CHINA CELEBRATES 60 YEARS OF THE PEOPLES REPUBLIC
Today is the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the Peoples’ Republic of China. Shown here are just some of the thousands of people who will be celebrating in Tiananmen Square.
It was one of the great historical achievements of the Twentieth century to throw out the Japanese, and Western colonialists, and unite the country. The problems that faced China were staggering - and even today they struggle with poverty.
Modern China has acheived great things to become the world’s second largest economy, but it is still a developing country where rural areas have levels of development and poverty closer to Bangladesh than Germany.
It is easy to criticise China, but much of the criticism doesn’t take into account the historical context of their development, and the urgent requirement for economic growth as a precondition for social justice and progress. Nor do the critics acknowledge the degree to which the Communist Party of China is self-aware of the difficulties and negative aspects of Chinese society - but there are often no easy answers to solve problems overnight.
More here, from Madam Miaow
“Shown here are just some of the thousands of people who will be celebrating in Tiananmen Square.”
Ordinary, non-vetted, Chinese people, on the other hand, will not be allowed anywhere near the square, because of ’security considerations’ - as I’m sure you know.
The day you stop shilling for these reactionary thugs will be a happy one.
Comment by Jonny Mac — 1 October, 2009 @ 9:36 am
too bad,people in china cant even freely go
online to answer you,hope you can explain that
Comment by eddie — 1 October, 2009 @ 9:41 am
Strolling by the shore of Coloane in Macau in the days before Macau returned to the Motherland, it was interesting to see the guard towers across the water.
They were erected to stem the flood of people living under Portuguese oppression who were desperate to swim over to begin new and happy lives in the People’s Republic of China.
Comment by Jim Smith — 1 October, 2009 @ 9:49 am
Well actually the PRC is massively popular among Chinese people, and millions will be proud of today’s celebrations.
Actually, as you probably know, prior to unification, the living standards were generally higher in the Western areas of the PRC bordering macau than they were in the quite impoverished Portugese colony.
Macau was an interesting anaomoly as a colony, becaue Prtugal tried to hand it over to the PRC in 1974, but China declined. So Portugal continued unwillingly to administer the place, until Hong Kong was united with the PRC, and the PRC relented and let macau join as well.
Comment by Andy Newman — 1 October, 2009 @ 10:17 am
These people need to be careful, congregating in Tiananmen Square. They might get run over by a tank.
Comment by Ben — 1 October, 2009 @ 11:08 am
At least “these people” will no longer be subject to military occupation by British imperialism which was finally forced out in July 1997 having managed it’s century long occupation of China without bothering with democratic trappings.
Comment by StevieB — 1 October, 2009 @ 11:26 am
Sister parties
http://english.people.com.cn/90001/90776/90883/6773802.html
Comment by Nick Wright — 1 October, 2009 @ 11:30 am
I think Andy has posted a press release from the Chinese embassy by mistake. At least I hope so.
One of the preconditions for the renewal of socialism is that socialists stop making excuses for regimes that are responsible for the imprisonment, execution and murder of millions of their own citizens in the name of ‘glorious socialist progress’.
This post is a further reminder of just how remote socialist renewal is. Profoundly depressing.
Comment by Michael Fisher — 1 October, 2009 @ 11:33 am
“The Communist Party of Britain sends its greetings to the Communist Party of China on the occasion of the 60th Anniversary of the Founding of the People’s Republic of China”
Do you sincerely believe that there is still a world communist movement?
Comment by johng — 1 October, 2009 @ 11:35 am
Andy, is this an attempt at self-parody?
Or are you a Stalinist?
Comment by SWP_John — 1 October, 2009 @ 11:55 am
#8 “One of the preconditions for the renewal of socialism is that socialists stop making excuses for regimes that are responsible for the imprisonment, execution and murder of millions of their own citizens in the name of ‘glorious socialist progress’.”
Hear hear, Michael. Exactly right. Socialists must respect, and be seen to respect, the human rights of EVERYONE: no more excuses.
Comment by Jonny Mac — 1 October, 2009 @ 11:56 am
“Well actually the PRC is massively popular among Chinese people”
How do you know, Andy? Have the Chinese people been asked? Obviously the butchered millions can’t have an opinion, but has anyone asked the survivors? Perhpas there could be a huge referendum to test this idea. You could call it an ‘election’.
Comment by John Meredith — 1 October, 2009 @ 11:57 am
The tone of your article is laughable; how can you seriously gloss over the censorship,the false imprisonments and murders and their dodgy and murderous dealings in Nigeria?
Why as a socialist can you not acknowledge the ‘reality’ rather than just post cod-fiction?
Comment by bob hope — 1 October, 2009 @ 12:03 pm
Er, this is the “Andy Newman” who isn’t a Stalinist, right?
Comment by Charles Dexter Ward — 1 October, 2009 @ 12:03 pm
What an impoverished mental capacity and vocabulary you have if you tink that praising the fact the achievements of China makes you a “Stalinist”.
China is a highly complex society, where there is considerable access to what people think, with a vigorous academic life, thousands of publications, millions of internet users, where there is a robust popular culture of mass lobbies of officials.
One way we can know that it is popular is by the increasing identification with the PRC from Chinese living in the West; for example inward investment into China is often facilitated by people of Chinese descent in the USA and other countries.
The idea that China is some huge labour camp is just a racist myth - you should go there sometime, you would be amazed.
Comment by Andy Newman — 1 October, 2009 @ 12:12 pm
Compare the human rights abuses and poverty in democratic India to communist China. Then take a look at human rights inequality and poverty in Westernised Russia. That’s the fair comparison to make.
China proves that Third World countries can become rich and powerful by rejecting liberalism; that’s why it’s absolutely hated by goodthinkful Guardianistas.
Better Chinese socialism than a sham democracy controlled by mafia oligarchs with a hotline to Wall Street and Washington
Comment by attila — 1 October, 2009 @ 12:25 pm
China is a workers’ state. Were it to cease to be a workers state it would be replaced not by fluffy liberal democracy but a form of Chinese fascism in the pay roll of Western imperialism. China would be dismembered.
However, among the greatest dangers to the continuation of China as a workers state is the burgeoning bureaucracy that is getting ever closer to the growing Chinese middle classes and the ever more powerful multi-national foreign investors. The bureaucracy is more interested in sucking up to those forces, suppressing the voice of the working class and cracking down on minorities than its rhetoric would suggest. As happened in the Soviet Union a wing is emerging in the bureaucracy that wants to restore bourgeoise rule in China and make legal its own wealth and privileges. Workers democracy is urgently required in China to control the bureaucracy and limit the growing influence of western imperialism and the chinese middle classes. China needs to return to the road of socialist internationalism if it is to survive either internally or externally driven counter-revolution. We should, however, not be moved by the hypocritical calls for democracy in China made by Western imperialism and its servants. They are only trying to reach for forces that can overturn the gains of 1949 however distorted.
Comment by David Ellis — 1 October, 2009 @ 12:32 pm
Tell you what….go to China, start to organise a political party in opposition to the ruling party and let’s see how fucking ‘complex’ the response of the state is.
Understanding the history of political repression and the political use of famine does not a racist make. Your charge of racism is an abhorant way of avoiding serious argument.
Comment by Michael Fisher — 1 October, 2009 @ 12:38 pm
My, my…
Comment by Rev9 — 1 October, 2009 @ 12:50 pm
A workers State? China is the fastest growing section of global capitalism. Of course its a complex society. So is India. So is Russia. This does not make either beacons of socialism and nor is China. Its absolutely correct that the appropriate comparison is with India and Russia. China is the most economically successful variant of that path of development of capitalism. Its also one of the most repressive. And that is not incompatible with popularity (especially amongst those classes benefitting from the growing role of the private sector in the economy). Nationalism is very strong in both India and in Russia incidently. Oddly people who praise this in Russia and China don’t do so in the case of India. They must be racists or something.
Comment by johng — 1 October, 2009 @ 12:59 pm
It is easy to criticise China, but much of the criticism doesn’t take into account the historical context of their development, and the urgent requirement for economic growth as a precondition for social justice and progress.
In the 1950s and 1960, the Great Leap Forward and then the Cultural Revolution were defended as necessary for economic growth. They led to mass starvations, mass persecutions - and the economy going backwards.
