Deng Xiaoping-inspired, self-described “peaceful development [27]” strategy meant to turn it into a global powerhouse of trade. Nor are the forward deployment of U.S. or NATO troops in Eastern Europe or other [28] such Cold-War-ish acts [29] likely to deter Moscow from a careful balancing act: ensuring that Russia’s sphere of influence in Ukraine remains strong without compromising trade and commercial, as well as political, ties with the European Union — above all, with strategic partner Germany. This is Moscow’s Holy Grail; a free-trade zone [30] from Lisbon to Vladivostok, which (not by accident) is mirrored in China’s dream of a new Silk Road to Germany.
Increasingly wary of Washington, Berlin for its part abhors the notion of Europe being caught in the grips of a Cold War 2.0. German leaders have more important fish to fry, including trying to stabilize a wobbly EU while warding off an economic collapse in southern and central Europe and the advance of ever more extreme rightwing parties.
On the other side of the Atlantic, President Obama and his top officials show every sign of becoming entangled in their own pivoting — to Iran, to China, to Russia’s eastern borderlands, and (under the radar [31]) to Africa. The irony of all these military-first maneuvers is that they are actually helping Moscow, Tehran, and Beijing build up their own strategic depth in Eurasia and elsewhere, as reflected in Syria, or crucially in ever more energy deals [32]. They are also helping cement [33] the growing strategic partnership between China and Iran. The unrelenting Ministry of Truth narrative out of Washington about all these developments now carefully ignores the fact that, without Moscow, the “West” would never have sat down to discuss a final nuclear deal with Iran or gotten a chemical disarmament agreement out of Damascus.
When the disputes between China and its neighbors in the South China Sea and between that country and Japan over the Senkaku/Diaoyou islands meet the Ukraine crisis, the inevitable conclusion will be that both Russia and China consider their borderlands and sea lanes private property and aren’t going to take challenges quietly — be it via NATO expansion, U.S. military encirclement, or missile shields. Neither Beijing nor Moscow is bent on the usual form of imperialist expansion, despite the version of events now being fed to Western publics. Their “red lines” remain essentially defensive in nature, no matter the bluster sometimes involved in securing them.
Whatever Washington may want or fear or try to prevent, the facts on the ground suggest that, in the years ahead, Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran will only grow closer, slowly but surely creating a new geopolitical axis in Eurasia. Meanwhile, a discombobulated America seems to be aiding and abetting the deconstruction of its own unipolar world order, while offering the BRICS a genuine window of opportunity to try to change the rules of the game.
Russia and China in Pivot Mode
In Washington’s think-tank land, the conviction that the Obama administration should be focused on replaying the Cold War via a new version of containment policy to “limit the development of Russia as a hegemonic power” has taken hold. The recipe: weaponize the neighbors from the Baltic states to Azerbaijan to “contain” Russia. Cold War 2.0 is on because, from the point of view of Washington’s elites, the first one never really left town.
Yet as much as the U.S. may fight the emergence of a multipolar, multi-powered world, economic facts on the ground regularly point to such developments. The question remains: Will the decline of the hegemon be slow and reasonably dignified, or will the whole world be dragged down with it in what has been called “the Samson option”?
While we watch the spectacle unfold, with no end game in sight, keep in mind that a new force is growing in Eurasia, with the Sino-Russian strategic alliance threatening to dominate its heartland along with great stretches of its inner rim. Now, that’s a nightmare of Mackinderesque[34] proportions from Washington’s point of view. Think, for instance, of how Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national security adviser who became a mentor on global politics to President Obama, would see it.
In his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard, Brzezinski argued that “the struggle for global primacy [would] continue to be played” on the Eurasian “chessboard,” of which “Ukraine was a geopolitical pivot.” “If Moscow regains control over Ukraine,” he wrote at the time, Russia would “automatically regain the wherewithal to become a powerful imperial state, spanning Europe and Asia.”
That remains most of the rationale behind the American imperial containment policy — from Russia’s European “near abroad” to the South China Sea. Still, with no endgame in sight, keep your eye on Russia pivoting to Asia, China pivoting across the world, and the BRICS hard at work trying to bring about the new Eurasian Century.
PEPE ESCOBAR is a Brazilian investigative journalist. He initially became famous in Brazil during the 80s, writing cultural criticism for the Folha de São Paulo newspaper.
Escobar has worked as a foreign correspondent since 1985, living in Los Angeles, Paris, Milan, Singapore, Bangkok, and Hong Kong. He has focused on Central Asia and the Middle East since the late 1990s. He writes a column- The Roving Eye- for Asia Times Online, as well as regular pieces for Al Jazeera, and Tom Engelhardt‘s TomDispatch.com. His columns have been mirrored at Michael Moore.com, The Nation, and The Huffington Post.
On television, Escobar has commented on Russia’s RT network, Iran’s PressTV, Al Jazeera’s The Stream, and The Real News Network.
Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/world/powerful-long-term-alliance-between-china-and-russia-unnerving-washington
Russia and China Announce Joint Naval Drills as NATO Declares Russia an Enemy
01.May.2014 |
Source: SCG
Today NATO’s second in command, Alexander Vershbow, declared that Russia is now to be categorized as an enemy.
“Clearly the Russians have declared NATO as an adversary, so we have to begin to view Russia no longer as a partner but as more of an adversary than a partner,” said Alexander Vershbow, the deputy secretary-general of NATO.
This statement comes as China and Russia announced that they will be carrying out joint Naval drills in the South China Sea. This show of unity sends a message on multiple levels.
Last week the Obama administration vowed to defend Japan against China in their territorial dispute over the Senkaku islands.
China, is obviously not happy about that. Nor are they happy about Washington’s overall push to contain them militarily in the region. Though the Obama administration publicly denies that the recent drive to shore up alliances with China’s neighbors is geared towards containment, no one is fooled (especially not Beijing).
Russia’s show of military solidarity obviously can’t be separated from the Ukrainian crisis. This week China made a number of statements criticizing the latest round of ‘sanctions’ against Russia.
We believe that sanctions are inconducive to the solution of problems. On the contrary, they will escalate tensions,” China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said on Monday.
So if NATO has declared Russia to be an enemy, and the U.S. is openly provoking China by injecting itself into territorial disputes, and beefing up its military presence in the South China Sea, how long until we start hearing the official war mongering rhetoric expanded to encompass all parties in the ‘axis of evil’? Answer: ASAPE (As Soon As Politically Expedient).
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