April 2023

Once again on the Chinese question
Correspondence with the Socialists of South Africa

From Shaheed of WIVL (South Africa) - April 9, 2023

Dear FLTI Committee
Could you send us your latest analysis on China, as some of the local groups are starting to raise the question that it is imperialist?
Greetings comrades.
Shahed Mohamed
WIVL

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Answer to Shaheed from WIVL (South Africa) on China

April 11, 2023

Comrade Shaheed,

We have read your note asking for our views on the current situation in China. Not only in Africa, but also internationally, very many left currents coming from the former Trotskyist movement, affirm that China has become a "new imperialist country", while the old Stalinist currents, today again "in fashion", continue to see it as a "market socialism" and, together with the Russia of the butcher Putin, a focus of "anti-imperialist struggle". It is clear that all those who call themselves "Putin's friends", like those in the Communist Party and other Stalinists in South Africa and throughout Africa, Latin America and the Pacific, are well and truly servants of the IMF and the US imperialist transnational corporations.

Surely you remember that we together produced a pamphlet on China in polemics with the US HWRS and the New Zealand CWG which we jointly elaborated at an FLTI Congress in 2010. There we defined the key questions of what is still our position, also expressed in our assessment of the fall of the workers' states in '89: after the imposition of capitalist restoration, both China and Russia were left as relatively independent capitalist countries, which gave fresh blood to the imperialist capitalist world market. But that blood has now run out and imperialism, after successive crises and crashes, is looking for new markets to survive, as the old ones have shrunk, and new colonies and semi-colonies to throw its crisis at.

As the last decades have shown, imposing capitalist restoration in the former workers' states was not enough for imperialism. Since the crash of 2008, there has been a brutal open offensive by the US in dispute with Maastricht Europe to take over these new markets, trying to recolonize China and Russia for good, while the European glacier nations, Georgia, the Caucasus, the former Soviet Muslim republics, Vietnam and lately also Cuba are already in the process of colonization.

Our positions on China have been set out in different documents and periodicals that we published after the brochure that we jointly issued in 2010.

Here we are sending you, first of all, our positions on the policy of US imperialism during the Trump administration. His trade war against Russia and China in particular, led to the closure of the markets and a harsh economic war.

We enclose herewith:

- Statement of November 2016 entitled "US imperialist pirates dress up as Trump".

- July 2018 statement entitled "Europe and the US: between economic bankruptcy, trade war and class war".

- Our discussions with the JRCL-RMF Japan, published in December 2019, where together with them we addressed the Chinese question and made contact with the Jasic Workers and Students Support Committee.

Today in the war in Ukraine it is clear that the USA has handed over its pawn for Putin to destroy it without Putin being able to win the war. The aim of the US is to wear down Moscow and to leave Ukraine divided and crushed in order to colonize it definitively and then be able to advance on Russia.

This is an expression of the aggressiveness with which American imperialism is fighting relentlessly for its crisis-ridden control of the world market. The US has even broken the living space that the Franco-German axis had conquered from Portugal to the Russian steppes, where it had gained an enormous source of raw materials for its production and a division of labor throughout Europe, articulated around the Maastricht economy.

The race today is for Russia and for China: for Russia's sources of raw materials and for the huge internal market built around the huge imperialist investments in China and the super-exploitation of its working class, guaranteed by a rapacious and counter-revolutionary new bourgeoisie, the real enslavers of its proletariat on behalf of the imperialist capitalist world economy.

There is no doubt that in this new colonizing offensive of bankrupt imperialism, vassal imperialist powers will also be created.

Imperialism is parasitism. Already in successive world crisis, it has come to light that the capitalists have spent profits that human labor has not yet produced, flooding the world and the banks with derivative values unsupported by production. The global crash is here. It is spiraling around the planet. It is about  the US, Maastricht and Japan financial capital dumping its crisis on the whole world. 

The US military outrages in Taiwan show that the gunboats are already part of the "trade negotiations" with China. The war in Ukraine anticipates what may happen in Taiwan.

War is the biggest business on the planet and the decisive economic factor of this age. The development of destructive forces pushes more and more towards the recolonization of China and Russia, with the wars that this brings. Therefore, the way forward is either fascism and war or socialist revolution.

We have developed these questions in several documents and statements. So we are also sending you a Dossier that we published on 13 March 2020, entitled "Towards a depression of the world economy?"
Moreover, in our last book Ukraine at War, we have developed this aspect in the chapter with the conclusions on this European war, which is nothing but a link in the inter-imperialist disputes to also go for China. We refer to chapter IX of this work, which we are also enclosing in English.

