Biden and the exploitation of the Chinese workforce

The Biden administration is driven by a fanatical ideology borrowed from small groups of left-wing believers. It is supported by two powerful lobbies: the military-industrial complex on the one hand, and the transnational corporations producing in China on the other. Thierry Meyssan presents this little-known lobby.

The Biden administration will not adopt a definitive strategy against its Chinese rival until June. An ad hoc committee of the Pentagon will then have to present proposals to the White House.

Under the authority of President Xi Jinping, China has begun its deployment outside its borders. It has already placed 3,000 soldiers in the UN forces and opened a base in Djibouti. Logically, it should, as it did at the time of the historic Silk Road, set up military posts along the roads it is building to secure its international trade. Last but not least, it is relocating to the islets it abandoned in the 19th century in the China Sea.

China first intends to reclaim its living space, which it has been robbed by Western colonists. It is sure of its right and considers that it has every right to take its revenge.

However, in accordance with the strategy outlined in 1999 by General Qiao Liang and Colonel Wang Xiangsui [1], China intends to avoid any direct military confrontation with the United States. It prefers to bypass its adversary and has engaged in undeclared wars on the commercial, economic, financial, psychological, media and other levels.

Chinese irredentism implies excluding the Westerners who have occupied the Far East for a century and a half. It must be distinguished from the Chinese development strategy which has succeeded in a few years in lifting hundreds of millions of its citizens out of poverty.

New China’s economic strategy began in 1978 under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, but it only really bore fruit in 1994. By that time the Soviet Union had disappeared; the US army had been largely demobilised; President Bush Sr. had declared that the time to make money had come and his successor, President Clinton, had been asked by big companies to open up the Chinese labour market. Indeed, a Chinese worker, albeit untrained, cost about 20 times less than a US worker.

President Clinton would therefore decouple human rights negotiations (in the Anglo-Saxon sense) from trade issues. Then he would bring China into the World Trade Organisation (WTO). Within a few years, the big corporations would transfer their production plants to the Chinese coast for the benefit of consumers and to the detriment of US workers.

Two decades later, the US is consuming Chinese products massively, while its big corporations, which have become transnational, have seen their profits grow exponentially. But at the same time, US consumer goods factories have been relocated or closed while unemployment has spread. The distribution of wealth has been altered so that now there is hardly any middle class left, but mostly poor people and a few ultra-billionaires.

This phenomenon began to affect Europe when US voters chose Donald Trump as their president. He first tried to resolve the balance of payments issue with China (border adjustment tax), but was prevented from doing so by the Democrats and part of the Republicans. Unable to push through a relative border closure, it embarked on a tariff war in which Congress had no say.

In 2021, President Biden officially succeeded him. He was supported by the transnational corporations that derived their immense fortune from economic globalisation. Immediately, he declared his desire to normalise US-China relations. He called President Xi Jinping to talk to him about the situation of the Uyghurs in Hong Kong, but he immediately admitted that Tibet and Taiwan were Chinese, which his predecessor had partially disputed. Above all, at a press conference, he said that each country had its “own standards” and that the political positions of China and the United States each had their own logic. Thus he was able to say, once in the White House, that he “understood” China’s repression of Uighur terrorism, whereas a few weeks earlier he had accused China of “genocide” of the Uighur people under the guise of repression of terrorism.

Over the next four years, the Biden administration should therefore continue the work of Presidents Clinton, Bush Jr. and Obama, to the benefit of the multi-billionaires and to the detriment of its people. It will rely on a ruling class deriving personal benefits from this system.

In order to understand this arrangement, we summarise the eight main personalities supporting the US-China trade alliance. First on the political level: one of the main Democratic icons and the head of the Republicans in the Senate; then on the economic level, the two most important distributors of consumer goods; finally on the governmental level, the decision-makers of the Biden administration.

Partisan supporters

Support from major retailers

Supporters of the Biden administration

It should also be recalled that during the election campaign, everything possible was done to prevent voters from reading the New York Post’s investigation into President Biden’s son Hunter. Hunter stole 1 billion dollars in Ukraine with the complicity of CEFC China Energy, a company that has now been dissolved.

The Chinese position

The election of President Biden is a godsend for China, which has not yet emerged from underdevelopment. It hopes to play with the easy money tastes of the US ultra-billionaires to build new factories, at their own expense, in the interior of the country.

China knows that this will be for a certain time. Indeed, as it develops, its workers are better and better trained and cost more and more. Already those who live on the coast of the China Sea are on an equal footing with the American workers. So they can no longer work for the foreign market and are turning to the now solvent domestic market.

China is therefore already protecting the developed part of the country from possible relocations. It is forcing all Western companies to act through joint ventures half owned by Chinese nationals. Moreover, it has introduced the presence of a Party representative on each board of directors of these companies, so that they never pursue an anti-national strategy.

Eventually, it is preparing to dismiss foreign investors and to flood their own market. But this time on its own behalf.

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