From Labor's Champion
June, 1989
By Mark Evans
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The massacre that took place in Beijing's Tienanmen Square on June 3 has laid bare the ugly reality of the Deng Xiaoping regime in China. Deng fought for capitalism and won, but his capitalist regime has proven itself to be utterly bankrupt. It is a regime of privilege, greed and exploitation, and, as the June 3 massacre shows, of fascist repression.
This October will mark the 40th anniversary of the Great Chinese Revolution of 1949. It should be a time of celebration for the Chinese people, but it will not be. The promise of the revolution - to build China into a truly socialist society - has not been fulfilled. Instead the Chinese people find themselves, forty years later, living in a society convulsed by all the ills of capitalism, with a huge and growing gulf between the rich and the poor, massive dislocation in the countryside, growing unemployment, inflation raging out of control and rampant corruption. China is a society in crisis, with sharp contradictions between classes and within classes. This turmoil has been reflected in the massive demonstrations that have rocked Chinese cities and have now culminated in the tragic events of June 3.
The significance of these events has been greatly distorted by the capitalist press and the government in (he United States. Here we are told that the Chinese students are fighting "against communism" and "for democracy.' The complex events in China are being contorted by the U.S. press in such a way as to seem to fit the grade school anti-communist lectures contrived by the U.S. ruling class. In reality, the tragic developments in China today are not the product of socialism but rather of capitalism.
The Chinese Revolution was one of the greatest revolutions of modern times, liberating the most populous country in the world from the stultifying hold of the feudal landlords, the comprador capitalists and the foreign imperialists. The tremendous changes brought about after the revolution greatly benefited the masses of peasants and workers. But the program followed by Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party, which was based on an alliance with the national bourgeoisie in constructing a new society, was incapable of building genuine socialism. For nearly three decades following the revolution China was a battleground, as radical and conservative wings of the Communist Party fought to implement their programs. Finally, after Mao's death in 1976, the right-wing faction of the Party, lead by Deng Xiaoping, gained hegemony and set China on the road of openly capitalist development. The results have been disastrous for the working people.
In the countryside, where the great majority of the Chinese people live and work, the collective farms were dismantled starting in 1979 and replaced with the "family contract system." Over the last decade, the peasantry has been rapidly polarized into a small class of rich capitalist farmers and a huge class of poor farmers who are steadily losing their land. The U.S. press, in its unending effort to promote capitalism, has expounded on the wonderful life of the rich farmers with their color TVs, new Toyotas and lavish weddings. Much less attention has been given to the hundreds of millions of victims of capitalism in the Chinese countryside. The scale of misery they are enduring is told by a few astounding statistics compiled by William Hinton, a longtime defender of the Chinese revisionists. The family contract system, writes Hinton, has led to "stagnation in grain production, grain shortages, falling production, 6 million peasants faced with famine, 80 million in serious straits and 200 million with short crops." He says it's likely there has been no real growth since the economic "reforms" began in 1979.
Capitalism permeates urban China as well. The entire service sector of the economy as well as much of small manufacturing is dominated by private capitalists, many of whom have become millionaires. "Special economic zones" have been created where foreign capital has been invited to super-exploit the labor of Chinese workers. Over one million workers labor in garment, textile and other sweat shops in southern China controlled by capitalists in Hong Kong. Others work in U.S., Japanese and European-owned factories, some for up to 70 hours a week.
Most large industry in China is nominally state-owned but is in reality used as the property of local managers and state authorities, who siphon off the surplus value extracted from the workers' labor. The Chinese capitalists are, in fact, currently devising schemes to officially transfer ownership of these enterprises from the state to private owners.
The capitalist class in China has become very wealthy. It is busy organizing stock markets and commodity markets in China as well as foreign banking operations. State and party officials have rushed to set up their sons in private and "public" enterprises and corruption and graft are rampant.
Meanwhile the workers are faced with the conditions found in capitalist countries around the world. Prices are going up rapidly; the official inflation rate is now over 35% a year. Millions are unemployed. A new bankruptcy law which went into effect late last year could close 400,000 money-losing factories, threatening the jobs of tens of millions more. The tradition of life-time job guarantees is being steadily done away with. The growing discontent of the workers has been expressed through an unprecedented number of strikes in recent years.
This discontent worries not only the Chinese capitalists but their American counterparts as well, who have their sights set on the tremendous possibilities for capitalist investment in China and do not want to see this potential gold-mine disrupted. This concern was expressed in the New York Times on April 5: "Inflation and corruption, along with the fear of unemployment and resentment of the newly wealthy, seem to be fostering a reassessment among Chinese farmers and workers about the benefits of sweeping economic change. Some Chinese officials and foreign diplomats are growing concerned that the Chinese people, instead of helping the market economy along, will become an obstacle to it."
