WTO Entry Extends Imperialist Penetration
Workers Protests Shake China
Reprinted from Workers Vanguard Nos. 781 and 782, 17 May and 31 May 2002.
In March of this year, workers in China’s industrial heartland unleashed the country’s largest protests since 1989. Thirteen years ago, the working class, angered by the inflation and rampant corruption engendered by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime’s “market reforms,” entered en masse into the student-initiated protests centered on Tiananmen Square, posing the possibility of a political revolution to sweep away the Stalinist bureaucracy. In recent years, masses of workers have been thrust into battle as “market reforms” take aim at state-owned industries, the core of the collectivized foundations of the Chinese deformed workers state. Extending into the capitalist “Special Economic Zones” (SEZs) and the peasant hinterland, these struggles are bound to intensify as China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) opens the door to wider imperialist penetration, threatening the livelihoods of millions of workers and peasants.
The current wave of mass protests is a spontaneous resistance by the Chinese working class to the hardships caused by the accelerating drive toward capitalist restoration in the name of “market reforms.” What is posed is the defense of the social gains of the 1949 Chinese Revolution, which overthrew the Chinese bourgeoisie, liberated the country from imperialist bondage and established a workers state based on a planned, collectivized economy.
Protests exploded on March 1 in the Daqing oil fields in northeastern Heilongjiang province. For more than two weeks, workers staged daily demonstrations to fight cuts in pensions, medical care and heating oil subsidies. When the oil fields were developed in the early 1960s, the Daqing workers were held up as heroes in China’s drive to industrialize. Workers in such state industries were provided with the “iron rice bowl” of guaranteed housing, education, medical and retirement benefits. But with the fields nearly dry, more than 80,000 workers have been laid off over the last three years. When officials demanded that the workers hand back the bulk of their severance packages as an insurance premium for health and pension benefits, the lid blew, and protests soon spread to oil fields as far away as Xinjiang province on China’s Central Asian border.
“The managers are getting huge packages and we are getting nothing,” said one worker. Authorities tried to smear the workers by claiming that protests had been infiltrated by the reactionary Falun Gong movement. Finally, riot police and units of the People’s Armed Police—a force formed in the mid 1980s to put down growing social unrest—were mustered from nearby cities to quell the protests.
An official report released by Beijing on April 29 titled “Labor and Social Security in China” states that more than 25 million workers were laid off from state enterprises between 1998 and 2001 (the World Bank puts the figure at 36 million). The layoffs resulted from the regime’s moves to “reform,” close or privatize plants deemed “inefficient” by the standards of the world capitalist market. Reporting on the Daqing protests, the Far Eastern Economic Review (4 April) noted that “sackings have provoked tens of thousands of similar, but smaller, disputes since 1998. Terrified that these could mushroom into a nationwide movement, the government has concentrated on suppressing dissent and preventing protesting groups in different cities and provinces from linking up with each other.”
What is behind the regime’s fears was on display in the city of Liaoyang, where demonstrations coincided with those in Daqing a few hundred miles to the north. Workers from the closed Ferro Alloy metalworking plant staged daily marches demanding pensions and back wages owed them. They also demanded the arrest of the company’s managers, who have been selling off the plant’s equipment and pocketing the proceeds. As in most of the recent protests, those who marched in Liaoyang were mainly laid-off workers and retirees. But the protests swelled to include 30,000 workers from 20 different plants in the area. A worker from Liaoyang Chemical Factory remarked, “This action is not organized; a lot of workers from other factories have only joined in because they have the same problems as the ferro-alloy factory.”
Fearing they could no longer contain the protests, police arrested four workers’ leaders and on March 20 removed hundreds of protesters from the city government compound, where they had gathered to deliver a petition. Officials also tried to defuse the situation by reportedly giving workers half of their back wages and announcing that they will soon pay some unemployment benefits and pensions. But workers say that this is only a fraction of what they are owed.
Protests reached into the capital on March 27, when some 200 retired auto workers staged a dramatic demonstration outside the Beijing Automobile and Motorcycle Works, shutting down traffic on a major thoroughfare for hours. The retirees demanded overdue pension payments and protested against the theft of state assets by managers. Similar actions have spread the length and width of China. In April, coal miners in Liaoning province repeatedly blockaded railway lines to protest layoffs. In southwest China, 1,000 retired steel workers, mostly women, blockaded two highways in front of the state-owned Guiyang Steel Factory to protest meager pensions. And in early May, protests resumed in Liaoyang demanding the release of the four detained labor leaders, while posters have appeared in workers’ dormitories there calling for investigating corrupt factory officials.
Defend China Against Capitalist Counterrevolution!
The 1949 Revolution was, despite profound bureaucratic deformations, a social revolution of world-historic significance. Hundreds of millions of peasants rose up and seized the land on which their forebears had been cruelly exploited from time immemorial. The rule of the murderous warlords and bloodsucking moneylenders, the rapacious landlords and wretched bourgeoisie was destroyed. The revolution enabled women to advance by magnitudes over their previous miserable status, symbolized by the barbaric practice of footbinding. A nation which had been ravaged and divided by foreign powers for a century was unified and freed from imperialist subjugation.
In the 1950s, the People’s Republic of China established a centrally planned, socialized economy—modeled on and aided by the Soviet Union—and agriculture was collectivized. A state monopoly of foreign trade protected the socialized economy from being undermined by cheap imports from the far more developed capitalist-imperialist countries. Particularly for women, getting a job in state industry was such a huge advance over the old way of life that families often threw large parties to celebrate the hiring of one of their members.
However, the 1949 Revolution was deformed from its inception under the rule of Mao Zedong’s CCP regime, which represented a nationalist bureaucratic caste resting atop the collectivized economy. Patterned after the Stalinist bureaucracy in the USSR, Mao’s regime preached the profoundly anti-Marxist notion that socialism—a classless, egalitarian society based on material abundance—could be built in a single country. In practice, “socialism in one country” meant opposition to the perspective of workers revolution internationally and accommodation to world imperialism.
The Beijing bureaucracy essentially acts as a transmission belt for the pressures of the imperialist-dominated world market on the workers state. The brittle and contradictory character of this bureaucratic caste can be seen in the fact that in the face of working-class unrest, the current regime has often reversed some of its economic “reforms” and occasionally put some of its own on trial for corruption, sometimes with a penalty of execution.
The recent outpouring of protests has jolted not only the Beijing regime but also American ruling circles, which have entertained the notion of a cold restoration of capitalism “from above.” Thus an article in the influential American journal Business Week (8 April) titled “China’s Angry Workers” stated: “Time is not on Beijing’s side. The government can’t afford perpetual welfare payments for the Rust Belt’s unemployed and disaffected workers, many of whom are only in their 40s and see no prospect of new employment in their home provinces. And the pattern of factory shutdowns and layoffs will only accelerate now that China is a member of the World Trade Organization and its decrepit industrial sector must go head-to-head with foreign competition.” The article rues that even as tourism, telecommunications and other sectors of the economy are opened to foreign investment, “protests are forcing Beijing to slow industrial restructuring” in an attempt to maintain social stability.
In its own way, Business Week recognizes certain fundamental truths about the People’s Republic of China today. One, the drive to restore capitalism is encountering powerful resistance from the working class. Two, fear of social unrest restrains the restorationist tendencies within the ruling bureaucracy.
