January 17--We should not allow the very serious setbacks in Eastern Europe to obscure the real significance of the lifting of martial law in the People's Republic of China.It is from every point of view a historic victory of socialism over the forces of counterrevolution, supported and inspired by imperialism headed by the U.S.
Of course, a formidable bourgeois reaction had been building up in China for some time. But notice this: During the entire month of June 1989, when martial law was instituted, the imperialist bourgeoisie pulled out all stops trying to mobilize world public opinion, imperiously demanding that martial law in China be lifted. Well, now it has been. And what is the attitude of the ruling class in the U.S.?
An anti-climax for the imperialists
The Bush administration, with tongue in cheek, claims it is a concession to the U.S. government.
The bulk of the Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, and particularly the so-called liberals (Solarz, Dodd, Broomfield), have been loudest in their scorn for the lifting of martial law.
It should be noted that martial law applied only in parts of Beijing. The great cities of Canton and Shanghai and the rest of the country were not affected by the martial law order (China Daily, Jan. 11).
Earlier, the U.S. had expected that once martial law was lifted the counterrevolution would spring forward and, by virtue of its alleged wide support, would overwhelm the People's Republic. As it turned out, nothing of the sort has happened. This was one of the keenest disappointments for U.S. foreign policy in China. The lifting of martial law, for which they had been clamoring, was an anti-climactic event that exploded some of their most cherished hopes in respect to subversion of the People's Republic.
What is martial law? Martial law means that the military forces of the state, whether it be a capitalist or a workers' state, have been called in either to supersede the civil authorities or to act with them in coordination to suppress social disorder or rebellion.
Crux of the problem
It is always a question, once the military has taken charge, whether it is acting autonomously or will obey the civil authorities and return to its normal military duties. Once such an extreme measure is taken, most particularly in time of social crisis, the real question is whether the military is acting as an agent, an auxiliary to support the civil government and the state, or is acting independently. The latter carries the threat, implied or expressed, of the military replacing the civil government. That's the crux of the problem.
Instituting martial law is therefore an exceptional, extraordinary measure fraught with danger. Always to be borne in mind is that not merely the governing group but the class as a whole, its dictatorship, rests on the armed forces. In a workers' state, this should mean the armed popular forces of the workers and peasants. In a bourgeois state, it rests squarely on the military bureaucracy, the higher echelons--the general staff, the colonels, the lieutenant colonels--and also the lower echelons of the officer corps.
Above everything else, the military reflects the class character of the state.
What happened in China was that the military, after a confusing few days (made much worse as a result of imperialist lies and deceit disseminated by the bourgeois media), acted exclusively as an arm of the civilian government, of the workers' or socialist state, as it is popularly called.
The talk about reverting to warlordism, about the development of antagonistic military cliques vying with each other while the civilian representatives of the workers' state were confused and divided, all this proved groundless.
Army acted as arm of government
As events have shown, the military acted as an arm of the People's Republic and carried out its mandate to end the counterrevolutionary disorders. That having been done, and civil life having returned to a sufficient degree of normalcy, the army followed instructions and retired to its normal functions. What does all this show? That the government, and in particular its leadership headed by the Communist Party, is in full command of the situation.
It is truly a historic development and runs counter to all the calculations of the imperialist bourgeoisie. Prime Minister Li Peng, in his speech announcing the end of martial law, emphasized that "had the government not taken the resolute measure of imposing martial law ... , the fruits of revolution earned by several generations through protracted struggle, the achievements made in the four decades of socialist construction and in the decade-long reform and opening to the outside world would have been destroyed, our country would have been split up, and hundreds of millions of people would have again fallen into the abyss of misery." (China Daily, Jan. 11.)
Li Peng twice mentioned the international situation, saying that "no matter what may happen in the world, we shall unswervingly follow the socialist road." (New York Times, Jan. 11.) He was addressing himself to Eastern Europe and the USSR as well as to the imperialist bourgeoisie.
Schlesinger's mission in 1976
The hope of the U.S. following the death of Mao Zedong was to reach out to the officer corps of the People's Liberation Army. It was with this in view that the U.S. government dispatched James R. Schlesinger, a former secretary of defense, to Mao's funeral in September 1976.
Schlesinger was one of those who had vigorously pushed playing the so-called China card, that is, intervening to further envenom the relations between the USSR and China. Schlesinger went to China to offer U.S. military aid in the form of sophisticated technology. Indeed, he permitted himself to denigrate Soviet military equipment which he was shown in China and made a pitch for China to purchase sophisticated U.S. military equipment. The U.S. could not have picked a more suitable representative for such purposes.
Schlesinger's counterpart in the Congress was the Senator from Washington, "Scoop" Jackson, who even earlier had been instrumental in putting through a cash sale of Boeing civil planes to China, which operated as the first opening of trade relations between China and the USSR.
