Major new WV article on China—Part 1
srd
BEGIN QUOTE
Workers Vanguard No. 964
10 September 2010
China: Labor Struggles in the “Socialist Market Economy”
Defend the Chinese Deformed Workers State Against Imperialism,
Capitalist Counterrevolution!
For Proletarian Political Revolution!
Part One
This past spring, China experienced a major strike wave involving
young migrant workers employed mainly in factories owned by Japanese,
other foreign and offshore Chinese capital. It was centered in the
southern coastal province of Guangdong, the main region in the country
producing light manufactures for export. Three dozen strikes took
place in that province in the span of a month and a half. The upsurge
of labor militancy extended to other industrial regions. For example,
workers at a Taiwanese-owned rubber plant near Shanghai clashed with
police; around 50 workers were injured. In most cases, the strikes
were settled quickly with wage increases and other gains for the
workers. Recognizing in its own way the significance of these
developments, the Economist (31 July), a house organ for American and
British finance capital, headlined an editorial: “The Rising Power of
the Chinese Worker.”
The strike wave began in mid May at a Honda plant in Foshan that
produces transmissions for the company’s four auto assembly plants in
China. As a result of the work stoppage, which lasted nearly three
weeks, production in all of these plants came to a halt. The strike,
which ended with a wage increase averaging 30 percent, was viewed as
an important victory for the workers.
Strikes are not uncommon in China. However, they are usually very
short-lived, quickly settled and/or quickly suppressed. And they are
almost never reported in the government-directed media for fear that
doing so would encourage other workers to engage in similar actions.
That is just what happened in the case of the Foshan Honda strike, as
the conflict between Chinese workers and the Japanese auto giant
became a focus of domestic as well as international attention.
Subsequently, the authorities reverted to a policy of clamping down on
news of labor unrest.
Organization and leadership of the strikes were provided by worker
activists outside the bureaucratic structures of the All-China
Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), the official union federation,
tied to the ruling Communist Party (CCP). One strike leader, Li
Xiaojuan, a 20-year-old woman worker at the Foshan Honda plant, wrote
an open letter on behalf of the negotiating committee that declared:
“We must maintain a high degree of unity and not let the
representatives of Capital divide us…. This factory’s profits are the
fruits of our bitter toil…. This struggle is not just about the
interests of our 1,800 workers. We also care about the rights and
interests of all Chinese workers.”
— quoted in Financial Times (London), 10 June
The strike wave in the capitalist sector of its industrial economy
underscores the fundamental social contradictions of China as a
bureaucratically deformed workers state. As Trotskyists (revolutionary
Marxists), we strongly supported the strikes and emphasized that the
rights and interests of Chinese workers require a leadership with a
comprehensive program of class struggle at the political as well as
economic levels:
“Chinese workers need a class-struggle leadership to advance their
struggle to wrest as much as possible from the capitalist companies
that are exploiting them, fight the ravages of inflation and improve
their working and living conditions. Workers in state-owned industry
also need such a leadership to protect and advance their living
standards and to fight against bureaucratic abuse.”
— “Militant Strike Wave in China,” WV No. 961, 2 July
The contradictions besetting the Chinese deformed workers state will
ultimately be resolved either by a proletarian political revolution,
opening the road to socialism, or capitalist counterrevolution and
imperialist re-enslavement.
A Bureaucratically Deformed Workers State
The People’s Republic of China emerged from the 1949 Revolution—a
social revolution of world-historic significance in which the peasant-
based forces led by the Communist Party of Mao Zedong defeated the
U.S.-backed puppet regime of Chiang Kai-shek’s Guomindang. Hundreds of
millions of peasants rose up and seized the land on which their
forebears had been exploited from time immemorial. The subsequent
creation of a centrally planned, collectivized economy laid the basis
for enormous social gains for both urban workers and rural toilers.
