Strikes spreading in China

By John Chan.wsws.org

Militant strikes have continued to spread in China, leading to violent clashes with police on several occasions over the past week.

According to the Hong Kong-based Oriental Daily, last weekend 4,000 workers at the Sanyo Electric plant in Shenzhen protested over the lack of compensation and job security after a merger with Panasonic Corp this month. The plant is a Sino-Japanese joint venture.

Employees were not told about the takeover until late last week. No compensation offer was made for their years working under the previous employer. This in turn affected their pensions and medical benefits. Workers pointed out that when Sanyo Motors, as well as the nearby Siemens factory, were taken over, employees were compensated for their years of service before being reemployed by the new owners.

Sanyo Electric workers demanded a similar deal. After talks with management and local officials broke down, workers took to the streets in protest, causing a major traffic jam. Riot police and security guards were deployed, leading to clashes in which several workers were injured and four arrested.

A more explosive strike by 2,000 workers erupted last Friday at a factory in Jiangxi province owned by Changhe Auto, a subsidiary of Chang’an Auto. According to the local Jingdezhen Daily, Changhe Auto—a joint-venture with Japan’s Suzuki—planned to transfer its productive assets to Chang’an-Mazda. The decision would end production at Changhe Auto, with no option for new jobs for the employees.

Chang’an is one of China’s big four automotive companies. It produced 1.83 million vehicles last year and has manufacturing bases in Malaysia, Vietnam, US, Mexico, Iran and Egypt. Like other major state-owned joint companies, it is listed on stock markets and participates in joint-ventures with Western and Japanese multinationals.

The restructuring of Chang’an is part of an industrial consolidation encouraged by the Chinese government and driven by a slowing auto market. After a massive expansion of the industry in China over the past decade, in which it overtook the US as the world’s largest automaker and market, auto sales grew by just 2.5 percent in 2011.

Angered by the plant closure and low monthly wages of just 1,700 yuan ($261) a month, Chang’an employees stopped work and stormed management’s offices. According to online accounts by workers, the general manager was arrogant and was driven off by furious strikers. Four hundred workers took to the streets and blocked traffic for four hours. They announced plans to take a collective petition to Beijing before the Chinese New Year next week.

Paramilitary police were deployed against workers protesting outside the plant last Sunday. (Click here to see the confrontation.)

Significantly, Chang’an workers have begun to direct their anger not only against the employer but also the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime. One worker declared online: “People of the whole country wield their fists to crush Zhongnanhai”—the central CCP headquarters in Beijing. Another wrote: “Everyone come for a strike! … Everyone come for an insurrection! Overthrow the dictatorship of the Chinese Communist Party! Overthrow the bureaucratic and privileged clique!”

Fearing the unrest could spiral out of control, the Jiangxi provincial authorities intervened to promise workers that the plant would be saved, even if the provincial government had to buy it. The assurance reportedly ended the strike as of yesterday.

Last Thursday, according to the Hong Kong-based China Labour Bulletin, more than 1,000 workers at a Foxconn-owned plant in Yantai, Shandong province, stopped work over the lack of equal wages for the same jobs. One young worker at the plant explained that Foxconn had announced that employees who joined the company before February 28 last year, would receive an increased monthly wage of 1,750 yuan ($268), while those employed later would receive 1,600 yuan and the new recruits would get 1,350 yuan. Some 80,000 workers work at the plant.

This was the second protest in a week at Foxconn plants. Hundreds of workers at the company’s Wuhan sweatshop had threatened a collective suicide over low wages and unbearable labour conditions. (See: “Foxconn workers threaten suicide protest in China”)

In recent weeks, strikes have continued to erupt in China, driven by falling export orders and a slowing economy, which have forced employers to step up attacks on the already low wages, poor conditions and jobs.

Last Wednesday, over 1,000 workers at Hong Kong-owned Creative Master at Dongguan in Guangdong province staged a protest over the sudden closure of the factory. The owners fled without paying outstanding wages. Workers held a street march with banners demanding the “heartless bosses” pay them for the Chinese New Year. Fearing an escalating protest, the local authorities promised to pay two months wages to the workers, and to hunt down the employers.