China’s new rulers now argue that sweatshops in which independent workers’ organisation is banned are similarly necessary for economic growth.
1949 was indeed a great defeat for imperialism, but the CCP weren’t motivated by social justice. Their agenda was a nationalist one, which led them to see the population of China as the objects of history, not the subjects.
Comment by Anonymous — 1 October, 2009 @ 1:03 pm
Anonymous at #21 was me.
Comment by chjh — 1 October, 2009 @ 1:03 pm
Its also true that if you make the perfectly comparisons with Russia and India its neccessary to say something about the social shifts even in the kind of nationalism which treats the people as the objects rather then the subjects of history. Being proud, for example, of having a nuclear bomb and getting a seat on the WTO does not have the same social content as being proud of beating imperialism.
Comment by johng — 1 October, 2009 @ 1:09 pm
#18
“Understanding the history of political repression and the political use of famine does not a racist make. Your charge of racism is an abhorant way of avoiding serious argument.”
It is the myth of China being a beehive society without robust mechanisms for debate that is racist; individuals who accept without challenge common sense myths are not necessarily themselves racist. there is more pubic debate and popular influence over economic decisions in China thorugh think tanks, consultations and debate within the CPC, for example, than there is in britain about the decisions of private multinationals
At no time has China ever had anything comparable to Stalin’s great terror; indeed China’s toleration of dissent is probably comparable with the USA’s over the last 60 years, if you take into account McCarthyism, the murder and crimialisation of Black Panther members, Kent State massacre, and now of course the Guantanamo bay camp,, and USA’s international network of torture centres.
With regard to human rights, for example, China’s prison population is currently about 30% higher proportionately than Britains, but the USA’s prson population is some 5 times higher than China’s, proportionate to population.
China didn’t invade Iraq; China didn’t invade Afghanistan; China has not used its financial and economic power to force privatisation and deregulation onto Third world countries, China didn’t kill one million people in Iraq through sanctions (a real use of “political famine” if ever there was one.
Comment by Andy Newman — 1 October, 2009 @ 1:13 pm
Andy it is a myth that China’s toleration of dissent is the same as in bourgoise liberal societies like the US. China imprisoned millions for their political beliefs. The US didn’t. Nobody here has said that China is a “bee hive” society. However it is also a myth that the Chinese people have more control over the direction of their economy then do people in other countries. There are thinktanks in this part of the world as well, and also academics who take part in debates about the direction of the economy. However over here it is legal to have think tanks representing opposition parties. It is not legal to have such think tanks in China. It is illegal. Millions died in economic experiments which they had no control over at all.
This attempt to rehabilitate long discredited ideas in the labour movement is increasingly embarressing.
Comment by johng — 1 October, 2009 @ 1:21 pm
#23
“treats the people as the objects rather then the subjects of history.”
does that even mean anything?
Comment by Andy Newman — 1 October, 2009 @ 1:22 pm
On #23 - I don’t think that’s a social shift, though, so much as the necessarily contradictory nature of nationalism. On the one hand it become the vehicle for expressing the hopes and aspirations of the mass of the population; on the other hand it’s also the world-view of people who want to be a new ruling class. They’ve beaten imperialism precisely in order to get their own bomb, or the seat on the WTO.
And in the specific conditions of millenia of Asian history, Asian nationalisms don’t simply define themselves as anti-Western imperialist, but also in relation to other former kingdoms and powers, depending on their particular histories.
So Cambodian nationalism, in the Khmer Rouge version, saw Vietnam as the main enemy because of centuries of (real and imagined) antagonism between the two countries, which predated the French.
Ho Chi Minh, given the “choice” between the French or the Guomindang re-occupying northern Vietnam after WW2, opted for the French because “The last time the Chinese came, they stayed for 1000 years.”
And Chinese nationalism is firmly opposed to Western and Japanese imperialism, but has no problem with dominating Xinjiang and Tibet in the same way as Western imperialist powers tried to dominate China.
Comment by chjh — 1 October, 2009 @ 1:24 pm
Its also counterproductive from the standpoint of workers all over the world. If you are right about China then rulers of neighbouring countries who repress independent workers organisations and protests about neo-liberalism using identical arguments are correct. In countries here Thatcher was essentially correct. What matters is economic competativeness and building successful capitalist economies. Trade union representation and democracy simply get in the way. Lets abolish them.
Comment by johng — 1 October, 2009 @ 1:24 pm
The arrogance of most of the British left never fails to stun me. How decent of some of you to acknowledge 1949 as a huge step forward, but how pathetic you then look to bleat about nationalism vs socialism and a conception of human rights straight out of the Guardian.
Nice to see the SWP failing to recognise their grave theoretical error regarding support for the destruction of the Soviet Union, and applying it gleefully to China.
Comment by Mikey — 1 October, 2009 @ 1:28 pm
#25
JohnG
What would be the social function of an “opposition party” in China, where the leading role of the CPC is embodied in the functioning of government? As of course you know, there are several independent politicall parties in China, represented in the Peoples’s Congress, and who have access to think tanks etc. These are similar to the old “bloc parties” in East Germany.
What happens is that the social and political divisions are mainly represented within the CPC itself, and very different social and economic programmes are argued over, supported by differing views by academics, think-tanks, journals, trade unions, different party committes, etc, etc. It is simply a fact that the government has more control over the economy in China than private corporations do, and the government is more susceptible to popular pressure, debate and opinion than the boards of directors of multinational companies are.
“Millions died in economic experiments which they had no control over at all. ”
Well, what would you have done differently? Of course you have the benefit of hindsight, but the structural problem of needing economic development from a tiny base was there; and in what meaningful way could millions of illiterate peasants have decided economic policy?
Incidently, the famine figures of the mao era are very much inflated by anti-communist cold-war misuse of statistics, to factor in a declining birth rate as famine deaths - despite the fact that the “people” who “died” had not even been conceived.
Comment by Andy Newman — 1 October, 2009 @ 1:37 pm
#27
“but has no problem with dominating Xinjiang and Tibet in the same way as Western imperialist powers tried to dominate China.”
Or more pertinenatly, in the same way that the UK dominates Surrey and the Isle of White.
Comment by Andy Newman — 1 October, 2009 @ 1:39 pm
johng (28) ironically, perhaps, says “Trade union representation and democracy simply get in the way.”
No they don’t, as any shop steward knows effective trade unions act as a stimulus to better management and higher capital investment, thus higher productivity. This is true whether enterprises are collectively owned or otherwise.
That is why a powerful trend in Chinese society sees trade unions as making them more efficient. Of course, in such a highly complex society, other trends exist.
Ultra left critics of the current state of affairs in China have an impoverished and idealised notion of what socialism should look like and will never find an actually existing model that meets their criteria.
A more dialectical take on China would try to evaluate what social and class forces are in play and make an assessment of the likliehood of a Chinese Gorbachov/Yeltsin fully transforming the privileges and individual wealth that is accumulated in some strata into a permanent and legally enforceable capitalist formation. Instead we get hysterics.
Comment by Nick Wright — 1 October, 2009 @ 1:42 pm
People’s Republic of China at 60: socialist revolution, capitalist restoration
By Chris Slee
September 23, 2009 — October 1 will mark 60 years since Mao Zedong proclaimed the creation of the People’s Republic of China. This followed the victory of the People’s Liberation Army, led by the Communist Party of China (CCP), over the US-backed Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party, KMT).
In 1921, when the CCP was founded, China was in chaos. Western intervention — military, economic, political and cultural — had destroyed or undermined traditional Chinese institutions. New, stable institutions had not been created. Various imperialist powers grabbed pieces of Chinese territory.
* Read more at http://links.org.au/node/1270
People’s Republic of China at 60: Maoism and popular power, 1949–1969
By Pierre Rousset
With the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) found itself at the head of a country three times larger than Western Europe, with a population of some 500 million. The internal situation was favourable to the revolutionary regime. At the end of a long series of civil and foreign wars, the population sought and relied on the new leaders to achieve peace while the ongoing people’s mobilisation opened the way for a deep reform of society.