The revolution enabled women to advance by magnitudes over their
previous miserable status, which was rooted in the old Confucian order
and marked by such practices as forced marriage and concubinage. A
nation that had been ravaged and divided by foreign powers was unified
and freed from imperialist domination.
However, the workers state that issued from the Revolution was
deformed from its inception under the rule of Mao’s CCP regime, the
political apparatus of a privileged bureaucratic caste resting atop
the workers state. Unlike the Russian October Revolution of 1917,
which was carried out by a class-conscious proletariat guided by the
Bolshevik internationalism of Lenin and Trotsky, the Chinese
Revolution was the result of peasant guerrilla war led by Stalinist-
nationalist forces. Patterned after the Stalinist bureaucracy that
usurped political power in the USSR beginning in 1923-24, Mao’s regime
and those of his successors, including Hu Jintao today, have preached
the profoundly anti-Marxist notion that socialism—a classless,
egalitarian society based on material abundance—can be built in a
single country. In practice, “socialism in one country” has meant
accommodation to world imperialism and opposition to the perspective
of international workers revolution that is essential for the advance
to socialism.
After a brief interregnum following the death of Mao in 1976, his
successor, Deng Xiaoping, scrapped centralized economic planning and
began implementing a number of market-oriented policies and practices.
In the late 1990s, the regime headed by Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji
privatized a large number of small- and medium-sized state-owned
enterprises (SOEs). Under “market socialism,” China has attracted
large-scale investment, mainly in manufacturing, by Western and
Japanese corporations and by the offshore Chinese bourgeoisie in
Taiwan, Hong Kong and elsewhere, with the CCP regime acting as labor
contractors. On the mainland, there has also emerged a sizable class
of indigenous capitalist entrepreneurs, many with familial and
financial ties to the CCP officialdom.
One consequence of these developments is the widespread belief in the
Western world, extending across the political spectrum, that China,
although still ruled by a party calling itself “Communist,” has become
capitalist. In reality, China remains a bureaucratically deformed
workers state. The core of the industrial economy—steel and non-
ferrous metals, heavy electrical equipment, telecommunications, oil
extraction and refining, petrochemicals—continues to be based on state-
owned enterprises. Outside of the foreign and offshore Chinese
capitalist sector, almost all productive investment is channeled
through the government and state-controlled banks. The Economist (10
July) pointed out that although China’s large banks “make money and
have the trappings of public companies, the state owns a majority
stake and the Communist Party appoints the top brass.”
The non-capitalist character of China’s economy has been clearly
demonstrated by the effectiveness of the government’s almost $600
billion stimulus program—mainly investment in infrastructure and
expanding bank lending—introduced in the fall of 2008 as the First
World capitalist economies were plummeting. The sudden collapse of its
export markets in North America and West Europe was a heavy blow to
China’s economy. The rate of growth of the gross domestic product fell
from near 13 percent in 2007 to under 7 percent in the last quarter of
2008. Since then, however, while the capitalist world has remained
mired in a deep downturn, economic growth in China has revived
rapidly, reaching almost 12 percent in the first quarter of this year
before edging down slightly in the second quarter. Noting one
significant effect of the skyrocketing levels of investment by state-
controlled companies, the New York Times (29 August) reported that
“the proportion of industrial production by companies controlled by
the Chinese state edged up last year, checking a slow but seemingly
inevitable eclipse.”
However much the Beijing Stalinists try to accommodate world
imperialism, the U.S. and other major capitalist powers are determined
to reverse the 1949 Revolution, reimposing semicolonial subjugation on
China and reducing its economy to a giant capitalist sweatshop. Toward
that end, they are utilizing economic penetration, increased military
pressure from without and political subversion internally, for
example, by the reactionary Buddhist forces in Tibet. The U.S.
continues to provide capitalist Taiwan with advanced weaponry while
itself extending its military reach in Central Asia and other areas
near China. As Trotskyists, we stand for the unconditional military
defense of China against imperialism and internal counterrevolution.
