HP Source: ‘All war is a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal.’ (1)

 

We Don’t Need This Fascist Groove Thing, 6^th August 2020; ‘All war is a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal.’ ⁽¹⁾

 

‘We need your faith and hostility

 

To be certain of a change

But could you ever recover from

Forever recover from this prejudice?’

 

The world is currently in a very strange place, it is more unsettled, and the future more uncertain than at anytime in my memory. The global pandemic has impacted everyone, everywhere, and will have all manner of repercussions. The most distressing of which could be the already strained relationship between the US and China.

The US is led by President Trump, a narcissistic megalomaniac, who’s misguided leadership exacerbated the pandemic.

He came to power on an ‘America First’ ticket, and scapegoated minorities and countries including China, giving the electorate the ‘stab in the back’ theory so beloved by right-wing politicians.

Trump is facing a difficult re-election campaign, currently he trails Joe Biden ahead of the November polling date.

He has been pushing a hard-line on law and order at home, and continues to rattle the sabre towards China, including blaming them for the pandemic and threatening to make them pay.
 

‘continues to rattle the sabre towards China, including blaming them for the pandemic and threatening to make them pay’

 

This ‘stab-in-the-back stupidity isn’t limited to Trump only, Tobias Ellwood, who chairs the House of Commons defence select committee, has written that ‘any notion that China can be trusted must surely have been dispelled following its initial – and disastrous – attempts to conceal the Covid-19 pandemic.

If it transpires that the virus began its spread as a result of negligence in a Wuhan laboratory,’ he continued, ‘it can only strengthen calls to temper China’s reach and influence.’ After quoting Churchill, he argues that ‘the time to stand up to China is now and the country to do it is Britain’.
 

‘the time to stand up to China is now and the country to do it is Britain’

 

But the scale of the anti-China reaction is disproportionate to the reality of the contributions made by Chinese scientists to our global understanding of this pandemic.

They were the first to identify the threat posed by the virus and warned of the threat of a pandemic. Their scientists first documented person-to-person transmission, and first sequenced the genome of the virus.

And their scientists were the ones that highlighted the importance of scaling up access to personal protective equipment, testing and quarantine. Something that sadly the UK singularly failed to grasp.

Analysts have suggested that China’s export driven economy is in trouble, as countries such as the US, India and Europe are beginning to close their market to Chinese companies.

For example, India has banned TikTok (along with 58 other Chinese apps) due to the Chinese incursion into Ladakh on 16 June during which 20 Indian soldiers were clubbed to death, and the US has frozen out China Mobile.

As the following statistics show China isn’t the dominant force we all think it is:
 

• Their fiscal deficit will be C.15 percent of GDP this year, including a government stimulus equal in scale to that which followed the financial crisis of 2008.
• As a percentage of GDP, its’s public plus private debt ratio has reached 330%.
• Its current account (trade) surplus peaked in 2007 at 10 of GDP and has since been declining.
• China is still very much a middle-income economy in World Bank terms (along with much of Latin America and North Africa

 

At this point I want to examine a parallel example, and ask the question, why did Japan declare war on the US in 1941?

Japan had been seeking expansion since its invasion of Manchuria in 1931, and in September 1940, it signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy, entering the military alliance known as the ‘Axis.’ Seeking to curb Japanese aggression and force a withdrawal of Japanese forces from Manchuria and China, the United States imposed economic sanctions on Japan. Faced with severe shortages of oil and other natural resources and driven by the ambition to displace the United States as the dominant Pacific power, Japan decided to attack the United States and British forces in Asia and seize the resources of Southeast Asia.
 

‘why did Japan declare war on the US in 1941?’

 

The point of this article is to examine whether history might repeat itself and force similar actions by China. This is, perhaps, best summed up in a quote from Carl Von Clausewitz; War is regarded as nothing but the continuation of state policy with other means ⁽²⁾.
 

‘Oh, war, I despise

‘Cause it means destruction of innocent lives..’

 

The reality of the situation is that the US now find themselves in a similar position to GB after WW1, our global power was diminishing as theirs was rising.

