 For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Hello and welcome to People's Dispatch. Today, we're joined by Charles Xu of the Chiao Collective. The Chiao Collective is a group which has been working extensively on matters of both US-China relationships, the various ups and downs that have been taking place in these relationships, as well as China's own internal trajectory in terms of economic growth, policies, and its approach to various countries outside. Thank you so much, Charles, for talking to us. Thank you for having me on. So today, I thought we could talk a bit about a number of aspects, but maybe to start with what's called, what's being called the tech war, which is a bit of sometimes a misleading term because there's no war with two sides taking place. It's really an extensive and extended session of bullying by the United States. But what we do see is that over the past couple of years, definitely it has intensified with Huawei recently, but it's been going on for a while. There was ZT before. There was a lot of US pressure on various countries to avoid using Huawei's technology even before. There was the arrest of the senior Huawei executive as well. And in the past one year, we've seen an increasing amount of action by the US. So to begin with, could you just talk about what you see as what the aims of the United States are as far as this tech assault is concerned? Yeah, absolutely. I think that what is referred to as the tech war on China or from a more sort of Western oriented perspective, a tech war between the US and China with the sort of implicit assumption there that we're talking about a rivalry between equals in some rough sense, really needs to be understood in a somewhat longer term historical context that begins with the reform and opening process within China itself. China's controlled reintegration into the global capitalist infrastructure at a moment when the entire global system was transitioning quite dramatically into its current neoliberal form. And it needs to be understood from the perspectives and from the strategic imperatives of both the United States and China. The expectation of the United States was essentially that here we are being given almost on a platter thanks to the sign of Soviet split. Thanks to the sort of newfound openness of the Communist Party leadership to control forms of foreign direct investment and diplomatic rapprochement. We're being given on a platter almost all of these essentially sort of free gifts of China's developmental model in the earlier decades of the People's Republic. A highly sort of educated workforce, extensive infrastructure, and of course the size of the potential market both for labor and as time went on and China's income itself grew, a consumer market as well for Western goods. And the sort of idea from the U.S. perspective was okay we're going to strike this grand bargain where China would open itself up to U.S. and more generally Western foreign investment. Granted in some ways on China's terms and by the end of its inclusion into global capitalism into these sort of extended global value chains that were becoming more and more integral to world capitalism that these would create the conditions essentially for China to take its place among the ranks of other sort of peripheral or semi-peripheral nations that had a well-defined place as manufacturing hubs, as sites where cheap labor could be found and where U.S.-based multinational corporations would have a reliable source of hyper exploitable labor and resources. And the expectation was that essentially you would have the rise of a compredor bourgeois class in China which would then have the capacity to essentially capture the state, whether under the Aegis of continued Communist Party rule or not. The idea was that the Chinese state would then become pliable itself to the demands of U.S. capitalism that would willingly take this sort of semi-peripheral place and that it would essentially offer up in large measure its own sovereignty, its own prerogative to determine the course of Chinese development in a way that was amenable to U.S. interests. From the Chinese side, you had a very much a longer term developmental plan put in place that offered for several decades an apparent convergence of interests with what the U.S. was pursuing, namely to sort of strategically open up to foreign direct investment on the conditions that foreign multinational investors would abide by Chinese law that they would exceed to the requirements of technology transfer to Chinese firms, that they would allow the creation of Communist Party cells within their own branches in China. And in general, that this opening would be a controlled process that would serve the interests of China's own developmental project, which was essentially to incorporate sort of all of these advantages of and fruits of foreign capitalist investment for its own sovereign ends. And they recognize as well that with the shifting configuration of global capitalism, it would require in some ways playing by the rules of the global system established by the United States for its own advantage up to a point, simply in order to acquire the technology then needed to sort of bootstrap China's own domestic technological base in order to build its productive forces and in order to arrive at a position of strength, of relative strength compared to where it was previously in the global pecking order wherein it could actually assert the kind of sovereignty that would then be needed in order to pursue an independent developmental path. And what we're seeing now is essentially the results of that sort of very pragmatic and as it turns out transient bargain, breaking apart because of the inherent contradiction between those two expectations, because contrary to what the United