In answer to the aspirations of the Chinese workers and rural toilers
for democratic rights and a government that represents their needs and
interests, we stand for proletarian political revolution to oust the
Stalinist bureaucracy and replace it with a government elected by
workers and peasants councils and committed to revolutionary
internationalism. Such a government would fight against bureaucratic
arbitrariness and corruption. It would expropriate the new class of
domestic capitalist entrepreneurs and renegotiate the terms of foreign
investment in the interests of the working people. It would create a
centrally planned and managed economy under conditions of workers
democracy—not the autarkic, bureaucratic commandism of the Mao era,
when “egalitarianism” meant an equalization of poverty. While
struggling to provide at least a basic level of economic security for
the whole population, a genuine communist leadership would understand
that achieving material prosperity for all hinges on the struggle for
socialist revolution in the centers of world capitalism.
The Honda Strikes
Migrant workers in China’s capitalist-owned factories are often forced
to work 60 to 70 hours a week at wages barely above subsistence
levels. The brutal conditions they endure were graphically exposed
last spring by the widely publicized suicides of workers at the huge
Foxconn industrial complex, employing more than 300,000, in Guangdong.
At least a dozen workers have killed themselves since the beginning of
the year. Owned by a Taiwanese company, Foxconn is the world’s largest
contract electronics manufacturer, making products for Apple, Dell and
Hewlett-Packard. A Hong Kong-based businessman who toured the site
described conditions on the factory floor as “almost militaristic and
kind of scary” (Financial Times, 11 June). Popular outrage over the
suicides at Foxconn doubtless contributed to widespread sympathy and
support for the strikes at Honda and other capitalist-owned firms.
The strike at the Honda transmission plant in Foshan was initiated by
a 24-year-old worker, Tan Zhiqing, from the interior province of
Hunan, a major supplier of migrant labor. A spirit of rebelliousness
is celebrated in the popular culture of Hunan, Mao Zedong’s
birthplace. Seeing his real earnings shrinking because of inflation,
Tan decided to quit Honda and seek higher pay elsewhere. He had
earlier approached local ACFTU officials about pressuring management
to increase wages but got no response from them. In late April, he and
a friend and co-worker named Xiao Xiao submitted a standard one-month-
in-advance notice of their intention to leave the company. Tan
subsequently told a reporter from China News Weekly (2 June): “Since I
was going to quit anyway, I thought I might as well do something for
the benefit of my fellow-workers.”
Toward that end, he and Xiao organized secret meetings with a small
number of co-workers to plan a work stoppage. On May 17, Tan pushed
the emergency button, stopping the assembly line where he was working,
and some 50 workers walked off the job. At first, most workers were
hesitant to go on strike for fear of reprisals. Production resumed
temporarily when management agreed to negotiate with workers’
representatives who were elected from the different departments. A
turning point came on May 21-22 when the company offered a wage
increase of less than 10 percent of what the workers were demanding
and then fired Tan and Xiao. The strike now resumed in earnest, with
much greater support and resolve. Strikers routinely sang the national
anthem and also an official song of the Chinese military, “Unity Is
Strength,” here referring to workers instead of soldiers.
Other management policies intended to weaken the strike also
backfired. A large section of the workforce is comprised of teenage
trainees from technical schools whose wages were much lower than those
of regular workers. In late May, the company demanded that the
trainees sign a “memorandum of undertaking” pledging “never to lead,
organize, partake in go-slows, stop work or strike.” Not only did most
refuse to sign but, as the China News Weekly (2 June) reported, the
trainees “were the staunchest supporters of the strike.”
