Something funny happened to George Bush on his way from the living room to the press room on April 23.
He was all ready to press a harder line against the Soviet Union on the question of Lithuania. The conventional wisdom, at least in the press corps, was that he would open, ever so slightly, the door to sanctions against the USSR if Moscow did not relent in the pursuit of its hard line on the Baltics.
But just as he was ready to open his remarks, someone must have handed him a note reminding him that Li Peng, the prime minister of China, was meeting with Gorbachev at that very moment. And that caused George Bush to mumble, and in fact to repeat the older, so-called more conciliatory, line toward the Gorbachev administration.
In essence, he repeated that there were much larger issues at stake with the USSR than just Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia.
Obviously, Bush had not earlier had it explained to him the possible significance of the rebellion in Xinjiang, and how it would relate to the nationalities problem of the USSR. In fact, that might have been one of the important topics discussed between Gorbachev and Li Peng.
Apparently, nobody among the hordes of China hands in the White House had bothered to remind George Bush, a former U.S. ambassador to China and lately under attack from the Democratic opposition for his "leniency" on Tiananmen Square, of Xinjiang's geopolitical, strategic concern to the U.S. It brings up bitter memories and could reignite old feuds in the U.S. government about who "lost" China.
Immediately after the Chinese Revolution in 1949, the issue in Washington was whether to invade China, or find some other route to overturn the revolution and thwart a Sino-Soviet alliance of socialist solidarity. The principal proponent in the State Department of a soft road to counter-revolution in China, and the darling of the liberals at the time, especially in academia, was Owen Lattimore.
Instead of looking to Taiwan and Chiang Kai-shek's army to lead an invasion of millions of U.S. soldiers, Lattimore had a different idea, which was much more appealing to the liberal elements of the U.S. imperialist establishment. According to him, Sinkiang (the old spelling for Xinjiang) offered a new center of gravity in the world.
In his book Pivot Asia (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1950), he described Sinkiang as follows:
A new center of gravity is forming in the world. In terms of power politics, it has two outstanding characteristics: accessibility from Russia for the kinds of power which are at Russia's disposal, and inaccessibility from America for the kinds of power that are at America's disposal. In terms of ideology, it is a whirlpool in which meet political currents flowing from China, Russia, India and the Moslem Middle East.
A perfect place to fish in troubled waters!
China's inner Asian province of Sinkiang occupies a major part of the focal area within which lies this new center of gravity. Sinkiang is China's India. Of its people, 90% are not Chinese. [?!] They feel themselves to be subjects rather than citizens of the Chinese republic. Like the peoples of India, they are divided among themselves by differences of language and religion, while the increase of nationalism tends in some ways to unite and in other ways to divide them.
As in India Mohammedanism is not only a religion but a political force. And finally, many of these non-Chinese subjects of China have close ties of language and historical association with various peoples in the Soviet Union [uh-huh] and the Mongolian Peoples Republic and to a lesser extent with Afghanistan.
A circle with a radius of 1,000 miles centering on Urumchi, capital of Sinkiang, encloses more different kinds of frontier than could be found in any area of equal size anywhere else in the world. There are linguistic and cultural frontiers between Mongols, Chinese, Tibetans, Indians, Afghans, the peoples who speak one or another of the inner Asian Turkic languages, and Russians.
The point that Lattimore made to bolster his softer restorationist line for China as against the McCarthyite line was that there was not yet "a strong foothold for free capitalist enterprise ... there's not a single political movement ... to establish democracy. In these regions, no such democracy has ever existed."
The road therefore was open for the U.S. and its interests to promote the free capitalist enterprise system and imperialist democracy.
Lattimore's policy was roundly defeated by the McCarthyites, and he himself was put in the dock as an alleged spy for the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, this same struggle between the soft-liners and the hard-liners has come up again and again in one form or another about how, where and when to concentrate on capitalist restoration and imperialist intervention.
Bush's press conference on Lithuania has therefore singular significance in the light of Li Peng's meeting with Gorbachev. Both China and the USSR, regardless of different political orientations, are faced with pro-imperialist, bourgeois nationalist movements. They are not merely the relics of ancient, unsolved national problems. They have also been encouraged and stimulated by pro-bourgeois reforms.
Even in the best days of socialist construction and revolutionary internationalist policies, it was impossible to completely resolve them within the context of world imperialist encirclement, aggression and economic strangulation. But much progress was made.
However, the regression in the Soviet Union, as well as what had occurred earlier in China but was halted after Tiananmen Square, poses a common problem for both countries.
The Middle East figures in all this. The decay of the Iranian Revolution and the growing power of the reactionary Arab regimes in the Middle East, especially those which make their wealth easily accessible to Western, mostly U.S. imperialist finance, offer an additional factor that favors the U.S. meddling in China as well as in the USSR.
There is no question that the pro-imperialist, nationalist uprisings in the Baltic states, in a large part stimulated and encouraged by the bourgeois reforms of the Gorbachev administration, now pose a new military-strategic threat to the USSR. The uprising in Xinjiang and the instability in Tibet as well, fomented by U.S. imperialism as always, raise the need in a truly extraordinary way for the resumption of socialist solidarity against the aims of imperialist sabotage and intervention.
Of course, this need at present is based only upon geopolitical considerations. But they operate as a firm support for socialist solidarity.
It is a long way from these external pressures to considerations of a domestic character, since the direction of the Chinese economy at the present time is to lead back to socialist construction, whereas the USSR is getting deeper into the morass of capitalist reforms. Nevertheless, the counter-revolution in the USSR, with which the bourgeoisie is altogether too giddy, is really nowhere in sight. The larger struggle still lies ahead, notwithstanding all the damage which has been done and is continuing at an ever more rapid rate.
All this does not paint a pretty picture for the pro-imperialist bourgeois elements in the Baltics who now correctly see themselves as small change in the overall struggle between two diametrically opposed social systems.
They are not a national liberation movement. When the bourgeois leadership in Lithuania jumped the gun and suddenly issued a pompous declaration of independence, they found to their sorrow that not a single country in the world would recognize them. Among the oppressed of the Third World, they have not a single friend.
The oppressors in the imperialist camp are merely estimating what portion of the booty each will be allocated in the event Washington decides to confront the USSR rather than deal with them. And such a decision would be for much broader reasons than Lithuania's independence.
Last updated: 23 March 2018