Although the invasion of Viet Nam by troops of the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) is only ten days old, it is possible to make some preliminary observations regarding the overall political and diplomatic situation of China.
The aim of the Deng-Hua reactionary grouping, which is at the helm of the PRC, has been for some time now to encourage, promote, and finally to effectuate a solid alliance with Washington, Tokyo, and NATO against the USSR and Viet Nam, as well as all other socialist countries.
How well has this policy succeeded in the light of the first few days of the reactionary adventure into Viet Nam?
China isolated
It must be a disappointment to the new Beijing (Peking) leadership. The first thing that strikes almost any observer of the international situation is that the Deng-Hua leadership by its provocative invasion of a small socialist country has completely isolated itself from the world community of the oppressed peoples, the national liberation movements, and the world working class.
This unheralded but absolutely indisputable fact assumes an even greater significance when one remembers that the Chinese leadership for many years regarded itself as the leader and inspirer of hope in the revolutionary liberation struggle against imperialism. It sought to be regarded, property so in its early days, as a beacon light and a bulwark in the struggle for emancipation from imperialist enslavement.
Today the Beijing leadership can only find in the oppressed nations such dubious friends as Sadat, Mobutu, Pinochet, and other puppets of imperialism. With the departure of the Shah and with the revolutionary struggle in Iran having reached truly anti-imperialist and revolutionary proportions, there was nothing left for Deng to do but to berate the Carter administration — for indecisiveness in acting against the Iranian Revolution!
Thus popular support of the masses on a world scale, a key element in the original Chinese communist revolutionary strategy, has been lost, scattered to the winds, never to be recovered by the reactionary leadership at the helm of the Chinese state.
But has not Chinese foreign policy, as practiced by Deng and Hua achieved its objectives in solidifying behind it a U.S.-Japan-NATO alliance? Let us see.
Why imperialists hide their role
The invasion is already more than ten days old. What has been the attitude of the imperialist press thus far?
Contrary to the expectations of the Beijing leaders, the bourgeois press on a world scale, and most notably the press of the U.S., Japan, and Western Europe, have not at all responded with loud cheers to the PLA's march into the territory of a sister socialist republic. The imperialist powers, and most conspicuously the U.S., have of necessity had to resort to an orgy of phony neutrality. They have been obliged to hypocritically condemn "both sides" — the aggressor or "transgressor" to use Blumenthal's and Carter's choice phrase, as well as the victim. And why are they indulging in this utterly shameless and false neutrality?
In the first place, they are in deadly fear of world public opinion. They are fearful that the masses of workers and the population generally are not only indifferent to any military adventure on the part of the U.S., but may be downright hostile. The memory of Viet Nam and the Viet Nam debacle fortunately is still alive in the generation that has had to bear the brunt of the U.S. military disaster.
The false neutrality posture is also to be accounted for by the fear in the ruling circles of U.S. imperialism that, notwithstanding all their complex military alliances in the Middle East, as a result of which direct intervention with U.S. forces was not considered a likelihood, such a possibility must now be reconsidered in the light of the Iranian Revolution. "New military contingencies" involving U.S. forces are again being hatched by the Pentagon and the White House.
Neither in Europe, Latin America, Asia, nor Africa is there really any regime which can publicly support the Deng-Hua aggression against Viet Nam. It is remarkable testimony to the fact that the forces of the anti-imperialist struggle and the forces of the revolutionary class struggle cannot be dismissed, even if the Deng-Hua governing clique have so cavalierly cast them aside. It will be seen later that this is part and parcel of the development that will surely undo them in the end.
Imperialism has a double aim
The imperialists, of course, are and have been most eager for the U.S.-China-Japan-NATO alliance against the USSR, Viet Nam, and all the other socialist countries, as well as against the national liberation movements. But that does not at all signify an identity of views or of objectives with China.
This contradiction can only be appreciated if one understands in the first place that it reflects the contradictory character of the relationship between the Beijing reactionary leadership and the progressive character of the PRC as a socialist state, understanding by that term to mean: the public ownership of the means of production, a basically planned economy buttressed with a monopoly of foreign trade, and a regime which has overthrown the bourgeois-landlord ruling class and broken the ties which previously chained it to imperialism.