From the outset, the local ACFTU bureaucrats were sidelined during the
strike. One of the workers’ demands was “a reorganization of the local
trade union: re-elections should be held for union chairman and other
representatives.” Union officials sat in on the negotiations,
purportedly to “mediate” between the two sides. Some union
functionaries were evidently rankled by their visible loss of
authority. On May 31, a large squad of ACFTU goons assaulted striking
workers. The next day, however, union officials issued a public
apology while downplaying the incident and claiming it was a result of
“mutual misunderstandings.” In mid June, the head of the Guangdong
province ACFTU promised that the Foshan Honda plant would be a “pilot
site” in “allowing members to genuinely elect a union chair.”
Within days after the Foshan strike ended, workers at two other Honda
parts plants went out. One of these strikes was settled quickly.
However, the strike at Honda Lock turned into a bitter conflict, the
outcome of which was very different than that at Foshan. Using desktop
computers, activists uploaded video of security guards beating
workers. In this case, both the Honda management and CCP authorities,
at least at the local level, took a harder line. The company recruited
“replacement workers” (scabs) and threatened to fire those strikers
who refused to accept the wage increase offered. Journalists seeking
to report on the strike were taken away from the plant by local
police.
CCP Regime’s Response to Strikes
The initial extensive coverage of the Foshan Honda strike in the
domestic media was accompanied by an equally unusual candor about the
country’s increasing social inequalities. Citing a leader of the
ACFTU, the official English-language China Daily (13 May) reported
that the share of the country’s gross domestic product going to
workers’ wages fell from 57 percent in 1983 to 37 percent in 2005. An
editorial in the Global Times (2 June), a People’s Daily spin-off,
stated:
“Admittedly, in the three decades of opening-up, ordinary workers are
among those who have received the smallest share of economic
prosperity….
“The temporary stoppage of production lines in the four Honda
factories, at a time of increasing market demand for the Japanese-
brand cars, highlights the necessity of organized labor protection in
Chinese factories.”
More recently, an ACFTU spokesman laid out an official policy of
promoting “the direct election of grassroots trade union
leaders” (People’s Daily online, 31 August).
Clearly, influential elements in the bureaucracy are concerned about
the danger (to themselves) of growing labor unrest in the private
sector. Even before the strike wave, a number of provincial and
municipal governments had raised the legal minimum wage, in some cases
as much as 20 percent.
Despite increasing economic inequality, one should recognize that
workers in China, including migrants in the capitalist sector, have
generally experienced a substantial improvement in living standards
during the decades of the “reform” era. It is also true that the
closing and privatizing of many state-owned enterprises over the years
have produced severe economic uncertainty for workers who have seen
their previously guaranteed social benefits cut and who lack the
education and skills to find new work. But with the export sector
booming, between 2004 and 2009 the average real monthly wage of
migrant workers increased by more than 40 percent. That workers at
Honda used cell phones and the Internet to coordinate strikes at
different plants indicates that they have access to modern technology—
a world away from the experience of their parents, not to speak of
their grandparents on the rural communes of the Mao era.
Because the strikes were in capitalist enterprises, they did not
constitute the kind of direct challenge to the ruling bureaucracy that
strikes or other labor protests in strategic sectors of the statified
economy, such as steel production, oil extraction and the railway
system would pose. To a certain extent, the CCP regime could posture
as a paternalistic defender of Chinese workers against unbridled
exploitation by Japanese, Korean and offshore Chinese capitalists. In
mid June, China’s premier Wen Jiabao intoned that “the government and
all sectors of society should treat migrant workers as they would
their own children.”
The fact that Honda is a Japanese company was likely an important
factor in the authorities’ initial tolerance for the strike and the
extensive domestic media coverage. The Beijing Stalinist leaders seek
popular legitimacy by, above all, appealing to Chinese nationalism,
evoking the historical memory of the country’s semicolonial
subjugation prior to the 1949 Revolution. An important source of the
CCP’s historical authority was its mobilization of the peasant masses
in resisting the Japanese imperialists’ invasion and occupation of
China in the 1930s-’40s. Even today Japan, rather than the United
States, is the main target of both popular and officially sponsored
Chinese nationalism.
