An article by Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times' star reporter in China, has completely confirmed the bankruptcy of the capitalist reforms--not only in China but in the USSR and Eastern Europe. The article, published June 11, discloses that strikes, sabotage and even assassinations are taking place in many areas of China--all the result of the capitalist reforms.The gist of the article is outlined in its first three paragraphs:
"Worried by layoffs and rising prices, many Chinese workers seem increasingly disenchanted by the capitalist-style changes taking hold in shops and factory floors around the country.
"As a result, for the first time since China began liberalizing its economy more than a dozen years ago, many ordinary citizens seem to be no longer agents of change but obstacles to it. Workers in several cities have attacked factory directors who have tried to introduce market-oriented changes, and there are growing reports of strikes and acts of sabotage.
"Those incidents suggest that opposition to fundamental change is increasingly coming not only from octogenarian Communist hard-liners but also from many ordinary blue-collar workers."
What drove workers to it?
There is no tradition of anarchist tendencies in the Chinese trade union movement. Even in the most repressive period during the Chiang Kai-shek regime, workers refrained from individual anarchist actions and relied, at the risk of their lives, on the classical form of working class struggle--strikes on a mass scale. The fact that today workers are resorting to individual attacks on managers and equipment demonstrates the absence of trade unions as representative organizations of the workers with the legal right to negotiate and strike.
Kristof does not indicate whether the strikes took place in the so-called free enterprise zones in the coastal areas or further inland.
At any rate, the incidents he relates seem credible. For instance, Huang Chuanying was a bank director hailed in the official Chinese press as a "daring reformer" who had the habit of dismissing employees he considered unproductive. Apparently he'll think twice about such practices since his home was fire bombed by a dismissed employee.
A driver laid off from a toothpaste factory drove his truck over his former boss earlier this year. Kristof described the employer as a "pioneering manager." The government, it seems, suggested that the reform-minded factory manager be hailed as a "martyr," but the factory workers refused.
Kristof added: "Factories in Xian, Tianjin and Dalian were reportedly also disrupted by angry workers, and in some cases machinery was smashed. After a watch factory in Tianjin temporarily laid off 2,400 workers early this year, rumors of suicides, sabotage and military intervention rapidly spread throughout Beijing. The official Economic Daily recently denied the allegations, and said the factory had retooled and reopened, providing jobs for all but 300 of the previous workers."
The role of the working class of China is decisive, even though it may still be a minority class. It is upon the workers that all industry, transport, etc. depends. All the needs of the peasants as well as of society in general are dependent upon working class production.
China broke the chains
Since the victory of the Revolution on Oct. 1, 1949, China has been in a state of transition. China is invariably referred to as the most populous country with 1.1 billion people. Rarely mentioned is that only 7 percent of its land is arable. Its centuries of feudal enslavement must also be understood.
China and India won independence within a few years of each other. India's independence was nominal to begin with, and it gradually became more beholden to the imperialist monopolies, not to speak of capitalism and landlordism. It is, nevertheless, a "free" capitalist democracy and thus has a formidable independent trade union movement and communist political organizations that are struggling on behalf of the workers.
China broke the chains of imperialist oppression and exploitation and rid itself of warlordism and landlordism. Unlike India, the party was led through decades of war and revolutionary struggle by a firm, revolutionary communist leadership. Over all these years its tactical approach and even its strategic conceptions baffled Western imperialist analysts. The capitalist governments were divided into factions which differed on the character of the Chinese Communist Party and the state that issued from the revolution.
Some in the U.S. regarded it as a mere peasant revolution. Others--the extreme right in particular--regarded China as a communist state whose leadership was all too flexible and Machiavellian in its politics, which were calculated to fool the West.
Edgar Snow, a distinguished bourgeois writer with many years in China, wrote The Other Side of the River--Red China Today (Random House, New York, 1961). It amounted to an 800-page brief to convince the U.S. State Department that the Chinese leaders were moderate, peaceable, "civilized" and worthy to be welcomed into the capitalist world community.
What road to take?
The problems China confronted during its long struggle for liberation also presented an ideological and theoretical problem for the international communist movement. The question was whether a country so overwhelmingly peasant in social composition, with such a narrow working class sector, could ever attain a socialist character.
Would not the party itself, for so long steeled in struggle against capitalism and imperialism, become liquidated or dissolved, that is, absorbed by the mass of the non-proletarian population?