With these materials, you will be able to follow our current position on the Chinese question, which reflect the evolution of our positions since the pamphlet we jointly produced in 2010.

China today

In all these materials that we are sending you, you will be able to see that there we define a more precise characterization of the different moments of crisis and China's position in the world division of labor: from the exporting China - which with its trade surplus sustained the deficit of the US treasury - to the struggle of imperialism to turn this situation around and, as we have already said, to take over its internal market, with the sending of its banks for opening up China's financial market or by encircling it and imposing tariffs on its production, as Trump did during his administration.

It is clear that China's situation today, as demonstrated by the Evergrande crisis and the bursting of the real estate bubble in 2021, is one of economic and financial asphyxiation. This has forced China to divest itself of US bonds in order to obtain cheap raw materials from around the world and at the same time to initiate a plan to build free trade zones in order to activate its internal market and offer it for new capitalist projects. This at a time when big capital, and the US in particular, is beginning to relocate its companies to India, Malaysia, Vietnam, Indochina, the Philippines, etc.

In order to get out of this encirclement, China today has an aggressive trade policy. We insist, without cheap raw materials, it loses its domestic market. Therefore, it enters Latin America and Africa like an erupting volcano to buy minerals, but it does so with cash, as a big trading partner, much like England at the beginning of the 19th century.

The famous yuan loans that China makes to bankrupt countries in order to trade are for the sum of 150 billion dollars, backed by US Treasury bonds in its Central Bank. This is the conclusion of an encircled China: having bought for decades overvalued US bonds to finance its deficit it is now selling them at a lower value, to get raw materials so that the imperialist transnationals do not go away... Japan has already said that the business is good for it and that it will not leave China, while France has proclaimed to the four corners that it will not remain submissive to the US in its encirclement of China.

China is encircled, including by the US from its island of Taiwan, as we have already said. The US is forcing China as it did in the last century, into an arms race, including an aerospace arms race, in an attempt to break it economically, as well as Russia itself.

Biden has even shown himself to be doubling down on Trump's trade war and threatens to take it into the military arena.

Our characterization of China today is that, like Russia, they inherited the old gains of the former workers' states which are in the hands of strong native bourgeoisies, associated and totally imbricated with imperialism in their business, on which they depend in the world-economy. In the midst of the world crisis, imperialism is after them and they are resisting to be recolonized. The US in particular does not yet find the strength in its proletariat to go for higher offensives, although the campaign of demonization of China within the US gives it a certain basis for attacks, including military attacks. The encirclement of Russia with the NATO countries is the gun to the head that the US uses in order to surrender Moscow.

China and Russia, then, are capitalist countries in a state of transition. Either the struggle for socialist revolution and the restoration of the dictatorship of the proletariat under revolutionary forms returns there, or if they continue to be dependent on the world economy, as is happening now, they will be cornered, encircled by imperialism and in the future, colonized.

The cowardly native bourgeoisies of Russia and China have long been indirect agents and junior partners of imperialism with which they are not and will never be willing to break off their deals, let alone rely on any mobilization of the working class and poor peasants to "defend their sovereignty". It is they who are the enslavers of the Russian and Chinese working class and the peoples oppressed by the jackal Putin.

The definition of this historical process will not be reached peacefully, but through wars that will bring civilization to the brink of barbarism. Though, the last word has not been said. The working class has by no means been taken out of the picture and the revolution is once again the protagonist of this third decade of the 21st century.

We hope that with these materials and these small reflections we can contribute to the concerns you have raised. We remain at your disposal for a comradely political exchange on these questions.

We would also like to inform you that from the FLTI we are closely following the development of the acute class struggle in South Africa with the strikes and struggles that are developing against the power cuts, the chronic unemployment that pushes the hungry to take their bread in the supermarkets and the historic crisis that has opened up in the ANC and in the regime of domination of the transnationals that strangle this oppressed nation. We would be pleased to know your positions on this issue.

Will South Africa open a new chain of revolutions on the African continent, as Tunisia and Egypt did yesterday in the Middle East and then Chile, Ecuador and Peru in Latin America?

In the meantime, France is burning. We are enclosing the statements we have issued in the face of what we consider already a revolutionary situation that has brought forward May in Paris.

Fraternal greetings to you and your comrades,
Omar and Milenka López