Chinese Bureaucracy Promotes Reactionary Nationalism
Resurgent Japanese Imperialism Sparks Protests in China
Down With U.S./Japan Counterrevolutionary Alliance!
For Unconditional Military Defense of Chinese Deformed Workers State!
Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 847, 29 April 2005.
APRIL 26—For the past month, tens of thousands of protesters have marched in anti-Japanese demonstrations in cities throughout China. The protests were sparked by Tokyo's approval of new junior high school history textbooks that whitewash past atrocities carried out by Japanese imperialism. The 1937 Rape of Nanjing, in which 300,000 Chinese were slaughtered by Japanese troops, is now described as "an incident." The enslavement of more than 200,000 Korean and Chinese so-called "comfort women," who were forced to serve as sex slaves in Japanese army brothels during World War II, has been erased from history.
The Japanese textbook whitewash is a provocation not only against the Chinese deformed workers state, but workers throughout Asia, and, in fact, it has sparked protests in South Korea. It is the latest in a series of provocations by Japanese imperialism against China, including Japan's recent statement that it will drill for oil and gas around the Diaoyutai Islands, which are claimed by China. Most significant was the issuing of a joint policy statement in February between the U.S. and Japan avowing that Taiwan is "a mutual security concern." Most of the protests in China, which for now have largely stopped, were tacitly organized or approved by the government as a response to the provocations by Japan. The bureaucracy had allowed the protests to continue—while anxiously seeking to keep them from getting out of hand—to provide a distraction from the deepening social turmoil tearing at the fabric of Chinese society. As one Shanghai demonstrator put it, "People are taking part in this march because they aren't allowed to protest anything else" (New York Times, 17 April).
However, the protests, which continued longer than any major public demonstrations in China since the 1989 Tiananmen revolt, have promoted a nationalist response to Japan's provocations—i.e., not against the capitalist rulers of Japan, but rather against the entire Japanese population, workers no less than their capitalist oppressors. "Japanese pigs get out!", shouted Chinese protesters as they trashed Japanese-owned shops. One expression of the nationalism has been calls for boycotting Japanese businesses and goods.
The nationalist poison being promoted by the Chinese Stalinist bureaucracy poses a grave danger to the gains of the 1949 Chinese Revolution itself. As opposed to class unity between the Chinese and Japanese proletariat, the bureaucracy is pushing unity of all Chinese people, including Chinese capitalists from Taiwan and Hong Kong, against all Japanese people. This was expressed in a recent demonstration in Hong Kong, where anti-Japanese protesters carried the Taiwanese flag of the Guomindang, which represents the capitalists and landlords who fled the Revolution. The Chinese government recently hosted a delegation of the Guomindang from Taiwan for the first time since the Civil War, a display of Chinese "unity" against the pro-Taiwanese-independence Democratic Progressive Party that expresses the deep nationalism and class collaborationism of the Chinese Stalinists.
The gains of the Chinese Revolution—above all the nationalized, collectivized economy—represent a historic advance not only for Chinese workers and peasants, but also for the entire world proletariat. The expropriation of the capitalists and the setting up of a socialized economy represented a great advance over the imperialist subjugation and horrendous oppression once suffered by China's masses, laying the basis for a tremendous leap in economic development. And, with the internationalist extension of the revolution, it could lay the basis for the eventual construction of a socialist society.
However, China from its inception has been a deformed workers state, in which a conservative caste of bureaucrats, ruling in its own narrow interests, blocks development toward a classless, socialist society. Ever since (and including) Mao Zedong, these bureaucratic rulers have championed the nationalist Stalinist dogma of building "socialism in one country." Flatly repudiating Marxism, the Stalinists have historically preached the idiocy that socialism could be built in a single country—even one as materially backward as China—if only imperialist military intervention were thwarted.
One aspect of the recent protests in China has been opposition to Japan's attempts to gain a permanent seat in the United Nations Security Council. For the Chinese government, this question is part of its maneuvering, within the framework of "peaceful coexistence" with world imperialism, between so-called "progressive" and "reactionary" imperialist powers. For example, China supports Germany's bid for a permanent seat. The truth is that the UN is nothing but an imperialist den of thieves and their victims. From the Korean War to the sanctions against Iraq, which killed over 1.5 million people, the UN has shown itself to be an enemy of working people and the oppressed internationally.