With Schlesinger's mission, it was not so much the sale of the technology which could prove decisive, not at a time when China had for many years been equipped with Soviet military technology. The main purpose was to make contact with China's officer corps. This has long been U.S. strategy in Third World countries, where it has had the most devastating effects, as in Chile and Indonesia.
Since the victory of the Chinese Revolution in 1949, however, this has seemed a virtually impossible task, made doubly difficult by the fact that the ruling class refused for so many years to extend normal diplomatic relations to China. To suddenly make contact with the Chinese military was a far-fetched idea. If anything, it could only follow, not precede, full diplomatic recognition. But this had not yet been achieved, notwithstanding the opening of negotiations and the restoration of China's seat in the United Nations, which had been obstructed by the U.S.
Both Schlesinger and Henry Kissinger had publicly announced in April of 1976 that the European allies were now free to exempt China from the ban imposed by COCOM (a committee of NATO) on the sale of military equipment to China. (New York Times, April 25, 1976.) The European imperialist countries had recognized China many years earlier.
Why U.S. failed in China but won in Romania
The most significant development to emerge when the counterrevolution struck last June was that the U.S. had been unable to make a dent in the Chinese military, after all those years of attempting to cultivate relations. Why? Because it was a people's army, not a military camarilla set up before liberation when China was headed by military groupings and warlords.
By contrast, the events in Romania especially have a certain relevance to the situation in China. In Romania, the military played the key role in the overthrow of the socialist government and prepared the way for the counterrevolution, which although still fragile has nevertheless constituted itself as the new government. The overthrow could not have taken place without the likes of General Nicolae Militaru and his colleagues in the disloyal military camarilla. The army was key to the coup d'etat.
Sure, they surrounded themselves with a facade of civilians, some communist renegades, former officials, mostly those in the foreign affairs department, and have awakened a strata of the bourgeoisie which long had been thought dormant. Of course, the external forces of imperialism and bourgeois reformism, stimulated by events in the USSR, played key roles in the overturn in Romania. But the main difference between what happened in China and Romania is that the military in Romania acted in a disloyal manner, subverting the government in the interest of the bourgeois counterrevolution.
The situation in Eastern Europe made Romania ripe for precisely such an attack. The civilian government became paralyzed due to the swiftness of the coup d'etat, which it has been admitted was planned long in advance. As can be clearly inferred from an Op-ed piece (New York Times, Dec. 28) by Mary Ellen Fischer, author of the book Nicolae Ceausescu, the U.S. was well advised and had its hand in it from the beginning, as did the French and probably the German imperialists as well.
The Gorbachev administration, which encouraged the overthrow of the Ceausescu government, got far more than it could ever have desired in terms of creating a danger for itself.
Instability in Romania
Now the military has shown that it is impatient with civilian bourgeois rule, and is taking over even local governments in the towns of Timisoara and Iasi (New York TImes, Jan. 13 and 15). Throughout Romania, the new rulers are an unstable coalition of warring bourgeois cliques, where the most rabid anti-communist and fascist elements come to the fore.
The banning of the Communist Party, its revocation the next day, a demand for the death penalty (to execute communists, of course), all this shows the utterly unstable character of the grouping of renegades and counterrevolutionaries that the military was able to assemble to act as a facade.
No wonder, then, that Silviu Brucan, one of the principal leaders in the so-called Council of National Salvation, complains that while France, the USSR, Britain and the Federal Republic of Germany are all sending top Cabinet officials to visit Romania, "Many in Bucharest are disappointed with the slow, modest, cautious reaction of Washington to the Romanian events. They ask themselves, `Why?' " (New York Times, Jan. 14.)
The answer should be very clear. The U.S. is not going to commit itself to this motley group and is banking on the military. Again, as Fischer hinted, they already have their candidate picked--General Militaru.
Yet the situation is fluid. While hundreds if not thousands of communists have been executed or are in jail, including the whole Politburo, the mass of the working class as such has not been an active factor one way or the other in the situation. The regime has been unable to produce any large demonstration of workers, or even the mention of trade unions as participants in the counterrevolution.
The economic situation can't be solved in Romania on a capitalist basis any more than it is being solved in Hungary and Poland, where the counterrevolution has taken over. It is only accelerating the misery with unemployment, inflation, and other symptoms of a bourgeois economy, which has been foisted upon the socialized economic sectors.
The problems in Hungary and Poland are the accumulated results of bourgeois, anti-socialist reforms which began to be seen as early as 1956 and which have sabotaged the socialist planning ever since, bringing about these very symptoms of capitalist decay.
While the counterrevolution has triumphed on top, the issue still is whether the working class can effectively mount a revolutionary counteroffensive, and whether its working class allies in Eastern Europe can support it. This is of course the most urgent task of international solidarity.
Will the forces of proletarian internationalism, of working class solidarity, break through in the USSR? Will new independent forces stretch their hands to the victims of the counterrevolution, rather than conciliate with the reactionaries as Gorbachev and his grouping of bourgeois reformers are doing?