Viewed in this light, the strategy of imperialism should have been patently clear not only to the Chinese leadership but to the world at large. The primary aim of imperialism as an exploitative social system, as the mortal enemy of socialism and social progress in general, is and has been not merely to overcome and if possible destroy the Soviet Union, but also in the process to weaken and destroy socialist China.
From this it follows that the strategy of imperialism is and has been to first envenom, incite, and exploit the differences in the socialist camp and particularly the differences between the USSR and China, and then to utilize and exploit the antagonism with a view toward fomenting an internecine struggle among them with the object of destroying them.
It follows as night does day that the first posture of the imperialists would be to play the old phony neutrality stance. Since the Soviet Union is the stronger, more powerful socialist country, imperialism would of necessity gravitate in the direction of overtly and covertly aiding and assisting the PRC reactionary leadership as a first step to involving them both in larger wars.
At the same time, the imperialists are not without their fears that while they instigated the Chinese aggression against Viet Nam, that may turn out to be a catastrophe for them in spite of the phony neutrality stance. Hence all the louder the cries from the kept press and media that "we must condemn both sides."
At the same time, however, the Blumenthal mission is geared to shore up China's military establishment by secret deals under cover of trade and commerce.
The necessity for the imperialists to talk out of both sides of their mouths while covertly supporting Beijing is not unusual in the light of their predatory objectives in relation to all the socialist countries. They must retain a posture of peace and neutrality for fear that to do otherwise would cement solidarity among the socialist countries and all the anti-imperialist and progressive forces. But not for a moment are they losing sight of the necessity to also weaken China as a socialist state.
They are willing to extend to the PRC just as much aid, or to put it more accurately, just as much rope, as it needs to hang itself-along with the USSR and Viet Nam.
Consider this very salient fact which has become crystal clear, particularly since the invasion began: Were the U.S. a true ally of the PRC, as true as an imperialist ally can be, were the two bound by really common predatory interests, at least as far as monopoly capitalist interests are concerned, it would seem that the first task of the U.S. government would be to strengthen the PRC leadership at home, where it admittedly faces considerable opposition. And this Washington could have done by quickly restoring Taiwan to be a province of China in truth.
What has happened instead? The U.S. has taken all conceivable legal, political, diplomatic, economic, and even military measures necessary to make Taiwan an outrageous neo-colony if not an outright appendage of the U.S. It is sheer robbery out in the open, and cannot but be the source of deep humiliation to the Chinese masses.
China in weakened position
The other point which clearly shows what the financial and industrial oligarchies in the U.S., Japan, and Western Europe are concerned about, with respect to the so-called modernization which Deng and his collaborators have projected for China, is that the outbreak of the war and the possible widening of hostilities is giving the bankers and industrialists a new opportunity to put the squeeze on the PRC leaders. They have more leverage in demanding political and economic advantages, while wringing out the most extortionate concessions as the price for China's efforts to obtain technology and military equipment. Hasn't this always been imperialist policy everywhere?
If the U.S. robbed the British, the French, and the Dutch allies blind in the Second World War (and these are class brothers and sisters of the Wall Street fraternity), what will it not do in grabbing everything it can possibly lay its hands on with regard to China, a socialist state? In relation to the U.S., the PRC's position has become weakened as a result of the war, and especially if it continues.
The insatiable appetites of the imperialists are only limited by the power of the PRC to restrict them. But this in turn depends on how far the PRC gets mired down in a fratricidal war with its socialist neighbors. What possible good can this do for the cause of socialist construction?
It must be clear, at least to some in the leadership of the PR that the building of the so-called worldwide anti-hegemonist front against the USSR and Viet Nam has completely isolated China from the world community of the working class and the oppressed. Only the Sadats, Pinochets, Mobutus, and their ilk have even a modicum of faint praise for the PRC.
They are left to rely only on the imperialist states, who in turn are alienated from the mass of the people whom they exploit and oppress. Anyone who has observed the diplomatic position of Washington, Tokyo, London, and Paris can easily see that they have all tilted in favor of the PRC. But this is merely an expression of their congenital hatred for the Soviet Union and for communism generally.
As to whether these imperialist allies can hold together in the face of growing anti-war and anti-imperialist sentiment, that is a considerable hurdle which they have yet to come face to face with.
The initial few days of the war have shown the wide gap that exists between the machinations of the imperialists and the PRC, on the one hand, and the broad mass of the people, on the other. To this must of course be added that all the imperialist newspapers and media constantly, incessantly must drum into the minds of the public that this, after all, is a war between "communist countries." They must utilize this internecine struggle to discredit socialism.
