By Miguel Lamas, a leader of the IWU-FI
In recent weeks, this conflict intensified with the visit of Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan, the president of the United States House of Representatives (Deputies), as well as the subsequent Chinese military manoeuvres as “reprisal” to the visit.
Although this conflict has its historical origin over 70 years ago, it became more acute with the growing economic crisis and the political and capitalist world disorder. The United States, while still the world’s dominant imperialist power, can no longer impose its hegemonic order on many regions of the world. Russia, a minor imperialism, dares to invade Ukraine, despite the US opposition. China, as the second world capitalist-imperialist power, has recently declared it wants to reinstate Taiwan, which it considers part of Chinese territory.
The advance of the world capitalist economic crisis makes us not rule out that the inter-imperialist frictions open the way to a new armed clash or a war in Asia. This would cause more humanitarian and social disasters for the workers and exploited sectors of China, Taiwan and the world.
How did Taiwan arise?
From the 1930s, China was occupied in its most economically key areas by Japanese imperialism. The Japanese occupation had great popular resistance for 8 years, with 14 million dead in China. Finally, in September 1945, in the Second World War, Japan was defeated and had to withdraw from China.
Japan’s withdrawal from China led the country to a new civil war between the bourgeois Kuomintang party, led by dictator Chiang Kai Shek, who intended to retake the country’s rule after having been in power since 1928. Its aim was to crush the peasant-popular guerrilla forces that had confronted the Japanese, led by Mao Tse Tung and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which occupied the lands of the peasant-exploiting landowners, in a gigantic agrarian revolution. This civil war ended in 1949 with the triumph of the Chinese revolution, the CCP seizing power. Chiang Kai Shek escaped with much of the Chinese bourgeoisie and landowners to Taiwan, which was part of the Chinese territory, relying on the economic and military support of American imperialism. From there, Chiang Kai Shek proclaimed the “Republic of China” as an anti-communist and pro-American stronghold. Since then, the government of Taiwan was protected by the United States, which until 1972 considered it the “legitimate” government of all of China.
The Mao and Nixon Accords
In 1972, American president Richard Nixon, advised by Henry Kissinger, radically changed US politics, travelled to China, and agreed with Mao. One point of the agreement was to recognise the Mao government and the Communist Party, and that there was “one China”. Because of that agreement, which had actually been concluded a year earlier, the People’s Republic of China was given a seat among the five members with veto power of the United Nations Security Council (the others being the USSR, the United States, Great Britain, and France). Before that, the so-called “Republic of China”, Taiwan, had that seat of privilege.
This marks the beginning of a new phase in US-China relations that will be deepened in 1979, when Mao passed away, with the agreements with Deng Xiaoping, which would start the process of semi-colonisation of the country, agreeing the entry of the multinationals into China, a process culminating in the capitalist restoration in 1992.
This pact with US imperialism would lead the United States, to this day, only to recognise as the legitimate government of all of China the CCP regime, which proclaimed the slogan “one country, two systems”. It was also agreed with the world imperialism the surrender of Hong Kong (1997), which was an English colony, and Macao (2001), a former Portuguese colony. Leaving open a future integration of Taiwan into mainland China, an issue that remained unresolved, with no concrete agreement.
Currently, only 16 countries diplomatically recognise Taiwan. Except for the Vatican (the only one in Europe), they are countries of little economic and political weight. From the Americas (Paraguay, Honduras, Belize, Guatemala, Haiti, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines); one from Africa (Swaziland); and some from Oceania, such as Tuvalu, Palau, Nauru, Kiribati, Solomon Islands. and the Marshall Islands.
Taiwan is one of the “Asian Tigers”
Taiwan is an island of 36,197 km2, with a little over 23 million inhabitants. It is one of the so-called “Asian tigers”, one of the poles of recent Asian capitalist development. Taiwan, along with South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong, the latter today a Special Administrative Region of China, developed their industry since the 1960-70s, with the reorientation of investment by multinationals in the search for greater shares of profits, based on the over-exploitation of cheap labour offered by these Asian semi-colonies. Thus began the production of the manufacturing industry for export to the world market.
Then capitalist China would join in that process. Since then, the country has been open to American, European, and Japanese imperialist investment. Today there are 70,000 imperialist companies that manufacture everything with cheap labour and no trade union rights for the Chinese, under the dictatorship of the Communist Party.
Taiwan became the world’s largest exporter of semiconductors or microchips, and the third in integrated circuits. With a high economic concentration, it manufactures the most sophisticated electronic products.
Taiwan’s per capita domestic product is $28,400, similar to that of South Korea (three times that of Argentina and four times that of Brazil). This development is based, as in all Asian capitalism, on foreign investment, high exploitation of labour, with skilled and relatively cheap labour compared to Europe and the United States. A country with low domestic consumption and whose economy is mainly devoted to the export of electronic products.
Taiwan’s major trading country is China, to which one-third of its total exports go. In 2021 it exported 188 billion dollars to China! China and Taiwan have had a free trade agreement since 2010. It is estimated that companies in Taiwan have investments of 150 billion dollars in the People’s Republic of China alone and also important investments in other Asian countries such as Vietnam, Indonesia, Burma, Thailand, and India, where they have much cheaper labour than in Taiwan.
This expansion is led by the company TSMC, which produces 84 per cent of the world’s advanced chips and is considered the twenty-second most valuable company in the world by Fortune magazine (Datos Clarin, Argentina, 4 August 2022).