American imperialism is bent on overturning the 1949 Revolution, one way or another, and once again reducing China to semicolonial subjugation. To this end, the U.S. ruling class combines pursuit of the economic openings offered by Beijing with escalating military pressure. The Pentagon has recently increased military aid to capitalist Taiwan, which has been maintained as an anti-Communist fortress for more than half a century. As a result of its war against Afghanistan, the U.S. has expanded its military presence in Asian territory surrounding China under the rubric of the “global war on terror.” This is on top of more than 80,000 troops stationed in South Korea and Japan, a dagger aimed at the Chinese and North Korean as well as the Vietnamese deformed workers states. Bush is pushing ahead with plans for an “anti-missile defense” system to facilitate a nuclear first strike against China, which has a small but effective arsenal of long-range nuclear weapons. Last year’s U.S. spy plane provocation was emblematic of American belligerence toward China, eliciting waves of outrage among the Chinese population against U.S. imperialism.
The International Communist League stands for the unconditional military defense of the Chinese deformed workers state against imperialism and capitalist counterrevolution. It is the task of the Chinese proletariat to sweep away the Stalinist bureaucracy, which has gravely undermined the system of nationalized property that resulted from the 1949 Revolution. As we wrote in “Chinese Miners Revolt Against ‘Market Reforms’” (WV No. 735, 5 May 2000) following a rebellion by 20,000 miners and their families in northeast China:
“The bureaucracy which is paving the way for capitalist counterrevolution is simultaneously preparing the ground for a new revolutionary proletarian explosion—not a social revolution which would overturn the economic foundations of society as in 1949 but a political revolution to oust the parasitic ruling oligarchy and to place political power in the hands of workers, soldiers and peasants councils (soviets). The urgent task facing the Chinese proletariat is to build a Leninist-Trotskyist party as part of a reforged Trotskyist Fourth International, to prepare and lead this political revolution, standing at the head of the masses and directing the spontaneous and localized workers’ struggles toward the seizure of political power.”
Bolshevism vs. Stalinism
In a perceptive article in the Nation magazine (4 March), Jiang Xueqin, who had spent months traveling across China, remarked, “Contrary to Western perceptions that the common people are benefiting from the free market, the Chinese see their government and the nation’s elite as conspiring to sell them out to imperialists, aka the Americans. Frustration with the government’s economic policies is now entwined with rapidly expanding anti-Western sentiment.” Jiang also noted that the late Mao Zedong is an “increasingly popular” figure. Indeed, protesters in Liaoyang last month carried portraits of Mao, just as workers did in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
Mao’s era can certainly seem egalitarian compared to today, when officials spend the equivalent of a retired worker’s annual income on a banquet with Hong Kong or American business partners. The 1949 Revolution is a living memory for Chinese families, almost all of whom have parents or grandparents who lived through the murderous Japanese occupation and the civil war against the hated Guomindang regime of Chiang Kai-shek, which was backed by American imperialism.
But it is crucial to understand the anti-proletarian character of Mao’s CCP regime. The Chinese Revolution was fundamentally different from the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia, which was carried out by a class-conscious proletariat under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky. The October Revolution established a government based upon proletarian democracy—the rule of workers, peasants and soldiers soviets (councils). The Bolsheviks saw the revolution in backward Russia as the first step in a worldwide socialist revolution, particularly in the advanced capitalist countries.
However, the defeat of the anticipated German workers revolution in 1923 demoralized the Soviet working class, which had been decimated by the destruction of industry and infrastructure wrought by World War I and the bloody Civil War of 1918-20. With the end of the Civil War, bureaucratic tendencies in the party and state administration began to coalesce into a bureaucratic layer. By 1923, Lenin was increasingly incapacitated. The burgeoning party bureaucracy, controlled by J. V. Stalin, was beginning to rise to self-consciousness. That fall, a loose Left Opposition led by Trotsky opened fire against the growing bureaucratism and called for a program of planned industrialization. The ensuing debate in the party press was soon shut down. The party conference called for January 1924 was so rigged that the Opposition was allowed only three delegates despite having won 25 to 30 percent of the vote in the Moscow and Petrograd party organizations.
Though it only became clear in hindsight, that conference marked the beginning of the Soviet Thermidor, the decisive point at which the bureaucratic caste seized political power from the Soviet working class (see “Trotsky and the Russian Left Opposition: A Critical Balance Sheet,” Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 56, Spring 2001). From this point on, the people who ruled the USSR, the way the USSR was ruled and the purposes for which it was ruled all changed. The nationalist outlook of the bureaucracy was given expression by Stalin’s proclamation of the anti-Marxist “theory” of “socialism in one country” in the fall of 1924.
In contrast to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the 1949 Revolution in China was the result of a successful peasant guerrilla war led by the CCP and People’s Liberation Army (PLA), which excluded the proletariat from political power from the beginning. Unlike the Russian bourgeoisie, which was effectively destroyed as a property-owning class, the Chinese bourgeoisie was able to survive as a coherent class by moving to Taiwan, Hong Kong and elsewhere in the Pacific Rim under the protection of U.S. and British imperialism. Nevertheless, the Chinese Revolution was a huge defeat for the imperialists, as was brought home by the intervention of the PLA in the Korean War of 1950-53, which saved North Korea from being overrun by the American imperialists and their South Korean puppet regime.
The Bankruptcy of Maoism
Marked by extreme voluntarism and economic adventurism, Maoist rule sought to transform impoverished China into a “socialist” world power through economic autarky within the framework of a bureaucratically centralized economy. Contained in this nationalist perspective were the seeds of the bureaucracy’s implementation of “market reforms” under Deng Xiaoping, who also sought “great power” status for China. Today, the core of the bureaucracy retains no subjective commitment to a socialist order; it preserves collectivized property only insofar as it dreads the proletariat.
Mao’s era was far from egalitarian and far from socialist. The “Great Leap Forward” was an attempt at forced-march industrialization using the unaided labor of the peasant masses. It was exemplified by the construction of thousands of small “backyard” steel furnaces in rural villages. This economic adventure ended in total collapse and led to a devastating famine. Mao’s “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” of 1966-76—a convulsive factional struggle within the bureaucracy launched by Mao to regain the authority he had lost following the “Great Leap” fiasco—disrupted the economy and brought education to a halt. The anti-proletarian character of the Cultural Revolution was exemplified by the use of student “Red Guards” to break a 1967 Shanghai general strike led by rail workers. Faced with the destruction wreaked by the “lost ten years,” two years after Mao’s death in 1976 the bureaucracy turned to Deng Xiaoping, who initiated “market reforms” in the name of modernizing the economy.
While Mao and Deng are commonly portrayed as opposites, they are in fact two sides of the same coin, as was seen with China’s anti-Soviet alliance with U.S. imperialism. After several years of nationalist feuding between the Moscow and Beijing bureaucracies, Mao declared in the late 1960s that “Soviet social-imperialism” was an even greater danger than the United States. In 1972, Mao embraced U.S. president Richard Nixon in Beijing at the very moment that American warplanes were bombing Vietnam. Deepening this alliance, Deng’s regime worked in tandem with the CIA to aid the Afghan mujahedin cutthroats who fought against the Soviet Army presence in Afghanistan in the 1980s (see “China and the U.S. ‘War on Terror’,” WV No. 776, 8 March). China’s anti-Soviet alliance with the U.S. was a crucial service to imperialism in its drive to destroy the Soviet degenerated workers state, which had been the military counterweight to U.S. imperialism. The anti-Soviet alliance also laid the basis for imperialist economic penetration of the Chinese deformed workers state.