* Read more at http://links.org.au/node/1269
People’s Republic of China at 60: 1925–1949 — Origins of the Chinese revolution
By Pierre Rousset
Retrospectively, we know the importance of the period opened in China by the overthrow in 1911 of the Qing Dynasty: it concluded, nearly four decades later, with the victory of the Communist revolution on October 1, 1949 – an event of historical scope. However, at the time, the future of the country looked very uncertain. Power was fragmenting in China, but the European states were not in a position to seize this opportunity to impose their colonial domination on the Middle Kingdom and were soon going to be at war with each other. The new imperialist powers (the United States and Japan) were not yet ready to replace them and claim for themselves the conquest of China. But it was only a matter of time. China seemed to be condemned to be dismembered into Japamese and Western zones of influence.
* Read more at http://links.org.au/node/1268
Comment by Terry Townsend — 1 October, 2009 @ 1:52 pm
#32
“A more dialectical take on China would try to evaluate what social and class forces are in play and make an assessment of the likliehood of a Chinese Gorbachov/Yeltsin fully transforming the privileges and individual wealth that is accumulated in some strata into a permanent and legally enforceable capitalist formation. Instead we get hysterics.”
Exactly Nick.
my own assessment, is that the danger is real but not presently current, Both President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jinbao are both on what you might call the left of the party; and the success of China showing 8% growth during 2009 will strengthen the hand of the left, while the capitalist societies that the right wing are more influenced by struggled. Although the CPC has lifted its ban on capitalists joining, they don’t have direct sway over government policy like they do in the West
But there was an informal collegiate election for HU’s sucessor a few yesrs back (perhaps inspired by competitive elections being introduced into the higer bodies of the Vietanemese party) and what we might nominally call “the right” won with their candidate Xi Jinping.
However, the election was not acrimonious, and the margin was very narrow, so some sort of collegtiate compromise is likely, even under Xi, that would preclude restortation of capitalism.
in any event Hu is relatively young, and not going any time soon; the fact that “Hu Jintao thought” has been elevated to officially adopted party reading, also suggests that the current path is set to continue. remember also that Hu had a significant victory over the right wing in 2005 when pro-capitalist party boss, Chen Liangyu was saked on corruption charges.
Comment by Andy Newman — 1 October, 2009 @ 1:53 pm
Christ, Andy, I read people calling you a Stalinist and think “Hmm, that’s a bit harsh”, and then you ask this humdinger of a rhetorical question at 30 -
“What would be the social function of an “opposition party” in China, where the leading role of the CPC is embodied in the functioning of government?”
Ffs, where to start?
Comment by Jonny Mac — 1 October, 2009 @ 2:05 pm
#28
I missed this supreme silliness from JOhnG
“Its also counterproductive from the standpoint of workers all over the world. If you are right about China then rulers of neighbouring countries who repress independent workers organisations and protests about neo-liberalism using identical arguments are correct. In countries here Thatcher was essentially correct.”
CHina’s economic and social model is clearly NOT “neo-liberal”, you will have Hayek and Freidman spinning in their graves.
Do you really in all sincerity think that modern China is embarked on a Thatcherite path? With the leading role of the state in the economy, and long term commitments to improving social provision.
Comment by Andy Newman — 1 October, 2009 @ 2:09 pm
#35
Well China has a different model of political system from the West, but it is even more different from Stalin;s Russia, and the CPC has nothing like the internal regime in the CPSU in the Stalin era.
The way to understand the difference is that the leading role of the CPC in the constitution is a similar presumption to the leading role of parliament in the British constitution. Differing political views can be exchanged between Liberals, Labour or the Tories, but broadly we expect all of them to abide by the constitution and rule via parliament.
In the Chinese CPC there are open disagreements, people know where different leading members stand on various issues and there are fairly well defined strategic factions, there is open political debate about which options the party should take, including in academic jounals and the mass media. Ther are contested elections for position of lower party bodies, and there was an informal electoral college election for who should succeed Hu.
It may not be your idea of democracy, but it is not “Stalinist” - it is just a different way of running a society.
Comment by Andy Newman — 1 October, 2009 @ 2:16 pm
I think its true Chjh that nationalism is janus faced. In India much recent literature on nationalism, correctly in my view, has stressed the continuities between the old nationalism and communal politics, and the way they defined each other as opposed to being simple opposites. But its not true that this means that they are identical. The overhaul of both economic policies and political structures neccessary to make the transition made a difference to the space that existed for independent organisation from below…
The defence of trade unions as neccessary parts of devopment programs (in India this effectively meant the hamstringing of trade unions throughout the 1950s and 60s followed by an inevitable explosion as the development program collapsed, issuing in the Emergency etc as differnet sections of society responded in different ways to this collapse) is too conditional a defence for my liking.
If you are a member of a trade union in a developing country its a dangerous path to go down (as it is, for that matter, in countries like this). Ignoring the ludicrous notion that it is “arrogant” to show solidarity to trade unionists in China (or that this is a merely liberal prejudice) facing a regime which is viciously repressive to workers seeking independent organisation (racist even!) or Andy’s very odd constitutional cretinism, its really (genuinely) difficult to understand where the attraction lies in trumpeting the virtues of a regime whose example is used by repressive neo-liberal governments from India to Mexico to push through policies which are destroying the lives of the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world.
Why should socialists be enthusiastic about this? Because the government has the word Communist in the title? Because speedy capitalist development is the only route to the socialist nirvana? So why not cut out the middle man and become a straight neo-liberal?
Oh and Andy, please tell me: do you support the policy of Special Economic Zones in developing countries or not? Do you think this is a neo-liberal policy (yes or no)? Do you support the rights of those pushed off their land to fight back? Or not. Its a simple question and not silly at all.
If the only thing that matters is capitalist growth then the comparison with Thatcher is an apt one. Apply that to developing countries and you are justifying vicious repression, imprisonment, executions, torture and worse. I’m sure unintentionally. But that is the reality.
Its a very wierd kind of fantasy politics.
Comment by johng — 1 October, 2009 @ 2:38 pm
re 35
The possible functions for an opposition party in China would be to act as a lightening rod for imperialist intervention, or possibly, to assemble a coalition of emerging bourgeois and petit bourgeois forces to act on and encourage the pro capitalist elements in the economy, the state apparatus and the party.
This fetish of multi party democracy that emerges in an ultra left form in this blog is the reflection of the more conventional bourgeois strand that is best represented by the BBC’s ‘from our own correspondent’.
Soon we can expect the ~BBC and VOA to start promoting a ‘colour’ revolution in China,
Comment by Nick Wright — 1 October, 2009 @ 2:43 pm
#38
John.
Special Ecomomic Zones in China are not neo-liberal, becasue they are a managed compromise by the state with multi-national capital to introduce investement and new technology into a largely state owned and directed economy. It is simply voiding words of all meaning if you describe entirely different social and economic strategies using the same name.
And there is a difference between economic growth in a society, and growth of capital as an independent social category.
With regard to “supporting the rights of those pushed off their land to fight back”, there are a whole raft of different issues being muddled up there. Should people be able to protest and present alternatives? yes. Shouod gvernments use repression to silnce political and social critics? no. Should sectional interests prevail over the interests of the whole of society? probably not. Shouod there be compensation for those affected? yes.
but economic development, and political and economic sovereinty are importnat issues for the developing world,, and colllaboration with China does have benefits in providing space for countries to acheive those aspirations as an alternative to World bank and IMF deregulation and privatisation. Similarly, access to foreign capital and modrn technology are critical if developig countries are able to particiopate in the global division of labour, and SEZ’s can help acheive that.
What is your alternative economic policy for these countries> How would you gain access to foreign capital? How would you gain access to modern technology> How would and SWP government respond to protestors disrupting your economic policy due to their sectional interests?
Now on the questioon of reprression, torture, etc, these are political questions; and the left opposes such things; but such repression is just as likely to occur in a country locked into a cycle of under-development as in a country seeking to use SEZs. And economic prosperity is a precondition for sustainable social justice.
Comment by Andy Newman — 1 October, 2009 @ 3:05 pm
#23 “the CCP weren’t motivated by social justice. Their agenda was a nationalist one”, if they werent motivated by social justice why did the GMD and the social forces they represented see them as a threat and try to wipe them out?
And if by “nationalist” agenda you mean they wanted to liberate their nation from imperialist oppression, isn’t that part and parcel of social justice?
