Chinese imperialism and the new Cold War

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“Think 1914 with nuclear weapons at the ready.” This is how Max Boot in the Washington Post described the possibility of a Taiwan war. The new Cold War being waged between two imperialist blocs, dominated by the U.S. and China respectively, has become the main driving force of global economic and political developments. It has slammed the process of capitalist globalisation into reverse and unleashed a military build-up not seen for half a century.

The horrific war in Ukraine is unlikely to be the last war in this dangerous new era. A war between the U.S. and China over Taiwan, which some commentators predict could break out within the next ten years, would threaten even greater horrors including the possible use of nuclear weapons.

Marxists identified and began to analyse the new Cold War a decade ago, as this book shows, while most mainstream capitalist commentators have only recently begun to recognise it as a fact. This is not a temporary historical aberration but rather the ‘new normal’ of global capitalism. Market-driven neoliberal globalisation is receding into the background while the increasingly state-driven power struggle between the two blocs moves centre stage. That is why it is characterised as a Cold War – a strategic conflict between two camps – rather than a more disconnected ‘multipolar’ contest.

Vincent Kolo writes for the Marxist website chinaworker.info, published by the China, Hong Kong and Taiwan section of International Socialist Alternative (ISA). This book is a selection of articles looking at Chinese capitalism’s foreign policy, its military ambitions and its strategic conflict with the world’s established hegemon, U.S. imperialism, as this has developed over the past decade.