Workers World, Vol. 20, No. 42
October 24 – The treaty signed today in Tokyo between China and Japan might, under different circumstances within China and under a different correlation of world forces, have been a significant diplomatic triumph for the People’s Republic of China and served as a lever to expand and accelerate socialist construction. But as matters stand it holds grave risks for China at home and for the world as a whole.
It is to be remembered that the real thaw between China and Japan which resulted in the restoration of diplomatic relations came under the impetus of the secret Kissinger visit to Peking, the so-called ping-pong diplomacy that followed, and finally the visit of Nixon himself to Peking later in 1972. The restoration of diplomatic relations between the two countries had the complete blessing of the Nixon administration while the present treaty, which has been in the course of evolution since that date, has had the enthusiastic support of not only the U.S. but all the imperialist powers.
Although the treaty is touted in the capitalist countries as a “peace” treaty, the media by no means hide the fact that the so-called anti-hegemony clause is clearly and unequivocally directed against the Soviet Union. It might also be added that in the present context it is directed against Vietnam as well.
This treaty should be differentiated from innumerable agreements that have already been made between the two countries, such as those on commerce, aviation, maritime transport, and fishing rights. Such agreements, whether they be called treaties or not, are to be regarded as part and parcel of a normalization process, free from the serious political and diplomatic postulates inherent in the present treaty.
This treaty in effect is much more in the nature of an aggressive alliance against the Soviet Union than it is a step in normalization between the two signers. Moreover, it is part of a broader attempt at a worldwide alliance encompassing not only the U.S. but NATO as well. Carried to its ultimate conclusion, it revives the attempt to encircle the Soviet Union in very much the same way that the U.S. and Japan tried to encircle the People’s Republic of China earlier.
Bearing in mind that the chief architect of this broad front is really U.S. imperialism, the alliance can only have the effect of an anti-Soviet and anti-communist worldwide crusade against the USSR and its socialist allies.
Although the Chinese leaders are the most vociferous exponents of the anti-Soviet alliance, it is clearly U.S. imperialism, which was formerly regarded by the Chinese leaders as “the main enemy of mankind,” which is really leading the pack today.
The ambition of American finance capital to subvert the socialist countries and in particular to undo the Soviet Union is not of recent vintage. It dates back to the days of the victory of the October Socialist Revolution. While there have been interludes of peaceful coexistence, short-lived accommodations, and the like, the hostility and irreconcilability of the imperialist colossus and its junior partners and satellites has never permitted them to adjust to the existence of the socialist countries, or what is now called “the realities of the situation.” This is notwithstanding all the peaceful efforts of the USSR.
While the China-Japan treaty represents an important step in the direction of encircling the Soviet Union, it should not be thought that the USSR is now isolated or that it would permit itself to be confronted with a virtual united front of the imperialist powers plus a willing tool in the form of the current leadership of China. Far from it.
The USSR will seek, as it inevitably must, a way out of the encirclement and may be propelled to make an alliance of another type to combat the diplomatic and military strategy of U.S. imperialism.
There are a variety of options open to Soviet diplomacy that are wholly consistent with its class character and the imperative needs of defense against imperialist aggression.
World historic questions of the magnitude entailed in China’s new thrust onto the world arena cannot be gauged in terms of bourgeois geopolitical concepts. What must be dealt with first of all to understand the new position of China’s leaders is what passes in bourgeois sociology as the “social question,” that is, the class character of the Chinese state as well as that of the Soviet Union.
Without taking that into account, one remains completely at the mercy of the imperialist geopoliticians who have their own dear imperialist interests to defend. It goes without saying that their conceptions are entirely in harmony with their interests.
Viewed in this light, one must at the outset acknowledge that the China-Japan treaty is not only a diplomatic reversal of the alliance between the USSR and China as embodied in the Sino-Soviet Friendship Treaty of 1950. It constitutes on the part of the People’s Republic of China a historical reversal of a class alliance with a sister socialist state. Whatever might have been the exigencies which led to this unfortunate development, this is the crux of the matter.
This is what the imperialists very well understand. That is what makes them so happy at the consummation of the China-Japan treaty which, after all, is a culmination of the long internecine struggle between the Soviet and Chinese leaderships. It began first over ideological questions, then degenerated into state-to-state matters, and it has now reached the point where the PRC leaders have taken upon themselves the role of cheerleaders for every anti-Soviet move, every Soviet setback, going all the way to the point of deliberately lining up with imperialism against the national liberation movements as evidenced in Angola, in Zaire, in Ethiopia, Chile, etc., etc.
In the course of this long struggle, Chinese foreign policy has lost its moorings. From being the revolutionary champion of the Third World, it has stooped to the role of an assistant to U.S. foreign policy, serving its interests in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In the heartland of Europe its constant haranguing on the war theme is a monstrous perversion of the Leninist concept of the inevitability of imperialist war.
