Workers World, Vol. 20, No. 5
January 31 – At a time when international tensions are rising, when capitalist contradictions within the imperialist camp are becoming more acute, and when imperialist statesmen are driven more and more to seek external political solutions to the continuing malaise and stagnation of the capitalist economy, international diplomacy becomes intensified and occasionally takes on an almost frantic pace. Maneuvers on both sides of the world class camps cross and crisscross each other and tend to blur and confuse the nature of the contemporary struggle in the world arena.
At such times it become necessary more than ever to examine every straw in the wind for a possible clue to a change in the direction of events so as not to be taken by surprise.
In this connection the visit of Senator Kennedy (Dem.-Mass.) to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is important and may possibly offer a clue vis-à-vis the relationship between the U.S., the PRC, and the USSR. Too little has been said about the Kennedy visit and none of it as relates to its possible significance.
It should be noted at the outset that Kennedy’s trip to China is not, in our view, an American initiative. Rather, it is an initiative from the People’s Republic of China. This alone invests his visit with more significance than the usual junkets of American congressional delegations to foreign lands, including the socialist countries.
Kennedy is not just another senator and his importance does not rest in the fact that he is the brother of former President Kennedy. The Kennedys are a formidable force because they constitute one of the firm pillars of the capitalist establishment. They have attained this status because they are one of the strongest financial and industrial oligarchies in the country and as such are properly regarded as having considerable sway in the basic political institutions of American capitalism.
The Kennedys also have long been regarded as the collaborators of the Harrimans and the Rockefellers and as such have ranked high in the top councils of American foreign policy.
But the Kennedys and the Harrimans have long been proponents, at least in words, of détente with the USSR and Senator Kennedy has also stood for the proposition that normalization with the PRC should proceed along with détente with the USSR – while strengthening NATO! The leadership of the PRC could scarcely be blind to this fact.
Senator Kennedy has played in liberal as against the hawks and no matter how many times he has double-crossed on civil rights, unemployment, etc. (witness his sponsoring of the infamous S-1 repression bill), he has nevertheless managed to retain the image of a moderate in foreign policy. As such he had been persona non grata in Peking ever since the Chinese leaders embarked on their fantastic appeasement theory about the USSR.
For a considerable number of years, it had been the policy of the Chinese CP leaders to court the most extreme, right-wing imperialist statesmen and politicians. Thus the red carpet treatment was given in Peking to the likes of Senator Henry Jackson, and earlier to James Schlesinger (when he was on his preemptive nuclear war binge), Franz-Joseph Strauss of West Germany, a virtual neo-Nazi and former Defense Minister of the Federal Republic of Germany, Margaret Thatcher, the right-wing leader of the British Conservative Party, and so on and so forth ad nauseam.
The invitation to Senator Kennedy therefore represents a possible switch in the policy of leaning on the hard-core rightists in order to get the ear of American imperialism. If there is any real reason for Kennedy’s invitation to the PRC, this is what it must be. After years of courting the rightists in order to win the attention and favor of American finance capital, the Kennedy invitation confirms the bankruptcy of that approach.
Washington in truth has ignored the People’s Republic of China’s overtures and pleas for normalization almost to the point of obliterating the existence of the PRC in the foreign relations of the U.S. government.
Next month it will be six years since the Shanghai Communique was signed between the Nixon administration and the PRC. To all intents and purposes it has become a dead letter. The PRC gained nothing from it that had not already been won by the general diplomatic offensive of the PRC in the world of public opinion, while Nixon achieved a propaganda coup for U.S. imperialism. Liaison offices in Washington and Peking were always available at the same terms as prevail now. Washington has not moved much further than that. Thus, almost three decades after the victory of the Chinese Revolution, the U.S. continues to ignore China’s rightful place in the world community.
