On November 15, China signed the world’s largest “free” trade agreement with 14 other Asia-Pacific nations. Beyond reducing tariffs and easing barriers to capitalist investments, the trade deal represents a giant step toward fascism and global war between China and its imperialist arch-rival, the U.S.
The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) “covers almost one-third of the world’s population and about one-third of its gross domestic product” (South China Morning Post, 12/1). The new alliance includes all 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, China’s top trading partner. It also draws four traditionally U.S.-leaning countries more deeply into China’s orbit: Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand. By strengthening ties with its neighbors, China will be less vulnerable to U.S. sanctions. Along with the Belt and Road Initiative, the gigantic Chinese infrastructure project of trains, roads, and gas and oil pipelines, the RCEP gives China tremendous leverage over poorer debtor capitalist bosses.
According to a commentary published by Renmin University’s school of international studies, the deal is China’s biggest win in economic diplomacy since the formation of the Beijing-backed Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank in 2016:
[It] displays that China’s economic cooperation with Asia-Pacific countries will be substantially strengthened, and significantly counter the numerous pressures from the China-US economic decoupling and changes in supply chains…” (SCMP, 11/20).
China’s rise has been relentless. In 2009, it surpassed Germany as the world’s largest exporting nation. This October, the International Monetary Fund acknowledged that China had overtaken the U.S. as the world’s largest economy (EurAsian Times, 10/18). Despite mostly empty threats from President Donald Trump, China’s annual trade surplus with the U.S. still tops $450 billion (focus-economics.com, 10/13). It’s the only major economy that has kept growing through the pandemic.
The RCEP may herald a tipping point, the moment when China supplants the U.S. as the world’s most powerful imperialist. Unlike the Trans Pacific Partnership, which Trump withdrew from in 2017, the RCEP plays to China’s strengths and will go by China’s rules. The pact has minimal labor standards, no environmental regulations, and no constraints on state-subsidized industries—all of which would have favored the U.S. rulers at the Chinese bosses’ expense.
What does this mean for the international working class? First of all, “free” trade is a cynical misnomer. As we saw with NAFTA in North America, it’s designed to give the bosses flexibility to move their companies, technologies, and merchandise freely across borders. Meanwhile, workers are free to be used as cheap labor—or, when the winds of profit blow the wrong way, free to starve.
Second, the looming change in the imperialists’ pecking order will make the world an even more volatile place. As the RCEP sharpens the contradictions between China and the U.S., it brings both countries that much closer to World War III. In the face of this development, workers of the world must reject the bosses’ calls to nationalism. Our task is to build the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party and smash capitalism and its enslaving economic system for all time.
U.S. bosses’ split: another win for China
Trump has represented the isolationist bosses who make most of their profits within the U.S. They have more to lose than to gain from multilateral trade deals that bring in added competition to the U.S. market. But for the top-dog finance capital wing of the U.S. ruling class, which makes much of its money internationally, Trump’s high-tariff, go-it-alone trade policy is a disaster, both for short-term profits and long-term geopolitical control.
The task of future Stooge in Chief Joe Biden is to revive the old order and put the liberal bosses back in charge. He’s probably doomed. For one thing, China’s unified ruling class and full-blown fascism gives them a huge strategic advantage. For another, the domestic U.S. bosses have hijacked the Republican Party and are likely to keep running the U.S. Senate, which must ratify any trade agreements.  
At bottom, the division in the U.S. ruling class is over the best way to handle China and its threat to U.S. profits. Trump’s Fortress America wing would rely on a defensive, scaled-down, predominantly white military that could wage genocide on the cheap. Biden’s interventionist wing is targeting Black and Latin youth to build a massive, multicultural, patriotic fighting force ready to lay down their lives by the millions.
Turn the guns around!
On November 24, a high-ranking Chinese official was published in the Op Ed section of the New York Times, finance capital’s daily mouthpiece. Fu Ying, an ex-vice foreign minister, called for a new era of “co-opetition” between China and the U.S., a “mutually beneficial” mix of cooperation and competition. But when you read the fine print, it didn’t sound so friendly: “On the political front, it is high time that the United States drop its habit of interfering in other countries’ internal affairs….and avoid challenging China on the issue of Taiwan or by meddling in the territorial disputes of the South China Sea.” In other words, China will be happy to work with the U.S.—as long as the U.S. surrenders Asia.
While imperialists may cooperate in narrow and short-lived ways when it serves their interests, competition is always primary. The bosses live by the law of maximum profit.
The U.S. finance capitalists will never voluntarily accept China’s ascent to become the world’s new number-one power—there are too many trillions in multinational profits at stake. They may lose, but they won’t go gently.
For the same reason, the Chinese bosses will stop at nothing to reign supreme. China’s true intentions were revealed in a recent message from President Xi Jinping to the People’s Liberation Army Marine Corps: “Put all your minds and energy on preparing for war” (cnn.com, 10/14).
The instability of this period is a great danger to the working class, but also an opportunity.  Though we cannot say when, where, or how the bosses will take up arms, it is our historic responsibility to transform imperialist war into war for communist revolution. We have no side in this fight between exploiters. Workers of the world, we cannot forget that our class seized state power in Russia during World War I, and did the same in China after World War II. Though these revolutions were a great advance for the working class, they ultimately failed to make a lasting break with capitalism. But history tells us we will have another chance—if we build for it today. Fight for communism! Join PLP!