What the Peking leaders are really promoting is the idea of directing and inciting the most rabid imperialist forces in a war against the Soviet Union. In that sense, they have taken on the role of an inciter if not arsonist in the struggle against the USSR.
How well does all this serve China, the China which is socialist – socialist because the foundations of a socialist society are still there notwithstanding the triumph of rabid political reaction?
The new leadership hopes that by currying favor with imperialism it will in turn receive large infusions of capital, industrial know-how, and technology. It is assumed that by becoming a strategic ally of imperialism, the doors of Wall Street, Lombard Street, and the Paris Bourse will all open wide and just pour in all the science and technology that China needs in order to develop, as the current phrase in China goes, “into a powerful socialist country.”
One wonders why this wisdom comes so late in the day, almost three decades since the Chinese Revolution. One wonders, too, about all the applause the new Peking leaders are getting on both their domestic and foreign policy.
Have the Chinese leaders forgotten that after 30 years the U.S. still hasn’t granted diplomatic recognition to China? That it hasn’t surrendered Taiwan, broken its treaty and diplomatic relations with the Chiang clique, or removed its forces from the area? That the U.S. is still on the doorstep of China? And this it is strengthening, rather than weakening, its military position in Korea?
For weeks and weeks on end the bourgeois press has carried stories released from Peking about the many delegations China is sending all over the capitalist world, broadening its contacts, seeking all sorts of technological and military hardware. However, after all is said and done, the imperialists are not really loosening their purse strings as would become one friendly ally to another, interested in helping a backward country raise itself by the bootstraps and come into the twentieth century, as the bourgeois publicists continually say.
If the nature of imperialism were such that it was merely concerned with dispassionately assisting underdeveloped countries to become industrialized, raising their technological and scientific level, offering them the instruments to fashion their own societies as they see fit, would there have been any reason to fight imperialism in the first place? The truth of the matter, or course, is that even the trade agreement to exchange Japanese technology for Chinese oil and coal, which is said to run for 13 years and would amount to something in the neighborhood of $80 billion (assuming it is ever fully consummated), is shrewdly calculated to make China dependent on Japan, not Japan on China.
It is not just a question of the imperialists controlling access to spare parts and so forth, or that their technicians will thereby be making contact with the technical intelligentsia in China. It is the broader question that the character of the technology which is sold gives them leverage over the Chinese economy – that and other circumstances which still have to be revealed.
Today, 45 years after the completion of the first five-year plan in the USSR, U.S. Secretary of State for Soviet Affairs Marshall Shulman can boast that by virtue of some computers sold to the Soviet Union for use at the giant Kama River automotive complex, the U.S. has a lever on that aspect of the Soviet economy. This may be small potatoes considering the magnitude of the Soviet industrial plan, but what can we then say about the leverage anticipated by the U.S. and Japan in the projected exchange of technology for Chinese oil and gas?
This is precisely what Chang Chun-chiao, who was a member of the Chinese Politburo and a senior Deputy Prime Minister until his removal along with Chiang Ching, Yao Wen-yuan, and Wang Hung-wen, was fearful of. In Chang’s view, China was going for “a colonial economy.” He feared the conversion of the ruling group in China into a comprador bourgeoisie. He even said, “There is a comprador bourgeois right in the Politburo.” (New York Times, Jan. 31, 1977.)
Did he have in mind Teng Hsiao-ping?
Chang may have completely overstated the issue. But he nevertheless stated the problem. The problem is how a workers’ state, a proletarian dictatorship in an industrially undeveloped country, can accelerate industrialization in order to achieve a socialist society.
In the world into which the People’s Republic was born in 1949, it no less than the young Soviet state needed to rely on its own inner forces to develop industrially and economically. Both socialist countries were fortunate in that they were continent-wide with a wealth of natural resources. However, to meet the demands of the modern world, China also needed assistance from outside either of a fraternal character from other socialist countries or trade and commerce with the imperialist powers.
The imperialist economic blockade of China, like the blockade of Cuba today, was overcome in part by the Soviet alliance. This socialist alliance with the Soviet Union helped it in the way of technical and economic assistance based on mutual aid. The fact that the Friendship Pact endured for a number of years and that the imperialist powers were unable to breach it, is a testimony to the strength of the call alliance and that it was able to overcome the narrower interests of the ruling groups in both countries.
This is not the place to go over the origins of the breach nor the character of the relationship that existed up to the time of the breach. The mere fact that it stood up under the pressure of an imperialist war on the peninsula of Korea, where both China and the Soviet Union came to the assistance of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, is ample testimony to the fact that imperialism at its very zenith couldn’t break up this class alliance until it was able to take advantage of the open political struggle that broke out between the Soviet and Chinese leaders in the late 1950s and particularly in the early 1960s.
When the relations between the PRC and the USSR became so envenomed that the USSR under the leadership of Khrushchev took the rash and unwarranted step of cutting off aid and assistance and withdrawing its technical and economic advisors, it left China in a position of economic isolation.