Revolutionary proletarian internationalism, not nationalist class collaboration, is essential to advance the interests of the Chinese workers in defense of the gains of the Chinese Revolution, and Japanese workers in their struggle against revanchist Japanese imperialism. As we wrote in a 13 March joint statement between the International Communist League's Japanese and American sections against the counterrevolutionary agreement between the U.S. and Japan over Taiwan (WV No. 844, 18 March):
"The Spartacist League/U.S. and the Spartacist Group Japan...stand for the unconditional military defense of China and North Korea—as we do for the other remaining deformed workers states, Vietnam and Cuba—against imperialist attack and internal capitalist counterrevolution....
"Since the 1949 Chinese Revolution, from which the Chinese deformed workers state emerged, Taiwan has been an outpost for U.S. imperialism's counterrevolutionary schemes, military threats and interference in Chinese internal affairs through the puppet Chinese bourgeoisie. Taiwan has been since ancient times a part of China, and we Trotskyists will stand with China in the event of any military conflict with imperialism over Taiwan....
"We are opposed to the Stalinists' plan of reunification with Taiwan embodied in ‘one country, two systems.' Instead, we advance a program for the revolutionary reunification of China, which requires a workers political revolution against the Stalinist bureaucracy on the mainland, a proletarian socialist revolution in Taiwan to overthrow and expropriate the bourgeoisie, and the expropriation of the Hong Kong capitalists."
For Revolutionary Internationalism!
The dogma of "socialism in one country" means opposition to the perspective of workers revolution internationally and accommodation to world imperialism. The recent protests, for example, have aimed their entire fire against Japan, whitewashing the crimes of U.S. imperialism. (Apparently, Beijing considers Tokyo the easier target in the U.S.-Japan military alliance.) This reflects and feeds into an illusion in China that the U.S. is a more benign imperialist power. Yet it was the U.S. that in 1945 became the only country ever to use atomic weaponry, causing the death of several hundred thousand Japanese civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These bombings served as a warning to the Soviet degenerated workers state. During the Korean War in the early 1950s, U.S. imperialism was responsible for the death of some three million Koreans. China's heroic sacrifices defended the North Korean deformed workers state and stopped U.S. forces—fighting under the flag of the United Nations—from grabbing the entire Korean peninsula and turning it into a neocolony of the U.S. During the Vietnam War, which ended in 1975, more than three million Vietnamese were murdered by U.S. imperialism's losing attempt to smash the social revolution there.
Many in China have illusions about the nature of U.S. imperialism because it fought against Japan in World War II. The Stalinists, presenting World War II as a "war against fascism," sided with the bourgeois-democratic imperialist powers —centrally the U.S. and Britain—against Germany, Italy and Japan.
In contrast, Trotskyists understood that the interimperialist slaughter in World War II was a conflict for redivision of the world's sources of cheap labor and raw materials in the interest of capitalist profits. During World War II, the Fourth International, founded by Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky, basing itself on proletarian internationalism, fought for the revolutionary defeat of all the imperialist nations. Simultaneously, it stood for the unconditional military defense of the Soviet degenerated workers state against imperialism and championed the self-determination of the colonies against their subjugation by the Axis and Allied imperialists alike.
During the occupation of China by Japan beginning in the early 1930s, Trotskyists gave military support to the Chinese resistance forces, while politically opposing Chiang Kai-shek's bourgeois Guomindang forces. With the entry of the U.S. into the Pacific War, the war effort of Chiang's Guomindang was decisively subordinated to the interests of U.S. imperialism, to the point that U.S. officials had the final say on how Guomindang forces were to be deployed. Under these conditions, it became necessary to advocate a revolutionary defeatist position—for the defeat of both sides through proletarian class struggle—toward both the U.S./Guomindang and Japanese forces, while giving military support to Mao's Communist Party forces, which were not militarily subordinate to U.S. imperialism (see "Permanent Revolution vs. the ‘Anti-Imperialist United Front'—The Origins of Chinese Trotskyism," Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 53, Summer 1997).
