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<h1 class="reader-title">Chinese Revolution at 70: Twists and
Turns, to What?</h1>
<span class="post_author_intro">by</span> <span
class="post_author" itemprop="author"><a
href="https://www.counterpunch.org/author/br8ph/"
rel="nofollow">Horace G. Campbell</a> - October 21, 2019</span></div>
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<p><strong>Introduction</strong></p>
<p>On October 1, 2019 the peoples of China celebrated 70
years of the rule of China by the Communist Party (CPC).
There was much to celebrate in so far as over the
seventy year period the Chinese society had risen from a
poor, underdeveloped society to be the second most
important economy in the world, in the process lifting
the living standards and confidence of hundreds of
millions. Central to the transformation of Chinese
society were the sacrifices made by the Chinese people
to overcome warlords, exploitation, economic
backwardness and imperial domination. In period since
1949, the state squeezed more work out of the workers
and peasants in order to accumulate surpluses that could
be invested for the diversification of the economy. The
economic and political choices over this seventy year
period produced many twists and turns, ups and downs in
the process of unleashing a great leap forward, a
cultural revolution and then a ‘reform ‘ agenda. It is
in this fourth stage after the ‘reforms’ where the
challenges of militarism, financialization and
environmental degradation will test the mettle of
Chinese socialism.</p>
<p>The choice of the label of socialist to mark the nature
of the Republic was made in October 1949 by the
political leadership when they seized power and
announced the formation of the People’s Republic of
China at Tiananmen Square on October 1, 1949. In order
to penetrate the social content of this declaration
towards socialist construction, it will always be
necessary to understand the survival of the CPC in
relation to the internal and external contexts. Today,
in the midst of a prolonged capitalist crisis and a
collision course with the military management of the
international system, the working peoples of China are
now confronted with a new stage of the struggle for a
new order. This commentary seeks to place the
celebration of 70 years of the socialist revolution in
the context of the rise of a social stratum in China
whose intellectual and ideological subservience to neo
liberalism is laying the foundations to the erosion of
the positive gains of the Chinese people since 1949.</p>
<p><strong>Emerging from the Long March – Coming to Power
of the Chinese Communist Party </strong></p>
<p>On October 1, 1949, the People’s Republic of China was
formally established, with its national capital at
Beijing. Standing before the people at the gates of the
old imperial palace Mao, Chairperson of the CPC had
declared that, ‘the Chinese People have stood up.’ The
Chinese peoples had been humiliated by western
imperialists from the middle of the 19<sup>th</sup>
century when Britain, France, Germany, the USA and Japan
extracted concessions from the Chinese imperial state
and occupied Chinese territory. The leaders of the
decaying Qing ruler ship had to open the port cities to
the monopoly capitalists and also granted them legal and
territorial concessions. It was in the period of the
first Opium War, in 1842, when the Chinese emperor ceded
Hong Kong to the British.<sup><a
id="post-115998-endnote-ref-1">[1]</a></sup> Chinese
youths, students and workers opposed imperial domination
and formed organizations imbued with ideas of the
self-determination of China. One such organ was the
small party that was started in Shanghai in 1921 and
called itself a Communist Party. Influenced by the ideas
of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin and the victory of the
Bolsheviks in the Great October Revolution of 1917 in
the USSR, the Communist Party of China set about
unifying with other anti-colonial forces. One of these
forces was the nationalist elements of the Guomindang,
led by Chiang Kai-shek. Urged on by the Soviet Union to
form an anti-colonial alliance with the Guomindang, the
Communist Party had worked with national capitalists,
but by 1927 the stark differences in objectives were
clear with the contradictions between the comprador
classes and the masses. In 1927, the Guomindang
massacred hundreds of Communists in Shanghai and the
surviving leaders fled to the rural areas of China
rooting themselves among the peasantry.</p>
<p>After crushing the Communist Party in Shanghai, between
1930 and 1934 Chiang Kai-shek launched a series of
military encirclement campaigns against the Chinese
communists in an attempt to annihilate (them politically
and militarily) especially in their base area in
southeastern China. The Communists successfully fought
off major campaigns using tactics of mobile infiltration
and guerrilla warfare developed by Mao. In the fifth
campaign, Chiang mustered about 700,000 troops and
established a series of cement blockhouses around the
communist positions. The Chinese communist Central
Committee, which had removed Mao from the leadership
early in 1934, abandoned his guerrilla warfare strategy
and used regular positional warfare tactics against the
better-armed and more-numerous Nationalist forces. As a
result, the communists suffered heavy losses and were
nearly crushed. It was in 1934 when surviving communists
now under Mao’s leadership embarked on the Long March
(1934–35). This historic 6,000-mile (10,000-km) trek of
the Chinese freedom fighters, which resulted in the
relocation of the communist revolutionary base from
southeastern to northwestern China and in the emergence
of Mao Zedong as the undisputed party leader. Fighting
Nationalist forces under Chiang Kai-shek throughout
their journey, the communist troops crossed 18 mountain
ranges and 24 rivers to reach the northwestern province
of Shaanxi. The heroism attributed to the Long March
inspired many young Chinese to join the Chinese
Communist Party during the late 1930s and early 1940s.
