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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Thu Jul 01, 2021 1:55 pm

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A long and winding road: Marking 100 years of the Communist Party of China
Kenneth HammondJune 30, 2021 2666 minutes read
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Massive celebrations are being held across China July 1 to mark the centenary of the foundation of the Communist Party of China. The handful of visionary leaders who came together in 1921 to form the CPC soon saw their organization grow to become the leading force representing the revolutionary struggle of the Chinese people to be free of oppression and imperialist rule. The anti-China, anti-working class corporate media outlets in the United States and other western countries are using this occasion to slander the Communist Party and the Chinese Revolution. But around the world many are taking this moment to reflect on the historic accomplishments of the Party.

Resistance in the “Century of Humiliation”

For a thousand years China was most populous and the wealthiest and most technologically sophisticated place on earth. Traders and adventurers from the rest of Asia, from Europe and Africa, and later from the Americas, came to China seeking their fortunes in the products of Chinese farms and workshops — from silk, cotton, and tea to ceramics, metalworks, and paper. Travelers like Ibn Battuta and Marco Polo brought news of the power and prosperity of China to readers in the West and Islamic world, further fueling the desire for the wealth of Asia. By the 16th century Europeans began to come to China in a steady stream, not as conquerors or colonizers, but as profit-seeking participants in a global economic system with China as its key driver.

At the beginning of the 19th century the long-established relations between Europe and China began to change rapidly as the Industrial Revolution gave the British and later other Western powers the ability to produce manufactured goods in great volume at low prices, and the military capacity to impose their domination on other peoples across the planet. European capitalism reconfigured global relations into a division of labor within which the colonies provided raw materials and served as outlets for industrial products forged in the factories of England, Germany, France, or the United States.

China became a top target of the imperialist drive to dominate and exploit the labor and resources of the world. First through the massive drug trade in opium of the early 19th century, then through the Opium War of 1839-42, Britain subordinated China to its capitalist quest for profits. This ushered in what in China is referred to as the Century of Humiliation, in the course of which China’s domestic economy was wrecked and its people subjected to the racist oppression of the combined forces of the imperialist powers.

The old dynastic system proved totally incapable of defending the country, and in 1912 the last emperor abdicated. But efforts to create a bourgeois democratic republic foundered, and the country fell into an anarchy of warlord domains. Meanwhile, the country was facing new threats from Japan, a rising imperialist power following the steps of its Western mentors.

Many Chinese began to search for ways to transform and modernize their country. The New Culture Movement rejected many aspects of China’s traditional political culture, and sought to bring literacy and education to the masses. The Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 inspired Chinese activists, and many took up the study of the writings of Marx and Engels, along with Lenin. Reading groups sprang up around the country, and began a process of coordination and cooperation in the hopes of finding a path to China’s revolutionary transformation.

In 1919 the victorious powers in World War One betrayed China at the Versailles Peace Conference, handing the former German concession at Qingdao over to Japan rather than returning it to Chinese sovereignty. Demonstrations broke out in Beijing on May 4 which grew into a nationwide protest and boycott of Japanese goods. The May 4th Movement was a turning point as the bankruptcy of Western capitalist democracy was exposed.

The communist movement in China is born

Thus, at the beginning of the 1920s, the stage was set for the launch of a great revolutionary movement in China. Drawing on the inspiration of the Bolshevik Revolution, and deploying the theoretical tools of Marxism, Chinese activists sought for create a political organization which could lead the anti-imperialist struggle and chart a path to a new economic and social order for the people. The Bolsheviks, who were fighting a civil war in Russia for the survival of their own revolution, sent assistance to the Chinese via the newly established Communist International, also known as the Third International or Comintern. Advisors from the International worked with the reading groups and other activists with the goal of establishing a Communist Party in and for the Chinese revolution.

This objective was fulfilled 100 years ago when the decision was made to hold a first Congress of the Communist Party of China. The Congress opened on July 23, but July 1 has come to be celebrated as the anniversary of the founding of the Party as a date which roughly accords with the call to local units to send delegates to attend the inaugural gathering. Only 12 members were present at these initial sessions, held in two phases. The first was in a quiet residential block in Shanghai, which today is the Museum of the First Congress of the CPC. After several days of meetings, the group moved to a houseboat on a lake near Hangzhou, south of Shanghai, for security reasons. The 12 delegates represented a total membership of only about 55, but that number grew dramatically in the months and years following the founding of the Party.

The history of China over the century since the founding of the CPC has been largely shaped by the revolutionary struggle which the Party has led. It was not a simple or straightforward process, and there were twists and turns along the way as the course of political affairs navigated the challenges and opportunities of the times. The Party had to deal with the successes and the failures of theory and practice. The initial focus on an alliance with the bourgeois Nationalist Party was betrayed by Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek in 1927. The CPC grappled with the difficulties of adapting their revolutionary goals to the realities of Chinese circumstances, but by the early 1930s developed a strategy of relying on the masses of rural workers, the poor peasants and day laborers of what Mao Zedong came to call the agricultural proletariat. They would be the main force of the revolution, working in alliance with the small urban industrial working class.

The CPC and Red Army established revolutionary base areas in different remote parts of the country, where they could work to develop policies of land reform, economic development, and social policy in preparation for their ultimate victory. They constantly fought the extermination campaigns aimed at them by the Nationalist Party government, having to abandon the Jiangxi base area in the south in 1934 to undertake the Long March. The Long March was an epic journey that brought the Party leadership to its new headquarters at Yan’an, in northern Shaanxi province, which became the center of the revolution until 1945.

The War of Resistance to Japanese Aggression saw another period of tactical alliance with the Nationalists, but when Japan surrendered in August 1945 the revolutionary struggle resumed. Through the Civil War from 1945-49 the corrupt and dysfunctional Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek were defeated and fled to the island of Taiwan. The People’s Republic was proclaimed in Beijing on October 1, 1949.

Building a socialist society

Since the victory of the revolution, the Communist Party has been the guiding force in the development of the People’s Republic. It led the campaign of Land Reform which destroyed the lingering power of the old landlord class in the countryside and created the basis to begin the building of a modern industrial economy. It brought in the Marriage Law of 1950, which abolished arranged marriages and became the basis for a society of gender equality. The Party oversaw the processes of economic development over the following decades, during which there were serious divisions over policy and procedure, and intense clashes over how best to pursue to goals of socialist development.

There was a major reorientation in policy with the transition from the leadership of Mao Zedong after his death in 1976 and the emergence of Deng Xiaoping as the guiding force from 1979 until his death in 1997. The Party undertook the policies of reform and opening in order to accelerate the rate of growth and raise the material standards of living for the masses. These have remained the guiding ideas into the present moment.

The history of the Communist Party of China is one of revolutionary struggle, of victories and defeats, of successes and failures, of correct choices and of errors of judgement. It is a process of economic and social transformation which is still underway. The ultimate outcome and the efficacy of the course chosen by the Party’s leadership remain to be seen. But the work of building better lives for peoples of China has been the mission of the Party from its inception, and there have been great achievements. Life expectancy has been dramatically extended; infant mortality dramatically reduced. There is universal literary and educational opportunity. Public health is seen as a human right, not a profit-generating commodity. Hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty.

Much work remains to be done, and many challenges need to be faced. But the centennial of the founding of the CPC is a moment for reflection and, indeed, celebration. The historic achievements of the Communist Party stand as testament to the possibility of the revolutionary transformation of the world.

https://www.liberationnews.org/a-long-a ... rationnews

Looks as though PSL has/is shaking off it's Trotskyists origins. Acceptance of the authenticity of the socialist revolution in China has been no easy task for many Western Marxists, we have been wed to pre-conceived ideas of what a socialist revolution should look like. It is no degradation of the Russian Revolution to recognize what the Chinese have accomplished. To do that we must chuck idealism out the window and examine the historical process as it has unfolded. There would not have been the Chinese Revolution as we know it without the precedence of the Russian Revolution is the first thing. Without going into the details it is clear the Chinese have learned much from the history of their predecessor. To expect a carbon copy is to demand the same historical result.
True to Marx, the Chinese have recognized the necessity of harnessing the wild productivity of capitalism(as did Lenin) in order to bring living standards to a level where socialism is possible. Also true to Marx is 'socialism with Chinese characteristics', for every nation will develop socialism according to it's historical constraints. Mistakes have been made and will be made but how could the creation of something so new and different from the status quo be otherwise? To those who would insist upon a narrow, provincial narrative of revolution, and that includes several parties I
otherwise respect, I can only say,"OK then, let's see what you got."

Hell, I'm not entirely comfortable with some of the things the CCP has done, but so what? They are, at this time, the great hope of humanity.
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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Fri Jul 02, 2021 1:07 pm

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Reasons to support the Communist Party of China (CPC) on its 100th anniversary
By Friends of Socialist China on Jul 01, 2021 05:09 am
By Danny Haiphong and Carlos Martinez

China is led by a communist party, with Marxism as its guiding ideology. In the period since the foundation of the PRC in 1949, the Chinese people have experienced an unprecedented and extraordinary improvement in their living standards and level of human development. The social and economic position of women has improved beyond recognition, along with the rights and conditions of ethnic and religious minorities. In spite of all this, support for China within much of the Western left is a somewhat marginal position.

This article, written to coincide with the centenary of the founding of the Communist Party of China (CPC), provides a brief overview of why we believe anyone considering themselves to be a socialist should support the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

Poverty alleviation and improvement in living standards

In its 72 years of existence, the People’s Republic of China has accomplished more in the realm of poverty alleviation than any nation in history. China in 1949 was one of the poorest countries in the world, with a life expectancy of 36 years (9 years lower than the global average). Its GDP constituted 0.3 percent of global GDP. Malnutrition, illiteracy and homelessness were rife; millions died every year for lack of food. Population numbers had remained static between 400 and 500 million for a hundred years.

During the first three decades of socialist construction, feudalism was eliminated, comprehensive land reform carried out, and basic medical services were set up throughout the country. However, although the basic problem of feeding the population was solved – and famines had become a thing of the past – hundreds of millions of people in the countryside still endured harsh conditions.

Since the launch of reform and opening up in 1978, the number of people in China living in internationally-defined absolute poverty has fallen from 850 million to zero. And although market reforms have resulted in high levels of inequality, the inverse correlation between wealth and poverty has been broken – life for ordinary workers and peasants has continuously improved, at a remarkable rate and over an extended period.

China’s average life expectancy is now 77 years (4 years higher than the global average) and its per capita GDP over 10,000 USD. Its GDP constitutes 18 percent of global GDP. The entire population (of 1.4 billion) has secure access to food, shelter, clothing, education and healthcare. By any measure, this progress is extraordinary and historically unprecedented. Anyone considering themselves socialist should appreciate the far-reaching significance of these steps forward in wiping out poverty and improving the living standards of the Chinese people.

Innovations in Marxism and the construction of socialism
China has billionaires and is a top destination for foreign direct investment. It has hundreds of branches of Starbucks and KFC, along with significant private ownership of capital. It suffers from high levels of inequality. These factors lead many to question whether it really is what it claims to be: a socialist country.

China’s leaders are very clear that “socialism with Chinese characteristics is socialism, not any other ‘ism’” and that “only socialism can save China”. Elements of capitalism have been purposefully used in order to develop the productive forces, increase productivity, attract investment, encourage technical development, and to support peaceful coexistence with the capitalist world. This has all proven invaluable in improving the living standards of the Chinese people and creating conditions for the construction of an advanced socialist society.

All this is ‘unorthodox’ in the relatively short history of actually-existing socialism, but Marxism offers no templates or formulas; there are no textbook solutions to the problem of how to build a new society in a large, underdeveloped country under constant threat from a hegemonic US imperialism. Socialism with Chinese characteristics is a creative contribution to Marxism based on the concrete analysis of concrete conditions.

Although private capital abounds, China’s basic economic agenda is set by five-year plans, put together on the basis of discussion and consultation that reaches throughout society. The state maintains tight control over the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy: heavy industry, energy, finance, transport, and communications. Finance – which has a key influence over the entire economy – is dominated by the state-owned banks.

Most importantly, capitalists are not allowed to dominate political power like they do in the West. If capitalists dominated political power, China would be a capitalist country – but then China would be a very different place. With capital calling the shots, China would not have been able to carry out the largest-scale poverty alleviation in history; it would not have taken the lead in tackling climate change; it would not be able to so successfully contain Covid, or to organise its scientific and technical infrastructure to develop some of the first vaccines and produce 5 billion doses in a year; it would not be systematically expanding its social welfare program.

In 1989, Deng Xiaoping commented to Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere that, “so long as socialism does not collapse in China, it will always hold its ground in the world.” Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Communist Party of China represents the Marxist mainstream, and continues to develop socialist theory and practice, to map out a path towards a future classless society free from exploitation.

Leading the way in the battle against climate breakdown

Just as economic development in Europe and the Americas was fuelled by the voracious burning of fossil fuels, China’s development has been built to a significant degree on ‘Old King Coal’, the most polluting and emissions-intensive of the fossil fuels. In 2010, coal made up around 80 percent of China’s energy mix.

This was a matter of necessity: China has been able to lift hundreds of millions out of poverty whilst simultaneously establishing itself as a global leader in science and technology. This process required vast energy consumption at minimal expenditure. Schools, hospitals, roads, trains, factories and laboratories all need energy to build and operate.

In recent years however, China has emerged as a leader in the global struggle against climate catastrophe. Xi Jinping announced last year that China would reach carbon neutrality by 2060, with its greenhouse gas emissions peaking before 2030. These commitments are in line with UN targets for developing countries, and as British environmental expert Mike Berners-Lee points out, China has unusually strong capacity for meeting its targets. “More than in most countries, if a policy idea is seen as a good thing, the Chinese can bring it about.” (There Is No Planet B, Cambridge University Press, 2019)

Indeed, half of Chinese cities and provinces are already switching to primarily renewable energy. In the course of the last decade, coal has gone from 80 percent to under 60 percent of China’s power mix – roughly the same as Australia, a country with a per capita GDP five times higher than that of China.

China is becoming the first “renewable energy superpower”, responsible for 38 percent of global clean energy investment, creating millions of green energy jobs along the way. The Green New Deal that much of the Western left is calling for is already being implemented in China, on an almost unimaginable scale. In the words of Xi Jinping, “We will never again seek economic growth at the cost of the environment.”

Challenging imperialism and building towards a peaceful, multipolar future

In sharp contrast to the US and its allies, China has not been to war in more than 40 years, never conducts regime change operations, does not get involved in destabilisation of other countries, and does not unilaterally impose sanctions as a form of economic bullying. Nonetheless, over the past decade, China has been mischaracterized by Western observers as an “imperialist country.” The scant evidence provided for “Chinese imperialism” includes China’s massive export economy as well as the financial instruments utilized in China’s global development project, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). A simple review of the facts, however, indicates that China is actually challenging imperialism on several fronts and contributing to a more peaceful and multipolar future.

China’s challenge to imperialism possesses both an economic and political component. Politically, China is committed to building a multipolar world whereby global problems are resolved by multilateral institutions and cooperation among nations rather than a singular nation’s influence. China’s orientation to world affairs can be summarized by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s remark that “the UN is not a club for big or rich countries; all countries enjoy sovereign equality and no country is in a position to dictate international affairs.”

China’s adherence to multilateralism takes several forms. China is a signatory of over 500 international treaties. Furthermore, China regularly stands up to the United States and the West’s promotion of unilateral coercive measures such as sanctions which have caused an enormous level of destruction for more than thirty countries around the world. On June 23rd, China voted at the UN General Assembly for the removal of US sanctions on Cuba. That same day, China called for the removal of illegal US sanctions on Syria.

