 For more videos on People's Truggles, 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 U.S.-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 load 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 sort of 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 you know as time went on and China's income itself grew a consumer market as well for Western bits. And the sort of idea from the US perspective was okay we're going to strike this grand bargain where China would open itself up to US and more generally Western foreign investment. Granted you know 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 US-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 you know aegis of continued Communist Party rule or not the idea was that the Chinese state would then become pliable itself to the demands of US 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 US 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 US was pursuing namely you know to sort of strategically open up to foreign direct investment on the conditions that you know 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 you know incorporate sort of all these advantages of and fruits of foreign capitalist investment for its own sovereign ends and you know they recognize as well that with the shifting configuration of global capitalism it would require in some means you know in some ways playing by the rules of the global system established by the United States right for its own advantage up to a point simply in order to acquire the technology then you know needed to to sort of bootstrap China's own domestic you know technological base in order to to build its productive forces and you know in order to 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 you know the kind of sovereignty that would 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 you know the establishment of of a comfortable board board about class in China that you know 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 you know the the longer terms of ideal situation for the United States has always been outright regime change in China you know um you know for for for a while I you know at least for the sake of appearances you know it accepted the sort of political leadership of the Communist Party you know while its its policymaking appeared to be compatible with with US economic interests but it was never entirely comfortable that situation but now we are seeing essentially you know China's longer-term plan paying off and in particular you know a renewed orientation particularly through you know the made in China 2025 initiative through you know the rise of Huawei as you mentioned to the status of you know a multinational corporation of global extent right 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 in development of of 5G infrastructure right far outstripping any US-based competitors which which you know in in terms of these sort of critical technologies as as the US describes them I you know is is is genuinely posing a threat at least to the US monopoly on the sort of higher value end of the value chain because you know the the the way that global imperialism operates today for the most part is is is through this international division of labor where you know countries of the global south China included are you know assigned essentially the role of of manufacturing hubs right where sort of the lowest value added elements of the production process are you know sort of localized while you know western countries like like the United States in particular continue to monopolize sort of 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 and and therein lies you know precisely the the linchpin of the US advantage and and and and the position that it wants to maintain um so you know you see there a direct uh conflict between you know US expectations and reality that is now leading uh to to you know this this apparent tech war that 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 uh the important thing also would be to figure out say especially what has changed maybe over the past two to three three four years which is really intensified this is it purely Trump sort of looking to create say some kind of you know 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 it's certainly a combination of factors um I think I think you know in terms of in terms of the rhetoric certainly in terms of uh the over pursuit of you know this this trade war with China um you know it dovetails very well with uh this nativist and and indeed at times pseudo workerist um you know agenda that that you know Trump was elected on that he uh has pursued rhetorically throughout his time in office and um yeah which which which which essentially uh has you know made even more hegemonic this narrative uh that is that is shared at a bipartisan level in the united states uh 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 um you know lower value added uh more labor intensive less capital intensive components of the manufacturing process right to uh countries like china right uh was you know from the beginning an insidious uh state driven plan by china to to steal jobs right um and and you know sort of getting completely backwards uh the the actual chain of causation that that led to sort of mass deindustrialization in the united states and the creation of this uh you know sort of very downwardly mobile um you know probably white either either proletarian or or or lower middle class uh fraction that constitutes trump's base at the same time though you know uh it's it's it's coming as well from from the recognition that uh china you know china's very intentional strategy of moving up the global value chain uh it means in concrete terms that uh 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 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 i in states versus what appropriate uh 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 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 when when this you know rivalry is presented as as a contest between equals right uh it completely includes the fact that you know if you look at them per capita basis uh chinese gdp is comparable more to the level of brazil or mexico than you know indeed even even the worst off uh states in the first world right and uh i 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 telecommunications side of things and uh just just in terms of uh you know how big you know the us lives of the pious 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