by Mick Kelly

The United States is on a collision course with socialist China. People’s China is promoting and pursuing peace while Washington, DC is encouraging separatism in the province of Taiwan. The U.S. has embarked on a unprecedented arms buildup that the Pentagon says is aimed at Bejing, and measures to decouple or delink the two economies, accompanied by President Trump’s inflationary tariffs on China, are another aspect of the preparations for war. 

No matter how strange it might seem, scholarly international relations journals—for example, Foreign Affairs—regularly carry articles about a coming U.S. war with the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and debate issues like whether this war will be long or short in duration, or what sort of weapons systems will be deployed. The planners of wars take themselves seriously; advocates of peace and progress must do so as well.

The Decline of the U.S. Empire

In our rapidly changing world, People’s China is ascending, and the United States is being left behind. In the post-World War II era, a period when the U.S. was able to dictate many of the rules for global trade and commerce, the U.S. had about 50% of the world’s GDP. Today, it accounts for only one quarter of the world’s GDP. The U.S. share of world trade has also decreased, by about 40% since 1970. 

A plurality of the world’s steel was once produced in the U.S., and in 1955, it dominated about 40% of the world market. By 2019 the U.S. had become one of the largest steel importers, only producing about 5% of the world’s steel. The same pattern can be shown in industry after industry, be it automobiles, electronic devices, or other manufacturing. 

China’s rapid development is a great contrast to the deteriorating economic position of the U.S. Using the measure of purchasing power parity, which allows a comparison of which commodities and services can be purchased with a given currency, the World Bank concluded that the Chinese economy was 23% larger than the U.S. economy in 2022. 

Directly linked to the decay of U.S. monopoly capitalism is the abandonment by successive administrations of the economic architecture that was created by Wall Street in the aftermath of World War II. The World Trade Organization is paralyzed due to the refusal by both the Biden and Trump Administrations to allow judges to be appointed to the international institution’s dispute resolution mechanism. U.S. policymakers invested immense amounts of time and treasure to create the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and then in 2016 withdrew from the free trade project shortly before Congressional consideration. The U.S. long-term commitment to the International Monetary Fund and World Bank is now shrouded by uncertainty, as foreign policy pundits lament the “post-American world.” 

The bellicose war threats from Washington are a sign of weakness, not strength. The U.S. departure from multilateral institutions and the construction of a tariff regime unseen since the 1930 Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act will bring about a fragmentation of the world economy, sharpen the rivalry between economic blocs, particularly between the U.S. and Europe, and take the U.S. on a course towards war in the Pacific. In the long run, politics always follow economics; less economic power translates into less political power. 

“Decoupling” from China

For the last decade, the Biden and Trump Administrations have imposed excessive tariffs on goods made in China. Promoting himself as the “tariff man,” Trump has vacillated on his proposed tariff rates, but at times they have been high enough to amount to a trade embargo on China. While the trade and industrial policies of Trump and Biden differ, they have a important point in common—to “decouple” or “delink” the U.S. and Chinese economies. 

Trump says that this will lead to a resurgence of U.S. manufacturing and generate well-paying manufacturing jobs. This will not happen. Tariffs are in essence a tax on consumers, and workers take the brunt of the blow. Much of the job losses in recent decades can be attributed to technology, and the utilization of advanced productive forces in the U.S. will lead to additional job losses in industries such as automobile production or steel. Putting impoverishment and a potential rise in unemployment aside, the Trump administration is determined to push ahead with decoupling, even at a high cost—for example, the tariffs on China have decreased the demand for U.S. agricultural products, thus causing a downturn in the production of farm equipment. 

The process of economic decoupling is designed to hurt China, but the U.S. is likely to be hurt more. China exports more goods to more places that the U.S. does, so it has the advantage of diversification, and it has pulled ahead in many branches of industry, especially with respect to green technology. Delinking from China does not make sense as a program of economic development. At best, it is a way to manage U.S. decline. 

Looking Back at U.S.-China Relations

From the victory of the Chinese revolution in 1949 until the early 1970s, U.S. foreign policy towards China was extremely hostile. Then came “ping pong diplomacy”, and in 1972, both counties signed the Shanghai Communiqué agreeing that “all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China.” This One China principle was reaffirmed when Wahington recognized Beijing in 1979 and formal diplomatic relations were established. 

