On Hong Kong

(Letter)

17 September 2019

Comrades,

I would like to comment on your article “Hong Kong: No to Counterrevolutionary Rampage!” [WV No. 1160, 6 September]

The CCP’s policy of one nation, two systems is at best dangerous. The dialectic of history shows us that a nation cannot sustain two opposing economic systems. This is one of the lessons of the American Civil War. Trotsky’s warning in “The Revolution Betrayed” about the Soviet Union holds true for China, that, to paraphrase, would lead either to political revolution removing the Stalinists from the workers state or to capitalist counterrevolution.

Your article mentioned how the United States and its allies give Taiwan money, weapons, and other support as well as military provocations in the South China Sea. But it should also be noted that Taiwan is seeking official United Nations recognition with the backing of the United States, Britain and their allies.

This is why it is important to give unconditional support to defend the gains of the 1949 revolution while working to oust the Stalinists and establishing workers rule.

Comradely, Alan Nicholoplus

WV replies: We thank our reader for his letter. When the British handed over their Hong Kong colony to China in 1997, we welcomed it while warning that the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) policy of upholding capitalism in Hong Kong was a threat to the gains of the 1949 Chinese Revolution (see article, back page). The CCP’s formula of “one country, two systems” has kept the wealth in the hands of Hong Kong’s tycoons and maintained Hong Kong as a breeding ground for counterrevolution and an outpost for imperialist machinations.

The American Civil War, a struggle between two distinct socioeconomic systems, culminated in the destruction of the Southern slavocracy and the victory of the Northern capitalists. The Chinese civil war in the late 1940s culminated in the destruction of the bourgeois state apparatus by the peasant-based CCP-led guerrilla forces and the creation of a bureaucratically deformed workers state. The Chinese bureaucracy’s policy of maintaining Hong Kong as a capitalist enclave is treachery and part of its accommodation to the imperialists, who seek nothing less than the overturn of the workers state. The only way to eliminate the danger of capitalist counterrevolution and open the path to developing socialism is through the victory of workers revolutions, especially in the advanced industrial countries.

Unlike Hong Kong, Taiwan is an independent capitalist state. While Taiwan has forever tried to win back U.N. recognition, Washington does not pursue that particular policy, but instead focuses on arming Taiwan as part of the imperialist military threat against China. In contrast to the CCP’s program of uniting with Taiwan on the basis of “one country, two systems,” the ICL stands for the revolutionary reunification of China. In Taiwan this means overthrowing capitalism through socialist revolution; in mainland China this means ousting the Stalinist misleaders through proletarian political revolution and establishing the rule of workers, peasants and soldiers councils.