Your counterposition is wrong in a fundamental way.
Comment by Armchair — 1 October, 2009 @ 3:42 pm
Well its political justice for sure. Independence from imperialism is a neccessary but not sufficiant condition for the achievement of social justice. Which is incompatible with models of development in which Special Economic Zones are set up in which foreign companies are free to dispense with national terms and conditions of host countries: China’s most influential foreign policy export.
Comment by johng — 1 October, 2009 @ 4:22 pm
jOhnG
I really wish you would answer the question of what concrete different policies you think the Chinese government shoud adopt.
Imagine that there was the sort of workers democracy you would like to see, you would still have to run that society - so what would you do difefrently?
Comment by Andy Newman — 1 October, 2009 @ 4:25 pm
Which Andy are being introduced on the Chinese model, as stated, by countries as diverse as India and Mexico. You seem to be suggesting that neo-liberalism is the only possible development path for developing countries. Many in the global movement do not agree with you. And it quite simply IS neo-liberalism to set up SEZ’s. No ifs or buts and no waffle about voiding terms of their meaning. This is what it is. Officially. Its approved and advocated by all the major institutions of global capitalism. In Europe and North America your Chinese opposite numbers are in the government. This is why all this is such comical fantasy politics.
Comment by johng — 1 October, 2009 @ 4:26 pm
Nick why on earth would the BBC advocate a revolution of any kind in China? China is not the enemy of global imperialism or capitalism. Its a crucial ally and without China the US would be bankrupt.
Comment by johng — 1 October, 2009 @ 4:28 pm
#42
“Which is incompatible with models of development in which Special Economic Zones are set up in which foreign companies are free to dispense with national terms and conditions of host countries: China’s most influential foreign policy export.”
So conceretely, how should developing countries gain access to modern techno;ogy and foreign capital?
If not SEZs then what do you propose instead?
Or do you recommend they opt out of the global division of labour and seek some sort of economic autarchy? How woudl that work in thre 21st century
But you also seem opposed to accumulation though the surplus of working class or peasant labour? So are you completely opposed to economic growth in socialist countries? Do you think there should be equality of poverty?
Comment by Andy Newman — 1 October, 2009 @ 4:28 pm
johng- I fail to understand the distinction between political and social justice, particlarly where national oppression and economic exploitation are so clearly linked as they were in China.
Comment by Armchair — 1 October, 2009 @ 4:33 pm
#44 “And it quite simply IS neo-liberalism to set up SEZ’s. ”
Do you know what neo-liberlism even means?
If SEZs are set up as part of a wider government strategy of state protection and regulation, then they are not part of a neo-liberal solution. China’ main impact in Africa is to provide an alternative to World bank and IMF restructuring.
China’s vision of a “walled world” of cooperating national economies, is entirely different to the US free trad emodel. they can’t both be “neo-liberalism”
Comment by Andy Newman — 1 October, 2009 @ 4:35 pm
Leaving the PRC on foot with a Japanese spouse, either at the border gate with Macau or over the bridge to Nepal, is an interesting experience.
A paleface’s documents are checked perfuntorily but an Oriental’s are throroughly and repeatedly perused, just in case a citizen of the PRC is trying to leave without permission.
Comment by Jimmy Scott — 1 October, 2009 @ 4:40 pm
The ignorance of some in the British Left (mostly sectarian trotskyists)about China is quite staggering. As the UN has reported recently no other nation in the history of this planet has lifted more people out of poverty in such a short space of time as China has done. The economic and social progress of China is incredible. One has only to compare the abject poverty and social conditions of the people in Bangladesh and areas of India to see the difference. The people of China are rightly proud of their countries achievements. They acknowledge quite openly that they still have mountains to climb but they are getting on with it.
China has embarked on an ambitious programme to reduce carbon emmissions and tackle global warming.
“China renewed its green promise to the world as President Hu Jintao pledged to cut carbon emissions by a “notable margin” by 2020 from the 2005 level at the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 22.
“We will endeavor to increase forest coverage by 40 million hectares and forest stock volume by 1.3 billion cubic meters by 2020 from the 2005 levels,” Hu said.
According to a state guideline released in 2006, China promised to lower emissions by 10 percent and reduce its energy consumption per unit of GDP by 20 percent between 2005 and 2010. That equals to a reduction of 1.5-billion-tonne greenhouse emission, or 300 million tonnes of carbon dioxide every year.
It also looks toward renewable energy sources and aims to increase their usage to 10 percent by 2010 and 15 percent by 2020 to secure future energy supply and reduce pollution.
By the end of 2008, China has Asia’s largest wind generator fleet with a total power-generating capacity of 12.21 million kilowatts, which ranked the fourth in the world, according to the Global Wind Energy Council.
The government’s policy incentives brought about more than 600solar cell companies, mostly privately-owned, which manufacture 44percent of the world’s total cells for solar power devices.
The strenuous efforts have already born fruits as official data showed China cut its energy consumption per unit of GDP by 10.1 percent from 2006 to 2008, which means the country saved 300 million tonnes of standard coal and cut carbon dioxide emissions by 750 million tonnes.”
In his speech at the celebrations The President Hu Jintua
said
“We must unswervingly follow the road of socialism with Chinese characteristics…and the reform and opening-up policy,” Hu said in a speech atop the Tian’anmen Rostrum after reviewing the troops.
“The development and progress of New China over the past 60 years fully proved that only socialism can save China and only reform and opening up can ensure the development of China, socialism and Marxism,” Hu said.
China has embarked on its road to Socialism, the left in Britain cannot even find unity of purpose.
Comment by Alfie — 1 October, 2009 @ 4:46 pm
#50 Alfie, can you explain for us in what way privatising huge swathes of previously state owned industry and making hundreds of thousands of workers redundant is a part of any road to socialism ?
Comment by Eddie Truman — 1 October, 2009 @ 4:52 pm
johng
The notion of contradiction seems absent from your handling of this issue of the role of foreign capital in countries like China and Vietnam.
China is not a free fire zone for foreign capital like, for instance Mexico. The Chinese trade limited and managed access to their labour force and internal markets in exchange for technology transfer, training and capital investment. The only other mechanism for capital investment would be to squeeze the agricultural sector. Whilst undeniably effective this carries with it an substantial political cost.
China has a very large balance of trade surplus, especially with the US. This is both a problem for the Chinese and for the United States. But the US has lost a measure of its power thus and these factors account for the contradictory stance towards China. Unless of course, you think that US pressure on China arises from their concern for human rights, the rights of ethnic minorities, concern for the environment etc.
Capitalists do have contradictory interests. Weimar Germany traded extensively with the Soviet Union. Farmers in the US midwest want to export wheat to Cuba. Mrs Thatcher wanted a stable GDR as a counterweight to capitalist Germany. Douglas Hurd reportedly dissented from the NATO onslaught on Yugoslavia.
We have to disentangle these contradictory elements. It is precisely because the US economy is so tied up with the Chinese that the working out of these contradictions (and those in China itself) are so important.
This model of China as the exemplar of a new or special kind of capitalism is simply inadequate.
Comment by Nick Wright — 1 October, 2009 @ 4:55 pm
In reply to armchair at #48, one way to understand the difference is to think about the end of British rule in India. National oppression and social exploitation were also strongly linked in the Raj. The independence of India and Pakistan was long-overdue political justice, in that both countries won formal independence from the empire. But rather less was gained in social justice - the subordinate classes remianed subordinate, albeit to different ruling classes.
Comment by chjh — 1 October, 2009 @ 5:41 pm
#45
“Nick why on earth would the BBC advocate a revolution of any kind in China? China is not the enemy of global imperialism or capitalism. ”
JOhnG - why did Thatcher privatise and deregulate Britain’s satte owned industries? It is the same question.
I don’t understand, if you think that state contriol of the econopmy makes no difference, then why do you oppose privatisation in Britain? Why do support the renationalisation of the railways if state control is irelevent?
Comment by Andy Newman — 1 October, 2009 @ 6:20 pm
#51
“can you explain for us in what way privatising huge swathes of previously state owned industry and making hundreds of thousands of workers redundant is a part of any road to socialism ”
Eddie.
the bulk of the economy is still state owned - and the privatisation (in most cases part privatisation) was to introduce foreign capital and access modern techology - which were necessary to avoid economic and social stagnation, and to participate in thwe world dividion fo labour without solely relying on being a source of cheap labour.
