JOE BIDEN claims a new cold war with China can be avoided.
Washington and Beijing have a responsibility to “manage our differences”, the US president says.
Fine words, and welcome, if the three-hour head to head between Biden and Xi Jinping has actually opened a path to greater co-operation.
We must hope so. China and the United States are the world’s largest economies, the world’s biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, the world leaders in scientific development.
Arresting global warming is one crucial area where it is difficult to see how progress can be made unless the breakdown in relations between Washington and Beijing is reversed.
But given the barrage of misinformation that substitutes for fact-based assessments of China across the West, we need to take Biden’s description of the cold war with a pinch of salt.
The narrative pushed openly by the Biden administration and parroted by the gormless war hawks who lead Britain’s Conservative and Labour parties is that the democratic West faces an existential threat from rising “authoritarian powers,” notably China and Russia.
China is described as authoritarian, aggressive and getting worse. Xi is said to have turned his back on the “opening up” policies of his predecessors and to lead a China that is “increasingly isolated”, in the words of the BBC.
The purpose of these reports is to convince us that worsening relations with China are China’s fault. This is not true.
Western media has attacked every Chinese administration since it became clear economic reforms were never intended to lead to Western-style market primacy — when Hu Jintao retired a decade ago pundits were bewailing China’s “lost decade” under his leadership since it had still not dispensed with the dominant role of public ownership (it still hasn’t).
As for China’s supposed isolationist turn, we must distinguish between Covid lockdown policies designed to protect public health — and which have done so far more effectively than any Western government — and the actual engagement of China with other countries.
Xi’s “isolated” regime has seen the Belt & Road project eclipse the World Bank as the biggest source of development credit worldwide. China is the biggest trading partner of a majority of nations.
“Isolation” is shorthand for trade decoupling with the West, not the world — but even that is misrepresented.
The aggression has all been one way, with the US and its allies slapping sanctions on Beijing in a bid to stymie its development, most recently through a near-total ban on the export of computer chip components to China. China — despite the ability to hit back hard given its dominance of key resources like rare earths — has tried to maintain trade ties wherever possible.
US policy has created the cold war. It is the product of an effort to maintain the hegemony of Washington and the Washington consensus — an international economic pecking order no socialist should support.
If China’s rise is a threat to “the West,” it is not that it threatens our freedoms (unlike our own governments) but the globally privileged position of US-aligned capital and the permanent subordination of a super-exploited global South.
This is no doubt why Biden felt able to rail against the “China threat” at the G7 summit of rich countries in June but has to tone down the rhetoric at the G20, where developing countries have a voice.
The lesson is clear. Support for the new cold war on China is contrary to everything the left stands for — it’s a threat to peace and a defence of a grossly unjust world order.
And that means resisting everything the new cold war entails — from higher military spending to the paranoid crackdown on cultural bodies like the Confucius Institutes.
A serious socialist left should neither accept nor ignore the normalisation of anti-China aggression. It serves the interests of our ruling class — and undermines our own.
