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Movement toward war with China accelerates. The public, focused on troubles currently upending U.S. politics, does not pay much attention to a war on the way for decades. The watershed moment came in 1949 with the victory of China’s socialist revolution. Amid resurgent anticommunism in the United States, accusations flourished of “Who “lost” China.”

Loss in U.S. eyes was in China the dawning of national independence and promise of social change. In 1946, a year after the Japanese war ended, U.S. Marines, allied with Chinese Nationalist forces, the Kuomintang, were fighting the People’s Liberation Army in Northeast China.

The U.S. government that year was delaying the return home of troops who fought against Japan. Soldier Erwin Marquit, participant in “mutinies” opposing the delay, explained that the U.S. wanted to “keep open the option of intervention by U.S. troops … [to support] the determination of imperialist powers to hold on to their colonies and neocolonies,” China being one of these.

These modest intrusions previewed a long era of not-always muted hostility and, eventually, trade relations based on mutual advantage. The defeated Kuomintang and their leader, the opportunistic General Chiang Kai-shek, had decamped to Taiwan, an island China’s government views as a “breakaway province.”

Armed conflict in 1954 and 1958 over small Nationalist-held islands in the Taiwan Strait prompted U.S. military backing for the Nationalist government that in 1958 included the threat of nuclear weapons.

Preparations

U.S. allies in the Western Pacific – Japan and South Korea in the North, Australia and Indonesia in the South, and The Philippines and various islands in between – have long hosted U.S. military installations and/or troop deployments. Nuclear-capable planes and vessels are at the ready. U.S. naval and air force units regularly carry out joint training exercises with the militaries of other nations.

The late journalist and documentarian John Pilger in 2016 commented on evolving U.S. strategies:

“When the United States, the world’s biggest military power, decided that China, the second largest economic power, was a threat to its imperial dominance, two-thirds of US naval forces were transferred to Asia and the Pacific. This was the ‘pivot to Asia’, announced by President Barack Obama in 2011. China, which in the space of a generation had risen from the chaos of Mao Zedong’s ‘Cultural Revolution’ to an economic prosperity that has seen more than 500 million people lifted out of poverty, was suddenly the United States’s new enemy…. [Presently] 400 American bases surround China with ships, missiles and troops.”

Analyst Ben Norton

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