30-yrs later, after WW2, the US position as the global economic superpower, and the dollars as the world’s reserve currency was complete. They also took on a more sinister roles as the worlds’ policeman, cruising the globe destabilising regimes that didn’t come to heel, or that didn’t suit their outlook.

Their role as the globes’ policeman has never sat comfortably with me.

They are quick to criticise others, especially China for their internal human rights issues, e.g. the imprisonment and repression of the Uighur people in Xinjiang, denial of freedoms to Tibetans, belligerence towards Taiwan, and the imposition of a draconian national security law in Hong Kong ⁽³⁾ that has seemingly extinguished the pro-democracy movement.
 

‘Their role as the globes’ policeman has never sat comfortably with me.’

 

However, the US’s own record is nothing to be proud of, since the end of the civil war and the abolition of slavery they have industrialised and institutionalised racism at home, e.g. ‘Black Lives Matter’, and seemingly allow the police carte blanche to assault and even murder black people.

In his latest attempt to show that black lives don’t matter Trump refused to praise the late John Lewis, the Georgia congressman and original Freedom Rider, and also questioned the value of the pivotal Civil Rights Act of the 1960s, which Lewis fought and almost died for.

Trump seemed more upset that Lewis hadn’t attended his events saying, ‘He didn’t come to my State of the Union speeches, and that’s OK,’ he said. ‘That’s his right. He should’ve come. I think he made a big mistake.’

The interview was conducted as the Georgia congressman lay in state in the Capitol rotunda. Trump did not pay his respects while Lewis’s casket was in Washington, nor attend Lewis’s funeral in Atlanta last week, at which Barack Obama delivered a soaring eulogy that was personally poignant but also a barnstorming political attack on the Trump administration’s efforts at voter and protest suppression.

Despite that decades-long legacy, the president insisted that, perhaps excluding Abraham Lincoln, ‘nobody has done more for Black Americans’ than he had, including Lyndon Johnson, who passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964.

‘How’s it worked out?’ Trump retorted. ‘If you take a look at what Lyndon Johnson did, you think?’
 

‘Your time has come

Your second skin

The cost so high

The gain so low..’

 

Economically, the rise of China has threatened the US position as the worlds’ major power. For 30 years or more large Western corporations cut costs and reduced their reliance on local labour by outsourcing manufacturing to cheap, developing countries.

China was the major beneficiary of this globalisation, as, in recent years, all supply chains seemed to begin in China.

China now accounts for C.18% of all global manufacturing exports and has state-of-the art production facilities with highly trained personnel. In addition, China has come to control the supply chains for strategic elements like lithium (used in EV batteries) and other rare earth metals.

Does this economic dominance mean that China wants world domination? Or, to replace America as the sole superpower. Perhaps China aims to displace the dollar as the worlds’ reserve currency, which confers on America so many advantages?
 

‘Does this economic dominance mean that China wants world domination?’

 

The international renminbi-based payments system that China has built is centred in Hong Kong, perhaps another reason why China took the risk of effectively tearing up the Sino-British agreement of 1984 which guaranteed ‘one country, two systems’ for 50 years.

The Bank of China’s gold reserves which are huge, partly because China is the largest gold producer in the world.

Despite this, and likely as a result of the pandemic and a US-led reaction against China, globalisation is replaced by ‘re-shoring.’

However, moving manufacturing out of China means that costs will rise irrespective of new technology such as robotization. This could mean that ‘re-shoring’ becomes ‘near-shoring’, e.g.  American corporates are already relocating production from China to Mexico, while French and German corporates might relocate from China to Slovakia or Poland.

America and its allies still have a technological advantage, China is not yet capable of manufacturing the most advanced semiconductor chips used for the famously upcoming ‘5G’ networks.
 

‘America and its allies still have a technological advantage’

 

They are thought to be about 10-years behind Silicon Valley in design terms. The USA controls the global semiconductor development process, working closely with partners in Japan, Korea and Taiwan. The latter partly explains Chinas desire to reunify with Taipei.

In May the US Department of Commerce forced Taiwan’s TSMC to cut off the supply of semiconductor chips to Huawei. In return, TSMC will be allowed to build a $12 billion new plant in Arizona.

