Event description: “In the face of growing, bipartisan US aggression on China, misinformation, racist narratives, and warmongering make it difficult to understand the situation clearly. It is the responsibility of all people who hope for a world without war, discrimination, and marginalization to understand the situation and do what we can to make a change. Join us for the second in a two-part teach in to hear from diverse voices from different sectors of society as we consider what actions we can take: What can we as organizers, activists, students, workers, do to push for deescalation and an end to this US-imposed new cold war?”

Event link: https://peoplesforum.org/event/teach-in-us-aggression-on-china-what-can-we-do/

Speech Text:

I’d like to start by thanking the People’s Forum for organizing this event, and by positioning ourselves as Qiao Collective. Our website describes us as “a diaspora Chinese media collective challenging U.S. aggression on China.”

In doing so we must remember that the People’s Republic of China once was, within living memory, a north star for much of the Western left. Since then, the two have largely lost contact and gone their separate ways. We need to examine the reasons why and heal this rift, especially with a new Cold War on China approaching at terrifying speed. After all, the US left played the decisive role in the domestic movement to end the Vietnam War, largely because its most radical elements identified so fully with the official enemy.  

Diaspora Chinese: we in Qiao Collective belong to the Western left by virtue of our geography, our acculturation, and our involvement in local struggles ranging from tenant organizing to police abolition. But we, or at least our families, hail from across mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and southeast Asia. As such we have a foot in both worlds and are in a unique position to bridge that divide.

Media collective: Hopefully all of us agree that the relationship between the Chinese left and the Western left would be enriched by having all voices represented -- especially those that usually get filtered out before reaching the other “side.”

In the West, we rarely hear from those on the Chinese left who broadly support their government, who don’t openly advocate for Western-style capitalist democracy, who aren’t some flavor of “dissident,” usually elevated by Western media. And we virtually never hear what original insights they may have about American politics. This kind of intellectual gatekeeping is hugely counterproductive. With our translations of writings by Tù Zhǔxí (Chairman Rabbit) on US electoral politics, by Jīliú on the George Floyd uprising, and by Zǐ Qiú on the US pandemic response, we aim to start filling that gap.

Conversely, the Chinese left isn’t much in dialogue with the US revolutionary left. But many of us in Qiao have thrown ourselves into the George Floyd uprising and into the ongoing movements for Black liberation, for police and prison abolition, for Indigenous sovereignty and decolonization. We have the immense honor of working alongside groups like Black Alliance for Peace, Red Nation, and Anticonquista in a common front against US colonialism and white supremacy. We’re especially indebted to our comrades at Red Nation for pointing out that the US military encirclement of China intensifies the colonial oppression of Hawai’i, Guam, Okinawa, and many other Pacific Islander peoples.  And much of our Chinese-language social media presence is dedicated to bringing awareness of these shared struggles to a Chinese left audience. 

We’ve been pleased to see these analyses picked up as talking points by high-level officials as well! For example Huà Chūnyíng, spokeswoman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, now routinely drops zingers into her press conferences about police lynchings or the genocide of Indigenous people in the United States. Let’s not be so quick to dismiss that as “whataboutism.” After all, that term originated during the Cold War to deflect criticism of the horrors of Jim Crow apartheid. So-called “whataboutism” from the Soviet Union, China, and other socialist states placed tremendous worldwide pressure on the US government to give into many (though of course not all) of the demands of the civil rights movement.

So in those remarks we hear echoes of China’s bold proletarian internationalism during the Mao era, which bound it so tightly with the most revolutionary elements of the Western left. We want to encourage a return to such internationalism -- among our Chinese comrades, yes, but even more importantly among our Western comrades. We believe the Chinese left should once again see itself as part of a common struggle by the nations and peoples of the Global South, the “darker nations” as Vijay Prashad puts it, to free themselves from the shackles of neocolonialism. And we want as much of the Western left as possible to come over to that side of the struggle. Which is why we’re proud to work in close collaboration with the Tricontinental Institute and of course the People’s Forum and Codepink. 

But bridging the divide between China and the US left (and the broader antiwar movement) remains very much an uphill battle. As materialists, we must examine the real historical forces that led to this ideological parting of ways.