States at least hoped for, we have not had we have not had the establishment of a comradal bourgeois class in China that essentially is aligned in its material and its political interests with US imperialism and has effective control of the Chinese state and party apparatus. And it must be mentioned as well that the longer terms of ideal situation for the United States has always been outright regime change in China. For a while, at least for the sake of appearances, it accepted the sort of political leadership of the Communist Party while its policymaking appeared to be compatible with US economic interests, but it was never entirely comfortable that situation. But now we are seeing essentially China's longer term plan paying off and in particular, a renewed orientation, particularly through the Made in China 2025 initiative through the rise of Huawei, as you mentioned, to the status of a multinational corporation of global extent, the world's number one producer of telecoms infrastructure and as of last month, I believe also the number one smartphone supplier. And certainly the global leader in development of 5G infrastructure, far outstripping any US-based competitors, which in terms of these critical technologies as the US describes them, is generally posing a threat at least to the US monopoly on the higher value end of the value chain because the way that global imperialism operates today for the most part is through this international division of labor where countries of the global south, China included are assigned essentially the role of manufacturing hubs where the lowest of value added elements of the production process are localized while western countries like the United States in particular continue to monopolize the higher value added elements of that, whether at the start of the process with R&D or at the end with marketing and sales. And therein lies precisely the linchpin of the US advantage and the position that it wants to maintain. So you see there a direct conflict between US expectations and reality that is now leading to this apparent tech war that at least in terms of what you see in western media gives off the appearance of actual parity where it's still not there. Absolutely. Yeah and in this context the important thing also would be to figure out say especially what has changed maybe over the past 2-3-4 years which has really intensified this. Is it purely Trump sort of looking to create say some kind of appeal to his base in some way playing on what has been his slogans for a long time or is there something even more structural that's happened? Yeah it's certainly a combination of factors. I think you know in terms of the rhetoric certainly in terms of the over pursuit of you know this trade war with China you know it dovetails very well with this nativist and indeed at times pseudo-workerist you know agenda that you know Trump was elected on that he has pursued rhetorically throughout his time in office and yeah which essentially has you know made even more hegemonic this narrative that is shared at a bipartisan level in the United States that you know this very intentional strategy by US multinational corporations right from the very start of the neoliberal era of you know offshoring their sort of you know lower value added more labor intensive less capital intensive components of the manufacturing process to countries like China right was you know from the beginning an insidious state-driven plan by China to steal jobs right and you know sort of getting completely backwards the the actual chain of causation that led to sort of mass deindustrialization in the United States and the creation of this you know sort of very downwardly mobile you know probably white either either proletarian or or lower middle class fraction that constitutes Trump's base at the same time though you know it's coming as well from from the recognition that China you know China's very intentional strategy of moving up the global value chain uh it means in concrete terms that China is acting you know with with the explicit intention of appropriating more and more of the surplus that is generated by its own workers labor right the the material process of manufacturing um you know it it entails sort of hyper exploitation of uh Chinese labor wherein uh China up to now as the world's quote unquote factory has been appropriating a pretty small sliver right and where you know the more its position uh is is is entrenched there uh you know the more the more that that the gap in fact widens at least in absolute terms uh between between you know the income that appropriates the United States versus what appropriates uh what what you know sort of is returned to China essentially um and therefore in quantitative terms it actually uh you know the the situation that still obtains now for the most part is that you know it it actually deepens the disparity between between the US and China in absolute terms in terms of per capita income so when when when this you know rivalry is presented as as a contest between equals right it completely includes the fact that you know if you look at them per capita basis Chinese GDP is comparable more to the level of of Brazil or Mexico than you know indeed even even the worst off uh states in the first world right and uh that's that's you know the the the sort of very deep structural reason why China has been pursuing this strategy of moving up the value chain um with with huawei in many ways leading the way uh at least on the telecommunication side of things and uh just just in terms of uh you know how big you know the US slice of the pie is compared to China's uh that that represents uh you know in many ways like like uh indeed a growing threat to to the sort of monopolistic position that US capital uh maintains in these sectors