A central tenet of the Stalinist bureaucrats' nationalistic outlook is that workers in the advanced capitalist countries are so bought off by their exploiters that revolutionary class struggle there is a utopian (or Trotskyist) pipedream. Yet, in Japan there have been signs of opposition to resurgent militarism, including within the organized working class. In 2001, some 200 dock workers at Sasebo port in Nagasaki refused to load armaments and military supplies onto Japanese navy ships headed to assist the U.S.-led war of terror on Afghanistan. More recently, hundreds of teachers have been fired or otherwise disciplined for refusing to stand for the Hinomaru (national flag) and sing the Kimigayo (national anthem), symbols of Japanese militarism. These actions were taken in defiance of the pro-imperialist leaders of the three main trade-union federations—including those affiliated to the Japanese Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party—and are a direct challenge to the "national unity" appeals of the Japanese bourgeoisie.
With the outbreak of anti-Japan protests in China, the administration of Japanese prime minister Junichiro Koizumi engaged in one anti-China provocation after another. Koizumi haughtily admonished the Chinese people to be "more grown up" and keep "a cool head" and echoed President Bush in successfully pressuring the European Union to retain the arms embargo of China.
The provocations by Japanese imperialism have been egged on by U.S. imperialism. Last summer, then-secretary of state Colin Powell declared U.S. support for Japan's bid to have a seat on the UN Security Council while noting that Article 9 of the U.S.-imposed constitution, which prohibits Japan from engaging in warfare abroad, "would have to be examined in that light" (AFP English edition, 13 August 2004). More recently, there has been a proposal to transfer the command headquarters of the U.S. Army's 1st Corps from the U.S. mainland to Yokohama, south of Tokyo, where, in the words of the London Guardian (19 April), "the primary focus of its forward deployment is likely to be the defence of Taiwan, regional challenges posed by China's military expansion, and the nuclear standoff with North Korea."
Right-wing chauvinists in Japan took the provocations by Japan and the protests in China as a green light to terrorize Chinese residents. Chinese diplomatic offices and other Chinese-related institutions were either attacked or vandalized. There were bomb threats at the Chinese Consul General in Fukuoka, an anthrax scare at the Chinese embassy in Tokyo and a spent bullet casing sent to the Chinese consulate in Osaka with a letter threatening violence against Chinese citizens. On April 10, shots were fired at a Bank of China branch office in Yokohama.
Finally, at the April 22 Asia-Africa summit meeting in Indonesia, Koizumi sought to defuse tensions with China by offering a vague apology for the "tremendous damage and suffering" caused by Japanese colonial rule. (The same day, a member of Koizumi's government joined 80 other politicians in a pilgrimage to the Yasukuni Shrine, a symbol of Japanese militarism where war criminals from World War II are among those enshrined.) Prominent voices in Japan had complained last week that continued tension would hurt Japanese business, while China's Ministry of Commerce declared that boycotts of Japanese goods would harm both countries' economic interests. China is now Japan's number one trading partner, and some 18,000 Japanese companies have set up operations in China. As the New York Times (23 April) put it, the "growing economic interdependence" between China and Japan "has mollified their positions in recent days."
Japanese imperialism is determined to throw off the constraints of the "defeated nation" syndrome with which it emerged from World War II. To accomplish this, the ruling class seeks to impose a policy of economic austerity domestically, whip up nationalist poison and reinforce the repressive apparatus needed to maintain capitalist law and order. The new defense guidelines not only target the Chinese and North Korean deformed workers states but also strengthen the state's arsenal of repression against the workers movement. There is considerable anger among the working people of Japan and a real desire to fight against economic austerity, discrimination, increased state repression and war. This anger and militancy must be directed toward the building of a revolutionary Trotskyist party that would link the fight for socialist revolution in Japan with the unconditional military defense of the Chinese and North Korean deformed workers states.
China: For Workers Political Revolution!
Speaking for many in the Chinese Stalinist bureaucracy, Li Rui, a former secretary of Mao Zedong, made the following bald admission: "Nobody understands Marxism. It is ridiculous. The ideals of the past don't exist any more. So it is right to turn to nationalism. It is the means by which the party can maintain its system and ideology" (London Observer, 17 April). Along with the cynical defense of nationalism as an effective means for manipulating the masses, this statement reflects widespread misidentification of Marxism with Maoism. In reality, the sharp contrast that is commonly drawn between Mao's policies and those of his successor Deng Xiaoping is fundamentally false.