That made the decision of the Johnson government in mid-July to block Huawei in the UK after all (second time around) much easier. The emasculation of Hong Kong began immediately thereafter.

However, it is Trumps latest ‘sanction’ that most catches the eye as, in return for allowing to attempt to acquire TikTok, Trump expects the US Treasury to receive payment as part of the deal. Quite how this will work he hasn’t explained

An editorial in the official state paper, China Daily, said China would not accept the ‘theft’ of one of its technology companies, ‘and it has plenty of ways to respond if the administration carries out its planned smash and grab’.

A spokesman for China’s ministry of foreign affairs said China firmly opposed any US action against Chinese software companies over national security concerns.
 

‘China firmly opposed any US action against Chinese software companies over national security concerns’

 

‘The US generalises the concept of national security and, without any evidence, presumptions of guilt and threats against relevant companies,’ said Wang Wenbin. ‘This violates the principles of market economy and exposes the hypocrisy and typical double standards of the US in maintaining fairness and freedom. It also violates the World Trade Organisation’s principles of openness, transparency and non-discrimination.’

China’s ambassador to the UK, Liu Xiaoming, also accused the US of hypocrisy. ‘It is the US that has politicised economic issues and abused the concept of national security to pursue discriminatory and exclusive policies,’ he said.

An editorial in China’s state-owned 21st Century Business Herald said forcing the sale would set a ‘dangerous precedent’. ‘For this transaction, the Chinese government may also consider reviewing whether the technology transfer in it violates Chinese laws and harms China’s national interests.’
 

‘The times they are a-telling, and the changing isn’t free

You’ve read it in the tea leaves, and the tracks are on tv..’

 

And there are also signs of diplomatic dislocation as, in late-July, the Trump administration, in an unprecedented move, announced the immediate closure of China’s consulate in Houston, citing espionage, the theft of industrial secrets and medical research and the intimidation of Chinese dissidents in the US.

Last Friday (24 July), in a tit-for-tat response, the Chinese ordered the immediate closure of the US consulate in Chengdu (Sichuan Province).

FBI Director Christopher A Wray has stated that China is ‘engaged in a broad, diverse campaign of theft and malign influence’; and Attorney General William Barr has claimed that China aims to ‘exploit the openness of our institutions in order to destroy them…and overthrow the rules-based international system’.

And on 23 July, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in a speech at the Nixon Library in California in which he called on the US and its allies to ‘engage and empower the Chinese people…to induce change in the CCP’s behaviour.’

It is clear, that many people in the US security establishment have distrusted China for a long time and, in many instances, have good reason to do so.

These concerns are now out-in-the-open for the benefit of its own domestic audience and for the Western alliance. Mr Pompeo reflected that it was 50 years since Henry Kissinger’s secret visit to China which opened the way for President Nixon’s visit in 1972 but that the era of a ‘blind engagement’ with China was over.
 

‘the era of a ‘blind engagement’ with China was over’

 

As Ai Weiwei ⁽⁴⁾ identifies, the US stand-off with China is different to the cold war with the Soviet Union which was based on ideological differences, ‘China has no ideology, no religion, no moral agenda.

It continues wearing socialist garb but only as a face-saving pretence. It has, in fact, become a state-capitalist dictatorship. What the world sees today is a contest between the US system of free-market capitalism and Chinese state capitalism.’

China’s rise has much to do with the US’s past foreign policy, as Ai Weiwei wrote, ‘In the years after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, administrations of both parties touted the absurd theory that the best plan was to let China get rich and then watch as freedom and democracy evolved as by-products of capitalist development.’

Whilst there was no political change in China, US business leaders regarded it as ‘an exciting new business partner: master of a realm in which there were virtually no labour rights or health and safety regulations, no frustrating delays because of squabbles between political parties, no criticism from free media, and no danger of judgment by independent courts. For European and US companies doing manufacture for export, it was a dream come true.’

Many people have expressed the view that ‘Beijing is more dependent on us than we are on them’, a statement that is both complacent and dangerous. China represents a complex new challenge, unlike the USSR which was closed off from the free world, China is already within our borders.
 

