US-China: the hardcore is yet to come

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.

Cargo ship crammed with Chinese goods. Trump's higher tariffs represent an attack on US consumer incomes, as Chinese lower prices have acted as wage subsidies.

The Trump administration’s response to China’s emergence has been to throw all sorts of spanners in the works, but tariffs won’t bring back manufacturing jobs.


[dropcap]L[/dropcap]et’s start with the “long” 16th Century – which, as with the 21st, also saw a turbulent process of marketization. At that time, the Jesuits and the Counter-Reformation were trying to rebound across Asia – but within a context where the rivalry between the Iberian superpowers of the age, Spain and Portugal, still lingered.

The Reformation first attached itself to the Dutch trade thalassocracy – a seaborne empire, under which commerce was paramount – over strict propaganda of religious dogma. Britain’s maritime realm was still biding its time. The emergence of Protestantism proceeded in parallel to the emergence of neo-Confucianism in East Asia.

Fast forward to our turbulent times. Marketization – renamed as globalization – seems to be in crisis. But not in the Middle Kingdom, which is now investing in globalization 2.0 amid increasing rivalry with the other superpower, the US.

The American thalassocracy is being superseded by the Revenge of the Heartland, in the form of the Russia-China strategic partnership – for whom Eurasian trade integration, as expressed by the New Silk Roads, or Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), is paramount over the Make America Great Again (MAGA) dogma.

Meanwhile, the re-emergence of Right populism in the West mirrors the re-emergence of pragmatic neo-Confucianism across Asia.

BRI – the prime vehicle for Eurasia integration – would have never come to light without China’s four decades of breakneck economic development.

My sharpest and most informed geopolitical readers, such as the wonderfully enigmatic Larchmonter, are in synch with my running conversations – for years now – with top analysts in Russia, China, Iran, Turkey and Pakistan; following the Obama administration’s fuzzy “pivot to Asia”, the Trump administration’s response to China’s emergence has been to throw all sorts of spanners in the works.

Thus, the current hysteria over tariffs, the trade offensive, the demonization of BRI, Made in China 2025 and Huawei’s 5G dominance, and all manner of disruptive Hybrid War tactics such as repeatedly claiming “freedom of navigation” in the South China Sea to progressive weaponizing of Taiwan.

All that duly fueled by non-stop hatchet jobs on media outlets, as in branding Huawei as “suspect” or “permanently untrustworthy”.

From the point of view of the hyperpower, there can be only one possible endgame: an amputated, permanently crippled and preferably non-stop aching Chinese economy – with unfavorable demographics to boot.

Soybeans from Ukraine are unloaded at the port in Nantong, in eastern China. Imports of soy used to come from the US, but have slumped since the trade war began. (Asia Times)

Where are our jobs?

Pause on the sound and fury for necessary precision. Even if the Trump administration slaps 25% tariffs on all Chinese exports to the US, the IMF has projected that would trim just a meager slither – 0.55% – off China’s GDP. And America is unlikely to profit, because the extra tariffs won’t bring back manufacturing jobs to the US – something that Steve Jobs told Barack Obama eons ago.

What happens is that global supply chains will be redirected to economies that offer comparative advantages in relation to China, such as Vietnam, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Cambodia and Laos. And this redirection is already happening anyway – including by Chinese companies.

BRI represents a massive geopolitical and financial investment by China, as well as its partners; over 130 states and territories have signed on. Beijing is using its immense pool of capital to make its own transition towards a consumer-based economy while advancing the necessary pan-Eurasian infrastructure development – with all those ports, high-speed rail, fiber optics, electrical grids expanding to most Global South latitudes.

The end result, up to 2049 – BRI’s time span – will be the advent of an integrated market of no less than 4.5 billion people, by that time with access to a Chinese supply chain of high-tech exports as well as more prosaic consumer goods.

Anyone who has followed the nuts and bolts of the Chinese miracle launched by Little Helmsman Deng Xiaoping in 1978 knows that Beijing is essentially exporting the mechanism that led China’s own 800 million citizens to, in a flash, become members of a global middle class.

As much as the Trump administration may bet on “maximum pressure” to restrict or even block Chinese access to whole sectors of the US market, what really matters is BRI’s advance will be able to generate multiple, extra US markets over the next two decades.

We don’t do ‘win-win’

There are no illusions in the Zhongnanhai, as there are no illusions in Tehran or in the Kremlin. These three top actors of Eurasian integration have exhaustively studied how Washington, in the 1990s, devastated Russia’s post-USSR economy (until Putin engineered a recovery) and how Washington has been trying to utterly destroy Iran for four decades.

Beijing, as well as Moscow and Tehran, know everything there is to know about Hybrid War, which is an American intel concept. They know the ultimate strategic target of Hybrid War, whatever the tactics, is social chaos and regime change.

The case of Brazil – a BRICS member like China and Russia – was even more sophisticated: a Hybrid War initially crafted by NSA spying evolved into lawfare and regime change via the ballot box. But it ended with mission accomplished – Brazil has been reduced to the lowly status of an American neo-colony.

Let’s remember an ancient mariner, the legendary Chinese Muslim Admiral Zheng He, who for three decades, from 1405 to 1433, led seven expeditions across the seas all the way to Arabia and Eastern Africa, reaching Champa, Borneo, Java, Malacca, Sumatra, Ceylon, Calicut, Hormuz, Aden, Jeddah, Mogadiscio, Mombasa, bringing tons of goods to trade (silk, porcelain, silver, cotton, iron tools, leather utensils).