Self-reliance became the watchword of the leadership under the then-existing circumstances. But the problem always was the need to expand commercial and trade relations with the rest of the world in a way which would assist socialist construction without becoming politically dependent upon imperialism, or upon the Soviet Union with whom hostile relations had reached the point where economic and trade relations could scarcely thrive given the sharp antagonism that had developed politically and on a state-to-state level.
Thus before the Cultural Revolution, during the Cultural Revolution, and immediately thereafter, the overriding issue was how to regulate the relationships with the imperialist world in the light of the breach with the USSR. The dominant political tendency during the Cultural Revolution, supported by Mao, was for steering a course of self-reliance, one which would avoid dependence upon imperialism economically, industrially, and above all militarily.
The present course, whose chief architect is Vice Premier Teng Hsiao-ping, is headed straight into the arms of the imperialists. In a way he is fulfilling the fears of the left wing which was suppressed following Mao’s death. It is of course not preordained that such a catastrophic development both for China at home and the world at large is inevitable or cannot be reversed.
The Hua-Teng grouping is counting on utilizing the intensification of imperialism’s overall struggle against the USSR to facilitate its own acquisition of technology and development of trade. The imperialists are unquestionably willing to go some distance in that respect, but in the course of it they will exact a very heavy political price, an inseparable concomitant in the overall policy of imperialism with respect to the socialist countries and underdeveloped nations.
There is one great difference between what is happening in China and the industrialization which began and took on such a speedy tempo in the Soviet Union beginning with the Five-Year Plan. No matter what mistakes in tempo, administration, and political direction, the industrialization effort and its planned character elicited tremendous popular support in the USSR. Its successes put the imperialist world to shame at a time when the capitalist depression was demoralizing the ruling classes of the world.
It is altogether different in China today. Even from accounts in the Chinese press itself, the launching of the industrialization effort by the Teng-Hua regime and its attempt at an accelerated tempo have certainly not evoked a torrent of enthusiasm from the masses, on whose backs this has to be carried out. The daring initiatives and the creative efforts which moved millions in earlier campaigns are distinctly missing.
It is all too apparent that the industrialization effort caters to material incentives for the upper stratum in Chinese society, which the left-wing characterized as “the bourgeoisie within the party and the government.” In contrast it demands hard work and speedier industrial output from the masses. Not a very original idea! And one well understood by workers everywhere.
Such material incentives were long a disputed issue in the party and the government and are regarded by the mass of the workers and peasants with suspicion as an attempt to break their class solidarity and cater to the few on the basis of individual aggrandizement. In disguised form this is a revival of bourgeois individualism for the upper crust of Chinese society.
It is not a matter of avoiding bourgeois norms of compensation and distribution altogether, which is not possible at this stage of China’s socialist development. That never was the program of the so-called “Gang of Four.”
An extremely tendentious and slanderous article, one of many which have appeared since the suppression of the left following the death of Mao, appearing in Peking Review (#41, Oct. 13), falsely attributes to them the most ridiculous position on this question. It says that, “They claimed that all the proletariat should care about was ideology and politics, not material interests, and as they saw it the proletariat must not ‘stoop’ to seek material interests – as if this would divest it of its revolutionary nature and its lofty ideals. This is a most preposterous argument.”
Indeed, it’s doubly preposterous because it’s putting up a straw man to knock him down. The left held no such position.
The issue was how far it was possible to go in restricting bourgeois right in compensation and distribution under the dictatorship of the proletariat. The arrow was aimed mostly at the bourgeois elements and not at the proletariat at all.
(For a further elaboration of the left’s position on this see “On Exercising All-Round Dictatorship Over the Bourgeoisie” by Chang Chun-chiao, a veiled polemic against the rightists who are now in control of the government. But it must be understood within the context of the fierce factional struggle raging inside the party at that time.)
Now that the Teng-Hua forces have become victorious, they are attempting to effectuate their rightist course by reorienting themselves headlong in the direction of reliance upon imperialism. Imperialism, on the other hand, is fully aware of the difficulties encountered on the domestic scene with which the Teng-Hua forces are grappling. As is their wont the imperialists are coldly calculating on the “opening up” of China with trade and commerce and technology, not for the purpose of helping to construct a “strong, socialist economy,” but to subvert it. Their plans are rigidly geared to their general strategic plan of agreeing to so much in the way of commerce and industry as well as military technology as will be fruitful in plunging China into a war with the Soviet Union.
However much the Teng-Hua forces try to ingratiate themselves with the imperialist with their violent campaign of unrestrained anti-Soviet propaganda, they will not be able to get the imperialists to do for China the way of industrialization what the imperialists will not even do for one of “their own” neo-colonialist underdeveloped countries, let alone a socialist country.
This is what one has to bear in mind when one considers the variants of development which flow from the position in world affairs of China’s new leaders who ascendency to power came as a result of the triumph of a reactionary over a progressive and revolutionary tendency in Chinese communist politics.
Last updated: 11 May 2026