Pelosi’s Trip to Taiwan—Beating the Drums of War

Aug 15, 2022

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan despite the Chinese government’s warning that such a trip would be seen as an act of aggression against China. The Chinese government claims Taiwan is part of China. After Pelosi left Taiwan, the Chinese government responded to her trip by staging a series of military exercises in the seas around Taiwan.

It is not clear whether or not the Biden administration, behind the scenes, encouraged Pelosi’s trip. What is clear is that this trip was seen by China as a deliberate provocation by a leader of the U.S. government. What is clear is that her trip continued a policy by the U.S. government of open hostility toward China.

This hostility started after the Chinese Revolution of 1949. Up until that revolution, the Chinese economy had been controlled and dominated by the leading imperialist nations, including the U.S. The Chinese revolution, fought and supported by the population and led by Mao Tse-tung, threw out the nationalist regime that was supported by the U.S. government. Under Mao, a new Chinese government attempted to give China some freedom from imperialist control and a chance to develop their own economy. This limited the ability of U.S. capitalists and the other imperialist powers to control the resources of China; it limited their ability to directly profit from the labor of Chinese workers.

The Chinese government, in recent years, has opened up more of their economy to Western investment. But U.S. capitalists still do not have a free hand to make maximum profits in China, like they do in most of the rest of the world. China, with its population of over 1.4 billion people, is a prize that U.S. capital would like to more fully exploit.

When the U.S. government denounces the Chinese dictatorship, that is only a smokescreen that they use to cover their real policy, which is to expand the interests of U.S. capitalists in China.

Sometimes this U.S. policy toward China has played out around the island of Taiwan, which is located just over 100 miles from the Chinese mainland. Taiwan is where the U.S.-supported nationalist government fled after they were thrown out by the 1949 revolution. Since then, the Taiwanese regime has been tied to and supported by U.S. imperialism. The U.S. government has used Taiwan as a pawn in its policy directed against China. The U.S. trains Taiwanese troops and supplies them with weapons. There are even some U.S. military personnel stationed in Taiwan.

When the U.S. government denounced China’s recent war exercises around Taiwan, that is pure hypocrisy because it is the U.S. which stages naval war exercises in the Pacific Ocean near China. U.S. navy warships regularly patrol the seas between Taiwan and China, which is a main shipping lane for some Chinese commerce. It is the U.S. which has naval and military bases in Japan, the Philippines, South Korea and Guam—countries which are surrounding China. It is the U.S. which has over 375,000 military troops and military personnel in the Asian Pacific region. All of these U.S. bases and U.S. forces pose a direct military threat against China.

And those who run this country are making a deliberate campaign to follow through on this threat. The two main political parties who serve the capitalist class of this country regularly denounce and demonize China. The capitalist-owned media, both liberal and conservative, regularly proclaim that China is an enemy of U.S. interests. Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan just added to the propaganda aimed at the U.S. population. Bit by bit, those who serve the capitalists are preparing the U.S. population for a possible war against China. They have to use propaganda on the population because such a war would not be in our interests.