China

The Chinese proletariat is showing signs of militancy and combativity on its own class terrain, against the Communist Party of China and the state unions. Unfortunately, the Western trade unionists and leftist activists are taking notice. Similar to the Polish workers struggles' of 1980-1981, the Chinese workers erupted into self-organized strikes and protests against the company

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The Chinese economy is supposed to be the exception to the global crisis of capitalism. Tell that to the thousands of Chinese workers who have been involved in a wave of strikes in recent weeks in many parts of the country.

This report represents an effort by the ICC's sections in Asia to come to grips with the specificities of imperialist tensions in Asia, and in particular as far as they concern the rising powers of China and India.

As thousands of troops goose-stepped through Tiananmen Square, part of the celebration of 60 years of the People's Republic of China on 1 October, the media in other countries were not slow to point out all the evidence of continuing totalitarianism.

On 24 July thousands of Chinesesteel workers in the northeastern city of Tonghuaclashed with police during demonstrations over a proposed take-over deal.

On Monday 2 July, following news of the deaths of at least 2 Uighur workers in Guangdong in fighting a couple of weeks earlier, Uighur protestors in the capital of Xinjiang, Urumqi, demonstrated

All over the planet, the working class is being subjected to increasingly unbearable levels of exploitation and poverty. And in the countries which the bourgeoisie hypocritically calls ‘developing economies' the workers are treated as no more than cattle. For several years, these wage slaves have been resisting more and more.

Twenty years ago, seven weeks of demonstrations that took place in more than 400 Chinese towns and cities met with brutal repression from the Chinese state. The repression in Tiananmen Square on the night of 3-4 June 1989, in which hundreds (or possibly thousands) of people were killed was condemned internationally.

Pun Ngai is professor at the Social Research Center of the Peking University and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. At present she is on tour in five European countries to present

More than a month after Cyclone Nargis hit Burma, as many as 2½ million people were still utterly destitute, with no homes, (often no villages), severely limited access to food, water or

Up to now capitalism has shown a conspicuous inability to develop the countries where two-thirds of humanity live. Now, with the incredible economic growth in India and China - and throughout East Asia generally - we hear it shouted from the roof tops that from henceforth it will be able to develop more than half the world and that it would be able to go even further if only all the constraints imposed on it were to be eliminated. If wages and working conditions were to be levelled down to those obtaining in China, it is claimed, then growth in the West would also rise to 10% a year.

This raises theoretical and ideological questions of great importance: does the development in East Asia represent a renewal of capitalism or is it no more than a stray occurrence in its on-going crisis? To answer this question we will consider the phenomenon throughout the whole of the sub-continent, though we will examine China more closely as it is the most publicised and the most representative example.

Just a couple of years ago, China's President Hu Jintao promised a "peaceful rise" of his country onto the international arena. Many international observers and commentators were taken in by the Stalinist doublespeak from the military dictatorship of the People's Liberation Army and argued that China's economic ascension would make it a more reliable, responsible power for good in the world.

Protests over the Chinese state's brutal treatment of the population of Tibet have dogged the passage of the Olympic torch from the moment it was lit. They seem likely to reach a climax on June 21 when the flame reaches Lhasa, the Tibetan capital.

On the weekend of 3-5 November Beijing hosted a China-Africa forum that top-level delegations from 48 (out of 53) African countries planned to attend. The way that the Chinese media sold the jamboree, along with loyal African cheerleaders, gave the impression that China is a great force for progress in Africa - such a contrast to the colonialists and imperialists of the US, Europe and Japan.

In the first part of this article (International Review No.81) we endeavoured to reclaim the real historical revolutionary experience of the working class in China. The Shanghai proletariat’s heroic attempted insurrection of 21st March 1927 was both the culmination of the spontaneous movement  of the working class begun in 1919 in China, and the last glimmer of the international revolutionary wave that had shaken the capitalist world since 1917.

According to official history, in 1949 a “popular revolution” triumphed in China. This idea, defended as much by the democratic West as by the Maoists, forms part of a monstrous mystification produced by the Stalinist counter-revolution about the supposed creation of “Socialist states”. It is certain that in the period between 1919 and 1927 China lived through an important working class movement, which was fully integrated into the international revolutionary wave that shook the capitalist world in that epoch, but this movement was ended by a massacre of the working class. What the bourgeoisie’s ideologues present on the other hand, as the “triumph of the Chinese Revolution”, was only the installation of a state capitalist régime in its Maoist variant, the culmination of a period of imperialist struggles on the terrain of China that began in 1928, after the defeat of the proletarian revolution.

In this article, we focus on the central aspects of this mystification: Mao Zedong himself as a “revolutionary leader”, and Maoism as a revolutionary theory, and one which claims to be a “development” of marxism to boot. We intend to demonstrate that Maoism has never been anything but a bourgeois ideological and political current, born from the guts of decadent capitalism.

In China explosions and mine collapses follow one another in a frightening rhythm. Last August, in Guangdong province, 101 miners were trapped in the mine and drowned in millions of cubic metres of water. At the same time an explosion in Guizhou province killed 14 miners. Recently, a new explosion at a mine in Dong province in northern China cost the lives of another 134 miners. In the autumn accidents struck this sector on an almost daily basis. These accidents, one after the other, make the mines in China the most dangerous in the world

According to the bourgeoisie, China has become the new workshop of the world. The media are full of images of ‘Made in China’ shirts, trousers, shoes and other clothes arriving in Britain, Europe, or the USA. For the western bourgeoisies, it’s obviously necessary to put limits on this flood of Chinese textiles...

According to Engels, the coal miner endured an unenviable excess of evils. “In the whole British Empire there is no occupation in which a man may meet his end in so many diverse ways as in this one. The coal-mine is the scene of a multitude of the most terrifying calamities, and these come directly from the selfishness of the bourgeoisie.” (The Condition of the Working Class in England, ‘The Mining Proletariat’).

The 11-day stand-off between American and Chinese imperialism in April was the first international crisis weathered by the new Bush administration, and it gave a glimpse of what lies ahead for American imperialism. The crisis with China should not be seen as a surprise or anomaly. Just as the election of George Bush has set off alarms bells in European capitals (see Internationalism 116), so too the tensions with the Chinese bourgeoisie have been exacerbated, as both the Chinese and American regimes are feeling each other out now that a new foreign policy team is in place in the US. For the Chinese, the central foreign policy concerns at this juncture include continuation of the strategic partnership in Asia between the US and China brokered during the Clinton years, attempts to influence the US not to sell sophisticated weaponry to Taiwan, continued integration of China into the World Trade Organization, and maintenance of most favored nation trade status with the US. Once the accidental collision of the American spy plane and a Chinese jet fighter, it was inevitable that the Chinese would seek to test the mettle of the new Bush administration foreign policy team.

For years the developed countries have been piling up huge budget deficits; levels of debt have increased at a constant and almost uncontrollable rate. The welfare state is being dismantled in numerous parts of the world, massive lay-offs are on the agenda, and all the promises of an imminent recovery prove to be without substance. And yet in the midst of this bleak situation we are being bombarded with propaganda about the 'Chinese economic miracle': economic growth in China, 'the triumph of Red Capitalism', is being interpreted as a sign of a new phase of development for the world capitalist system.