Mao’s base in Yunan became a center of resistance to the
Nationalists and the Long March decisively established
Mao’s leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. It was
under the leadership of Mao where the Party organized
poor farmers and peasants in the countryside.</p>
<p>By 1937 when the Japanese carried out genocide in
Nanking and occupied most of China, the communists led
the fight for Chinese sovereignty. Mao Zedong had
emerged as the theoretician of the Chinese path to
socialism by developing new ideas about revolution.
Where in the classical Marxist texts, the vanguard of
socialist change was supposed to be the workers, Mao
studied the Chinese reality and set about the building
of peasant soviets. It was from these social forces that
Mao and the communists forged a Red Army that fought a
long and brutal battle for power. <sup><a
id="post-115998-endnote-ref-2">[2]</a></sup>
Emerging from a long march in the late thirties, the
Maoists had fought the Japanese and the Goumindang and
emerged victorious in 1949. From their base at Yunan,
the communists grew in strength and eventually defeated
the Nationalists in the struggle to control mainland
China.</p>
<p><strong>There was no blueprint to build socialism.</strong></p>
<p>When the Communist Party acceded to power in 1949 there
was very little industry left after foreign occupation
and Civil War. The new Chinese state looked to Joseph
Stalin and the Soviet Union for assistance but even
before there was any agreement, about socialist
planning, the Chinese society was thrust into another
war in Korea in June 1950 less than one year after
assuming power. The United States had opposed the
Communists and even after the victory in 1949 had
recognized the exiled Republic of China government in
Taipei as the ‘legitimate’ government of China. Anti-
communists in the USA and their allies kept up this
farce from 1949 until 1973 when the nonaligned movement
forced the acceptance of China as the legitimate
representative of the Chinese people at the United
Nations. During this period of anticommunist
provocations, the United States aggressively opposed the
People’s Republic of China. China was sucked into the
Korean War when the aggressive strategy of the
Eisenhower administration pushed the western forces
(fighting under the flag of the United Nations and the
leadership of General Douglas MacArthur) right up to the
border of China. The Communist Party of China and its
leadership mobilized millions of Chinese workers and
peasants in the Chinese People’s Volunteers Force (CPVF)
to repel the US occupation of Korea. After more than a
million combat casualties had been suffered on both
sides, the fighting ended and in a stalemate in July
1953. Negotiations in 1954 produced no further
agreement, and the front line has been accepted ever
since as the de facto boundary between North and South
Korea.</p>
<p>It was in the midst of this war situation when the
leaders of the CPC launched the period of the
‘transition to socialism’ with the announcement of the
First Five Year Plan (1953-1957) with the goal of
achieving industrialization, collectivization of
agriculture and political cohesion of the state. In
1949, 89% of China’s population lived in the
countryside, with agriculture accounting for about 60%
of total economic output. The backbone of China’s
economy, agriculture and industry together employed more
than 70% of the China’s labor force and accounted for
over 60% of the country’s GDP. By 1956, over 90 per cent
of the land had been collectivized and the government
nationalized banking, industry and trade. Private
capitalism was virtually demolished and the leading
capitalists sought refuge in Taiwan, Hong Kong and
Singapore.</p>
<p><strong>Great Leap Forward - First Major twist</strong></p>
<p>The next period of the Chinese revolution is one that
has been the most controversial; this was the period
when the Party launched the Great Leap Forward. It was
from this era where the state developed planning at the
national level and key to this were measures to keep
consumption down among the producers in order to amass
surpluses for investment. With rising tensions between
the Soviet Union and China in the late fifties, the
political leadership had calculated that it would be
optimum to put their large rural population to work to
hasten the transition to socialism. Building on the
experiences of the soviet communes of the period of the
Long March, the party undertook a new campaign called
the Great leap Forward between 1958 and early 1960 to
organize its vast population, especially in large-scale
rural communes, to meet China’s industrial and
agricultural problems. The plan was to develop
labor-intensive methods of industrialization, which
would emphasize human power rather than machines and
capital expenditure. The Great Leap Forward approach was
epitomized by the development of small backyard steel
furnaces in every village and urban neighborhood, which
were intended to accelerate the industrialization
process.</p>
<p>Politically, the Great Leap Forward strengthened the
Communist Party in robbing the landlord class of social
power in the rural areas and strengthening the
collective ownership of land. Under the commune system,
agricultural and political decisions were decentralized
and a commitment to socialism rather than expertise was
emphasized. The peasants were organized into brigade
teams, and communal kitchens were established so that
women could be freed for work. Millions of women were
freed from domestic work and joined agricultural
fieldwork, pasturage, mining, foundry, irrigation,
communication, transportation, all kinds of factories,
commerce, shop work, and various other public services.
