It’s not China — it’s the Chinese Communist Party

Hello this is Darrell Castle with today’s Castle Report. Today I will be talking about China from the perspective of what all the recent “news” is about. As you may guess I have my own views on the subject. These views I will endeavor to share with you today. My intention was to talk about issue number one. Which of course is the killing of George Floyd and its aftermath. But I have gained little if any traction with my own views on the subject. So I proceed to issue number two, which is China. Perhaps I can share my views on Mr. Floyd and the aftermath of his death at some other point.

Don’t conflate China with its government

What is going on between China and the United States right now amounts to the result of an unwritten but spoken agreement that started in what seems like ancient history now. Before I get to that let me pause for a moment. When we say China did this or that, we are making a serious mistake. The rest of the world, especially in places like China and the Middle East, believe that the United States is a self-governing country. We elect our leaders, they presume, so when our leaders do something, they conclude that America did it. In their minds we are responsible for the acts of our government because we can vote.

The Chinese do not vote

We Americans often do the same thing with China. Let me give you this example. In a fund raising letter I received from a congressman in Michigan who is also a retired army general:¹

It is irrefutable that China is responsible for the unchecked spread of the Corona Virus. They need to be held responsible for the havoc they have caused to our nation.

I don’t dispute the veracity of what the general said, but when he says China is responsible, I disagree.

China and its despotic government

China consists of about 1.5 billion people. Probably no more than about 500 of them had anything to do with the virus. Most of the 500, and that number is just a guess, are members of the National People’s Congress. This is the ruling body of the Chinese Communist Party. It would be more accurate and less inflammatory to say the Chinese Communist Party is responsible for the unchecked spread of the coronavirus. We would then have a better, and clearer picture of where to put the blame.

The Chinese government has a big advantage in these things because it is completely despotic. There are no meaningful elections and the Communist Party selects its own leaders and membership. Any leader anywhere in China from village mayor to Party Chief is a member of the Communist Party. One is either a member or he does not survive very long.

China and America – a long and not always pleasant history

During World War ll China and the United States fought as allies against the invading Japanese. The Chinese people suffered horribly under Japanese domination, a great deal because of their help for American military forces. Since the end of that war the United States has been in at least a cold war with the stated aims of Global Communism.

Keep in mind: neither the Chinese people or the Chinese Government have ever tried an invasion of the United States. But Washington has had its military inside China and killing Chinese people beginning in 1856. I recommend three movies that deal with this subject. All involve characters acting on behalf of Washington, through its military. And all end up wandering why am I here and what am I doing. The three movies are:

• The Sand Pebbles with Steve McQueen,
• 55 Days at Peking, with Charlton Heston, and
• The Bridges at Toko-Ri with William Holden.²

History of the present conflict

The growing conflict with the Chinese Government has a long history. One can couch that in terms of being involved everywhere in the world under the belief that you have a right to be so involved. From the Communist side, the revolutionaries under Mao spent the years 1966 to 1976 trying to destroy capitalism and sweep it from China. But it was capitalism that made the Chinese economic miracle possible. So I suppose if you can’t beat them join them.

The China sea…

Right now, the physical conflict centers around control of the waters off the Chinese coast. The Yellow Sea between northern China and the West Coast of the Korean Peninsula runs south to the East China Sea and continues south to the South China Sea west of Taiwan and south of Hong Kong. You may have wondered why everyone calls it the China Sea. Well, I suppose the Chinese are pretty sure they have the answer. It’s probably a similar answer to the question the Iranians have for why the Gulf that contains the US Fifth Fleet has the name Persian Gulf.

…and its islands

The China Seas contain hundreds of small islands that for the most part are uninhabited. The Chinese Government has begun building military installations on several islands. This included airstrips for their most advanced fighter aircraft. Several nations in the area claim those islands as their own. They at least have some legal, under international law, claim to them for navigation and fishing rights. Those nations include the Philippines, Taiwan, South Korea, Vietnam, and Malaysia, among others. Notice that the United States is missing from that list.

The American claim: freedom of the seas

The claim of the United States is not about territory but its obligation as the world’s premier naval power. Which is to keep the sea lanes open for trade and international commerce. The US also has alliances with the other nations that bear mention. Periodically the US Navy sends a fast destroyer through the channel just to let them know that the US will not accept Chinese ownership. A US carrier battle group is always patrolling just East of the islands in deep water. These events make confrontation and conflict to some degree, inevitable.

The China trade – an illusory benefit

The rest of the story is about trade. For that we must return to my second paragraph where I left the story with:

1. The rise of communism in China, and after that
2. The US-Chinese war in Korea.

The Chinese Government was very interested in taking the country and its billion plus people into the modern world and the 20^th century. When Richard Nixon became President, he nominated Henry Kissinger as his Secretary of State. Kissinger was and still is perhaps the world’s leading globalist. Much to the chagrin of his conservative hard line supporters, off went Nixon and Kissinger to China to open that country up to trade with the west.