Raising it to a higher theoretical level, the question was: Does not being determine consciousness? With such a huge peasantry, a narrow working class sector, 7 percent arable land, a feudal heritage in ideology, customs and practices, the question was: What road to take?
From the very beginning there were two basic ideological and political tendencies within the summits of the party itself. In later years one was popularly referred to as the capitalist-roaders, the other as the "hard-liners" led by Mao Zedong. The centrists were in between and vacillated back and forth.
But before the debate even got to where this question could be discussed more or less openly, it was eclipsed by the U.S. imperialist intervention in Korea. China had to mobilize almost a million volunteers, and quickly. The Korean people and their revolutionary people's army led by Kim Il Sung were resisting valiantly, but the U.S. imperialists had brought their military armada and air power to within a stone's throw of China itself.
All U.S. politics at the time were convulsed by the rise of revolutionary China. Capitalist factions battled over seemingly divergent strategies but shared the common aim of destroying the revolution. The factions ranged from the outright fascist types like the McCarthyites to what were then called the moderates. These were grouped around the Truman administration and ranged from Owen Lattimore, a well-known State Department expert on the Far East, to Adlai Stevenson, the liberal (who nevertheless in a hot election campaign permitted himself to hint that China could be "incinerated").
Struggle to escape imperialism's grip
The Peoples Republic of China has never had a day free from imperialist encirclement, isolation, economic quarantine and myriad threats of strangulation unless it comes to terms with the imperialist West, including Japan.
Probably its most important advantage, aside from China's own resources, was the historic Sino-Soviet Friendship Treaty, ratified in 1950. If anything made the Pentagon war-mongers and their civilian counterparts think twice, it was this treaty and the explosion of an atomic bomb by the USSR only a few months earlier.
One has to look back at those days in order to understand the vicissitudes of Chinese politics, the struggles that took place, first and foremost within the summits of the party leadership, and in order today to put into perspective what might otherwise appear to be the final denouement in the restoration of capitalism.
China made many valiant, truly imaginative efforts to pull itself up by its bootstraps. The bourgeoisie always ridiculed these efforts. If any showed real promise, the bourgeoisie would try to sabotage them. Almost all the plans developed by the Chinese Communist leaders were calculated to accelerate industrialization, to pull China out of the ancient feudal morass and bring it into the new industrial age.
China needed freedom to plan, to trade, to acquire technology, to send students abroad and bring experts in. It needed sovereignty in order to achieve formal equality with other nations. But wherever it attempted to break out of its isolation, the U.S. was there to prevent anyone from normalizing relations. Its rightful membership in the United Nations was successfully blocked every year by the U.S. It was militarily blockaded and the U.S. fed counterrevolution wherever it could.
With all this, China made steady and consistent progress in health, education, industry, transportation, mining--in virtually every sphere of endeavor. But the question still remained: Which road to take? The road that led first to building a capitalist society and later toward a socialist reconstruction of society, or the transformation of China into a socialist society as quickly as possible?
The Peoples Republic of China took over the ownership of the basic means of production early enough. But the so-called patriotic bourgeoisie remained, and notwithstanding its patriotism, it never for a moment mitigated its exploitation of the workers. When the Peoples Liberation Army was on the threshold of Shanghai, the Chinese Chamber of Congress waved red flags to welcome them, but did not offer to hand over its properties. However, the workers on their own took over the management of the plants wherever they could.
Struggle between two tendencies
The Chinese government, unlike the Soviet government in its early days, offered compensation to the Chinese bourgeoisie in the initial stages after the revolution. It attempted to deal gently with the bourgeois elements, presenting a different picture from the harshness and repression in the Soviet Union at the time.
The Great Leap Forward, of which so much was expected, turned out to be a failure, as did building steel furnaces in backyards as a means to build up the industrial infrastructure of China. However, there was enough room for totally divergent views to be presented on how to transform China into a modern socialist state.
During the long period in which the Maoist leaders held power, a great deal of progress was made, notwithstanding political vicissitudes and severe internal struggles within the party and the government, which reverberated in the entire population.
For the first time in centuries, if ever, China established a functioning centralized government. It eventually even exploded a nuclear bomb--which didn't make China a great military power, but showed that it had developed a significant scientific community to be drawn on for industry and defense.
But the struggle between the two tendencies--the capitalist roaders and those who wanted to go directly to socialist transformation--continued unabated during this entire period.