One other great achievement of this period was the
integration of modern medicine with Chinese traditional
medicine (TCM). “Due to the call by Mao Zedong, as well
as the practice of the combination of Western medicine
and TCM by the first group of Western doctors with a
training in TCM, medical circles paid more attention to
integrating Western medicine and TCM. It became more
popular among doctors of Western medicine to study TCM.”
<sup><a id="post-115998-endnote-ref-3">[3]</a></sup></p>
<p>From the many scholarly reports from sources that were
not influenced by the Cold War, the program for
socialization in the rural areas was implemented with
such haste by overzealous cadres that implements were
often melted to make steel in the backyard furnaces, and
discontented peasants slaughtered many farm animals. The
challenges in the implementation of the Great Leap
Forward were compounded by drought, natural disasters
and the withdrawal of Soviet technical support. The
social and economic dislocation led to inefficiency,
sabotage and internal struggles within the party. With
the disruption of agriculture where peasants were
exhorted based on moral incentives, diversion of farm
labour into small-scale industry disrupted China’s
agriculture seriously, and three consecutive years of
natural calamities added to what quickly turned into a
national disaster. There are diverging estimates on how
many peasants perished during the period of the Great
Leap Forward and one of the tasks of a future socialist
regime in China will be to develop clear records on what
happened during these years. This period coincided with
hunger, famine and the deaths of millions. Since that
time, the debates have not been able to separate the
truth from the anticommunist claims that Mao oversaw the
death of millions of Chinese peasants. <sup><a
id="post-115998-endnote-ref-4">[4]</a></sup></p>
<p>Joseph Ball and Samir Amin in separate commentaries
have been able to locate the challenges of the Chinese
society at that period within the context of the
agrarian question in semi colonial societies. Both have
been able to analyze the goals of achieving the economic
and technical transformation of the society. Both
acknowledged the successes and setbacks of the process
of transformation underlining the reality that
transformation in a society never proceeds in a linear
process, or in liberal terms, clear ‘progress.’<sup><a
id="post-115998-endnote-ref-5">[5]</a></sup> Joseph
Ball’s essay in Monthly Review on “Did Mao Really Kill
Millions in the Great Leap Forward” has added to the
debates on the complexities of this bold attempt by the
Chinese Communist Party. He had noted that,</p>
<p>‘the approach of modern writers to the Great Leap
Forward is absurdly one-sided. They are unable to grasp
the relationship between its failures and successes.
They can only grasp that serious problems occurred
during the years 1959-1961. They cannot grasp that the
work that was done in these years also laid the
groundwork for the continuing overall success of Chinese
socialism in improving the lives of its people. They
fail to seriously consider evidence that indicates that
most of the deaths that occurred in the Great Leap
Forward were due to natural disasters not policy errors.
Besides, the deaths that occurred in the Great Leap
Forward have to be set against the Chinese people’s
success in preventing many other deaths throughout the
Maoist period. Improvements in life expectancy saved the
lives of many millions. <sup><a
id="post-115998-endnote-ref-6">[6]</a></sup></p>
<p><strong>The Great Cultural Revolution and the Left Turn</strong></p>
<p>The struggles within the Communist Party of China in
the first twenty years of the revolution were compounded
by imperial encirclement and differences with the USSR
over the paths to socialist reconstruction. Inner party
struggles had led to Mao stepping down in 1959, but by
1966, Mao had recovered his position within the party by
launching a movement to rejuvenate the party.