So let’s start with the basics: the mid-to-late 70s saw the end of the Cultural Revolution, the cementing of the Sino-Soviet split, and a growing diplomatic rapprochement between China and the US. All of this led the United States to pursue a strategy of so-called “engagement,” which in reality meant: 

• Incorporating China into global capitalism as a large, but peripheral and hyper-exploited partner;

• Weakening its bonds of solidarity with the rest of the Global South;

• Subordinating it to the geopolitical dictates of the US.

That was the plan. China, on the other hand, entered this relationship with the intention of retaining full political sovereignty and strategically using Western investment to develop its own productive base. It may have started as the “world’s factory” but it’s not content to remain there. Instead it’s moving rapidly up the value chain, eating into Western companies’ share of the profits from Chinese labor, and challenging the US high-tech monopoly.

China can thereby push for a truly multipolar world order from a position of security and strength. It lends immense material and diplomatic support to countries in the Global South that are facing US economic strangulation and regime change: among them Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, and the DPRK. Much like the Soviet Union once did, but arguably with even greater resources at its disposal.

And of course, just as it did with the Soviet Union, the US tries to spin these displays of South-South solidarity as a sinister plan for world domination. In this way it seeks to project (or rather displace) its own crimes and social ills onto China: as a hyper-capitalist, imperialist power founded on racism and settler colonialism. Of course the government is only doing this so nakedly now because the strategy of engagement manifestly failed from its perspective. But perversely, the fact that it so long appeared to succeed is what alienated the Western left from China, and conditioned it to see in China a reflection of America’s own monstrous image.

On the domestic front, the US propaganda machine mostly works instead to position China as this great, menacing oriental Other. We’ve seen this during the COVID-19 pandemic in Trump’s rhetoric about the “China virus” and in Biden’s attempts at one-upmanship. In a spasm of overt and often violent anti-Asian racism on the streets. And at the state level, in the racial profiling and persecution of Chinese academics and researchers.

In this atmosphere the specter of McCarthyism looms large. I worry we’ll soon see a return to loyalty oaths, to professional blacklists, to the most rigorous thought policing to ensure that no one of Chinese descent can contradict the favored narratives of the State Department and remain in public life. And it’s extremely concerning to us that many on the Western left seem intent on applying the same litmus test in our own circles.

As anti-imperialists living in the imperial core, we in Qiao insist that our primary responsibility is to disrupt the US war machine, not to debate the social or economic character of countries that are in its crosshairs. But within left spaces, we do also insist on the socialist direction of China’s developmental path. A path beset by many reversals and compromises -- but in a deeply inhospitable world order, starting from a position of feudal poverty, semi-colonial subjugation, foreign invasion, and civil war.

As Marxists we insist on treating “socialism with Chinese characteristics” as a process. A dialectical process rife with contradictions but also replete with possibilities. Not a static condition, much less one that China could somehow attain a mere four decades in.

As Jodie mentioned, China just achieved a milestone in that process: the complete elimination of absolute poverty. A monumental achievement. 850 million people freed from abject want in just 40 years, and it went almost completely unheralded in the Western press. Absolute crickets, and that includes most so-called “left” outlets.

China’s response to COVID-19, now the envy of the West, also showed the world the true face of a society founded on solidarity, on putting people over profit. Western journalists focused almost exclusively on its top-down, “draconian” nature, on initial hesitations and missteps which were blown grotesquely out of proportion. They didn’t report on the titanic grassroots mutual aid efforts organized by local Communist Party cells. The contrast with the United States could hardly be more stark. Here we’re seeing daily case counts in excess of 200,000, nearly three times China’s total over the course of the entire pandemic. We’re seeing a wave of mass evictions that has already claimed an estimated 10,000 lives and is set to intensify dramatically.

A media landscape that buries or ignores such stories -- that limits itself exclusively to the discursive terrain set by our enemies -- is an impoverished one. It’s one on which the left and the anti-war movement will lose every time, to a much more sophisticated and powerful propaganda apparatus. And it’s one that has already cost countless lives: not just abroad, by manufacturing consent for genocidal sanctions and regime change wars, but also here at home. The blood of covid-19’s many US victims is at least partly on the hands of media outlets which, in their orientalist arrogance, uniformly denigrated China’s response and foreclosed the possibility of learning positive lessons from it.