So it is that a Paris magazine, Le Nouvel Observateur, whose reporter K.S. Karol accompanied French Premier Raymond Barre during the latter’s recent visit to China, said this week that Chinese officials complained to Karol that their relations with the U.S. have deteriorated under Carter and that the Carter administration was ignoring China. This could scarcely be doubted. In the many news conferences held by President Carter, Secretary of State Vance, and others of the administration, China has scarcely been mentioned.
It would ordinarily be an easy assumption that the cause of this neglect is due to U.S. preoccupation, or rather aggression, in the Middle East and the Horn of Africa. But it is precisely because of Washington’s “preoccupation” with these intractable problems of imperialism that one would assume that Washington would see the need for a more open relationship with the PRC, that is, full normalization.
But this has not as of now materialized and the reason for this lies not in some tactical error by the Carter administration or because the hysterical cries of “Munich” by the PRC leaders have not been heard in the State Department, White House, or Pentagon.
The answer lies in the complete misconception by China’s leaders of the relationship with the U.S. on the one hand and, certainly much more so, with the Soviet Union.
When the Roosevelt administration recognized the Soviet Union in 1934, it was not because Roosevelt was a progressive. Nor was it because of the imprecations of Soviet diplomacy. On the contrary, while the Soviet Union at the time was of course eager to establish normal diplomatic relations with the U.S., as with all the capitalist countries, there was no atmosphere of panic or hysteria to embrace the U.S.
As John Foster Dulles, who was at the time in the inner circle of State Department planning, explains it, the U.S. government was most anxious to recognize the USSR not so much because of the impending Hitler threat but as a necessary counterweight to Japanese imperialist expansion in the Far East. It was a recognition of objective necessity.
Of course, it was also calculated to upset the rising menace of Hitler’s Germany which threatened the old European imperialist powers as well as the ambitions of American imperialism. But there was never any indication, from the day that Hitler took power in January 1993, all the way down to the end of the hostilities in Europe, that U.S. imperialism was going to fight a war to save the USSR or that its real motivation in entering the war was the struggle against fascism.
The fundamental error in Peking’s diplomacy is based upon a misconception of the nature of U.S. strategy in relation to both China and the USSR. This strategy, as we indicated previously, has not been altered in any of its fundamental features. It is geared, or to put it more accurately, anchored, to the idea of exploiting to the hilt the antagonism between the USSR and China, and, if possible – and that is what they are working hard on – to engulf them both in a fratricidal military struggle.
The fallacy of appealing to the extreme rightists, to the Jacksons and Strausses, has proved fruitless. Hence the invitation to the Kennedys may augur a new maneuver to win the ear and the favor of American finance capital. As seen from this side of the ocean, nothing could be more fruitless, nothing could be more self-defeating. There is absolutely no principled difference between the Jacksons, the Schlesingers, and the Kennedys, as Chinese literature throughout the 1950s and early 1960s continually propagated. And in addition these politicians are all part of the Carter administration and are all part and parcel of Pentagon strategy planning. They vary in their tactical approaches so far as an appeal to broad public sentiment in the U.S. goes, but they have a common class approach to both China and the USSR. This approach has nothing in common with any of the fantastic interpretations which fill the pages of the Peking Review about the U.S. “appeasing” Moscow and other such drivel.
But as we have stated earlier, the Munich articles in Peking Review (Dec. 9, 1977) speak with two voices which are at variance with each other. On the one hand there is the shrill voice virtually calling for war against the USSR. On the other hand there is the voice which says the U.S. is trying to divert the USSR against China. This assertion would be correct if to it were added that the U.S. is also trying to divert and incite China in a fratricidal war with the USSR.
The Kennedy visit is therefore interesting from another point of view. It is also a gesture to the so-called détente element in the U.S. capitalist establishment. Thus the appeal to Kennedy is also a thinly disguised threat at a rapprochement with the USSR. Such are the devious ways of diplomacy.