That was the original Maritime Silk Road, progressing in parallel to Emperor Yong Le establishing a Pax Sinica in Asia – with no need for colonies and religious proselytism. But then the Ming dynasty retreated – and China was back to its agricultural vocation of looking at itself.

They won’t make the same mistake again. Even knowing that the current hegemon does not do “win-win”. Get ready for the real hardcore yet to come.

 


ABOUT THE AUTHOR



Pentagon Report on China’s Military Expansion: ‘Hypocrisy,’ Says Col. Lawrence Wilkerson (Text & Video)

Another important dispatch from The Greanville Post. Be sure to share it widely.

A Dispatch from the Real News Network (TRNN)

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]wo U.S. Navy warships sailed near disputed islands claimed by China in the South China Sea on Monday. The Navy called this a “freedom of navigation” operation, used to reinforce that the area in question is still governed by international law.

This comes at a time of tense relations between China and the United States: On Monday, the Trump administration announced they would impose additional trade tariffs on Chinese goods, and late last week, the Pentagon released a report that said China is using espionage to try to become a leading global military power.

Col. Larry Wilkerson spoke with The Real News Network’s Sharmini Peries and described the current focus on China as another strategy for maintaining the military-industrial complex left over from the Cold War. “We found terrorism, and terrorism we milked, and milked, and milked, and we're still milking it to a certain extent, but terrorism doesn't last. And besides that, terrorism is a tool. It's not an animate enemy. China is an animate enemy. And so everything China does, is gonna be perceived by the Pentagon as threatening.”

“This is all about money,” said WIlkerson, referring to the recently released Pentagon report describing China’s use of industrial espionage, and renewed shows of force in the South China Sea. “This is a budget ploy just like the missile gap, just like the Soviets are 10 feet tall, just like the Soviets are well ahead of us in this or that category of armaments.”

Wilkerson said the Trump administration’s combative attitude toward China increases the potential for conflict. “We're talking about a serious situation. So we're doing everything we possibly can—Trump, largely for his domestic base and his political objectives to get re-elected, and the military, largely to gain money. And what we're doing is we're fulfilling all the prophecies that people have said … that China and the United States will inevitably fight. It is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

“I actually heard someone say the other day, an otherwise sane and sober person, it's better to fight them now than to wait later because later they'll be better,” said Wilkerson. “Well, my question was, why fight them at all?”

Below: The podcast version

Transcript

SHARMINI PERIES It’s The Real News Network. I’m Sharmini Peries, coming to you from Baltimore. On Sunday morning, the Pentagon announced that it is sending two guided missile destroyers near the disputed islands claimed by China in the South China Sea. This move comes shortly after the Pentagon released a report in which it warns about China’s new military capabilities and its militarization of the South China Sea. The Pentagon report, which was released to Congress last week, is titled Chinese Military Development and it discusses how China is engaged in industrial espionage, cyber hacking, and also through its One Belt, One Road initiative, which is a trade initiative, that China is planning to accumulate military technologies and to position military bases in countries that participate in the trade and infrastructure initiative—that is, the One Belt, One Road initiative.

The report also predicts that China’s first domestically-built aircraft carrier will be deployed this year. China has already got one carrier and is planning a third it says. If all of this is not enough to intensify relations with China at this time, President Trump also announced that trade talks with China has failed. Trump said that the US will double the tariffs on Chinese goods, which amounts to about 25 percent on $200 billion worth of goods imported annually from China. That will, of course, be starting this week. It’s a very serious blow to China-US trade. It caused the stock market to fluctuate radically this morning. So joining me now to discuss the Pentagon’s report and the latest US incursion into the South China Sea as well as the implications these failed talks has, is Colonel Larry Wilkerson. He is a former Chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, and he is now a Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Government and Public Policy at the College of William and Mary. And, of course, he is a regular guest here, so welcome Larry.

LARRY WILKERSON Good to hear your voice, Sharmini.

SHARMINI PERIES Thank you, Larry. Larry, let’s start with the South China Sea. What do you think of this renewed show of US force in the region? Is it justified?

LARRY WILKERSON I think first and foremost—and I know this from my experience, personal experience in the Pentagon, but also my contacts now and my experience with what’s happening in the last year, year and a half, with regard to the Pentagon. First of all, this is a budget ploy just like the missile gap, just like the Soviets are 10 feet tall, just like the Soviets are well ahead of us in this or that category of armaments. Now it’s China; to a certain extent, its Russia too. We could talk about that too, but mostly it’s China now. And it’s kind of awkward for the military to make these claims; for example, like those you cited, bases. China perhaps has eleven, twelve bases. We have eight hundred bases. They have a long way to go to catch up with us. And you talked about overseas deployments and the Navy moving out with aircraft carriers, and so forth. We’ve got a dozen. They’ve got one at sea, one in the ways about to come out, and another one perhaps, and ours are so far ahead of theirs. That it’s 10, 15, 20 years before they even achieve the kind of capacity we have.

And on top of all of that, you know, I’ve said it before, I think aircraft carriers are anything but an instrument of national power except against countries like Panama or someone who really can’t shoot back very well because aircraft carriers are extraordinarily vulnerable and we’re going to find that out when one of them with 5,000 hands and $14 billion worth of taxpayer money is sunk in less than 30 minutes, whenever we get engaged in something real. So all of this right now, first and foremost, is a budget ploy. They want more money. And that’s largely because their personnel costs are just eating their lunch.