The current regime in Beijing preaches that China will become a strong, modern power through greater integration into the capitalist world market. This nationalist dream is aimed at duping the masses who are increasingly estranged from the bureaucracy. It also serves to cultivate commercial and ultimately political and social ties with the overseas Chinese bourgeoisie. From the beginning of “market reforms,” the Deng regime made a strong appeal to Chinese capitalists. The SEZs were initially established near Hong Kong and Macao and along the coast across from Taiwan with the aim of encouraging investment from offshore Chinese capitalists who retain linguistic and family ties to these regions. After 1979, the offshore bourgeoisie accounted for 80 percent of foreign investment on the mainland, and today still accounts for more than half of such investment. The ties of the offshore Chinese capitalist class to the mainland serve as useful conduits for Western and Japanese investment in China.
Much of the investment of Chinese capital has been in partnership with the “princeling” sons and daughters of top Beijing government and CCP officials. Describing a layer of privileged Chinese youth who have studied overseas, Jasper Becker noted in his book The Chinese (Free Press [2000]):
“They have been to the same American universities as the children of those capitalists and KMT [Guomindang] officials who fled to Hong Kong or Taiwan in 1949, and they now share the same lifestyle and aspirations. Many either own their own companies or are in joint ventures with these overseas Chinese capitalists. They travel abroad and often have much of their wealth safely secured offshore or they hold foreign passports. One can only speculate on what they will do with their wealth and power when the older generation leaves the scene but it is possible that they may lead China in the political direction pioneered by Taiwan or Hong Kong.”
“Market Socialism” and Counterrevolution
The changing economic course from bureaucratic centralization under Mao to “market socialism” under Deng & Co. reflects a general tendency under Stalinist rule to “rationalize” the economy through decentralization. Centralized planning as practiced by a parasitic and uncontrolled bureaucracy invariably squanders economic resources and generates obvious inefficiencies. Plant managers often willfully understate actual capacity so as to be given easily fulfillable production targets. Plan targets are met in quantitative terms but at the cost of poor quality and lack of assortment. Economic administrators and managers are reluctant to use new technologies lest they be penalized if these don’t work.
In his classic analysis of the Soviet bureaucracy, The Revolution Betrayed (1937), Trotsky pointed to the inherent limits of bureaucratic centralism:
“The farther you go, the more the economy runs into the problem of quality, which slips out of the hands of the bureaucracy like a shadow. The Soviet products are as though branded with the gray label of indifference. Under a nationalized economy, quality demands a democracy of producers and consumers, freedom of criticism and initiative—conditions incompatible with a totalitarian regime of fear, lies and flattery.”
In China under Deng, the bureaucracy moved toward “market socialism” following the examples of Yugoslavia and Hungary. Economic administrators and managers were now rewarded or penalized on the basis of market profitability. The threat of plant closures and layoffs also served as a means of enforcing labor discipline among the workers. At the same time, agriculture was decollectivized and replaced by the “household responsibility system,” i.e., peasant smallholding. The pressures of market competition have inevitably resulted in the growth of a small class of wealthy farmers alongside tens of millions of poor peasants. This is the origin of the massive migrant labor force, estimated as high as 200 million, which has flooded into the cities looking for work.
“Market socialism” invariably weakens the collectivized economy and strengthens the forces of capitalist counterrevolution. In Yugoslavia, decentralization greatly aggravated the inequalities and economic conflicts (e.g., over access to foreign exchange) between Serbia, Croatia and the other national republics, setting the stage for the bloody fratricidal wars of the early 1990s that destroyed the Yugoslav deformed workers state. In the Soviet Union, Gorbachev’s assault on centralized planning in the mid 1980s under the rubric of perestroika (restructuring) resulted in economic chaos and sharply falling living standards. This conditioned the capitalist counterrevolution that destroyed the USSR in 1991-92—under the leadership of Boris Yeltsin (formerly Gorbachev’s lieutenant) and actively supported by Washington.
Nonetheless, many Chinese intellectuals and student youth buy the bureaucracy’s line that the “discipline” provided by market measures and the recent WTO trade agreement is necessary for China to develop into a modern, industrial powerhouse and for its people to reap the material benefits of a growing economy. Anyone who thinks that the “free market” will bring abundance to China should look at the former Soviet Union, where capitalist restoration has brought desperate poverty and ethnic bloodletting. And intellectuals and trained technical personnel did not fare well: after the society’s scientific-technical structure and medical system collapsed, Soviet physicists and doctors ended up driving cabs in New York City, if they were lucky.
If this happened to the USSR, which was a global industrial and military power, a capitalist China would subject its masses to far greater impoverishment, and its intellectuals would be thrust back to their degraded status in prerevolutionary society. Capitalist restoration would bring not only economic collapse and immiseration but the danger of the breakup of the country and bloody political chaos. Whatever the nationalist illusions of some Chinese students, the few big imperialist powers that dominate the world economy have no intention of allowing China to become a “great power.” One can look at South Korea. As long as the Soviet Union existed, U.S. imperialism acted to shore up the Seoul regime as an anti-Communist bulwark, allowing it to develop its own shipbuilding and auto manufacturing industries. But when the Asian financial crisis hit in 1997, several years after the destruction of the USSR, the American and Japanese rulers pulled the plug on the South Korean economy.
Beijing’s “market reforms” have already given the working class a taste of what capitalist restoration would mean, and it has responded with wave after wave of strikes and protests. The fight must be for a political revolution to establish a regime of workers democracy committed to reviving the planned economy, restoring a strict state monopoly of foreign trade and expropriating capitalist holdings that have made their way onto the mainland.
A revolutionary China of workers and peasants councils would face virulently hostile imperialist reaction. But proletarian political revolution would also electrify the working class internationally and demolish the “death of communism” lie peddled by the bourgeois ruling classes since the collapse of the USSR.
A political revolution in China, waged under the banner of proletarian internationalism, would truly shake the world. It would radicalize the proletariat of Japan, the industrial powerhouse of East Asia, and inspire revolutionary struggles by workers and peasants throughout Asia. It would spark a fight for the revolutionary reunification of Korea—through political revolution in the beleaguered North and socialist revolution in the South. Only through the overthrow of capitalist class rule internationally, particularly in the imperialist centers of North America, West Europe and Japan, can the foundations be laid for the all-around modernization and development of China, as part of a socialist Asia. It is to provide the necessary leadership for the proletariat in these struggles that the ICL seeks to reforge Trotsky’s Fourth International—world party of socialist revolution.
The Deadly Fruit of “Market Reforms”
A key factor in the outbreak of labor protest over the last three years was the decision of the CCP’s 15th National Congress in 1997 to privatize a number of small and medium-sized concerns and to subject many larger state-owned enterprises to market measures. It is these enterprises themselves and not the central government that have historically been responsible for providing workers with social benefits. When enterprises are declared “bankrupt” or even face significant cuts in subsidies, it is not only the workers’ jobs that are at risk but also benefits like medical insurance. The centralized pension system established in 1995 is so underfunded that it is often unable to pay workers’ pensions, provoking much of the current labor protest.
Official corruption greatly aggravates the workers’ plight. Many of the aging industrial plants are declared bankrupt only to have the former managers steal the assets or sell off the property to private investors. Under huge pressure to show profits, managers often direct loans from state banks not into upgrading production methods or augmenting social benefit funds but into real estate and stock market speculation.
The Beijing auto workers launched their protests after the closing of their plant, which had once been part of a state-owned company. After it merged with American Motors in 1983 to form China’s first joint venture, Beijing Jeep, the new company seized much of the plant’s assets. This caused production to dwindle until it halted entirely, forcing 5,000 workers into layoffs or early retirement. Now, Japanese auto makers are increasingly shifting production to joint ventures in China, where wages are far lower than at home.