On the other side of the Sea of Japan, the leading bourgeois newspaper
Nikkei complained that “in the strike at the Honda-supplier, the
authorities took a neutral stance from beginning to end.” In this
respect, the strikes in China contrast sharply with the bloody state
repression of labor struggles against Japanese companies in the
semicolonial countries of Southeast Asia. For example, soldiers and
police recently attacked workers at a Toshiba plant in Indonesia. In
the Philippines, a union leader at the Japanese company Takata was
murdered in early June in the course of a struggle for union
recognition.
The strikes at the Chinese Honda and Toyota factories underscore the
need for unity between the proletariats of China and Japan—a prospect
that is completely outside the nationalist worldview of China’s
Stalinist misrulers. Had the Japanese workers at these two auto giants
expressed support for their Chinese class brothers, this would have
strengthened their bargaining power and undercut the anti-Japanese
nationalism promoted by the Beijing regime.
At the same time, the unity between different strata of workers—
trainees from technical schools and full-time employees—displayed
during the Foshan Honda strike could provide a positive and powerful
example for the Japanese labor movement, with its hierarchical
division between the permanent employees of the big corporations and
the large number of temporary workers. This division poses directly
the need for a political struggle against the lackeys of the
bourgeoisie in the top leadership of the unions in Japan. For example,
the most powerful unions in strategic industries such as auto and
electronics allow only full-time employees to join.
The workers’ suicides at Foxconn and strikes at a number of other
Taiwanese-owned enterprises point to the substantial presence of
offshore Chinese capital in the mainland industrial economy. The
island statelet of Taiwan, where the bulk of Chiang Kai-shek’s
defeated forces fled in the late 1940s, is the base of the main body
of the Chinese big bourgeoisie. Unlike mainland capitalist
entrepreneurs, the bourgeoisie on Taiwan possesses its own
counterrevolutionary political organizations. Moreover, the Taiwan-
based bourgeoisie operates under the direct military protection of
American imperialism.
The Beijing Stalinists have long promoted reunification with Taiwan
under the formula, “one country, two systems,” the same formula used
to incorporate the capitalist enclave of Hong Kong (a former British
colony) in 1997. The incorporation of Taiwan into the People’s
Republic under that formula is not on the immediate historical agenda.
But should such a development take place, it would greatly strengthen
the social forces of capitalist restoration, much more so than in the
case of Hong Kong. Opposing the Stalinists’ efforts to accommodate the
Taiwan-based Chinese bourgeoisie, we stand for revolutionary
reunification: proletarian political revolution on the mainland and
proletarian socialist revolution in Taiwan resulting in the
expropriation of the bourgeoisie.
A Tight Labor Market and a New Proletarian Generation
The strike wave that began in the spring took place in the capitalist
sector of China’s economy. However, favorable conditions for these
workers’ struggles have been the result in good part of the workings
of the core collectivized sector of the economy. When the world
capitalist market tanked in the fall of 2008, an estimated 20 million
workers were laid off from the export-producing factories in coastal
China. Most returned to the rural villages.
One of the main effects of the government’s stimulus program has been
a substantial expansion of employment opportunities in the country’s
interior. As export production revived, beginning last summer, the
inflow of migrants seeking work in coastal China was less than in the
past. Glenn Maguire, Asia chief economist for the French bank Société
Générale, observed that this development “suggests that the stimulus
packages have been incredibly successful at creating jobs” (Reuters, 1
June). A survey by the ministry of labor estimated that in the Pearl
River Delta manufacturing center in Guangdong, job vacancies exceeded
applicants by 9 percent in the first quarter of the year. The tight
labor market has increased the bargaining power of workers at the
individual and the collective level. An executive at a Guangdong-based
electronics company noted the changed situation: “When you fined
workers nobody would dare to object because if you said anything you
were out. But now every time a certain number of workers oppose some
management move, my company will adjust it” (Financial Times, 4 June).