And second, it’s an attempt to develop, and this has something to do with money too of course, another threat, another Cold War, another feeding system. The military just hooks up, like it’s hooking up to an intravenous I.V. system and the money just pours out— slush fund money, appropriated money, and everything else. This is all about money and it’s all about keeping the complex alive, which the military was scared to death would disappear as we begin to pay the American people back. George H.W. Bush called it a peace dividend after the Cold War’s end. We found terrorism and terrorism we milked, and milked, and milked, and we’re still milking it to a certain extent, but terrorism doesn’t last. And besides that, terrorism is a tool. It’s not an animate enemy. China is an animate enemy. And so everything China does, is gonna be perceived by the Pentagon as threatening.

SHARMINI PERIES Larry, the budget justification argument you’re providing here— how does that play here? Because the military got the biggest increase and a very large portion of the budget is already allocated to the military. Are you saying that they want more?

LARRY WILKERSON Absolutely. Let’s face it, Sharmini. We’re looking at an all-volunteer force, the personnel cost of which are better than 50 percent of a $700+ billion budget. And just heading up, we’re looking at people costing now the Army last year almost half a billion dollars just to recruit 9,000, three brigades of noncommissioned officers now are out trying to recruit. We’re paying these people. We’re paying them bribes to serve. They’re coming from the third and fourth quintiles in America. They’re coming from West Virginia. They’re coming from Mississippi. They’re coming from Louisiana. You know, most Americans, 99 percent of America has no skin in the game. And so, they don’t realize even these wars are going on, nor do they realize that we’re contemplating more of them, nor do they realize that we’re doing things in the South China Sea, for example, or in the Strait of Hormuz with Iran that might lead to even more conflict.

And this is all part and parcel of the extraordinary cost of people to the military. It’s just astounding what we’re paying for people right now. You have the Chief of staff for the Army, Mark Milley, the other day, prospectively the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs I’m hearing—you had him arguing that the Chinese budget was not a comparable budget to the US budget because we pay so hellaciously much for the people in our military. Well to a certain extent, that’s true. To a larger extent it’s not true and Milley ought to be bullwhipped for having made the comparison. But it is an indication that Milley, at least indirectly, understands how much people are costing him. The army could not expand, it could not take on a real enemy today without massive conscription and full mobilization. And I wonder if the nation could even stand that today. And so, you’re looking at a situation where the only thing they can ask for in terms of fixing any of this is money— more and more money.

SHARMINI PERIES Larry, at the beginning, I said that Trump has announced that the trade talks with China has failed and that he’s going to be doubling the tariffs on Chinese goods, so what are the implications of the trade dispute along with these military tensions that are arising in the South China Sea?

LARRY WILKERSON Sharmini, if this were scripted by a Hollywood screenwriter and we were looking at say, Graham Allison and his book, The Thucydides Trap, which of course pretends to say— at least I don’t think Thucydides said this, but Graham Allison said this about Thucydides— that rising powers and status quo powers inevitably are going to fight. Well, we’re doing everything we possibly can to write that script right now, whether it’s Trump and the trade wars, whether it’s the military saying China is the number one threat and doing Freedom of Navigation exercises all the time in the South China Sea, or whether it’s Trump more or less treating the interest section in Taipei as if it were an embassy and making all manner of comments beneath the table, if you will, about that. This is a real red line for China— Taiwan. We’re talking about a serious situation.

So we’re doing everything we possibly can. Trump, largely for his domestic base and his political objectives to get re-elected, and the military, largely to gain money. And what we’re doing is we’re fulfilling all the prophecies that people have said, including Graham, that China and the United States will inevitably fight. It is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. And when you do this, you have to remember too that there’s another side. This is a terrible, terrible deficiency in Washington. Washington does not have any empathy. And by that, I simply mean they don’t do Sun Tzu. They don’t do Clausewitz. They don’t look at the enemy as it were and say, what is the enemy thinking? What is his strategy? What is his objective, and so forth? If they looked at that, they would understand that much of what they’re doing is indeed a self-fulfilling prophecy.

They are marking out, they are demarcating the highway to war with China. Now some of them probably want that; I don’t think too many of them do. I don’t think President Trump does, but I don’t give him a lot of credit for smarts. And so, and frankly, I don’t give the leadership in the Pentagon a lot of credit for smarts these days either—not the chairman, not the Joint Chiefs, not the service chiefs as service chiefs. They’re just not very smart people; no imagination at all. And what we’re doing here is just fulfilling history’s mandate, if you will. We will fight, therefore, let’s go ahead and fight. I actually heard someone say the other day, an otherwise sane and sober person, it’s better to fight them now than to wait later because later they’ll be better. Well my question was, why fight them at all?

SHARMINI PERIES Exactly. All right, Larry. We’ll leave it there for now. I’m sure we’ll get a chance to revisit this issue with you. Next, we’re going to take up a conversation about US- Iran relations, and please join me again for our conversation with Larry Wilkerson.

Closing words

About the Author
Lawrence B. "Larry" Wilkerson is a retired United States Army Colonel and former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell.

 









The Eagle, the Bear and the Dragon – a short fable for our times of trouble

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.

by Pepe Escobar – Crossposted with permission with Consortium News

[dropcap]O[/dropcap]nce upon a time, deep into the night in selected campfires across the deserts of Southwest Asia, I used to tell a fable about the eagle, the bear and the dragon – much to the amusement of my Arab and Persian interlocutors.