The Daqing protests were the result of Beijing’s decision in 1998 to place many of the oil fields under the ownership of PetroChina Ltd., a subsidiary of the state oil company which subsequently issued stock to raise investment funds. Protesting PetroChina’s Wall Street stock offering in the U.S. was an anti-Communist cabal led by the AFL-CIO bureaucracy and including liberal environmentalists and the CIA-sponsored “Free Tibet” movement. This had nothing to do with defending the welfare of the Daqing oil workers, whose benefits have been stolen from them in the interests of PetroChina’s bottom line. Rather, the protests were part of the pro-imperialist labor tops’ protectionist campaign against the entry of “Communist China” into the WTO.
The fight to defend nationalized industry against privatization and closure is a matter of life and death for the Chinese proletariat. This is literally true in the coal mining industry—the world’s largest—where death rates have reached as high as 10,000 per year and new mine collapses are reported almost every week. The horrific death rate is a direct result of cutbacks in state-owned mining operations and the proliferation of mines owned by private entrepreneurs and by township and village enterprises (TVEs). As the Los Angeles Times (23 January) reports, “The miners of yesterday were state employees, relatively well-paid and well-respected pillars of the socialist motherland. Today, more and more are working for private mines with minimal or no safety standards, subsisting on the dark side of the new economy, lucky to have jobs at all.”
Workers in state mines, which use relatively sophisticated equipment and have stringent safety regulations, typically receive at least three months of training. But as the Times article points out, privately run mines rely largely on untrained workers, mainly migrant laborers. With no regard for workers’ lives, private mine operators carve out as many shafts as possible, put in fewer exits and run fewer of the ventilation fans needed to remove natural gas fumes—the cause, according to one report, of half of the mine explosions. A retired miner described what usually happens when the rare inspection is scheduled: “When the inspectors do come, they are often whisked straight away to a banquet and stuffed with red envelopes of money. Deng Xiaoping said, ‘Let some people get rich first.’ They got rich all right, by breaking the law.”
The bureaucracy encouraged the growth of the township/village enterprises as part of economic decentralization. Descended from rural industries that accompanied collectivized agriculture, TVEs are in many cases “collective” in name only. Employing low-wage labor to make shoes, textiles and the like, they do not have to provide the benefits accorded workers in state industry. For years, TVEs steadily undercut state-owned plants producing the same kind of products, and in recent years have come close to equaling state industry’s share of national output. Beijing has recently moved to rein in these enterprises, shutting down tens of thousands of unsafe mines. Many unprofitable TVEs have closed down; others have been bought outright by private investors. A Leninist-Trotskyist party would call to restore guaranteed benefits for workers in state industry and to extend these benefits to workers in the TVEs.
Reports of labor struggle in the TVEs, which are isolated and dispersed throughout the hinterland, are rare. Not so in the Special Economic Zones, which have concentrations of modern factories and are often located near major cities like Hong Kong and Guangzhou (Canton). In April, more than a thousand workers occupied a toy factory in Guangdong province owned by a Hong Kong company that supplies Wal-Mart and other Western firms. The workers had been fired without pay, a not uncommon practice by SEZ bosses, who act in cahoots with local officials.
The capitalists must be driven out of the SEZs and off the land. This poses the question of forming workers and peasants councils to oust the parasitic bureaucracy. Defend and extend the planned, collectivized economy! Expropriate without compensation the holdings of the bloodsucking imperialists and offshore Chinese capitalists!
A regime based on workers and peasants councils would reverse the current regime’s policy of encouraging private property in the countryside, which has spawned a layer of rural exploiters. It would prohibit or restrict the hiring of labor and the leasing of additional land by rich peasants and would promote the recollectivization of agriculture. This is not a matter of reverting to Mao’s agricultural communes, which were essentially an aggregate of backward peasant holdings. For the mass of Chinese peasants to give up their private holdings in favor of collective farms, they must be convinced that this will result in a higher standard of living for themselves and their families. Thus a workers government in China would offer reduced taxes and cheaper credits to peasants who joined collectives. But as Trotsky wrote in a February 1930 article titled “The New Course in the Soviet Economy”:
“The collectivization of agriculture presupposes a certain technical base. A collective farm is above all large. The rational size for the farm is determined, however, by the character of the means and methods of production being applied. With the aid of peasant plows and peasant nags, even all of them put together, it is not possible to create large agricultural collectives, even as it is not possible to build a ship out of a flock of fishing boats. The collectivization of agriculture can be achieved only through its mechanization. From this it follows that the general level of industrialization of a country determines the possible speed of the collectivization of its agriculture.”
Trotsky was writing here in response to the policy of forced collectivization being carried out by the Soviet Stalinist bureaucracy, which had for years conciliated the wealthy peasants (kulaks) to the point that they posed an immediate counterrevolutionary threat to the workers state. The problems of collectivization addressed by Trotsky are all the more acute in China today. The vast majority of the population lives in the countryside, where production methods are still primitive and there is little modern infrastructure.
A rational collectivization and modernization of Chinese agriculture would signify a profound transformation of the society. The introduction of modern technology in the countryside—from combines to chemical fertilizers to the whole complex of scientific farming—would require a qualitatively higher industrial base than currently exists. In turn, an increase in productivity in agriculture would raise the need for a massive expansion of industrial jobs in urban areas to absorb the vast surplus of labor no longer needed in the countryside. Clearly, this would involve a lengthy process, particularly given the limited size and relatively low level of productivity of China’s existing industrial base. Both the tempo and, in the final analysis, the very realizability of this perspective hinges on the aid China would receive from a socialist Japan or a socialist America, underlining again the need for international proletarian revolution.
In refuting the Stalinist doctrine of “building socialism in one country,” Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky emphasized that the threat to the Soviet Union posed by the forces of imperialism was not just military but even more fundamentally economic:
“The capitalist world shows us by its export and import figures that it has other instruments of persuasion than those of military intervention. To the extent that productivity of labor and the productivity of a social system as a whole are measured on the market by the correlation of prices, it is not so much military intervention as the intervention of cheaper capitalist commodities that constitutes perhaps the greatest immediate menace to Soviet economy.”
— The Third International After Lenin (1928)
Indeed, the unremitting military and economic pressure of world imperialism brought about the demise of the Soviet degenerated workers state, which was destroyed by capitalist counterrevolution in 1991-92.
The main weapon available to a nationally isolated and relatively economically backward workers state against the intervention of cheaper goods is the state monopoly of foreign trade—i.e., the strict control of imports and exports by the government. However, the moves toward decentralization of China’s planned, collectivized economy by Deng Xiaoping and his successors have led to a breaking down of the state monopoly of foreign trade. Thousands of large state-owned enterprises (as well as foreign firms and joint ventures) have been given a wide latitude to import raw materials and equipment. The Beijing regime has sought to protect state-owned industry and also small-scale peasant agriculture from the full force of foreign capitalist competition through tariffs, subsidies, import licenses, limits on access to foreign exchange and other such palliatives.
But these measures cannot fundamentally protect the Chinese economy against the dominant imperialist powers. The 1949 Revolution that overthrew the Chinese bourgeoisie and ousted the imperialists led to the creation of a centrally planned economy and state monopoly of foreign trade, which resulted in massive social progress, including advancement of industry. But against the economies of the U.S., Japan and West Europe, Chinese industry, with its relatively low productivity of labor, cannot compete on the world market. By abandoning the state monopoly of foreign trade, the Beijing bureaucracy is opening the mainland’s economy to even greater imperialist pressures.