China has actively sought multilateral partnerships with all nations seeking to bring about a more peaceful world order. Russia and China have worked together on numerous occasions at the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) to block resolutions that threaten global peace. This includes the consistent veto at the UNSC of efforts to escalate the US war in Syria, much to the chagrin of pro-interventionist forces. During the US-backed coup in Ukraine in 2014, China stood firmly with Russia in denouncing outside interference and has championed the development of political resolutions for all disputes within and between nations.

China’s growing economic partnerships with nations around the world, particularly in the Global South, have been maligned in the West as “debt-trap diplomacy.” The facts tell a different story entirely. According to Director of the China Africa Initiative at John Hopkins University, Deborah Brautigam, China’s economic ties with developing countries in Africa serve a critical infrastructure need and represent only a small fraction of the developing world’s overall debt portfolio. A recent working paper published by Boston University’s Global Development Policy Center argued that China’s willingness to renegotiate debt and provide multiple avenues for financing serves as a possible alternative to the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) conditional lending practices.

What this means is that China is committed to sharing in its successes with high-speed rail development, 5G technology, and the like without demanding privatization, austerity, or any other kind of political or economic reform from its trade partners. Greek economist and former government minister Yanis Varoufakis summarized China’s role in the world aptly when he said:

“The Chinese are non-interventionist in a way that Westerners have never managed to fathom… They don’t seem to have any military ambitions… Instead of going into Africa with troops, killing people like the West has done… they went to Addis Ababa and said to the government, ‘we can see you have some problems with your infrastructure; we would like to build some new airports, upgrade your railway system, create a telephone system, and rebuild your roads’… they have never combined their investment with imperialistic [goals].”

Leading the way in the battle against Covid-19

China was the first to discover the novel coronavirus in December 2019. Covid-19 has since developed into a worldwide pandemic that has taken the lives of at least four million people to date. Given China’s enormous population, it could be assumed that the country would be plagued by a high number of pandemic-related deaths and cases.

Yet the exact opposite is true. China has had roughly 103,000 cases to date and .35 deaths per one hundred thousand in the population. Contrast this with the United States, which has had a whopping 33 million cases and 184 deaths per one hundred thousand in the population. While the United States and much of the West have demonized China’s pandemic response and even blamed the country for the spread of the virus, the real question is: how did China take the lead in combating COVID-19?

Make no mistake, China took the emergence of Covid-19 seriously from day one. China wasted no time in alerting the World Health Organization (WHO) and taking swift action to contain the virus’s spread. By January 12th, 2020, China had provided a genome sequence to the WHO. By January 23rd, the city of Wuhan was effectively placed under lockdown and infection-prevention measures implemented across the country to curb viral transmission. China, under the leadership of the Communist Party (CPC), mobilized an enormous public health response in the cause of preserving human life.

Hundreds of thousands of party cadres organized to ensure basic human needs were fulfilled for the entire population. Hospitals were built within weeks to increase healthcare capacity. Industries were repurposed for the production of personal protective equipment (PPE). Technology was deployed to assist with contract tracing. Entire cities were tested for the virus at any sign of an outbreak. For all of these reasons and more, China was able to not only preserve human life but also restart its economy four months after its outbreak and become the only major economy in the world to post positive growth for the duration of 2020.

Internationalism has been a critical aspect of China’s ongoing pandemic response. China has donated a massive amount of PPE in the form of masks, ventilators, and testing kits to dozens of countries around the world since the beginning of the pandemic. China is also the global leader in Covid-19 vaccine distribution, exporting hundreds of millions of doses to nations that otherwise would not have access. In stark contrast to the US and Western narrative, it is quite clear that China has demonstrated both the capacity and the political will to lead the way in the global battle to defeat the Covid-19 pandemic.

Conclusion
China is a socialist country, where government policy is determined principally on the basis of the needs and desires of the working people. That is why China is able to take the lead globally when it comes to wiping out poverty, transitioning to renewable energy and tackling the pandemic. At a global level, China is leading the shift towards a multipolar world – a more democratic system of international relations in which each country has the right to determine its own development path, free from bullying and intervention.

Such is the contribution of the ongoing Chinese Revolution to the people of China and the world. Of course the Communist Party of China, like any governing organization, makes mistakes and has to make compromises with a complex and difficult reality; it is by no means above criticism. However, its overall record is one of immense and continuing progress for the global working class and the cause of socialism.

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Communist Party of China Now has Over 95 Million Members

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Membership was 3.5 percent up from the figure reported at the end of 2019, and approximately 20 times more than the figure in 1949. | Photo: Twitter/ @PDChina
Published 1 July 2021

Approximately 2.31 million people joined the CPC in the first half of this year, the statement added.


The Communist Party of China (CPC) has 95.148 million members as of June 5, the Organization Department of the CPC Central Committee announced on Wednesday.

Membership was 3.5 percent up from the figure reported at the end of 2019, and approximately 20 times more than the figure in 1949 when the People's Republic of China (PRC) was founded, the department said in a report ahead of the CPC's centenary on July 1.

In 1921 when it was founded, the CPC had more than 50 members.

Approximately 2.31 million people joined the CPC in the first half of this year, the statement added.

"The continuous increase of members has shown the strong vitality of the Party and the prosperity of the Party's cause," the statement said.

The number of primary-level Party organizations has increased from 195,000 when the PRC was founded to 4.86 million, an increase of about 24 times, according to the statement.

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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Thu Jul 08, 2021 1:15 pm

The US War to Destroy China’s Crown Jewel and Secure US Cyber Supremacy
July 6, 2021

Stephen Gowans

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When then US president Donald Trump said he would call off US efforts to extradite from Canada Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou to face bank fraud-related sanctions-evasion charges in exchange for trade concessions from China, he effectively admitted to a political kidnapping. The reality that normal US practice is to fine companies that violate US sanctions, not arrest their officers, strengthened the contention that Washington was conspiring with Canada to abduct Meng for political gain.

The Meng case has become the most high-profile aspect of a US campaign to cripple the Chinese tech champion Huawei. But it is also one of the least consequential elements of a multi-layered operation. Since 2010, Washington has spied on Huawei, declared it a national security threat whose equipment must be banned from telecom networks, starved it of US technology, harassed its employees to gather information to use in law suits against the company, and has even gone so far as to pay Huawei’s potential customers to buy from its competitors instead.

The impetus of the campaign is multidimensional and mutually reinforcing. Washington is trying to block China from dominating emerging tech industries. Huawei, a global telecom powerhouse, is seen by Beijing as a key player in China’s industrial strategy, a jewel in the country’s crown. Crippling the company could slow China’s technological ascent and ultimately allow US investors, rather than Chinese enterprises, to reap the bounty of tomorrow’s industries.

Moreover, telecom networks are an important part of the infrastructure the NSA and its counterparts in the Five Eyes signal intelligence alliance—Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand—use to gather political and business intelligence, and conduct cyberattacks, around the world. As the preferred network supplier, Huawei was on track to blanket the world’s telecom networks with its gear. This was hardly an auspicious prospect for the US intelligence community. As a Chinese company, Huawei is far less likely to cooperate with US intelligence than equipment manufacturers based in countries under US influence. The latter can be expected to accede to Washington’s demands to comply with US intelligence community requests for cooperation; not so Huawei.

In 2019, Huawei was the world’s largest telecom equipment manufacturer. It had 180,000 employees and the largest R&D budget of any tech company in China. [1] Over 40 percent of its employees worked in research and development. The company was held privately, with an ownership stake divided among 81,000 employees. [2] Renowned for the quality of its gear and the attractiveness of its prices, Huawei was at the forefront of the next-generation 5G networks. [3]

As a global leader capable of outcompeting its US-allied rivals, Huawei was vitally important to Beijing’s industrial strategy. Indeed, so important was the company to Beijing, that Wall Street Journal reporters Bob Davis and Lingling Wei called the company China’s “crown jewel.” [4]

But to Washington, Huawei was a threat. Referring to 5G, US telecom experts prepared a paper for the White House warning that “For the first time in modern history, the United States has not been the leader in an emerging wave of critical technology.” [5]

Huawei’s US competitors were seen as too small to compete with the Chinese firm. [6] As for Huawei’s main competitors, Nokia, Ericsson, and Samsung, Washington and London worried that the Chinese tech company was so attractive to the world’s telecom providers that it would drive its rivals out of the 5G business. [7]

In 2010, the NSA secretly broke into Huawei’s computers, looking for evidence that the company was covertly controlled by the Chinese military, and that the company’s CEO and founder, Ren Zhengfei—he had once served in the People’s Liberation Army Engineering Corps.—retained an active role in the Chinese military. The NSA was unable to confirm its suspicions. [8] All the same, two years later, Congress declared Huawei a national security threat, effectively shutting it out of the US market. [9]

A half a decade later, with Huawei defying Congress’s efforts to slow its rise, US National Security Advisor John Bolton decided to step up the war on Huawei. [10] Washington plotted to insert “the federal government deep into the private sector to stiffen global competition against Chinese telecom giant”. [11] Senator Tom Cotton, author of an attack plan to “roll back Chinese power”, [12] tweeted: “@Huawei 5G, RIP.” [13]


One of the first salvos in the Bolton-initiated operation was to formalize the exclusion of Huawei from the US market. US president Donald Trump signed an executive order prohibiting US companies from doing business with China’s crown jewel. [14]

Next, Washington pressured its allies to declare Huawei’s network equipment a potential instrument of Chinese espionage. At its July, 2018 meeting in Halifax, the US-led eavesdropping network, the Five Eyes, announced it would work to ban Huawei 5G equipment from the core of its telecom networks. [15]

Other US allies were pressured to follow suit. Washington designated foreign telecom providers that shunned Huawei as ‘clean telcos’, and implied that those that did business with Huawei were US national security threats to be dealt with accordingly. [16] Frightened of US reprisals, telecom providers turned cool to the Chinese gear provider.

US pressure to eschew Huawei was seen by foreign telecom providers as a dishonest ploy to gain leverage in trade negotiations with Beijing, rather than an effort to address legitimate national security concerns. The view was reinforced by Washington’s failure to produce evidence showing Huawei was engaged in espionage or that its equipment could be used by Beijing to eavesdrop on Western governments and businesses.

Some US allies questioned “whether America’s campaign [was] really about national security or if it [was] aimed at preventing China from gaining a competitive edge.” [17] Executives at Canada’s first and third largest telecom providers complained that they were being asked to rip Huawei gear out of their networks to satisfy US trade ambitions and to allay US fears of losing its coveted place as a global technology leader. [18]

While trade ambitions and a desire to reply to China’s challenge to US global technology leadership were playing roles in Washington’s campaign to cripple Huawei, so too was another motivation: Controlling the world’s telecom networks to allow the United States to maintain its dominant role in espionage and cyberwarfare.

When the NSA penetrated Huawei’s computers in 2010, it had two goals: First, to find out whether Huawei was an espionage threat; and second, to look for a backdoor into the company’s network equipment. “Many of our targets communicate over Huawei-produced products,” a N.S.A. document leaked by Edward Snowden said. “We want to make sure that we know how to exploit these products,” in order to “gain access to networks of interest” around the world. According to the New York Times, the NSA’s goal was “to exploit Huawei’s technology so that when the company sold equipment to other countries — including both allies and nations that avoid buying American products — the N.S.A. could roam through their computer and telephone networks to conduct surveillance and, if ordered by the president, offensive cyberoperations.” [19]

Washington argued that as a Chinese company, Huawei is obligated to comply with any request from Beijing to use its equipment as a vehicle for spying and cyberattacks. But Washington’s real concern may have been, not that Huawei was a potential tool of Chinese espionage and cyberwarfare, but that it would be an unwilling tool of US espionage and cyberaggression. In contrast, Nokia, Ericsson, and Samsung, as companies based in US satellite countries, would be far easier to recruit, either knowingly or unwittingly, as instruments of NSA eavesdropping and US cyberoperations. From Washington’s perspective, the ideal intelligence scenario would be one in which the guts of a country’s network are provided by manufacturers under US influence. Since Washington has no sway over Huawei, it is undesirable as a provider of equipment to the world’s networks. From the vantage point of US intelligence, Huawei needs to be crippled and blocked so that ductile US-allied manufacturers—Washington’s ‘security’ partners—can take its place.

In order to promote Huawei’s rivals, Washington is paying network equipment buyers to use Nokia, Ericsson, and Samsung. Acting through the U.S. International Development Finance Corp, Washington offers “financial incentives and other enticements to countries willing to shun Chinese-made telecom gear.” [20] For example, the DFC has provided a $500 million loan to a consortium of telecom companies led by the UK’s Vodaphone to build a mobile network in Ethiopia. A condition of the loan is that it cannot be used to purchase Huawei equipment. [21] Meanwhile, Congress is expected to pass legislation that will allow Eastern European countries to use US aid to build cellular networks, so long as they use Huawei rivals. [22] In effect, Washington is paying countries not to use the Chinese supplier.

The DFC was created by Congress in 2018 to compete with China’s One Belt, One Road initiative. While its main goal is to invest in US companies, the corporation is willing to support non-US firms, if doing so hurts Huawei, and pushes NSA-compliant manufacturers to the fore . “We’re not out to play defense,” DFC head Adam Boehler told the Wall Street Journal. “We’re out to play offense.” [23]

On top of promoting Huawei’s competitors, Washington has sought to degrade the company’s products, by denying it access to the US technology it needs. In 2019, Washington banned the export of US-made chips to Huawei, and additionally blocked Huawei’s access to chips made anywhere in the world with US equipment. The aim, according to the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, is to decouple “computer technology supply chains from China” and Huawei. [24]

Washington has also mounted a campaign of harassment against the company. According to Huawei, US officials have instructed US “law enforcement to threaten, menace, coerce, entice and incite both current and former Huawei employees”. [25] US prosecutors have brought charges of racketeering conspiracy and conspiring to steal trade secrets against Huawei and its partners. [26] FBI agents have visited the homes of Huawei employees to pressure them to disclose information that could be used against the company in US courts. [27]

The most high-profile case of harassment has been the arrest of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou by Canadian officials at Washington’s request. Meng, the daughter of Huawei CEO, Ren Zhengfei, awaits a Canadian decision on her extradition to the United States. US prosecutors allege that Meng helped Huawei circumvent US sanctions on Iran by lying to banks.

On the surface, the case has a number of curious features.

First, the alleged crime appears to have little to do with the United States. Meng’s putative misdeeds occurred in Hong Kong; one of the alleged victims, HSBC, is a British bank; and the accused is a Chinese national. [28] The US connection is the alleged evasion of US sanctions on Iran, but US law does not apply to Chinese nationals or Chinese enterprises outside US jurisdiction.

Second, Washington’s standard practice is to punish corporations that violate its sanctions laws, not arrest company executives. The economist Jeffrey Sachs produced a long list of US and international banks that have paid fines to the US government for sanctions violations. None of their executives were arrested or charged with crimes. [29] Recently, the software giant SAP paid $8 million in fines for selling software to Iran. Not only were company executives spared arrest, the company wasn’t even prosecuted. Instead, it was let off with a promise to improve its compliance. [30] As Canadian political operative Eddie Goldenberg has argued, the arrest of Meng is not a criminal matter. Instead, it lies in “the realm of geopolitics. That is why Ms. Meng was personally targeted when the normal U.S. practice in similar matters is to charge the corporation, not the individual.” [31]

Third, while the Canadian government has presented the Meng affair as a purely criminal matter, when he was US president, Donald Trump told Reuters that he would intervene in her case if by doing so he could secure a better trade deal with China, suggesting Meng had been arrested as a bargaining chip. [32]

US prosecutors argue that the Huawei CFO committed bank fraud by misleading Huawei’s banks in order to evade US sanctions on Iran. The extradition case hinges on the question of whether bank fraud is a crime in both the United States and Canada. Under Canadian law, Meng cannot be extradited for an act that is not recognized as a crime in Canada.