It was a compromise with capital not a capitulation to it.
Comment by Andy Newman — 1 October, 2009 @ 6:24 pm
I think Andy has posted a letter from the Chinese embassy and it ‘isnt’ a mistake.
Poor lad.He really needs a long long rest.
He must be sharing the prozac with Gordon the Moron, the Prozac Primeminister.His posts are rapidly turing into farcical jokes.
What a great waste.
He did at one time have a functioning brain but no longer.It’s all gone up in smoke.Have you tried therapy or counselling Andy?
Comment by Doughnut — 1 October, 2009 @ 6:30 pm
On the role of SEZs, JohnG in particular seesm completly ignorant of the role they play in fiostering technology sharing agreements with State Owned Enterprises; nor the way these State enterprises then share with middle sized cooperatives to disperse modern technology throughout China.
I am still waiting for JohnG’s alternative suggestion about hw this new technology could be accessed by the Chinese.
In particular i am interested in whether he is advocating developing that surplus by increasing the exploitation of the countryside - which seems to me like the only alternative.
Comment by Andy Newman — 1 October, 2009 @ 6:30 pm
Alfie @50
Copy and Pasting claims from some government handout does not make them true.
You could, if you were sufficiently masochistic, perform a smiler exercise with the speeches of our beloved leader Gordon Brown. This also would not make them true.
All government lie about what they are doing.
Comment by timothyMN — 1 October, 2009 @ 6:48 pm
Andy, you are a morally repugnant fool and patsy. Sorry to say it.
“At no time has China ever had anything comparable to Stalin’s great terror;”
China has imprisoned millions. It has killed millions. It has at times set up police mechanisms for ‘exposing’ bourgeois elements and eliminating them.
“indeed China’s toleration of dissent is probably comparable with the USA’s over the last 60 years, if you take into account McCarthyism, the murder and crimialisation of Black Panther members, Kent State massacre, and now of course the Guantanamo bay camp,, and USA’s international network of torture centres.”
This is incomparable to the mismanagement and murder associated with the cultural terror of the Great Leap Forward or the vicious violent and cold-blooded murder of its own citizenry in the several hundreds at Tiananmen.
I actually was involved with the flotation (and privatisation) of CNOOC on to NASDAQ. Never have you met a more corrupt bunch of capitalist pigs posing as ‘Communists’, traipsing around the world shopping at Gucci and Saks, while 50,000 people were made redundant with 2 days notice with ZERO social safety net in order to meet the requirements. Their oilfields poisoned the local villages and rivers. These were the most disgusting people I have ever met, equalling anything I had met in the West. They then negotaited a discount on their fees by withholding funds contractually owed to our company. These funds were luxury expenses they themselves had insisted on, like private jets and luxury buses and hotels for their entourage of stooges.
I left the business soon after - dealing with the likes of CNOOC, Marconi etc. was a shambles - but the Chinese had not an ounce of dignity or ‘Socialism’ in their blood - they were money and powerhungry.
You’re a first class stooge and patsy. A mental and moral criminal.
Comment by Mick — 1 October, 2009 @ 6:56 pm
ROFL: http://english.people.com.cn/90001/90776/90883/6773802.html
Couldn’t Chairman Griffiths just have circulated a card for all his comrades to sign? And maybe a whipround for a bottle of plonk?
Comment by Charles Dexter Ward — 1 October, 2009 @ 7:12 pm
Mick
You really need to calm down.
It is simply a fact that the political repression in China has never equally the scale and ferocity of Stalin’s Great terror.
The majority of your comment reveals that you have experienced that there is corruption and greed in the Chinese government and businesses. Who knew! Did anyone say that there wasn’t corruption and greed? we are not discussing a utopia, we are describing a real, complex and flawed society grappling with real-world problems and complications. Modern China has arisen out of a patricular set of circumstances, and that context needs to be understood.
Now with regard to the contrast with the USA. It is simply a fact that although more compressd in time the repression after the Tiananmen square demonstartions was certainly not greater than the American state’s crushing of the black panther party over a more sustained period.
And if you are including economic mismanagement as tantamount to murder, then the disastrous handing of the US economy precipitating the Great Depression might be worthy of standing side by side with the Great Leap Forward.
BUt what is most obvious is that the USA has spread its intollerance of dissent over a world stage. The coup in Chile in 1973, the Vietnam war. The inavsions of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Comment by Andy Newman — 1 October, 2009 @ 7:29 pm
“At no time has China ever had anything comparable to Stalin’s great terror;”
What! Are you kidding. The three greatest mass murderers of the twentieth century were: Hitler, Stalin and Mao.
In fact MORE people died of starvation or in labour camps under Mao than under Stalin.
The above statement shows an unbelievable disregard for human life.
Comment by timothyMN — 1 October, 2009 @ 7:31 pm
China’s policy is that a socialist society cannot be succesfully accomplished on the basis of poverty. Lenin realised this when he introduced the NEP in 1920. He welcomed foreign investment in developing industries. China has never gone through the capitalist stage of development and they realised that to grow into a modern nation based on socialist principles it has to modernise and needs outside investment to do so. In 1949 China ravaged by decades of war and underdevelopment, ridden with povery famine and diseases had to adopt a new path to development.
China is doing so at remarkable pace. It is influencing and helping the developing world without having to place military bases anywhere. China has no military bases outside its borders. Recently the Chinese government made a gift of 200 nursery schools to Sudan, it has also done the same to other countries in Africa and even some of the Caribbean islands. China has just signed a massive aid package with socialist Cuba.
The drivel about millions being killed in China and mass repression is beneath contempt and although many crimes were committed under the Maoist cultural revolution this has not prevented the great progress and opening up of China we see today. The Chinese goverment has never been so popular amongst its people.
Comment by Alfie — 1 October, 2009 @ 7:40 pm
#62 You have been reading to many horror comics. Please before making such ridiculous assertions quote some facts and the sources.
Comment by Alfie — 1 October, 2009 @ 7:44 pm
#62
*sigh*
Well you have to distinguish between people who die for different reasons if you want to make an historical analysis. Stalin’s Great terror is estimated to have killed about 700000 people in direct elimination of political opponents.
The cultural revolution was not an organised series of deliberate purges like that, but rather a much more chaotic process. they just aren’t the same sort of thing.
Now, with regard to the deaths by poverty in China, you have to factor in the massive impact of the liberation war against Japan, Kapanese military occupation had left some 50 million dead; and the deliberate economic sabotage to isolate and bankrupt the Xhinese economy by the USA in particlar after 1949.
You also have to factor in the fact that in a society where the margin of income over bare survival was so precarious, then famine was always an iminanent threat.
So while it is clear with the benefit of hindsight that the Great Leap Forward and Cultural revolution were deeply flawed, they were expereiments taken by a government attempting to negotiate through a very dangerous and hostile political and economic context.
Comment by Andy Newman — 1 October, 2009 @ 7:50 pm
“The Chinese goverment has never been so popular amongst its people.”
Great stuff. So the government would have no reason whatsoever to deny the Chinese people full freedom of expression and free, open elections.
Comment by Alex Ross — 1 October, 2009 @ 7:56 pm
@ timothyMN #62. Your above statement shows an unbelievable disregard for the facts.
Even in the worst year of food shortages in China during the ‘great leap forward’ (& by the way, pest outbreaks and dreadful weather made a very large contribution to the poor harvest in 1960) the per-capita death rate in China was lower than that in many Third World countries, and was very similar to the average death rate in India.
But China recovered well from that setback. Life expectancy more than doubled between 1949 and 1979- an amazing achievement, particularly given that China was under very harsh international sanctions (imposed by the USA) durng those three decades.
While one can make severe criticisms of the policies of the Chinese Communist Party under Mao Zedong, there is no room for doubt that under their leadership, hundreds of millions of people, who would otherwise have met premature deaths through malnutrition and disease, were able to live to old age.
Comment by Noah — 1 October, 2009 @ 8:11 pm
Give me a sick-bucket, Newman.