The dangers of the arms race between China, the United States, and Taiwan
Why is the conflict reactivated now? Many bourgeois commentators wonder why Nancy Pelosi made the trip to Taiwan, heckled by the Chinese government, amid the invasion of Ukraine, even though the US military high command itself advised against it. As we pointed out, the framework is the sharpening of the world capitalist economic crisis, encouraged by the invasion of Russia and Putin to Ukraine.
Everything shows that neither US nor Chinese imperialism wants to be involved in a war. The major opponents are the multinationals and the Chinese, Taiwanese, and American big bourgeoisie. Given the interrelationship, they have in their investments and operating quotas, and profits in both China and Taiwan.
The dictatorial Chinese regime knows that a war in the Taiwan Strait could have very serious consequences on its own economy, being one of the most integrated countries in the world market, a major exporter and importer.
There are divisions in the Taiwanese bourgeoisie itself. Unusually, the old Kuomintang (KMT), today in opposition to the bourgeois Liberal government, has been pursuing a policy of conciliation with the CCP regime for years. Amid the current crisis, a representative of the KMT was travelling to China to meet with business owners.
President Lee Teng-hui, known as the “father of democracy” in Taiwan, led the constitutional changes that allow the bourgeois-democratic political opening and led to the election of the first non-KMT president, Chen Shui-bian, in the year 2000. Since then, the liberal governments have threatened to declare independence. Which the Taiwanese bourgeoisie has never formally done.
The elements of a certain lack of control in the regional situation have to do with the economic and political crisis suffered by both the Biden government and the Chinese regime.
The Chinese economy is no longer growing in double digits. Foreign investment is falling, savers are protesting to the banks because they do not return their savings. The fall in world consumption will affect China.
The dictatorship of the CCP thinks recovering Taiwan would become a “popular nationalist” quest, facing the latent economic and social crisis and as a weapon of blackmail for negotiations with the United States. Xi Jinping seeks to consolidate himself in the power of the CCP, when the meeting of the XX Congress is coming that would have to resolve that Xi Jinping has a third mandate.
Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan can only be explained by the internal difficulties Biden’s Democratic government faces. Worn down by inflation, solving social problems, immigration, and spending money for the Ukrainian war. As the November legislative elections get nearer, they can weaken the government if it has an electoral setback at the hands of the Republicans. This has led Biden to show himself as a “hard-line” to China and in “defence of Taiwan” to the conservative and reactionary electoral base of a large part of the US popular electorate.
Both Biden and Xi Jinping play with fire as an expression of the global crisis of the capitalist-imperialist system. This leads to a dangerous increase in inter-imperialist frictions and the arms race and leads to the danger of a possibility of a regional war we repudiate.
Taiwan: An Artificial Capitalist Country Supported by the US Imperialism
The US imperialism has supported Taiwan since its artificial creation by the genocidal Chaing Kai Shek in 1949. Since then, they have had close political, military, and economic relations, sustaining it as a counterrevolutionary stronghold in Asia.
That is why Taiwan is an artificial capitalist country, which has always been an American semi-colony with powerful elements of a political and military enclave.
Despite the pact of the US, Japanese and European imperialism with China and the CCP dictatorship, the United States did not stop protecting Taiwan but subordinated to the agreements with China. That is why Taiwan is today also a trading partner and investor in China.
Taiwan should be part of the Chinese nation. From1972 to the United States and the UN formally recognised it. Taiwan is isolated and only 16 smaller countries recognise it.
As revolutionary socialists, we recognise that right. That is an unresolved national task. But what we do not accept is the policy of China’s capitalist dictatorship to resolve it, let alone an invasion or a regional war.
We also repudiate the historic presence of the United States and its policy in Taiwan and throughout Asia, with 200 military bases installed after the Second World War. Japan alone has 112 bases, 83 in South Korea and 5 in the Philippines. The American aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan, for example, is permanently stationed on a Japanese base and is the support of all surveillance movements in the Pacific and Asian seas.
We are for the immediate American withdrawal of all its troops and military bases in Taiwan, and Asia, since it is not to defend the people but their business and imperialist interests and to act as the police gendarme of the region and the world.
We repudiate the Chinese imperialist dictatorship that over-exploits the Chinese working people and is resisted, for example, by the people of Hong Kong (a former British colony that is now part of China). China had carried out border military aggression against Vietnam years earlier, oppressing the peoples of Sing Kiang and Tibet as internal colonies. Chinese imperialism was also one of the main props for the corrupt Sri Lankan regime against which its people rebelled.
That is why we are against any military attack on Taiwan which would only be in defence of the business of the Chinese imperialist bourgeoisie. We also repudiate the military and imperialist political presence in Taiwan and Asia, which contributes to encouraging a military intervention by US imperialism.
A true reunification of the peoples of China and Taiwan, which serves the needs of the workers and popular sectors, will come from a socialist change, first in China and also in Taiwan. The International Workers Unity-Fourth International (IWU-FI) supports the workers, popular, and peasant’s struggles in the perspective of ending China’s capitalist dictatorship to achieve a working class, peasants, and exploited sectors’ government to end capitalist exploitation and resume the building of true socialism with democracy for the working people. In the same way, we support the workers and popular struggles in Taiwan to achieve a workers’ and people’s government.
12 August 2022