Meng’s lawyers have argued that, notwithstanding US claims, the case pivots on sanctions-evasion, with bank fraud as a red herring. [33] “It is a fiction to contend that the United States has any general interest in policing private dealings between a foreign bank and a foreign citizen on the other side of the world. However, it is the case that the United States has a global interest in enforcing its sanctions policy. Sanctions drive this case.” [34]

Meng’s lawyers have also argued that if the Huawei CFO had misled the banks—a point they do not concede—the banks would have suffered no harm in Canada, since Ottawa has no matching sanctions on Iran, and therefore would have no reason to penalize the banks for their actions. The critical point is that deception is not fraud unless harm befalls the deceived party. Since the banks would have suffered no harm in Canada, the necessary condition for extradition of dual criminality—that the actions of the accused constitute a crime in both Canada and the United States—has not been met. [35]

In March, Canadian officials indicated that there was a “strong possibility” that the US Justice Department would drop its extradition request if Huawei admitted guilt and agreed to pay a substantial fine. [36] Huawei CEO Ren Zhengfei rejected the offer out of hand. His daughter, he said, had “committed no crime,” adding that “the U.S. is the side that should plead guilty.” [37]

While US prosecutors and the Canadian government argue that the Meng case is non-political, and purely criminal, the United States’ top business newspaper, The Wall Street Journal, thinks otherwise. “We might prefer that prosecution of its chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou … were over something other than violating U.S. sanctions on Iran,” opined editorial writer Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. “But the U.S. is nonetheless positioning itself to destroy China’s shiniest success story.” [38]

If the US operation succeeds, not only will the world’s telecom networks be dominated by US-allied equipment manufacturers, but the United States will have secured its position as the world’s top cyberwarfare and cyberespionage threat, with the power to spy on governments and businesses, and carry out offensive cyberoperations, virtually anywhere in the world.

1 Dan Strumpf, Min Jung Kim and Yifan Wang, “How Huawei took over the world,” The Wall Street Journal, December 25, 2018

2 Ibid

3 Stephen Fidler and Max Colchester, “U.K. to Ban Huawei From Its 5G Networks Amid China-U.S. Tensions,” The Wall Street Journal, July 14, 2020

4 Bob Davis and Lingling Wei, Superpower Showdown: How the Battle Between Trump and Xi Threatens a New Cold War, Harper Business, 2020, p. 26

5 Editorial Board, “Huawei and the U.S.-China Tech War,” The Wall Street Journal, June 9, 2020

6 Ibid

7 Bojan Pancevski and Sara Germano, “In rebuke to US, Germany considers letting Huawei in,” The Wall Street Journal, February 19, 2019

8 Matthew Dalton, “Spy charges put Huawei’s European ambitions in jeopardy,” The Wall Street Journal, January 14, 2019

9 Ibid

10 Bob Davis and Lingling Wei, Superpower Showdown: How the Battle Between Trump and Xi Threatens a New Cold War, Harper Business, 2020, p. 25

11 Drew FitzGerald, Sarah Krouse, “White House Considers Broad Federal Intervention to Secure 5G Future,” The Wall Street Journal, June 25, 2020.

12 Gerald F. Seib, “Tom Cotton Has a China Coronavirus Attack Plan,” The Wall Street Journal, May 11, 2020

13 Bob Davis and Lingling Wei, Superpower Showdown: How the Battle Between Trump and Xi Threatens a New Cold War, Harper Business, 2020, p. 27

14 Parmy Olson, “US would rethink intelligence ties if allies use Huawei technology,” The Wall Street Journal, April 29, 2019

15 Matthew Dalton, “Spy charges put Huawei’s European ambitions in jeopardy,” The Wall Street Journal, January 14, 2019

16 Stephen Fidler and Max Colchester, “U.K. to Ban Huawei From Its 5G Networks Amid China-U.S. Tensions,” The Wall Street Journal, July 14, 2020

17 Matthew Dalton, “Spy charges put Huawei’s European ambitions in jeopardy,” The Wall Street Journal, January 14, 2019

18 Christine Dobby, “Bell, Telus warn of 5G delays, higher costs if Ottawa joins peers in banning Huawei,” The Globe and Mail, December 21, 2018

19 David E. Sanger and Nicole Perlroth, “N.S.A. Breached Chinese Servers Seen as Security Threat,” The New York Times, March 22, 2014

20 Stu Woo and Drew Hinshaw, “U.S. Fight Against Chinese 5G Efforts Shifts From Threats to Incentives,” The Wall Street Journal, June 14, 2021

21 Alexandra Wexler and Stu Woo, “U.S. Fund Set Up to Counter China’s Influence Backs Covid-19 Vaccine Maker in Africa,” The Wall Street Journal, June 30, 2021

22 Stu Woo and Drew Hinshaw, “U.S. Fight Against Chinese 5G Efforts Shifts From Threats to Incentives,” The Wall Street Journal, June 14, 2021

23 Editorial Board, “Huawei and the U.S.-China Tech War,” The Wall Street Journal, June 9, 2020

24 Ibid

25 William Mauldin and Chao Deng, “US-China talks stuck in rut over Huawei,” The Wall Street Journal, July 17, 2019

26 , Jacquie McNish, Aruna Viswanatha, Jonathan Cheng and Dan Strumpf, “U.S. in Talks With Huawei Finance Chief Meng Wanzhou About Resolving Criminal Charges,” The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 4, 2020

27 William Mauldin and Chao Deng, “US-China talks stuck in rut over Huawei,” The Wall Street Journal, July 17, 2019

28 K J Noh, “Why Canada must release Meng Wanzhou,” Asia Times, October 30, 2020

29 Jeffrey D. Sachs, “The U.S., not China, is the real threat to international rule of law,” The Globe and Mail, December 12, 2018

30 Aruna Viswanatha, “SAP Admits Iran Sanction Violations to Justice Department,” The Wall Street Journal, April 29, 2021

31 Eddie Goldenberg, “Want to bring the Michaels home? Send Meng Wanzhou back to China,” The Globe and Mail, January 16, 2020

32 Bob Davis and Lingling Wei, “China moves to address US economic concerns,” The Wall Street Journal, December 11, 2018

33 Sean Fine, Andrea Woo, and Xiao Xu, “Fraud allegations are a façade, lawyers for Meng Wanzhou argue at extradition hearing,” The Globe and Mail, January 20, 2020

34 Ibid

35 Dan Bilefsky, “Huawei executive goes to court, fighting extradition to US,” The New York Times, January 19, 2020

36 Robert Fife and Steven Chase, “Canada held secret U.S. talks in bid to free Kovrig, Spavor jailed in China,” The Globe and Mail, June 7, 2021

37 Robert Fife, Steven Chase, and Nathan Vanderklippe, “Meng Wanzhou in talks with U.S. Justice Department to allow her to return to China, The Globe and Mail, December 3, 2020

38 Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., “U.S. Can Destroy Huawei, Part Two,” The Wall Street Journal, January 29, 2019

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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Thu Jul 15, 2021 1:32 pm

What Did We Learn from the CPC’s 100th Anniversary? Leadership Matters
Danny Haiphong, BAR Contributing Editor 15 Jul 2021

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What Did We Learn from the CPC’s 100th Anniversary? Leadership Matters

There is a lesson to be learned from the differences in recent U.S. and Chinese historical celebrations.

“The U.S. model of neoliberal capitalism, characterized by racial antagonism and military aggression, is losing legitimacy.”

Popular enthusiasm was evident across China for more than a month leading up to President Xi Jinping's speech at a gathering marking the 100th anniversary of the Communist Party of China (CPC). Americans gathered three days later to celebrate the founding of the United States over two centuries ago. To build excitement for the holiday, the White House published on social media that the cost of a cookout had fallen $0.16 in 2021. The announcement predictably failed to garner a rousing applause on social media as Xi Jinping's speech received from the Chinese people. As the U.S. continues to assume a dangerously aggressive posture towards China, there is a lesson to be learned from the differences in the two celebrations: leadership matters.

The United States is currently experiencing a crisis of leadership. Historic inequalities and the empowerment of corporate shareholders have led to stagnation in all facets of the society. Racism continues to expose Black Americans to disproportionate rates of poverty, police violence, incarceration as well poor outcomes across all social indicators after centuries of enslavement and Jim Crow terror. Native Americans remain dispossessed of their lands and have yet to receive justice for the myriad of disasters caused by settler colonialism. The majority of workers in the United States across all racial groups cannot afford a $400 emergency.

“Historic U.S. inequalities and the empowerment of corporate shareholders have led to stagnation in all facets of the society.”

U.S. political leadership has doubled down on the status quo rather than adapt to the needs of the people. Instead of following through on widely supported policies such as universal healthcare, student debt relief and a living wage, the Biden administration has increased the military budget. Instead of reducing the prison population, the Biden administration has increased weapons transfers from the Pentagon to local police departments. It should come as no surprise that U.S. presidents struggle to maintain favorability ratings above 45 percent while Congress generally hovers at around half of such support. Change is hard to come by, even when such change is desired by most of the population and is required to preserve human life itself in the case of the COVID-19 pandemic. China does not have such a problem. The Communist Party of China (CPC) maintains popular support because adaptation is a key pillar of its governance model. Many in the U.S. and the West have been taught that the CPC does not allow criticism, both inside and outside of the organization. This is categorically false.

“It should come as no surprise that U.S. presidents struggle to maintain favorability ratings above 45 percent while Congress generally hovers at around half of such support.”

The CPC started with just about 50 members in 1921. CPC leaders such as Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai engaged in countless debates as the Party navigated often deadly encounters with warlords and aggressive foreign forces. This led the CPC to adapt from an urban-based organizing model to one focused on the more populous countryside, a change that was crucial in ending China's "century of humiliation" once and for all. Adaptation continued to be a theme following the CPC-led revolution that founded the People's Republic of China in 1949. Over the course of the last 72 years, the CPC has continuously implemented reforms and acknowledged mistakes in the process of socialist construction. Early successes in socialist development failed to shake off absolute poverty. The CPC responded by introducing reforms to rapidly develop and open the economy. Rapid market-oriented growth produced new challenges such as political corruption and uneven development. The CPC has addressed these challenges by renewing its focus on party discipline and strengthening its leadership over the nation's poverty alleviation campaign.

“Over the course of the last 72 years, the CPC has continuously implemented reforms and acknowledged mistakes.”

The achievements gained from the CPC's ability to adapt cannot be understated. China has become a world leader in renewable energy and advanced technology. Extreme poverty has been eliminated and living standards continue to improve for every sector of the society. The CPC has demonstrated the capacity to both successfully preserve human life in the fight against COVID-19 and extend solidarity to countless nations in their own fight against the virus. It is for these reasons and more that the CPC enjoys a growing membership of 95 million and an approval rating well above 90 percent. Political leadership reflects the legitimacy of a given society's model of development. U.S. officials claim to represent "democracy" even though elections are largely dictated by a wealthy minority. The U.S. model of neoliberal capitalism, characterized by racial antagonism and military aggression, is losing legitimacy with large segments of the population. More than 60 percent of people support a third-party alternative to the two major parties and large numbers of young adults want a more egalitarian society. By contrast, young adults make up one-third of the CPC – a number that continues to grow. It is clear that the people of China have chosen their preferred leadership. The same cannot be said in the United States.

This article was originally published in CGTN.

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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Thu Jul 29, 2021 1:04 pm

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Is China imperialist?
July 26, 2021 Editor2 capitalism, China, Imperialism, Leninism, marxism, new cold war, socialism
By Carlos Martinez – Jul 2, 2021

Foreign domination does not have the same gravitational pull on the Chinese economy as on the economies of Britain, the US, Japan and others. CARLOS MARTINEZ examines why

THE slogan “Neither Washington nor Beijing” relies largely on the premise that China is imperialist, and that the new cold war is an inter-imperialist war — a war in which the antagonists are fighting over their share of the spoils from the exploitation of foreign countries.

If China isn’t imperialist, and if the new cold war isn’t an example of inter-imperialist rivalry, the “third camp” position is simply not viable.

We have to start by attempting to define imperialism. In his classic work Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism — the first serious study of the phenomenon from a Marxist perspective — Lenin states that, reduced to its “briefest possible definition,” imperialism can be considered simply as “the monopoly stage of capitalism.”

He notes that such a concise definition is necessarily inadequate, and is only useful to the extent that it implies the presence of five “basic features”:

1. Capitalism has developed to a level where, in the main branches of production, the only viable businesses are those that have been able to concentrate a huge quantity of capital, thereby forming monopolies.

2. The emergence of a “financial oligarchy” — essentially banks — as the driving force of the economy.

3. Export of capital (foreign investment) as an important engine of growth.

4. The formation of “international monopolist capitalist associations which share the world among themselves,” the equivalent of the modern multinational company.

5. The world’s territory has been completely divided up among the capitalist powers; markets and resources around the globe have been integrated into the capitalist world system.

Lenin’s definition remains a useful and relevant description of the capitalist world.

However, a few months after the publication of his book, a new variable appeared in global politics in the form of the socialist camp.

The socialist group of countries disrupted the imperialist system in a number of ways: most obviously, it directly withdrew the socialist countries from that system; it offered support to colonial and anti-imperialist liberation movements, accelerating their victory; and it offered aid and favourable trading relations to formerly colonised states that would otherwise have little other option than to subject themselves to neocolonial oppression.

The arrival of socialist state power in Europe and Asia was, therefore, an unprecedented boon for the cause of national sovereignty around the world. At the same time and in equal measure, it was a setback for the imperialist world system.

No longer is the world so cleanly divided into imperialist and oppressed nations as it was before 1917.

As such, Lenin’s five features of imperialism can’t simply be used as a checklist for answering the question of whether any given country is imperialist.

Canadian political analyst Stephen Gowans has proposed the following broad definition: “Imperialism is a process of domination guided by economic interests.”

This domination “can be declared and formal, or undeclared and informal, or both.”

This provides a useful framework for thinking about whether China is imperialist: is it engaged in a process of domination guided by economic interests?

Does it, in Samir Amin’s words, leverage “technological development, access to natural resources, the global financial system, dissemination of information, and weapons of mass destruction” in order to dominate the planet and prevent the emergence of any state or movement that could impede this domination?

At the time Lenin was writing, China was unambiguously in the group of oppressed countries, having been stripped of a large part of its sovereignty by the colonial powers over the course of the preceding 80 years.

One of the world-historic victories of the Chinese Revolution was to end that domination and to establish the national independence of the Chinese people.

So inasmuch as China is imperialist, this must be a recent phenomenon — presumably starting in the last 20 years, in which period China’s sustained GDP growth has resulted in it becoming the largest economy in the world (in purchasing power parity terms) and a technological powerhouse.

Certainly China has its fair share of monopolies that deploy extraordinary quantities of capital.

China’s foreign direct investment outflows stand at around $117 billion, slightly more than Germany, slightly less than the Netherlands.

In terms of foreign direct investment outflows ratio to GDP (ie the importance of capital export to the national economy as a whole), the value for China is 0.8 per cent — a similar level to Brazil, and far less than Ireland, Japan, Sweden, the Netherlands and the United Arab Emirates.

It would be difficult to make a case for labelling China imperialist on the basis of its foreign investment alone.

In a long piece for Counterfire, Dragan Plavsic claims that China’s global expansion is “merely the latest example of a road well-travelled by other major economies such as Britain, Germany and the US, as they too expanded beyond their national limits in order to take competitive advantage of global trade and investment opportunities.”

Moreover, “the competitive logic that motivated them is not qualitatively different from the one motivating China today.”