With China’s recent entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO), Western and Japanese imperialists demand that China’s remaining trade barriers be eliminated or radically reduced. Beijing is for the first time granting a foreign bank—America’s Citibank—the right to provide foreign-currency reserves to domestic customers. The regime has promised to eventually drop all restrictions against foreign banks offering local currency services to Chinese customers. These moves would provide Western and Japanese bankers points of direct contact on the mainland with entrepreneurs, rural businessmen and other capitalist-restorationist forces.
Meanwhile, the U.S. has adopted “anti-dumping” tariffs as high as 30 percent for Chinese and other steel imports! Faced with U.S. protectionism and seeking to take advantage of lower Chinese tariffs under the WTO agreement, a number of steel-producing countries have sharply increased exports to China, causing revenues at the largest state-owned steel company, Baoshan Iron & Steel, to plummet.
Regime spokesmen openly declare that as the economy adjusts to the terms of international competition stipulated by the WTO, the already soaring unemployment rate will triple over the next three years, with as many as ten million workers losing their jobs annually. Even this may be an understatement. Western bankers and academics estimate the current rate of unemployment at around 9-10 percent. The rate in the “rust belt” cities is commonly put at 25 percent. Unlike in capitalist societies, China’s state industries are supposed to maintain benefits for laid-off workers; no one is being kicked out of their subsidized housing. But there is enormous pressure for state enterprises to cut back on such benefits, as overseas bankers demand that the central government stop bailing out these companies.
It is among the peasantry that the WTO may take its greatest toll, as import duties are sharply reduced on foreign produce. Some estimate that as many as 40 million Chinese peasants would be displaced if WTO strictures are enforced. Given China’s backward agricultural techniques, even relatively well-off farmers will not be able to compete with produce imported from advanced capitalist countries. The poorer northern and western regions, which include most of China’s ethnic minorities, would be particularly hard hit, aggravating the yawning gap in living standards between the rural hinterland and the booming eastern coastal regions. Moreover, with local officials charged with raising funds for public services since the mid 1980s, the rural population is subjected to extortionate taxes and specially incurred fees, which also help fill the pockets of thieving officials. The result has been a wildfire of peasant protests and riots.
However, the actual effects of China’s entry into the WTO are not predetermined. The rules stipulated by the WTO for trade among member countries, like all other international agreements between sovereign states, are not self-enforcing, and are mainly honored in the breach. Member governments formally agree to abide by WTO rules and decisions and, if necessary, to change their existing policies accordingly. But if a member state violates these rules, openly or surreptitiously, its trading partners have no recourse other than retaliation in kind (just like in the pre-WTO days). Thus the European Union is now threatening to raise tariffs on an array of American imports in retaliation for Bush’s recent increase in U.S. tariffs on foreign steel (which certainly violated WTO rules).
Obviously, the current leadership of the Chinese Stalinist bureaucracy has not joined the WTO with the intention of then flouting its rules and thereby antagonizing the American as well as the Japanese and European ruling classes. But greater fear of internal social unrest may cause them to do that.
Three years ago, right-wing American economists Mark Groombridge and Claude Barfield published a book on China’s then-pending accession to the WTO in which they expressed skepticism that China’s leaders would subject state-owned enterprises (SOEs) to unrestricted international competition:
“The authors consider it naive to think that China will allow SOEs to make decisions based solely on commercial considerations. China has been attempting to restructure its SOEs since 1978, making the attempt a top priority since 1984. Although considerable progress has been made in some cases, it is clear that commercial factors are not the only considerations; political, social and dubious economic factors count as well. Politically, some Chinese leaders still see SOEs as a tool to protect state leaders from hostile domestic and foreign forces by preserving control over strategic resources.”
— Tiger by the Tail: China and the World Trade Organization (1999)
The authors voice concern that if the Chinese government does not restructure its economy according to the dictates of Wall Street and Washington, “the WTO will face enervating disruptions and turmoil for many years to come after China’s accession.”
In their own way, these right-wing ideologues recognize that China is not now a capitalist state. The actual economic effects of entry will be determined by the struggle of the Chinese working class and rural toilers against the privations caused by the “market reforms” instituted by the ruling Stalinist bureaucracy. A parasitic layer administering the collectivized economy that issued out of the 1949 Revolution, this bureaucratic caste is acting ever more openly and directly as a transmission belt for the pressures of world capitalism upon the Chinese deformed workers state.
A proletarian political revolution that ousts the bureaucracy and establishes the rule of workers and peasants councils would re-establish a centrally planned economy and with it a state monopoly of foreign trade. This would necessarily mean pulling out of the WTO and repudiating or radically revising some of the other economic agreements negotiated by the Beijing regime with the capitalist powers. We are not here advocating a return to the economic autarky of the Mao era. To whatever extent possible, a Chinese workers state should take advantage of the international division of labor by promoting a high level of both exports and imports. At the same time, a regime of workers and peasants councils would face intense imperialist hostility, both militarily and economically (e.g., an economic embargo). This underlines the inextricable link between the defense of the gains of the Chinese Revolution and the struggle for socialist revolution internationally.
The Workers State and the Monopoly of Foreign Trade
Some Chinese leftists point to the New Economic Policy (NEP) developed by the Soviet workers state in 1921 as a justification for China’s entry into the WTO and the “market-oriented reforms” in general. Such a comparison is false to the core. Unlike the “reforms” of Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin & Co., the NEP was seen as a temporary means of revitalizing the economy of the workers state that issued out of the 1917 October Revolution. On top of the destruction wreaked by World War I, following the revolution industry was further devastated by a three-year civil war and an imperialist embargo. Most importantly, Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks fought for the international extension of the revolution, particularly to the advanced capitalist countries. Even as the NEP was implemented domestically, the Bolsheviks dedicated much of their efforts to building the Third (Communist) International—an international of revolutionary parties whose task was to lead the working class in the overthrow of the world capitalist order.
Lenin described the NEP as a “strategical retreat” from policies enacted during the Civil War, when the young workers state successfully defended itself against imperialist invasion and counterrevolutionary White armies. Under “war communism,” the Soviet regime requisitioned grain from the peasantry in order to feed its army and workers in the cities. This created huge resentments among the peasants, who began to withhold grain. The dictatorship of the proletariat in backward Soviet Russia had to lean heavily on the peasantry, which was the overwhelming majority of the population. As the Civil War wound down and the revolutionary tide that swept Europe after WWI receded, the cracks in the smychka (alliance) between the proletariat and peasantry made a turn in policy urgently necessary.
To get the economy moving, the Bolshevik regime made a series of concessions to market forces. Under the NEP, peasants were allowed to market produce exceeding the quota they were obliged to sell to the state. Small-scale industry (employing no more than 20 people) was encouraged. State industries had to sell their products on the market, giving peasants something to buy in exchange for their produce. Leeway was allowed for foreign investment in leased factories or joint ventures, although imperialist hostility largely blocked such investment.
Crucially, trade was kept under the control of the state. Lenin and Trotsky collaborated to beat back proposals put forward by elements in the Bolshevik leadership, including J.V. Stalin, to weaken the state monopoly of foreign trade. When Nikolai Bukharin advocated reliance on protective tariffs, Lenin insisted in “Re the Monopoly of Foreign Trade” (December 1922):
“No tariff system can be effective in the epoch of imperialism when there are monstrous contrasts between pauper countries and immensely rich countries. Several times Bukharin mentions tariff barriers, failing to realise that under the circumstances indicated any of the wealthy industrial countries can completely break down such tariff barriers. To do this it will be sufficient for it to introduce an export bounty to encourage the export to Russia of goods upon which we have imposed high import duties. All of the industrial countries have more than enough money for this purpose, and by means of such a measure any of them could easily ruin our home industry.
