Workers World, Vol. 20, No. 50
December 19 – Had the recognition agreement between the People’s Republic of China and the U.S. been reached years ago, before the triumph of political reaction in China and the victory of the new governing group headed by Teng and Hua, it would have been universally regarded as a singular achievement for socialist China, as a victory for all of the workers and oppressed of the world, and as a major concession won in struggle and wrested from the leading imperialist power.
Indeed, such a victory was won when China was admitted to the UN, over the objections of the U.S. and its allies, to the cheers of the rest of the world. Scarcely anyone who witnessed the final tabulation of the vote in the UN to admit the PRC can forget how African delegates, among others, jumped for joy when the victorious vote was finally announced.
No such joyous manifestations anywhere in the Third World countries have been reported in response to the announcement on diplomatic relations.
As matters stand, the accord reached between the People’s Republic of China and the U.S. will impart a new momentum to the forces of unbridled Pentagon militarism, embolden imperialism everywhere, and fuel bourgeois reaction in general. Above all, it will tremendously accelerate the virtual de facto alliance that has been in the making between Washington and Peking for a number of years against the Soviet Union and other socialist countries.
Unquestionably it will further cement what has been in evidence for some time now, particularly since the signing of the China-Japan Treaty: the emergence of a new axis in world relationships, the Washington-NATO-Tokyo-Peking axis. It is directed not only against the USSR and Vietnam, but against all the socialist countries. It is a threat to the liberation movements, to all of the oppressed peoples, and to the workers of the world.
It all points up the growing danger of a renewal of imperialist war and military adventures, including confrontation with the USSR. Its deepest cause lies in the inability of imperialist to adjust itself to its declining and decomposing role in world affairs. As an outmoded social system incapable of curing its protracted economic crisis with increasing impoverishment, unemployment, and growing social evils, it must continually wreak havoc on the standard of living of the overwhelming bulk of the popular masses everywhere – or divert the anger of the masses into war channels.
A secondary cause lies in the inability of the socialist countries – the USSR and China – to limit their original ideological and political struggle over tactics and strategy in relation to the struggle with imperialism, and keep it from turning into a state-to-state struggle. As a consequence, imperialism was able to realize one of its fundamental objectives – to split the socialist countries wide open and ultimately to ensnare and capture the PRC leadership in an axis directed against the USSR.
It would, however, be wholly erroneous to view the recent Sino-U.S. accord as a culminating point, one that has been finalized in a tight, permanent alliance with imperialism leading to an irreversible collision course against the socialist countries.
It is of course true that including the clause against the so-called hegemony (a code word referring to the USSR) in the recognition agreement is an insolent, open proclamation that the China-U.S. rapprochement is directed against the USSR. One cannot conclude from this, however, that the alliance is a fully accomplished fact, that the process is altogether finished, or that there are no broad and historic class forces that can arrest and reverse this dangerous development. To do that would be to negate and leave out of consideration altogether the effects of the China-U.S. accord on the domestic situation in China and the inability of the current governing group to successfully direct it into imperialist channels.
The China-U.S. accord has a number of tremendously significant aspects to it which operate in a contradictory direction and contain the seeds for its undoing.
The recognition agreement concedes political, juridical, and over-all diplomatic sovereignty over Taiwan to the PRC. To that extent, any PRC leadership can claim, and properly so, that this concession at last puts an end to the two-China nonsense and removes the Chiang Kai-shek clique as a diplomatic obstacle in the way of the unification of Taiwan with China’s mainland as an integral part of the PRC.
However, as Teng Hsiao-ping indicated in his now famous interview with Evans and Novak on Nov. 27, he is willing to permit Taiwan to remain economically and socially intact. That is, there is to be no overturn by force or otherwise of the class relations between exploiter and exploited on the island. Taiwan is to remain (save for the juridical and political formula of sovereignty) an imperialist colony free to be exploited by the carnivorous multinational corporations just as they please.
