If China invades us with tanks I will join the fight against them, but I doubt China intends to do that.
My Five-Point Egalitarian Take on the Possible Coming U.S. War With China
by John Spritzler
April 15, 2026
The first point to make about China is that China, just like the United States (and Russia and the other BRICS nations and Western nations and most if not all other nations today) is a dictatorship of the rich with an oppressive ruling class that treats the have-nots like dirt. I have written about how the United States ruling billionaire class treats the American have-nots like dirt here. And I invite you to read in some detail about how the Chinese ruling class (the Communist Party of China) treats the Chinese have-nots like dirt in this footnote1.
The second point is that the vast majority of the Chinese people—the Chinese have-nots—feel no hostility whatsoever to the vast majority of the American people—the American have-nots. Were the have-nots of the world in power instead of the oppressive rich, there would be no reason at all to fear a war of Chinese people against American people. I discuss why this is so in some detail in this footnote2.
The third point is that the reason some Americans fear a Chinese tank invasion is because the American ruling billionaire class has for many years now been doing and saying things to make Americans fear China as a frightening (I would say bogeyman) enemy. To understand the actual purpose of this warmongering, read here about why oppressors need to be at war with a bogeyman enemy.
The fourth point is that, even with the world being as it unfortunately is today with the rich in power over the have-nots, there is no reason to believe that the Chinese government intends to invade the United States. What there is reason to believe is that the U.S. government will use the U.S. navy to try to block shipments of things to and from China to weaken China economically (which will be the PR explanation) and to create a war mentality in the American public so that our rulers will be able to label anything we do that they don’t like (such as resisting the way they oppress us) as “un-patriotic” (which will be the real explanation.)
The fifth point is that to end this warmongering we need to remove the warmongers from power. As I write about here, for U.S. rulers world peace is their greatest FEAR.
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1
SOME FACTS ABOUT HOW THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT OPPRESSES THE CHINESE HAVE-NOTS
“On September 23 [2012], a siren pierced the night at the 80,000-worker Taiyuan plant as rioting erupted. Zhonghong recalled, “During the previous month workers had clocked as many as 130 hours overtime.” Overtime was compulsory. This was more than three times the maximum 36-hour limit of overtime per month allowed under Chinese law. Put another way, workers were subjected to 13-to-1, and under extreme conditions, 30-to-1 work-to-rest schedules, that is, just one day off every two weeks or one day off a month in the pressure-cooker months preceding the release of the new iPhones.
“Fatigue and bodily pain aside, workers experienced being severely ill treated. “Over the past two months,” Zhonghong continued, “we couldn’t even get paid leave when we were sick.” The ever-tightening production cycle pressured workers to speed up. Days off were canceled and the sick were pressed to continue to work. The upgraded iPhone was hailed as a thinner, faster, and brighter model. In stark contrast, workers experienced some of their darkest days on the production floor. Worker fury was fueled by security staff brutality at the male workers’ dormitory. Zhonghong explained:
“At about 11: 00 p.m., security officers severely beat two workers for failing to show their staff IDs. They kicked them until they fell to the ground.”
“This beating of workers by security officers touched off the riot. By midnight, thousands of workers had had enough. They smashed company security offices, production facilities, shuttle buses, motorbikes, cars, shops, and canteens in the factory complex. Some grabbed iPhone back-plates from a warehouse. Others broke windows, demolished company fences, pillaged factory supermarkets, and overturned police cars and set them ablaze. The company security chief used a patrol car public address system in an attempt to get the workers to end their “illegal activities.”
“But as more and more workers joined the roaring crowd, managers called in the riot police. By 3: 00 a.m., five thousand riot police in helmets with shields and clubs, government officials, and medical staff had converged on the factory. Over the next two hours, the police took control of the dormitories and workshops of the entire complex, detaining the most defiant workers and locking down others in their dormitory rooms. More than forty workers were beaten, handcuffed, and sent off in half a dozen police cars. The factory was sealed off by police lines on all sides, so that workers were contained and onlookers were prevented from joining in. While police repression could demobilize, defuse, and crush worker actions, such methods could also highlight the depths of conflict and might even intensify it.
