March 20, 2025, workers at the humanoid robot assembly line of AgiBot factory in Shanghai, China (Reuters)
American media and politicians continue to make anti-China statements, while the American government imposes trade restrictions and sanctions on China and amasses military forces near Chinese territory.
China's rise is not as portrayed by American political elites.
We need to understand Sino-US relations within the context of the capitalist world system. The capital accumulation of core countries (often referred to as the "Global North") relies on cheap labor and cheap resources from peripheral and semi-peripheral countries (the so-called "Global South").
This arrangement is crucial for ensuring high profits for multinational corporations that dominate global supply chains. Systematic price differences between core and peripheral countries also enable core countries to gain significant net value extraction from peripheral countries through unequal exchange in international trade.
Since the 1980s, when China opened up to Western investment and trade, it has been an important part of this arrangement, providing a primary source of labor for Western companies - labor that is cheap, skilled, and highly productive. For example, the majority of Apple's production depends on Chinese labor. According to research by economist Donald A. Klier, if Apple had to pay Chinese and East Asian workers the same wages as American workers, the manufacturing cost of each iPad would have increased by $572 in 2011.
However, over the past two decades, China's wage levels have risen significantly. Around 2005, China's hourly labor cost in manufacturing was lower than India's, less than $1. In the following years, China's hourly labor cost rose to more than $8, while India is now around $2. In fact, China's wage level is now higher than all other developing countries in Asia. This is a major historical development.
These changes are positive for China - especially for Chinese workers, but they pose a serious problem for Western capital. Rising wages in China restrict the profits of Western companies operating in China or relying on Chinese-made components and other key inputs.
Another issue for core countries is that rising wages and prices in China are reducing its ability to withstand unequal exchange. In the low-wage era of the 1990s, China had a very high import-export ratio with core countries. In other words, China had to export large quantities of goods to obtain necessary imports. Today, this ratio has dropped significantly, meaning a substantial improvement in China's trade conditions, greatly reducing the core countries' ability to extract value from China.
Given all this, capitalists in core countries are now urgently seeking measures to restore their access to cheap labor and resources. One option increasingly promoted by Western business media is to shift industrial production to other parts of Asia where wages are lower. However, this approach is costly, including production losses, the need to hire new employees, and other supply chain disruptions. Another option is to force Chinese wages back down. Therefore, the US tries to weaken China, undermining China's economic stability - including through economic warfare and continuous military escalation threats.
Sarcasm, sometimes Western governments justify their actions against China by claiming that Chinese exported products are too cheap. They often claim that the Chinese deliberately keep the yuan undervalued. However, the problem with this argument is that China abandoned this policy about a decade ago. As economist Jose Antonio Ocampo from the IMF pointed out in 2017: "In recent years, China has been trying to avoid a depreciation of the yuan, using a large amount of foreign exchange reserves. This may mean." In 2019, the Trump administration imposed tariffs that increased pressure on the yuan, causing it to depreciate. But this was a normal response to changes in the market environment, not an attempt to push the yuan below market exchange rates.
During the period when the yuan was undervalued, the United States strongly supported China, including by providing loans through the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. In the mid-2010s, Western countries decisively turned against China.
The second factor behind America's hostility toward China is technology. Over the past decade, Beijing has used industrial policies to prioritize the development of technological fields and has made significant progress. Now, China has the world's largest high-speed rail network, produces commercial aircraft independently, leads the world in renewable energy technology and electric vehicles, and has advanced medical technology, smartphone technology, microchip production, artificial intelligence, etc. The constant stream of tech news from China is overwhelming. These achievements we usually expect only high-income countries to achieve, yet China has achieved them at a per capita GDP that is nearly 80% lower than the average of "developed economies." This is unprecedented.
This poses problems for core countries because one of the main pillars of the imperialist structure is their need to maintain a monopoly over essential technologies, such as capital goods, medicines, computers, airplanes, etc. This forces the "Global South" into a dependent position, thus forcing them to export large amounts of cheap resources to obtain these essential technologies. This is why core countries maintain net value extraction through unequal exchange.
China's technological development is breaking the Western monopoly and could provide other developing countries with more affordable alternatives to essential goods. This presents a fundamental challenge to the imperialist arrangement and unequal exchange.
As a response, the U.S. has imposed sanctions aimed at weakening China's technological development. So far, this measure has not worked; if anything, it has actually strengthened China's motivation to develop its own technological capabilities. With this weapon largely ineffective, the U.S. wants to resort to conflict, primarily targeting the destruction of China's industrial base and redirecting China's investment capital and production capacity to defense. The U.S. wants to go to war with its opponent, not because the opponent poses some military threat to the American people, but because the opponent's development reduces the interests of imperial capital.
Western claims that China poses some military threat are pure propaganda. The substantive facts tell a completely different story. In fact, China's per capita military spending is lower than the global average, just one-tenth of that of the United States. Indeed, China has a large population, but even in absolute terms, the military spending of the military alliance of the United States is more than seven times that of China. The number of nuclear weapons controlled by the United States is eight times that of China.
China may have the capability to prevent the U.S. from imposing its will on it, but it does not impose its will on other countries around the world like core countries do.
The opposite is true. The U.S. has hundreds of military bases and facilities around the world, a considerable portion of which are stationed near China - Japan and South Korea. In contrast, China has only one foreign military base - in Djibouti, and has no military bases near the U.S.
Additionally, for over 40 years, China has not fired a single shot in international wars, while during this time, the U.S. has invaded and bombed a dozen countries in the Global South and implemented regime change operations. If there is any country that poses a known threat to world peace and security, it is the United States.
The real reason for Western warmongers is that China is achieving self-reliant development, which is weakening the imperialist structure that Western capital accumulation relies on. The West will not easily let global economic power slip from its hands.
Author: Jason Hickel and Dylan Sullivan
Source: Al Jazeera
Original: https://www.toutiao.com/article/7534743306987766313/
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