China as super-power?

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Tomgram: Chalmers Johnson, Coming to Terms with China

In our media lives, Asia plays a remarkably small and fragmented role,
given its growing importance in the world. In our press, coverage of Asia
is a strange jumble of alarums, fears, and trends: the North Korean bomb,
avian flu and SARS, the tsunami, the Taiwan "war bill," the growth of the
Chinese Navy, anime (and remilitarization) in Japan, the U.S. military in
Indonesia, the possibility that the central banks of East Asia may dump
dollars for euros triggering an economic cataclysm, and the normal run of
monks, exotica, and strange customs -- all adding up to conceptual chaos.
Seldom do you find a piece that tries to put East Asia together, laying out
for us, in particular, the explosive nature of the U.S./Japan/China
triangular relationship, which in various combinations has in the past
plunged us into bloody war .

Below, Chalmers Johnson does just that and in monumental fashion. It's rare
for us to take time out of busy lives to consider how exactly the dots
might be connected, how the world actually works. I urge all of you to
consider doing so in the case of Johnson's long essay. It will repay your
time many times over. And while you're at it, any of you who haven't laid
your hands on the first two volumes of Johnson's Blowback Trilogy on
imperial America and the loss of our republic (the third of which is being
written at this moment) should do so immediately. Both Blowback: The Costs
and Consequences of American Empire, and The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism,
Secrecy, and the End of the Republic are now available in paperback and are
must reads: The first was a prophetic account, published in 2000, that laid
out the background to the attacks of 9/11; the second focuses, as no one
else has, on the dramatic story of the endless growth of our military and
its bases abroad.

No Longer the "Lone" Superpower
Coming to Terms with China
By Chalmers Johnson

I recall forty years ago, when I was a new professor working in the field
of Chinese and Japanese international relations, that Edwin O. Reischauer
once commented, "The great payoff from our victory of 1945 was a
permanently disarmed Japan." Born in Japan and a Japanese historian at
Harvard, Reischauer served as American ambassador to Tokyo in the Kennedy
and Johnson administrations. Strange to say, since the end of the Cold War
in 1991 and particularly under the administration of George W. Bush, the
United States has been doing everything in its power to encourage and even
accelerate Japanese rearmament.

Such a development promotes hostility between China and Japan, the two
superpowers of East Asia, sabotages possible peaceful solutions in those
two problem areas, Taiwan and North Korea, left over from the Chinese and
Korean civil wars, and lays the foundation for a possible future
Sino-American conflict that the United States would almost surely lose. It
is unclear whether the ideologues and war lovers of Washington understand
what they are unleashing -- a possible confrontation between the world's
fastest growing industrial economy, China, and the world's second most
productive, albeit declining, economy, Japan; a confrontation which the
United States would have both caused and in which it might well be consumed.

full: http://www.tomdispatch.com/

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"China in the Contemporary World Dynamic
of Accumulation and Class Struggle:
A Challenge for the Radical Left"
Loren Goldner

Everyone recognizes the growing importance of China both for world
capitalist accumulation and for the remaking of the international working
class. But the variety of approaches to the question in the broader "left"
are as diverse as the old gamut of viewpoints on the "Russian question",
and ultimately flow from the same theoretical frameworks. The old Maoists
and "Marxist-Leninists" argue for a return to the pre-1978 system of Mao.

Those who see China as state-capitalist (as I do) or scattered
"bureaucratic collectivists", or orthodox Trotskyists, all favor the
removal of the Stalinist bureaucracy by working-class revolution (although
for the Trotskyists such a revolution would be merely "political", not
social). These different takes on the dynamic of China today, and how it
got there, lead to different conceptions of the practical tasks.

All of these debates are tied up with the potential emergence of China as a
future "hegemon" of the world capitalist system. Such debates uncannily and
eerily echo the 1980's debates about "Japan as No. 1", and may well find
themselves in the same dustbin down the road. The very formulation of the
problem in this way leads to a briar-patch of further questions. Foremost
is the 80-year old Marxist debate about the "decadence" or "decay" of
capitalism as a global system, and how that analysis can explain and
interpret the undeniable major development of the productive forces in East
Asia in the past 35 years (in South Korea, Taiwan, and China, as well as in
the "flying geese" such as Malaysia, Thailand, etc.) and finally in the
broader "emerging economies" (e..g. Brazil, Russia, India) that are
currently growing rapidly. Most judgements about contemporary China stand
or fall depending on how one comes down on this question of "decadence".

China undeniably has a long way to go before it can be a first-tier
capitalist power in any sense of the term. GDP is still ca. $500 per capita
(compared to $350 in India). Total GDP recently passed that of Belgium.
Yes, China surpassed the U.S, in 2004 as the top national recipient of
foreign direct investment (FDI), and last year foreign capital earned
approximately $10-(15?) billion net returns on investment. But global
capital earned roughly the same amount in Australia. So far the post-1978
turn to the "socialist market economy" has mainly improved the lot of about
200 million people in the coastal regions, and of them, approximately 50
million enjoy "middle-class" living standards. But one overriding social
question in China today is what is going to happen to the other 900 million
people (overwhelmingly peasants) as yet unaffected positively or affected
negatively by the market reforms. There are an estimated 100 million people
in the floating population that migrates from city to city in search of
work. A "rust bowl" has emerged in the northeast, particularly in
Manchuria. A net 20 million industrial jobs have been lost, as the large
"SOE's" (state-owned enterprises) are downsized and looted by their
managers. (At the party congress of 1997 that consecrated his replacement
of Teng shao-peng, Xiang Zemin announced 100 million layoffs for the coming
10 years.) The banking system is reportedly filled with "non-operating
loans", and the Western capitalist press openly worries about a
deflationary bust that would be as bad as or worse than the bursting of the
Japanese bubble in 1990.

full:
http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=05/03/14/1327228&mode=nested&tid=9

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