“Consequently, all Bukharin’s arguments about the tariff system would in practice only leave Russian industry entirely unprotected and lead to the adoption of free trading under a very flimsy veil.”
Lenin concluded: “In the present epoch of imperialism the only system of protection worthy of consideration is the monopoly of foreign trade.” This fight with Bukharin, who at that time represented a small minority in the party, foreshadowed a similar fight waged by Trotsky in the mid 1920s, when both Bukharin and Stalin were at the helm of the party.
Industrialization and Revolutionary Internationalism
While the NEP succeeded in reviving economic life, it also created a layer of speculators, small traders and well-to-do peasants (kulaks) who were a corrosive influence on the apparatus of the workers state. Lenin was alarmed at the danger this posed, particularly as these layers found voice among state officials and party leaders. One of the last battles fought by Lenin, who was incapacitated for a year before his death in January 1924, was against the burgeoning bureaucracy that was exerting a conservatizing pressure on the small proletarian vanguard organized in the Bolshevik Party.
As early as April 1923, Trotsky warned of the danger posed by the “scissors crisis” (the lack of sufficient manufactured goods to exchange for agricultural produce, leading the peasants to withhold food from the cities). In early October, he wrote to the Bolshevik Central Committee to demand that it address the urgent need for planned industrialization and open a campaign against bureaucratism in the party. Later that same month, the failure of the expected German revolution shattered the hope of the Soviet workers that a proletarian revolution in Europe would end the desperate isolation of the Soviet republic. The demoralization that swept the working class strengthened the then-ruling “triumvirate” of Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev, who expressed the conservative and nationalist outlook of the coalescing bureaucratic stratum.
A loose anti-bureaucratic opposition demanding economic planning and a faster pace of industrialization came together around Trotsky in the leadup to the Thirteenth Party Conference, held in January 1924. At this conference, the Left Opposition was bureaucratically defeated by Stalin and his allies in the triumvirate. With the benefit of hindsight, Trotsky wrote in his 1935 piece “The Workers’ State, Thermidor and Bonapartism”:
“The smashing of the Left Opposition implied in the most direct and immediate sense the transfer of power from the hands of the revolutionary vanguard into the hands of the more conservative elements among the bureaucracy and the upper crust of the working class. The year 1924—that was the beginning of the Soviet Thermidor.”
In late 1924, Stalin propounded the “theory” of “socialism in one country.” Initially developed as a rationale for economic autarky, this anti-Marxist dogma later served as the bureaucracy’s ideological justification for forfeiting the cause of proletarian revolution internationally in a futile effort to appease world imperialism. As Trotsky noted in his seminal work, The Revolution Betrayed (1937):
“Irresoluteness before the individual peasant enterprises, distrust of large plans, defense of a minimum tempo, neglect of international problems—all this taken together formed the essence of the theory of ‘socialism in one country,’ first put forward by Stalin in the autumn of 1924 after the defeat of the proletariat in Germany. Not to hurry with industrialization, not to quarrel with the muzhik, not to count on world revolution, and above all to protect the power of the party bureaucracy from criticism!”
Coming to the fore as a leading theoretician for the bureaucratic regime, Bukharin argued to “build socialism even on a pauper technical basis” and to grant ever greater concessions to the rich peasants. In 1925, he urged the kulaks to “enrich yourselves,” a potentially fatal conciliation of social forces that would inevitably seek the restoration of capitalism in Russia. Encouraged by the bureaucracy, the “NEPmen” continued to grow in strength: at the end of 1926, nearly 60 percent of the industrial labor force worked in privately owned small-scale industry, under the grip of petty capitalists who controlled supply and distribution. The NEPmen and kulaks were demanding that they be allowed to sell their produce on the world market and to import industrial and consumer products.
The bureaucracy’s increasing conciliation of the kulaks led to a conflict of interests in the triumvirate, pitting Zinoviev and Kamenev, with their proletarian bases in Leningrad and Moscow, against Stalin and Bukharin’s pro-kulak policies. In the summer of 1925, Stalin seized control of the Moscow party organization; later that year he smashed Zinoviev’s base of support. In 1926, Zinoviev and Kamenev joined forces with Trotsky’s Left Opposition to form the United Opposition (UO). The UO advocated the planned construction of heavy industry, to be financed by increased taxation of the kulaks. The Opposition also called for a rise in workers’ wages and for the use of economic incentives to further voluntary collectivization among poorer peasants.
In response to Bukharin’s drive to weaken the monopoly of foreign trade, the September 1927 “Platform of the Opposition” asserted that the state monopoly “is a vitally necessary instrument for socialist construction, under the circumstances of a higher technological level in the capitalist countries.” But, the Platform continued:
“No domestic policy can by itself deliver us from the economic, political, and military dangers of the capitalist encirclement. The task at home is to move forward as far as possible on the road of socialist construction by strengthening ourselves with a proper class policy, by proper relations between the working class and the peasantry. The internal resources of the Soviet Union are enormous and make this entirely possible. While we make use of the world capitalist market for this purpose, our fundamental historical expectations continue to be linked with the further development of the world proletarian revolution. Its victory in the advanced countries will break the ring of capitalist encirclement, deliver us from our heavy military burden, enormously strengthen us technologically, accelerate our entire development—in town and countryside, in factory and school—and give us the possibility of really building socialism—that is, a classless society, based on the highest level of technology and real equality among all its members both at work and in the enjoyment of the fruits of their labor.”
When the conciliation of the kulaks proved every bit the disaster predicted by the Opposition, Stalin moved to purge his former Bukharinite bloc partners and implement part of the Opposition’s economic program. This turn foreclosed the immediate threat of capitalist restoration. Having laid none of the technical or economic foundations, the Soviet state—with Stalin’s characteristic brutality—moved to collectivize the peasantry and initiate an adventurous rate of industrialization.
In forming the UO, Trotsky and Zinoviev-Kamenev had shared a theoretical opposition to “socialism in one country” and opposition to the pro-peasant economic policies of Stalin and Bukharin. However, on the critical international question of the then-unfolding Chinese Revolution of 1925-27 Trotsky and Zinoviev had fundamental differences. On the instructions of the Comintern, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was buried inside the bourgeois-nationalist Guomindang (Kuomintang), a policy which eventually paved the way for a bloody defeat. Even before the UO was formed, Trotsky had called for the full withdrawal of the CCP from the Guomindang. This demand, opposed by Zinoviev and his supporters, was not the public line of the UO.
The UO platform called for the “revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry,” insisting that the Chinese Revolution could only be a national-democratic revolution, not a socialist one. Again, this was at variance with Trotsky’s position. In September 1927, Trotsky argued that “the business at hand is the dictatorship of the proletariat” in China. It was on the basis of the experience of the defeat of the Chinese Revolution of 1925-27 that Trotsky came to generalize his theory of permanent revolution, which had been confirmed by the October Revolution: in countries of belated capitalist development, only the dictatorship of the proletariat, leaning on the peasant masses and fighting to extend proletarian rule to the imperialist countries, could break the fetters of political despotism and economic and social backwardness. In his 1928 article “The Opposition’s Errors—Real and Alleged,” Trotsky noted:
“Last fall we did not explain aloud that the experience of 1925-27 had already liquidated the slogan of the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry for the Chinese revolution, and that in the future this slogan would lead either to a regurgitation of Kuomintangism or to adventures. This was quite clearly and precisely predicted. But even here we made concessions (completely impermissible ones) to those who underestimated the depth of the backsliding on the Chinese question.”