Identifying himself with the ‘left’ trend within the
Communist Party, Mao launched the Great Proletarian
Cultural Revolution in May 1966, soon calling on young
people called the Red Guards to ‘bombard the
headquarters’ and proclaiming ‘to rebel is justified.’
Mao charged that bourgeois elements had infiltrated the
government and society and that they aimed to restore
capitalism. The Red Guards were directed to root out
those among the country’s population who were not
‘sufficiently revolutionary’ and those suspected of
being ‘bourgeois.’ In the process of this revolutionary
upsurge there was the humiliation and shaming of those
leaders in the Party who had been designated as
‘rightists’ and capitalist roaders.</p>
<p>The Cultural Revolution in China had coincided with the
international left wave of 1968 when youths in all parts
of the globe were protesting for better conditions. In
the case of France and Germany, the convergence of the
cultural revolution and worker protests had been a high
point in anti-capitalist activities with demonstrations,
major general strikes, and occupations of universities
and factories. In the USA, the struggles for Black
liberation had reached a new high and in response even
nonviolent leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
was killed. In China Mao had proclaimed, that,
‘revolution is not a dinner party. Revolution means
rebellion. It means violent action with one class
overthrowing another.’ The Maoist faction of the
Communist Party compared the Cultural Revolution armed
struggles to war between the Chinese Communist Party and
the Goumindang.</p>
<p>The Red Guards had little oversight, and their actions
led to anarchy and terror, as ‘suspect’
individuals—traditionalists, educators, and
intellectuals, for example—were persecuted and killed.
The Red Guards were soon reined in by officials,
although the brutality of the revolution continued. In a
sympathetic assessment of the Cultural Revolution, Amin
noted,</p>
<p>‘while the Cultural Revolution met Mao’s expectations
during the first two years of its existence, it
subsequently deviated into anarchy, linked to the loss
of control by Mao and the left in the party over the
sequence of events. This deviation led to the state and
party taking things in hand again, which gave the right
its opportunity. Since then, the right has remained a
strong part of all leadership bodies. Yet the left is
present on the ground, restricting the supreme
leadership to compromises of the “center”—but is that
center right or center left? <sup><a
id="post-115998-endnote-ref-7">[7]</a></sup></p>
<p>Within China, the limited summing up of the twists and
turns of the revolution has led to the formulation that
the Great Cultural Revolution and the Greta Leap Forward
were mistakes of Mao. Yet, the same analysis that
designated Mao’s mistakes have not yet acknowledged the
reversal for progressive politics in the Sino Soviet
rift during this period.</p>
<p><strong>Errors of analysis of Soviet Social Imperialism</strong></p>
<p>The Chinese peoples were alert to imperial provocations
from 1949. At the end of the Korean War, the skirmishes
between Beijing and Taiwan over the Quemoy and Matsu
islands had seen the threats of the United States that
it was considering using nuclear weapons to defend the
Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek. After
negotiations that threat receded, but provocations in
Tibet were only compounded by the Sino Indian War of
1959 and the withdrawal of Soviet Advisors in 1960. For
the Chinese revolutionaries, Nikita Khrushchev and the
leaders of the USSR had embarked on a ‘capitalist road’
and the radicals in China designated the USSR as a
social imperial state. In this analysis, the Maoists
declared that social imperialism was a bigger threat to
socialism than US imperialism and in the process; Moscow
replaced Washington as China’s biggest threat.</p>
<p>This line of the Chinese leadership proved disastrous
for those fighting wars of national liberation. There
were many liberation movements in Asia, Africa and Latin
America that came to adopt the tactics and strategies of
peoples war as advocated by the thoughts of Mao. From
Nepal to India (Naxalites) and from Peru to Zimbabwe,
freedom fighters adopted the ideas of Mao. In practice,
the Chinese leaders decided that any liberation movement
that received assistance from the USSR or COMECON
countries was a lackey of social imperialism. The Sino
Soviet spilt fostered opportunism among Third World
Leaders who were anti communist. A leader such as Mobutu
Sese Seko of the Congo who had been complicit in the
assassination of Patrice Lumumba was received with pomp
by the Chinese leadership. Similarly, opportunists such
as Jonas Savimbi of Angola represented himself as a
Maoist fighting against Soviet imperialism and her
’Cuban’ lackeys. This position of China was manipulated
