IntroductionMONTHLY REVIEW by John Bellamy Foster MONTHLYVOL. 73 NO. 3 JULY- AUGUST 2021 REVIEWAN INDEPENDENT SOCIALIST MAGAZINE ` Is China Transforming the World? TONY ANDREANI, RÉMY HERRERA & ZHIMING LONG Legacies of Definancialization NEW SIT TSUI, HE ZHIXIONG & YAN XIAOHUI China: Core or Semi-Periphery? MINQI LI Korea in U.S.-China Strategy COLD TIM BEAL Challenges of Ecological Civilization LAU KIN CHI, JIN PEIYUN & YAN XIAOHUI U.S.-China Technology War WAR on JUNFU ZHAO China & the American Lake MARK TSENG-PUTTERMAN Can the Diaspora Speak? CHINA QIAO COLLECTIVE US$14 | CAN$14 | €10 | £9 monthlyreview.org | mronline.org JULy–AUGUST 2021 MONTHLY REVIEW VOL. 73 NO. 3 An Independent Socialist Magazine Founded in 1949 by Leo Huberman & Paul M. Sweezy John Bellamy Foster, Editor ◊ Brett Clark, Associate Editor ◊ Camila Valle, Assistant Editor ◊ Martin Paddio, Business Manager ◊ Gordon Beeferman, Circulation ◊ R. Jamil Jonna, Associate Editor for Communications & Production Former Editors: Harry Magdoff (1969–2006) ◊ Ellen Meiksins Wood (1997–2000) ◊ Robert W. McChesney (2000–2004) 134 W. 29th Street, Suite 706 Editorial: [email protected] New York, NY 10001 Circulation: [email protected] 212-691-2555 MR Online: [email protected] INTRODUCTION The New Cold War on China John Bellamy Foster 1 Is China Transforming the World? Tony Andreani, Rémy Herrera, and Zhiming Long 21 Legacies of Definancialization and Defending Real Economy in China Sit Tsui, He Zhixiong, and Yan Xiaohui 31 China: Imperialism or Semi-Periphery? Minqi Li 47 China and the American Lake Mark Tseng-Putterman 75 In Line of Fire: The Korean Peninsula in U.S.-China Strategy Tim Beal 92 The Political Economy of the U.S.-China Technology War Junfu Zhao 112 Can the Chinese Diaspora Speak? Qiao Collective 127 From Sandstorm and Smog to Sustainability and Justice: China’s Challenges Lau Kin Chi, Jin Peiyun, and Yan Xiaohui 143 Notes from the Editors This special issue of Monthly Review is devoted to the New Cold War on China. This leads us to the question: What has been the view of the Chinese Revolution pre- sented in Monthly Review in the past seven decades? How has it changed over time? Here we are reminded of a famous statement often attributed to John Maynard Keynes, though likely apocryphal. Accused by a critic of being a flip-flopper, Keynes replied: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” (Jason Zweig, “Keynes: He Didn’t Say Half of What He Said. Or Did He?,” Wall Street Journal, February 11, 2011). As Paul A. Baran, one of the principal MR figures in its early years, observed: “[Karl] Marx and in particular [V. I.] Lenin being master-tacticians shifted horses and arguments as conditions changed (rightly so, to be sure!)” (Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, The Age of Monopoly Capital [New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017], 394). The question then becomes not the changing views themselves, but how these shifts in perspective reflect changing historical circumstances. The very first Review of the Month in the first issue of Monthly Review, written by its founding editors Leo Huberman and Paul M. Sweezy, included a section on “China and Socialism.” As the MR editors stated at the time: DOI: 10.14452/MR-073-03-2021-07_0 (continued on inside back cover) monthlyreviewarchives.org DOI: 10.14452/MR-073-03-2021-07_1 INTRODUCTION The New Cold War on China JOHN BELLAMY FOSTER On March 24, 2021, a high-profile article proclaiming “There Will Not Be a New Cold War” appeared in Foreign Affairs, the flagship publication of the Council on Foreign Relations, the principal think tank for U.S. grand strat- egy. The author, Thomas Christensen, a professor of international affairs at Columbia University and former deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs in the George W. Bush administration, went so far as to acknowledge that “the [Donald] Trump administration basically declared a cold war on China.”1 Nevertheless, no New Cold War, Christensen opti- mistically indicated, would actually materialize, since Washington under Joe Biden would presumably back away from Trump’s extreme policies toward China given its “vital position in the global value chain.”2 Beijing could not be seen as an aggressive power in ideological or geopolitical terms, but was simply interested in economic competition. Yet, what Christensen’s analysis excluded was any mention of the imperi- alist world system, crowned by U.S. hegemony, which is now threatened by China’s seemingly inexorable rise and pursuit of its own distinctive sovereign project.3 In this respect, the Trump administration’s prosecution of a New Cold War on China was no anomaly, but rather the inevitable U.S. response to China’s rise and the end of Washington’s unipolar moment. Just as the United States declared a Cold