This is an unofficial spartacist league web page. I hope to do this badly enough that the SL will be forced to create their own page out of self defense.
I will put up the latest WV if I have time, and if I feel like it. This will continue until SL puts up their own page, or they send me a cease and desist order.
I am instituting a new policy with regards to links. I will have no links on this page to sites that the SL would not enter into a united front with. This new policy is a result of some recent complaints.
| No.671 | |
11 July 1997 |
As the clock struck 12 on the night of June 30, thousands of villagers in Hong Kong's New Territories area cheered as 4,000 troops of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) crossed the border from Guang dong province. The departure of Hong Kong's last British governor, accompanied by Prince Charles, on the royal yacht Britannia, was greeted with slogans proclaiming: "Wash clean 100 years of national humiliation!"
The International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) joined in cheering as the rotted British Empire finally lost its last major colonial holding with the lowering of the bloody Union Jack and the raising of the five-starred red flag of the People's Republic. But we warn that in the hands of the venal Stalinist bureaucracy, which has pledged to maintain Hong Kong's capitalist system, the takeover of the territory is a dagger aimed at the remaining gains of the 1949 Chinese Revolution. The heightened danger posed to the Chinese bureaucratically deformed workers state was amply manifest in the record high hit by Hong Kong's Hang Seng stock index on the eve of the takeover, and by the all-night parties hosted by local tycoons. Buisiness Week(9 June) gloated: "Our hunch is that the takeover does not mean an end to Hong Kong, but rather the beginning of the endgame for what will eventually be seen as the relatively short-lived (for China) Chinese Communist era."
On July 1, Chinese president Jiang Zemin assured a meeting of financiers, foreign "dignitaries" and members of the territory's new, handpicked govornment that "Hong Kong will continue to practice the capitalist system." This was in keeping with the "one country, two systems" formula advanced by the late Deng Xiaoping at the time of the 1984 accord with Britain outlining the terms of the handover. But Two systems cannot long coexist within China's borders. The takeover of Hong Kong poses ever more starkly the choice faced by the Chinese proletariat: either proletarian political revolution sweeps away the treacherous Stalinist bureaucracy and stops the galloping danger of capitalist restoration, or bloody counterrevolution will engulf all of China and again subject the workers and peasant masses to brutal exploitation and misery.
The smashing of capitalist rule and the construction of a planned economy following the 1949 Revolution, when Mao Zedong's Communist Party (CCP)/PLA peasant-gerrilla forces defeated Chiang Kai-shek's hated Guomindang (Kuomintang) regime, brought enormous social gains for China's workers and peasants. But that social revolution was deformed from its inception by the political rule of a nationalist bureacratic caste, which has steadily undermined the collectivized foundations of the Chinese workers state. The introduction and deepening of capitalist market measures by the Beijing regime have already significantly cracked and threatened the complete destruction of the "iron rice bowl" system of lifelong guaranteed jobs, housing and social insurance. In response, there have been sharp struggles by the workers in defence of their liveihood.
However, the elemental and atomized resistance of the Chinese proletariat to growing immiseration and social chaos cannot in itself defeat the powerfol forces - both within China and outside it - pushing toward capitalist counterrevolution. As we recently wrote in "China on the Brink: Workers Political Revolution or Capitalist Enslavement?" (Spartacist No. 53, Summer 1997):
"The program of political revolution is needed in China today if the workers and impoverished peasant masses are to emerge victorious in the class battles that lie ahead. As part of our fight to reforge Trotsky's Fourth International, the International Communist League seeks to build an egalitarian-communist party based on the program of Lenin and Trotsky's Bolsheviks and early Chinese Communist Party. Such a party would link the struggle against the currupt Stalinist bureacracy in China with the class struggle of the militant Indonesian and South Korean workers against their capitalist rulers, and with those in the imperialist centers such as Japan. Only through extending socialist revolution to these countries will the threat of capitalist reenslavment be eliminated once and for all and the basis laid for the development of China in a socialist Asia."
The outpourings of Chinese people around the world on June 30 spoke to the deep hatred of the British colonialists who lorded it over Hong Kong as their privilaged preserve for over 150 years. Britain siezed Hong Kong, then a sleepy fishing village, in the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing (Nanking),the first of a number of "unequal treaties" ceding huge swaths of China, including imperialist-controlled "concessions" in major cities, to foreign rule. The treaty concluded the first Opium War between Britain and China, which had been touched off when a Qing Dynasty official burned hundreds of tons of opium imported into the country by Britain from its Indian colony. Untold numbers of Chinese wasted away as "perfidious Albion" created a demand for the product as a means of paying for Chinese exports like tea and silks.
When China began to resist this deadly triangle trade, the British sailed their gunboats into the country, defeating the weak Qing state. Britain later forced China to cede other areas which are now part of Hong Kong. While British trading firms like Jardine Matheson made their killing in opium trafficking, American capitalist proffiteers like Warren Delano, grandfather of future Democratic "New Deal" president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, also grew rich.
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