by the United States and Henry Kissinger openly boasted
of the intrigue involved in this manipulation in his
book, <strong><em>On China</em></strong>. Zbigniew
Brzezinski, the National Security advisor of President
Jimmy Carter, went one better and mobilized over 80,000
tons of weapons for the apartheid regime via Jonas
Savimbi in this period of the rhetoric of Soviet Social
imperialism. This period is so shameful in the annals of
the Chinese revolution that in 2013, when Nelson Mandela
joined the ancestors, the leader of China was the only
significant head of state absent at the celebration. The
Chinese Leaders had erroneously branded the African
National Congress of South Africa as a puppet of the
Soviet Union.</p>
<p>One of the continuing mysteries of the Chinese
revolution is the extent to which many Chinese
intellectuals and communist party leaders view Henry
Kissinger as a friend of the revolution. In the past,
the Chinese had been astute in working with sections of
the US state machinery to end political isolation. In
July of 1971, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had
made a secret trip to China. With pressures from the
nonaligned movement for the USA and the UN to recognize
the government in Beijing as the legitimate
representative of over a billion people, the US opened
diplomatic relations after President Nixon traveled to
China in 1972. Nixon who had been a staunch opponent of
China spent eight days in China in February 1972, during
which he met with Chairman Mao Zedong and signed the
Shanghai Communiqué with Premier Zhou Enlai. The
communiqué had set the stage for improved U.S.-Sino
relations by allowing China and the United States to
normalize relations.</p>
<p>This normalization of state-to-state relations confused
the political leadership in China and has become a
consistent source of contradictions within China’s
leadership class. For example, after the brutal assault
against the Chilean peoples in 1973 and the massive
bombing of the Vietnamese peoples, the leadership
embraced Henry Kissinger as a friend. This embrace was
to reach its most obscene position when under the banner
of combating social imperialism, China fought a brief
war with Vietnam in 1979. In the brief border war
fought between China and Vietnam in early 1979. China
launched a punitive expedition in response to Vietnam’s
invasion and occupation of Cambodia in 1978 (which ended
the rule of the Khmer Rouge). Similarly, the initial
inability of China’s political and economic leadership
to deal with President Trump was a result of their
failure to fully understand the shift which had taken
place in how America’s political, economic and defense
elites viewed China, from a strategic competitor to a
strategic national security threat. This failure was
partially a product of China’s gradual adoption of
neo-liberal financial liberalization reforms in the
early 2000’s and the strong friendships between China’s
capitalists and government with the leaders of Wall
Street (Black Stone, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, etc.)
and subsequent over reliance on their views and lobbying
influence over the USG’s economic policies towards
China. But this is to anticipate.</p>
<p><strong>The Reform Period and pragmatism in China</strong></p>
<p>After the death of Mao in September 1976, the Cultural
Revolution was brought to an end by the removal of the
allies of Mao from the leadership of the Party. The
faction of the Communist Party led by Deng Xiaoping
emerged as the driving force of the Chinese revolution.
It was in this period after 1978 when China embarked on
the era of ‘reforms.’ The first stage of this process
involved the relaxation of the state centered approach
to agriculture with the de-collectivization of
agriculture, the opening up of the country to foreign
investment, and permission for unleashing the
capitalists who had been underground inside China since
1949. These reforms did not minimize the central role of
the state in the economy. In the late 1980s and 1990s,
the reform twist involved the privatization and
contracting out of much state-owned industry and the
lifting of price controls, protectionist policies, and
regulations, although state monopolies in sectors such
as banking and petroleum remained. The private sector
grew remarkably, accounting for as much as 70 percent of
China’s gross domestic product by 2005. From 1978 until
2013, unprecedented growth occurred, with the economy
increasing by 9.5% a year.</p>
<p>Western social scientists, international financial
institutions and pundits attributed the phenomenal
growth in China to the opening to the West and adoption
of “free market forces.” For no society which has been
universally acknowledged for lifting more human beings
out of poverty in human history and which helped sustain
the global economy following the last two capitalist
financial crises, could have done so via socialism.