“In emergency mode, Foxconn announced “a special day off” for all workers and staff at the Taiyuan facility. Local officials were sensitive to the fact that riots could undermine economic goals, thereby provoking the wrath of higher authorities if grievances were not quickly resolved and worker insurgency suppressed. The iPhone parts factory reopened after a one-day lockdown. The timely shipment and continuous flow of products appeared to have remained Apple’s overriding concerns. On the same day that the riot occurred, Apple CEO Tim Cook assured the world that retail stores would “continue to receive iPhone 5 shipments regularly and customers can continue to order online and receive an estimated delivery date.” 18 But as international news headlines blared “China Apple Factory Riot” 19 and “Riot Reported at Apple Partner Manufacturer Foxconn’s iPhone 5 Plant,” 20 Apple was compelled to reassure consumers around the world, including Chinese consumers, that it was not running sweatshops.”
— Dying for an iPhone: Apple, Foxconn, and The Lives of China’s Workers by Jenny Chan, Mark Selden, et al.
“In a long-awaited response to intern abuse, the Chinese central government in 2016 belatedly took some of the first steps to protect the basic rights of student interns. Specifically, vocational schools are instructed to manage student internships in accordance with the “Regulations on the Management of Vocational School Student Internships.”
“Under the new regulations, effective April 11, 2016, the duration of workplace-based internships should normally be six months. Vocational schools and enterprises are required to jointly provide interns with commercial general liability insurance. The regulations also require that student internships have substantial educational content and work-skills training provisions, along with comprehensive labor protections for student interns such as eight-hour working days, no overtime, and no night shifts.
“Above all, no more than 10 percent of the labor force at “any given facility,” and no more than 20 percent of the workers in “any given work position,” should consist of student interns at any point in time. 16
“However, the government left intact incentives for corporations to continue to prioritize student interns as cheap and expendable labor.
“The 2016 regulations stipulate the statutory minimum level for paying interns: “Wages shall be at least 80 percent of that of employees during the probationary period” (emphasis added). 17
“In other words, interns are to be paid for their labor, but employers are permitted to pay them just 80 percent of the minimum income offered to employees. Employers save further since interns, defined as students rather than workers, receive no corporate payments toward retirement.
Fundamentally, the interests shared by companies and local governments are intertwined to the detriment of student interns.
“In 2019, Foxconn Hengyang in Hunan province, whose primary contracts were with Amazon, reportedly violated limits on the number of intern and dispatch workers (also known as agency workers), who made up, respectively, 21 percent and 34 percent of the 7,435 workers. Under the law, dispatch workers should not exceed 10 percent of the company’s workforce.
“The proliferation of “flexible” employment has adversely impacted not only dispatch workers. Regular workers would also encounter greater difficulty in making collective demands on employers as they now must compete with contingent laborers in the workplace.
“Worse, student interns were illegally required to work 10-hour shifts, day and night, including two hours of forced overtime. 18
“The super-exploitation of Chinese student labor has in fact gone far beyond Foxconn to e-commerce giants such as JD.com, and from manufacturing to the services industry. 19”
— Dying for an iPhone: Apple, Foxconn, and The Lives of China’s Workers by Jenny Chan, Mark Selden, et al.
Extract from https://globaldialogue.isa-sociology.org/.../class... March 22, 2018:
”Production and social reproduction of Chinese rural migrants
China’s rapid capital accumulation was spurred in part by its heavy reliance on a rural-to-urban migratory workforce over the past four decades. By official reckoning some 282 million rural migrants have been drawn into the manufacturing, service, and construction sectors in towns and cities all across the country, an increase of more than 50 million following the economic recovery since 2009, and accounting for one-fifth of China’s total population. City governments have adopted a “points system” granting certain rural migrants, particularly big entrepreneurs, an urban household registration based on criteria such as their ability to buy a house, specialized job skills, and educational attainments. However, even after years of working in the city, the great majority of moderately educated migrants and their children remain second-class citizens, retaining rural residential status and lacking equal access to public education, subsidized health care, and retirement benefits, making possible the suppression of labor costs.
