Obama and Hilary in Asia to counter Chinese ascendancy with US chutzpa

US president Barack Obama made a few Asian stop offs on the way to the G20 meeting in Seoul South Korea. He wooed the Indians and supported India getting a permanent seat on the UN Security Council then headed off to Indonesia which is considered the world’s third largest democracy and is one of the fastest growing “emerging” economies in Asia. I italicize emerging to bring attention to the fact that these countries are always emerging from something. Developing was the favored term not so long ago and I assume emerging is a step above that level but they never seem to fully develop and I am not convinced they will fully emerge either.

The purpose of the visit is to counter the growing influence of China in the region. Obama had a little dig at the Chinese for their massive surpluses and “intervening” in the currency markets to maintain these surpluses. It’s just not cricket. When the US was more a surplus power rather than a deficit one it didn’t seem to mind so much.

Anyway, Obama wants to counter Chinese influence in Asia and Indonesia is an important economy that warrants attention. Obama felt the need to educate the Asians capitalists on economic etiquette pointing out that China’s rising prosperity should be within certain boundaries, and that, “We do want to make sure that everybody is operating with an international framework and set of rules in which countries recognize responsibility to each other.” Makes you laugh doesn't it.


The Financial Times reports that Indonesia does not seem concerned about China’s growing power, as it has only benefited from the rise of the Chinese economy. The problem for US capitalism is that Indonesia’s trade with China has overtaken its trade with the US, growing two times faster between 2005 and 2009. This year China and Indonesia traded 44% more goods than a year ago $7 billion more than the US did.

So the representative of US capitalism lectures the new rising stars of the former colonial world that its leading star should make sure it acts responsibly and obeys the rules. As he says this,  Obama announces to the media that, “We are number three in terms of trade volume and investment and I informed him (Indonesia’s President) we don’t like being number three, we want to be number one.”

Fair enough, but so do the Chinese.

US China relations can only worsen. We are all too familiar with the encroachment of China on what has been the US and European imperialism’s field of operations but its influence in Asia comes a little easier. The day before Obama arrived in Indonesia, China promised to invest $6 billion on Indonesian infrastructure projects and last week agreed to lend Cambodia’s largest mobile phone company a half a billion dollars. This is serious stuff and will lead to some nastiness.The US, on the other hand, needs to borrow more money from China to fix its infrastructure.

Behind all the diplomatic language and hypocritical niceties, like saying someone is being disingenuous instead of lying like workers do, the Chinese and all the leaders of the underdeveloped world must think their US rivals have some neck or chutzpa, or nerve, whatever we want to call it. When has the US or British capitalist class ever concerned themselves with rules or thought about their responsibility to others; In the Congo? In India perhaps? Or maybe the US was being concerned about others in Vietnam or when it invaded Iraq and drove a million refugees in to Syria. Perhaps the British capitalists were concerned about others when they massacred Kikuyu. Oh, and lets not forget the Boxer rebellions.  What rules other than the market existed when the British were importing Opium in to China and distributing it.

The US capitalists are worried about China and rightly so, they are losing their dominant position in the world. The US has “peaked” as a world power as one bourgeois commentator put it. It’s happens to all of ‘em. If they are worried about Indonesia, imagine what will happen when the Chinese are building roads in Haiti, a country that must not be allowed to develop from US imperialism’s point of view. Venezuela is bad enough.

But surely the Chinese must be both disgusted while also having a chuckle to themselves as well. They had to listen to Hilary Clinton telling the Australians during her visit there (they’re really scared having both of them out there at the same time badmouthing the Chinese) that it is “Important China abide by international rules as it become more powerful and that is acts as ‘a responsible member of the international community’” (FT 11-10-10) It’s hard for me to quote her without feeling disgusted.

The Chinese must have to call on all their so called Asian manners to not want to have a go at both of these two publicly, but they are no fools either. One advantage the Chinese bureaucracy has over the representatives of US capitalism is that they have read Marx on economics and they have had the experience of western Imperialism. They are just as ruthless we know that.

As I wrote earlier this week, surely there would have been World War Three by now were it not for nuclear weapons.  But tensions can only mount.  We live in a world economy that transcends the boundaries of nation states, something that is an objective reality beyond the control of individual nations.

Our only way forward in this situation is a world federation of socialist states that produces not for competition and profit, but for the needs of society, a global society where everyone can live a decent life.  The material resources are present for such a development.  You can say this is utopian but the alternative is no future and an end to life as we know it.