Creative Master was once the world’s largest contract manufacturer of metal toy cars for multinationals such as Mattel, PMA and Hornby, with 10 factories and 10,000 workers. The closure of the Dongguan factory—the company’s last—is an indication of the impact of the worsening world economic crisis on China’s export industries.

On January 4-5, around 1,000 workers at Wuxi Little Swan Co Ltd in Jiangsu province—the world’s third largest washing machine manufacturer—also staged a strike against the axing of 40 percent of the workforce, and cutbacks to wages and benefits. The firm has just been taken over by Midea, an emerging Chinese multinational, as part of the consolidation of the home appliances industry.

The unrest has spread to shipyard workers. On January 2, hundreds of workers at China’s seventh largest shipbuilder, Fujian Crown Ocean Shipbuilding Industry, blocked local traffic for hours. Authorities deployed armed police to disperse the protest. Workers took to the streets to demand three months of unpaid wages.

The National Development and Reform Commission indicated that new shipbuilding orders fell by 47.3 percent in the first 11 months of 2011 compared with a year earlier. This is another sharp indicator of declining global trade and the resulting economic slowdown that is impacting on China and propelling the working class into struggle.

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The Grim Implications of Obama’s New Defense Plan

Pentagon’s New Strategic Guidance

by JOSEPH GERSON

In early January the Obama Administration released the Pentagon’s new Guidance, Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21^st Century Defense. It is clearly designed less to cut U.S. military spending than to reorder Pentagon priorities to ensure full spectrum dominance (dominating any nation, anywhere, at any time, at any level of force) for the first decades of the 21^st century. As President Obama himself said, after the near-doubling of military spending during the Bush era, the Guidance will slow the growth of military spending, “but…it will still grow:, in fact by 4% in the coming year.”

The new doctrine places China and Iran at the center of U.S. “security” concerns. It thus prioritizes expansion of U.S. war making capacities in Asia and the Pacific and Indian Oceans, by “rebalanc[ing] toward the Asia-Pacific region…empahsiz[ing] our existing alliances.” This means Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and now Australia and India as the U.S. “pivots” from Iraq and Afghanistan to the heartland of the 21^st century global economy, Asia and the Pacific. The implications for Okinawa and Japan should be clear: Washington will be doing all that it can to ensure that Japan remains its unsinkable aircraft carrier, including pressing for construction of the new air base in Henoko.

Russia “remains important,” but the priorities are ensuring that China’s rise occurs within the post-WWII global systems dominated by the West and Japan. The Iran focus is to ensure that Tehran’s ambitions do not jeopardize the West’s neo-colonial control of Middle East oil essential to their economies and militaries.

China and Iran are thus the primary targets of: weapons systems to be developed; of expanded U.S. military alliances, bases, access agreements and an increased tempo of military exercises; as well as advanced cyber and space war capabilities.

Related to Middle East oil, the Guidance explicitly stresses NATO’s out of area (read Global South) responsibilities “in this resource-constrained era.” This is to be reinforced by the counter-terrorist operations on a global scale, including increased emphasis on covert Special Forces operations. And, among the many fault-lines of the Guidance is the emphasis given to financial and war-fighting “burden-sharing” by NATO and other U.S. allies, goals unlikely to be achieved midst Europe’s economic meltdown.

The Guidance signals that the President’s National Security Council is currently conducting a nuclear posture review that could at least minimally reduce the roles of nuclear weapons in U.S. war fighting doctrines and the numbers of weapons in the U.S. arsenal in a second Obama administration. This needs to be seen in the contexts of the President’s Prague speech, as well as the political extortion that led him to embrace the $185 billion increase in spending for new nuclear weapons and delivery systems over the next decade in order to win New START Treaty ratification.

Dr. Joseph Gerson is Disarmament Coordinator of the American Friends Service Committee and Director of the AFSC’s Peace and Economic Security Program in New England.