Competition demands relentless innovation, which inevitably reduces the role of human labour in the production process, which by definition reduces the component of “variable capital” with the magical property of being able to transform a given sum of money (the cost of labour) into a larger sum of money (the value added by labour).

The ever-declining proportion of variable capital means an ever-declining rate of profit, which capitalists compensate for with ferocious expansion, capturing new markets and lowering the costs of production.

This is the economic engine at the heart of imperialism — the “competitive logic” referred to.

The problem with Plavsic’s analysis is that the “well-travelled road” taken by Britain, Germany and the US is no longer open.

By the time Lenin was writing — a century ago — the world was already “completely divided up, so that in the future only redivision is possible.”

That is, country A can only dominate country B by displacing country C; the means for this process is war and military conquest.

Since China’s record remains remarkably peaceful, it’s evident that inasmuch as China has a path to becoming an imperialist power, it is by no means the “well-travelled” one.

Noam Chomsky, by no measure an ideological adherent of the CPC, pokes fun at the idea that China would become an aggressive military power on the scale of the US, “with 800 overseas military bases, invading and overthrowing other governments, or committing terrorist acts … I think this will not, and cannot, happen in China … China is not assuming the role of an aggressor with a large military budget, etc.”

Further, the structure of the Chinese economy is such that it doesn’t impel the domination of foreign markets, territories, resources and labour in the same way as free market capitalism does.

The major banks — which obviously wield a decisive influence over how capital is deployed — are majority-owned by the state, responsible primarily not to shareholders but to the Chinese people.

The key industries are dominated by state-owned companies and subjected to a heavy regulation that doesn’t have private profit maximisation as its primary objective.

Li Zhongjin and David Kotz assert that while “China’s capitalists have the same drive towards imperialism of capitalists everywhere,” but further note that any such drive is restrained by a CPC government which “has no need to aim for imperial domination to achieve its economic aims.”

While capitalists are represented within the CPC, there is “no evidence that capitalists now control the CPC or can dictate state policy”; hence “the Chinese capitalist class lacks the power to compel the CPC to seek imperial domination.”

As such, the prospect of foreign domination does not have the same gravitational pull on the Chinese economy as it did/does on the economies of Britain, the US, Japan and others.

Nor do the objective conditions exist for China to establish even an informal empire without direct military confrontation with the existing imperialist powers.

Nevertheless, China stands accused of imperialist behaviour on several fronts, notably in its economic relationship with Africa, its economic relationship with Latin America, its vast Belt and Road infrastructure programme, and its behaviour in the South China Sea.

We will turn to these accusations in the next articles in the series.

https://orinocotribune.com/is-china-imperialist/
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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Fri Jul 30, 2021 1:29 pm

China Cracks Down On Tech - Its People Benefit
Back when Stephen S. Roach was Morgan Stanley's chief economist Moon of Alabama often quoted from his columns. Fifteen years ago Roach spoke out against globalization and emphasized the need of labor power. His takes stood in stark contrast to the conventional wisdom of that time. Roach retired from Morgan Stanley around 2011 and has since been a senior lecturer at the Yale School of Management.

While I had not read Roach for some time I today stumbled over a column of his which I find astonishingly wrong and badly argued.

Roach writes about China's recent clamp down on fin-tech, internet monopolies and private education companies: https://www.scmp.com/comment/opinion/ar ... ping-point

China’s regulation of its spirited tech sector could be a tipping point for the economy

The subtitle is a good summary of the column:

There are legitimate reasons for China’s anti-tech campaign, but when the full force of regulation is used to strangle the business models and financing capacity of the economy’s most dynamic sector, it weakens confidence and the entrepreneurial spirit
China has recently cracked down and financial consumer services, hail services and private education companies. Alibaba's fintech spin off Ant was prohibited from going public. Didi, the Uber of China, went public in U.S. capital markets even though it been warned not to do so. Its apps were taken down and it will have to pay a severe fine. Other tech companies are also under pressure says Roach:

Moreover, there are signs of a clampdown on many other leading Chinese tech companies, including Tencent (internet conglomerate), Meituan (food delivery), Pinduoduo (e-commerce), Full Truck Alliance (truck-hailing apps Huochebang and Yunmanman), Kanzhun’s Boss Zhipin (recruitment), and online private tutoring companies like TAL Education Group and Gaotu Group. And all of this follows China’s high-profile crackdown on cryptocurrencies.
It is not as if there were a lack of reasons – in some cases, like cryptocurrencies, perfectly legitimate reasons – for China’s anti-tech campaign. Data security is the most oft-cited justification.

This is understandable in one sense, considering the high value the Chinese leadership places on its proprietary claims over big data, the high-octane fuel of its push into artificial intelligence. But it also smacks of hypocrisy in that much of the data has been gathered from the surreptitious gaze of the surveillance state.

The issue, however, is not justification. Actions can always be explained, or rationalised, after the fact. The point is that, for whatever reason, Chinese authorities are now using the full force of regulation to strangle the business models and financing capacity of the economy’s most dynamic sector.

Stephen Roach thinks, wrongly, that it is bad to restrict certain business models and financing through public offerings. But from China's point of view it makes perfect sense. Why should it care how much money foreign investors lose by that:

Beijing is pursuing other goals: reining in the power of its tech titans and boosting startups; protecting social equality; and making sure the cost of living in cities isn’t so high that families aren’t willing to have children. And Beijing is suspicious of companies that are skilled at raising capital overseas—beyond its watchful eye.
...
Sometimes, China might feel it’s being hijacked by hot foreign money. For example, Beijing wanted to scale down investment in for-profit education as early as 2018, but venture capital kept pouring in. Now the lucrative bet has been called to a halt.
Or consider geopolitical risks. Because of the [variable interest rate corporate] structure, in theory, DiDi, which is incorporated in the Cayman Islands, didn’t need Beijing’s approval to list in New York. But China’s cybersecurity office was concerned enough about DiDi’s data security—such as possible exposures to sensitive government locations—that it suggested the company postpone its IPO. DiDi ignored the warning, and we all know how it’s turning out.

The companies Roach listed are largely monopolies. They often buy up competitors and thereby, like Microsoft does in the U.S., prevent innovation. Moreover Alibaba's Ant tried to be a bank without being regulated as one. It promoted consumer credit and pulled people into debt. The delivery services and hauling services abused their workers. The tutoring companies took extremely high prices and distorted the otherwise equal chances between pupils, the basis of China's meritocracy.

All that is enough reason to strongly regulate them. But what was probably even worse is that the greedy owners of those companies planned to go public in western capital markets. They would thereby fall under foreign regulators and foreign laws. Other countries would probably gain access to the data they collect and use that against China. On top of that foreigners would gain the profits the companies make in China. At a time of a longer conflict between the U.S. and China it is better for Chinese companies to stay at home. If these companies really need more capital to grow they can find enough in China and do not need to go abroad.

Socialism with Chinese characteristics simply does not prioritize speculative capitalism over other values.

Stephen Roach knows that but he dislikes it. He argues that the regulation crack down on those companies diminishes the confidence in China. That is correct with regards to the confidence of 'western' speculators. But Roach argues, without evidence, that the clamp down will also hit the confidence of Chinese consumers who will thereby spend less:

Nor is the assault on tech companies the only example of moves that restrain the private economy. Chinese consumers are also suffering.
Rapid population ageing and inadequate social safety nets for retirement income and health care have perpetuated households’ unwillingness to convert precautionary saving into discretionary spending on items like motor vehicles, furniture, appliances, leisure, entertainment, travel, and the other trappings of more mature consumer societies.
...
The reason is that China has yet to create a culture of confidence in which its vast population is ready for a transformative shift in saving and consumption patterns.
...
Confidence among businesses and consumers alike is a critical underpinning of any economy.

But why should a crackdown on abusive conglomerates diminish Chinese consumer confidence. Might it not do the opposite?

Roach does not think so:

Modern China lacks this foundation of trust that underpins animal spirits. But while this has long been an obstacle to Chinese consumerism, now distrust is creeping into the business sector, where the government’s assault on tech companies is antithetical to the creativity, energy and sheer hard work they require to grow and flourish in an intensely competitive environment.
I have frequently raised concerns about the excesses of fear-driven precautionary saving as a major impediment to consumer-led Chinese rebalancing. But the authorities’ recent moves against the tech sector could be a tipping point. Without entrepreneurial energy, the creative juices of China’s New Economy will be sapped, along with hopes for a long-promised surge of indigenous innovation.

Why should people not save for their old age and consume on 'trappings' instead? Why should they take up credit? Why should they accept abusive monopolies and financial speculation?

Roach's argument is disingenuous as he answers none of the above questions.

Others, like Berkshire Hathaway's vice chairman Charlie Munger, are much wiser:

Berkshire Hathaway vice chairman Charlie Munger praised the Chinese government for silencing Alibaba's Jack Ma in a recent interview, adding that he wishes US financial regulators were more like those in China. "Communists did the right thing," Munger, the 97-year-old longtime friend of Warren Buffett, said about the handling of Ma, who criticized officials in Beijing last year for stifling innovation.
...
Although he would not want "all of the Chinese system" in the US, Munger did say "I certainly would like to have the financial part of it in my own country."
...
Munger also told CNBC's Becky Quick that while "our own wonderful free enterprise economy is letting all these crazy people go to this gross excess," the Chinese "step in preemptively to stop speculation."

China has decided to live by producing stuff instead of by betting on financial speculation. It does not favor the finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) sectors which dominate the U.S. economy. Unlike the U.S. China puts socialism before shareholders which in the end increases consumer confidence:

The Hang Seng Tech index, launched with fanfare last July and comprising internet darlings-turned-gargantuan blue chips such as Tencent and Alibaba, has cratered 40% since February to record lows.
...
Investors have so far responded with alarm that tipped on Tuesday towards panic. They dumped health stocks in anticipation the sector will be next in the firing line, even as the property and education sectors reel.
Housing, medical and education costs were the “three big mountains” suffocating Chinese families and crowding out their consumption, said Yuan Yuwei, a fund manager at Olympus Hedge Fund Investments, who had shorted developers and education firms.

“This is the most forceful reform I’ve seen over many years, and the most populist one,” Yuan said. ”It benefits the masses at the cost of the richest and the elite groups.”

With the crackdown on the big tech companies smaller ones will have a chance to grow. Workers will get better wages. Consumers will no longer have to spend on much too expensive services.

Now what are the real reasons why you think that is bad, Mr. Roach?

Posted by b on July 29, 2021 at 17:08 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2021/07/c ... .html#more

Kinda surprising from 'b', who sure as hell ain't no flaming Red, but he is big on national sovereignty, which puts him in the anti-US camp, usually.

That a few finance guys piously commend regulation of 'excess' is PR which I doubt these pros believe. 'Super-profits' and corruption are inevitable in capitalism as the Prime Directive is to accumulate as much capital as possible, the means are entirely secondary.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Thu Aug 12, 2021 1:45 pm

Marxism resurges among young Chinese after CPC’s centenary proves a success
Marxist-inspired youths
By Hu Yuwei and Huang Lanlan
Published: Aug 08, 2021 11:40 PM

Image
CPC centenary exhibition attracted youths to its birth place Photo:Cui Meng/GT


“How a Western ideology like Marxism can take roots and grow in an Eastern country and make the second largest economy even more prosperous than the Western country where it originated? There must be scientific and magical answers,” This is how 18-year-old Wang Yijin interprets her ambitions in studying Marxism. Wang made national headlines in July for grabbing an offer of Marxism studies at China’s prestigious Peking University (PKU) after giving up an offer of full scholarship from Hong Kong University.

Wang is a typical Chinese youngster propelled by a strong interest in Marxism studies in recent years, inspired with confidence in this ideology that has made China the second largest economy thanks to its strong economic vitality while the West is stuck in frequent economic crises.
Many of them are deeply aware of how Western ideologies advocating liberalism have lost their charm and hegemony after failing to deal with the pandemic and economic recovery.

Analysts say that the new generations of Chinese youths have been inspired to find alternatives to Western development in a more rational, scientific and practical way, especially after feeling frustrated under capitalism.

Marxism grabs the hearts of youths

The enthusiasm of China’s younger generations to explore Marxism has increased markedly in recent years, noted Wang Chuanli, professor at the School of Marxism of Tsinghua University, adding that getting admitted on a doctoral program in Marxist theory at Tsinghua is growingly competitive, as “the number of applicants has kept rising in the latest couple of years.”
Furthermore, Tsinghua started enrolling undergraduate students majoring in Marxist theory this year in a response to the interests among young applicants, Wang added.

Similarly, PKU, China’s first institution to open Marxist studies in 1992, launched a popular program in 2008 called “Dazhao Class” to commemorate one of the founding figures of the Communist Party of China (CPC), Li Dazhao. With the program is aimed at cultivating more talents in the area of Marxist theoretical research, Wang Yijin became the first admitted undergraduate student for this class extended to the Bachelor level in 2021.

The major has enrolled 20 undergraduate students this year, with programs covering subjects like Chinese Marxism, Marxist Development History, and Introduction to Marxist Basic Theory.

Wang told the Global Times that she hopes to understand why creative Marxism can make China a more powerful country and draw a clearer path for China’s future with innovative practices in next decades.

“Very thoughtful and rational with good analytical and speaking skills,” Wang defined herself as a qualified candidate for Marxist studies in a China’s top university.

Far away from the “politically indifferent younger Chinese generations” portrayed in biased Western media stories, Wang’s keen interest in politics gave her determination to make the difficult decision to give up an offer from Hong Kong University of a HK$684,000 full scholarship to major in law or economics, a seemingly more lucrative choice.
She participated in the Model United Nations and closely follows remarks from the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokespersons. She tried to discover the wisdom of the Chinese political system and the theory behind it.

She told the Global Times that the enthusiasm of the younger generations for Marxism is becoming a trend as many around her like to use vintage cultural products with profile pictures of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin and their quotes. She is spending her current summer holiday reading a biography of Marx.

Though lectures on Marxism-Leninism are common in Chinese educational curriculum, the students’ devotion goes beyond.

Online videos featuring extracts or inspiring episodes about Marxism-Leninism have become popular across domestic social media platforms, with many getting tens of thousands of likes up across Bilibili, a video-streaming platform popular among young Chinese audiences, including a typical video clip of a lecture by famous American Marxist economist Richard David Wolff.

Capitalism decay boosts domestic confidence

Students enrolled in Marxist studies reached by the Global Times regarded the experience as a window for youngsters to look for an alternative system for national prosperity, after realizing how Western capitalism can frustrate people’s aspirations.

Resentments and frustrations against capitalism have been also more prevalent across many domestic social media, Chen Xin, a PhD student majoring in theoretical Marxism, pointed out that many graduates prefer to become a national civil servant instead of going to the private sector, which they described as an “involution” where people compete for limited resources with demanding busy schedules under exploitative conditions.

Chen realized that studying Marxism is better aligned with the Chinese mainstream ideology and more suitable to understand how the theory develops creatively and retains its basic principles in the country.

“It's neither vague nor boring. It's explaining reality,” Chen told the Global Times, noting that she hopes to become a researcher or a civil servant after graduation to put her theory into practice and fit in the national system.

"Marxism teaches a legacy of socialism, not of gravediggers. The younger generations in China should be more socially responsible than their Western counterparts who grew up with values that emphasize individualism," Yu Heping, a master’s degree student at the School of Marxism at China University of Political Science and Law, explained his decision to enroll on this program.

“Marxism provides impetus for youths to follow dreams and makes us more confident to cope with confrontation with external ideologies,” he said, adding that “it is a matter of great pride to tie my personal destiny to the future of our country.”

Yu has similarly witnessed the growth in enrollment at the School of Marxism in his university in recent years, from 30 students in 2018 to more than 50 this year.
Compared with the elder Chinese generations, who grew up during a period of domestic political turmoil, lived through the collapse of the former Soviet Union and witnessed the tremendous change of East Europe in the 1990s, today’s young Chinese generations are much more confident in Marxism, said Wang Chuanli, the professor of Marxism.