Cheap labor

Now, I ask you, what did China have in the early 1970’s that was desirable to the west? Only one thing and that was a very cheap labor force of over a billion people. The Communists in China have always been a little nervous about the prospect of a couple of hundred million hungry, unemployed Chinese workers descending on the capitol with their pitch forks and axes. Kissinger and Nixon were able to offer them a way to prevent that long term, and they accepted the offer. To a large extent that deal still exists today and it has prevented conflict for almost 50 years. It is also at least partially responsible for the economic demise of the United States.

The golden age of American labor…

The background of all this was that it began during the golden age of the American middle-class worker. And it was also the demise of that golden age. Nixon, with Kissinger in his ear, had already ended the gold standard and set the US dollar free from any restraint which gave the administration the opportunity to spend without limits. US union labor had just reached its peak in those years and I was one of those workers. When I came home from the Marine Corps, I went to Michigan to work in a General Motors factory. There the union scale wages were many times what I could make in Tennessee.

…loses out to China and the CCP

That factory where I worked at 36^th Street in Grand Rapids Michigan was eventually shipped in its entirety to China. Cars continued to be made there, but with Chinese labor and then shipped back to the US. These Chinese cars weren’t any cheaper, just more profitable. The labor rate in China then was less than one dollar per hour. It was about ten dollars in a union plant. The United States has never recovered from this unholy relationship with the Chinese Communists.

Oh, I’m very familiar with the argument that many new modern high-tech jobs replaced the assembly line. But those are mostly white-collar high-tech jobs and not jobs for blue collar workers. The result was that the mainstream economy was and has been deprived of real investment, good jobs, and genuine wealth building capitalism by order of the federal government. That was and is the real effect of our deal with the Chinese Communists.

The process continues…

It was not just Nixon and Kissinger although they started it. Every President since has continued the process, except possibly Donald Trump. That is because the process has now run its course. A country finds it difficult to prosper when it intentionally guts its manufacturing core just to benefit a few at the very top and at the same time break the backs of the labor unions which strive for better lives for ordinary people. The people I worked with at Fisher-Body number two in Grand Rapids were in many ways the same people I saw in my Marine rifle platoon. They had good jobs for themselves and their families. But greed plus the opportunity for globalism to dominate robbed them of it.

…until now!

It all seems to be ending now, however. Suspicion is growing around the world, about the Chinese Communist Government and its goals of economic world prominence. These countries, led by the United States, not only opened their markets but shipped their factories to China. Thus they enriched the Communist Party and making possible the Chinese Miracle for their workers. To quote Chinese expert John Derbyshire;

The developed countries of North America, Western Europe, and Australasia are waking up to the fact that we have sold the Chinese Communist Party a whole lot of rope with a gift card attached saying “Please Hang Us.”

China dependency reveals itself

It appears now that these once industrialized nations are starting to grow tired of the relationship. So they are looking for ways out of it. The coronavirus³ revealed that the world depended on a communist government for all manufactured goods. This includes medicine necessary for the lives of their own citizens.Thatseems to have gotten some attention. The days of western governments helping Chinese Communists to consolidate power and spread economic dominance around the world at their own expense may be over. The coronavirus has swept away any illusions about what Chinese Communists really are.

China v. Hong Kong

The final item of dispute is Hong Kong. But although that is a dispute evolving out of what I have covered on this report it is another discussion for another day. Briefly though, the people of Hong Kong were promised 23 years ago when the British handed them over to the Chinese Communists that they would continue to enjoy British levels of social and economic freedom. The way the communists worded it was two systems one country. Well, it turns out that the promise was just another empty Communist lie. And now the people of Hong Kong clearly see it. They are in the streets demanding freedom or at least they were before the virus hit.

Time to bring manufacturing back home from China

Finally, folks, the Coronavirus and now the situation with Hong Kong have served to reveal the Chinese Communists for what they are, master liars. That doesn’t have to mean a bipolar world of constant conflict. But it should mean that we at least return to manufacturing our own products.⁴ I hope you have enjoyed this brief history moment.

At least that’s the way I see it.

Until next time folks,

This is Darrell Castle.

Editor’s Notes

1 This could be Rep. Jack Bergman (R-Mich.-1st). But Rep. Bergmann is a retired lieutenant general of Marines, not the Army.

2 This last film dealt not with any invasion of China per se but of the Korean Peninsula. At the time the Chinese likely considered Korea an extension of itself. In fact China and Japan had jockeyed for position in Korea ever since Japan’s own modernization. The CCP inherited the ambitions of the Chinese Empire in this context.

3 Tellingly, The Epoch Times has its own name for SARS-CoV-2: the CCP Virus. They blame the Chinese Communist Party for incubating and releasing it, if not necessarily for engineering it.

4 Your editor claims vindication for this earlier piece on how free trade is not free.

About the image

“Beijing, China” by sodai gomi is licensed under CC BY 2.0