Chinese
President’s Visit Underscores Washington-Beijing Tensions
By Patrick Martin
25 April 2006
World
Socialist Web
The four-day visit to the United
States by Chinese President Hu Jintao, culminating in Thursday’s
White House meeting with George W. Bush, produced little progress on
any of the key issues in dispute between the two world powers. Instead,
there was evidence of growing tension as the Bush White House inflicted
a series of diplomatic snubs, ranging from the trivial to the flagrant,
recorded in detail by the US media, and undoubtedly noted by the visitors
from Beijing.
Despite Chinese requests,
Hu’s session at the White House was not accorded the status of
a full state visit, with an evening state dinner and associated ceremony,
a distinct step down from the treatment accorded Hu’s predecessors
Jiang Zemin and Deng Xiaoping during previous visits to Washington by
a Chinese head of state.
When the Chinese national
anthem was played to welcome Hu, the White House announcer described
the country as “the Republic of China,” the official name
for Taiwan, rather than the “Peoples Republic of China,”
the title of the Beijing regime. Given that the status of Taiwan is
the number-one foreign policy issue for China, this can hardly have
been an oversight.
More significant was the
decision of White House officials to permit a prominent activist of
the banned Falun Gong organization to participate in the joint press
conference of Bush and Hu, which she then interrupted by shouting denunciations
of the repression of the quasi-religious group. Wengyi Wang, a Chinese-born
doctor who lives in New York City, was admitted to the press conference
on a one-day pass issued to the Falun Gong’s newspaper, Epoch
Times, which recently carried a series of articles, written by Wang,
alleging that Chinese authorities were harvesting the organs of imprisoned
Falun Gong disciples.
For several minutes, Wang
stood on a camera platform shouting, in English and Chinese, “President
Hu! Your days are numbered,” “President Bush! Stop him from
killing!” and other anti-Beijing slogans. She tried to unfurl
a banner. Secret Service agents finally removed her, and she was later
arraigned before a magistrate on charges of attempting to intimidate
or threaten a foreign official, which carry a sentence of up to six
months in jail.
Given the current security
mania in Washington, it is inconceivable that the decision to give press
credentials to a Falun Gong activist—one with a record of heckling
the previous Chinese president, Jiang Zemin, at an appearance in Malta
in 2001—was made unwittingly. The White House routinely denies
access to such events, not merely to those suspected of an intention
of disruption, but to journalists from socialist and antiwar publications,
who might ask embarrassing questions.
Only three months ago, Capitol
Hill police arrested Iraq war activist Cindy Sheehan for wearing an
antiwar t-shirt at Bush’s State of the Union Speech, which she
attended as the guest of a Democratic congresswoman. While Secret Service
agents took three minutes to get to the Falun Gong representative (a
Washington Post columnist commented that their strategy seemed to have
been to let her shout herself hoarse), they would have been far quicker
to grab and silence a heckler denouncing Bush for having blood on his
hands in Iraq.
Even after the fact, Bush
administration officials defended the decision to give Wang a press
pass, presenting it as an example of their commitment to democracy and
a free press. One told the Los Angeles Times, “We can’t
go around denying access to reporters when we’re going around
the world trumpeting that to do so is incorrect.” This from an
administration that is currently engaged in investigating leaks on secret
CIA torture prisons and illegal domestic spying by the National Security
Agency, in which both the journalists and their whistle-blower sources
could face imprisonment.
The most ominous indication
of US-China conflict, far more serious than the diplomatic slights,
came in a statement little noted by the media, issued by the Pentagon
on the day Hu visited the White House, confirming that the US military
regards China as a dangerous potential adversary and is repositioning
its forces to deal with a future military confrontation with Beijing.
Bryan Whitman, a spokesman for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, told
reporters that the Pentagon remained concerned about “a lack of
transparency and some uncertainty surrounding China’s future path.
Therefore, we and others have to naturally hedge against the unknown.”
Whitman was responding to
questions generated by reports this week in the Wall Street Journal
and the Washington Times, both publications closely linked to the right-wing
forces directing the Bush administration, that the Pentagon has increasingly
focused its long-range military planning and preparations on the likelihood
of conflict with China. This includes shifting forces from Europe to
the Asia-Pacific region and increasing both aircraft carrier and submarine
fleets in the Pacific.
