“The Russia invasion of Ukraine has given the US and NATO the excuse to intensify the economic, political and military encirclement of China with Taiwan as its hub. By the broadest definition of military intervention, the US has engaged in nearly 400 military interventions between 1776 and 2019, with half of these operations occurring since 1950 and over 25% occurring in the post-Cold War period. these interventions have revolved around economy, territory, social protection, regime change, protection of US citizens and diplomats, policy change, empire, and regime building. The US backed by an extended NATO, no longer confined to the Atlantic seaboard, sees China as the next area for ‘intervention’ down the road.
The Western media helps by continually talking of China’s so-called ‘aggressive behaviour’ and its crimes against human rights. Whatever the truth in those charges, they are easily matched by the crimes of imperialism in the last century alone: the occupation and massacre of millions of Chinese by Japanese imperialism in 1937; the continual gruesome wars post-1945 conducted by imperialism against the Vietnamese people, Latin America and the proxy wars in Africa and Syria, as well as the more recent invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and the appalling nightmare in Yemen by the disgusting US-backed regime in Saudi Arabia etc. And don’t forget the horrific poverty and inequality that weighs for billions under the imperialist mode of production.
But the economic and political conflict between China and the US is the major geopolitical issue of the 21st century – much larger than the Russia-Ukraine war. US National Security advisor Jake Sullivan summed it up recently. “This is a decisive decade… in which the terms of our competition with the People’s Republic of China will be set.”He continued: “The PRC’s assertiveness at home and abroad is advancing an illiberal vision across economic, political, security, and technological realms in competition with the west,” China must be stopped because “It is the only competitor (to the US) with the intent to reshape the international order and the growing capacity to do it.””
Even as Xi Jinping was promising China’s Communist Party’s national congress that China would “resolutely win the battle” in key areas of technology, employees of technology companies in China and elsewhere were being told to down tools. Dozens of the hundreds of executives and engineers with US citizenship or green cards who work in or with China’s semiconductor sector, many of them born in China, have been told by their employers – whether those are foreign or Chinese companies – to stop work while their employers seek clarification of a new US rule that bars US citizens and residents from supporting China’s advanced chip-making industry without a licence.
It is now crystal clear that the US, enabled by a bipartisan consensus in Washington, is determined to stop China upgrading technologically. This has massive implications for Beijing’s ambitions in areas such as artificial intelligence and autonomous driving. The new Chips Act introduced…
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