The great challenges facing China today
Based on a talk given by Deirdre Griswold at the Dec. 6-7
"Reviving the Worldwide Struggle for Socialism"
conference.
At this conference on how the world needs
socialism, how could we not talk about China?
It is the largest country still governed by a communist
party and the largest country to call itself socialist, even
though that term has been modified to "market socialist." Of
course, it is the largest country in the world. One of every
five human beings lives in China.
Today the premier of China, Wen Jibao, is on his way to the
United States to meet with Bush. He is not coming to denounce
U.S. imperialism but to try to keep the peace while reiterating
China's determination not to allow Taiwan to become a separate
country, which would be nothing but a neo-colony of the United
States.
Taiwan was where the counter-revolutionary army of Chiang
Kai-shek fled at the time of the Chinese Revolution. The U.S.
government at that time not only agreed that Taiwan was part of
China, but insisted that Chiang was still the leader of all
China and Taiwan was its temporary capital. That fiction
persisted for 22 years, until 1971, when the People's Republic
of China finally was able to take its rightful seat in the
United Nations.
The struggle of the Chinese Revolution has been not only to
transform China economically and socially, but to defend its
territorial integrity and its very life as a nation. It's very
interesting that an article in Pravda this week on why nuclear
non-proliferation won't happen in today's world mentions that
the United States threatened China with nuclear attack three
times in the 1950s--once over Korea and twice over small
islands in the South China Sea that Chiang's forces had
occupied and that Red China threatened to take back. Once China
developed its own nuclear weapons, such U.S. threats lost their
punch--something that North Korea also would take note of
today.
This is the kind of brutal world into which the Chinese
Revolution was born, with its tremendous promise to liberate
hundreds of millions of human beings from intense poverty,
oppression and foreign colonial occupation.
Anyone in this room who lived through the radical period of
the 1960s and 1970s knows how China inspired oppressed peoples
everywhere. I met representatives from Vietnam in 1967 who were
wearing Mao buttons. Think of that. China was leading the
worldwide defiance of imperialism and challenging the Soviet
leaders' policies that subordinated the national-liberation and
class struggles to an illusory peaceful coexistence between
socialism and capitalism.
However, China, while vast, was a poor and underdeveloped
country. Its political break with the USSR cost it much-needed
technological assistance. Even before the Vietnam War was over,
and while Chairman Mao Zedong was still the leader, China
invited U.S. President Richard Nixon on a state visit in an
attempt to ease the threat from the main imperialist power in
the world.
The China represented today by Premier Wen Jibao is still a
developing country. But it has experienced phenomenal economic
growth in recent years, due very largely to billions of dollars
in foreign investment. It is also a nuclear power and recently
put an astronaut into space. No imperialist country helped them
by investing in that. The imperialists want a China that is
industrialized just enough to facilitate the exploitation of
its cheap labor by foreign capital.
In today's New York Times (Dec. 7) you can read about how
the child's toy Etch-a-Sketch is now being made in China by
super-exploited workers--so it can be sold cheaply here at
Wal-Mart; how the bosses coach the workers to lie to Chinese
government inspectors about their wages and working
conditions--or else lose their jobs; and about how the workers
there have at times gone on strike over these conditions.
The class struggle has at times been intense in China since
the revolution. Now it's in a new form.
"Market socialism" is a blend of two contradictory social
phenomena--two modes of production based on opposing classes.
The early Soviet Union under Lenin had to reintroduce the
market in agriculture because of the total breakdown in the
country caused by civil war. But Lenin wrote about its great
dangers and saw it as only a temporary measure. Cuba also tried
a farmers' market for a few years, but ended it during the
rectification period of the early 1980s.
Why is the market so dangerous to a socialist country?
Because it inevitably introduces gross inequalities that eat
away at the morale of the workers and poorer farmers, who are
the pillars of the socialist revolution.
Eventually, it becomes a danger to the very existence of the
workers' state. It contributes to corruption within the state
apparatus. China in recent years has executed a number of
millionaires--probably the only country in the world to do so.
When was there last an execution of a millionaire in the United
States? That says something about the Chinese state. But it
also says something about the capitalist economy growing up
alongside the workers' state. Otherwise there wouldn't be
millionaires to execute.
The turn toward the market began several decades ago. After
a long internal struggle the Maoist leadership lost out to the
forces around Deng Xiaoping, who had been labeled a "capitalist
roader" by the left. We have an article in Workers World that
briefly summarizes this turn. But to get a more in-depth
understanding of the significance of this great struggle, I
urge you to read the two pamphlets by Sam Marcy, "China--the
Struggle Within" and "The Suppression of the Left."