But while doing so, they by the same token make it difficult for themselves to openly choose the side they favor.
The disappointment and disillusionment among the mass of the progressive and class conscious workers that comes with the outbreak of hostilities between two socialist countries will give way to more sober calculation and understanding as imperialism involuntarily makes clear that its objective is not merely to aid China in its aggression, but to facilitate the destruction and ruination of all the socialist countries.
War in light of world struggle
The war against Viet Nam must be seen in the wider perspective of the world struggle of which the anti-Viet Nam invasion may be only the first stage. Our epoch is the epoch of imperialist wars, socialist revolutions, and liberation struggles against imperialism. In a still wider and deeper sense, it is a struggle between the old ancient capitalist system and the new beginnings of a worldwide socialist order. In that sense it is more pertinent than ever to see the struggle from the perspective that the existence of the USSR and the other socialist countries, including China and notwithstanding the defection of its leaders to the imperialist camp, is the fundamental barrier and challenge, along with all the oppressed countries, to the existence of decadent, monopolist, incendiary imperialism.
This is well understood in all the top circles of world finance capital. Among them there are waverers, defeatists, and demoralized elements and also some who see their only hope in a lasting, peaceful accommodation with the socialist countries. But these are not in the commanding heights of the imperialist summit.
And even were that not so, it must be understood that over a long period of time it is the congenital forces which irresistibly drive finance capital to forcible, violent solutions which are the dominant fact of contemporary imperialist politics. Peace has always been to them an interlude for the preparation of war.
The key to understanding the nature of the conflict among the socialist states lies in their reciprocal relation to imperialism. Therein lies nine-tenths of the problem. Were imperialism a minor factor affecting the socialist countries, the problems and difficulties besetting the new social order in the socialist camp would be confined to the growing pains of constructing a new society.
To a large extent they would be dealing with problems left over by the legacy of imperialism, colonialism, and of the previous social orders which include remnants of feudalism and reactionary social institutions, customs, and practices also left over by bourgeois society. There can be no question that these are problems of considerable weight and sources of serious friction and conflict. They can scarcely be dealt with adequately, however, as long as the overriding problem of imperialism continually intrudes itself in a thousand-and-one ways into the very vitals of the new social order.
So much time, energy, and resources are consumed in that struggle as to make a relatively free and rapid evolution in a thoroughly socialist direction enormously difficult, especially if one takes into account the continual maintenance and growth of the armed forces and the industry necessary to maintain them.
War drags China into orbit of imperialism
If the present course of the war continues, it will of necessity pull China deeper and deeper into the orbit of imperialism. China will become more and more dependent upon Western imperialism and Japan and these in turn will seek to exact greater and greater concessions which will tie China to them more securely than ever It is a direction which the Chinese leadership, although regressive and reactionary, cannot possibly view in any other light but with great apprehension.
The view of the Deng grouping and its exponents of modernization lies in the theory that the imperialist powers need China in the struggle against the USSR more than China needs the imperialists. The alliance that they projected at the very beginning of the Deng-Hua administration (somewhere after October 1976 following the fall of the so-called Gang of Four) was based on the opportunist scheme that the imperialists would be forced by the nature of the struggle against the USSR to grant considerable advantages and concessions to the PRC, which would enable China to win sufficient technology industrial know-how and equipment to aid in its socialist construction.
In return, the PRC leaders would go to great lengths to make such concessions as would attract foreign imperialists, which no other socialist country has done save for Yugoslavia. (The last word on the class character of the Yugoslav state has not yet been said. It is politically but not as yet economically in the imperialist camp.)
With all this in view, the Deng leadership made a wild swing to the right by opening the doors of China to the transnational corporations and offering such lucrative and extravagant concessions as to virtually create a stampede among the imperialists into China. Nothing like it had been seen since the days following the defeat of China in the Opium Wars of the 1850s.
Endangers China's socialist foundations
But the war will of necessity put a new face on any and all arrangements, both public and private, between China and the imperialists. In the first place, military equipment and sophisticated weapons systems, which are enormously costly, are bound to take precedence over civilian procurement deals with the imperialists. The diversion of manpower and womanpower from peaceful socialist construction into the military field is bound to slow down, if not altogether negate, socialist construction.