War against the Soviet Union and China in the 1940s and ’50s, as part of a grand strategy to secure its global hegemony in the immediate post-Second World War era, today it is declaring a New Cold War on China in the interest of maintaining that same imperial hegemony. Indeed, days before Christensen’s Foreign Affairs article went to print de- claring that there would be no New Cold War, the Biden administration made it clear that it not only intended to continue the New Cold War, but to accelerate it, pushing it to greater heights. This was evident in the first high-level bilateral talks between the United States and the Peoples’ Repub- lic of China following the election of Biden as U.S. president, held on March 18, 2021, in the Captain Cook Hotel in downtown Anchorage, with U.S. sec- retary of state Antony Blinken and national security advisor Jake Sullivan sitting across from China’s director of the Office of the Central Commission for Foreign Affairs Yang Jiechi and Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi.4 In the week prior to this high-level meeting, Washington had set the stage, signaling through its actions its intention to promote a hyper-ag- gressive Cold War 2.0 directed at China. Thus, on March 12, Biden met 1 2 MONTHLY REVIEW / July–AUGust 2021 with the heads of state of Japan, India, and Australia, representing the new Quad military-strategic alliance led by the United States, widely seen as an attempt to construct an Asian analogue to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The Quad issued a joint statement the entire sub- text of which was enmity toward China.5 On the same day, the U.S. Feder- al Communications Commission blacklisted five Chinese companies in- cluding Huawei.6 Late on March 16, less than two days before the bilateral talks with China were set to begin, the Biden administration renewed sanctions against twenty-four officials of the Chinese government, in re- sponse to the suppression of dissent in Hong Kong.7 In a break with diplomatic protocol, Blinken started off the March 18 bilateral talks in Anchorage by bluntly stating that he and the U.S. secre- tary of defense Lloyd Austin had just returned from a meeting with their counterparts in Japan and Korea, two U.S. leading military allies that share many of Washington’s concerns with regard to China. Washington’s goal, he said, was “to advance the interests of the United States and to strength- en the rules-based international order.” He then entered into a direct chal- lenge to Beijing, referring to “deep concerns with actions by China, in- cluding in Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Taiwan, cyberattacks on the United States and economic coercion toward our allies. Each of these actions threaten the rules-based order that maintains global stability.” The United States was ready not only to be competitive, and in some areas “collaborative,” with China, but also to be strongly “adversarial” where necessary. Sullivan followed up by pointedly referring to Biden’s hosting of “the Quad leaders’ summit” the previous week, and the Quad military alli- ance’s security concerns in the Indo-Pacific, thereby foregrounding the warlike pact being formed in Asia against Beijing. He added that U.S. al- lies and partners had expressed “areas of concern” with respect to Chi- na’s use of “economic and military coercion” in its “assaults on basic val- ues” and that the United States would welcome “stiff competition” with China, but that it was also, he intimated, prepared for full-scale conflict.8 Yang responded by insisting that China firmly upheld “the United Na- tions-centered international system and the international order under- pinned by international law, not what is advocated by a small number of countries [as] the so-called rules-based international order.” “The Chinese people,” he said, “are wholly rallying around the Communist Party of China. Our values are the same as the common values of humanity. Those are: peace, development, fairness, justice, freedom, and democracy.” He stressed the quite different conceptions of democracy represented by Chi- na and the United States. Contrasting Beijing’s foreign policy to that of Washington, both historically and in the present, he stated: Introduction 3 We do not believe in invading through the use of force, or to topple other regimes through various means, or to massacre the people of other coun- tries.… The United States has exercised long-arm jurisdiction and suppres- sion and overstretched [its] national security through the use of force or fi- nancial hegemony, and this has created obstacles for normal trade activities, and the United States has also been persuading some countries to launch attacks on China.… With [respect to] Xinjiang, Tibet and Taiwan, they are [each] an inalienable part of China’s territory.