How the US aims to induce systemic change in China

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo laid bare America’s true geostrategic intentions towards China in the speech he gave last Thursday at the Nixon Library, and it’s worse than many skeptics suspected. The US doesn’t just want to “contain” China, but induce systemic change. The first is geopolitical and to an extent even economic, both of which are manageable, while the second relates to its target’s domestic affairs and changing its system of governance. In other words, the US is now directly threatening the Chinese people and all that they’ve built.

Quoting former President Richard Nixon who was responsible for the US’ rapprochement with China, Pompeo said that “Our goal should be to induce change.” This reveals that the US’ intentions all along weren’t to partner with the People’s Republic for mutually beneficial geopolitical and economic reasons, but for purely self-interested long-term interests related to transforming the entire country from the inside-out. As is now known from the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Libya for example, US-backed systemic changes are neoliberal divide-and-rule disasters.

Reaffirming such a goal as the core of American policy towards China isn’t just unprecedentedly aggressive, but also shamelessly hypocritical since it embodies everything that Pompeo accuses his counterparts of supposedly wanting to do worldwide. He spent a great deal of his speech ranting about how the Communist Party of China (CPC) allegedly wants to transform the world according to the party’s ideological vision, but in reality, it’s actually the US that wants to transform China against its will instead.

In pursuit of this pernicious policy, Pompeo proposed “a new alliance of democracies”, which isn’t anything new in theory since such an idea was previously bandied about since the turn of the century but takes on an urgent impetus in the context of what an increasing number of observers are referring to as the “new cold war”. He even said that “I think the sides, the division – the shirts and skins, if you will – is between freedom and tyranny. I think that’s the decision that we’re asking each of these nations to make.”

Much has been said in recent months about the scenario of the so-called “Quad” transforming into the US’ geopolitical instrument for “containing” China, and those predictions ominously seem to have been very accurate in hindsight considering what Pompeo just proposed. Even so, that’s only part of the threat that the US is making towards China since its grand strategic goal is to “induce (systemic) change”, or in other words, not just overthrow the Chinese government and install a puppet regime, but to get rid of its communist system.

He fearmongered that “If the free world doesn’t change, communist China will surely change us...Securing our freedoms from the Chinese Communist Party is the mission of our time.” In reality, however, it’s the US that wants to change China by taking away the economic freedoms that its people enjoy under the CPC and which are responsible for the most rapid improvement of living standards in human history. Basically, the US is doing exactly what it accuses China of, which isn’t new since that’s it’s modus operandi nowadays.

Judging from the Yugoslav, Iraqi, and Libyan precedents among many others, the American vision for China is of an internally divided, economically destitute, and politically weak country that functions as a regional puppet state if it even continues to function at all. Considering that this dark scenario concerns the lives of a whopping 1.3 billion people or nearly a fifth of humanity, it can accurately be described as a global threat intended to aggressively impose American hegemony on the rest of the planet by seizing control of its means of production.

China is fondly referred to by many as “the world’s factory”, but it’s one in which most means of production are owned by society per the country’s communist system. Thus far, this has worked out to the world’s benefit and was responsible for globalisation, which swept the world after the old Cold War and lifted billions of people out of poverty. It also laid the basis for the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) that’s going to complete that process in the “Global South”, yet the US wants to reverse all of those gains so as to remain the world’s sole superpower, but it can only do so by aggressively “inducing (systemic) change” within China and seizing control of its economy.