02.03.2023
Xi and John and Yoko
China’s 12-point plan has not been welcomed in Washington, Brussels or Moscow. But, asks Paul Demarty, should communists join the pacifist camp?
As the great and the good of world politics marked the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the People’s Republic of China took its own approach, offering a “12-point plan for peace”. It runs as follows: 1 Respecting the sovereignty of all countries; 2 Abandoning the cold war mentality; 3 Ceasing hostilities; 4 Resuming peace talks; 5 Resolving the humanitarian crisis; 6 Protecting civilians and prisoners of war; 7 Keeping nuclear power plants safe; 8 Reducing strategic risks; 9 Facilitating grain exports; 10 Stopping unilateral sanctions; 11 Keeping industrial and supply chains stable; 12 Promoting post-conflict reconstruction.1
What is going on here, then? Has Xi Jinping come over all John Lennon and Yoko Ono - “Give peace a chance”? It does not seem terribly likely. Marxists have known, all the way along, that war and peace are not simple opposites, but alternating poles in dialectical development; indeed, we learned that much from Carl von Clausewitz. So far as one is not merely a pliant dupe of western policy (or, for that matter, one of the small handful of committed Putinites who genuinely believe Russia is engaged in saving Europe from Nazi hordes), the Ukraine war is in fact a very clear demonstration of this principle: that ‘peaceful’ strategic manoeuvres very often have the goal of entrapping opponents into costly military adventures.
Policy
China’s little initiative should be interpreted in line with Chinese policy then. It is no surprise to find, as the first two items, national sovereignty and defusing the ‘cold war’ dynamics of the present situation. In the ‘new cold war’ - after all, pursued by successive US governments at least back to Barack Obama’s presidency - Russia is merely the appetiser: the PRC is the main course. That much is extremely obvious. Economic ‘delinking’ is in its early stages, but in certain areas - notably semiconductors - the temperature is increasing noticeably, with the USA simultaneously using its influence over Taiwan (the source country for most of the world’s advanced silicon chips) to control Chinese access to these indispensable technologies for modern industry and warfare, not to say attempting to onshore more production in the industry.
My mention of Taiwan brings us to the question of national sovereignty. It is assumed often in the western press that China is backing its ally, Russia, to the hilt in this war, but that is simply a piece of paranoid fantasy. The Chinese are not impressed with Putin’s little adventure: their own sprawling, diverse country has not a few fractious national questions, from Tibet to Xinjiang, to Hong Kong … to Taiwan, still considered part of the unitary Chinese state by Beijing (and Taipei), but for now still with the support of the ‘strategic ambiguity’ conceded by Nixon and Kissinger in the 1970s.
It is to be expected that, if Putin and his Federal Security Service regime survive the fallout from their invasion, China will exact a heavy toll for its support. Whatever we think of the conventional international rules around ‘national sovereignty’, it can hardly be denied that the Russian invasion - indeed, even the earlier annexation of Crimea, however historically absurd it is that Ukraine ever had sovereignty over the peninsula - is in violation. China’s rough-handed policy in its more restive provinces depends on those rules.
The western reaction to the whole slate of Chinese demands has been predictably contemptuous. From the point of view of Ukraine’s backers, calling for a ceasefire short of a Russian defeat essentially means reconciling oneself to a frozen conflict in the country - perhaps decorated with pious, but non-operative, formulae about ‘Ukrainian sovereignty’ over Crimea and the Donbass equivalent to that concerning Taiwan further east. This would inevitably entail a hard stop to the eastward expansion of Nato, and will thus be unacceptable to the US and friends. (Volodymyr Zelensky has proclaimed himself open to talking with Xi, but only the most gullible could possibly suppose that he is calling the shots on this matter.)
Yet that contempt has increasingly obvious limits. The western bourgeois press, in its increasingly insane war fever, has often pretended that Russia is totally isolated on the world stage. China’s diplomatic gambit is perhaps the most notable example of a wider unease about the war in the world’s capitals, including in the largest ‘emerging’ economies.
