China rulers take steps to consolidate control in Asia – The Militant

....it has become clearer that rivalry between capitalist nation states in the age of imperialism is far more powerful than so-called globalization. Deglobalization is spreading worldwide.

In the 1990s, the U.S. rulers, blinded by the illusion that the implosion of the USSR and Eastern Europe meant they “had won the Cold War,” thought they had free rein to lord over a new boom for imperialist expansion and profit. The 2008 financial panic sharply revealed how wrong they were.

Instead of becoming a new, giant state, the European Union is being torn apart. The U.K. has headed out, and other capitalist rulers who have suffered at the dictates of Berlin and Paris, the two strongest European powers, are considering similar moves. “Emerging” nations — from Brazil to India and Russia — have yet to emerge.

And so-called worldwide organizations — from the United Nations to the World Trade Organization — have less and less to say about relations between competing capitalist ruling classes.

In this framework, both Washington and Beijing have reached a new trade deal that lifted the recent series of tit-for-tat tariffs.

For decades the Chinese rulers drove a huge wave of industrialization that drew hundreds of millions of peasants into mushrooming cities. The bureaucratic state acted to police the proletarian workforce intensely exploited by foreign and native capital in the factories. It presided over explosive capitalist growth as imperialist bosses set up shop to take advantage of cheap labor. In return for access to a burgeoning mass market, foreign investors were forced to allow Chinese access to advanced technology.

Now the Chinese rulers are poised to take another step.

Full article

China rulers take steps to consolidate control in Asia – The Militant