“In the early 1990s there were some who doubted Marxism, socialism or the ruling [ability] of the CPC. But now, witnessing the country’s growing prosperity under the guidance of Marxism and the Party, most young people in China no longer have such doubts like their predecessors did,” said the professor.
“As Chairman Mao once said, our Party’s fighting strength would be greatly enhanced if it had one or two hundred comrades who had learned Marxism systematically,” Wang noted.

“Now we are going to have tens of thousands of young people who believe in and learn Marxism,” he said, adding that “they speak good English, have international perspective, and are good at thinking. They confirm the correctness of Marxism through their own observations, comparing China with the West.”

A contribution to such wave of enthusiasm was the recent celebration of the centenary of the founding of the CPC, advocating for a fresh understanding of socialism and Marxism in a new era, with rich pop culture products and drama series focusing on relevant histories.
Chinese TV drama Awakening Age, which narrates the story of how the CPC was founded in 1921, has become popular among young people such as Wang, the professor.

The CPC took the Communist Manifesto written by Marx and Friedrich Engels as a fundamental guidance and source of many policies of the CPC when it was created in 1919.

“So far China has successfully achieved the first centenary goal. The second centenary goal, as well as the building of a modern socialist country, will be the mission and stage of our generation,” said Wang.

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202108/1230909.shtml
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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Wed Aug 18, 2021 1:56 pm

CNN discovers communists in China, oh no!
President Xi Jinping turns his fire on China’s rich in push to redistribute wealth

By Laura He, CNN Business
Published 5:01 AM EDT, Wed August 18, 2021

Hong Kong CNN Business —
Chinese President Xi Jinping this week issued a bold new pledge to redistribute wealth in the country, piling more pressure on the country’s richest citizens and businesses.

Xi told top leaders from the ruling Chinese Communist Party on Tuesday that the government must establish a system to redistribute wealth in the interest of “social fairness,” according to a summary of the speech published by Xinhua, the official state news agency. He said it was “necessary” to “reasonably regulate excessively high incomes, and encourage high-income people and enterprises to return more to society.”

The Xinhua article did not include many details about how Xi hoped to accomplish this goal, but did suggest that the government could consider taxation or other ways of redistributing income and wealth.

Xi even invoked the need for “common prosperity” among the Chinese people as critical for the Party to maintain power, and transform the country into a “fully developed, rich and powerful” nation by 2049, the 100th anniversary of the existence of the People’s Republic of China.

“Common prosperity is the prosperity of all the people,” Xi said during the leadership’s economic meeting, which is hosted every few months to determine policy. “Not the prosperity of a few people.”

A significant phrase

That phrase carries a lot of historical significance in China, and Xi’s use in the context of wealth redistribution calls to mind its use by Chairman Mao Zedong in the middle of the last century as the former Communist leader advocated for dramatic economic reforms to take power away from rich landlords and farmers, the rural elite.


China sparked an economic miracle -- now there's a fight over its legacy
Mao ruled the country through great economic and social transformation and upheaval. His death in 1976 marked the end of the Cultural Revolution.

Afterward, China embarked on decades of economic liberalization under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping.

Deng adopted his own use of the phrase “common prosperity” as the country embraced free market principles in China’s socialist economy, and opened up the world’s largest Communist country to the West.

The former Chinese leader famously told a visiting delegation of American corporate executives in 1985 that “some areas and some people can get rich first, and then lead and help other regions and people [get rich], and gradually [we] achieve common prosperity.”

Over the years, China has transitioned from a poor country to the world’s second largest economy and one of its greatest forces in business and technology. Its rapid growth could help it overtake the United States as the world’s largest economy within a decade.

Growing inequality

But while the country’s private sector and amount of wealth has exploded — in 2019, the number of rich Chinese surpassed the number of rich Americans for the first time — gaps between rich and poor and rural and urban citizens in China have worsened.

That problem appears to have vexed Xi. On Tuesday, he admitted that the Party “allowed some people, some areas to get rich first” following its economic reforms dating back to the 1970s.

But since 2012 — when Xi assumed office — he said the central government has made “realizing the common prosperity of all people in a more important position.”

Xi’s focus on wealth redistribution ties into his government’s broader goals for the economy. In recent months, the country has embarked on an unprecedented crackdown on tech, finance, education and other sectors in the name of stemming financial risk, protecting the economy and stamping out corruption.

His government has also cited a need to safeguard national security and protect the interests of its people. Regulators have widely blamed the private sector for creating socioeconomic problems that could potentially destabilize society and affect the Party’s grip on power.

A woman on her electric-powered scooter films a large video screen outside a shopping mall showing Chinese President Xi Jinping speaking during an event to commemorate the 100th anniversary of China's Communist Party at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, Thursday, July 1, 2021.(AP Photo/Andy Wong)
China's biggest private companies are in chaos. It's all part of Beijing's plan
The crackdown on private enterprise has rattled global investors and stoked fears about the prospects of innovation and growth in China’s economy.

The country’s economy already has showed signs of weakness lately. Data released Monday indicated that the country’s recovery is slowing, and the unemployment rate among young people has spiked to the worst level in a year.

Economists have attributed to the slowdown to an array of factors, including the fast spread of the Delta variant, natural disasters, growing debt risks, and waning investor sentiment on the heels of the regulatory clampdown.

https://us.cnn.com/2021/08/18/economy/x ... index.html

********************************************

China’s biggest private companies are in chaos. It’s all part of Beijing’s plan

Analysis by Laura He, CNN Business
Published 1:17 AM EDT, Wed August 4, 2021

Hong Kong CNN Business —
China’s crackdown on private enterprise has wiped out more than $1.2 trillion in market value for many powerful Chinese companies and stoked fears about the future of innovation in the world’s second largest economy.

But the end goal of Beijing’s aggressive bid for control isn’t about creating chaos. The government wants to make clear to its corporate champions that tapping capitalist markets is fine — as long as it is on the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s terms.

The heavy selling has accelerated in recent months as Chinese authorities slap companies with fines, ban apps from stores and demand that some firms completely overhaul their businesses.

Hundreds of billions of dollars in market value has been erased in the last week alone, after regulators announced curbs on China’s for-profit education industry and its food delivery sector.

The way Beijing sees it, the efforts to rein in private enterprise are meant to protect the economy and the country’s citizens from instability. They’re also intended to fix longstanding concerns around overwork, data privacy and inequality in education.

“Ultimately, Beijing’s crackdown on private business is about control,” said Alex Capri, a research fellow at the Hinrich Foundation. “The main priority is about preventing behavior amongst private companies that could engender more independent and potentially non-conformist activities, which undermines Beijing’s state-centric model.”

A major corporate shakeup

Corporate China has been rocked by Beijing’s reforms.

The government first focused on tech, abruptly pulling an IPO for Ant Group in November. The company, best known for its Alipay payment app, was later ordered to restructure its operations and become a financial holding company.

No part of the tech industry has been spared scrutiny. Alibaba (BABA) was hit with a record $2.8 billion fine after regulators accused the e-commerce company of behaving like a monopoly. Other firms, including social media and gaming giant Tencent (TCEHY) and e-commerce platform Pinduoduo (PDD), have been hauled in front of authorities investigating alleged anticompetitive behavior, too.

And early last month, Didi was banned from app stores shortly after the ride-hailing company went public in the United States.

Regulators have set their sights on other industries, too. Other US-listed Chinese companies have been singled out by authorities who are probing them over data security issues. On July 24, China banned education and private tutoring companies from turning a profit or raising funding on stock markets — dramatic new rules that will almost certainly force many major firms to rethink their entire business model.

The crackdown is “unprecedented in terms of its duration, intensity, scope, and the velocity of new policy announcements,” analysts from Goldman Sachs wrote in a research report last week that called the strategy a “rebalancing of socialism and capital markets.”

“Chinese authorities are prioritizing social welfare and wealth redistribution over capital markets in areas that are deemed social necessities and public goods,” they added.

Image
A woman on her electric-powered scooter films a large video screen outside a shopping mall showing Chinese President Xi Jinping speaking during an event to commemorate the 100th anniversary of China's Communist Party at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, Thursday, July 1, 2021.

Merit to the crackdown

Beijing’s decision to frame its unprecedented clampdown as a necessary public good has merit, according to analysts.

The regulatory crackdown on Didi and other internet companies, for example, focused on allegations that those firms mishandled sensitive data about their users in China, posing risks to personal privacy and national cybersecurity. There’s also been a public outcry in the country against widespread data breaches, abuse of personal information, and corporate surveillance.

Inequalities within education and private learning have also spurred plenty of reform. As the government announced its restrictions on for-profit tutoring last week, it claimed that the industry has been “hijacked” by capital and that has “distorted the nature of education.”

The country’s education system is heavily competitive and exam-focused, leading to concerns about student fatigue. Private tutoring, meanwhile, has flourished as urban middle-class families have tried to give a head-start to their children by preparing them intensively for exams — but such resources are costly.

The government’s focus on inequality is a “smart choice,” said Sonja Opper, a professor at Bocconi University in Italy who studies China’s economy and the private sector, given concerns about disparities in income and education.

The country is also increasingly worried about unemployment — especially the welfare of its young workers, a growing number of whom are complaining about a crushing culture of overwork.

A movement called “lying flat” — “tangping” in Chinese — has become enormously popular among young people. It calls on them to reject societal pressures to work hard, get married, have children or buy property because of the diminishing rewards of achieving such goals.

Chinese tech companies have been widely blamed for forcing young people to work long hours and glorifying overwork culture. “996,” which refers to the practice of working from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week, has attracted particular ire among urban young workers and is said to be common among big technology companies and startups.

The “lying flat” philosophy appears to have worried the ruling Chinese Communist Party. The word “tangping” has been largely censored on Chinese social media in recent months, and state media outlets have criticized the movement.

“The creative contribution of youths is indispensable for our country to achieve high-quality development,” the state-owned Guangming Daily wrote in a May editorial. It called the “lying flat” movement problematic as China contends with a labor shortage that could hurt its long-term economic goals.

The risk of aggressive action

Beijing’s tactics carry plenty of risk. Along with the $1.2 trillion in market value that Goldman Sachs says has been wiped off of prominent stocks, analysts also point to concerns that the crackdown could kill China’s entrepreneurial spirit — a critical piece of the country’s economic liberalization and rapid growth.

“The increase in regulation can bring some benefits to the Chinese corporate world as some sectors are very unregulated,” said Steve Tsang, director of the SOAS China Institute at the SOAS University of London. “But the increase in control also signals to the private entrepreneurs that they must now watch their steps more carefully and bring their businesses in line with Party guidelines or leadership.”

Opper, of Bocconi University, cited similar concerns, adding that Beijing’s decision to target specific companies may not be “the most effective policy response.” She suggested that progressive taxation and education support for the poor could more successfully combat inequality.

“China’s government may well feel, that more restrictive policies can be introduced, now that the country has moved closer to the technological frontier,” she said. “But it is highly unlikely that the entrepreneurial spirit — so successfully unleashed by leaders preceding [President] Xi Jinping — survives under a highly restrictive, regulatory regime.”

The reforms really come back to one thing, according to Tsang, who warned that economic inequality could hurt the legitimacy of the Communist Party if left unchecked.

“I think what Xi is attempting is not to crackdown on private businesses but to enhance regulations (or party control) over private enterprises so that they all ‘serve the people’ or follow the leadership of the Party,” he added.

https://us.cnn.com/2021/08/04/tech/chin ... index.html
Looks to me something like a New Economic Program might be working..."A huge mistake risking 'entrepreneurial spirit', yadda yadda". And what is wrong with the ruling party striving to meet the masses' needs and expectations? Ain't that the way democracy is supposed to work? Well, not in these parts, where the 'rights of the minority'(which has always meant the rich in booj-speak) put not a thumb but an ass-cheek on the scale. So ya see, them chi-coms don't understand how democracy works....

And if ya think that this throws sand in the capitalists' vasoline pity the Manhattan Maoists suffering from acute cognitive dissonance.

Again and again the punchline of the old cautionary tale comes back to me, "You always knew I was a snake."
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Wed Aug 25, 2021 1:41 pm

Can The Chinese Diaspora Speak?
AUG 19
WRITTEN BY QIAO COLLECTIVE


The political speech of the Chinese diaspora has a long history as a site of critique and co-optation by U.S empire and its enabling discourses. Amidst a new apex in Cold War Sinophobia, we trace the revolutionary and reactionary framings of “overseas Chinese” as a political category, from Qing-era anti-colonialism to 20th century Cold War liberalism and beyond.

This essay was originally published in Monthly Review’s July-August 2021 issue.

In May 2017, Yang Shuping took the podium before a packed auditorium. Sporting a black commencement gown streaked by the University of Maryland’s gold sash, Yang stood by university dean Wallace Loh as he tried to pick out Yang’s parents in the sea of seats before them. “You must feel very proud of your daughter. We certainly are proud of her,” Lowe remarked as Yang’s mother stood, holding a bouquet of red roses to audience applause.

Unbeknownst to them, this simple commencement ritual would spark international controversy. In keeping with the genre of the graduation ceremony, Yang’s speech mobilized tropes of struggle, hardship, triumph, and almost maudlin optimism. But filtered through her experience as a Chinese international student, Yang’s remarks presented a highly politicized affirmation of U.S. exceptionalism and an accordant repudiation of her native China.

Yang’s coming-to-America story hinged on positioning U.S. liberalism as a welcome release from Chinese oppression. Recounting her first arrival at Dulles International Airport, Yang described her “first breath of American air,” contrasting the “sweet and fresh” air to her hometown in China, where she reported wearing a face mask whenever leaving the house for fear of getting sick. “When I took my first breath of American air,” Yang waxed poetically, “I put my mask away.”

“The fresh air of free speech,” as Yang put it, was a privilege only to be found in the United States.

Yang’s liberation from the ostensibly oppressive constraints of her face mask served as a metonym for her transformation from oppressed Chinese subject to liberated U.S. pupil. Recounting her childhood exposure to the U.S. concept of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” Yang claimed these “strange, abstract, and foreign” words had little meaning to her—until she came to the United States. “The fresh air of free speech,” as Yang put it, was a privilege only to be found in the United States.

The speech—while lauded by peers and praised by a tearful Dean Loh as capturing “some of his deepest feelings” about the United States as an “American by choice”—nonetheless provoked backlash from Chinese netizens and media outlets who saw in Yang’s embrace of U.S. exceptionalism as a “bolstering [of] negative Chinese stereotypes.” Yang was held to account not only by her ostensible compatriots but by fellow Chinese students at the University of Maryland: the Chinese Student and Scholar Association quickly released a video response titled “Proud of China UMD,” in which Chinese international students criticized Yang’s “stereotypical comments” and shared prideful stories about the culture, cuisine, and climate of their Chinese hometowns.[1]Quickly, the backlash against Yang’s speech became the story itself. The Washington Post chastised “nationalist netizens” who “force[d]” Yang to make an apology; the BBC similarly derided these “angry student patriots” as the “new Red Guards.”[2]

In deriding the critiques of Chinese students and commenters who chastised Yang’s speech as that of hysterical nationalists, mainstream media’s backlash to the response was premised on its own policing of legitimate political discourse.

