A tale of two anniversaries

The 250th anniversary of the US Declaration of Independence took place on 4 July, and Trump’s tawdry, corrupt and self-serving “celebrations” were widely covered in the mainstream media.

The 105th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China on 1 July was scarcely noticed outside of China itself. The regime claims continuity with the worker-based Communist Party of 1921, whose leader, Chen Duxiu, would become a Trotskyist. In fact, the CPC later became something very different, a militarised and peasant-based Stalinist party. After it took power in 1949 it would jail all the Trotskyists it could find.

But in the Morning Star, up jumped the perennial CPC propagandist Carlos Martinez to examine “two very different versions of the international order.”

As ever with Mr Martinez, his piece could have been simply dictated by the CPC — and indeed, it may have been, given his ties to Chinese government mouthpieces like CGTN,Global Times andChina Daily.

But credit where it’s due: Martinez is correct when, in contrasting the US and China, he writes that “the US has been at war for over 90 per cent of its history [whereas] China has not fought a war in close to five decades” (since its 1979 war against Vietnam).

This, however, ignores what amount to long-running internal “wars” against the peoples of Tibet, Xinjiang and (more recently) Hong Kong. It also ignores President Xi’s repeated threats of using military force to invade and “reunify” Taiwan and the campaign of military, legal and economic coercion aimed at it.

Racist

Although not an act of war, the recent “Promotion of Ethnic Unity” law codifying Taiwanese identity (and other minorities who “undermine ethnic unity”) as criminal, is undoubtably a belligerent and racist measure. Any person who publicly rejects a Chinese national identity (as defined by the CPC) or asserts a distinct ethnic identity can be prosecuted.

Martinez’s piece mentions none of this. But he proudly proclaims that China’s foreign policy “still rests on the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence — mutual respect for sovereignty, non-aggression, non-interference, equality and mutual benefit — first articulated in 1954.” How China’s stance on Ukraine (de facto support for Russia’s invasion) fits in with this is not explained.

Our propagandist then goes on to contrast the US’s “order of dollar dominance, financial sanctions, military alliances and the assumed right to intervene anywhere” with China’s oh-so-benign “multipolar trajectory” of which the Belt and Road Initiative and the BRICS alliance are supposedly shining exemplars.

What is not described is how the Belt and Road initiative often involves massive, unsustainable loans to developing nations for infrastructure projects they cannot afford. When countries default, China recoups by demanding long-term leases on strategic assets, such as Sri Lanka’s Hambantota Port or Uganda’s sole international airport.

The end result is a network to expand China’s military footprint and global economic clout.

Martinez would, no doubt be horrified if anyone called this a form of imperialism.

As for the BRICS: despite Martinez’s claim that this “works towards a global community… in which all nations participate on equal terms”, in reality it is an economic marriage of convenience between governments with little in common. Russia and China are highly repressive, India is a bourgeois democracy with an authoritarian government, Brazil and South Africa are relatively open bourgeois democracies, while the UAE and Saudi Arabia are absolute monarchies. The idea this motley crew of capitalist and state-capitalist rulers can be considered even the start of a “global community” is laughable.

Martinez gets something right. It is true that “over four decades China has lifted millions of people out of poverty”. Just as the North American and Western European countries did during their periods of rapid capitalist development.

He ignores the huge inequality in China — greater than in Western Europe or Taiwan or South Korea — and claims that China’s welfare system covers “essentially its entire population [providing] extended pension coverage to all its elderly, and [has] largely solved the problem of homelessness.”

This rose-tinted picture ignores the injustices of the hukou system and the fact that the old-age pension for rural people in China is the equivalent of just £17 per month.

The words “trade unions”, “democracy” and “human rights” are absent from Martninez’s crude propaganda piece. More surprisingly, so is “socialism”, but perhaps we should thank him for not insulting us by misusing that word.