“Low-paid migrant workers are often housed in dormitories, which are cost-effective for the employer and conducive to ensuring that workers spend most of their off-hours preparing for the next shift. The socio-spatial boundary between work and life is blurred, helping to ensure that production deadlines are met by facilitating overtime work. The all-in-one, multi-functional architecture of production workshops, warehouses, and residential places was typical of early industrial districts, and is still common in contemporary cities where migrant settlers are concentrated.
“In the search for limited personal freedom over their private lives, workers leave the management-dominated collective dormitory to rent private apartments as soon as they can afford to. These are often inexpensive rental rooms with no windows, or only a small window, which are at least a link to the outside world. Some complexes are infested with mosquitoes, rats, and cockroaches. Utilities and property management fees vary widely. As private housing prices have reached sky-high in megacities, workers’ earnings have been eaten up by the landlords.
“Blue-collar migrants are selling their labor in food delivery, package delivery, car-hailing and home cleaning services, to name only a few examples, fueling the growth of China’s GDP and the shift from manufacturing to service work. With the continued expansion of the digital economy, tens of millions of new “flexible” jobs mediated by platforms and apps are created. As independent contractors, however, they are not adequately protected by the national labor law; their job security and income stability are minimal. With the shutdown of unlicensed workplaces and unregistered dormitories after the deadly fire, the vulnerability of informal service workers, and their children, as well as many working people from other sectors, came to the fore. Some of them had to pay higher rent for a temporary housing to withstand the freezing cold, while the others had no choice but to leave.
“Chinese internal migrants have long been targets in urban governments’ “clean out” efforts. From the city to the countryside, under the accelerated pace of “development” and economic transformation, encroachment of cities on rural farm land and villages has been intensified. Scores of villagers have been displaced, bereft of the ability to return home to till the land. Landless laborers, who have lost their access to household plots in their natal villages, face an added burden: employers are reluctant to hire villagers who have lost the contracted land that supported subsistence, thus requiring employers to increase wages. Rural project contractors, particularly in the construction industry organized through localistic networks, refuse to hire dispossessed peasant workers because they have to pay up-front to maintain the basic livelihood of these workers before they are paid for work, which typically occurs at the completion of the project. Among the jobless, landless migrants are the lowest of the low.”
The Chinese Myth versus Reality
We often hear that the Communist Party of China has lifted the Chinese people up out of poverty. To understand how false this claim is, read “Bill Gates Says Poverty Is Decreasing. He Couldn’t Be More Wrong“ by Jason Hickel (also see this same point made about Africa here). As Hickel explains, moving people from living in a rural society, where money is a relatively unimportant way of obtaining one’s needs and people have less money, to an urban society where money is the only way of obtaining one’s needs and people have more money, makes it easy to misleadingly say, “See, people were lifted out of poverty when they went from rural to urban living,” even when the actual conditions of life for the urban people--working as horribly oppressed wage-slaves in huge factories--make their lives arguably worse than those of rural peasants. Millions of rural Chinese peasants have been forced to leave the rural countryside and immigrate to cities to work in the cheap labor and extremely oppressive factories, as described in some detail here.
In particular, the Communist Party of China in 1999 eagerly signed an agreement with the United States leading to China’s accession to the World Trade Organization, which resulted in the reduction of tariffs on agricultural products and new limits on how much the Chinese government could subsidize farmers as discussed here and here [2003] (”Farmers of land-intensive products--particularly cotton, sugar crops, oilseeds, corn and soybeans--will be among the most adversely affected”.) Life prospects for farmers, especially for their adolescent children, were made bleak and this motivated them to migrate to the cities for urban wage work.
In the rural homes they left, these farmers did not have very much money, nor did they need to rely solely upon money to get what they needed to live; but in the city they relied totally on their wage to buy what they needed to live--and it provided an abject poverty standard of living. The fact that their city wage was higher than whatever small amount of money they obtained in the countryside does not mean their standard of living was higher in the city than in the countryside; the opposite was the case. But apologists for the Communist Party of China point to the wage to assert that the peasants were “lifted out of poverty.”