To sum up—in spite of the pandemic, in spite of the trade war, in spite of nonstop US aggression, China has met its 2020 deadline for ending extreme poverty. The next self-imposed deadline is 2049, the centenary of the Chinese Revolution, for becoming a “modern socialist country.” Sure, that’s a vaguely worded goal. But who among us does not want China to meet it in some way, shape, or form? Who among us with any human decency would greet the prospect with anything but excitement?

The election of former Trump advisor Mauricio Claver-Carone as president of the Inter-American Development Bank is a sign of the Trump administration’s intent to turn Latin America into an unwilling partner in the New Cold War on China. 

Having launched his presidential campaign by labeling migrants from south of the U.S.-Mexico border as “rapists and criminals,” Latin America was perhaps one of the last places President Donald Trump expected to rely on as a source of steadfast friends. It thus comes as no surprise that in the new Cold War against China, Trump’s tactics in recruiting allies in Latin America have been reminiscent of the many “caudillos” that have plagued the continent in the past. The politicized impeachment of Dilma Roussef, deposing of Evo Morales, and attempted invasion of Venezuela set the backdrop to U.S. efforts to bring Latin America under U.S. influence by force. 

The recent election of Mauricio Claver-Carone to head the Inter-American Development Bank—its first U.S.-born president—is a similarly blatant, if under-reported, instance of U.S. meddling in Latin American affairs.

Founded in 1959, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) has grown to 48 member states primarily concentrated in South America and the Caribbean. Like the IMF and World Bank, IDB’s ostensible aim is to facilitate loans for infrastructure and economic development projects, often with severe austerity provisions attached.  

Despite being based in Washington D.C. and with 30% shares giving the U.S. supreme decision-making authority over the institution, the U.S. has always strategically ensured that the president of the bank is a citizen of a Latin American country. 

After over half a century of abiding by this unwritten rule, maintaining the veneer of IDB independence from Washington interests has officially fallen to the wayside with the selection of Miami-born Mauricio Claver-Carone to head the bank. It is one of many examples of the Trump Administration’s uncouth approach to ensuring U.S. supremacy in international relations. 

Attorney Mauricio Claver-Carone originally caught the attention of the Trump administration with his hardline anti-Communist beliefs and his staunch opposition to the Obama administration’s normalization of relations with Cuba. Eager to expunge Obama’s legislative legacy, Mauricio became a top advisor and architect of Trump’s re-imposition of sanctions on Cuba in 2016. 

Taking a hardline stance on Cuba remains a priority, but it is understood that Mauricio Claver-Carone’s wish to lead the IDB stem from much bigger ambitions—an agenda that finds itself conveniently congruent with the broader foreign policy priorities of the Trump administration. Namely, shoring up U.S. influence over Latin America amidst a growing Chinese presence in the region.  

Mauricio Claver-Carone’s agenda finds itself conveniently congruent with the broader foreign policy priorities of the Trump administration. Namely, shoring up U.S. influence over Latin America amidst a growing Chinese presence in the region.  

In the past few years, China’s involvement in Latin America has risen substantially. In 2018, it officially became the continent’s second-biggest trading partner. In that same year, China proposed to extend its signature Belt and Road Initiative to an enthusiastic response, with 16 countries expressing an interest in joining the initiative—including Bolivia, Chile, and Panama. 

Long having been considered one of the richest regions in the world for natural resources, China has been seeking to gain a share of copper exports from Chile, iron-Ore from Brazil, and lithium deposits in Bolivia to fuel its still expanding economy. In order to better facilitate this cross-Pacific trade, China has also expressed interest in upgrading the region’s infrastructure. 

Despite its historical diversity, Latin America has been a continent of few inter-state conflicts. It has also been a continent where government projection of power in its own domestic borders have been difficult, leading to guerilla movements and drug gangs operating in many cases with impunity. The duality of this political reality has stemmed from one factor, geography. Jungle makes up a total of 79% of Latin America’s land and it is also home to vast mountain ranges such as the Andes. 

