Marxist science has always paid close attention to China. In the mid-19th century, it was concerned with the discovery of the world market
; in the early 20th century, with the prospect of the inflammable material
of revolution in Asia; in the postwar period, it was faced with the duration of the counter-revolutionary phase
; and today it is concerned with the critical juncture of the crisis in the world order
and the prediction of its breakdown. Over the past two centuries, without exception, China has been involved in every major juncture of revolutionary development.
This volume is limited to one particular aspect: the Dragon’s global projection over the last ten years. The Asian Giant’s imperialist maturation was bound to shake up the world order set up by the winners of World War II and to decree its crisis. This world order was able to co-opt the recovery of Germany and Japan during the liberist economic cycle, sustained by the exceptional post-war expansion of the world market. Today, on the contrary, China’s irruption is taking place amid the armed liberism of military spending and the defensive return of State capitalism, propped up by protectionist elements in America and Europe. Co-opting China into the cartel of great imperialist powers would lead to a division of the world so uneven that it would be difficult for the old powers to accept it without a fight. Moreover, the once-extensive hinterland of the world market is rapidly dwindling for the financial concentrations of the old metropolises, now challenged by their new competitors. The economic cycle, the political cycle, and the military cycle are inextricably linked, with no solution other than that of the breakdown of the order: either imperialist barbarism, or social revolution.
News From the Silk Road is a record, month by month, of the development of the basic lines of Chinese foreign policy. For some time now, it has operated in the delicate balance between gradually abandoning the low profile
prescribed by Deng Xiaoping – concealing one’s strength, taking time to grow stronger, avoiding the provocation of excessive reactions – and actively playing the balancing game. This undertaking has been calibrated, with a dose of realism, among the main powerhouses of multipolarism (the US, the EU, Russia, India, Japan, etc.), and accompanied by attempts to reassure and tempt – but sometimes also to intimidate – the medium-sized powers. The last few years have seen the Dragon increasingly drawn onto the international scene.
The Chinese attempt to use barbarians against barbarians
, mainly by exploiting the differences among the old Atlantic powers, has collided with the growing reaction to China’s penetration into Africa, the Middle East, the Persian Gulf, and even the European periphery. The Chinese and anti-Chinese parties
emerging in the metropolises reveal a plurality of political lines, ranging from negotiation with China to military preparation, i.e., the two hands
of policy directed towards Beijing. Europe’s definition of China, simultaneously as a partner
and as a rival
, holds no surprises for Marxist dialectics, which is used to conceiving of the unity of opposites as the ultimate driving force behind all movement. Peaceful partition and military struggle, the unity and scission of imperialism, have always made up the DNA of our conception of unitary imperialism as a den of thieves
, united in plundering but divided when it comes to sharing out the spoils. In fact, it is necessary to accurately evaluate their relative proportions and the pace of the trend towards the future breakdown of the ruling order.
Tensions are building, from the Persian Gulf to the Taiwan Strait, in the new choke points – hotspots of the imperialist contention where the factors of conflict between powers are concentrated. History has fully confirmed our long-term analysis of the Persian Gulf as a multidimensional artery, and our classification of the 2003 Iraq War as the US’s preventive war against Europe and China, through oil and not only for oil, along the key Eurasian routes. At the time, energy routes were seized upon in the strategic struggle between the powers. Twenty years later, the Dragon’s presence in the Gulf is an undeniable economic and political reality.
Twenty years ago, China joining the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the euro about-turn in Europe, and the wars of American decline were the political facts which inaugurated a new strategic phase. China, a power emerging from the backward areas that were shared out and developed by imperialism, went so far as to challenge the post-war order and to demand a new partition of the world. This transition, taking place in the twilight – but not yet the final breakdown – of the old order, together with the classic silent accumulation of contradictions which paves the way for every great chemical reaction in history, had to be accurately studied. We needed to pay special attention to the variants and nuances of Chinese foreign policy, the pluralism of its schools of thought, and the way that their orientations adapted and changed over time. In the absence of any serious systematic effort among Western sources, we decided to review some of the main threads of China’s vast number of publications on current affairs.
The Dragon is stepping forward by presenting itself as a new great industrial investor and benevolent peacemaker, sending Kyiv and Tel Aviv offers to broker peace, and adapting old principles of coexistence
to the needs of today’s emerging powers. No dominant political current in China has declared the breakdown of the old order as one of its immediate proposals. However, on the whole, even those most reluctant to let go of the old dosages of peaceful rise and liberism are, in the end, aligning themselves with the relentless trend of Asian rearmament. It is only a matter of time, they think – counting aircraft carriers, nuclear warheads, and latest generation fighters – before the rearmament race leads to an Asian regional war, like those in Ukraine and Gaza that attest to the crisis in the world order. Such a war would put China’s real capabilities to the test: a downside of the low profile
that China has kept for all these years is that it has been unable to demonstrate its own military readiness, which is a key element of deterrence. Indeed, iron times are on the horizon.