Our analysis of these events is not just based on criticisms
of the leadership, on calling them sell-outs and betrayers,
which unfortunately many of those who once passionately
defended China have done. We of course recognize the tremendous
importance of revolutionary leadership. How could Cuba have
survived to this day without the great leadership of Fidel
Castro--or Che Guevara and other socialist heroes. Or take
Korea, which continues to hold out against the pressures of
capitalism and imperialism despite all odds. The Korean people
revere the memory of Kim Il Sung because of his great
revolutionary leadership during periods of incredible
trial.
But China's problem is not just a subjective one, not just a
lack of revolutionary leaders. It is, above all, the problem of
feeding over a billion people, of trying to move forward to a
modern economy at a time when the world economic system is
completely dominated by predatory monopoly capitalism.
We in the United States most of all have to understand this.
This society takes so much for granted. We need socialism
because it is the only system that works when you have
abundance. That's what makes socialism a historic possibility
in this day and age: abundance. Capitalism has developed the
means of production to the point of producing goods in
abundance, but then it goes haywire. Abundance under capitalism
leads to overproduction, layoffs, people sleeping under bridges
and going hungry when warehouses are full. Only socialism can
lead the way out of this irrational morass by liberating the
means of production from private ownership.
But what happens when you have the socialist revolution in
parts of the world that have never known abundance; where, as
in China, millions died of starvation every time there was a
bad harvest; where everything needs to be built up--mining,
manufacturing, transportation, communications, and the people's
health, education and housing?
That's what the leaders of China's revolution faced. And
they have faced it pretty much alone.
We see how capitalism has become a world system. It has
integrated the world in a way that is often irrational--moving
the production of Etch-a-Sketch toys to China just for the
cheap labor, even though they have to be shipped back here for
the U.S. market, for example--but it shows it can be done.
Socialism will be truly a world system, not for the purpose of
super-exploiting three-quarters of the world, but for the
purpose of rationally and fairly sharing all the peoples' great
intellectual and cultural contributions and all the planet's
resources in a sustainable way.
Yes, it can be done and it must be done.
China's revolutionary generation had great hope that it
would be done in time to help them solve their great
problems.
We've heard that a favorite slogan in Latin America today
is: "Iraq, hold on. The world is rising." All the world is
looking, waiting, hoping that this is true not only in the
oppressed countries but inside the imperialist countries as
well, especially right here in the belly of the beast.
Would those in China who favored the market have won the
political struggle if there had been a real challenge to
imperialism coming from the workers and revolutionary youths in
the imperialist countries?
Wouldn't the more revolutionary elements, those who are
fighting for the workers' interests, have been heartened and
pressed harder? But in a period of reaction like the last few
decades in this country, even leftists were afraid that turmoil
in China would open the door to a real counter-revolution like
in the USSR, and the destruction of the Chinese state.
The existence of a workers' state in China has made a huge
difference. The only country comparable to China in size and
history is India. While it achieved independence from British
colonial rule, there was no social revolution in India, no
setting up of a new state based on the workers and peasants.
The vital statistics today show the difference: India's infant
mortality rate is almost three times that of China. Its life
expectancy is 10 years less. Illiteracy is much higher in
India. Chinese women are much more integrated into economic and
social life at all levels.
China's leaders today are pragmatic, not revolutionary. But
how do they see the world? When even rich imperialist countries
are cutting education, health care, pensions--all the social
programs won by the workers--they say how can a poor,
developing country like China afford them?
We could say this is shortsighted. Any socialist country's
most important asset is its people. Well-educated, healthy
people will contribute more to raising the country up. Cuba has
shown that splendidly.
But they will reply: You don't understand our problems. We
know how much money is in the state treasury. We don't have it.
Once we have more rich people, we will tax them, the way you
do. And then we'll have more money for these things.
Through our actions, we need to prove to the world that
socialist development as we understand it--not the
contradiction of building socialism through a market that
fosters inequality--is possible. We can't do it with polemics
alone. We can only do it by building the struggle here against
imperialism, by winning more and more workers to this struggle
because imperialist war and super-exploitation abroad are
undermining their position, by fighting racism and national
chauvinism and bigotry to unite our class and eventually bring
down the capitalist exploiters and oppressors.
China's future needs it. The whole world needs it.
Reprinted from the Dec. 25, 2003, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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