It was about how, in the young 21stcentury, the eagle, the bear and the dragon had taken their (furry) gloves off and engaged in what turned out to be Cold War 2.0.

As we approach the end of the second decade of this already incandescent century, perhaps it’s fruitful to upgrade the fable. With all due respect to Jean de la Fontaine, excuse me while I kiss the (desert) sky again.

Long gone are the days when a frustrated bear repeatedly offered to cooperate with the eagle and its minions on a burning question: nuclear missiles.

The bear repeatedly argued that the deployment of interceptor missiles and radars in that land of the blind leading the blind – Europe – was a threat. The eagle repeatedly argued that this is to protect us from those rogue Persians.

Now the eagle – claiming the dragon is getting an easy ride – has torn down every treaty in sight and is bent on deploying nuclear missiles in selected eastern parts of the land of the blind leading the blind, essentially targeting the bear.

Dragon bridge, Ljubljana. (Ali Eminov/Creative Commons)

All That Glitters is Silk

Roughly two decades after what top bear Putin defined as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20thcentury”, he proposed a form of USSR light; a political/economic body called the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU).

The idea was to have the EAEU interact with the EU – the top institution of the motley crew congregated as the blind leading the blind.

The eagle not only rejected the possible integration; it came up with a modified color revolution scenario to unplug Ukraine from the EAEU.

Even earlier than that, the eagle had wanted to set up a New Silk Road under its total control. The eagle had conveniently forgotten that the original, Ancient Silk Road linked the dragon with the Roman empire for centuries – with no interlopers outside of Eurasia.

So one can imagine the eagle’s stupor when the dragon irrupted on the global stage with its own super-charged New Silk Roads – upgrading the bear original idea of a free trade area “from Lisbon to Vladivostok” to a multi-connectivity corridor, terrestrial and maritime, from eastern China to western Europe and everything in between, spanning the whole of Eurasia.

Facing this new paradigm the blind, well, remained blind for as long as anyone could remember; they simply could not get their act together.

The eagle, meanwhile, was incrementally raising the stakes. It launched what amounted for all practical purposes to a progressively weaponized encirclement of the dragon.

The eagle made a series of moves that amount to inciting nations bordering the South China Sea to antagonize the dragon, while repositioning an array of toys – nuclear submarines, aircraft carriers, fighter jets – closer and closer to the dragon’s territory.

All the time, what the dragon saw – and continues to see – is a battered eagle trying to muscle its way out of an irreversible decline by trying to intimidate, isolate and sabotage the dragon’s irreversible ascent back to where it has been for 18 of the past 20 centuries; enthroned as the king of the jungle.

A key vector is that Eurasia-wide players know that under the new laws of the jungle the dragon simply can’t – and won’t – be reduced to the status of a supporting actor. And Eurasia-wide players are too smart to embark on a Cold War 2.0 that will undermine Eurasia itself.

The eagle’s reaction to the dragon’s New Silk strategy took some time to swing from inaction to outright demonization – complementing the joint description of both the dragon and the bear as existential threats.

And yet, for all the spinning crossfire, Eurasia-wide players are not exactly impressed anymore with an eagle empire armed to its teeth. Especially after the eagle’s crest was severely damaged by failure upon hunting failure in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria. Eagle aircraft carriers patrolling the eastern part of Mare Nostrum are not exactly scaring the bear, the Persians and the Syrians.

 

A “reset” between the eagle and the bear was always a myth. It took some time – and much financial distress – for the bear to realize there won’t be any reset, while the dragon only saw a reset towards open confrontation.

After establishing itself, slowly but surely, as the most advanced military power on the planet, with hypersonic know-how, the bear came to a startling conclusion: we don’t care anymore about what the eagle says – or does.

Under the Raging Volcano

Meanwhile, the dragon kept expanding, inexorably, across all Asian latitudes as well as Africa, Latin America and even across the unemployment-infested pastures of the austerity-hit blind leading the blind.

The dragon is firmly assured that, if cornered to the point of resorting to a nuclear option, it holds the power to make the eagle’s staggering deficit explode, degrade its credit rating to junk, and wreak havoc in the global financial system.

No wonder the eagle, under an all-enveloping paranoid cloud of cognitive dissonance, feeding state propaganda 24/7 to its subjects and minions, keeps spewing out lava like a raging volcano – dispensing sanctions to a great deal of the planet, entertaining regime change wet dreams, launching a total energy embargo against the Persians, resurrecting the “war on terra”, and aiming to punish like a Bat Out Of Intel Hell any journalist, publisher or whistleblower revealing its inner machinations.

It hurts, so bad, to admit that the political/economic center of a new multipolar world will be Asia – actually Eurasia.

As the eagle got more and more threatening, the bear and the dragon got closer and closer in their strategic partnership. Now both bear and dragon have too many strategic links across the planet to be intimidated by the eagle’s massive Empire of Bases or those periodic coalitions of the (somewhat reluctant) willing.

To match comprehensive, in-progress Eurasia integration, of which the New Silk Roads are the graphic symbol, the eagle’s fury, unleashed, has nothing to offer – except rehashing a war against Islam coupled with the weaponized cornering of both bear and dragon.

Then there’s Persia – those master chess players. The eagle has been gunning for the Persians ever since they got rid of the eagle’s proconsul, the Shah, in 1979 – and this after the eagle and perfidious Albion had already smashed democracy to place the Shah, who made Saddam look like Gandhi, in power in 1953.

