Less than two months after the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, the latest in a string of U.S. military defeats since the Vietnam War, tensions with imperialist arch-rival China may be simmering to a boil. Over five days in October, China conducted 150 warplane sorties near Taiwan’s coast in the South China Sea, “an alarming escalation that coincided with China’s National Day celebrations” (msn.com, 10/13). For the finance capital main wing of the U.S. ruling class, military conflict with China appears to be just a matter of time—and the time may be sooner than later.
President Joe Biden is doubling down on the “great-power competition” declared by predecessor Donald Trump. As Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said in March, only China has the economic and military might to “challenge” the U.S. China already leads the world in critical technologies, from telecommunications to artificial intelligence (robeco.com, 5/10). It has the world’s largest navy and by far the most active military troops. “[G]reat powers are simply unwilling to let other great powers grow stronger at their expense,” noted the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, the liberal U.S. rulers’ top foreign policy journal. “Cold War II is already here….China is likely to be a more powerful competitor than the Soviet Union was in its prime. And this cold war is more likely to turn hot” (foreignaffairs.com, November-December).
As the U.S. empire teeters and China’s bosses turn to intensified nationalism to deflect the mass anger of exploited workers, the chances of an armed clash—whether planned or by miscalculation—are greater than ever. As Blinken acknowledged, “Our relationship with China will be competitive when it should be, collaborative when it can be, and adversarial when it must be” (reuters.com, 3/3).
Only a new mass force of communist-led workers, organized from New York to Shanghai and beyond, can drive the profit-driven warmakers from power.  Only communist revolution can move forward from these dark times to smash the borders that divide our class.  
Taiwan: caught in imperialist crosshairs
Since the 1950s, Taiwan has stood as an outpost of U.S. liberal democracy in China’s backyard—and an obstacle to China’s regional dominance. Today the stakes are higher than ever. The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company is the world leader for microchips, “the building blocks of the 21st-century digital economy” (New York Times, 10/20). Biden’s administration recently reaffirmed its commitment to an independent Taiwan as “rock-solid” (Reuters, 10/6). In June, with the bipartisan U.S. Innovation and Competition Act, the U.S. Senate “controversially” called for treating Taiwan “as a sovereign state of ‘vital’ strategic importance” (Foreign Affairs, November-December).
In a related move, Biden spurned French imperialist allies by displacing them in a huge nuclear submarine deal with Australia.  U.S. imperialism hadn’t shared offensive nuclear power on this scale since 1958 (NYT, 10/17), signaling a more aggressive posture toward Chinese imperialism in the Pacific (see map).  
Is China ready to be top imperialist?
In the twenty-five years since the 1996 crisis, Chinese imperialists have squeezed the working class to direct huge flows of capital into a frenzy of arms deployment.  China spends about $200 billion a year on its military, up 800 percent over the last 30 years (statista.com, 6/21). According to Politico, “…the U.S. military is on track to be outgunned [by China] — potentially in quantity and quality of armaments — by the end of President Joe Biden’s first term” (5/21).  “I worry that they are accelerating their ambitions to supplant the United States,” Admiral Philip S. Davidson, the retiring commander of the Indo-Pacific Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in March. “Taiwan is clearly one of their ambitions before then, and I think the threat is manifest during this decade; in fact, in the next six years” (NYT, 10/12).  
Although both China and the U.S. have been cautious to avoid direct military confrontations thus far, Taiwan is a wild card.  The brutal move by China’s ruling capitalist “Communist” Party  to absorb Hong Kong has been well-received by workers in China. An attack to take Taiwan could divert workers’ attention from slowing economic growth and a troubled housing market, where giant developers like Evergrande are collapsing from debt.
Since the 1990s, as capitalism has taken deeper root in China, workers have not forgotten class struggle. They’ve launched thousands of local campaigns targeting oppressive conditions and bosses.  Despite the Chinese bosses’ drive for nationalism, the legacy of communist ideas is still alive in the Chinese working class.    
U.S. ruling class bumbling toward war
Chinese imperialism has been given a huge opening by repeated blunders by the U.S. bosses, from the failed “War on Terror” and the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan, to the 2008 global economic collapse, to the botched response to Covid-19 and the deep split in the ruling class itself.
The segregationist, kkkop-backing Biden-Harris team was supposed to be save the empire after the disastrous Trump years.  The purging of the names of open racists from military bases reflects the liberal bosses’ understanding that a fighting force built on white nationalism can’t win future wars.  A global conflict with China will require a draft that draws on the entire U.S. population, not just the white working class. The bosses need more Black and Latin officers to lead Black and Latin troops to their deaths.  
As the threat from China grows, the political battle between the liberal fascists of finance capital and the more open fascists fronted by Trump continues unchecked.  The liberal Big Fascists can’t afford to lose the White House in 2024 to a white nationalist candidate. But their eroding power to shape events makes the world situation even more volatile.  
Opportunities and dangers in the dark night
From the great Soviet and Chinese communist revolutions to the inspirational victory of communist masses in Vietnam, the international working class has proven that it’s possible to defeat the forces of imperialism. But to many workers today, it may feel impossible to end racist police murder, or abolish the mass murder of poverty, or stop the sexism that makes women fearful of walking down streets at night. It may feel impossible to stop U.S. and Chinese imperialists from going to war over Taiwan—or to halt a runaway climate disaster.  
Workers of the world: Do not despair!  Our class has the ability to dethrone the imperialist warmakers from Washington to Beijing and to banish the profit motive. The road to revolution is not a peaceful road or an easy road.  But it is our historical task to smash the bosses’ rotten nationalism, racism, sexism, and individualism with our super-power: internationalist working-class consciousness.  We have a whole, wide world—a communist world—to win.