China's rulers are right to be nervous

The celebrations earlier today to mark the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China were amongst the strangest in history. Residents in Beijing were told that they were likely to be shot if they opened any window or balcony door facing the route of the anniversary parade. Police shouted at people to watch the displays of military might on television rather than venture onto the streets.

Since July there has been a major clampdown on Internet communications, such as Facebook, U-tube and Twitter, according to most accounts, including Reporters Without Borders, who remarked: “The Electronic Great Wall has never been as consolidated as it is now, on the eve of the 1 October anniversary, proving that the Chinese government is not so sure of its record.”

There is no doubt that Mao Zedong’s proclamation on 1 October 1949 of the founding of the People’s Republic of China was a momentous event. It was a triumphant end to no less than three anti-colonial revolutions and decades of civil war between the nationalists of the Kuomintang capitalist classes and the Peoples Liberation Army.

Chinese peasants and working masses toppled the might of British, Japanese and US colonialism and challenged the power of the Chinese bourgeoisie. The Kuomintang were massively aided by the United States and other capitalist powers, while the Soviet Union supported the PLA, albeit in a duplicitous way. The success of the Chinese Revolution marked a tectonic shift in the struggle by developing nations to free themselves from old and new imperial powers.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the Stalinist-influenced Chinese Communist Party pursued a series of exaggerated policy turns, some of which led to famine, in a bid to overcome the country’s isolation. The Cultural Revolution was launched in attempt to defeat bureaucracy but turned into an orgy of violence against intellectuals and dissidents.

After Mao’s death in 1976, a power struggle resulted in a leadership that would eventually take down China down the capitalist road. From the 1990s, China became the manufacturing centre of the world economy as the global capitalist corporations moved into the country. Chinese corporations are now amongst the world’s biggest predators for oil, gas, water, mineral and land resources, competing ferociously for territory and power. The ruling elites and the middle classes have benefited from China’s rise to become the world’s biggest exporting nation and third largest economy. This enabled the rulers to keep a lid on things.

But in the wake of the global financial crash the Chinese economy is being shaken by vast cutbacks in production which has led to waves of sackings. Many of the millions who migrated to cities in past decades are now being forced back to the countryside, but without the old securities. Social unrest and strikes are commonplace, while issues like the lack of care for the victims of the Sichuan earthquake in May 2008 lead to hostile anti-government demonstrations. Those who try to defend the earthquake victims, like world-famous artist-designer Ai Weiwei, have their blogs shut down and are cruelly beaten by police.

Alongside repression of internal dissent, the Chinese government rules with a mailed fist against rebellious national, ethnic and religious minorities within the country’s borders, not to speak of its active support for dictatorships around the world, from Burma to Sri Lanka.

During September there was another brutal clampdown on the Uighur peoples in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. The World Uighur Congress said that near 800 Uighurs were killed after Han Chinese attacks and following intervention of Chinese government forces.

Members of the Politburo and Central Committee are desperate to being seen as the heirs of the Chinese Revolution. The reality, of course, is quite different. In recent decades, the Communist Party has turned into the vehicle for promoting the interests of a self-serving ruling elite while headlong growth has seen an environmental and public health nightmare.

The nervousness of President Hu Jintao and the bureaucrats who control virtually all the political and economic top positions is apparent. They are terrified lest their carefully manipulated claim to legitimacy is torn to shreds by 1.3 billion people over whom they rule. They live in fear of a repeat of the events of 1989, when students and workers joined together in a pro-democracy movement, encouraged by Gorbachev’s glasnost in the Soviet Union, only to be put down in the bloodbath in Tiananmen Square. As many China experts note, the ruling regime is fragile and ossified and a renewal of the country’s revolutionary tradition is long overdue.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

Marking the revolt against Stalinism

Twenty years ago today, the Hungarian government, under pressure from anti-Stalinist demonstrators, announced that it was opening its borders with Austria. Tens of thousands of East Germans flooded into Budapest, on their way to Western Europe. This human tidal wave led to the collapse of the Berlin Wall later that year and the reunification of Germany in 1990.

Meanwhile, thousands of miles away, a crack appeared in the seemingly impenetrable rule of another Stalinist regime. In China, hundreds of thousands of students and workers were marching through Beijing, Shanghai, Chonquing and other big cities. They were inspired by the fearless sit-in begun by students in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in the heart of Beijing two weeks earlier.

The students began a sit-in to mourn party secretary-general Hu Yaobang, who had recently died, at the Monument to the People’s Heroes at the centre of the square. Within days, the demonstrations spread to more than 400 cities. Martial law was declared on May 20 by a split Politburo. By June 3, the 27th Army was firing on demonstrators in the square. This was the extraordinary moment when a man in a white shirt confronted a tank column on the Avenue of Eternal Peace.

Even as you read this, the Chinese government is clamping down on bloggers and journalists, petrified at unrest on the anniversary of the brutal crackdown in which around 3,000 people lost their lives as troops fired on demonstrators. Café Sentido reports : “As the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacres approaches, the event itself remains taboo in China, forbidden from discussion on state-run television and even banned from results pages on search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN, operating inside China.”

The Chinese government was one of the very few Stalinist regimes to survive the global revolutionary events of 1989. Elsewhere bureaucracies were breaking up. Mikhail Gorbachev’s withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan and Eastern Europe at the beginning of 1989 had marked the dawn of a new era for the Soviet Union and the countries it dominated politically and militarily. In Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Romania, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia dictatorships toppled like ninepins.

A new generation has sprung to life since that year that shook the world. Then the media crowed about the “end of communism”. But now capitalist triumphalism is a thing of the past. The global economy is in its deepest crisis and the arrogance that followed the end of the Soviet Union has given way to a patent loss of confidence amongst the ruling classes.

The hope that the masses who made 1989 happen would turn their energies against the capitalist system was premature. Many were dazzled by the consumer capitalism that they experienced, then in full swing. But the glitter of McDonald’s, BMW and game players is losing its shine as millions are thrust into unemployment, bankruptcy and repossession. In China, the Stalinist-imposed ruthless brand of capitalism is falling apart and the authorities are fighting a losing battle to stay in control over increasingly angry masses.

The regimes that fell in 1989 hid their true identity behind socialist phraseology while they carved out special privileges for themselves. Just as the students and workers of 1989 unmasked them, the challenge for today’s generation is to dismantle the political system that pretends to rule in our interests today. A recent YouGov poll revealed that in 1989, 35% thought that politicians were generally “good people”. Only 17% believe that today. And, confidence in the police has fallen from 70% down to 46%. Draw your own conclusions.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary