U.S. and Chinese Imperialisms Face Off at the Taiwan Strait Pt. 2

Continuing from Pt.1…

Sounds of War in the Pacific

The pandemic has not dampened the confrontation between China and the United States in the waters off the Chinese coast.

The spread of the virus among US sailors stationed in the Pacific has limited the operational capabilities of their units, allowing an increase in the activity of rival military apparatuses. A significant case is that of the aircraft carrier Roosevelt, which with over 800 infected remained stuck in its Guam base, but four aircraft carriers were also infected, including the other aircraft carrier in the Pacific, the Ronald Reagan, which operates from Japan.

This momentary US difficulty was used by China to conquer strategic positions in the disputed areas. It conducted several operations to demonstrate its strength, moving air and naval equipment there. In recent months, Chinese ships have plowed through the waters of the Strait of Formosa and undertaken actions in the waters of the China Seas, including the sinking of a Vietnamese fishing boat, and in early July conducting a large military exercise around the Paracel Islands. Last April, China went so far as to formalize its control over Paracel and Spratly Islands with the creation of two administrative regions for them, the Xisha and Nansha districts, which are part of Hainan province.

Beijing’s military activism on the seas was accompanied by a squeeze on Hong Kong, despite numerous and prolonged protests of the autonomist movement, which were severely repressed by the Chinese authorities. The recent national security law that Beijing has imposed on Hong Kong aims to bring the former British colony back firmly under the control of the Chinese center and to put an end to the protests used by Western powers, primarily by American imperialism, to engage China.

In fact, Chinese imperialism, before it can commit itself to questioning the current world partition, needs to settle the home front, taking into account those areas where centrifugal tendencies are present, such as Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and especially Taiwan.

Precisely towards Taiwan, China has increased military pressure in recent months with an ever-greater number of operations in the Strait, featuring naval exercises and landings, and on several occasions trespassing in Taiwanese waters and airspace. In April alone, the Liaotung aircraft carrier and its strike group crossed the strait in twice, forcing the Taiwanese army to send planes and warships to observe it.

Nor was the response from the United States lacking: US military ships crossed the Strait on at least seven occasions this year, a clear warning for Beijing. Another warning was the recent arms sale from the United States to Taiwan, not so much for the quantity (because we are talking about supplies worth only 180 million dollars, a small fraction of the more than two billion dollars in armaments sold last year) but because the announcement of the sale came on the same day that Taiwan’s president Tsai Ing-wen, who won the elections last January as head of a party fiercely hostile to Beijing, was sworn in for her second term. Another military deal for Taiwan worth a total of 620 million dollars was approved by the US State Department in July. With Lockheed Martin being the main arms supplier to Taiwan, China has decided to impose sanctions against the US company. Also in July, in support of the positions of Taiwan and other states involved in territorial disputes with China, the US deployed two aircraft carriers and their respective combat groups in the Philippine Sea.

The People’s Republic is not ready to risk a war with the United States for Taiwan, despite the rapid development of national capitalism that is fueling and requiring substantial rearmament, with investments in air, naval, missile, information, and other forces. At the moment the games in progress do not shift the balance of forces that much. The two imperialisms are different sizes. On the one hand, there is a young imperialism that claims the role corresponding to its economic weight in the imperialist partition. Its political and military power has to be imposed in the surrounding regions before launching onto the open seas. It is already competing for islands and islets with the other states of the region, smaller in tonnage but supported by the United States. On the other hand, there is the United States which, although a declining imperial power, pursued by the rise of new large and medium powers, still represents the only true world gendarme, capable of imposing its military presence in all corners of the world and still maintaining superiority in the Pacific.

The current skirmishes exist in the context of a profound crisis that is shaking the capitalist mode of production, whose only solution can only be a huge destruction of men and goods to allow a new cycle of capital accumulation. The next world slaughter that capital is preparing will see, as already happened in the Second World War, the Pacific region among the main theaters of confrontation between the imperialist powers.

But, while at the time of the Second World War the Far East was still a geographical area with a predominantly peasant population, today the spread of the capitalist mode of production has amassed hundreds of millions of proletarians in the Asian metropolises, who, exploited by the national bourgeoisie and by foreigners, have no homeland. United with the proletarians of the other capitalist metropolises, they form the great world proletarian army that will destroy this decrepit and infamous bourgeois world forever.