According to these reports,
one key change involves new maintenance procedures for Navy warships
to keep four aircraft carrier battle groups on station in the Pacific
at the same time. Another involves the shifting of 8,000 Marines from
Okinawa to Guam, the US island territory in the western Pacific that
is being built up as a center for long-range bombers, spy aircraft and
logistical support operations.
These measures were hardly
mentioned in the press coverage of the US-China summit, and there was
no hint of the possibility of mutual annihilation in the carefully orchestrated
public statements by Bush and Hu. The 10,000 nuclear weapons in the
US arsenal could destroy not only China, but all life on earth. For
its part, China has hundreds of nuclear weapons, together with missiles
that can reach most major US cities.
The danger of a military
conflict between the United States and China, with all its potentially
cataclysmic consequences, does not arise out of the personalities of
Bush or Hu, but out of deep-going objective contradictions. The same
economic forces that have produced an ever-greater integration of the
US and Chinese economies—perhaps the highest expression of the
overall globalization of the world economy—lead inevitably to
conflicts between these two powers over access to natural resources,
control of key strategic positions and, ultimately, world power.
From the early 1980s, the
major imperialist powers—the US, Japan, the European powers—have
poured capital into China, building China up as an offshore manufacturing
platform that plays a decisive role in their class strategy, allowing
them to put unrelenting pressure on labor costs and generating super-profits.
The growth of world capitalism over the past quarter century is largely
bound up with the opening up of China.
But this same process has
generated a challenge to US domination of the Asia-Pacific region. The
growing industrial and financial might of China increases its strategic
weight in world affairs and makes possible a more ambitious program
of armament, diplomacy and cultivation of economic ties. US imperialism
reacts to China’s rise as a threat to its hegemony all along the
eastern shore of Asia, as well as in the Indian Ocean and even in Africa
and South America.
For all the ritualistic invocations
of democracy by American politicians, the US-China conflict has nothing
to do with any repressive actions on the part of the Stalinist dictatorship
in Beijing. On the contrary, maintenance of China as an almost inexhaustible
supplier of cheap labor for international capital requires an internal
political regime that denies workers any democratic rights and suppresses
all opposition to the most brutal sweatshop methods.
Corporate America relies
on the Beijing dictatorship to police and suppress the Chinese workers
as well as to provide an increasingly important market for the sale
of US goods. Hu Jintao’s trip was clearly intended by the Chinese
leadership to showcase this relationship. The Chinese president spent
two days in Seattle, meeting with corporate executives, touring the
Boeing aircraft factory and dining with Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates.
In Washington, after his chilly reception at the White House, Hu was
the guest of honor at a dinner sponsored by the US-China Business Council,
where he was introduced by former secretary of state Henry Kissinger,
an architect of the turn by US imperialism to cultivate Beijing in the
early 1970s. More than 900 corporate executives attended the dinner,
while several dozen more were guests at the White House luncheon.
China has, if anything, proceeded
extremely cautiously in response to the US drive to seize control of
the oil resources of the Persian Gulf and Caspian basin, even though
these are vital to the future development of the Chinese economy. Clearly,
Beijing would rather use diplomatic and economic methods than risk a
confrontation with Washington.
The Bush administration’s
policy, however, has been considerably more provocative, with top officials
like Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Rice suggesting
that China must have some dark and ulterior motive for building up its
military forces—which remain far inferior technologically to the
United States. There is a considerable degree of recklessness in this
posturing, not only because of the danger of sparking military conflict,
but because of China’s growing role in the world financial system.
China has accumulated the
world’s largest foreign currency reserves, surpassing Japan this
year. The Chinese central bank holds more than $1 trillion, currently
mostly in dollars, although it has begun, at least on a small scale,
to shift some of these reserves into euros and the Japanese yen. As
the New York Times observed in a commentary on Hu’s trip, “If
China were to begin a fire sale of these and other American securities—perhaps
as part of a policy to loosen the yuan’s peg to the dollar—American
interest rates could increase significantly, delivering a powerful blow
to the housing market and consumer spending.” This in turn would
undermine the ability of consumers and US corporations to pay their
debts, with incalculable consequences for financial markets worldwide.