#handsoffchina

Reported exclusively by the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) on Sunday, the claim immediately made headlines in major U.S. news outlets. However, its timing and source “only show the low credibility” of the report, analysts said, adding that the new hyping of an old topic is part of the U.S.’ political and information warfare with China.

Make no mistake: the situation in the U.S. is dangerous. Members of oppressed communities are dying. Millions of workers are living on the edge of disaster. But the workers and oppressed, the masses of the people, have not yet been heard from. The working class has the power to turn the situation around – not only to halt the fascist advance but to reverse the setbacks and expand people’s rights.

On April 26, in the “Washington Declaration,” the Biden administration announced that the U.S. would be docking nuclear-armed submarines in South Korea for the first time since the 1980s. The U.S. had withdrawn its open nuclear weapons from South Korea in 1992 with the “Joint Declaration of South and North Korea on the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” treaty. Although it was widely believed that the U.S. continued to secretly deploy nuclear weapons in Korea, this move by the Biden administration is a blatant violation of the denuclearization treaty.

The Pentagon has sent over 12,000 troops to the Philippines for the annual Balikatan (“shoulder-to-shoulder”) military exercises. Along with them are 5,400 Filipino forces.  These maneuvers ― the largest in their 30-year history ― are aimed at the People’s Republic of China.

In President Joe Biden’s 2023 State of the Union address on Feb. 7, there was one honest moment. Biden said, “I am a capitalist.” Well, he fudged a bit; he should have said, I am a capitalist and a servant to capitalism. But that’s a quibble. Behind all of the rhetoric of “leave nobody behind,” almost everyone — with the exception of the wealthiest 1%, including the arms dealers, big oil and gas, and, of course, the Pentagon — have been left behind.

“The U.S. and Japanese armed forces are rapidly integrating their command structure and scaling up combined operations as Washington, D.C., and its Asian allies prepare for a possible conflict with China such as a war over Taiwan, according to the top Marine Corps general in Japan,” the FT report states.

Filipinos and their supporters protested the Pentagon’s war buildup in the Philippines on Feb. 11 in New York City. People rallied at the Times Square military recruiting station on a busy Saturday night in the entertainment center. The rally was called by the International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines-U.S.; BAYAN USA; and the Malaya Movement USA.

The U.S. war strategy against the PRC has depended on provoking China to launch a quite justified but costly war to recover its Taiwan province. If the anti-independence KMT party takes power in Taiwan and reopens negotiations with the PRC, then the U.S. “defend independent Taiwan” strategy goes up in smoke. That is why the Biden administration is trying to find any pretext, even as absurd as a weather balloon, to spark a war with China before the current pro-independence regime in Taiwan is kicked out next year.