The U.S. government will be allowed to continue sending selected arms to the Taiwan governing clique and China, as the Evans and Novak column puts it, “would look the other way.” (Washington Post, Dec. 18)
If a revolutionary government, under difficult circumstances, were forced by the U.S. to accept such a condition for a short, definite period prior to Liberation, it would be understandable. One has to view it, however, in the light of other factors which throw an altogether different light on the character of the concession made by the current PRC leaders to get the recognition agreement.
Taiwan is not the only part of China which is at the mercy of imperialist monopolies. Hong Kong as well as Macao, both integral parts of China, are also the objects of imperialist plunder. Thus, we now have a situation where a socialist republic would be the guardian, that is in reality the policeman, the ultimate political authority, for sanctioning, preserving, and enhancing the imperialist exploitation and robbery of the masses by foreign monopolies.
In Macao and in Hong Kong, where this abominable situation has existed since Liberation, it has generally been excused by slavish apologists for PRC policies as “necessary” because “China is a poor country” and needs these very important commercial outlets. The workers in Macao and in Hong Kong, however, are never asked whether they need the imperialist monopolies for their welfare.
Unquestionably during the early 1950s such an arrangement might have been understandable. But one is hard put to explain why it is necessary thirty years after Liberation. Now the Peking leaders will become, willingly or unwillingly, consciously or unconsciously, the new proconsuls to protect the imperialist exploitation of the workers in Taiwan, with its 18 million people, as well as Hong Kong and Macao.
There is a still more insidious element in this new relationship between the U.S. and the leaders of a socialist nation exercising ultimate political dominion over colonial people in their own country in the interests of foreign monopolies. What it signifies objectively is the growing penetration of imperialist finance capital through the colonies into China proper. The commercial and financial relations, that is, the penetration of capital and its growing social and political significance is here of critical importance.
What the Teng industrialization program amounts to in sum and substance is the opening up of the People’s Republic of China as a whole to economic penetration by the most powerful imperialist monopolies, on a vast scale and with breathless speed. In truth it is the second “opening up” of China to imperialist aggrandizement and subversion. It parallels what took place more than a century ago.
At that time the Taiping rebellion, a progressive democratic revolution, was crushed with the aid of the imperialists. On the ruins of that revolution the imperialists were able to achieve the opening up of China to imperialist penetration.
Unquestionably the defeat of the Cultural Revolution, the rapid dismantling of its tremendous revolutionary gains, and the assumption of power by the Teng-Hua leadership have made possible the re-emergence of the worldwide imperialist monopolies on the very threshold of China.
The Teng leaders seem at this writing to be pulling out all stops in offering tantalizing incentives to the imperialist monopolies to do business in China. The offers are no longer confined to the normal commercial and trade relations entered into with capitalist countries. It is no longer merely a matter of offering attractive terms for the purchase of industrial equipment and technology. Nor is it any more a matter of incurring credit or loans in a disguised form through so-called deferred payment schemes.
As we pointed out in an earlier article, the Chinese leaders have now resorted to offering the imperialists opportunities for joint ventures. This means permitting the foreign monopolies part ownership of plants, equipment, or other facilities. Although specific agreements with details on how in fact the joint ventures would operate have not been made, it is clear from the remarks made by Li Chiang, China’s Minister of Foreign Trade, that the governing group now in power in China is willing to extend most liberal terms to the imperialists.
Just the other day in a press conference Li said that the imperialist monopolies will be allowed to invest in Chinese companies or set up their own companies, factories, and plants inside China, and that Peking will even accept government-to-government loans for the first time. (New York Times, Dec. 19)
According to the Wall Street Journal of Dec. 19, “foreign concerns that form joint ventures with Chinese enterprises within China will actually own their share of the venture.” Even whether that ownership would be temporary or permanent, according to Trade Minister Li, is negotiable, or as Li phrased it, “should be negotiated.” More significantly, although China has only recently gone so far as to say that foreign ownership would always be limited to no more than 49 percent, Li, according to the Wall Street Journal, indicates “some overseas companies might end up holding more.” “The question,” he is quoted as saying, “is still under discussion. It’s still a bit flexible at this moment.”