We therefore find it of considerable interest that Le Nouvel Observateur senior correspondent K.S. Karol claims that Chinese officials, during his visit as part of the Barre entourage, made it clear that they “have another weapon in reserve: a reconciliation between the China of Hua and the USSR of Brezhnev which certainly would not exclude a non-aggression pact normalizing to some extent relations between the two states. No one in Peking told me that such a pact was already on the order of the day, much less in the process of being negotiated; but, by dint of their insistence on Carter’s perfidy and on the capacity of China to foil his maneuvers, my interlocutors made me feel that something of this sort could happen in the not-too-distant future.”
Ambiguity, says one of the great practitioners of imperialist diplomacy, Henry Kissinger, is the essence of diplomacy. Precisely. Imperialist diplomacy needs ambiguity to give its practitioners flexibility and room to retreat. But more importantly it needs ambiguity to mask the nature of its predatory selfish imperialist interests.
Socialist diplomacy, on the other hand, is based, or should be based, as Lenin envisioned it to be, on open diplomacy, against secret treaties, on open covenants openly arrived at. Enlightenment of the proletariat and oppressed people as to the real nature of contemporary relations through the pursuit of proletarian internationalism is far more important than any episodic gains made in secret agreements or through ambiguous diplomatic maneuvers which confuse and frustrate the masses and thereby set back the course of the working-class struggle.
Illusion and reality seem to coexist in contemporary world politics more today, perhaps, than at any other time, precisely because of the feverish pace of events.
Take Sadat, for instance. His misadventure with his visit to Jerusalem is not an accident of history but an outgrowth of the development of the Egyptian bourgeoisie, or certainly of a very substantial part of it – that part which values the security of its deposits in Swiss banks more than it does the course of the Arab nation as a whole.
But Sadat also had a misconception with regard to Israel and the U.S. He fancied that the Egyptian bourgeoisie, with himself at the head, could replace the tiny satellite of Israel and become the fundamental prop of U.S. imperialism in the Arab world. The U.S. relationship would be with him, not with Israel.
He overlooked one fundamental factor of contemporary world relationships: the existence of oppressed and oppressing nations. Israel and Egypt could both be in the orbit of U.S. imperialism. Israel, nonetheless, is an oppressor state, an extension of U.S. military power in the heartland of Arabia, while Egypt is an oppressed nation, something the Arab workers and peasants know in their bones. The statesmen of the new bourgeoisie in Egypt conveniently forgot this.
Take Siad Barre. In an interview with a Kuwaiti newspaper last spring, before the real hostilities began with Ethiopia, he was asked by a reporter if he could conceive of any situation where he would renounce his relationship with the USSR. His unambiguous reply was no. See what happened to Sadat, he said, he has gotten nothing from the imperialists for breaking from the USSR.
Siad’s plunge into the camp of imperialism following the example of Sadat was also based on illusion and a disregard of the real relationship on the Horn of Africa. He overlooked the profound and tremendously significant revolutionary process in Ethiopia and regarded the current leadership as some passing, transitory thing that could easily be toppled, its revolutionary masses dispersed, and its revolutionary aspirations frustrated.
To his chagrin, he has found that the revolution has become deeper, stronger, and much more intransigent than had occurred to him when Premier Fidel Castro had urged upon him a peaceful settlement based upon a socialist federation in the Horn of Africa.
Is it possible, is it conceivable that a great country, a socialist country, a country that has gone through one of the greatest revolutions in human history, can find itself engulfed in a fratricidal struggle with another socialist state to the delight of imperialism, which seeks the destruction of both?
This is not a theoretical question any longer.
The experience of the last two decades confirms a regressive process which threatens their very vitals and the social foundations which the USSR and China share. It is not too late to call a halt to the process, and the recognition of the onerous consequences which can befall the cause of world socialism should be the revolutionary incentive to change course.
It will equally serve the interests not only of China and the USSR but of all the socialist countries and give new impetus to the revolutionary struggle of the workers and the oppressed everywhere.
Last updated: 11 May 2026