China on the Brink
In China today, the policies of the Stalinist bureaucracy closely resemble those advocated by Bukharin, and then some. The current Beijing regime has discarded even the fig leaf of egalitarian socialism, and many of its offspring openly aspire to become capitalists.
One of the most incisive Chinese critics of the corruption engendered by “market reforms” is the journalist He Qinglian, who recently went into exile in the U.S. Her article “China’s Listing Social Structure” (New Left Review, September-October 2000) takes aim at the Communist Party leadership for setting up their “princeling” sons (and daughters) in business, calling this a “one family, two systems arrangement.” This is a play on the regime’s policy on the reversion of Hong Kong from British colonial rule to Chinese control in 1997. The policy was dubbed “one country, two systems,” referring to the fact that while political power lay in Beijing, Hong Kong remains capitalist.
Some officials have set themselves up as exploiters by routing funds through dummy corporations in Hong Kong back into the mainland as “foreign” investment. Recently, there has been a marked outflow of money from the mainland, despite laws against the export of capital. The “princelings” and other entrepreneurs often invest overseas via connections they made through joint ventures and other dealings with foreign businessmen.
Describing China’s growing social polarization, He Qinglian writes:
“Many large or medium Chinese cities now have wealthy neighborhoods, often guarded by state-of-the-art security systems. Consumption too is highly stratified. Specialty stores sell high-fashion items to the rich; street stalls offer cheap wares to the poor. Commercialized political power redistributes wealth to an elite now reproducing itself across generations. Members of the middle or lower classes are acutely aware of the mechanisms of dispossession and exploitation. The most obvious phenomenon is the contrast in the fate of managers and workers when a state enterprise goes bankrupt. Workers are thrown off-post without the slightest compensation, but a former manager or head of a factory never falls into the same pit of poverty. On the contrary, he will often be re-employed by the buyer of the firm’s residual assets—not because of his skill as a manager, but for his cooperation in disposing of state property. Such bosses display ever-stronger anti-social tendencies. The result is a rise in terrorist incidents, physical attacks on the rich, stoppages and sabotage in state-owned enterprises—all manifestations of class conflict.”
This is a powerful depiction of a country on the brink of explosion. But where will this lead?
Many purported leftists advance the anti-Marxist notion that capitalist restoration has succeeded in China and the bureaucracy has become a possessing class in its own right (a view apparently shared by He). This position is characteristic of what passes for “Trotskyism” in China, as represented by the Hong Kong-based Pioneer group associated with the United Secretariat (USec). An article in the USec’s International Viewpoint (March 2002) stated: “The overwhelming majority of technocrats and bureaucrats—the backbone of the CCP—have benefited handsomely from the restoration of a capitalist market economy, and they certainly see no reason to reverse its course.”
Many in the bureaucracy may aspire to a place in the ruling class of a capitalist China for themselves and their children. But this would require a social counterrevolution that destroys the workers state and creates a new bourgeois state. Writing of the USSR under Stalin, Trotsky noted in The Revolution Betrayed: “The contrast between forms of property and norms of distribution cannot grow indefinitely. Either the bourgeois norm must in one form or another spread to the means of production, or the norms of distribution must be brought into correspondence with the socialist property system.” In China, despite the erosion of nationalized industry, state enterprises are still the core of the economy. As Trotsky wrote, the bureaucracy “continues to preserve state property only to the extent that it fears the proletariat.”
From its support to the counterrevolutionary Polish Solidarność movement in the early 1980s to the Yeltsin-led counterrevolution in the USSR in 1991-92 to China today, the USec has consistently sided with the forces of “democratic” counterrevolution. The USec has repeatedly backed pro-imperialist Chinese “dissidents” who act as domestic agents for capitalist restoration, and a Pioneer spokesman at a public forum in Tokyo last November declared that his group would defend capitalist Taiwan in a war with China. Against such counterfeit “Trotskyists,” the ICL stands for the unconditional military defense of the Chinese deformed workers state against Taiwan or any other capitalist state, and against any internal threat of capitalist counterrevolution. The fight for proletarian political revolution is premised on defense of the gains of the 1949 Revolution.
Beware “Labor” Front Men for Imperialism!
Throughout the anti-Soviet Cold War, the American AFL-CIO labor bureaucracy promoted and funded “free trade unions” in East Europe—centrally Solidarność in the 1980s, which spearheaded the capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet bloc. Today, the labor lieutenants of U.S. imperialism, working through such agencies as the American Center for International Labor Solidarity, want to carry out a similar operation in China. They hope to exploit the hostility of Chinese workers to the oppressive and corrupt Beijing bureaucracy by appealing to “democracy.” In the mouths of the AFL-CIO tops, “democracy” is nothing but a code word for re-establishing the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie through counterrevolution. The American labor tops combine anti-Communist tirades against China with flag-waving trade protectionism. At a protest outside the Seattle WTO meeting in December 1999, which also attracted a wide range of liberal and leftist youth, a delegation of AFL-CIO officials demonstratively dumped a load of Chinese steel into Puget Sound.
The All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), the only union body legally allowed in China, acts as an arm of the bureaucracy to police the workers, including in the Special Economic Zones (SEZs) where union officials openly act in league with the capitalist exploiters. In a truly grotesque display, this May Day—traditionally a commemoration of international working-class solidarity—ACFTU officials “honored” a group of capitalist entrepreneurs as “model workers”!
Workers organizations independent of the bureaucracy have begun to emerge in the recent wave of labor protests. In Daqing, retired oil workers built their own organization counterposed to the ACFTU. Other workers have tried to install a new leadership in order to transform their ACFTU union into an organization that fights for their interests. Any organization which is to defend the workers’ interests must stand in defense of the workers state and its collectivized foundations. As we wrote in “Chinese Miners Revolt Against ‘Market Reforms’” (WV No. 735, 5 May 2000):
“A proletarian political revolution will begin under the banner of struggles against social inequality and political oppression, as in 1989. The struggle for freedom of the trade unions—based on the defense of socialized property—as well as for the right of assembly and freedom of the press, will unfold as part of the fight for soviet democracy, for the formation of workers councils opposing the bureaucratic parasites and suppressing counterrevolutionary elements. The central question is that of revolutionary leadership, which can only be resolved by forging a Leninist-Trotskyist party to bring revolutionary socialist consciousness to the working class.”
As workers struggles develop in China, the central importance of defending the gains of the 1949 Revolution is illustrated in the negative by the history of Han Dongfang, who is upheld by the AFL-CIO bureaucracy and the capitalist media as an “independent” labor leader. A railroad worker in 1989, Han emerged as a leader of the Beijing Autonomous Workers Federation, a key workers organization during the Tiananmen protests. Similar groups arose in city after city, joined by many of the regime’s own ACFTU unions. The entry of the working class into the student-initiated protests marked an incipient political revolution. Faced with this proletarian upheaval, the bureaucracy was fracturing, with recalcitrant military commanders refusing to follow orders to suppress the protests. Eventually, the regime found units it could mobilize against the protests and carried out a bloody campaign of terror aimed squarely at the workers. What was crucially missing in the 1989 upheaval was a revolutionary leadership.