It is very well known throughout all the countries where the imperialist monopolies have penetrated that they really can exercise a great deal of political as well as economic influence in the country with not just 49 percent of plants, equipment, and other facilities, but with as little as 10 percent and in some cases through no ownership at all. In the latter case, “arrangements” can be made which are as deadly in their influence as they are complicated in their legalistic technicalities and which offer a million and one loopholes for imperialist exploitation.
Are not the Saudi Arabian oilfield facilities “fully owned” by the Arabian monarchy? Where is there a dependent country which has not gone through the experience of having nationalized or taken over from the imperialists and yet remains in bondage to the imperialists by tricks and devices? The political leadership of the country permits the monopolies to hang on rather than undertaking a thoroughgoing socialist revolution.
For a socialist government to extend concessions to imperialist monopolies is not necessarily unprincipled or automatically harmful. It depends upon the political and economic circumstances in the given socialist country. Under Lenin’s leadership the Soviet government was ready to make significant concessions to imperialist monopolies, but this was to be strictly controlled by a workers’ government which was intransigent in its revolutionary dedication and inflexible in its opposition to the return of the bourgeoisie through the back door after throwing them out through the front door.
No wonder the imperialists turned a deaf ear to the offers and only an insignificant number of concessions were accepted for a short period of time.
Of course, trade and commerce are necessary for every socialist country in a capitalist environment. But how it conducts itself politically in its attempt to get trade, industrial equipment, and technology is an indubitable sign of how serious it is in constructing a socialist society. Ultimately the political methods chosen are a sure sign of its strategic approach to socialist construction.
At the rate the Teng-Hua leadership is moving, it is recklessly opening wide the gates to the imperialist plunderers and breaking down the pillars of the proletarian dictatorship in China. By promising to set up separate Chinese companies that will deal with individual capitalist concerns, it has opened the door to breaking down the monopoly of foreign trade, which has to be on a centralized basis. By promising private ownership in part in join ventures with imperialist monopolies, it has opened an avenue for impairing and defeating the planned nature of the socialist economy. Finally, holding out the possibility of foreign ownership flies in the face of the Chinese Constitutional provision which prohibits any but public ownership of the means of production.
In a word, all of these obviously unplanned and uncoordinated offerings made to the imperialist bourgeoisie have the earmarks of haste, improvisation, and lack of overall planning. They are not made pursuant to a comprehensive plan. They lack the ordinary standards, well established in at least some of the socialist countries, whereby the proper planning authorities first submit a plan to a party congress or conference at least, and then to the National Peoples Congress for adoption. Nothing of this sort has been done since the Teng leadership took over. There is not even an authoritative document from the Party which authorized Teng and his collaborators to conduct economic relations with the imperialists the way he has been doing. The general programmatic instructions of building a powerful socialist country do not encompass the wild and adventuristic approaches made recently by the Teng-Hua leadership.
It is interesting to note that when Willard C. Butcher, president of the Chase Manhattan Bank, was in China, he tried to engage Vice Prime Minister Li Hsien-nien in exploring the possibilities for future commercial and trade exchanges between the U.S. and China, and he attempted to elicit from him a broader view of what the current governing group in China had in mind. This was before the China-U.S. accord and before the most recent reckless offerings by the Teng leadership of joint ventures, private ownership, and direct foreign investment from imperialist monopolies. It was also before Foreign Trade Minister Li Chiang said that the imperialist monopolies would be allowed to invest in Chinese companies or to set up their own companies, factories, and plants in China.
Vice Prime Minister Li Hsien-nien told Chase president Butcher that China “can cooperate with the United States in many fields on condition that our independence and sovereignty are not jeopardized.” (Our emphasis.) This was reported in Hsinhua and also in the Dec. 15 New York times, section D, page 2.