Deng Xiaoping
Deng Xiaoping was part of the leadership all along, except for short periods when he was ousted. He became the acknowledged head of the capitalist roaders. After the leaders of the Cultural Revolution were crushed, the government was really taken over by Deng and his lieutenants. The October 1976 overthrow of the "Gang of Four," the leaders of the revolutionary wing of the party, signalled an end to revolutionary innovation and to class struggle. It did not, however, signify that a social counter-revolution had taken place.
It was a step back to the reforms that Lenin had tried in his day with the New Economic Policy. But Lenin clearly explained that the NEP was only temporary. Deng's reform was for an indefinite time and under circumstances that continually widened and deepened capitalist practices.
The scientific community in China had been unduly besieged with communist ideological indoctrination, contrary to the cautious policies of Lenin that extended full freedom to the scientists as long as they did not participate in counter-revolutionary activities. Deng used this to make a play for the scientists.
He is said to have told a gathering of intellectuals, "This is the Academy of Sciences, I believe, not the Academy of Cabbages."
The reforms now in progress--especially in the coastal areas and "special enterprise zones"--unmistakably got their intellectual inspiration from the Deng pragmatic road to socialism.
He and his grouping have always denied they are for capitalism. But they have, ever since the overthrow of the "Gang of Four," more or less consistently steered a road toward reforms that in reality are more like the restoration of capitalism in certain parts of China.
While the basic means of production, transport, aviation and all other huge industrial enterprises built by the revolution are still state-owned, the concessions to the imperialists have widened. In addition to private ownership and joint ventures in the coastal areas, there is individual land ownership by the peasants and a formidable commercial bourgeoisie.
The June 16 China Daily, in a front-page article headlined "Bold Keys Open New Gates to Investors," wrote that
China is adopting landmark measures to fling open new doors for foreigners from coast to mountains--in banking and insurance, through stocks and real estate--in a massive bid to integrate itself into the world economy [Of course, this means the world capitalist economy.--SM.] Harbin, an inland industrial city in the country's northern Heilongjiang province will see foreigners running businesses with preferential policies.The first Sino-foreign insurance company is expected to be launched on a trial basis in a southern city. Millions of stock shares will be listed for sale on the open market to foreign investors. Those and many other moves are in the works for 1992 and beyond. They hold the promise of transforming China's entire national economy in the way that the southern coastal areas have been developing.
However, if one were to believe that this aggressive campaign to attract the foreign imperialist monopolies to China is the last act in the transformation of China into a capitalist state, it would be a great mistake.
U.S. seeks to break up China
It would be wrong at this time to regard the Deng regime on the same plane as that of Gorbachev and later Yeltsin in the USSR. The Deng regime is obliged by circumstances to resist imperialism. However feeble one may believe that resistance is, it nevertheless must be seen in the light of current relations between imperialism--especially U.S. imperialism--and China.
For instance, an op-ed piece in the Nov. 13, 1991, New York Times by Leslie Gelb entitled "Breaking China Apart" threatened that unless China widened its capitalist market and allowed more freedom (for the bourgeoisie and particularly its pro-imperialist intellectuals and academicians), the U.S. would move to break China apart.
Gelb reminded the Chinese of an article by Secretary of State James Baker in the Foreign Affairs quarterly that said trade between China and the West had "led to the integration of China's coastal provinces with Hong Kong, Taiwan and the global economy." If so, argued Gelb, then the U.S. is in the position of being able to "break China apart."
This is the language of imperialist brigandage, the way they talked 100 years ago. It is not the language they used with Gorbachev. All through his tenure they always sugar-coated their relations.
China has grown large on the international arena. And notwithstanding its considerable military establishment, it is still under the gun of the imperialists. One would have thought that following Tienanmen Square, China would take steps to eliminate imperialist influence in Hong Kong, Taiwan and the coastal areas. But the opposite has been true. China is moving aggressively to bring in more foreign investments and compete on the international arena to lure in all sorts of capitalist entrepreneurs and widen their areas of operations.
But it's still under the control of the Chinese government and the party. The working class has become much more numerous and has a revolutionary history; it only lacks independent class organization. Serious as the situation may be with regard to the capitalist reforms, it would be wrong to assume at this time that China has become a neocolony or that the social system as a whole has succumbed to imperialism and bourgeois restoration.