In addition to conjunctural factors, the long-term demographic trend
is beginning to impact the labor market. For the past several decades,
the CCP regime, seeking to curb population growth, has limited urban
families to one child and rural families to two. As a consequence, the
population between the ages of 15 and 24—the pool from which almost
all migrant workers are drawn—has remained basically unchanged for the
past five years and is projected to fall by almost 30 percent over the
next ten years. Many bourgeois commentators foresee the beginning of
the end of “cheap labor” in China.
But it is not only objective conjunctural and demographic factors that
underlie the increased assertiveness and social power of China’s
workers. The strike wave signals the entry of a new proletarian
generation onto the social scene, one whose outlook and attitudes
differ significantly from those of their parents.
The young peasant men and women who flooded into the cities in the
1980s and ’90s came from very poor, economically primitive conditions.
Working in a factory or construction site, however harsh the
conditions, was the only way they could improve their lives. For most
of them, the goal was to save enough money so that they could return
to their native villages and build new homes, buy equipment for their
family farms or open small businesses.
The present generation of migrants has come of age in a society that
is far more developed, even in the countryside, but also much more
unequal. Their aspirations and expectations are correspondingly
different. In response to a survey of 5,000 second-generation migrant
workers conducted by the General Labor Union in the Guangdong city of
Shenzhen, almost all said that they were unwilling to return to their
home villages and become farmers. Cha Jinhua, described as a Guangdong-
based labor activist, explained: “We’re different from our parents’
generation. Their wishes were simple—earn some money and return to
their home towns. We want to stay in the cities and enjoy our lives
here. But we demand respect” (Financial Times, 1 June).
However, the aspirations of young migrant workers to build good lives
for themselves in the cities directly confront the legally based
household registration or hukou system. Workers as well as members of
the petty bourgeoisie who have an urban household registration have
social benefits that are denied to those with a rural hukou. And the
latter includes the grown children of migrants who, while born in the
cities, are registered as members of a rural household. Holders of an
urban hukou have priority for employment in state-owned enterprises,
which generally provide much better social benefits, such as
subsidized housing, and greater job security. In general, migrants pay
more for inferior medical care and public schooling for their
children. Furthermore, as we observed in “Women Workers and the
Contradictions of China Today” (Spartacist [English-language edition]
No. 61, Spring 2009):
“The migrant population is itself divided between those who have legal
status and those who do not. Almost all migrant workers in factories
and other major enterprises like Wal-Mart have temporary urban
residency permits. However, there are millions of ‘undocumented’
migrants—no one knows exactly how many—who eke out an existence as
casual laborers, housemaids and nannies, street vendors and the like.”
We have long called for the abolition of the hukou system and for
migrants to have the same rights and access to jobs as legally
registered urban residents. In championing the rights of migrant
workers, a class-struggle labor leadership would help unite the
struggles of workers in state-owned industries against bureaucratic
mismanagement and cuts in benefits with those of workers exploited in
capitalist enterprises.
Labor Struggles in Guangdong: Yesterday and Today
The parents and older brothers and sisters of the workers involved in
the recent strike wave also fought for a better life in the capitalist-
owned factories and construction sites of coastal China. And there are
important elements of continuity as well as differences across the
generational divide.
A few years ago, Ching Kwan Lee, an academic of leftist sympathies,
published a book based on her fieldwork in two very different regions
of China in the early 2000s: Against the Law: Labor Protests in
China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt (University of California Press [2007]).
The “rustbelt” in the subtitle is the northeastern province of
Liaoning, which suffered economic devastation and mass unemployment
when many large SOEs were downsized and smaller ones were privatized
or closed outright in the late 1990s. The “sunbelt” refers to
Guangdong.
In regard to the latter region, Lee emphasized the importance of labor
laws and their non-enforcement in conditioning workers’ struggles.