An indication of the terrible poverty--in terms of standard of living rather than magnitude of an urban wage compared to a rural wage--of China’s urban factory workers who migrated to cities from their rural homes is this: these factory workers cannot even afford to raise their children (69 million as of 2018 or “1 in 5 children in China”) with them in the city and so must leave their children to be raised by their grandparents in their rural home, which the parents can only typically afford to visit “a few days over the holidays every year.” “By 2006, migrant workers comprised 40% of the total urban labor force.[51]”
Read here about the enormous economic inequality in China today.
The Communist Party of China oppresses and represses the working class much the same as Western capitalist governments do. Read about the repression here and here and here and here.
IN SHARP CONTRAST TO HOW IT IS IN CHINA, READ HERE WHAT INDUSTRIAL PRODUCTION IS LIKE WHEN THE WORKERS REALLY ARE IN POWER
2
The ruling classes tell the have-nots that we are all in a dog-eat-dog economic competition in which whatever is good news for some have-nots is bad news for others, in which some have-nots being more productive means a worse life for less productive have-nots. None of this is true when the rich are removed from power and we have an egalitarian world.
In an egalitarian world people who work in an enterprise would all have an equal say in democratically running the enterprise. They would not be just the ‘hired hands’ who must obey the top guy or be fired. They and the other egalitarians in the local community would have the real say in what they produce and how they produce it or what service they provide and how they provide it. Things would not be bought and sold, they would be shared with other producers with mutual agreements on the basis of “from each according to reasonable ability, to each according to need or reasonable desire with scarce things equitably rationed according to need.” Since things are not bought and sold, tariffs would be non-sensical.
In an egalitarian world people would not be competing against each other, fearful that advances of people elsewhere in technology and production was an economic threat against which tariffs are required for protection. On the contrary!
Egalitarians don’t view other people as competitors; they view them as friends, as people with whom to create relations of mutual aid, as people with whom to share the economic fruits of their labor (read about an egalitarian economy here) for mutual benefit. Egalitarians would share technological and scientific knowledge in order to increase everybody’s ability to maximally benefit people everywhere. Why not? Egalitarians would be happy if people elsewhere discovered or invented a way to do something faster or cheaper or create something new and wonderful. Why not?
If egalitarians were for some reason much more economically productive somewhere compared to elsewhere, they would practice mutual aid with the less productive egalitarians. They would share according to the principle of “From each according to reasonable ability, to each according to need or reasonable desire with scarce things equitably rationed according to need.” Virtually everybody today understands exactly what this means because this is how adults share goods and services with children, right?
Adults don’t share goods and services with children according to the principle of “equal value in exchange for equal value” (which is what money and barter are ALL about). Thus adults don’t say to children, “If you want a meal to eat you’ll have to give me something of equal value for it.” No! Adults say, “Today I provide you with meals to eat and ask only that you do whatever you are reasonably able to do to help out in return. And I also teach you how to become a proficient adult one day yourself, when you will accomplish perhaps more than I ever could and make my life and the lives of others better by doing so. And when I see you doing something amazingly creative that I never thought of, I say that is WONDERFUL.”
Likewise, more economically productive egalitarians and less economically productive egalitarians would not view each other as enemies or competitors (as Tulsi Gabbard tells us we must view the Chinese as our enemy because of their advances in technology, etc.) but would be in a mutually beneficial relationship like the mutually beneficial relationship between adults and children.
This is how the vast majority of people think it ought to be! This is how the vast majority of people will make it be when they seize power.
In an egalitarian world, there is sovereignty of local assemblies of egalitarians. There are no national law-making governments. There is voluntary federation of the local assemblies of egalitarians to carry out mutually agreed upon endeavors, on as large a scale as people wish, even globally if people desire. If egalitarians wish to exchange goods and services on a large—even global-scale, they can do so. If egalitarians wish to specialize in various geographical regions what kinds of goods and services they produce, they may do so. Egalitarians are not obliged to arrange things so that they rely exclusively on locally produced goods and services. They may decide there is a more sensible way to go about producing and sharing such things.
The point is that, in contrast to our anti-egalitarian world that is a dictatorship of the rich in which the only choices we’re allowed to debate are ones that are bad for us and good for the rich, in an egalitarian world egalitarians will debate and choose among choices that they believe are good for the vast majority of people—their fellow egalitarians. And the anti-egalitarians will be told, “You’re no longer in charge.”