Over the past two decades, the posture of the United States towards China has evolved from economic cooperation to outright antagonism. US media outlets and politicians have engaged in persistent anti-China rhetoric, while the US government has imposed trade restrictions and sanctions on China and pursued military build-up close to Chinese territory. Washington wants people to believe that China poses a threat.<\/p>\n
China\u2019s rise indeed threatens US interests, but not in the way the US political elite seeks to frame it.<\/p>\n
The US relationship with China needs to be understood in the context of the capitalist world system. Capital accumulation in the core states, often glossed as the \u201cGlobal North\u201d, depends on\u00a0cheap labour and cheap resources from the periphery and semi-periphery, the so-called \u201cGlobal South\u201d.<\/p>\n
This arrangement is crucial to ensuring high profits for the multinational firms that dominate global supply chains. The systematic price disparity between the core and periphery also enables the core to achieve a large net-appropriation of value from the periphery through\u00a0unequal exchange\u00a0in international trade.<\/p>\n
Ever since the 1980s, when China opened up to Western investment and trade, it has been a crucial part of this arrangement, providing a major source of labour for Western firms \u2013 labour that is cheap but also highly skilled and highly productive. For instance, much of Apple\u2019s production relies on Chinese labour. According to research by\u00a0the economist Donald A Clelland, if Apple had to pay Chinese and East Asian workers at the same rate as a US worker, this would have cost them an additional $572 per iPad in 2011.<\/p>\n
But over the past two decades, wages in China have increased quite dramatically. Around 2005, the manufacturing labour cost per hour in China was lower than in India, less than $1 per hour. In the years since, China\u2019s hourly labour costs have increased to more than $8 per hour, while India\u2019s are now only about $2 per hour. Indeed, wages in China are now higher than in every other developing country in Asia. This is a major, historical development.<\/p>\n
This has happened for several key reasons. For one, surplus labour in China has been\u00a0increasingly absorbed into the wage-labour economy, which has amplified workers\u2019 bargaining power. At the same time, the current leadership of President Xi Jinping has expanded the role of the state in China\u2019s economy, strengthening public provisioning systems \u2013 including public healthcare\u00a0and\u00a0public housing\u00a0\u2013 that have further improved the position of workers.<\/p>\n
These are positive changes for China \u2013 and specifically for Chinese workers \u2013 but they pose a severe problem for Western capital. Higher wages in China impose a constraint on the profits of Western firms that operate there or that depend on Chinese manufacturing for intermediate parts and other key inputs.<\/p>\n
The other problem, for the core states, is that the increase in China\u2019s wages and prices is\u00a0reducing its exposure to unequal exchange. During the low-wage era of the 1990s, China\u2019s export-to-import ratio with the core was extremely high. In other words, China had to export very large quantities of goods in order to obtain necessary imports. Today, this ratio is much lower, representing a dramatic improvement in China\u2019s terms of trade, substantially reducing the core\u2019s ability to appropriate value from China.<\/p>\n
Given all this, capitalists in the core states are now desperate to do something to restore their access to cheap labour and resources. One option \u2013 increasingly promoted by the Western business press \u2013 is to relocate industrial production to other parts of Asia where wages are cheaper. But this is costly in terms of lost production, the need to find new staff, and other supply chain disruptions. The other option is to force Chinese wages back down. Hence, the attempts by the United States to undermine the Chinese government and destabilise the Chinese economy \u2013 including through economic warfare and the constant threat of military escalation.<\/p>\n
Ironically, Western governments sometimes justify their opposition to China on the grounds that China\u2019s exports are too cheap. It is often claimed that China \u201ccheats\u201d in international trade, by artificially suppressing the exchange rate for its currency, the renminbi. The problem with this argument, however, is that China abandoned this policy around a decade ago. As the International Monetary Fund (IMF) economist Jose Antonio Ocampo\u00a0noted in 2017, \u201cIn recent years, China has rather been making efforts to avoid a depreciation of the renminbi, sacrificing a large amount of reserves. This may imply that, if anything, this currency is now overvalued.\u201d China did eventually permit a devaluation in 2019, when tariffs imposed by the administration of US President Donald Trump increased pressure on the renminbi. But this was a normal response to a change in market conditions, not an attempt to suppress the renminbi below its market rate.<\/p>\n
The US largely supported the Chinese government in the period when its currency was undervalued, including through loans from the IMF and World Bank. The West turned decisively against China in the mid-2010s, at precisely the moment when the country began to raise its prices and challenge its position as a peripheral supplier of cheap inputs to Western-dominated supply chains.<\/p>\n
