The New Silk Road – The Colonizers Colonized

Political and financial tensions are the obligatory scenario of the “great game” of the inter-imperialist clash to which, in the final cycle of this era, the declining and ascendant powers are historically forced.

It was in autumn 2013 that the Chinese President Xi, during a state trip to Indonesia and Kazakhstan, proposed an initiative of commercial and political partnership, “One Belt One Road”, a huge infrastructure project that would integrate roads and railways, transport of energy products and technological connections, flanking the seaways to the land, a project then executed and finally renamed the “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI). It is a project of fundamental importance, which aims to create an immense political and commercial bloc from Asia to Europe.

In the Far East, the plan is the new edition of the Co‑Prosperity Sphere, the Japanese Empire’s attempt to connect the Indian Ocean states, the Philippines, and Southeast Asia in an economic and political network, in order to free itself from the grasp which dying British imperialism, and even more so the newly ascendant and formidable imperialism of the United States, had on the region. How that project ended is the history of the first half of the last century. The iconic image of the atomic mushroom is the symbol that marked the failure of the Rising Sun’s bid for imperialist domination.

But today’s Chinese plan, with a power much greater than that of Japan in the 1940s, has a broader and deeper objective: together with the control of African resources, it aims to penetrate Europe and settle permanently in the Mediterranean, close to and undermining the old colonial powers.

The BRI in fact has five routes (six, if one includes the Arctic naval route): three land and two sea routes. Currently, both in terms of volume and value, the majority of trade passes through maritime ports of call: around 80%.

To sustain the massive investments required by the BRI, the Chinese government has created a financial structure, with the assistance of unknown foreign shareholders, with investments of at least $1,700 billion.

In its outlines, this financial and geopolitical plan could resemble the Marshall Plan of the post‑world War II period, but it completely differs in the historical moment: the state of capitalism and the world political framework. We will not discuss here the relative dimensions of the economic, financial and political strength of the US then and China now. This comparison apart, there is a fundamental difference in the two phases, which presupposes a process opposite to that which has allowed the half century and more of “peace” in the European Western capitalist ambit. At that time, it was a question of restarting the economic cycle after the second imperialist war, of maintaining the division of the world between the two victorious imperialisms. The present one develops in the senescent and final phase of a more than seventy­year cycle of accumulation and does not mark a condition of armed peace between imperial monsters such as the era of “peaceful coexistence,” but the opening of a cycle of confrontation, in which an old imperialism is challenged by a new world power, but under the constraint of the general crisis of capitalism.

For the United States, the imperative is to curb the rise of any power that challenges its hegemony over the world in commercial, financial, and ultimately military terms. That dominance seemed to stabilize again after the disintegration of the USSR and the weakness of Russia, which has barely recovered in recent years from a serious crisis and is found to be an imperialist power of lower rank, and after the proven inability of the European Union to really constitute an effective political force – too many divergent interests between states, too many lacerations of a declining economic fabric, too many tensions on the single currency.

For China, on the other hand, the BRI is also based on the historical need to oppose first world imperialism. Technologically, China is now on the same level as the United States; militarily, the development has been enormous in terms of ground forces and the gap has narrowed. With regard to the navies, there still some distance. So the threat of war, though it still seems to be far off, is not negligible.

It is not possible in the current context to foresee the outcome of such a clash within the dynamics of the catastrophic crisis of global overproduction. But we can read indications of the results of the trade war brought by the US with the imposition of custom duties and other non‑tariff barriers, and the consequent reduction of trade.

These are episodes in this current historical phase of war by other means, in which the United States is resisting China’s commercial expansionism which is forced to make its intervention less aggressive, but certainly not to end it.

We recall the sanctions against Russia, which also dealt a severe blow to exports from European countries, the war waged against the German car industry, the attempted blockade of Nord Stream 2, and finally the opposition to the spread of 5G, promoted by the Chinese giant Huawei, which threatens American dominance in that strategic sector. We are certainly not disturbed by these interferences in and offenses against the non‑existent “free market,” nor are we in favor of one or other of the European states that have suffered as a result, nor are we critical of the dominant imperialism in favor of an impotent and anti‑historical national or, worse still, European claim. Each of the events mentioned, taken in isolation, would be a more or less serious episode of a trade dispute; altogether they mark a process that starts a trade war first, then a political one, with the potential for it to develop into actual military conflict.

On the other hand, many European states have already concluded important trade agreements with China. Chinese investments in Europe in the period 2000‑2018 sees the United Kingdom in first place with €47 billion, followed by Germany with €22 billion, Italy with €15 billion, and France with €14 billion.

We are not indifferent to all this. Even if nothing interests us about the economic fate of the state monsters and the mode of production that animates and sustains them, that we oppose with all our strength, we must carefully read and understand the jolts and convulsions that agitate the bourgeois world because they will mark the future for proletarians around the world.