While American IT corporations value their cooperation with Beijing in the high-tech field, US banking elites and Washington hawks are up in arms about China's rapid economic rise, James Petras, a retired Bartle Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York, points out.
According to the American academic, Washington is deliberately escalating tensions with Beijing, making attempts to "criminalize" the country and accusing it groundlessly of cyber espionage, at the same time playing down China's technological breakthroughs.
The US authorities even went so far as to arrest several Chinese scientists and issue warrants for others charging them with data theft. Needless to say, the charges against several of them were "quietly dropped" later for lack of evidence.
Washington remains remarkably silent about its own large scale clandestine campaign aimed at spying on Beijing and using major American IT corporations working in China as "a principal vehicle for data theft."
"This is essentially a policy of strategic confrontations, including military encirclement through regional base agreements, deliberate economic exclusion through regional trade agreements and political provocation through threatened sanctions," Petras underscored.
"US military bases have expanded and a huge naval armada patrols China's maritime frontier. There are US fighter planes flying over Beijing's reclaimed island installations while the US State Department goads China's neighbors to stake their own territorial claims in the South China Sea," he added.
"The high tech multinational corporations are eager to welcome China's President Xi on his visit, viewing it as an opportunity to mend and expand relations. The Silicon Valley-Seattle corporate elite oppose sanctions while the White House claim to be acting on their behalf," the professor stressed, adding that Apple, IBM, CISCO, Qualcomm have already declared that they would rather comply with Beijing's strict regulations than "face big losses or total exclusion from the Chinese market."
The American financial elite, however, favors a "winner-takes-all" approach, planning to coerce Beijing into submission.
Ludicrously, they are claiming that China is facing a recession while the country's projected annual growth has decreased from 7.3 percent just to 7.0 percent.
"If the EU and the US grew at half that rate, the financial scribes would claim an 'economic miracle'!" the professor noted ironically.
The Obama administration is playing into hands of the US big banking sector and neocon warmongers, neglecting corporate American interests — "whether it is US oil interests in Iraq and Libya, or IT corporations in China."
Obama's anti-China campaign "will lead to lifeless cranes in empty Pacific coast ports and rusting container ships; profit losses and vacant country clubs in Silicon Valley and lost sales for US auto companies. The list is endless but the consequences are clear," Petras warned.