You really are a schmaltzy old Stalinist, aren’t you? Proper old-stylee. Although, your lot are so defeated and morally and intellectually discredited these days that you’re reduced to supporting a bunch of “Maoist” capitalist authoritarians who slaughter people in their national square for daring to demand reform.
Unbelievable.
Comment by Ben — 1 October, 2009 @ 8:29 pm
Who reads this shit?
Comment by daggle — 1 October, 2009 @ 9:20 pm
“China’s toleration of dissent is probably comparable with the USA’s over the last 60 years”
Yes, I well remember the Cultural Revolution under JFK, with teachers in small towns across the Midwest being paraded along main street by the county sheriff and his deputies and forced at gun-point to confess to thought crimes against the American Constitution before being dragged off and shot in front of their families while their schoolbooks were piled on a bonfire and burnt.
Andy is our great helmsman.
Comment by Socialist Surrealism — 1 October, 2009 @ 9:56 pm
Andy Newman:
“So while it is clear with the benefit of hindsight that the Great Leap Forward and Cultural revolution were deeply flawed, they were expereiments taken by a government attempting to negotiate through a very dangerous and hostile political and economic context.”
They were not flaws, they were massacres. Uprootings. An assault on humanity and the nature of humanity. They were unflinching attempts to destroy the lives and loves of people under the whip of the State and Mao’s vision to retain power over a weakened and demoralised people.
Experiments that cost the lives of millions, set up a paranoid generation of young murderous radicals who would betray their parents, teachers and friends and effectively allowed Mao to divide and rule his abused peoples until his very timely and welcome death.
Yet while you excuse the government of “experimentation” what could possibly have been the reason behind running hundreds of people over with tanks at Tiananmen for example?
You have no pity. Only cold-blooded rationalisation of a largely irrational and merciless regime whose only redeeming feature is to have maintained a society that has not completely imploded - despite the many attempts by it’s government through ‘experimentation’.
Comment by Mick — 1 October, 2009 @ 10:13 pm
The Great Leap Forward partially fulfils Andy’s description, but not the Cultural Revolution.
The 50s in China were very different, economic thought was in its infancy, the Soviet propaganda machine was in full flow. It was a stupid idea but I don’t think the Great Leap Forward was pure evil. More mad than bad, although still a lot bad.
The cultural revolution on the other hand was a power grab by Mao, and an assault on the identity and physical person of hundreds of millions of Chinese.
Comment by Left Outside — 1 October, 2009 @ 10:48 pm
#70
” I well remember the Cultural Revolution under JFK, with teachers in small towns across the Midwest being paraded along main street by the county sheriff and his deputies and forced at gun-point to confess to thought crimes against the American Constitution ”
Well not under JFK.
YOur description is not a million miles away from what actually happened. In particular, the HUAC hearings were ceremonies of humiliation and degradation by forcing people not only to confess, but also forcing them to inform on others - even though the names were of no use, as the FBI already had all the names.
you mention teachers. well, In 1952, the US Supreme Court upheld a lower court decision in Alder v. Board of Education of New York, to approve a law that allowed state loyalty review boards to sack teachers deemed “subversive”. Exactly being persecuted for thoughts crimes against the Smerican constitution.
Mccarthyism didn’t just reach into Hollywood. Hundreds of ordinary people were imprisoned for belonging to or sympathising with the Communist Party during the McCarthy Red Scare in the USA, and between ten thousand and twelve thousand people lost their jobs, and found it impossible to gain alternative employment. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were actually executed. In May 1952 The New York Times reported intimidation of librarians across the nation by Legionnaires, by Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution, by Minutemen in Texas and California. School texts showing city slums, UNESCO material, books left wing novelists like Howard Fast were purged from school libraries.
An ilustration of the hysterical atmosphere can be gathered from this quite from Ellen Schrecker’s book “The Age fo McCarthyism”:
McCarthyism introducued a dulling conformity, with politicians unwilling to promote even mild social reform, and it became impossible to challenge the basic assumptions of US foreign policy without endangering your job.
McCarthyism was not the first time such repression had been used in the USA of cource, in 1919 and 1920s the scandalous Palmer raids - unconstitutional and illegal - arrested and deported out of the country some 250 socialists and anarchists, and 6000 members of the IWW trade union were arrested - 4000 of them in a single night. By January 1920 around 10000 people had been arrested for nothing other than “thought crimes against the American constitution”
It is now a matter of historical record that the FBI though 1968 and 1970 fabricated documents and deliberately created misinformation to start a gang war between the Black Panther Party and various criminal gangs - and when the BPP increased their self defence cpability (legally under the constitutionall right to bear arms), FBI and police officers murdered a layer of cadre of the panthers.
Comment by Andy Newman — 1 October, 2009 @ 11:07 pm
“Your description is not a million miles away from what actually happened.”
Do you really believe this vile rubbish? You are the moral equivalent of a holocaust denier.
Hold on - in the context of China, you ARE a holocaust denier.
Comment by Socialist Surrealism — 1 October, 2009 @ 11:14 pm
#72 the irony of course is that the Cultural Revolution is correctly seen as utterly disastrous in China now, and even the faintest whiff of it causes consternation.
I am not sure that it was really only a power play by Mao - in so far as it became a faction fight it was more a settling of accounts between the ultra-left Lin Piao, and Deng Xiaoping.
Certainly there were large elements of personal amibition and unprincipled rivalry between the tp layers of the party.
BUt there was also a real underlying issue, with a long-standing legacy from Chinese culture of the relatively weak authority of central government compared to regional power bases, and these regional fiefdoms were ( and are!) the basis for corruption, inefficiency, nepotism and fraud. It seems to me that Mao made a highly ill-advised attempt to solve this structural problem by summoning up a permanent revolution based upon a suspension of all concepts of constitutionality and legality, and reaped more than he sowed. BUt I still think it falls under the more stupid than wicked category.
Funniliy enogh, the reason i keep asking the SWP memebrs in this debate what their concrete alternative olicies for the Chinese government, is that they sound exactly like Red Guards from the cultural revoltion. they don’t know what alternatie polcies they want, but they want a revolution against the “capitalist roaders” and it is all terribly exciting and real social problems can be solved by enthusiastic waving of red flags and shouting “one solution revolution”.
Comment by Andy Newman — 1 October, 2009 @ 11:21 pm
#74
There was no holocaust in China. That is bollocks.
Have i made that up about Mccarthism? China was a desperately poor country under economic blockade, struggling with mass illiteracy and external military threat, with a population traumatised by decades of inhuman occupation and war. Living standards were marginal, so there was very little slack, so that failed harvests in 1960 did cause famine. that is a terrible tragedy, but it is understandable that such a beseiged government used brutal measures simply to secure the economic and social survival of the nation and society.
the USA was the most prosperous nation in the world, at the time of the McCarthy red scare - the only major industrial nation that had not had a war fought on its home soil, and yet it launched a hysterical witch-hunt for polictial non-conformists, while simulataneously starting a pattern of wars in Asia, and coups in the middle east and latin america to protect its economic interests.
Look at the US inspired and co-ordinated coup in Indonesia in 1965 that left between 80000 and 2000000 dead? Look at the US inspired and organised coup in Chile in 1973 that left 40000 dead, and the total dismantling of the social safety net for Chile’s poor? Look at the USA’s murderous occupation of South Vietnam, that left 3000000 dead? Whay about the sanctions agianst Iraq that left 1 million dead?
Even in terms of human rights, the USA’s prison system today is much more extensive than China’s, and conditions of inmates little better (Abu Ghraib anyone?)
Comment by Andy Newman — 1 October, 2009 @ 11:35 pm
Andy, how many people died under the vile but brief wind of McCarthyism?
McCarthyism was abandoned and rejected by the State and did engender a lot of social resistance. Furthermore, resistance to HUAC grew through the independent judiciary - can you imagine that in Maoist China?
BTW: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were actually guilty. Guilty as hell. No show trials necessary.
Seriously, grow a spine mate.
Comment by Mick — 1 October, 2009 @ 11:38 pm
But Mick
You are not taking into account the differences between a prosperous liberal democracy, and a beseiged deperately poor and war ravaged country on the edge of social collapse.
Let us set aside the legacy of Mccarthyism, which although stopped ahd already changed American society irrevevocably for the worse.