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Obama’s new war doctrine fuels debate in China

By John Chan, WSWS.ORG

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US prepares for war against China

PETER SYMONDS, WSWS.ORG

The USS George Washington, one of the globetrotting carriers deployed by the American government in all latitudes to project force and intimidate other nations. We are today the main purveyors of war and instability in the world.

The Pentagon’s new strategic guidance, “Sustaining US Global Leadership: Priorities for 21^st Century Defence”, released last week places China squarely at the centre of American war planning. It formalises the shift in American foreign and military policy from the Middle East to Asia that has been underway since President Obama took office.

“US economic and security interests,” the document declares, “are inextricably linked to developments in the arc extending from the Western Pacific and East Asia into the Indian Ocean and South” signifying that “we will of necessity rebalance toward the Asia Pacific region.” It calls for an expansion of the network of US military alliances and partnerships, specifically naming India as “a regional economic anchor and provider of security in the broader Indian Ocean region.”

China is the only country named as a threat to American interests, with a call for “greater clarity of its strategic intentions in order to avoid causing friction in the region.” The document declares that the US in conjunction with its allies will “protect freedom of access throughout the global commons.” Under the rubric of “freedom of navigation”, the US has already greatly heightened tensions in the South China Sea by challenging China’s maritime claims in these strategic waters.

The Pentagon’s military reorientation to Asia goes hand-in-hand with an aggressive US diplomatic offensive to undercut growing Chinese economic and political influence throughout Asia and internationally. Powerful sections of the US political and foreign policy establishment backed Obama for the presidency in 2008 out of deep concern that China had gained while the US was mired in the Bush administration’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

These sentiments were voiced in an essay last November entitled “Reorienting America” by Richard Haass, President of the Council on Foreign Relations. He warned that the US had “become preoccupied with the Middle East… and had not paid adequate attention to East Asia and the Pacific, where much of the twenty first century’s history will be written.” Welcoming the “rediscovery of Asia” under Obama, Haass declared that it was “difficult to exaggerate the region’s economic importance”, adding that the US had to ensure “China is never tempted to use its growing power coercively.”

Initially, in the midst of the 2008/09 global financial crisis, the Obama administration was compelled to tread softly with China—the world’s largest holder of US bonds. However, the US rapidly shifted onto the offensive on all fronts. In July 2009, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared at an Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit that the US was “back in South East Asia.”

At an ASEAN meeting the following year, Clinton deliberately inflamed tensions with China by declaring that the US had “a national interest” in the South China Sea and was prepared to mediate territorial disputes between ASEAN members and China. The Chinese foreign minister reacted by branding the remarks as “virtually an attack on China.” Encouraged by the US, the Philippines and Vietnam have aggressively asserted their claims in the South China Sea, provoking a series of conflicts.

Over the past two years, the US has steadily strengthened its military alliances and ties throughout the Indo-Pacific region, especially with Japan, India and Australia. It has provided warships to the Philippines, held joint exercises with Vietnam, based new littoral combat ships in Singapore, announced a huge new weapons sale to Taiwan and lifted the ban on US cooperation with Indonesia’s notorious Kopassus special forces. President Obama visited Australia last November and announced the positioning of 2,500 Marines in the northern city of Darwin, as well as the more extensive use of Australian naval and air bases.

Central to US military strategy is naval dominance over key “choke points” through South East Asia, above all the Malacca Strait, through which China imports vital energy and raw materials from the Middle East and Africa. “Freedom of navigation” for American warships through these strategic waterways also means the ability of the US navy to blockade China and to bring the Chinese economy to its knees. In its 2006 Quadrennial Defence Review, the Pentagon foreshadowed a shift away from the Atlantic, with the allocation of at least six aircraft carriers and 60 percent of America’s submarines to the Pacific.

On the economic front, the Obama administration has repeatedly demanded that China revalue the yuan against the US dollar—a move that would wipe out significant sections of China’s export industries. At the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in November, Obama announced a new trading bloc, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, aimed at forcing Beijing to accept US trade terms. US military actions also have a deliberate economic impact: the NATO war on Libya and the mounting US threats against Iran have undermined China’s investments and energy supplies.

