China Military Growth Sets Stage for War

Recent tensions between the U.S. and China reflect a sharpening battle among imperialists for the world’s wealth. The U.S., top dog since World War II, is struggling to maintain control over resources, markets and exploitable labor. With critical shipping routes and huge oil reserves in the South China Sea at stake, a clash between the U.S. and China looms as a potential prelude to all-out war, the inevitable outgrowth of imperialist competition.
As always under capitalism, the international working class will bear the brunt of this conflict. Imperialist war will end only when the working class, led by the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party, seizes state power. Only communism can serve workers’ needs. Only a communist society led by PLP can truly make us free.
Challenging U.S. Supremacy
Over the past 18 months, China has escalated its campaign to claim sovereignty over the South China Sea, a 1.4-million-square-mile stretch of the Pacific. By building two thousand acres of artificial islands as military outposts, China is asserting its dominance over Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, and other smaller capitalist powers in the region. But its main thrust is to challenge U.S. naval supremacy from the Pacific to the Mediterranean.
On May 25, five days after a U.S. surveillance aircraft was warned away from a disputed reef where China is building an airstrip, “a Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman called on America to end its ‘provocative behaviour.’ Global Times, a state-owned newspaper known for its hardline views, said war would be ‘inevitable’ if America kept complaining about the island-building” (Economist, 5/30/15).
Meanwhile, the U.S. is countering China’s activity in the Pacific and any threat to its military bases in Guam. Under a 10-year defense pact signed in April 2014, the U.S. will have access to eight military bases in the Philippines—including two with ready access to the Spratly archipelago in the South China Sea, the site of China’s chain of island fortresses. As the opposing imperialist powers fortify their positions, a Philippine military consultant said, “Once one side crosses, then it will be like a tripwire, all hell will break loose” (Straits Times, 5/31/15).
The Next Pearl Harbor?
Island building reflects the Chinese bosses’ long-range planning for the same scenario that led Japan to strike Pearl Harbor and ignite World War II: a U.S.-enforced oil embargo. Beijing is well aware of its vulnerability as an oil importer. Much of its energy supply travels thousands of miles over seas patrolled by the U.S. Navy.
In response, the imperialist generals of China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) are undertaking a massive buildup for a potential World War III. On May 26, they released an official “white paper.” According to the Council on Foreign Relations, the U.S. bosses’ leading think tank:
China is building a military to fight and win wars. The Chinese military is focused on ensuring recent investments in the PLA translate into genuine warfighting capability. The white paper clearly states that the PLA intends to “endeavor to seize the strategic initiative in military struggle, proactively plan for military struggle in all directions and domains, and grasp the opportunities to accelerate military building, reform and development” (CFR, 5/27/15).
Beijing’s anti-U.S., blue-water push dovetails with its Maritime Silk Road project. It aims to extend its maritime influence through Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, India, Pakistan, and Kenya—and, via the Suez Canal, to Greece and Italy in the Mediterranean Sea, a U.S. lake since the Soviet implosion of the 1980s.
As Foreign Affairs, the CFR’s journal, reported:
On May 21, Russia and China concluded ten days of joint naval exercises in the eastern Mediterranean, which included live fire drills. China and Russia both see opportunity in a weakened southern Europe. In 2008, the China Ocean Shipping Company (COSCO) invested 4.3 billion euros to operate one of the three terminals at the Greek port of Piraeus and rebuild a second terminal there, a venture that would give China’s Maritime Silk Road an important outlet in the Mediterranean. Meanwhile Gazprom, Russia’s state-owned gas company, is seeking to develop a new gas pipeline via Turkey and Greece, bypassing Ukraine (5/26/15).
Back in the Pacific, the U.S. is beginning to marshal its own potential World War III alliance, using China’s expansionism as a lever to hasten Japan’s remilitarization. Last July, it backed a Japanese resolution to end the longtime ban on deploying its military overseas (Washington Post, 5/23/15). For the first time, Japan will join the U.S. and Australia in a major military exercise, “a sign of the growing security links between the three countries as tensions fester over China’s island building in the South China Sea” (New York Times, 5/26/15). In addition to its military build-up in Asia, the U.S. is pushing the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP) as an economic front against China’s ambitions. But the U.S. capitalist media is openly acknowledging that these tensions may be headed toward military conflict:
The debate in Washington is over whether Chinese restraint should be encouraged through diplomacy and appeals to legal principles and international norms, or imposed by force. Either way, restraint is not assumed (Wall Street Journal, 6/2/15).
Workers Will Pay the Price
As the U.S.-China rivalry escalates, the ruling class will use anti-Chinese sentiments to rally U.S. workers to fight for the capitalists’ spoils. Likewise, workers in China will make and man the guns to kill their working-class brothers and sisters. Our party fights to rid the world of ruling-class wars for profits. Join PLP today!