Comparisons of China and the U.S. in Their Roles as Global Hegemons ~~ dmorista

~~ Written by dmorista ~~

I would like to present what I consider to be a realistic view of China’s current role in the World, and compare it to the time that the U.S. was similarly dominant in Global affairs. There is no doubt that the Chinese Revolution that evolved in 1949, after defeating the direct military power of capitalism, as manifested in the colonial / comprador forces of the Kuomintang, was a great triumph for the Chinese people. After the initial victory they had to turn to the much longer term and more complex issue of developing China into a modern nation; and concomitantly raising the society up from the intense poverty and humiliation that had been so severe in the period from the mid 1800s - the victory of 1949. The triumph of the Chinese Communist forces in 1949 was a victory for the people of the world, but had been achieved at a terrible cost. Chairman Mao himself lost both of his brothers and a female cousin who had been adopted and raised in his family as a sister during the long struggle against the imperialists / colonialists. No family in China came out of the 20+ year civil war, Japanese Invasion, and revolution unscathed.

After the 1949 victory the new government took numerous long-needed measures. They confiscated the land holdings of the rural landlords and distributed that land among the landless peasants. They built schools and clinics for the people in the villages and cities. They trained hundreds of thousands country medics known as the "barefoot doctors"; not to the standards found in posh clinics in the advanced capitalist countries, but to a standard never seen before by the poor of China. They built state industries that provided housing, medical care, schools, and pensions for their employees and their families. By the late 1970s the Chinese were poised to begin a new stage of the development process. They had a sound foundation of a universally literate, and relatively healthy population to build on.

The late 1970s were a time when the Capitalists of the U.S. and other western countries were looking to move as much of their investment in industrial production away from the unionized, high-wage, and more closely regulated core capitalist countries. Much of that investment went to Taiwan (where the main remnant of the Kuomintang fled), South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong. At that point East Asian development was still led by Japan, but the Japanese never allowed foreign companies to invest in their economy, they generated all of their own investment capital and set up very favorable industrial and technological licensing arrangements. The leading geostrategists of the U.S. ruling class viewed Japan, Taiwan, S. Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong as the main bulwarks encircling and controlling China; and those 5 societies were given very wide latitude in their economic actions. That was true even when those business initiatives harmed the U.S. domestic socioeconomic system, and in addition they were given huge amounts of technological processes originally developed in the U.S., and overwhelmingly developed at public expense.

The Chinese were clever enough to set up investment opportunities in China that, while those opportunities allowed foreign capitalists to rake in high profits, were designed to benefit the Chinese Socioeconomic Order much more in the long-run. The early period in this development saw Chinese factories established that exploited the low wages prevalent in China, but the Chinese political and economic leadership always planned to move up the technological ladder to more capital-intensive and less labor-intensive industries. They have now achieved that status to a large degree. There were and still are struggles going on among the ruling class in China over how to proceed in the future. The Chinese East Coast industrialists were perfectly happy to keep running low-wage labor intensive industries supplying the West with consumer and capital products. But the Financial and Economic Crisis of 2007 - 2008 marked the end of the era when that strategy was the foundation of the process of Chinese development. The bottom fell out of the consumer markets of the West for a couple of years and those markets never completely recovered. It became obvious (for those who had not already figured it out) that Western consumers could not keep buying ever increasing amounts of Chinese products, when many of them had lost their jobs and had been immiserated. The longer term actions of the U.S. and other Western Transnational Corporations (operating to serve the interests of the ultra-rich who own them) undermined the U.S. Geostrategic position over the 40+ years from the late 1970s to the present day. The contradiction between the private interests of the American based rich, and the nation state that they command was resolved in favor of Private Wealth, and against the supposed Nation State they always claim to love and cherish.

In many ways the current situation of China resembles that of the U.S. a century ago, or that of England over two centuries ago. A major difference is that the U.S. and England rose to their respective hegemonic economic, political, cultural, and military positions as part of, and as a consequence of, the great expansion of European Power and the establishment of Capitalism. The Europeans burst out into the wider world around 1450 - 1550 and expanded from occupying their corner of Eurasia to taking nearly complete control of three other continents (North and South America and Australasia), with a series of strong footholds in Africa and eastern Eurasia. This did involve a tradition of conquest (greatly aided in the three "new" continents by the microbes that caused the "Old World Diseases"), but that came straight out of the human perception of how things were done in the 1400s. Conquest and domination were not any private preserve of White People or Europeans. The period of U.S. Hegemony merely marked the high water point, and ironically the end, of that 500+ year period of Euro/American Dominance.