The eagle wants all that oil and natural gas back – not to mention a new Shah as the new gendarme of the Persian Gulf. The difference is now the bear and the dragon are saying No Way. What is the eagle to do? Set up the false flag to end all false flags?

This is where we stand now. And once again, we reach the end – though not the endgame. There’s still no moral to this revamped fable. We continue to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Our only, slim hope is that a bunch of Hollow Men obsessed by the Second Coming won’t turn Cold War 2.0 into Armageddon.

MAIN IMAGE: James Audubon and His Journal, published in 1899 in the Public Domain. (Wikimedia Commons)

 


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Why was a Cultural Revolution needed in already-Red China? (3/8)

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.


Supporters of Mao's cultural revolution. Their aspirations and backgrounds were and remain congruent with the interests of the Chinese masses.


[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n every modern revolution the winners owed their victory to the poor, and China in 1949 was no exception. Iranians call 1979 the “Revolution of the Barefooted” for this same universal reason.

(The reason is universal because any major political change not led by the poor cannot possibly be a “revolution”, but is merely a “coup”, “takeover” or “regime change”.)

I call these revolutions “Trash Revolutions”, even though the adjective is derogatory, because in the English language “trash” gets right to heart of it: the taking of political power by and for the lowest class of society.

Trash Revolutions are the best… but not all Trash make great revolutionaries.

This was the case in China, where by the mid-1960s many in the Chinese Communist Party lost their willingness to identify with the poor and to share in their hardships – thus, they had lost the most important two traits which had propelled them to victory.

The adults in the room, unlike the hardcore capitalists eager to criticize socialist societies at the first pause for breath, understand that the mere proclamation of socialist victory does not translate into an immediate paradise of equality and opportunity. This article seeks to explain why a retrenchment of revolutionary asceticism, a second so-called “cultural” revolution, was needed in already-Red China.

(Iranians agreed that a no-holds barred Cultural Revolution was so necessary in the “postmodern” era that the world’s second (and only other) state-sponsored Cultural Revolution was launched just one year after booting out the Shah: political modernity requires a massive mental shift on the individual level, and thus a massive cultural shift on the societal level. But this article does not seek to preach to the Iranian choir….)

This series examines The Unknown Cultural Revolution: Life and Change in a Chinese Village by Dongping Han, who was raised and educated in rural Jimo County, China and is now a university professor in the US. Han interviewed hundreds of rebel leaders, farmers, officials and locals, and accessed official local data to provide an exhaustive analysis of unparalled objectivity and focus regarding the Cultural Revolution (CR) in China. Han was kind enough to write the forward to my brand-new book, I’ll Ruin Everything you Are: Ending Western Propaganda in Red China. I hope you can buy a copy for yourself and your 400 closest friends.

‘Meet the new boss, same as the old boss’ - The Who… and the pre-CR CCP

Of course, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was not remotely the same as the fascist Kuomintang nor the emperor - only a dimwitted political nihilist would make such a claim… but neither had they perfectly exemplified the Chinese concept of the “Heavenly Mandate”.
After 1949 the CCP apparently thought that rural residents would be easily bought off with land, farm implements, houses and furniture while they prioritized urban areas. But despite increases in quality of life, the rural-urban divide remained glaringly in evidence and stood as galling proof of inequality, creating major domestic discord. For example, urban residents got free medical care, paid holidays, paid sick days and pensions, whereas peasants had none of these things. Maybe it is true that China, only beginning to dig itself out of the muck they were wedged in thanks to their century of colonial humiliation, could not afford to give these things to the mass majority of their citizens (China was 82% rural as late as 1964), but pro-urban sectarianism is going to be resented and certainly needs a remedy soon.

Thus the CR (and the Yellow Vests).

But at the same time that Nikita Khrushchev (Soviet leader 1953-64) had thrown open the gates to Communist Party membership – drastically weakening the ideological purity of the “vanguard party”, a key component of socialism, and in order to drown out the non-revisionist Stalinists – China had closed their ranks. Those CCP members who were there in 1949 could certainly be trusted, but many were proving to be greatly without socialist merit.

“Without new blood, the old party members were able to monopolize village power. The Communist political structure in the rural areas gave the village party secretary supreme authority….Their control of the village seemed complete.”

Westerners and anti-socialists portray Mao (and Stalin) as something like the apex of all corruption on earth, which is flatly contradicted by actual Chinese historical fact. A 1951 anti-corruption campaign found (a Western Liberal Democracy-like) 64% of 625 cadres in eastern Jimo County guilty of corruption. Now we can rationalise that just two years of peace following decades of horrific war is not enough time to to terminate wartime insanities and to inculcate proper socialist habits and, but Mao is so revered in China precisely because he absolutely did not tolerate such poor governance of the People.

“After the Communists took power, Mao Zedong was a curse to corrupt officials in his government…. Before the Cultural Revolution there was an anti-corruption campaign almost every other year. Still, without a radical change of the political culture which would empower ordinary people, all of Mao’s efforts to curb official abuse fell short.”

It must be said that it was not “all of Mao’s efforts” – Mao was simply the figurehead of this broad anti-corruption party of the CCP, or in Western terms an anti-corruption “faction”.

But, again, sayin’ it (proclaiming socialist revolution) and doin’ it (implementing, practicing and protecting socialist revolution) is just a different thing, with just as much difference as “night” and “day”:


"The adults in the room, unlike the hardcore capitalists eager to criticize socialist societies at the first pause for breath, understand that the mere proclamation of socialist victory does not translate into an immediate paradise of equality and opportunity..."

The CCP had done a lot of redistribution of wealth, but the two pillars of Marxist thought simply cannot exist independently: redistribution of wealth is nothing without a concomitant redistribution of power and control over politics/workplaces. But the CCP did not really derive their power from politics and workplaces - they derived their power from the battlefield and human hearts.
“The CCP cadres who ruled rural areas after 1949 did not derive their power from villagers. They were not elected by the villagers…. Consequently, commune and village leaders were more inclined to please their patrons than respond to villagers’ needs and aspirations.”
The clear problem here was that villagers lacked control over their local village leader to make him or her implement their democratic will. This is exactly why a primary demand of Yellow Vests to Macron is to implement regular “RICs”, Citizens' Initiative Referendums.
There is no doubt: everybody wants and needs local decision-making; but socialism is not anarchism – socialism contains the non-paradox of a central organizer and planner overseeing local independence.

It was precisely this lack of local control which led to some of the problems of the Great Leap Forward: the desire by village leaders to please the central organizer despite the advice and knowledge of the local population, as I described in my book in the most simple human terms possible. This failure to implement Marxism’s second pillar is truly the hardest part of socialism - anyone can write a check - and when socialism has collapsed it has been because of this failure.

Collectivization is good and more productive than capitalism, but only alongside Socialist Democracy, which did not fully exit pre-CR
In order to quickly prove that socialist collectivization is just as effective in promoting overall economic development as individualist capitalism, I quote myself from Part 1 – this summarizes the differences between rural China in 1966 and after the Cultural Revolution in 1976:

You just read about 2 times more food and 2 times more money for the average Chinese person, 14 times more horsepower (which equates to 140 times manpower), 50 times more industrial jobs, 30 times more schools and 10 times more teachers during the CR decade in rural areas.

Collective farming and control in rural areas – enormously impressive economic, industrial, agricultural and educational results during the CR: end of that discussion.

Han puts these numbers into context by honestly relating the successes and failures of collectivization from the previous era, 1949-1964:
“In essence, the collective farming was a form of mutual insurance designed to make up for the absence of other forms of social insurance.” Let’s remember that urban Chinese had many social insurance guarantees peasants did not.

In practical terms: the rural collective (which comprised all that which had been nationalized: plows, oxen, farm tools, land, etc.) was the social arbitration of limited resources, with the goal of egalitarianism amid increased efficiency.

Capitalists will say: “The exceptional Chinese farmer was shortchanged and denied his right to excel and live in a superior fashion!”
Yes. But there is no debate about how the collectives of the pre-CR era ended the very real poverty the average rural person was threatened with via every storm cloud:

“Substantial social security guarantees were embedded in the collective distribution system in Jimo. No matter whether a villager could work or not, the collective undertook to provide him and his family with ‘five guarantees’, (wu bao) - food, clothes, fuel, education for his children and a funeral upon death…. The collective, thus, provided a de facto institutional retirement plan for villagers. The government had put some thought into this unique social security system in the villages.”

So even though urban peasants had it better, let’s not pretend that the 1949-1964 era did not greatly stabilise and better the life for the average Chinese farmer. Certainly Trash around the West – especially Blacks and Native Americans in Western countries – were not guaranteed any of these things in the era of 1949-1964.

Good, Mr. Mao, but not great. Major failures were still easy to spot, and Han’s book relates them.

Like in education: In Jimo County in 1950 48% of area children were enrolled in primary schools, and by 1956 that figure was just 56%. Per Han, 65% of these schools did not even have chairs or tables. From 1949 to 1966 Jimo County produced 1,616 high school graduates out of 1,011 villages; half of them left the county in a huge “brain drain”. The rural-to-urban brain drain remains a major, major plague on rural Western areas today, and that may be the biggest problem - the massive flight of human capital from rural areas to urban ones.
Medical care was not provided either. Han relates how villagers often relied on dangerous and often deadly witch doctors, and he relates how these witch doctors would soon be among those shamefully paraded during the Cultural Revolution and even beaten by the families of their still-grieving victims. The idea of witch doctors may be very hard for developed countries to imagine, but this was a very real phenomenon which only the modern CR exposed as a sham and then replaced with true doctors. (I would imagine that a worried parent could often rather have a witch doctor than no doctor….)

Why was a Cultural Revolution needed in already-red China? Because the record of the pre-CR era was mixed, or rather, it was unfinished. The CR needs to be seen as “re-collectivization” of an already “collective society”.

Such a retrenchment requires not only 20th century socialist ideas, but also intense patriotism and not mere “nationalism”. Iran was able to have a CR of their own largely because they wanted a re-collectivisation of what Iran “was” - and it included Kurds, Arabs, Jews, etc - thus, “Neither East nor West but the Iranian Republic”. China’s CR was not asking Soviet technicians to come and fix things (nor ones from the IMF, nor Brussels, nor Esperanto-speaking Trotskyist theoreticians) - it was asking Chinese peasants; Iran was asking the average poor, hijab-wearing Iranian woman, humble-living mullahs and the many barefooted what good governance should be.
France in 2019 lacks both modern socialist ideas (its emphasis on RICs as some sort of Godsend is one proof) and all-embracing patriotism. However, so did China and Iran at one point.

The Great Leap Forward didn’t end the desire for collectivization and empowerment, thus the CR

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]s we all know, capitalism is not patient - they demand mercilessly quick results from socialism or else will start shoveling massive denigration. Socialism, however, cares not: Han relates that the collectives were all about taking the long-term view, the very opposite of capitalism’s “get rich quick” ethos. Yes, young people worked harder than older people in the collective, but when they were sick or got old they moved to the easier jobs; couples with six children took more rice than childless couples, yes, but when the kids grew up their work supported the old childless couple. This is the “collective” mentality, and it enrages the Arizona rancher.
The CR cannot be understood without just a bit of fair, objective knowledge of the Great Leap Forward (GLF). It is pathetic that celebrated faux-historians like Frank Dikotter top Wikipedia pages with claims like "coercion, terror, and systematic violence were the foundation of the Great Leap Forward", when the GLF was undoubtedly motivated by altruistic desires to cooperate on ambitious projects which aimed to improve the nation. Briefly, from Han:

“When discussing the Great Leap Forward in China, many people see only the food shortages and other negative consequences. They do not understand that the goal of the Great Leap Forward partly was to improve infrastructure in the countryside. The reservoirs built during the Great Leap Forward benefited the rural areas for decades to come. These infrastructure improvements are why farmers who suffered most during the Great Leap Forward have always viewed it with ambiguity other than completely condemning it.”

That is based on his years of his interviews with farmers - it is not based on the judgment of some hack journalist writing an article 10,000 kilometres away who has no idea about anything Chinese other than egg foo young, and who knows even less about socialism.

Because capitalism can never present socialism as an ideology which can adapt and evolve (much as the 1%ers in capitalist societies were able to successfully evolve capitalism into its modern form: neoliberal globalism), but which is an ideology as frozen as a Soviet gulag, they can never even bring up this fact as a mere possibility: By the mid-1960s China had learned from the failures of the Great Leap Forward, and thus regained their appetite and ambition for big collective projects.

But not so big….

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hat the GLF taught China was that the 2nd pillar of socialism (local control) really is vital for success. Bigger is not always better: combining 50 villages was just too unwieldy to create individual worker empowerment. Collectives were thus reduced to roughly one-third of the village (30-40 households). This obviously made a world of difference, given the fantastic economic, industrial, agricultural and educational success of the CR for rural China (i.e., China).

The Great Leap Forward, while having other successes, helped prove that socialism is essentially locally-based, and thus is not intended to be the totalitarian steamroller non-socialists caricaturize it as.

So it’s that second, less-publicised pillar of socialism which was the Achilles’ heel of China’s first-generation collectives:

“The main weakness of rural collective organisation was political: ordinary members were not politically empowered and were dependent on village and commune officials. The Communists had not fundamentally changed the rural political culture of submission to authority and had not significantly remedied the lack of education in the countryside. Collectivisation had made ordinary villagers more dependent on officials by placing economic decisions in the hands of the collective while failing to really empower villagers to take part in the decision-making process. This was not only a political problem: without solving this problem, possibilities for real rural economic development would remain untapped.” (emphasis mine)

But it’s all development which remains untapped without socialist democracy and socialist education. Yes, socialism needs specifically-socialist education to succeed, just as capitalism needs a steady diet of gangster rap, mafia movies and sexual advertising to sway their minds - the collective mentality must be taught.

Capitalists may have local empowerment, but it is purely individual – it totally lacks the power of solidarity. This is the fundamental difference between the two: in capitalism, one seeks to dominate over all. Socialists, on an individual level, have had revolutions of the mind whereas fearful capitalists are simply working out of habit, tradition, instinct, resentment and fear.

Western liberal democracy mistakenly assumes that their often-federalist systems sufficiently grant local control, but they do not at all grant local control to the average, powerless person; they only grant control to the local factory owner, the local agricultural corporation, the local media baron, etc. This hypocrisy is never admitted; it is papered over by constant exhortations that YOU should make yourself the owner, baron, etc.

“Fukua feng (exaggeration of production) became a serious problem during the Great Leap Forward because the commune members were not politically empowered to check the wrongdoings of the commune and village leaders. In this sense, the Great Leap Forward failed not just because its overall design and rationale were flawed, but also because China’s political culture at the time was out of sync with the new production relationships introduced by the agricultural collectivization.” (emphasis mine)

You don’t have to make your analysis of the Great Leap Forward more sophisticated, but if you want to - voila.

The CR sought to re-sync these relationships in Chinese Collectivization 2.0.

What good is implementing the first pillar of Marxism without creating the second pillar? How can China introduce socialist rule of law and expect success, when workers have not been educated and trained in empowerment?

Once China got these relationships remedied, that is when China began to take off economically, and that is essentially the thesis of Han’s entire book. The proof of the correctness of his thesis is the CR’s era staggering human and economic development that he demonstrated.
By illustrating that the empowerment of the CR decade produced the rural industry, agricultural boom, and the educated workers who laid the foundation for the continued economic success of China into the 1980s and beyond, Han shows how the CR proves that socialism is not merely high taxes on the rich but an entirely new culture.

Already-Red China realized this, and thus their center and left united to support the CR.

Black-hearted Western capitalists realize this too - why do you think they will never permit any good (or even objective) talk about the CR? That would only empower the types of cultural changes Western leftists and Yellow Vests actually want and need.