Forced to flee China, Han made his way to the U.S., where he was adopted by right-wing Congressmen and the AFL-CIO hierarchy. Converting to Christianity, Han soon became a pro-imperialist “dissident.” He eventually set up shop in Hong Kong, where he publishes the journal China Labour Bulletin (now available only on the Internet), which includes correspondence with workers on the mainland. The purpose he serves is demonstrated by his regular show on Radio Free Asia, an arm of the U.S. government that broadcasts into China. In 1999, Han and three other Chinese “human rights” activists issued a letter commending California Republican Congressman Christopher Cox for his “courageous work in promoting freedom within the People’s Republic of China.” Cox spearheaded the racist witchhunt against Taiwanese-born scientist Wen Ho Lee the same year and ranted that all the tens of thousands of mainland Chinese students, scientists and others residing in the U.S. were potential “Communist agents.”
In the guise of defending workers’ rights, Han’s outfit and others, like the New York City-based “China Labor Watch,” seek to bring imperialist pressure to bear on the Chinese deformed workers state. They are lauded in the West as harbingers of a Chinese version of Polish Solidarność. In East Europe and the former Soviet Union, many workers bought the lie that capitalist restoration would bring prosperity and living standards comparable to the U.S., West Europe and Japan. But it will not be easy to sell “free enterprise” to Chinese workers, many of whom have already experienced the miseries of “free market” exploitation in the SEZs. It is telling that in his service to imperialism, Han has to resort to leftist-sounding rhetoric in denouncing the corruption of rich cadres and capitalist exploitation in such plants.
The Struggle for the Liberation of Women
It is no accident that women have played a prominent role in the recent workers’ protests. While the 1949 Revolution brought enormous social and economic gains to Chinese women, many of these gains have been eroded by “market reforms.”
After 1949, women were given access to education and the right to marry whomever they chose (and to divorce as well), as enshrined in the 1950 Marriage Law. However, the weight of traditional peasant backwardness frequently prevented those newly won rights from becoming a reality. Moreover, Stalinist ideology glorifies the family, particularly in China where the Communist Party was based on the peasantry. Party cadre assigned to enforce the Marriage Law in the villages often bowed to the pressure of peasants who wanted to maintain the traditional family structure.
Nevertheless, with the establishment of planned industrial development, women were vaulted into the workforce at many levels, although some discrimination remained. The skills and education they achieved can be measured today at the mammoth Three Gorges dam construction site, where women as well as men operate some of the world’s largest and most powerful earthmoving machinery. One would be hard-pressed to find this sight duplicated in even the most advanced capitalist societies. It would certainly not be seen in a country like capitalist India, which before 1949 was roughly at the same level of social development as China but today remains mired in hideous poverty, barbaric anti-woman practices and all-around backwardness.
But today women in cities like Guangzhou (Canton) account for only one-third of workers in state industry, whereas previously they had held nearly half the jobs. In part, this is due to discrimination against older women. For some years, the official retirement age for women has been lower than that for men. After the regime began encouraging “early retirement” in 1994, the age was lowered to the point that in some large plants it is now 42 for women (and 52 for men). In large part, this is a veiled form of layoffs.
With consummate cynicism, the government’s 29 April report, “Labor and Social Security in China,” crows that “a total of 30 cities so far have carried out a ‘starting a business’ training program, offering training to laid-off and unemployed persons who wish to establish a small business.” This is scant solace to the vast majority of women who have lost their jobs. In the mid 1990s, a study of the economically depressed northeastern city of Shenyang showed that a large proportion of those laid off were women over the age of 35. Many have been forced to eke out a living peddling from street stalls. Predictably, there has also been a rise in prostitution. An additional danger to women’s rights is the growth of reactionary religious sects like Falun Gong, which opposes abortion, considers women inferior to men and is rife with anti-homosexual bigotry.
In the countryside, where some two-thirds of the population lives, women have suffered gravely since the decollectivization of agriculture beginning in 1978. While the communes of the Mao era were essentially large aggregates of backward peasant plots, women did achieve a certain degree of equality. But the division of the land into individually leased family-operated plots—the first “market reform”—has breathed new life into centuries-old horrors rooted in the traditional Chinese family structure, such as female infanticide and the buying and selling of “wives.” With rural life such a dead end for young women, many flocked to sweatshops in the SEZs, even if this meant toiling up to 14 hours a day with barely a day or two off per month.
As we wrote in “China: ‘Free Market’ Misery Targets Women” (Women and Revolution No. 45, Winter-Spring 1996):
“A China run by democratically elected workers and peasants councils would make short shrift of the scum who traffic in human beings. But to overcome the social pathology that has brought about the return of female infanticide, abandonment of children and selling of women into slavery requires alleviating the poverty and isolation of the peasant masses, which in turn requires the massive modernization and mechanization of the countryside to lay the material basis for a rational recollectivization of agriculture. This task is dependent on the economic integration of China into a socialist Asia based on the advanced industrial capacity of countries like Japan and Australia.”
For a Leninist-Trotskyist Party!
The resistance of the Chinese working class to attacks on their livelihoods has created some fissures in the bureaucratic caste itself. Moves by Chinese president Jiang Zemin to invite capitalists to join the CCP were met with significant internal opposition. Fearing that disgruntled workers may link up with such leftist elements, the regime recently placed a prominent Maoist named Wei Wei under house arrest and shut down at least two journals reporting on corruption and the plight of the working class. (For a Trotskyist polemic against Wei Wei’s views, see “Whither China? ‘Market Socialism’ and the Legacy of Mao,” WV Nos. 743 and 745, 6 October and 3 November 2000.)
In Shenyang a few years ago, CCP veterans went into rebellion after the arrest of a local official, Zhou Wei. A CCP cadre for more than 40 years, Zhou had led a series of protests and petition campaigns denouncing the government for corruption and for refusing to defend peasants, workers and retirees like himself. Protests in the city became so common at one point that the day’s road blockages were announced on the morning news! Such events illuminate the potential to forge a new, egalitarian communist party in China. But this requires a sharp political struggle to break such militants from the dead end of Maoism and win them to the genuine communism of Lenin and Trotsky.
A Chinese Leninist-Trotskyist party would wage uncompromising struggle against the Han chauvinism promoted by the nationalist CCP regime. It would seek to imbue the proletariat with the understanding that it must fight for the interests of all the oppressed—from women and homosexuals to the poor peasantry and national and ethnic minorities.
A crucial task is the defense of migrant laborers who have flocked to the cities and towns. Forced into the most dangerous and menial work, they lack the rights of legal city residents and are typically forced to live in segregated areas. Under conditions of rising unemployment, tensions are mounting between urban residents and migrant workers, who are seen as stealing jobs and depressing wages. Working-class militants must fight for migrants to receive all the rights enjoyed by legal residents, including access to housing and public education, and demand equal pay for equal work.
To date, the most militant protests have generally been by workers who have been laid off or older workers living on meager pensions. What is necessary is to bring the strategic core of the Chinese proletariat—those employed in basic industry and transport—into battle. These are the workers who have the social power to oust the bureaucracy and defeat the forces of capitalist restoration. But such a development will not happen automatically or spontaneously. There must be built in China a revolutionary vanguard party which can unify in struggle all sectors of the working class in alliance with the rural toilers and urban poor.
Above all, a Leninist-Trotskyist party is needed to provide Chinese workers with a revolutionary proletarian internationalist strategy. For even the most advanced leftist Chinese workers, the prospect for socialist revolution in Japan or the United States may seem remote or utopian. What is actually utopian is the belief that there is a nationally limited road to socialism in China. The modernization of China—ensuring a decent life for all its inhabitants on the basis of access to advanced technology and productive resources now concentrated in North America, West Europe and Japan—requires proletarian revolutions in the imperialist centers, establishing an internationally planned socialist economy. The International Communist League fights to build revolutionary workers parties which are the necessary element to lead the working class to power internationally.