The jungle-dense geography of Latin America makes overland trade costly and inefficient. Given the importance of seaborne trade to the region, it is no surprise that China has almost 19 cooperation pacts to upgrade port facilities in countries such as Chile, Brazil, and Panama. The most impressive project however, has been the Bi-Oceanic Railway. The brainchild of a meeting between China and the former President of Bolivia, Evo Morales, in 2013 consists of a 3,750 km railway that will bypass the complex terrain of the Andes mountains and the Bolivian Amazon. 

Most importantly, for a major market like Brazil, the effect the railway will have on its Pacific trade will be of great expedience as it will no longer have to circumnavigate the southern tip of the continent. Rather, it can rely on a newly created inland route that will allow its products to be exported via Chile to the markets of Asia, all with an estimated 14 day reduction in its total travel time and save the country $760 per container shipped. What is more, is that the railway line will abet the development of traditionally landlocked countries such as Paraguay and Bolivia, by giving them vital access to the sea. Naturally, as the idea for the project had been the product of both Chinese and Latin American cooperation, so too will Chinese and Latin America cooperation provide the funding and see its ultimate fruition.

But of greater value than the infrastructure projects, may very well be China’s investments in Latin America’s tech sector. Latin America’s economic history has tragically been characterized by its enslavement to commodity prices. Good times usually resulted in relative wealth gains and increased standards of living, whereas times of commodity price crashes have ushered in recession and domestic instability. Upgraded infrastructure will boost Latin American exports but it will, as it always has been in the past, be for naught if the continent’s countries do not diversify and create a strong middle-class to shield the country from economic shocks induced by falling commodity prices. China has had such a solution with its investments into Latin America’s burgeoning startup scene. Valued at 1 billion dollars, it is a strategic investment which will ensure that while exports will continue contributing to government revenues, the creation of a knowledge economy will finally help Latin America surge past the middle-income trap into greater prosperity.      

This bountiful cooperation has most certainly caught the attention of the United States, which has long considered the continent to be its backyard. It is an interesting position to stand by, especially from an administration that has done nothing but level insults to the citizens of Latin America and ignore bi-lateral relations as a whole, save for a select few relationships such as with the similarly fascistic Jair Bolsanaro. But as the failed coup in Venezuela and the unrightful ousting of Evo Morales has shown, U.S. imperial ambitions prohibit it from ceding an inch of what it perceives to be rightfully its own. 

A prelude to the current tensions involving the IDB manifested in 2019, when the organization abruptly cancelled a summit that was to be held in Chengdu as a result of U.S. pressure. This trend now culminates with the ascension of Claver-Carone. His tenure as the bank’s president will consist of nothing less than the enlistment of Latin America into a new Cold War it has no wish to be a part of. 

What is more egregious is the fact that Trump is extending the same callousness through which he has treated his own people in the COVID-19 pandemic, to Latin America as well. Latin America has been devastated by COVID-19 with five of the ten worst-affected countries located in the region. The coronavirus has not only exacted a crippling human toll but exacerbated the economic conditions in the region, which even prior to the outbreak had been afflicted with slowing growth, widening economic inequality, and growing discontent. 

While Washington has politicized every facet of the pandemic right down to the scientific validity of wearing a face mask, China and similarly socialistic Cuba have filled the void in helping “America’s backyard” combat the pandemic. It has done so through medical aid and granting South American countries priority in the eventual dissemination of the SinoVac vaccine. 

More importantly China, as the only country thus far to have recovered economically from the pandemic, will be the chief driver of the broader global recovery. As such, the economic projects proposed by China in South America are no longer just business, but paramount in preventing the common people’s further degradation into absolute poverty. 

However, with complete hegemony over an institution of regional development, the U.S. will now dictate the terms through which much needed aid can be allocated to its struggling member states. Through sheer might, it will likely impose terms that countries must shun economic relations with China as a prerequisite for American funds that they have no guarantees will even come. In a more extreme iteration of U.S. unilateralism, it could even impose punitive measures on countries that continue to receive COVID-19 relief from China and even dictate which vaccines Latin American countries can distribute to its citizens.