The so-called reforms of the Deng-Hua grouping, such as the material incentives and others, are of a bourgeois character and cater to bourgeois norms. These stifle mass socialist initiative, cultivate bourgeois individualism and destroy revolutionary working class idealism and dedication to socialism and class solidarity.
The reactionary character of the war will accelerate all this. The danger of China becoming a neocolonialist tool in the empire of world finance capital looms ever larger the longer the war continues.
It inevitably and irresistibly follows from all this that the course of the war will tend to erode the socialist gains of the Chinese Revolution. The deeper China gets swung into the orbit of imperialism as the war widens and deepens, the greater are the prospects of eroding the socialist foundations in China.
Unlimited means for limited objectives
Yet as the war is merely one for proclaimed limited objectives on the part of the PRC, a greater danger lies in the pursuit of unlimited means to achieve the objective.
On the part of the Vietnamese, the objective is clear and unequivocal, and the means of achieving its objective are equally clear — to mobilize the entire country and achieve a withdrawal of the Chinese forces back to the latter's borders.
The proclaimed objective of the PRC ruling group, however, of "punishing" or "teaching" Viet Nam a lesson, already has proved a dismal failure, although enormous amounts of lives and property have recklessly been spent by the PRC adventurists. But they have it within their power to go to virtually unlimited means to obtain their unachievable objective, and therein lies a very great danger indeed.
The danger lies in wildly pursuing this unachievable objective which inevitably will have the effect of provoking the USSR and thereby widening the conflict. In doing this the PRC leaders will be achieving not their own objective but the objective of imperialism, which for more than two decades has been encouraging, inciting, and promoting just such a conflict.
All the more so must the policy be to find a way to reverse the character of the struggle, to limit the struggle to a withdrawal of the Chinese troops. This would not spell out a disaster for China. China as a socialist state would not lose anything except a spurious false policy.
It would only be the Deng-Hua group of reactionary adventurers who would stand to lose in such an eventuality. It would not be an affront to China as a state, which has the workers and peasants as pillars for the proletarian dictatorship.
The wounds which have been inflicted upon each other by China and Viet Nam would be healed. All that would be lost by the withdrawal of the PLA forces from Viet Nam is a corrupt adventurist policy, not its socialist prestige. While China has suffered many reverses, its earlier revolutionary policies were able to secure one of the greatest triumphs of world history, the triumph of the Chinese Revolution.
Only those who equate the Chinese Revolution and China as a socialist state with the corrupt reactionary policies of the current leadership can feel that a withdrawal is a tremendous loss. But on the contrary, it would lay the foundation for a true fraternal and socialist solidarity between the Vietnamese and the Chinese people.
In the course of the war it is all too easy to lose sight of the enormous fact of the existence of China as a socialist state built upon the foundations of a monumental revolution. In directing our fire against the PRC leadership and its flagrantly regressive policy both at home and abroad it is necessary to draw a strict line of demarcation between the leaders and those who are led.
Great harm can be done and incalculable damage inflicted upon the working class movement by directing ourselves to China in the same vein as though it were an imperialist state. The tendency to succumb to this is very strong at a time when class consciousness on a wide scale in the American working class movement needs to be sharpened and not adulterated.
Furthermore, there are also those who castigate the Chinese as "fascists" or "Nazis" and tend to virtually obliterate China as a socialist state. They do so in the belief that in the use of such extravagant and unnecessary terminology they are strengthening the resolve of the progressives and the advanced workers to fight against the PRC invasion.
In the first place, it alienates those in the working class movement who understand only too well that China is a socialist state and that it is a question of a reactionary grouping having usurped state power.
In the second place, by obliterating the class character of the Chinese state it adulterates working-class consciousness, corrupts the working-class and anti-imperialist character of the struggle, and runs perilously close to putting the struggle on a frenzied nationalist basis.
This can only do harm because it takes away from the wholly progressive character of the anti-imperialist Vietnamese struggle and runs the risk of substituting bourgeois nationalist criteria for revolutionary Marxist-Leninist criteria in the struggle against imperialism and its allies in the Deng-Hua leadership.
Index
Introduction | 1. An Historic
Betrayal | 2. Behind the U.S. 'Neutrality' Posture |
3. The Early Harvest of the Deng-Hua Policy | 4. The Great Socialist Destiny of China and Viet Nam
Last updated: 14 June 2018