The driving force for this US confrontation with China is the relative economic decline of American imperialism, which is determined to prevent the rise of a potential strategic rival. The Pentagon’s latest strategic guidance calls for the maintenance of the present “rules-based international order” but that signifies a continuation of a global order dominated by the US, in which the Pacific Ocean remains “an American lake”, China is hemmed in by a network of US military alliances, and Beijing’s economic and strategic interests are subordinate to Washington’s.

The danger of the world sliding into a catastrophic global conflict centred between the US and China does not arise out of the subjective intentions of individual political leaders, but from the geo-political competition fueled by the deepening global economic crisis. The US is recklessly using its military might to undermine its rivals and force them to bear the burden of the economic breakdown. It necessarily comes into conflict with China, which is upsetting the present international order as it seeks to secure raw materials and energy around the globe. Any number of flash points—North Korea, Taiwan, the South China Sea, to name just three—can become the trigger for war.

The only social force capable of preventing a new world war is the international working class through the abolition of its underlying cause—the capitalist system and its outmoded division of the world into rival nation states—and the establishment of a world-planned socialist economy.

Peter Symonds writes for the World Socialist Website, an offshoot of SEP, and member of the International Committee of the Fourth International (a Trotskyist organization).

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Clinton in Burma: Another US move against China

By Peter Symonds , WSWS.ORG

The three-day visit by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Burma (Myanmar) this week featured prominent meetings with opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi and a great deal of hypocritical hype about American support for “democratic rights.” The real aim of Clinton’s visit, however, was to further the Obama administration’s concerted campaign to undermine the influence of China throughout Asia.

The trip—the first by a US Secretary of State for more than 50 years—was announced just two weeks ago at the East Asian Summit, where Obama intensified pressure on China over disputes in the South China Sea. Obama was determined to seize on signs that the Burmese junta was seeking an accommodation with the US to loosen the regime’s close economic and strategic ties with Beijing.

In pointed comments before arriving in Burma, Clinton told an aid conference that developing countries should be “smart shoppers” and be wary of taking assistance from donors—like China—that were more interested “in extracting your resources, than in building your capacity.” The message was obviously addressed to Burma, among others, which is heavily dependent on Chinese economic aid and investment.

Clinton explained that she had come to “test the true intentions” of the junta and would make no significant concessions by Washington. She met with Burmese President Thein Sein on Thursday in the country’s artificial new capital of Naypyidaw, warning that recent political steps, while welcome, were “just a beginning.” Over the past year, the regime has released Suu Kyi from house arrest, handed nominal power to a civilian president and permitted Suu Kyi and her opposition National League for Democracy (NLD) to run in upcoming by-elections.

The Burmese government is anxious to reach a rapprochement with Washington that would ease its heavy dependence on Beijing, end Western sanctions and allow the transformation of the country into a new cheap labour platform. Thein Sein described Clinton’s visit as “a historic milestone” that he hoped would open a “new chapter in relations.”

In comments reported in Time, presidential political adviser Nay Zin Latt pointed to some of the junta’s motivations. “Before, whether we liked it or not, we had to take what China had to offer. When sanctions are lifted, it will be better for everyone in Myanmar,” he said.

An Asia Times article entitled “China embrace too strong for Naypyidaw” traces the regime’s shifting orientation back to a power struggle that took place in 2004 when then prime minister Khin Nyunt, regarded as “China’s man” was removed on corruption charges. It pointed to Chinese anger in 2009 over the Burmese army’s treatment of Chinese nationals inside northern Burma and to a recent decision to shelve a major Chinese-funded dam project.

Despite these tensions, the Burmese regime wants to keep Beijing on side. On Monday, prior to Clinton’s arrival, the country’s top general, Min Aung Hlaing, went to Beijing to reassure top Chinese political and military leaders of the junta’s continuing collaboration. Beijing has invested considerable resources in fostering an economic and strategic relationship that provides China with raw materials and direct access to the Indian Ocean.