The second element that\u2019s driving US hostility towards China is technology. Beijing has used industrial policy to prioritise technological development in strategic sectors over the past decade, and has achieved remarkable progress. It now has the world\u2019s largest high-speed rail network, manufactures its own commercial aircraft, leads the world on renewable energy technology and electric vehicles, and enjoys advanced medical technology, smartphone technology, microchip production, artificial intelligence, etc. The tech news coming out of China has been dizzying. These are achievements that we only expect from high-income countries, and China is doing it with almost 80 percent less GDP per capita\u00a0than the average \u201cadvanced economy\u201d. It is unprecedented.<\/p>\n
This poses a problem for the core states because one of the main\u00a0pillars of the imperial arrangement\u00a0is that they need to maintain a monopoly over necessary technologies like capital goods, medicines, computers, aircraft and so on. This forces the \u201cGlobal South\u201d into a position of dependency, so they are forced to export large quantities of their\u00a0cheapened\u00a0resources in order to obtain these necessary technologies. This is what sustains the core\u2019s net-appropriation through unequal exchange.<\/p>\n
China\u2019s technological development is now breaking Western monopolies, and may give other developing countries alternative suppliers for necessary goods at more affordable prices. This poses a fundamental challenge to the imperial arrangement and unequal exchange.<\/p>\n
The US has responded by imposing sanctions designed to cripple China\u2019s technological development. So far, this has not worked; if anything, it has increased incentives for China to develop sovereign technological capacities. With this weapon mostly neutralised, the US wants to resort to warmongering, the main objective of which would be to destroy China\u2019s industrial base, and divert China\u2019s investment capital and productive capacities towards defence. The US wants to go to war with China not because China poses some kind of military threat to the American people, but because Chinese development undermines the interests of imperial capital.<\/p>\n
Western claims about China posing some kind of military threat are pure propaganda. The material facts tell a fundamentally different story. In fact, China\u2019s military spending per capita is less than the global average,\u00a0and 1\/10th that of the US alone. Yes, China has a big population, but even in absolute terms, the US-aligned military bloc spends over seven times more\u00a0on military power than China does. The\u00a0US controls eight nuclear weapons\u00a0for every one that China has.<\/p>\n
China may have the power to prevent the US from imposing its will on it, but it does not have the power to impose its will on the rest of the world in the way that the core states do. The narrative that China poses some kind of military threat is wildly overblown.<\/p>\n
In fact, the opposite is true. The US has\u00a0hundreds of military bases and facilities\u00a0around the world. A significant number of them are stationed near China \u2013 in Japan and South Korea. By contrast, China has only one foreign military base, in Djibouti, and zero military bases near US borders.<\/p>\n
Furthermore, China has not fired a single bullet in international warfare in over 40 years, while during this time the US has invaded, bombed or carried out\u00a0regime-change operations\u00a0in over a dozen Global South countries. If there is any state that poses a known threat to world peace and security, it is the US.<\/p>\n
The real reason for Western warmongering is because China is achieving sovereign development and this is undermining the imperial arrangement on which Western capital accumulation depends. The West will not\u00a0let global economic power slip from its hands so easily.<\/p>\n
The views expressed in this article are the authors\u2019 own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera\u2019s editorial stance.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Over the past two decades, the posture of the United States towards China has evolved from economic cooperation…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":315372,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5311],"tags":[11410,1395,3058,7670,49,978,286,659],"class_list":{"0":"post-315371","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"tag-asia-pacific","9":"tag-china","10":"tag-international-trade","11":"tag-opinions","12":"tag-united-states","13":"tag-us","14":"tag-us-canada","15":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114966618769592654","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315371","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=315371"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315371\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/315372"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=315371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=315371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=315371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}