Almost all strikes and other industrial actions were preceded by
complaints to local officials that the employer had violated the law
with respect to wages (unpaid or below the legal minimum), overtime,
social benefits or safety. She cited a case where complaints to the
Labor Bureau by a small number of workers’ representatives were
repeatedly ignored. Only when all of the workers in the factory went
on strike did the Bureau intervene to arrange mediation.
Lee concluded that “migrant workers, feeling deprived of the socialist
social contract available to state-owned enterprise workers, see the
Labor Law as the only institutional resource protecting their
interests vis-à-vis powerful employers and local officials.” One woman
worker told her: “Once we saw the terms of the Labor Law, we realized
that what we thought of as bitterness and bad luck were actually
violations of our legal rights and interests.” A construction worker
made similar comments in explaining the struggle against an employer
who had forged workers’ signatures on labor contracts and denied
workers access to the contracts’ terms:
“For two weeks, we had only one meal each day and we read everything
on the Labor Law and labor dispute arbitration in the bookstore.
Before this, we had no idea what the law said about us migrant
workers. For many years, we had only heard about the labor contract,
but we did not press the company hard enough when they refused to give
us a copy…. Since we started this struggle with the company, many
workers have begun to read newspapers. Some even cut out labor dispute
stories for circulation in the dormitory.”
The prevailing attitude among workers was that the labor laws, if
enforced, would substantially improve their conditions of life. But
they were not enforced by local officials, many of whom were corrupt
and openly colluded with the employers. A lawyer specializing in
getting compensation for workers injured on the job recounted that a
judge once told him: “Lawyer Zhou, if the court adheres to all the
laws and regulations of the provincial government, all these factories
would move elsewhere and the local economy would collapse. Who would
be responsible then? You?”
To what extent is Lee’s observation from the early 2000s, that
knowledge of the labor laws encourages and shapes workers’ struggles,
applicable to the recent strike wave? From afar one cannot give a
definitive answer. However, in the judgment of most observers, an
important contributing factor to the upsurge of labor militancy was
the new labor law adopted in 2008, which strengthened workers’ formal
rights vis-à-vis the employer. Obviously, the CCP leadership did not
intend this legislation to be an incitement for workers to go on
strike. Rather, it sought to pressure capitalist firms to ameliorate
the conditions of exploitation so as to minimize labor unrest.
The relation between workers’ struggles and the labor laws is
contradictory. Workers have been emboldened to undertake strikes and
other actions in defense of their legally recognized rights. At the
same time, a belief that the laws are good but local officials are bad
can foster illusions in the benevolent nature of the central
government/party leadership. China’s premier likes to be called “Uncle
Wen,” as he cultivates an avuncular image. It serves political
stability if the workers’ anger is directed at low-level functionaries
who can easily be sacrificed to assuage popular sentiment.
[TO BE CONTINUED]
END QUOTE
srd
jh
is strikingly insightful on *what is happening* in the Chinese working
class and in China in general, I am definitely looking forward to Part
Two. I get the impression from reading it that there was major input
into the article from the Japanese Spartacists, who naturally are
closer to events.
Naturally I am pleased that it emphasizes the point I have repeatedly
made here on APST, that the rise in the productive forces in China is
strong empirical evidence that firstly, China isn't capitalist, and
secondly and even more importantly, that breaking from capitalism is
the only way forward for the world economy and the human race.
The widespread illusion that China is a capitalist country, so
prevalent on the Left, is now being dissipated in bourgeois public
opinion, freaked out by Chinese economic successes and American
failures. See for example a thoroughly bourgeois article in the
current New York Review of Books, which is more or less the spokesman
for the more intelligent and cultured sector of the American
bourgeoisie.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/sep/30/party-impenetrable-all-powerful/
Presumably this illusion will now begin to dissipate on the Left as
well, given the dependence of so much of the left on bourgeois
opinion.
-jh-