The Chinese have, to large measure, taken up the types of economic activities that were prevalent in the U.S. and England during their analogous periods of hegemony. The Chinese now lead the world in capital intensive industrial production, and are busy building the infrastructure needed to extract resources from the less developed world. At the same time they are building significant infrastructure to permit the movement of globalized trade around the planet. And this is most particularly the case for Eurasia and Africa. This is not a charitable enterprise but is clearly one that the Chinese want to run in such a way that it also benefits the places where they build these projects. The Chinese socioeconomic project is run, first and foremost, to benefit the Han Chinese living in Mainland China. They are the world's largest ethnic group numbering some 1.5 billion people worldwide, and who compose about 91% of mainland China's population of 1.4 billion (1.274 billion), they are also the majority in Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong. The super rich and the political elite in China know that if they make sure enough benefits and prosperity flows to the Han Chinese population in the Mainland they will stay in power. Doing that now requires a Chinese led organization and mobilization of the world's resources. That process has, so far, fueled a strong enough socioeconomic situation inside China to supply both the riches the Chinese Oligarchs want to control, and even more riches to allocate to the great majority of the 1.274 billion Han Chinese living in Mainland China. Though that second allocation is on a much more limited per capita basis; despite the fact that the overall amount is quite large. The Chinese accomplish this degree of prosperity and social welfare through promoting the most profitable industries, and by socialist spending to bolster the socioeconmic conditions of the poorer elements of the Han Chinese population (and others as well). Earlier excesses of Capitalist Zeal by the East Coast Industrial faction of the Chinese Elites, who among other activities ruthlessly stole rural land from peasants and villages for use in industrial development schemes, were corrected and policies were modified. The Chinese have a long tradition of "The Mandate of Heaven" by which enlightened rulers maintain the loyalty of the overall population by making sure that the overall socioeconomic order is more-or-less just and takes care of the needs of the common people.

In many ways the current situation in China closely resembles that which existed in New Deal America. Both societies are/were the dominant productive political entity on the planet. The population profiles are also strikingly similar. The U.S. was, at that time, around 90% "White" and the policies that were pursued were arranged to provide some minimal living standard for that dominant population. The percentage of Whites slowly fell beginning at 89.8% in 1930 and 89.9% in 1940, then slowly declining to 89.5% in 1950, to 88.8% in 1960, to 87.5% in 1970, to 83.1% in 1980, to 80.3% in 1990. The decline of Whites as the dominant population accelerated after the 1965 Immigration Act, that reopened the U.S. to significant immigration for the first time since the early 1920s, and to a dominant flow of non-Europeans for the first time since the importation of slaves before the Civil War. (See, "HISTORICAL CENSUS STATISTICS ON POPULATION TOTALS BY RACE, 1790 TO 1990, AND BY HISPANIC ORIGIN, 1970 TO 1990, FOR THE UNITED STATES, REGIONS, DIVISIONS, AND STATES", Population Division, "Working Paper No. 56", "Table 1. United States - Race and Hispanic Origin: 1790 to 1990", pg 19 {pg 29 per pdf pagination}, September 2002, Campbell Gibson & Kay Jung, U.S. Census Bureau, Washington, DC). In the case of the New Deal America the terms of the economic arrangements were worked out by the largest and most successful mobilization of the American Working Class in the country's history. The ruling faction of the Capitalist Elite, led by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, worked out an uneasy truce with the working class in the mid-late 1930s. There were numerous strikes and other socioeconomic struggles across the country, the single culminating strike was the Flint Sit-Down Strike in 1936 - 1937 that led to General Motors recognizing the United Auto Workers union as the exclusive bargaining agent for the entire production working staff of the company. Ford Motor was finally organized by the UAW in 1941. The resultant socioeconomic arrangements were called "The Treaty of Detroit" by labor and some business historians. They largely carried through until the mid-1970s when the U.S. ruling class began to change over from Industrial Capitalism to Finance Capitalism as their dominant organizing principle to maximize profits.

The arrangements of the "Treaty of Detroit" had to be overthrown through a generalized program of attack against the working people of the U.S. That process included numerous political assassinations of actual Populist leaders (not the faux right-wing Cultural Populism of Trump and similar monsters), an extremely active political and social surveillance and covert action campaign against working people, a very vigorous attack on the union movement that also featured numerous key assassinations, and significant attacks on the various popular organizations from the anti-war movement to the Black Panthers and everything in between. The political attacks and assassinations began in earnest in the 1960s and included, in chronological order the most significant though far from the only murders, those of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Robert F. Kennedy, Thomas Merton, Fred Hampton, and Walter Reuther (still president of the activist UAW at the time, in May of 1970). It is no accident the 3 of the 7 political murders were of African American leaders.

The Chinese are assuming the mantle of Global Hegemon at a time that is fraught with challenges, dangers, and opportunities. They must be more enlightened and far-seeing than was the case for the last couple rounds of Global Hegemons (the U.S. and the U.K.). It will still be a close run set of events. The Chinese are about 10 times as numerous and powerful as the core U.S. state and population was in the period from the mid 1930s to the mid 1970s. Technology and science has advanced immeasurably, but also there has been massive growth in the size of the existential problems that humanity faces, due to population growth and the horrific activities of the Capitalists. I certainly wish the Chinese, and all the rest of us, the best of luck in the coming years.  We are going to need to work together and get some of the breaks from fate and chance.