If the Bush administration hoped that, by sending a high-level delegation to Beijing, it could recapture a good part of the relationship it had with China in earlier years, the trip proved to be a howling blunder from beginning to end.
The deliberate attempts to keep it secret, when there was no reason to do so, boomeranged, especially when the White House made the announcement at 2 a.m. on the morning of Dec. 9 to a press corps which was awaiting some spectacular China development. As it turned out, the mission of national security adviser Brent Scowcroft and Deputy Secretary of State Laurence Eagleburger produced nothing of real value to U.S. finance capital.
The Bush administration should have known that what Kissinger himself could not do with his earlier mission to China, his subordinates from the same fraternity, the Rockefeller-controlled Council on Foreign Relations, could not possibly do. Especially since Nixon himself had already tried, with perhaps even greater effort.
What caused them to suddenly believe they could really restore the old relationship, which so heavily favored imperialist penetration and slow and gradual political counterrevolution in China? Obviously, some in the White House were so enthralled with their apparent diplomatic gains at the Bush-Gorbachev Malta conference that they thought China might be ripe for the "new thinking" so well advertised by the Gorbachev administration.
Forgotten in all this was that the People's Republic of China has made a fundamental reorientation, not only of its political course at home, but even more significantly of the direction of its economic system — a virtual revolution in itself.
It would seem as though all this was forgotten in Washington in the euphoria over their gains at the Malta conference. But, as the New York Times ruefully admitted in its editorial of Dec. 12, every day brings new evidence that China is continuing to deepen its socialist course. No diplomatic ploy on the part of the U.S. can change that.
After having fomented and promoted economic and financial penetration of China, and finally the emergence of a violent counterrevolution, Washington now sends a delegation with a straight face asking to resume the old friendly relationship! That's adding insult to injury.
The polite and diplomatic manner in which the Chinese leadership greeted the U.S. delegation does not in any way diminish what is said above. China needs and has always wanted to increase its trade and commercial ties, not only with U.S. imperialism, but with the other capitalist countries and the world at large in order to accelerate the development of its vast resources and population. This should be taken as the normal course of business, which for more than 30 years the U.S. boycotted, attempting to isolate China in order to support the defeated and discredited remnants of the Chiang Kai-shek regime in Taiwan. The U.S. still clings to the Chinese province of Taiwan as its military outpost, continuing to arm it, feed it economically and prop it up politically.
The explanation that the Scowcroft-Eagleburger mission was going to China to brief them on the substance of Bush's discussions with Gorbachev, on the assumption that China is a strategic ally of the U.S., was simply too ridiculous. "Why call us a strategic ally if you have now consummated a strategic alliance with our supposed adversary?" the Chinese leaders might well have asked. Obviously, the Scowcroft-Eagleburger missionaries thought that by rekindling some of the old fires of earlier Sino-Soviet struggles, they would regain some of the old leverage. It didn't work.
The term strategic was barely referred to during the meeting by either delegation. It was all friendly and even cordial, and all the diplomatic niceties were carried out, but so far as any restoration of the old relationship, it was a complete flop.
That's why the anger in Congress at the mission. Of course, their public posture was that they were outraged because the administration was dealing with China and had forgotten its so-called human rights mission. This was in line with the Times editorial, which referred to the Chinese leadership as "the butchers of Beijing."
All this anger in the halls of Congress, especially from the Democratic side, and from the capitalist press, however, comes more because of disappointment at their inability to regain some of the old foothold. All those who are weeping over the lives lost in Tiananmen Square have not been so conspicuous in demonstrating their concern over the spilling of blood in El Salvador, in the Philippines, in South Africa, and in the phony drug war which imperialist high finance is conducting at home.
Even though the Gorbachev administration had taken steps earlier to normalize relations with China following bitter years of conflict, the Soviet side lost the opportunity to send a high-level delegation to Beijing before the Malta conference and brief a fraternal socialist ally on the agenda at the meeting.
That would have been an act of solidarity, of socialist fraternity, and would have reversed the course set in motion by Khrushchev when he first embarked upon personal summitry during the Eisenhower administration and disregarded what then was a solid socialist alliance, codified in the Sino-Soviet treaty of 1950. That treaty meant a lot in terms of socialist internationalism.
Following the victory of the Chinese Revolution, the People's Republic of China demanded that it occupy the seat held by Chiang Kai-shek in the Security Council and that the Chiang mercenaries be ousted from the UN. When U.S. opposition prevented the recognition of the PRC, the Soviet Union went to the extent of boycotting the UN altogether for a period of time.
One would hope that, notwithstanding the reaction that has enveloped the USSR and Eastern Europe, fraternal socialist solidarity will be renewed and reinforced between these two great socialist states that represent a tremendous portion of the world's people.
Last updated: 23 March 2018