It is worth remembering the old habit people had of talking about the ‘BRICs’ - Brazil, Russia, India and China. Leaving Russia aside for obvious reasons, it is notable that Brazil and China have both called for negotiations; meanwhile, India happily continues to trade with Russia in defiance of western sanctions, and has become one route whereby Russian oil is laundered back onto the world market. Naftali Bennett - former prime minister of that veritable pacifist paradise, Israel - recently let slip that his government had played a role in brokering a peace deal early in the war, only to see it sabotaged by the US and UK. That is to say nothing of the dozens of countries plunged into economic crisis due to dependence on Russian and Ukrainian energy and grain exports. It is not always clear why the citizens of, say, Egypt should starve on account of a territorial dispute a thousand miles away.
It is that audience, surely, that Xi has in mind with some of his other 12 points - “facilitating grain exports”, “stopping unilateral sanctions” and “keeping industrial and supply chains stable”. The western powers have succeeded in provoking this war, and have succeeded also in globalising it - at least on the level of the economy.
The fact that the United States can still pull something like that off is testament to its continuing hegemony, in spite of long-term decline. That decline, however, robs it of much of its power to positively construct an order in the image of its global interests. Its impact is more purely destructive. The zeal of the American foreign policy elite for ‘fighting to the last Ukrainian’ need only be placed in a long series of countries reduced to state failure on account of this decline: Syria, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia …
A rising power, then, can compete for allies and vassals by making a better offer than the hegemon. ‘Peace’ - in any form that allowed the reconstruction of the economic links interrupted by the invasion and the American policy of unlimited escalation - would have obvious benefits to weaker countries, in the same way that ‘belt and road’ infrastructure has more appeal to developmentalist regimes than International Monetary Fund austerity and western corporate parasitism.
United Nations
There are certainly those on the left who welcome what they see as a shift to a more ‘multipolar’ world. In some respects, this is a kind of phantom-limb version of pro-Sovietism, where Stalinist-influenced peace movements in the west appealed to the United Nations and similar bodies where the USSR had a veto. But this sort of pacifism was given a real shot in the arm by the succession of disasters inflicted unilaterally by the United States after 2001, of course, and for that reason is not wholly senseless.
We would rather say: be careful what you wish for. ‘Multipolarity’ only ever goes so far in the capitalist world: the remorseless logic of military-industrial competition inevitably produces hegemonic states. A ‘multipolar’ world is always an interregnum, and it is invariably settled by war. Thus the replacement of Britain by America as world hegemon was achieved only by the defeat of Britain in the early stages of the World War II, which allowed the American state and capital to subordinate their old masters.
In some respects, China more resembles the Germany of World War I - and likewise the US resembles the Britain of that time. American military spending dwarfs that of China (although some American foreign policy types worry that so much is spent on expensive boondoggles). A direct war over Taiwan might be difficult for the US to fight - at least without losing half its beautiful aircraft carriers to hypersonic missiles. In that case, however, they will choose to fight somewhere else. China’s readiness to strike a telling blow is uncertain, to put it mildly.
What is quite certain is that things are driving in the direction of an intensifying great-power conflict, of a sort that will make us nostalgic for the artillery barrages and street-by-street battles of the present Ukraine conflict. China’s peace initiative is an attempt to strengthen its position. It is not the job of Marxists to proclaim themselves part of the ‘peace’ camp and to back diplomacy over warfare per se - that is mere pacifism. We must discern the deeper patterns at work.
Deepest of all is the inherent, indissoluble link between capitalism and bloody conflict - from the Anglo-Dutch wars (1652-1784) to the present war in Ukraine. Of course, it is only human to wish for an end to the senseless slaughter and mass population displacement, and in that respect some kind of peace deal would be preferable to what seems to be the favoured policy of Ukraine’s sponsors - perpetual, grinding war with a grim, World War I flavour. Yet all peace in capitalist society is in some sense a mere ceasefire; an absence of war that must in the end be merely temporary. Thus pacifism, even in ‘socialistic’ form, must be rejected.
Equally, since this dynamic towards war is immanently international, and that applies too to any possible countervailing force. The Second International may have fluffed its lines in 1914, but only an organisation of such a scale (indeed, much larger, given its almost entirely European character) could even be said to have lines to fluff.
Our object must be to point the way to such a movement that could impose a foreign policy of the working class on our war-crazed rulers.
paul.demarty@weeklyworker.co.uk