June 2021
Oppose G7/NATO Imperialist War Drive
Against China, Russia
Group of 7 imperialist
leaders in Cornwall, Britain, joined U.S. president Biden in
demonizing China over COVID origins. But who contained the
virus? (Photo display: Reddit / r / Sino)
In back-to-back summit meetings in mid-June, imperialist leaders of the Group of 7, meeting in Cornwall, England, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) meeting in Brussels, Belgium, issued a pair of sabre-rattling communiqués demonizing China and denouncing Russia. The New York Times (14 June) noted the “distinctly Cold War overtones” of the confabs.
The G7 (Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, United States) went after Beijing for cracking down on anti-China rioters in Hong Kong, echoed Washington’s Big Lie about supposed “genocide” against Uighurs and took up the U.S. call for an “investigation” of the origins of the coronavirus. As we have shown in detail, the 2019 Hong Kong rioters were financed and advised by Washington, and the World Uyghur Congress is a creature of U.S. agencies.
As for Donald Trump’s “Wuhan lab leak” conspiracy theory, now embraced by his successor Joe Biden, there is no evidence for this at all (only rampant “suspicions”). Its purpose is to cover up the fact that capitalist countries worldwide were unable to protect their populations from the COVID-19 pandemic, and in fact aided its spread, leading to almost 4 million deaths, while the Chinese bureaucratically deformed workers state, with its socialized planned economy, was able to contain the deadly virus in a matter of weeks.
While the G7 high-handedly ordered Moscow to stop its supposedly “destabilizing behaviour,” the next day in Brussels, the NATO communiqué was positively frothing, denouncing now-capitalist Russia 62 times. The charges range from carrying out military maneuvers on Russia’s own territory and modernizing its nuclear arsenal (in response to the U.S. doing the same) to interfering in foreign countries through proxies. This is pretty rich coming from the war mongers who still have occupation troops in Afghanistan, 20 years after invading that Central Asian country.
The imperialist miliitary alliance demanded that Russia get out of Crimea, whose ethnic Russian population voted to join the Russian federation, and stop aiding eastern Ukrainian rebels fighting against the fascist and Ukrainian nationalist forces that have tried to conquer the region for the last seven years. These demands are fostered by the superannuated Cold Warriors that infest the Biden administration. Victoria Nuland, who as a top aide of Hillary Clinton coordinated U.S. intervention with Ukrainian fascists, is now back as a top State Department official.
We repeatedly warned that Biden’s election would bring U.S. war moves against China, one of the few areas of “bipartisan” agreement between Republicans and Democrats. Today in Washington, the new administration is pitching all its initiatives, from education to the infrastructure bill, with anti-China rhetoric. And as the New York Times (29 May) wrote of the Biden budget: “The Pentagon pivots to a possible war with China.”
While much of the left parrots imperialist anti-China war propaganda, Trotskyists call to defend the deformed workers state against the threat of imperialist aggression and internal counterrevolution, while fighting to replace the nationalist Stalinist bureaucracy with an internationalist leadership fighting for world socialist revolution. ■
CUNY Union Denounces
U.S. Anti-China Drive
On May 13, the Delegate Assembly of the Professional Staff Congress (PSC), the union representing 30,000 faculty and staff at the City University of New York (CUNY), passed a resolution to oppose “the steady build-up to war with China by the US government.” Proposed by the PSC’s International Committee, a long-standing official body of the union, it passed by a wide margin, overcoming opposition from the top leadership. We print the resolution in full below. That it was passed at the largest urban public university in the U.S. is a significant and important event – one that has been met with almost universal silence in both the big-business and “left” press.
Over the years and despite divergent viewpoints, Class Struggle Education Workers (CSEW) activists in the PSC have worked with International Committee members on a number of issues, going back to the successful campaign to spike the sinister “Homeland Security” course at CUNY’s Borough of Manhattan Community College (see “'Fatherland Security' Hits CUNY,“ Revolution No. 2, October 2004) and PSC actions in solidarity with teachers in Oaxaca, Mexico. Though not involved in producing the China resolution, the CSEW backed it and highlighted the importance for the entire labor movement of this step.
At the Delegate Assembly (DA), a CSEW spokesman called on fellow delegates to vote “yes,” noting that Democratic president Joe Biden (whose election was supported by the PSC together with the rest of the union movement) is rapidly escalating U.S. imperialism’s anti-China war drive, which threatens humanity with World War III. With Israel launching its renewed war on the Palestinian people the day before the DA, he also called on the union to stand forthrightly with the Palestinian people.
At the June DA, after a fight over the content of a “Resolution in Support of the Palestinian People,” it was passed. While containing many “Whereases” and standard liberal phrases, it does state that “the PSC-CUNY condemns the massacre of Palestinians by the Israeli state.” It will be crucial to defend the union in the face of the inevitable attempts to whip up new witch hunts by an unholy alliance of rightists, Zionists, China-bashers, anti-Palestinian and anti-Asian racists.
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No Cold War with China
Whereas, US belligerence towards China is growing in what some call a Cold War with China;
Whereas, we have learned from the “war on terror” that wars “abroad” often translate into wars at “home”, with the violent targeting of racialized communities;
Whereas incessant China-bashing by the mainstream media is inflaming imperialist, xenophobic, racist, and misogynist ideologies, triggering violence against Chinese, Chinese-American and Asian communities at home, such as the March 16, 2021 shooting of six Asian women in Atlanta, and the more than 3,700 incidents of violence, discrimination, and violations of civil rights against Asian Americans reported since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, some of which directly impact CUNY students, workers and the broader community;1
Whereas, anti-Chinese racism has long roots in the U.S., including the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the exploitation of Chinese workers who built the transcontinental railroad, the current demonization of China serves as a distraction from the coronavirus pandemic and weakening economy at home;
Whereas US military spending is expanding at the expense of funding education, healthcare, housing, and other essential social needs;2
Whereas, a Cold War with China harms students, researchers and educators in China and the U.S. by erecting barriers to international academic collaboration and exchange;
Whereas, the PSC, in solidarity with international workers traumatized by US wars and military occupation of their homelands, has consistently declared its resolute support for anti-war campaigns, and successfully brought anti-war resolutions for adoption by our affiliates NYSUT and the AFT;
Whereas, we are still learning that ‘cold’ and ‘hot’ wars leave wounds that never heal and permanent scars on peoples, nations, and even landscapes;
Therefore be it resolved, that the PSC opposes and rejects the steady build-up to war with China by the US government, and declares that as anti-war US trade unionists and educators it is our duty to join in solidarity with Chinese fellow-workers, educators and scholars to oppose US military spending for a Cold War in China, which leads to further racism at home; and
Be it further resolved, that the PSC will bring this resolution forward for consideration by our state affiliate NYSUT, our national affiliate the AFT, and other labor bodies, so as to build a movement among US teachers and unionists against a Cold War with China.
- 1. Yeung, R., Yellow Horse, A., Popovic, T., Lim, R., Stop AAPI Hate National Report, February 28, 2021 [online] https://caasf.org/stop-aapi-hate/. Accessed March 19, 2021. [Footnotes from original resolution. – Ed.]
- 2. See https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/03/29/the-real-danger-of-the-pentagons-new-indo-pacific-plan/