This is no surprise for our Marxist school of thought. Never was the news of the emergence of an imperialist power so loudly proclaimed: in the mid-19th century, Marx and Engels had predicted China’s capitalist development and Lenin’s analysis advanced the analytic tools necessary to predict its imperialist development in the 20th century. In the post-WWII period, by re-establishing the link between these threads of analysis on the uneven development of capitalism in the imperialist phase, it was possible to situate the Dragon’s industrialisation – and, prospectively, its establishment as a power – in the strategic approach of our Leninist party. With China having reached imperialist maturity and a huge Asian proletariat having formed, these strategic factors, destined to disrupt the post-WWII imperialist order, have appeared as predicted. A process that, under Marx’s gaze, barely emerged from the historic collision
of European capitalism in China, is now made increasingly obvious by the collision of China with the global system. In the face of such challenges, the method of historical and dialectical materialism demonstrates its superiority.
By following the main thread
of revolutionary strategy, i.e., the conscious action of the proletariat based on theory and the scientific study of the international dynamics of classes and powers, it is no accident that we encounter Marx and Engels’ first articles on China. In their mid-19th century writings, the Middle Kingdom is already a part of their brilliant vision of the world market created by large-scale capitalist industry.
Among the principles of the Marxist theory of international relations, The German Ideology [1845-46] established the fundamental thesis of the ‘historic collision’, or social and political upheaval, provoked from outside
, stemming from the enlargement of the world market, the competition of the more industrially-advanced countries, and the imbalances in the system of States caused by the movements of capital. 19th-century China was the site of such a collision.
Marxism was born by raising its gaze to the world and investigating historical trends. In just a few pages, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung [1850] connected the defeat of the European 1848 revolutions, capitalist development in America and Asia (driven by the discovery of gold mines in California and the change of course
of world trade towards the Pacific Ocean), and the external collision of British capitalism in China. As China disintegrated on first contact with the export commodities of the British bourgeoisie – cotton bales and cannon balls – the living fossil
generated paradoxical social phenomena. The Taiping egalitarian revolt, a utopian and religious peasant uprising, was even then already sowing the seeds of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois democracy in the fields of the thousand-year-old empire.
Marx and Engels delved into the collision of British capitalism with China and the possible feedback effect that the Chinese crisis might have on the British commercial crisis: a curious spectacle, that of China sending disorder into the Western World
[Revolution in China and in Europe, 1853]. Studying China became part of the study of the spread of capitalism across the world and the universality of its laws of movement. The Manifesto of the Communist Party [1848] states that the need of a constantly expanding market for [the bourgeoisie’s] products
will batter down all Chinese walls
. In 1859, Marx identified an apparent enigma
: the obstinate resistance of Chinese small production to British industrial power. In Capital, a comparison with India demonstrates a connection between the speed of capitalism’s economic penetration and the direct political force
exerted by the States which embody the collision, with Britain holding a far weaker grip over China than over India. Only with the 1894 Sino-Japanese War would Engels be able to more fully explain half a century’s worth of evaluations of the capitalist advance in the Middle Kingdom, establishing that the decisive element was the war factor. The isolation of old China, partially
broken by the Europeans’ wars, was struck by the new Japanese bourgeoisie.
In his 1894 correspondence, Engels includes China as a factor in the end-of-century crisis
. Presciently, his dialectical mind worked with concepts to create a basic outline of how America and Asia’s development would in turn affect Europe, and how China’s capitalist development would shake capitalism itself. Among other elements, he reflected on the disintegration of the Chinese peasantry, the supplanted peasants who will flock to the coast en masse
, and how industrialisation would create Chinese competition on a mass scale
. Engels had long been thinking about the cosmopolitan competition into which the development of capitalist production has thrown all of the world’s workers
and about the prospect of China also becoming a great manufacturing country
.
Towards the end of the 19th century, this factor became part of his prediction of a European crisis, together with the breaking of the British monopoly, the irruption of the new American power and that of Japan in Asia, and the change in power relations in the world market. Engels’ multilateral strategy looked ahead to the 20th century of imperialism, the highest stage, which would multiply the communicating vessels
connecting all areas of world capitalism. The dialectic between Europe and the world market, discovered in 1850, spread to the new extra-European powers. Lenin’s theory would further develop these findings.