When when we compare China’s meteoric success (starting from the start of the CR era!) with the Great Recession, the subsequent (but never admitted) Lost Decade in the Eurozone, and the wiping out of the 1980-2009 socio-economic gains of the Western middle class, there is no doubt: the Socialist Democratic has more efficiency, production, capability and morality than the Liberal Democratic model.
For many Western capitalist-imperialists it will take a furious Cultural Revolution right in their faces to accept this reality. But, clearly, Mao and the left wing of CCP understood this long ago.

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


This is the 3rd article in an 8-part series which examines Dongping Han’s book The Unknown Cultural Revolution: Life and Change in a Chinese Village in order to drastically redefine a decade which has proven to be not just the basis of China’s current success, but also a beacon of hope for developing countries worldwide. Here is the list of articles slated to be published, and I hope you will find them useful in your leftist struggle!

Part 1 – A much-needed revolution in discussing China’s Cultural Revolution: an 8-part series

Part 2 – The story of a martyr FOR, and not BY, China’s Cultural Revolution

Part 3 – Why was a Cultural Revolution needed in already-Red China?

Part 4 – How the Little Red Book created a cult ‘of socialism’ and not ‘of Mao’

Part 5 – Red Guards ain’t all red: Who fought whom in China’s Cultural Revolution?

Part 6 – How the socioeconomic gains of China’s Cultural Revolution fuelled their 1980s boom

Part 7 – Ending a Cultural Revolution can only be counter-revolutionary

Part 8 – What the West can learn: Yellow Vests are demanding a Cultural Revolution

About the author
I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China. His work has also appeared in various journals, magazines and websites, as well as on radio and television. He can be reached on Facebook. 


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China’s Military Interests Along The Silk Road Stretch From Sea To Shining Sea

BE SURE TO PASS THESE ARTICLES TO FRIENDS AND KIN. A LOT DEPENDS ON THIS. DO YOUR PART.

China is no longer a paper tiger in military capabilities. Which only raises the ante in the face of colossal idiotic provocations.


[dropcap]L[/dropcap]eaked Chinese military documents purport that the People’s Liberation Army will seek to expand its presence across the world in order to defend its Silk Road interests.

The Japan Times was the first outlet to report on the plans that putatively circulated in Chinese circles back in February and which implored the state to concentrate on expanding its force projection capabilities beyond coastal defense and into the maritime and land realms. Although not directly stated, this is in clear reference to the need that China has to protect its Silk Road infrastructure investments and Sea Lines Of Communication (SLOC), mirroring the path that all other globally relevant Great Powers before it followed in having their overseas military activity driven by economic interests.

It was only a matter of time before China naturally did so as well, despite publicly eschewing this approach and being extremely sensitive to how it’s portrayed, though with good reason because of the likelihood that this will be exploited through weaponized infowar means as supposed “proof” that the country is really just “another imperial power”, albeit one that cleverly disguises its military moves with win-win Silk Road slogans. That’s not entirely correct, though it feeds into India’s paranoia about China’s creeping military encirclement through the so-called “String of Pearls” infrastructure projects around its South Asian periphery.

About those, it would make the most sense for China to reach agreements with the host states there and beyond similar to the 2016 Logistics Exchange Memorandum Of Agreement (LEMOA) between the US and India in allowing both parties to use each other’s military facilities on a case-by-case “logistical” basis, essentially giving some category of Silk Road projects such as seaports and airports a dual function even though this is exactly what American think tanks warned would eventually happen. Even so, it’s the most logical and cost-effective security solution available.



The catch, though, is that China must avoid being drawn into “mission creep” all across the world in defending its Silk Road interests, to which end it’s likely to avoid having any significant military presence overseas, let alone in actual conflict zones apart from the Hybrid War experiences that its peacekeepers are presently learning from. Thus, China will probably step up its training, advisory, and assistance missions to its many partners as part of its own multipolar version of the US’ “Lead From Behind” strategy, which could for example see future aircraft carrier deployments off the African coast in order to help its in-country allies respond to anti-Silk Road militants.

The People’s Liberation Army is therefore predicted to become a hemispheric force active all across Afro-Eurasia, though concentrating mostly on the supercontinental Heartland of Central Asia and the East African coast of the Indian Ocean Region in managing its dual mainland-maritime military competencies in protecting the Silk Road. This is natural given China’s expanding security interests by virtue of the need to defend the trade routes and infrastructure that form the backbone of its export-oriented economy and consequently its national stability, though it will undoubtedly be misportrayed by the country’s enemies as an “aggressive move” driven by “neo-imperial” calculations.

The post presented is the partial transcript of the CONTEXT COUNTDOWN radio program on Sputnik News, aired on Friday July 13, 2018:

DISCLAIMER: The author writes for this publication in a private capacity which is unrepresentative of anyone or any organization except for his own personal views. Nothing written by the author should ever be conflated with the editorial views or official positions of any other media outlet or institution. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
 Andrew Korybko is a political analyst, journalist and a regular contributor to several online journals, as well as a member of the expert council for the Institute of Strategic Studies and Predictions at the People’s Friendship University of Russia. He specializes in Russian affairs and geopolitics, specifically the US strategy in Eurasia. His other areas of focus include tactics of regime change, color revolutions and unconventional warfare used across the world. His book, “Hybrid Wars: The Indirect Adaptive Approach To Regime Change”, extensively analyzes the situations in Syria and Ukraine and claims to prove that they represent a new model of strategic warfare being waged by the US.

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