Within the nationalist framework of "socialism in one country," the regimes of Mao and Deng pursued different policies in different international contexts. Nonetheless, in one very important respect their policies were substantially identical: the alliance with U.S. imperialism against the Soviet Union. That alliance was sealed in 1972 when U.S. president Richard Nixon embraced Chairman Mao at the very moment that U.S. warplanes were carpet bombing Vietnam. U.S. imperialism's rapprochement with the Maoist bureaucracy on the basis of shared hostility to the Soviet Union led to U.S. recognition of the People's Republic and a seat for China in the United Nations at the expense of Taiwan.
The alliance with the U.S. was continued and deepened under Deng. In 1979, Deng ordered the People's Liberation Army (PLA) to invade Vietnam, the main Soviet ally in East Asia, with the approval and encouragement of Washington. The Vietnamese resisted effectively and inflicted 20,000 casualties on the PLA, which retreated across the border. (Speaking of doctored history textbooks, this ignominious chapter has been virtually disappeared by the Chinese Stalinists.) During the final years of the Cold War in the 1980s, China bolstered American imperialism in weakening and undermining the Soviet Union—for example, giving aid to the CIA-backed mujahedin cutthroats fighting Soviet troops in Afghanistan—thereby furthering the counterrevolutionary drive which wiped out the remaining gains of the 1917 Russian Revolution.
Having destroyed the Soviet Union, homeland of the only successful workers revolution, the imperialists are today intent on restoring capitalism in China. To this end, they are pursuing a two-pronged strategy: economic penetration to build up the internal forces of capitalist counterrevolution combined with military pressure and the threat of armed intervention. The Stalinist bureaucrats are in fact encouraging the imperialists through their policy of betrayal: allowing massive capitalist investment combined with a futile quest for "peaceful coexistence" with the imperialists.
But despite the bureaucracy's "market reforms," the core of the Chinese economy remains collectivized. Moreover, the economic policies of the Communist Party regime are still constrained by fear of social—especially working-class —unrest which could topple it. This came close to happening in 1989, when student-centered protests for political liberalization and against corruption triggered a spontaneous workers revolt that was then suppressed with great bloodshed by the regime.
Today, China is a tinderbox of social tensions waiting to explode. According to government statistics, the number of protests increased 15 percent last year to 58,000. Millions of impoverished farmers and urban workers have blocked roads, waged strikes or demonstrated against official corruption, land seizures, environmental destruction, layoffs and unemployment, miserable working conditions and the growing gap between urban wealth and rural poverty. In mid April residents of Dongyang in southeastern China, furious at the government's refusal to deal with the pollution from nearby factories, drove out 1,000 riot police and seized control of the city. At the same time, nearly 2,000 former PLA soldiers staged a series of protest demonstrations in Beijing against their meager retirement benefits. Most recently, some 10,000 workers at a Japanese-funded Uniden electronics factory in Shenzhen near Hong Kong went on strike demanding the right to unionize. By April 23, the strike ended. Revealing how the Chinese bureaucracy acts as a labor contractor for the imperialist bourgeoisies investing in China, one striker told the Washington Post (26 April), "Some labor officials told us we had to cooperate or else the investors might withdraw and move to other places to invest, and we would all get thrown out of work."
Through their policy of "market reforms," the Chinese bureaucracy is strengthening the forces of counterrevolution by allowing the imperialists to economically penetrate the workers state. At the same time, this policy is augmenting the social power of the industrial proletariat. The alternatives facing China are capitalist counterrevolution or proletarian political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucracy and replace it with democratically elected workers and peasants Soviets, organs of proletarian rule. A Leninist-Trotskyist party is needed to provide Chinese workers with a revolutionary proletarian internationalist strategy. There is no nationally limited road to socialism in China. The modernization of China—providing the basis for a decent life for all its inhabitants on the basis of access to the advanced technology and productive resources now concentrated in North America, West Europe and Japan—requires the international extension of socialist revolution, centrally to these imperialist powers, laying the basis for an internationally planned socialist economy. This requires the reforging of Trotsky's Fourth International of world socialist revolution.