The United States announced this week that it would press charges against five Chinese military officials for cyber spying. Claiming these five officers had hacked into U.S.-owned nuclear, metal and solar companies’ databases, the U.S. foreign policy establishment made history by pressing the first charges of cyber espionage.
This is the latest in the United States’ protracted smear campaign against the Chinese government. It comes out of the long-standing discussion on the so-called Asia Pivot, or the U.S. military’s effort to rebalance its strategic posture to focus on East Asia.
The very idea of an Asia Pivot is a symptom of imperialism: why else does the United States station so many troops in Asia? What do most people in the United States gain by having troops there in the first place?
Anyone even vaguely familiar with the history of these troop deployments understands that they are there to counterbalance other imperialist powers and to quell national liberation movements. The Pentagon and their friends in the White House make no pretenses about the U.S. troop presence in South Korea serving as a threat against North Korea and China.
These accusations of cyber espionage are part of the same effort to maintain U.S. global military and political dominance.
Who is the real cyber spy?
This agenda is clearest in light of the revelations regarding National Security Agency global wiretapping. Last week, the Washington Post, the New York Times and several other news sources revealed the NSA’s MYSTIC program which monitors every single phone call made in several foreign countries. This comes as part of a series of revelations of the agency’s unwarranted meta-data collection in the United States and U.S. monitoring of the calls of German President Angela Merkel and other high-profile international leaders.
This new chapter in the NSA mass surveillance scandal shows the United States’ foreign policy in its true colors. It is perfectly willing to comprehensively spy on entire countries and to station hundreds of thousands of troops abroad, but deems it completely unacceptable for other countries to collect any information whatsoever. The United States can spy indiscriminately; every other country cannot do even limited research into private corporations in the United States.
This foreign policy double-standard is the essence of imperialist foreign policy. Like the Asia-Pivot, its logic is “anything and everything for the United States.” The People’s Republic of China does not pose a threat to the people of the United States. The Chinese government does not threateningly station troops in neighboring states nor indiscriminately wiretap whole populations abroad. It is not the Chinese but the U.S. government which chronically bullies the peoples of the world. It is not the Chinese but the U.S. government that has been shown time and time again to be the enemy of poor and working people not just in the United States but around the world.