With complete hegemony over the IDB—an institution of regional development—the U.S. will now dictate the terms through which much needed aid can be allocated to its struggling member states

Much to the chagrin of even some foreign policy hawks, Donald Trump has shunned multilateral organizations, soured bilateral ties, and withdrawn from international institutions. With the selection of a Trump asset as IDB president, the question arises: how might Trumpian unilateralism be wielded over a multilateral institution such as the IDB? 

The inauguration of the first-U.S. born president of the IDB once again raises the occasion to imagine a future for Latin America beyond the vice grip of U.S. imperialism—a future seemingly more remote as the region is instrumentalized as a theater in the U.S.-led Sino-American Cold War.

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]]>A Cold War Power Play at the Inter-American Development BankQiao CollectiveThu, 03 Sep 2020 22:29:58 +0000https://www.qiaocollective.com/blog/remembering-japanese-aggression5e221b9a8c24523f813a5a8e:5f5143e6b7d64f194ad19847:5f516da30ecb502de9dbc7ac

The calendar is peppered with anniversaries which recall the painful scars left by the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (中国抗日战爭). From the Marco Polo Bridge Incident (July 7) to the beginning of the Nanking Massacre (December 13), these dates mark an opportunity to remember and learn from the Chinese people’s great struggles against imperialism and fascism.

Today, September 3rd, 2020, marks 75 years since the Japanese army formally surrendered to China, marking the end of the war which began in 1931 with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and intensified by 1937 with the Marco Polo Bridge Incident (卢沟桥事变). 75 years on, Chinese society and the Communist Party continue to mark these dates with high-profile ceremonies honoring the martyrs of the war. More than 25 million Chinese civilians and soldiers perished in their struggle against imperialism and fascism, accounting for a full one-third of global fatalities during the Second World War.

China’s experience of Japanese imperialism has deeply shaped its history, and the trajectory of the world at large. However, the Chinese people’s contributions to the global victory over fascism has been overshadowed outside of China by a Eurocentric lens and the post-war conflation of fascism and communism. In fact, China’s military efforts played a pivotal role in the Pacific Front in foreclosing the possibility of a combined Japanese-German front in Europe. At the time of Japan’s surrender, more than half of the Japanese military’s 3.5 million deployed soldiers were stationed in China.

China’s suffering under Japanese invasion an occupation was particularly brutal. Japan's "three alls" policy—"kill all, burn all, loot all" was designed to "pacify" the Chinese masses under Japanese occupation. Chemical warfare and rape were commonplace. These atrocities continue to inform China’s commitments to a “peaceful rise” and a “community of shared future for humankind,” principles which define China’s 21st century foreign policy.

However, Japan’s defeat solidified the emergence of the U.S. as the principal imperial threat in China’s struggle for national liberation. Tellingly, the U.S. ordered Japanese soldiers to surrender only to imperialist-aligned KMT troops, despite the Red Army’s mass war efforts. Immediately after Japan’s surrender, the U.S. sent 50,000 marines to occupy Northern China to ‘facilitate’ the removal of Japanese troops.

Rather than dismantle the Japanese empire and reconcile with its atrocities, the U.S. appropriated the imperial Japanese apparatus for its own purposes, maintaining much of Japan’s administrative infrastructure for the U.S.’s own military occupations of South Korea and the Philippines. By the time of the Vietnam War, occupied Ryukyu became a staging grounds for U.S. aggression in Southeast Asia.

Meanwhile, the rehabilitation of post-war Japan as a “pacifist” junior partner to U.S. empire coincided with the projection of the crimes of fascism and Nazism onto Communism. The Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China were demonized as the new threat to world peace, ignoring these country’s decisive contributions to the defeat of fascism itself. We remember that it was the Red Armies of the Soviet Union and China that led the global triumph over fascism and imperialism!