You have to understand China in its own terms. there was no possibility of the government being overturned by an independent judiciary, becasue that constitutional arrangement had never existed. Mao didn’t inherit a liberal democracy, he came to power in a country that had been run by war lords for decades; and concepts of the rule of law in the sense understood in the anglo-saxon world had never existed.
the CPC forged a centralised state out of nothing; and dragged a country in grinding poverty up towards greater prosperity and security.
People died because of the lack of basic food security and damaged economic infrastructure; replacing the anarachy of warlordism and private armies and gangsters is not easy. How well have the USA got on with that task in Afghanistan and Somalia? The Chinese succeeded in quelling gangster anarchy, it wasn’t always pretty.
You need to be a lot more specific about what deaths you are talking about. The famine of 1960 was genuinely caused to a large degree by crop failures and plant disease - but also famines are themselves complex social phenomenon, and the death toll depends upon micro-decisions of food distribution at a househols level (do you risk feeding everyone not enough, or do ou select one child to die - these are the terrible decisions people have to make in famine sitiations), as well as being affected by marginal shifts of economic behaviour (If everyone stops having a haircut to save money, the barber dies).
Undoubtedly, with the benefit of hindsight, different government actions might have been better or more effective. But famies are not a “holocaust” comprable to Hitler’s death camps - famines are complex social catastrophes.
Comment by Andy Newman — 1 October, 2009 @ 11:55 pm
#77 “Seriously, grow a spine mate.”
Well I am arguing a counter-intuitive position, and unpopular position. Doesn’t that require a spine?
Comment by Andy Newman — 1 October, 2009 @ 11:55 pm
“Well I am arguing a counter-intuitive position, and unpopular position. Doesn’t that require a spine?”
Haha - you made me laugh so fair do’s.
This is not about intuition or popularity. This is about fact. Reality. Historical truth. Hindsight allows use to be fully judgemental and critical. Put into any relative perspective, Mao’s rule was ultimately inordinately cruel and wasteful of humans and humanity - his own people. Mao released China from the shackles of colonialism and feudalism and plunged it into several very dark decades. Social progress and longevity were hallmarks of most emerging nations in the second half of the 20th century, Mao could hardly have done worse beyond letting the nation fully implode into a steaming pile of corpses. His program was not Socialist in any sense, it was dictatorial, it suppressed the mind and senses of the people. It is a sad affair.
Comment by Mick — 2 October, 2009 @ 12:34 am
Many books have now been published that provide horrifying evidence of the mass slaughter that took place in China under Mao.
Are they all works of fiction written by counter-revolutionary liars in the pay of the CIA?
Comment by Socialist Surrealism — 2 October, 2009 @ 12:37 am
#81
Well many books have been published that dispute that conclusion as well, for example
Paul Clark’s “The Chinese Cultural Revolution”
Dongping Han’s “The Unknown Cultural Revolution: Life and Change in a Chinese Village”
and Mobo Gao’s “The Battle for China’s Past”
There are of course largely discredited pieces of pop-history like the Chang/Haliday’s book that support your argument, but which muddle up deaths from all sorts of causes, misattribute natural disasters as the outcomoe of human action, and attribute everything that went wrong to mao, even where he had nothing to do with the evnts in question.
Comment by Andy Newman — 2 October, 2009 @ 1:10 am
You don’t know your Chinese history. The Japanese were defeated by the Americans. Those parts of Chinese territory which were subject to Western powers’ extraterritoriality were ceded back to China in 1945, and so was nothing to do with the Communists victory in their civil war. Of course, HK and Macau were issues that were changed later, but again were little to do with the Communist revolution.
It is also arguable that given that the Japanese managed to occupy so much of the territory of China because both Chinese civil war participants were loath to waste fighting resources on the Japanese when they had each other to fight.
The Kuomintang government was far from perfect, but I doubt they would have introduced such human rights issues as the cultural revolution with associated famines, the one child policy and such political repression.
Socialism is an excellent idea for utopia. The trouble is that utopia will never be arrived at.
Comment by Giles Smedley — 2 October, 2009 @ 2:18 am
History is lies, written by the victors.
When China is the leading superpower at the end of this century the official history will exonerate Mao, and Russia will count Stalin’s terror in the hundreds of thousands not millions. Most of those will be described as genuine criminals rather than political prisoners.
The crimes of liberalism, such as the Irish famine will be listed in detail and Chinese historians will produce a Black Book of Market Liberalism in which all the deaths in India and Africa through malnutrition and preventable diseases will be held up as a crime against humanity.
Even if the a few maverick Western revisionists do not subsribe to the orthodox version of history they will not be taken seriously outside the US and some European countries, which by then will be peripheral in the world’s affairs.
Latin American history textbooks will most likely follow the Chinese view.
All hail Chairman Mao! The sun rises in East!
Comment by attila — 2 October, 2009 @ 2:27 am
Seriously if you count all the dead in the Third World through lack of a welfare state plus all the deaths caused by American sponsored wars against the left in countries such as Chile or Vietnam the crimes of Mao look much less impressive.
The Great Leap Forward deaths were not deliberate but caused by mistaken economics. So was the Irish Famine and the Indian famines under the Raj. Laissez faire is every bit as deadly a utopian fantasy as communism. But it is a utopia that makes money for the rich, which is why it doesn’t get denounced the way Mao does.
It is market liberalism that needs to be erased from the planet and right now the People’s Republic of China is the one power that is challenging Wall Street and the Pentagon’s ability to impose it on the world. Good luck to the PRC and long may China keep its flag flying.
Comment by attila — 2 October, 2009 @ 2:35 am
China’s just introducing national healthcare by the way. Apart from anything else fear of getting ill is one reason why Chinese save rather than spend especially in rural areas. And China needs its people to spend in order to boost the domestic economy; the American export market having collapsed thanks to the greed and incompetence of Wall Street
The Chinese tyranny can afford to provide a health service to its people because in China the government controls the banks. In America the banks and the multi millionaire owned media tell the government what to do. Health is run for profit in the land of the free. So tell me if you have cance is it better to suffer American freedom or Chinese tyranny?
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23610.htm
Comment by attila — 2 October, 2009 @ 2:51 am
“Well actually the PRC is massively popular among Chinese people, and millions will be proud of today’s celebrations.”
This could well be true, but I’d doubt if there’s any any valid and reliable instrument of gauging social opinion to show that this is the case, as opposed to Andy’s opinion.
Comment by Nick Fredman — 2 October, 2009 @ 3:24 am
#87
Oh come on. NIck
You could make exactly the same statement about Cuba, but you would be the first to point out the level of popular participation, etc, etc.
Comment by Andy Newman — 2 October, 2009 @ 8:18 am
#83
Giles Semdely is clearly an insufferable prick. What pitiful ignorance.
He says that the Cultural revolution was responsible for innumerable famies, but the big famine that mao’s government is castigated with was in 1960, and the “three difficult years” wwre 1958 to 1960. The Cultural Revolution didn’t start until 1966.
Giles Smedley says “The Kuomintang government was far from perfect, but I doubt they would have introduced such human rights issues as the cultural revolution with associated famines, the one child policy and such political repression.”
We don’t need to speculate on what they “would have done”, they were after all in power in Taiwan. In 1949 they enacted the Emergency Powers which placed restrictions and limitations on civil rights, including abolishing freedom of political speech, freedom of the press and publication, abolishing right to peaceful assembly, and freedom of association. their prisons were full, their workplaces had no trade unions, and and it simply was a police state. It remained an effective military dictatorship until 1986, despite enjoying a massive amount of US economic aid, which meant they simply did not have the same diffiuclt conditions to deal with as mao.
Smedley also claims that the japanese were defeated by the Americans, and the Chinese were only involved in a covil war. Yet some 3 million Chinese soldiers were killed fighting the Japanese - in the case of the GMD fighting as conventional armies, and in the case of the Red Army fighting as guerilas.
The fact that the GMD then came to an accomodation with the Japanese to keep 100000 Japaneses soldiers fighting the Red Army until 1947 explains why it was the Communists who genuinely represented independce, not the GMD.
Comment by Andy Newman — 2 October, 2009 @ 8:29 am
Furthermore, the GMD were in power in substantial parts of China from 1927 onwards, where human rights were not high on their agenda to say the least.