In deriding the critiques of Chinese students and commenters who chastised Yang’s speech as that of hysterical nationalists, mainstream media’s backlash to the response was premised on its own policing of legitimate political discourse. The controversy exhibits the ways in which the political speech of overseas Chinese has long been circumscribed by the dictates of liberal universalism. Students such as Yang are compelled either to prostrate to an edifying project of assimilation to U.S. liberal democracy, or be branded as illiberal “Red Guards” unfit for serious political discourse. This discursive context has long mobilized overseas Chinese to affirm the universalism of Western liberalism in opposition to a Chinese despotism defined either by dynastic backwardness or communist depravity. The question: Can overseas Chinese speak for themselves in the face of what Mobo Gao has described as the West’s “hegemonic right to knowledge?”[3] Or will all such speech that challenges U.S. presuppositions of liberal selfhood and Chinese despotism simply be tuned out as illiberal noise?

The controversy over Yang’s remarks signaled the accruing symbolic power of overseas Chinese students amid heightened Cold War antagonisms toward China. As of 2019, there were some 372,000 Chinese students enrolled in U.S. universities, 120,000 in the United Kingdom, and many more studying in Canada, Germany, and Australia. This sizable population exists at the intersection of multiple, often contradictory, geopolitical impulses. On the one hand, overseas education has long been seen as a route toward channeling technical and managerial skills toward China’s national modernization, and the neocolonial regime of academic knowledge production means that Western degrees continue to bear social status for upwardly mobile Chinese professionals. On the other hand, Chinese overseas students have historically been framed as a target of Western liberal soft power—as proxies for a neocolonial project of molding China in the U.S. image.

In 2019, there were 372,000 Chinese students enrolled in U.S. universities and 120,000 in the United Kingdom. This population exists at the intersection of multiple, often contradictory, geopolitical impulses.

While international U.S. education has long been mobilized as a means of “making the world like us,” the presence of a growing body of Chinese international students willing to voice their political disjunctures with Western liberal truisms represents a unique threat to the ideological regimes of U.S. exceptionalism and the “civilizing mission” of overseas education.[4] Amid broader generational trends such as the Chinese millennial turn away from U.S. culture and commodities, some have noted the apparent collapse of Chinese visions of the United States as the “lighthouse country” (灯塔国)—a beacon of modernity, technological prowess, and liberal governmentality to be imitated by Chinese bourgeois reformists.[5] In particular, Xi Jinping’s doctrine of “four confidences” represents a canonized repudiation of longstanding currents of Chinese neoliberal political thought that viewed Western liberal democracy as a model for China’s modernization. Preaching confidence in China’s chosen path, its guiding theories, its political system, and its culture, this rearticulation of Chinese national self-confidence has been decried by Western onlookers as part of China’s ideological challenge to U.S. hegemony.

This increased confidence among Chinese overseas students in the legitimacy of the Chinese model has led to ideological clashes that trouble the neat presumption that exposure to Western liberal education will evangelize Chinese international students into the dogma of bourgeois democracy. In this context, Chinese international students have transformed from a symbol of liberal edification into agents of Chinese communist infiltration: when the Chinese Students and Scholars Association at the University of California, San Diego, protested the selection of the Dalai Lama as the campus’s 2017 commencement speaker, other campus voices argued they were “doing the work of the Chinese government” and pledged not to allow Chinese government “propaganda” to encroach on academic freedoms.[6] The international spotlight afforded to the Hong Kong protests of 2019 similarly sparked campus clashes: at Australia’s University of Queensland, Chinese students clashed with pro-Hong Kong student protesters, some of whom hoisted signs reading “No ChiNazi” and occupied the university’s Confucius Institute, part of a network of cultural and language partnerships affiliated with the Chinese government.[7] Once again, a serious engagement with the political speech of Chinese students was deferred in favor of a nationalist and racially charged narrative of “communist creep” into the liberal safe haven of Australian higher education. A parade of Western liberal commentators emerged to pontificate on how, exactly, Chinese overseas students dared to articulate their own understanding of Chinese politics rather than embracing the tenets of bourgeois democracy and “self-determination.” As one U.S. university professor bemoaned: “Chinese international students are studying for years in the United States without adopting democratic values.… Clearly, we’re not doing a very good job teaching them.”[8]

These flashpoints quickly fueled racist speculation that Chinese overseas students, far from being proxies to mold China into the Western capitalist model, were in fact duplicitous agents of the Chinese state intent on undermining the West itself. In a salacious article titled “The Chinese Influence Effort Hiding in Plain Sight,” the Atlantic compared Chinese students in Germany, the United States, and Australia to “mushroom tendrils spreading unseen for miles beneath the first floor,” invisible to European leaders yet growing in nefarious power.[9]

In 2020, the Donald Trump administration issued an executive order canceling the visas of thousands of Chinese graduate students and researchers in the United States who had ties to universities affiliated with the People’s Liberation Army.

Calls for political action soon followed. In 2019, assistant secretary of state for educational and cultural affairs Marie Royce called on educators to contribute to “integrating international students,” bemoaning the fact that Chinese overseas students “live in a propaganda bubble” by nature of consuming Chinese media and using Chinese social media apps like WeChat.[10] The following year, the Donald Trump administration issued an executive order canceling the visas of thousands of Chinese graduate students and researchers in the United States who had ties to universities affiliated with the People’s Liberation Army—a list which includes hundreds of Chinese universities, from those run by China’s military academy to top civilian universities that provide STEM scholarships through the PLA.[11] Not to be outdone, Republican senators Tom Cotton and Marsha Blackburn unveiled even more onerous legislation to prohibit visas for all graduate-level Chinese international students in STEM fields.[12]

The starkly opposed receptions afforded to Yang Shuping and her fellow compatriots derided as “Red Guards” and “security threats” speaks to the binary construction of overseas Chinese people in the Western imagination. On the one hand, they represent the chance to affirm the hegemony of Western liberal ideology: by “liberating” Chinese subjects from the ostensibly repressive confines of socialist society, overseas Chinese people affirm the superiority of “fresh, American air” and serve as authentic mouthpieces for neocolonial agendas that seek to transform China into an object of Western intervention and modernization. On the other hand, when overseas Chinese rebuke the magnanimous hand of Western assimilation, they are framed by the trope of the Oriental invasion, infiltrating Western societies at risk to body, family, and nation.

In an era of renewed Cold War aggression towards China, historicizing the workings of multicultural empire and the strategic inclusion of the Chinese diaspora therein reveals the justifying discourses of U.S. imperialism.

If the branding of Yang Shuping as a “traitor” by Chinese “nationalist netizens” appears uncouth, it nonetheless speaks to an explicit strategy of the United States and other Western nations to instrumentalize overseas Chinese people in service of a paternalistic, antagonistic posture toward the People’s Republic of China. In this configuration, Yang’s story is representative of a broader genre of multicultural empire that wields the confessional speech of newly incorporated Chinese Americans as part of a campaign to delegitimize China’s socialist project. In an era in which a renewed Cold War posture toward China is obscured through the uplifting of ethnic Chinese testimonies of Chinese depravity and U.S. excellence, historicizing the workings of multicultural empire and the strategic inclusion of the Chinese diaspora therein reveals the justifying discourses of U.S. imperialism.

National Humiliation, National Rejuvenation

The United States has long viewed the Chinese diaspora—and overseas Chinese students in particular—as a vehicle through which to direct China’s development in favor of U.S. commercial and geopolitical interests. In the early twentieth century, as the United States jockeyed with European powers and Japan in the so-called scramble for China, the overseas education of Chinese elites was posed as a strategic avenue to advance U.S. interests. As Russian, German, and Japanese military incursions into China threatened to collapse the fragile “open door” system that preserved the appearance of China’s territorial integrity and, more importantly, the open competitive access for foreign commerce in China’s ports, the possibility that the United States would be compelled to force its own sphere of influence in China via military power appeared imminent. Yet, secretary of war William Howard Taft posed the Americanization of Chinese elites as a “more subtle and strategic policy than using gunboats to open China to American influence.”[13] University educators such as Edmund James, the president of the University of Illinois, gave similar advice. Writing to president Theodore Roosevelt, James put forth a model of ideological, not military, intervention: “The nation which succeeds in educating the young Chinese of the present generation will be the nation which…will reap the largest possible returns in moral, intellectual, and commercial influence.… We should to-day be controlling the development of China in that most satisfactory and subtle of all ways—through the intellectual and spiritual domination of its leaders.”[14] In 1908, President Roosevelt would heed James’s advice and institute the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program, remitting some $13 million to the Chinese government to be devoted to the U.S. education of select Chinese students. Described by Roosevelt as an “act of friendship” between the two countries, the measure was in fact an attempt to shape China’s destiny toward U.S. interests.

In the early twentieth century, as the U.S. jockeyed with European powers and Japan in the so-called scramble for China, the overseas education of Chinese elites was posed as a strategic avenue to advance U.S. interests.

While such programs, alongside decades of missionary penetration of China, attempted to foster the “intellectual and spiritual domination” that reformers like James sought, efforts to paint the United States as a magnanimous great power alternative to European colonial encroachment were undermined not only by the growing U.S. role in the neocolonial China trade, but also by racist Chinese exclusion immigration laws that singled out Chinese migrants to be subjected to humiliating inspections, indefinite detentions, and outright bans on entry to the United States. In this context, overseas Chinese encounters with the humiliations of anti-Asian racism in the United States formed a politicizing crucible that connected racism abroad to the colonial domination of China at home. Far from evangelizing overseas Chinese people toward convergence with a U.S. model of modernity, these experiences created new movements for national self-determination and self-strengthening within and beyond the transnational Chinese community. These diverse emergent political currents—from Qing reformism to anticolonial nationalism and revolutionary republicanism—proved the capacity of overseas Chinese to mobilize a political identity in service of aims beyond the preordained machinations of U.S. aspirations. Far from neocolonial proxies of Western soft power, the overseas Chinese earned the honorific title of “the mother of revolution” in recognition of their role in fostering China’s 1911 republican Xinhai Revolution.[15]

The 1905 Chinese boycott of U.S. goods represents one moment on a longer timeline of transnational Chinese activism that mobilized experiences of overseas racism toward a nationalist, anticolonial project. Subjected both to “unequal treaties” at home that created segregated colonial concessions in port cities like Shanghai and to racist Chinese exclusion laws in the United States, Canada, Australia, and beyond, overseas Chinese sojourners, students, and laborers alike forwarded an analysis that linked both forms of racism to the weakness of a feudal Qing government that had become a glorified mediator of foreign incursions into China.

The humiliations of Chinese exclusion were circulated through political pamphlets, such as those of the Baohuanghui (保皇會) reformist party, which sought to mobilize readers toward a vision of reformist self-strengthening. As political thinkers such as Liang Qichao toured Chinese overseas communities in Hawai‘i, San Francisco, and beyond, they vividly depicted the ritualized humiliation of Chinese migrants subjected to body measurements, fingerprinting, and photography in the nude upon arrival to immigration detention centers such as Angel Island. As Liang wrote: “the Chinese immigrants coming to America have not yet committed any crimes, but they are treated as criminals.”[16] These testimonies coalesced a transnational Chinese political identity on principles of national and racial pride and anticolonialism.

A song circulated by a Baohuanghui chapter in Burma in 1905 mournfully depicted the treatment of overseas Chinese, linking it to China’s own national weakness in the face of foreign imperialist powers:

Watch a European with a dog wagging its tail, both landed, walking away slowly.

Chinese should be grieving, lower than a dog.

Why so despicable, so disgraceful?

Our one country is too weak, no good,

Tears come down like rain

When looking at the general situation and our fatherland.[17]


In 1904, resumed U.S.-China negotiations threatened the indefinite extension of Chinese exclusion laws codified by the 1894 Gresham-Yang Treaty, giving rise to popular protests aimed at bolstering what reformers and revolutionaries feared would be the Qing court’s weak negotiating hand. Bringing together immigrant associations such as the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, overseas Chinese merchants, and Chinese reformists and revolutionaries, the 1905 boycott movement protested the humiliations of Chinese exclusion and called for national strength in the face of both colonial incursions and overseas discrimination.

The testimonies of overseas Chinese who bore the brunt of U.S. racism became a kind of transnational folklore that mobilized the 1905 boycott movement of U.S. goods.

The testimonies of overseas Chinese who bore the brunt of U.S. racism became a kind of transnational folklore that mobilized the boycott movement. Stories such as that of Feng Xiawei—a laborer from Guangdong who was wrongfully detained in an immigration raid in Boston and later returned to China before committing suicide in front of the U.S. consulate in Shanghai on July 16, 1905—spread the boycott through public remembrances of martyrdom. In a letter written before his death, Feng had warned of the mass movement to come if exclusion laws were extended: “many Chinese will follow me to die in protest if the treaty is not repudiated.”[18] Similarly, Tom Kim Yung, the military attaché of the Chinese legation in Washington DC, was popularized as a martyr of the boycott movement after he committed suicide at the Chinese consulate in San Francisco in 1903, after having been arrested and beaten by local police.[19] Through public vigils and commemorations throughout China and its diaspora, these fallen overseas Chinese became martyrs for the boycott and the nationalist movement it helped propel.

Importantly, the crude force of global anti-Chinese racism helped transnational currents of Chinese politicization to partially transcend boundaries of geography and class. Merchants, activists, scholars, students, and manual laborers in China, Hawai‘i, the Philippines, and Singapore came together in unity to boycott U.S. goods. Liang Qichao described this spirit of camaraderie in Shanghai: “From millionaires to poor workers, millions of people are of one mind, and we must not stop until we win back our rights.… The foreigners in Shanghai have become worried, saying that China, the sleeping lion, has awakened.”[20] Emblematic of the power and unprecedented nature of the boycott, U.S. newspapers described the movement as a “commercial menace” and speculated it may represent a “forerunner of an anti-foreign agitation.” The Baltimore Sun reported in September 1905 that even some of the wealthiest U.S. tycoons in Shanghai may not be “able to weather the storm.”[21]

This same overseas network of Chinese merchants, students, sojourners, and laborers would form the base for the dissemination of propaganda, financial support, and safe havens in the runup to the Xinhai Revolution that overthrew the Qing court in 1911. But later events of the twentieth century would prove the inadequacies of the bourgeois democratic model as a conduit for the liberation of China’s peoples. Having overthrown the monarchical system, the young Republic of China continued to face backward industry, a new capitalist class society, the influence of feudal warlords, and, most importantly, lacked real national recognition in an imperialist international system. Despite Chinese military support in Europe’s “great war,” China was marginalized from the Allied powers Paris Peace Conference in 1919. That conference’s transfer of German concessions in Shandong to Japan, rather than retrocession to China, proved the endurance of the colonialist domination of China and the persisting era of national humiliation. It was not until the formation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 that Mao Zedong could credibly announce that the Chinese people had “stood up,” rejecting the colonial incursions suffered by its Qing predecessor and the foreign manipulation of which the rival U.S.-backed Kuomintang was long accused.

After decades of support for the exiled Kuomintang, the United States saw Communist Party leadership as a closing of China’s long-sought open door. Having now “lost” China, these changes fundamentally refigured the strategic significance of the Chinese diaspora in the eyes of U.S. officials. The racial regime of Chinese exclusion that had animated a transnational Chinese alliance in support of China’s national liberation gave way to Cold War tactics of contingent Chinese inclusion that sought to presage the U.S. battle for “hearts and minds” by symbolically integrating loyal Chinese Americans. Meanwhile, the lingering enforcement apparatus of the exclusion era was mobilized to target overseas Chinese with perceived loyalties to “Red China.” In this context, the precondition for Chinese diasporic political subjectivity was its allegiance to a hostile U.S. stance toward the new People’s Republic and an unquestioning loyalty to both the United States and the Kuomintang regime in Taiwan known by Cold Warriors as “Free China.” These early Cold War years enshrined new strategies of racial liberalism and multicultural empire that assimilated the Chinese diaspora into a militarized project of Cold War anticommunism.