There are also sharp contradictions among the Chinese capitalists, as they fight over dividing the profits squeezed out of the workers' and peasants' labor. Sharp in-fighting has taken place between capitalists of different regions and of different sectors of the economy. The main division among the capitalists, however, is expressed in the struggle between two major factions in the party, one led by Deng Xiaoping and Li Peng and the other led by Zhao Ziyang. Deng's faction wants to maintain a certain level of state control of prices, etc. in order to try to contain the consequences of capitalist economic anarchy. Zhao Ziyang and his cronies, on the other hand, favor doing away with most forms of state intervention in the economy, allowing individual capitalists a free hand. The struggle between the two factions has become increasingly bitter, being played out in Beijing's Tienanmen Square, as well as in cities across the country, with thousands of student demonstrators pushing for Zhao Ziyang's cause and thousands of soldiers carrying out the orders of Deng Xiaoping and Li Peng.
Neither of these factions is "progressive" or "democratic" in any sense of the words. Both are completely capitalist, reactionary and anti-democratic. The state regulation favored by Deng and Li has nothing to do with genuine socialism; it is simply capitalist regulation which benefits the capitalists. On the other hand, the "laissez faire" methods promoted by Zhao do not offer any kind of "democracy" or "freedom" for the masses of working people. Zhao is the epitome of a corrupt capitalist politician, having set up his two sons in highly lucrative enterprises. He and his associates are described as favoring a "neo-authoritarian" system and admire the right-wing capitalist regimes in Taiwan and South Korea. Like their counterparts who rule these two countries with an iron fist, the Chinese proponents of "neo-authoritarianism" are concerned about suppressing resistance by the working class. Nicholas Kristof, chief reporter for the New York Times in Beijing, writes: "[They] prescribe such a system partly because they see the growing risk of urban unrest. As China's labor unions become more independent and workers more indignant their discontent could boil over. Thus we see the type of "democracy" the faction behind the "pro-democracy demonstrations has planned for the working class.
The leadership of the student demonstrations is connected with the Zhao camp. They initiated the most recent round of demonstrations with a memorial to Hu Yaobang after his death in April. Hu was a proponent of the ideas espoused by the Zhao faction. Among their main slogans have been "Down with Li Peng" and "Support Zhao Ziyang." The main leaders of the demonstrations are, in fact, sons and daughters of top party officials and attend the most elite universities. They are the next generation of capitalists in China and are very conscious of this fact. These are the same forces who led the racist anti-African demonstrations earlier this year and have consistently campaigned to maintain and extend the privileges enjoyed by the intellectual elite. Their slogans about "democracy" refer to the capitalist variety never intended to extend to the masses of people.
However, the Zhao forces have cynically rallied the masses of people behind them appealing to the people's general discontent. Broad sectors of the people have come out in the streets to denounce government tyranny and the hypocrisies and corruption of the capitalists and government officials and to protest against inflation which is starving the poor. Thus while the leadership of the demonstrations is promoting capitalism in the extreme, the masses are coming of to protest the very manifestations of this capitalism. The conflict between the demands of the masses and the interests of the leaders of the demonstrations in China is reflected by the following passage in a New York Times report (April 28, 1989): "For a similar strategic reason, [the students] have for the most part refrained from complaining about inflation because they realize that it is a by-product of the economic liberalization policies they favor..."
The Deng regime did not resolve the problems it faces by suppressing the student demonstrations on June 3. Chinese capitalism is in the midst of a severe and chronic crisis, which will continue to convulse the country. There is only one way out of this crisis of revisionism - the Chinese working class must seize power and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat and true socialism. The promise of the Chinese Revolution must he fulfilled through a socialist revolution. The consolidation of capitalism in China and the growing discontent of the working class and peasantry are advancing the objective conditions for this revolution. But a genuine Marxist-Leninist party of the Chinese proletariat must be built if the working class is to be victorious. This is the path of struggle against the revisionists envisioned a decade ago by Enver Hoxha, the late Albanian Marxist-Leninist leader, in his hook Reflections on China. These words are as true now as they were then:
"...Deng Xiaoping is nothing other than a petty Napoleon... The Chinese revisionists are just like Napoleon who sought to establish his empire. He did create and establish his empire, but it was soon destroyed. In the same way the day will come when the Chinese revisionists are destroyed.
"Marxism-Leninism and the proletarian revolution will triumph in China, and these renegades will be defeated... Naturally, such a revolution will not triumph without fighting and bloodshed, because great efforts must be made in China to create the main subjective factor - the revolutionary Marxist-Leninist party, which did not exist as such before and does not exist now."
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