‘If the US can’t think beyond them, the primacy of its position in this changing world will disappear’

 

Trumps simple policy of blaming China for Covid-19 is just that, ‘simple’, it masks the countries lack of awareness and reaction to the pandemic and provides a scapegoat to appease the US electorate. Extending this to trade will, he hopes, overcome the lengthening unemployment queues that are the economic consequences of the virus.

Sanctions are not the answer, as Ai Weiwei concludes, ‘Sanctions’ is a cold war term that names an old policy. If the US can’t think beyond them, the primacy of its position in this changing world will disappear.’

One of the issues that is often overlooked, is that China is an enemy the US doesn’t understand, not dissimilar to the situation they faced in Vietnam.

There, not only couldn’t they see the enemy they constantly underestimated their ability to absorb suffering and still hit-back.

Whilst Trump needs all the help he can get in the lead-up to the November presidential elections, America is not going to attack China, but it will seek to contain China. The downside here is, as I pointed out earlier, remember Japan in December 1941.
 

‘Don’t turn around until you look at me

Why don’t you take a second and tell me what you see

Things I see you only disagree

You never understand that’s what I want to be..’

 

Notes:

1. John Steinbeck
2. Carl von Clausewitz (1 June 1780 – 16 November 1831) was a Prussian general and military theorist who stressed the ‘moral’ (meaning, in modern terms, psychological) and political aspects of war. His most notable work, Vom Kriege (On War), was unfinished at his death. Clausewitz was a realist in many different senses and, while in some respects a romantic, also drew heavily on the rationalist ideas of the European Enlightenment.
3. Last month China introduced a controversial national security law in Hong Kong, which allows them, in their words, to target the crimes of ‘secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces’ and carries penalties as severe as life in prison. Critics have warned that it would be used to target legitimate opposition and highlighted the unusual decision to make the law applicable to both Hong Kong residents and non-residents, which could give China jurisdiction beyond its own borders.

 

As a result of this legislation several countries, including the UK, Australia and Germany have suspended their extradition treaties with Hong Kong,, as a possible safeguard against attempts to use the national security laws to round up activists abroad. The US ordered an end to Hong Kong’s special economic status earlier in July.

Last week we saw the legislation in practise when Hong Kong police issued arrest warrants for six pro-democracy activists living in exile. Chinese state media reported that the six men were wanted for ‘incitement to secession and collusion with foreign forces’.

4. Ai Weiwei is an artist and activist.

 

A very different feel to Philip’s piece this week; if it feels grown up, and not a little scary, that’s because it addresses possibly the biggest single area of potential conflict around the world.

His perspective that ‘China doesn’t need to win, whereas the US can’t afford to lose’ is fascinating; the Donald is trailing in the polls and needs a scapegoat for the pandemic, whereas China can remain inscrutable and  play the long game.

It’s a fascinating conflict with so many wrinkles and potential twists and turns; Philip draws parallels with the circumstances that led to Japan declaring war on the US in 1941, but that couldn’t happen again. Could it?

This is a really well researched and balanced piece that seeks to apportion no blame; neither does it point to a likely outcome. Anything is possible, and maybe that’s the scary thing.

The sun may have thawed him this week as Philip serves up five tracks for lyric spotters, with some old favourites returning; fully thirty points on offer, but electronic entries only please with the heightened risk of a second spike. Each one offers three for the artist and three for the track.

First up, if ‘one of a number of great post-punks bands from Liverpool’ doesn’t help, the big clue is in the article itself – but it didn’t get me to China Crisis and ‘African and White’; next a much covered ‘classic’ and the instantly recognisable Edwin Starr and ‘War’. Let’s hope not.

Thirdly, ‘a powerful anti-racism song’ and a favourite – Public Image Ltd with ‘Rise’; then ‘another favourite in suitably dystopian form’ it’s Bromley’s finest with ‘1984’.

Last but not least ‘another favourite brings us the to end in a sea ear-splitting feedback’ its Jesus and Mary Chain with the excellent ‘Never Understand’. Enjoy!
 
 

 
 

Philip Gilbert is a city-based corporate financier, and former investment banker.

Philip is a great believer in meritocracy, and in the belief that if you want something enough you can make it happen. These beliefs were formed in his formative years, of the late 1970s and 80s

 

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