The Cold War Mandate of Chinese American Inclusion

Following liberation from Japanese occupation and the fleeing of Kuomintang troops to Taiwan, the United States emerged as the primary antagonist facing New China. As Mao identified U.S. imperialism as “the common enemy of the whole world,” racism against overseas Chinese was invoked as evidence of the hypocritical support the United States pledged toward “Free China.” In this context, the People’s Republic of China attempted to once again mobilize the racism faced by overseas Chinese in service of a project of national rejuvenation—now one of socialist development. For instance, a 1951 pamphlet published by the People’s Republic of China Office of Overseas Chinese Affairs included the testimony of a Chinese national living in San Francisco, describing the contradictions of a United States that preached a “special friendship” with the Chinese people that was never extended to Chinese nationals in the United States. As the pamphlet described: “Every Chinese in America has experienced mistreatment by the American Imperialist Immigration Authorities.”[22]

Cold War racial liberalism framed the Chinese diaspora in new ways: “overseas Chinese” emerged as a category of targeted U.S. propaganda that aimed to have the Chinese diaspora “be denied to the Peking Regime.”

These charges of U.S. racism, white supremacy, and imperialism from Chinese, Soviet, and nonaligned third world nations chipped away at the U.S. self-designation as leader of the “free world.” Socialist, anticolonial revolution was the only way toward real self-determination and an end to the fetters of neocolonialism in a supposedly postcolonial era. Aware of the ramifications of these allegations for U.S. influence in the third world, the Cold War ushered in a new regime of racial liberalism—what Jodi Melamed has described as the “incorporation of antiracism into postwar U.S. governmentality.”[23] Prototypical discourses of U.S. Cold War racial liberalism framed the Chinese diaspora in new ways: “overseas Chinese” emerged not as a politicized identity of transnational Chinese anticolonialism, but a category of targeted U.S. propaganda and strategic integration that, in the words of a 1954 U.S. Information Agency (USIA) memorandum, aimed to have the Chinese diaspora “be denied to world communism…and the Peking Regime.”[24]

The new paradigm of racial liberalism presented unprecedented opportunities for Chinese American civic inclusion after decades of legally mandated exclusion, segregation, and discrimination. Chinese American political elites—from elected officials to old Chinatown organizations such as the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association—exploited these newfound opportunities for political power and representation. But this civic power was predicated on a willingness to wield Chinese ethnicity and U.S. patriotism in service of U.S. foreign policy objectives—decisively wedding Chinese American racial “progress” at home to a militarized regime of Cold War anticommunism abroad.

The political ascent of Hiram Fong, the first Asian American U.S. senator and a Republican representing occupied Hawai‘i, is illustrative of the opportunities to be found under the auspices of a multicultural Cold War empire. As speaker of the Hawai‘i House of Representatives, Fong yoked the movement for Hawaiian statehood to the Cold War “battle for hearts and minds” in Asia. Like others, Fong recognized that granting statehood to Hawai‘i, with its majority-Asian population, would help dispel suspicions in Asia about U.S. racism—particularly anti-Asian immigration quotas that remained on the books until 1965. In a 1950 testimony before Congress, Fong argued that Hawaiian statehood would do in Asia what the Marshall Plan did in Europe—“win friends for our democratic way of life” by refuting communist allegations of U.S. racism, without incurring the equivalent costs of the Marshall Plan.[25]

Fong’s political success was no doubt grounded in his ability to wield his ethnic identity as proof of U.S. racial tolerance in the face of propagandized communist “totalitarianism.” As Newsweek put it amid Fong’s first senatorial run in 1959: “Imagine a Chinese in the U.S. Senate—how would Red China like that?”[26] Once in office, Fong made good on the promise of instrumentalizing his ethnic identity to advance U.S. foreign policy objectives. In October 1959, Fong embarked on a diplomatic tour of U.S. allies in Asia, in what was described in the New York Times as a “one-man people-to-people program” designed to “promote Asian appreciation of democracy as practiced in the United States.”[27] It was a delegation only Fong could accomplish, for “the color of his skin and the shape of his eyes tell his story to an Asian audience before he begins to speak.” Fong himself described his tour’s mission of preaching to ethnically Chinese people in Southeast Asia on the question of national loyalties and inclusion: “They say that a picture tells more than 10,000 words. I hope that my appearance in the flesh will do the same.” On the heels of the genocidal U.S. intervention in Korea, Fong’s delegation speaks to the uses of “diversity” in rendering U.S. Cold War imperialism as a project of “spreading democracy” rather than a militarized project of anticommunist invasion and occupation.

By the mid–1950s, the State Department and CIA had both identified the overseas Chinese as a strategic target for psychological warfare and anticommunist propaganda.

Fong’s foreign diplomacy was part of broader efforts to sever the political linkages between socialist China and overseas Chinese populations. By the mid–1950s, the State Department and CIA had both identified the overseas Chinese as a strategic target for psychological warfare and anticommunist propaganda. In the eyes of the U.S. government, the sizable population of ethnic Chinese living in countries like the Philippines, Indonesia, and Singapore was considered a latent “fifth column” of communist mobilization. Identifying the “critical importance” of overseas Chinese to U.S. Cold War efforts, ethnic Chinese in the United States were mobilized to produce and disseminate testimonials of U.S. exceptionalism to encourage Chinese diasporic allegiance to their host countries and not “Red China.” For instance, the USIA launched a popular Chinese-language magazine called Free World Chinese, which featured success stories of Chinese and other Asians in the United States as evidence of free world liberal exceptionalism.

Voice of America, a radio broadcast unit of USIA, similarly tapped Chinese American figureheads to perform the ideological work of U.S. empire. Chinese American screenwriter Betty Lee Sung was tapped to write a Voice of America series titled “Chinese Activities,” depicting a rose-tinted view of life for Chinese people in America. As Sung would later recount: “What would interest the Chinese in China and Southeast Asia more than learning about how their compatriots lived and were treated in a country that represented to them the ‘mountain of gold,’ the ‘land of the beautiful,’ and presently archenemy of the Chinese communists?”[28]

Beyond token individuals, Chinese American communal institutions were also courted to cooperate with the goals of the U.S. foreign policy establishment and its geopolitical allies. The Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (CCBA), a longstanding intermediary between the Chinese American community and U.S. immigration authorities, emerged during the Cold War as an avatar of both Kuomintang and U.S. anticommunist repression in the Chinese diaspora. For pledging loyalty to “Free China,” many CCBA executives were rewarded with positions in the Kuomintang party and the Nationalist government. These loyalties were tapped to crush any political sympathies in the Chinese American community to the People’s Republic: when Chinese Americans in San Francisco hoisted the People’s Republic of China flag in celebration of China’s founding in 1949, pro-Kuomintang thugs disrupted the celebration and beat the attendees.[29] The following day, posters were plastered throughout Chinatown listing some fifteen diaspora supporters of the People’s Republic and offering a $5,000 reward to anyone willing to kill them.[30] In New York, the consul general of the former Republic of China complained to authorities of the “hoisting of the new flag of the bogus regime in Chinatown.”[31]

In 1950, the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association helped establish the Chinese Six Companies Anti-Communist League and declared that “99.7 percent” of Chinatown was on the right side of the Korean War.

These acts of anticommunist repression were coupled with public displays of patriotism for both the United States and the Kuomintang regime. Various CCBA organizations officially condemned Mao’s leadership, denounced China’s entrance into the Korean War, and protested against potential People’s Republic of China representation in the UN General Assembly. Partisan publications like the Chinese Nationalist Daily urged Chinatown leaders to “prove to the American people that we are against communism.” Chinatown leaders met the call—in 1950, the CCBA helped establish the Chinese Six Companies Anti-Communist League and declared that “99.7 percent” of Chinatown was on the right side of the Korean War.[32] The League formed with the express objective to support the U.S. intervention in Korea and “cooperate with Americans in general and help them differentiate between friend and enemy among the Chinese.” Doing so entailed public performances of patriotism, such as a February 1951 fundraising rally in which participants carried signs proclaiming “Down with Red Imperialists,” “Chinese Americans Are Loyal Citizens,” and “Help Free China.”[33] With their knowledge of the community landscape and their shared interest in suppressing the diaspora left, the CCBA increasingly took on a role as community broker for state repression. For instance, when the Kang Jai Association, a locality organization for men from Hainan, declined to sign a CCBA declaration of loyalty following China’s entrance into the Korean War, their headquarters were raided by U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), and eighty-three of its members were detained.[34]

In differentiating “friends and enemies,” Cold War Chinese American inclusion was premised on a binary between “model minority” anticommunist allies and “yellow peril” communist sympathizers. While Cold War racial liberalism afforded new opportunities for civil inclusion for Chinese Americans willing to embrace the legitimizing fictions of U.S. imperialism, it also created conditions for state-sanctioned anticommunist repression for those alleged to have the wrong international sympathies. Programs such as the Chinese Confession Program, overseen by the INS from 1956 to 1965, are illustrative of the binary of assimilation and repression that governed U.S. mediation of Chinese diasporic communities during the Cold War. Sparked by a Hong Kong embassy official’s concerns that the longstanding “paper son” system utilized by Chinese migrants to evade Chinese Exclusion restrictions could become a “criminal conspiracy” to be exploited by Chinese communists, the INS called for Chinese American paper sons and their descendants to come forward to “confess” and normalize their immigration status. In this way, officials hoped to close the books on the paper son system through which Chinese migrants used fraudulent family immigration records to evade onerous exclusion laws and, later, national quotas that remained in place until 1965.

Under the spirit of McCarthyism, the 1950s “Chinese confession” immigration program was wielded to uncover and reprimand potential communist activities in the Chinese American community.

The Confession Program attempted to reckon decades of distrust between Chinese Americans and immigration officials with the benevolent promise of normalizing the status of paper sons and their families “if at all possible under the law.”[35] And yet, under the spirit of McCarthyism, the program was also wielded to uncover and reprimand potential communist activities in the Chinese American community. As the 1954 FBI report Potentialities of Chinese Communist Intelligence Activities in the United States alleged, leftist diaspora groups such as New York City’s Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance were “alleged to be under Communist control.”[36] Based on these tenuous associations, membership lists of the Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance and subscription lists for their affiliated Chinese Daily News were used as evidence in immigration hearings, leading many to cancel their subscriptions and leave the group. Two prominent Laundry Alliance members committed suicide because they could “no longer endure the constant FBI harassment.”[37] While the INS promised that it would “assist [paper sons] to adjust their status if at all possible under the law,” it exercised no such benevolence when it came to those affiliated with left-wing organizations. Paper sons such as Louie Pon, a member of Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance, were routinely denied relief and stripped of citizenship “as a matter of administrative discretion.”[38] While the confession program was posed as a program of racial liberalism and inclusion, its anticommunist bent revealed its lingering racism. INS reports boasted of the agency’s “special attention” to the “problem of the subversive class of Asiatic origin”—selectively transposing the nineteenth-century figure of the unassimilable alien onto the Chinese communist.

In a telling juxtaposition, the targeted repression of Chinese American leftists was coterminous with refugee relief programs that sought to “rescue” Chinese refugees who, in “voting with their feet,” had spurned Chinese communism and represented a symbolic coup for the United States. Organizations such as Aid Refugee Chinese Intellectuals, which launched with $50,000 in CIA seed funding, sought to resettle Chinese refugees with professional and technical training with a “plea to the American people…that these people must be saved for service to Free China.”[39] In a confession of the class character of the refugee program, Aid Refugee Chinese Intellectuals leaders compared the “hundreds of coolies” entering the United States “simply because they have relatives” to the legislative obstacles encountered in their efforts to relocate elite intellectuals. Dramatic solicitations for financial support were supplemented with moralizing calls to support families who “thought enough of freedom to hazard the agony of exile rather than bow to Communism.” A “gift of $350,” one advert read, “will save one Chinese for freedom.”[40] Once resettled in the United States, Chinese refugees were assumed to owe a debt to the United States. A declassified CIA document from 1964 titled Windfall from Hong Kong described a program “exploiting the emergency mass admission of Red China refugees” that had presented the intelligence community with an “exceptional opportunity” to collect information. As the author of the brief curtly described: “When the government pays for the transportation and arranges for the livelihood of a political refugee, it has the right to ask certain things of the refugee in return.” In this case, that meant “providing information of value” about the nature of China under Communist leadership that might advance Cold War aggression toward the United States’s “most difficult intelligence target.”[41] Once more, the Chinese diaspora’s price of admission for the “American dream” was their submission to the mandates of U.S. Cold War foreign policy.

“Free Speech” in a Discursive Cage

The contemporary escalation of Cold War aggression on China—heralded by the Barack Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia” and intensified by both the Trump and Joe Biden administrations—retains the twentieth-century ideological configuration of the Chinese diaspora. The tactics of racial liberalism that mandated the easing of explicit anti-Asian immigration policy in favor of selective civic inclusion for patriotic Chinese Americans and anticommunist Chinese refugees have only become more sophisticated in an age of neoliberal multiculturalism. Where 1950s Cold Warriors spoke of the “special relationship” between the United States and China to justify the U.S. embargo on China and the propping up of Chiang Kai-shek’s Taiwan regime as “Free China,” contemporary Sinophobia is structured by a similar profession of solidarity with an abstract “Chinese people” posed alongside righteous opposition to the Chinese state and the leadership of the Communist Party.

The value of ethnic Chinese willing to testify to the “depravities” of China’s system is reflected in the prevalence of Chinese-descent Cold Warriors who pepper the staffs of corporate media China desks and defense think tanks.

Rampant targeted prosecution of Chinese nationals in the STEM fields now coexists with the elevation of Chinese American government officials, journalists, and researchers as foot soldiers of Cold War Sinophobia. The roundup of Chinese American scientists such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Chen Gang, accused of grant fraud for receiving research scholarships from Chinese entities, can be defended as “race neutral” in a multicultural system in which trade hawks such as Katherine Tai, the Biden administration’s U.S. trade representative, is heralded as the first Asian American woman to hold the role.[42] The value of the confessional speech of ethnic Chinese willing to testify to the “depravities” of the Communist Party of China is reflected in the growing prevalence of Chinese-descent Cold Warriors who pepper the staff directories of corporate media China bureaus and defense industry think tanks. While vapid multiculturalism poses these native informants as authentic affirmations of U.S. superiority, historicizing the Cold War roots of such confessional speech betrays a more complicated truth: the political subjectivities of the Chinese diaspora have long been shaped not by a liberal ideal of “free speech,” but by the illiberal confines of Cold War anticommunism that uplifted a Chinese American brand of U.S. exceptionalism while silencing all dissent.

In the midst of a sharp rise in anti-Asian violence in the United States over the past year, the severe curtailment of Chinese American political discourse has become all the more evident. This violence, above all, has been structured by Sinophobia: countless victims of racist violence have recounted being told to “go back to China” or being labeled as carriers of the “Chinese virus.” In a telling convergence, the Georgia police chief who described the Atlanta spa shooter as “having a bad day” was linked to Facebook posts depicting T-shirts declaring COVID-19 as “imported…from Chy-na.”

Yet, the liberal response to Sinophobic violence has not been a critique of U.S. empire’s Cold War posture toward China, but instead the deployment of claims to American belonging that reflects a fervent reinvestment in U.S. liberal democracy as the only legible framework for a viable Asian American future. This rehearsal of Asian American belonging and calls for civic inclusion in the face of “perpetual foreigner” tropes strips anti-Asian violence from the discursive and political conditions from which it arises. Rather than rejecting the fictions of U.S. liberalism and multiculturalism, this political genre professes a deep faith in their future realization, reifying American exceptionalism and its inexorable capacity for liberal progress.

The liberal response to Sinophobic violence amidst the pandemic has not been a critique of U.S. empire, but claims to American belonging and a reinvestment in U.S. liberal democracy as the only framework for an Asian American future.

