American global hegemony continues its steady decline. The most striking recent case in point is the overt shift of Pakistan, long a U.S. client state, into China’s sphere of influence. The U.S., no longer able to supply its forces in Afghanistan through Pakistan, has no choice but to withdraw rapidly from that country. (The old Soviet supply route through Uzbekistan is inadequate on its own, and we know from Wikileaks that the U.S. asked China to allow a new route through Chinese territory but was refused.) Afghanistan will revert to its traditional status as a dependency of Pakistan, whose...
Read more »
Frank Dikötter, a historian who teaches at the University of Hong Kong, said he found that during the time that Mao was enforcing the Great Leap Forward in 1958, in an effort to catch up with the economy of the Western world, he was responsible for overseeing “one of the worst catastrophes the world has ever known”. Dikötter, who has been studying Chinese rural history from 1958 to 1962- The Great Leap Forward – explains that at least 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death in China over these four years. His book, Mao’s Great Famine;...
Read more »
The heroic and inspiring struggles of China’s working class will only lay the ground for new and improved exploitation methods – unless, that is, the struggle turns political – and socialist. “I do the same thing every day,” said one employee at the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, China, where more than ten workers have committed suicide. “I have no future.” Many, perhaps most, workers will know exactly how he feels. But to the bourgeois mind, it’s all an impenetrable puzzle. There was something criminally stupid and sickeningly idiotic about the reaction to the suicides of Terry Gou, the billionaire...
Read more »
China’s manufacturing contracted by the most on record last month as the global financial crisis cut demand for exports, a second survey showed. A government-backed survey released on Nov. 1 also showed a record contraction, adding to concern that the world’s fastest- growing economy may slump. With export orders falling because of the global slowdown and rising raw material and labor costs, more than 68,000 small companies nationwide collapsed in the first half of 2008 and about 2.5 million jobs in the Pearl River Delta region may be lost by the end of the year, according to government and...
Read more »
An interesting take-over battle is now taking place in the world mining industry. Towards the end of last year, BHP Billiton, the world’s largest mining company, made a bid to take over Rio Tinto, the world’s second largest mining company. According to the Times of London (5 February) a BHP-Rio merger “would create the world’s largest iron ore, aluminium and coal supplier . . . A merged BNP-Rio would control about 36 per cent of the world’s iron ore, which is used to make steel, and consolidate 75 per cent of that market in the hands of only two...
Read more »