The supression of the CCP and anyone associated with it in Shanghai for example was on a scale and level of almost unbelievably barbaric brutality. Of course foreign imperialist troops and Police were also involved togetger with Chiang’s mates in the local criminal gangs.
Comment by Armchair — 2 October, 2009 @ 8:39 am
Here’s a personal observation:
Well over decade ago, before Macau reverted to indirect CCP control, I was in the courtyard of the seminary in Macau - a seminary with no seminarians - and talking to one of the historians of the city, Monsignor Manoel Teixera.
An apparantly-aged Chinese man hobbled past and beamed at us. He and Monsignor Teixeira exchanged lengthy civilities in Chinese and the man hobbled onwards.
“How old do you think he is?” the historian asked me.
“Seventy or eighty,” I replied, hazarding a rough guess.
“He is younger than you are,” came the reply. I was then in my forties.
The crippled man was a Chinese Catholic, an unswerving lay recusant who had refused to accept the authority of the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, the body established by the CCP to command the loyalty of Chinese Catholics.
He had spent over twenty years in and out of forced labour camps and prisons, steadfastly enduring beatings and extremes of hunger, thirst, heat and cold, all the while refusing to renounce the spiritual authority of the Papacy.
Eventually, Teixiera was able to pull a few useful strings on the occasion of the visit to Beijing of the President of Portugal and the man was released on the clear understanding that his story was not to be published or broadcast.
The CCP has accomplished much, but it is important to remember how many millions - literally millions - of lives were quite needlessly destroyed or blighted.
How many Chinese perished in the aftermath of the appalling Great Leap Forward? Thirty million, as was claimed in Taiwan at the time? Or a mere few hundred thousand, as Han Suyin would have us believe?
I hate to sound like a know-it-all snob, but those who extil CCP rule tend to be those who know next to bugger all about China.
Comment by Jimmy Scott — 2 October, 2009 @ 8:49 am
POSTSCRIPT:
JAPANESE SOLDIERY IN POSTWAR ASIA
The number of Japanese who fought in the ranks of the Chinese Red Army against the KMT has been variously estimated: anywhere between 5,000 and 30,000 is the usual estimate in Japan. Some are still there, aged now - in their eighties and nineties - and usually living in very humble circumstances, as are those surviving Japanese who fought in the ranks of the Vietminh and the Indonesian ‘Merdeka’ forces.
Comment by Jimmy Scott — 2 October, 2009 @ 8:54 am
The repetition of #91 and #92 is regretted. However, #92 has a postscript of some possible interest to readers.
Some of the Japanese who fought in ranks of the Red Army could - some years ago - be visited in a retirement home for Foreign Friends of the Chinese Revolution in Mukden in Manchuria.
Talking to those Chinese who endured the Cultural Revolution of 1966 - 1976 makes one ashamed that one ever had any distant-altruistic sympathy with the perpetrators.
In one small provincial town not far from Canton / Guangzhou a man, a local government clerk in his thirties, was beaten to death in front of his neighbours for possessing a paltry collection of dog-eared [and quite worthless] foreign stamps.
The fact that he possessed foreign stamps proved clearly that he was an agent of Imperialism or, at least, that he would have become an agent of Imperialism if he had got half a chance to become an agent of Imperialism.
This appalling story was told to me by the man’s nephew long after the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was over.
Similar scenes, some involving mass executions of entire families, happened all over Han China, Tibet, East Turkestan and Inner Mongolia.
Foodstuffs, such as Great Wall Corned Mutton from Inner Mongolia, was being exported at a time of desperate food shortage in the PRC. I recall buying cans of it in Dhahran and Bahrain in 1975.
Comment by Jimmy Scott — 2 October, 2009 @ 9:14 am
#91 “I hate to sound like a know-it-all snob, but those who extil CCP rule tend to be those who know next to bugger all about China.”
But those like you who use the mistakes and indeed crimes of the Great leap Forward ad Cultural revolution to castigate the CPC rule in china today also seem to know very little.
The criticisms you make of the Cultural Revlution are pretty much mainstream opinion among the business and party elite in the CPC nowadays.
Now in fact much of that criticism is decontextualised, as the Cultural revolution was a much more complicated social phenomenon than presented, which although it did blight millions of lives, was also a product of deep anomalies and tensions in Chinese society - the fact that the Cultural Revolution lasted for about 8 years after Mao tried to call a halt to it shows how much it took on a self-sustaining dynamic and momentum of its own.
But nevertheless, the current legitimacy and authoritity of the leading role of the Communist party in China doesn’t stand on the foundations of the Cultural revolution, or of the Great leap Forward. Supporters of the current government would be the first to agree with a highly negative assessments. Hu Jintao doesn’t rely upon mao for his authority.
It is also worth pointing out the degree to which some of the traumas could have been avoided had mao taken the advice of the USSR over not anatagonising the USA, and on economic policy.
However, we simply should not overlook the degree to which material circumstances constarined the options of the Chinese government. Economic sanctions from the USA being a large factor, but also the desperately low cultural and economic level of the countryside; the war torn nature of the country, the traumatised population.
There is also the factor that Mao’s government had been conditioned by a long and arduous guerilla war; and men habituated to violence do turn more quickly to violence to solve problems; men habituated to military command are not necessarily the best coalition builders for consensual civilian government. These are factors that would have affected any post-independence government.
Comment by Andy Newman — 2 October, 2009 @ 9:17 am
Can’t Rob Griffiths find an old folks’ home in China to twin the CPB with?
Comment by Charles Dexter Ward — 2 October, 2009 @ 10:04 am
There is another gathering of active Chinese netizens in Hong Kong yesterday(where I come from), discussing the emerge and “individualism” in China, using Internet as a tool to allow the people to express themselves APART FROM official media.
And quiet a number of them have to endure harassment by local police just because of their political discussion online, something you all are doing here on a daily basis.
And I think a TRUE socialst always look at the liberalisation of individual from state and bourgeosis order.
The moderator said it all: Given them a choice, they preferred to host the forum in Beijing. Hosting in Hong Kong is only a “sad” choice.
I hope Andy Newman can address the rights of these Chinese folks as well, being a TRUE socialist as you claim.
Comment by eddie — 2 October, 2009 @ 10:28 am
Andy’s line is very like Han Suyin’s:
Mistakes were made but one can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.
Draw a line. The past is over and done with.
Let bygones be bygones.
Look to the future!
Except. of course, that some people ruined by events are ruined to this day and many of those who were exalted have done very very well.
COMPARE the period of the Reformation and the Dissolution of the Monasteries in England.
Comment by Jimmy Scott — 2 October, 2009 @ 11:30 am
Free Tibet!
Comment by chris — 2 October, 2009 @ 2:28 pm
#98
Inded Chris
One of the great acheivement of the Chinese Communist Party has been freeing the serfs and slaves in Tibet, and liberating that nation from feudalism.
Meanwhilw the Dalai lama liberated the country’s gold reserves to keep him company in India while he draws his CIA pension.
Comment by Andy Newman — 2 October, 2009 @ 3:48 pm
Indeed, what human rights were there for the Chinese before 1949?
Aintcha sorry for the poor families who had to give up their servants and their big houses and do a stint in the countryside alongside the farmers? How are you supposed to keep a manicure?
Comment by Paper Tigger — 3 October, 2009 @ 12:22 pm
Nooman has crossed the rubicon with this grovelling paeon to the old Stalinist and present-dasy capitalist Chinese regime: he’s no longer any sort of Marxist socialist, and neither is this blog.
Comment by Jim Denham — 3 October, 2009 @ 5:45 pm
Please dig out
‘Red China Blues’ and read it from cover to cover before enthusing about CCP rule!
Comment by Snitch and Snatch — 4 October, 2009 @ 4:48 am
‘Red China blues’ is an awful, self-indulgent book. There are many better memoirs, written by people who actually grew up in China. Jung Chang’s Wild swans is particulalrly valuable, as it gives not just the perspective of someone who came of age in the Cultural Revolution, but also her parents’ generation, and why they were so loyal to the CCP. It’s also a very useful correcting to her and Jon Halliday’s Mao the unknown story.
Comment by chjh — 4 October, 2009 @ 1:26 pm