China has begun energy pipelines through Burma to southern China as part of Beijing’s efforts to limit its reliance on the Malacca Strait to import oil from the Middle East and Africa. The strategy is aimed at countering Pentagon plans to control key “choke points” such as the Malacca Strait and thus have the ability to impose a naval blockade on China.

Speaking on Chinese Central Television, academic Gao Zugui highlighted Beijing’s fears, saying: “The US wants to strengthen relations with lower Mekong countries like Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos. We can see this intention is strong, and it is very clearly targetting China.”

Burmese presidential adviser Nay Zin Latt also pointed to events in the Middle East as another motivation for improving relations with the US. “We do not want an Arab Spring here,” he said. The regime is concerned not only about the prospects of wide scale anti-government protests, which it has ruthlessly suppressed in the past, but also about the way in which the US exploited social unrest in Libya to intervene militarily to install a pro-American client regime.

Clinton arrived in Burma with a list of demands, including greater political freedom for the bourgeois opposition led by Suu Kyi; an ending of the protracted conflicts with the country’s ethnic minorities; and inspections of the country’s limited nuclear program by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

In return, Clinton offered very little. “We are prepared to go further if the reforms maintain momentum. But history teaches us to be cautious,” she said, adding that “we are not ready to discuss” lifting sanctions. Nor is the US proposing to establish full diplomatic relations with Burma. Clinton indicated only that the US would no longer block financing from international institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund and will support the expansion of UN development grants for health care and small businesses.

Significantly, Clinton invited Burma to join the Lower Mekong Initiative as a means of further loosening its ties to Beijing. The grouping, which includes Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam, was created by Washington in 2009 as a means of exerting a greater regional influence. The choice of name was quite deliberate—the “lower” Mekong region by definition excluded the “upper” Mekong inside China. The US is hoping to exploit grievances over China, including the impact of Chinese dam projects on the Mekong River.

Clinton also suggested that the US and Burma collaborate in the recovering the remains of about 600 soldiers who died in the country during World War II. The proposal is similar to the joint US activities in Vietnam to locate missing American soldiers. It provides a convenient pretext for establishing direct contact between the Burmese and American military.

Clinton met twice with opposition leader Suu Kyi on Thursday and Friday in Rangoon. The Obama administration is collaborating closely with the Burmese opposition as it seeks to fashion a regime more closely aligned with American interests. Obama rang Suu Kyi from Bali two weeks ago just prior to announcing Clinton’s visit.

Suu Kyi has endorsed the US strategy in its entirety, again demonstrating that the Burmese opposition is not motivated by concerns about the democratic rights of ordinary working people. Rather Suu Kyi represents sections of the Burmese ruling elite who have been marginalised by decades of military rule and are pushing for close ties with Western powers and an opening up of the country to foreign investment.

Having boycotted the junta’s sham elections last year, Suu Kyi has now indicated that she and the NLD will stand in by-elections despite their anti-democratic character. In a video conference with the Council on Foreign Relations, Suu Kyi declared that she trusted President Thein Sein, a former general and longstanding junta apparatchik.

Suu Kyi is hoping to leverage US support to reach an arrangement with the junta that will allow the NLD to have a greater political say and give more economic opportunities to the business layers that support the opposition. Like the junta itself, Suu Kyi has expressed concern that there should be no “Arab Spring” in Burma—that is, no mass protests by the working class and rural masses.

A Wall Street Journal article entitled “Firms see Myanmar as next frontier” pointed to the benefits anticipated by major corporations from any economic opening up of the country. Business delegations are already beginning to flow into Burma keen to exploit its potential markets and rich natural resources, including gas and oil. The article noted Burma’s advantages as a cheap labour platform with “low manufacturing wages”, an intellectual class that speaks English and a legal system rooted in British common law.

While economic considerations are clearly a motivation, the primary aim of the Obama administration is to undercut China’s relations with Burma as it seeks to develop anti-China alliances throughout the region.

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