2019 has been the defining year for how many Americans have come to view China. Amid the heatup of the U.S.-China cold war, the emergence of the U.S.-backed Hong Kong protests, and the subsequent vast escalations of anti-Chinese propaganda, people have taken diverging sides on the China issue. Some have seen through the U.S. empire’s propaganda about China, but most haven’t-and it appears that most anarchists are part of the latter group.
This anarchist trend towards anti-Chinese cold war demagoguery is seemingly paradoxical, since anarchists profess to hate the systems behind U.S. imperialism and state propaganda above all else. But it’s actually nothing new. In his 2003 essay on the priorities of those within the different parts of the political spectrum, Michael Parenti described how anarchists have supported imperialism when it’s helped advance their ideological narratives:
It wasn't the leftists or rightists who waged a war against Yugoslavia, with its repeated bombings of civilian populations and its military assistance to ex-Nazi Croatian and Muslim Bosnian separatists. It was that paragon of centrism Bill Clinton and all the centrists and moderate liberals who stood shoulder to shoulder with him and with NATO and the CIA (along with a gaggle of those anarchists and Trotskists I mentioned earlier who convinced themselves that the destruction of the Yugoslavian social democracy was a blow against Stalinist communism).
It’s appropriate that like was the case during Washington’s campaign to use “humanitarian” military action to conquer Yugoslavia through balkanization, anarchists are supporting the U.S.’ “humanitarian” efforts to destabilize and balkanize China. The CIA-backed National Endowment for Democracy’s operations to stir up violent unrest in Hong Kong are part of a U.S. subversion campaign within China which targets the entire country. In China’s Xinjiang province, the U.S. has been working to sow violent religious extremism among the region’s Uighur youth, which has resulted in a series of terrorist attacks. A network of U.S. propaganda outlets have been amplifying the dishonest claims of Falun Gong, a far-right religious cult that’s charged the Chinese government with organ harvesting. Washington’s economic warfare against China, global anti-China propaganda campaign, and military buildup against China and its allies represent the full scope of the war that Western imperialists are waging on China.
Anarchists may oppose imperialism in theory, but in practice many of them are supporting imperialism when it comes to China. Anarchist commentators and social media pundits have uniformly fallen in line behind the anti-Beijing protests in Hong Kong, and you can reliably find anarchists repeating anti-Chinese propaganda narratives like “Uighur concentration camps” and “Chinese organ harvesting” rather than challenging them. Reinforcing the narratives that make imperialist projects possible is the same as supporting those projects, and as leftists these anarchists must know this. So why have they chosen to side with the U.S. in the Washington/Beijing cold war?
One reason is that accusing China of atrocities and glorifying the Hong Kong protests are irresistibly satisfying for many anarchists. Anarchists have long had a fierce ideological rivalry with communists, one which has been fueled by the anarchist belief that all governmental authorities should be opposed. Anarchists who have this sectarian mindset are especially focused on attacking socialist states like China because they want an opportunity to tell the Marxist-Leninists: “I told you so. Your approach leads to oppression!” So when the Western media provides them with a series of dramatic narratives about China being “totalitarian” and Hong Kongers fighting for “freedom,” anarchists gladly go along with it.
Another reason is that in the United States, many of the people who are inclined towards anarchism have internalized a colonial worldview which treats anti-imperialist projects like the People’s Republic of China as innately inferior. This colonial chauvinism is apparent when anarchists and other anti-China strains attack not just China, but also Cuba, the DPRK, and the other socialist countries that have been built by historically colonized and largely nonwhite societies. The condemnation of China and these other nations as “Stalinist” is merely an excuse for those in colonial cultures to feel superior; as the anti-imperialist Jay Tharappel has assessed, “‘Anti-Stalinism’ is left-wing racism,” because it allows white First-World leftists to deride the achievements of nonwhite socialist movements.
The racial aspect of these anti-China sentiments are also apparent in the characterizations of China as “ethno-nationalist” or “Han supremacist”; making out an Asian culture to be as (or more) racist than the colonizing white cultures is a way of deflecting white guilt, and of painting the two sides in the U.S.-China conflict as moral equivalents.
The other reason why anarchists can rationalize going after China in this moment of escalating cold war tensions is that historically, Western anarchists have tended not to care about the geopolitical consequences of attacking a given country. Not only did many anarchists support the imperialist assault on Yugoslavia, but anarchists like Noam Chomsky have formulated disingenuous attacks against the USSR and other socialist states. More recently, the Syrian anarchist militias have effectively sided with imperialism by collaborating with the United States and opposing the Ba’ath socialist government of Bashar al-Assad, all while anarchists throughout the West have often sided with the imperialist narratives which vilify Assad’s government.
Anarchism exists because as the proletariat struggles against capitalism, some of the proletariat is naturally drawn towards utopian notions of what revolution means. Anarchism claims that in the fight for a post-capitalist society, we can immediately make the step of abolishing the state. This is a simplistic approach which lacks the scientific foundations of Marxism-Leninism, and which leads those who’ve embraced anarchism to pursue unconstructive or even counterproductive behavior.
Communism is the revolutionary approach that’s won vast sections of land from the imperialists, and that’s brought over a billion people under socialist governments. Under China’s increasingly powerful global leadership, it’s the force that’s carving out a new system of peace and equality amid the collapse of the U.S. empire and global capitalism. Thanks to communism, every year more people in China and the DPRK are seeing their living conditions improve as a result of strengthening social safety nets in these countries. And it’s because of the military and economic maneuverings of the Chinese Communist Party that Venezuela has been protected from U.S. invasion, Syria has been able to greatly rebuild after nine years of imperialist assaults, and U.S. imperialism has lost much of its grip over Africa and the Indo-Pacific.
As passionately as anarchists fight against the individual symptoms of capitalism and desire to take part in anti-capitalist civil disobedience, many of them aren’t going to be willing to support the creation of a proletarian workers state. I this not because I don’t desire unity with the anarchists in America, but because I see the hostility that they already have towards the core parts of what I stand for as a communist. The anarchists who’ve jumped on the anti-China bandwagon have taken a very definitive stance in our country’s current conflict between imperialism and anti-imperialism, one that aligns with the fascists, reactionaries and liberals who have led the charge against China.
If these anarchists have taken such a stance now, what kinds of stances will they take during the later stages of the class struggle?
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