We in the West are not taught the scope of this imperialist, genocidal war on China nor of China's massive sacrifices in the global war against fascism. This is because Japan has been rehabilitated as a junior partner to American imperialism against the so-called "Chinese threat.” Historical revisionism has been a convenient tool for the shifting imperial ambitions of the United States in the post-war era. This has become all too clear as the U.S. has abetted Japanese revisionism in spite of Chinese and Korean attempts to force Japanese reconciliation and redress for the crimes of Imperial Japan’s “comfort women” system of sexual slavery.

Today, we watch as the U.S. corporate media, China hawks, and security experts lionize the legacy of Shinzo Abe as he prepares to step down from power. The Abe’s administration’s calls for a revision to Japan’s pacifist constitution, its support for historical revisionism of Japanese war crimes, and its repeated visits to shrines honoring Japanese war criminals demonstrate a clear violation of Japan’s commitments to peace and reconciliation. Yet Abe’s record of aiding and abetting fascist revisionism has been ignored by the West because Abe’s vision of Japanese nationalism and militarism are useful for the U.S. alliance’s anti-China military buildup.

The U.S.-Japanese imperial alignment endures in the 21st century, with profound consequences for the Chinese people and the peoples of Korea, Ryukyu, the Philippines and beyond.

We remember the martyrs of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression as we work towards peace and an end to imperialism in all its guises today.

The following reflects the views of Qiao Collective and its members alone. 

Qiao Collective is pleased to announce that we are joining Progressive International as a member and as a contributing publication of their media arm, the Wire. 

We share Progressive International’s call to “unite, organise, and mobilise progressive forces behind a shared vision of a world transformed,” and are inspired by the work of Progressive International member groups which have consistently condemned and organized against imperialist intervention and aggression in Cuba, Bolivia, Ecuador, and beyond.  

We are pleased to work alongside trusted comrades, intellectuals, and political leaders who serve on Progressive International’s council such as Vijay Prashad, Nick Estes, Álvaro García-Linera, and Wang Hui. 

We continue to affirm Qiao Collective’s political commitments to Marxism-Leninism, anti-imperialism, internationalism, and Chinese socialism. We are conscientious of the fact that our political program, particularly our support for the Communist Party of China in the face of escalating imperialist aggression, differs—sometimes radically—from other members of Progressive International’s coalition. We take seriously the important criticisms of strains of anti-Communism and ‘progressive imperialism' within Progressive International. 

We join Progressive International out of a belief that in a moment of crystallizing Western aggression against the project of Chinese socialism, we must seek broad platforms to disseminate our message of Chinese socialism, internationalism, and anti-imperialism. A new wave of McCarthyism and anti-Chinese racism makes it critical for us to reinsert critical support of China and the CPC into the broader spectrum of left politics. 

Our membership has no bearing on Qiao Collective’s autonomy, political line, and editorial control over our work. 

We look forward to building bridges to the principles of Chinese socialism as a member of Progressive International.

August 21, 2020 Update: The announcement of Qiao Collective joining as a member of the Progressive International sparked criticisms and condemnations both from “third camp” social democrats as well as from Marxist-Leninists. To clarify certain questions and concerns, we would like to offer a few clarifications. 

First, there is absolutely no fiscal relationship between Qiao Collective and the Progressive International. We receive no payment or compensation for the articles that are cross-published on the Wire. 

Second, our participation as a member of the Progressive International is limited to media publications on the Wire. At present, we have no role in the Progressive International’s leadership structure or decision-making apparatuses. We evaluate partnerships with Progressive International members on a case-by-case basis based on our evaluation of an organization’s political platform and not by nature of shared Progressive International membership alone.  

Third, we are well aware of the political contradictions and conflicts that exist between Qiao Collective and other members of the Progressive International. Our membership is in no way an endorsement of member stances that are antithetical to our principles, particularly our defense of China’s sovereignty. We enter into the Progressive International out of careful consideration for accessing a strategic platform. For too long, critical support for Chinese socialism has been ostracized, slandered, disregarded, and marginalized amongst the left establishment in the U.S. and much of the West. We believe it is strategic to insert Qiao Collective’s analysis into a larger conversation on the left. 

We trust that our ongoing work, political stances, and analysis will speak for itself. 

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