In the following decades, the U.S. followed the strategy of “peaceful evolution”, the theory that by using political, economic, and cultural ties, it would be possible to foster forces in China antithetical to socialism, capitalism would prevail, and a Western-style government would be established. The application of this strategy was played out in the late 1980s when the U.S. did everything it could to encourage turmoil in China and the other socialist countries. In China, however, socialism continued to not only survive, but to thrive, creating incredible social achievements such as the elimination of extreme poverty. 

With Trump’s election in 2016, the Cold War rhetoric, which had been part of the foreign policy background noise, came to the fore. This hostility towards China was open and raw, a toxic brew of national chauvinism combined with anti-Asian racism—for example, how of Covid was frequently called the “China virus” in the U.S. The Trump and Biden Administrations returned to trying to weaken China and prepare for war. 

Preparations for War

In the Pentagon, real, concrete preparations for a war with China are underway. The Department of Defense budget for Fiscal Year 2026 is aimed at “[d]eterring China in the Indo-Pacific by prioritizing combat credible military forces and capabilities postured forward in the Western Pacific.” This is just part of the military encirclement of China; given that even the coastal city of Shanghai is well over 6,000 miles west of Los Angeles, it is evident that the U.S. is going a long way to pick a fight.

The political establishment and the Pentagon have multifaceted plans. The U.S. is trying to put together alliances—formal and informal—against China. Of note is the Philippines, where the U.S.-backed Marcos regime has enlisted in the coming war on China. American and Filipino troops train together and carry out counter-insurgency operations against the national democratic movement, and plans are underway to construct a huge ammunition-making facility at Subic Bay. 

The White House is looking to fund war-related manufacturing and expand naval capacity. Industrial policy will now have big money for submarines (a proposed $5 billion for the submarine industrial base), ship building, advanced aircraft, and munitions such as hypersonic missiles.

Finally, U.S. military bases, ships, and missile systems in the region are nothing less than the provocative encirclement of China. U.S. vessels violate Chinese territorial waters in the Taiwan Strait, and the Pentagon complains when military aircraft are confronted in the PRC Air Defense Identification Zone. All these things take place thousands of miles from the U.S. mainland. Fair-minded people might ask, who is it that really needs to be “deterred”? 

Taiwan Province 

Achieving reunification with Taiwan is the great unfinished business of the Chinese revolution. A part of China since ancient times, Taiwan was partially colonized by the Dutch in 1624. In 1662, the heroic Chinese General Zheng Chenggong led the fight to successfully drive out these invaders. 

In 1949, the defeated American puppet Chiang Kai-shek decamped from the mainland and fled to Taiwan, where he still claimed be the ruler of all of China. His backers in Washington stood in the path of Taiwan’s liberation and referred to Taiwan as their “unsinkable aircraft carrier.”

Though the U.S. now acknowledges that Taiwan is part of China and that there is only one China, it also encourages separatism. The Pentagon’s 2026 budget contains a proposal to send more weapons into Taiwan, and both Biden and Trump have contradicted the long-standing policy of “strategic ambiguity”, suggesting that the U.S. might intervene to block reunification. 

In his 2024 New Year’s speech, President Xi Jinping stated, “We Chinese on both sides of the Taiwan Strait belong to one and the same family. No one can ever sever the bond of kinship between us, and no one can ever stop China’s reunification, a trend of the times.” 

Reunification will happen. Those of us here in the U.S. who oppose imperialism and demand peace with justice must insist the Pentagon stays out of the way. 

China: Peace and Progress

Socialist China is a beacon of progress. Its existence demonstrates that socialism brings peace and prosperity, while the United States controls a declining empire that is continuously at war. The difference between the two roads these respective counties offer could not be starker. When U.S. warmongers talk about “modernizing” nuclear weapons, in the next breath they mention China. Progressives and revolutionaries in the United States must do everything in our power to stop them, and join with people around the world who want to do the same. 

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Mick Kelly is the political secretary of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization and editor of FightBack! News. He is a long-time labor and anti-war activist, and has written numerous articles on the international situation and the role of socialist China.