Herein lies the crux of the entire problem! Independence and sovereignty – both may be jeopardized. Li’s fears are all summed up in the above phrases. This is not to say that Li Hsien-nien is in any way in disagreement with Teng or Trade Minister Li Chiang.
But what ought to be crystal clear to any socialist friend of China is that the recent spate of offerings made by the Teng-Hua leadership directly threatens the independence and sovereignty of the PRC.
Why did Li Hsien-nien bring up the issue of independence and sovereignty? Because that is the issue. It would not occur to Chase president Butcher to say “we (the U.S.) will cooperate with China on condition that our independence and sovereignty are not jeopardized.” Of course not! For in the final analysis, in this new halcyon bilateral relationship between the U.S. and China, the U.S. is nevertheless still the imperialist predator and China is still the country to be preyed upon.
That is why it is Li Hsien-nien, not Butcher, who is concerned about his country’s sovereignty and independence being lost in the new relationship. Li knows that China is barely emerging from the status of an oppressed country, oppressed by the very imperialism with whom the Teng-Hua leadership is finding a common (artificial, utterly false) basis for alliance against the USSR, another socialist country which differs from China only in that it emerged from its own centuries-old oppression by the same native and imperialist oppressors thirty years earlier than China and is more industrially and economically developed as a socialist state.
This demonstrates more than anything the precarious, dubious nature of the alliance between the PRC leadership and the U.S. imperialists. It demonstrates that although it is very late in the day, it is possible to reverse the harmful aspects of the recognition agreement while retaining those which are really part and parcel of diplomatic recognition and normalization of relations regarding trade, commerce, and other activities that are of mutual benefit.
Rather than take the bourgeois geopolitical view of power relationships in the world, it is most necessary and essential to asses the China-U.S. accord in the context of the world class struggle, in the context of the effort of imperialism to overcome its contradictions and its acute economic and political problems at the expense of one or both of the socialist countries and, if possible, to so envenom their relations as to set them on the path to war.
National Security Advisor Brzezinski describes the China-U.S. accord as a “major strategic shift in the global distribution of power.” (Public Broadcasting Service interview, Dec. 18.) Thus, in the mind (and here he speaks Carter’s mind, too), U.S. imperialism has line up the People’s Republic of China (a socialist country) in a tight alliance against the USSR (another socialist country) and has thereby “redistributed,” to use his chose phraseology, the power relationships between the two world class camps. Power has been redistributed in such a way as to enlarge the power of imperialism over the power of the USSR, the socialist countries, and oppressed peoples – by adding the power of socialist China to the power of predatory monopoly finance capital.
However, Carter’s National Security Advisor is counting without his host. By adding the authority of Teng, Hua, and company, Washington has not thereby annexed the power of socialist China against the USSR. The authority of Teng, Hua, and company is not an organic outgrowth of the Chinese socialist system in the same way as the Carter administration and its foreign policy is a direct reflection and organic outgrowth of the urgent needs of the imperialist social system. The Teng-Hua governing group is a temporary recrudescence of that which is alien to the socialist development of China and harkens back to what has been overturned in the course of the Chinese Revolution.
The position of the Teng-Hua grouping, therefore, is precarious and dubious. Its much-vaunted program of modernizing and industrializing China is at odds with the organic requirements of socialist development. Its efforts to enlist the bourgeoisie to do for China what the bourgeoisie cannot do for its own people are bound to fail.
Enlisting capital to aid in socialist construction would be beneficial and helpful, if that were possible, and if it could be carried out on terms that were consistent with socialist construction, sovereignty, and national independence. But the Teng-Hua “plan” is heading toward enlisting socialist China to aid imperialism in a war against the USSR and the socialist camp as a whole. It inevitably will fail, particularly once the Chinese workers begin to feel the effects of the Teng-Hua “industrialization” schemes.
Last updated: 11 May 2026