The colliding political projects of institutionalized Sinophobia and a neoliberal promise to “Stop Asian Hate” has circumscribed the possibilities for Chinese American political speech in new ways. Increasingly, the confessional genre of the Chinese American political essay is predicated on a repudiation of Chinese national affiliation as one of guilt and shame. As one essayist wrote in the wake of the Atlanta massacre, “to live conscientiously as a Chinese person is to assume a perpetual state of guilt.”[43] The performance of Chinese liberal guilt enables the reification of U.S. exceptionalism in a moment of crisis: in the face of anti-Black police executions and the persistence of the U.S. settler state, it is Chinese “authoritarianism” that Chinese Americans are tasked with denouncing.

It is a trope within this genre to say that Chinese people in America who exercise the right to political speech are engaged in a freedom they would not be allowed in China. The irony is that despite being held up as exemplars of freedom, tolerance, and opportunity, Chinese diasporic figureheads of U.S. liberalism remain deeply circumscribed by Cold war anticommunism and its racist undertones. “Freedom” to speak has only been afforded to those willing to stake their right to speak on the backs of those crushed by an increasingly aggressive U.S. empire. As the confessional testimonies of Chinese Americans are rallied once more to reinvigorate U.S. Cold War imperialism, seeing through the ruses of multicultural empire is paramount. Until the Cold War binaries of “free world” liberalism and Chinese “authoritarianism” are undone, the Chinese diaspora will not be able to speak on its own terms.

[1] “#Proud of China UMD,” Youtube video, posted by Esme Jiang, May 22, 2017.

[2] Carrie Gracie, “The New Red Guards: China’s Angry Student Patriots,” BBC, May 26, 2017.

[3] Mobo Gao, Constructing China: Clashing Views of the People’s Republic (London: Pluto, 2018).

[4] See Liping Bu et al., Making the World Like Us: Education, Cultural Expansion, and the American Century (Westport: Praeger, 2003).

[5] He Huifeng, “China’s Millennials, Generation Z Leading Nation Away from Hollywood Films, American Culture, US Brands,” Southern China Morning Post, March 20, 2021.

[6] Elizabeth Redden, “Chinese Students vs. Dalai Lama,” Inside Higher Ed, February 16, 2017.

[7] Christian Harrison and Georgia Forrester, “Heated Hong Kong Protest at Auckland University,” Stuff, October 2, 2019.

[8] Jonathan Zimmerman, “My Chinese Students Don't Want You to Talk About Hong Kong. Clearly, We're Failing Them,” USA Today, November 13, 2019.

[9] Didi Kirsten Tatlow, “The Chinese Influence Effort Hiding in Plain Sight,” Atlantic, July 12, 2019.

[10] “Assistant Secretary Royce Remarks at the EdUSA Forum,” United States Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, July 30, 2019.

[11] Edward Wong and Julian Barnes, “U.S. to Expel Chinese Graduate Students with Ties to China’s Military Schools,” New York Times, May 28, 2020.

[12] “Cotton, Blackburn, Kustoff Unveil Bill to Restrict Chinese Stem Graduate Student Visas & Thousand Talents Participants,” Office of Senator Tom Cotton, May 27, 2020.

[13] Madeline Hsu, The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 44.

[14] Hsu, The Good Immigrants, 42.

[15] For more on this contested framing, often attributed to Sun Zhongshan (Sun Yat-sen), see Jianli Huang, “Umbilical Ties: The Framing of the Overseas Chinese as the Mother of the Revolution,” Frontiers of History in Modern China 6, no. 2 (2011): 183–228.

[16] Quoted in K. Scott Wong, “Liang Qichao and the Chinese of America: A Re-Evaluation of His ‘Selected Memoir of Travels in the New World,’” Journal of American Ethnic History 11 no. 4 (1992): 16.

[17] Quoted in Jane Leung Larson, “The 1905 Anti-American Boycott as a Transnational Chinese Movement,” Chinese America: History and Perspectives (2007): 194.

[18] Sin-Kiong Wong, “Die for the Boycott and Nation: Martyrdom and the 1905 Anti-American Movement in China,” Modern Asian Studies 35, no. 3 (2001): 571.

[19] “Arrest and Death of Tom Kim Yung May Bring International Trouble,” San Francisco Call, September 15, 1903.

[20] Larson, “The 1905 Anti-American Boycott as a Transnational Chinese Movement,” 193.

[21] “Chinese Bitter in the Boycott: Believe That Hundreds of Chinese Have Been Killed in America,” Baltimore Sun, September 14, 1905.

[22] Quoted in Meredith Oyen, “Communism, Containment, and the Chinese Overseas,” in The Cold War in Asia: The Battle for Hearts and Minds, ed. Zheng Yangwen et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 77.

[23] Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

[24] Ellen Wu, The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Making of the Model Minority (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 171.

[25] Hawaii Statehood: Hearings on H.R. 49, S. 156, S. 1782, Before the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, U.S. Senate 81st Cong., 2nd Session (1950) (statement of Hiram Fong, speaker of the Hawaii House of Representatives and Cochairman, Hawaii Legislative Hold-Over Committee of 1949), 187.

[26] Quoted in Wu, The Color of Success, 37.

[27] Robert Trumbull, “Senator Fong Shows Asia the Twain Meet: U.S. Senator Fong On A Visit to Asia,” New York Times, October 11, 1959.

[28] Betty Lee Sung, Mountain of Gold: The Story of the Chinese in America (New York: Macmillan, 1967). U.S. consulates in Singapore and Hong Kong similarly arranged in 1952 for the Chinese-American artist and memoirist Jade Snow Wong to tour ethnic Chinese communities in Southeast Asia. U.S. Information Agency officials made clear their intention: Wong’s success in the United States “would be a much-needed testimonial to the opportunities our society offers to citizens of so-called ‘minority races.’”

[29] “Chinese Split Brings Row in San Francisco,” Los Angeles Times, October 11, 1949.

[30] Charlotte Brooks, “Numbed with Fear: Chinese Americans and McCarthyism,” PBS, December 20, 2019.

[31] “Communist Flags Fly in Chinatown: Consul Protests, but Display Is Held Legal,” New York Times, October 11, 1949.

[32] Wu, The Color of Success, 115.

[33] Wu, The Color of Success, 116.

[34] John Edward Torok, “‘Chinese Investigations’: Immigration Policy Enforcement in Cold War New York Chinatown, 1946–1965” (dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2008), 119.

[35] Annual Report of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (Washington DC: Immigration and Naturalization Service, 1957).

[36] Federal Bureau of Investigation, Potentialities of Chinese Communist Intelligence Activities in the United States (Washington DC: Federal Bureau of Investigation, 1954).

[37] Renqiu Yu, To Save China, To Save Ourselves: The Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 198.

[38] Annual Report of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (Washington DC: Immigration and Naturalization Service, 1965).

[39] Hsu, The Good Immigrants, 144.

[40] Hsu, The Good Immigrants, 142.

[41] Charles F. Turgeon, “Windfall from Hong Kong,” Central Intelligence Agency, Studies in Intelligence 8 no. 1 (1964): 67.

[42] “Katherine Tai Unanimously Confirmed as First Asian American US Trade Representative,” Guardian, March 17, 2021.

[43] Yangyang Cheng, “The Grieving and the Grievable,” SupChina, April 9, 2021.

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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Fri Aug 27, 2021 1:33 pm

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Socialism before shareholders: China reins in big tech’s unchecked power

This important article by CJ Atkins, originally published on 25 August 2021 in People’s World, discusses the reasons for the recent wave of government regulation in China.

Shareholders beware, socialism is back.

That’s the warning being sounded by stock market analysts and financial advisors to anyone parking their money in Chinese tech stocks. Behind the investor panic is a stepped-up regulatory campaign by the Communist Party of China that aims to combat inequality, lower living costs for working families, impose order on often chaotic markets, and prevent monopoly control over key sectors of China’s economy.

President Xi Jinping told the world in July that China’s leaders were determined to “safeguard social fairness and justice and resolve the imbalances and inadequacies in development” to solve what he called “the most pressing difficulties and problems that are of great concern to the people.”

Xi was speaking to a local crowd at the CPC’s centenary celebration in Beijing; most Western media treated his remarks as just another propaganda speech: heavy on socialistic verbiage but nothing to be all that concerned about.

But many may now be rereading his words for clues as to what might be coming next. That’s because over the last several months, Chinese authorities have embarked on what many in the international investor class see as a full-fledged assault on their wealth—a class struggle salvo aimed directly at them.

“Reckless capital expansion is over”

Waves of new regulations issued by the State Council have targeted various sub-segments of China’s $4-trillion tech economy lately: education, insurance, gaming, e-commerce, fintech, and others. Fresh controls to contain rising costs and bend industries to better serve the public interest are emerging on an almost weekly basis.

No less than 50 different regulatory actions have been executed against dozens of different firms for a range of offenses and lapses—price gouging, false advertising, monopolistic exploitation, failure to protect users’ data privacy, and more. Calculations made by The Economist magazine estimate that government enforcements have chopped at least $1 trillion from the share prices of the various companies involved, exacting a big hit on investors’ portfolios.

Given the dizzying pace of legislation, some in the Western business press have resorted to old-school anti-communist rhetoric to criticize the government. The right-wing journal National Interest claims “Xi Jinping’s personal dictatorship” is destroying all of China’s capitalists and decimating the wealth of many outside the country.

Other outlets have been slightly less hysterical, preferring a more sophisticated style to deliver a similar message. The Wall Street Journal, flagship paper of the U.S. financial establishment, warned in a July 27 editorial that Xi is on a mission “to bring ever greater swathes of China’s private economy under the state’s control.”

Alan Song, founder of private equity firm Harvest Capital, speaking to Reuters, lamented last month that “a new era that prioritizes fairness over efficiency” has unfortunately begun in China. “Chinese entrepreneurs and investors,” Song said, “must understand that the age of reckless capital expansion is over.”

Lately, the prime exhibit for the China-is-destroying-capitalism accusation is the set of regulations targeting private after-school tutoring firms, which were forbidden last month from seeking foreign capital, forced to cut their operating hours, and obligated to make big chunks of their business into non-profit organizations.

The restrictions, the government says, will save families money and rescue children—who often spend just as much time at tutoring sessions as they do in school—from classroom burnout. Tutoring is a $120-billion industry, and the Ministry of Education plans to beef up public schools to take its place for K through 9 students while also reducing the burden of homework weighing down kids in China. (And also, the government hopes, reduce the costs of child-rearing and help reverse declining birth rates.)

In the wake of the changes, some of the top Chinese tutoring companies listed on the U.S. stock market—names like TAL Education, New Oriental, and Gaotu Techedu—saw their share prices plunge up to 90% almost overnight. Billions were wiped out, leaving a lot of investors shocked and angry.

In another example, online insurance sellers have been ordered to halt illegal marketing and pricing practices that bilked workers out of their hard-earned yuan. According to the Shanghai Securities News, the state wants to “purify the market environment” and “protect the legal interests of consumers.”

As of last year, some 146 insurance companies had entered the so-called “insurtech” sector in China, hawking health insurance, life insurance, property insurance, and all manners of coverage online. Many unlicensed companies also rushed to make fast cash in the sector, which saw high double-digit expansion. Banking regulators have given companies until the end of October to clean up their act, or else.

And when it comes to online shopping and social media, the National People’s Congress just passed a new Personal Information Protection Law that will force companies like e-commerce giant Alibaba, tech conglomerate Tencent, Tik Tok owner ByteDance, and others to obtain consent before collecting people’s data and follow strict new requirements to keep it safe.

From zero to one hundred

Tutoring, insurance, and data privacy are just chapters in a much bigger story of government action against unchecked private economic power.

For the beleaguered investor class, the tale of their suffering begins with the supposed martyrdom of Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba. Last fall, Ma was planning the initial public offering (IPO)—the first public sale of shares—for Ant Group, his company’s fintech spin-off. Ant was anticipated to be the largest IPO in history, with possible valuations of up to $37 billion being floated.

At a meeting in Shanghai connected to the IPO, Ma laid into China’s financial regulatory system, saying it was outdated and stifled innovation. He called for an overhaul. In the months that followed, Ma got what he asked for, if not in the form he wanted.

The tech CEO had called for liberation of banks and lenders; instead, the government has answered with measures aimed at protecting consumers from reckless financial practices and a crackdown on poor management of people’s personal data. Ma took to ground and hasn’t been heard from much ever since.

Investors reacted to this injection of “government-fueled uncertainty” into the market in a predictable fashion: sell-off. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Golden Dragon Index, an exchange-traded fund of U.S.-listed Chinese stocks, has lost over 41% of its value in the past six months. And as for the IPO of Ant Group? Indefinitely postponed.

Although many bourgeois commentators are eager to denounce China as “crazy” for undermining its own domestic tech companies with such strenuous legislation, what they fail to see is that rather than destroying its economy, the government is laying the basis for sustainable and, hopefully, more equitable growth.

Essentially, when it comes to regulation of the online and tech space, China is going from zero to one hundred in under ten seconds. In most countries, the high-tech sector has for years been growing faster than legislation can keep up, becoming more complex by the day and defying the efforts of regulators to manage it in a way that protects society. China is no different; new developments in AI, finance, and more all advance quicker than the laws that govern them. The current campaign is intended to rectify that shortcoming.

China has no intention of crippling or crushing the tech sector; the government knows it is a hub for the innovation and growth that will be needed to keep China economically successful in the 21st century. (So U.S. competitors shouldn’t salivate too much.) The Chinese state also knows that contain-and-control measures are needed to make sure tech serves society rather than society being held hostage by tech. If the financial wellbeing of some investors’ portfolios is the price of achieving that goal, then the government of China seems willing to pay.

Another motivation behind the new measures is to prevent China from ending up in a situation like the U.S., where giant tech companies have already achieved monopoly market power and heavily influence government policymaking. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook—they’ve all become powerful enough to influence elections, buy legislation, and crush any possible challenges to their position. The Communist Party of China appears determined to never allow China to be subject to the whims of Alibaba, Didi, ByteDance, and the rest in a similar way.

Keeping the “socialist” in “socialist market economy”

For years, smug commentators ridiculed the “socialist market economy” formulation that China uses to describe its hybrid economic model. Critics on the left say you can’t have socialism if there is a market, while critics on the right argue there’s no such thing as a free market when socialist policies are involved. The two sides were joined in the belief that the CPC claim of building a “socialist market economy” was just political cover for a ruling elite determined to quietly retreat from communist ideology.

The current regulatory wave should prompt a second look at such notions, however accurate they might have seemed in the 1990s or 2000s. The determination of Xi Jinping and the Chinese government to “pursue common prosperity” is looking pretty serious these days. And there’s probably more to come: The CPC Central Committee and the State Council just released new guidelines for a five-year plan for the “construction of a government under the rule of law.” Translation: Expect more regulation.

But even if one doesn’t subscribe to socialist notions, there is a way of seeing the current government moves as being good for business, too. The smart capitalists, if they can admit it, should know that these rounds of regulation are actually beneficial for them as a group. The anarchy of competition under the market system has always meant that it’s not in any single capitalist’s interest to look out for the health of the system as a whole. Instead, it has always been the state which has to do that.

Right now, that process is happening fast in China, and it’s costing a lot of people a lot of money. But in the long term, these measures will ensure stronger rule of law and protect the system from both reckless firms and the “too-big-to-fail” problems that persistently plague Western capitalism from one recession or depression to the next. It will also protect working people from some of the tech sector’s most exploitative business practices.

China is laying the foundation for a healthier mixed economy that will be less prone to economic crisis. And for the long, long term, China’s leadership is making it clear that all its talk of Marxism and socialism are more than just political window-dressing.

https://socialistchina.org/2021/08/27/s ... ked-power/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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