However, Samir Amin noted that one cannot understand the
massive growth in the economy without grasping the
transition and changes that were laid in the period of
the Great Leap Forward. In short, ‘lifting 600 million
human beings out of poverty cannot be attributed to the
market but to socialization of the society’ and the fact
that the commanding heights of the economy were still in
the hands of the state. In Amin’s words,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“The results of this choice are, once again, simply
amazing. In a few decades, China has built a
productive, industrial urbanization that brings
together 600 million human beings, two-thirds of whom
were urbanized over the last two decades (almost equal
to Europe’s population!). This is due to the Plan and
not to the market. China now has a truly sovereign
productive system. No other country in the South
(except for Korea and Taiwan) has succeeded in doing
this. In India and Brazil there are only a few
disparate elements of a sovereign project of the same
kind, nothing more.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>He continued</p>
<blockquote>
<p>To say, as one hears ad nauseam, that China’s success
should be attributed to the abandonment of Maoism
(whose “failure” was obvious), the opening to the
outside, and the entry of foreign capital is quite
simply idiotic. The Maoist construction put in place
the foundations without which the opening would not
have achieved its well-known success. A comparison
with India, which has not made a comparable
revolution, demonstrates this. To say that China’s
success is mainly (even “completely”) attributable to
the initiatives of foreign capital is no less idiotic.
It is not multinational capital that built the Chinese
industrial system and achieved the objectives of
urbanization and the construction of infrastructure.
The success is 90 percent attributable to the
sovereign Chinese project. Certainly, the opening to
foreign capital has fulfilled useful functions: it has
increased the import of modern technologies. However,
because of its partnership methods, China absorbed
these technologies and has now mastered their
development. There is nothing similar elsewhere, even
in India or Brazil, a fortiori in Thailand, Malaysia,
South Africa, and other places.<sup><a
id="post-115998-endnote-ref-8">[8]</a></sup></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Lin Chun’s work on the changes in Chinese society since
1978 takes the same position as Amin. In the book, <strong><em>the
Transformation of Chinese Socialism</em></strong>,
the question was posed thus, Were the seeds of the
present planted long ago, only germinating so slowly
that at the time it was difficult to see or imagine the
shape of things to come? <sup><a
id="post-115998-endnote-ref-9">[9]</a></sup> The
answer of Lin Chun was that in order to understand what
is happening in China forty years after the ‘reform’
period it is necessary to go further back in history
than 1978 and the pragmatism of Deng Xiaoping. In 1949,
the decision had been made that the political leadership
of the CPC would rationally coordinate the planning of
an entire national economy of China in such a way as to
transform the major economic choices of the society into
political choices, responsive to the will of the people.
Central to this process were the sacrifices made by the
Chinese people to overcome economic backwardness. In
that period the state squeezed more work out of the
workers and peasants in order to accumulate a surplus
that could be reinvested for the diversification of the
economy.</p>
<p><strong>Future of socialist transformation or the
recomposition of capitalism in China</strong></p>
<p>One of the outcomes of the emphasis on the ‘development
of the productive forces’ has been the massive increase
in the industrialization without regard to the health
and well being of the population. The levels of
ecological degradation in China as a result of a form of
industrialization without regard for the population has
led to China having one of the worst air qualities in
the world. In all major industrial areas of China, the
quality of the lives of the peoples have been impaired
by pollution. Beijing and industrial areas of northern
China have the worst levels of Sulphur dioxide pollution
on the planet earth. China is home to 16 of the world’s
20 cities with the worst air pollution. The drive to
urbanize and industrialize had been so intense that in
the three-year period 2011 to 2014, China poured more
concrete in three years than the US did in the entire 20<sup>th</sup>
century. <sup><a id="post-115998-endnote-ref-10">[10]</a></sup>
Research by the Chinese Academy on Environmental
Planning, revealed that 100 million people live in
cities where the pollution reaches “very dangerous”
levels.</p>
<p>This level of pollution is most extreme is a city such
as Shijianzhuang, in Hebei province where the coal
barons have a base in the Communist party. The
environmental crisis in China is also an expression of
the alliance of capitalists in China with international
capitalists. Since 1978, the leaders of China marketed
the society as a space of cheap labor and a society
where environmental standards were ignored. There is
enough scholarship on the environmental crisis in China
that outlined how western capitalists located polluting
industries in China. <sup><a
id="post-115998-endnote-ref-11">[11]</a></sup> Many
of the polluting factories sell their cheap goods to
richer nations. Throughout the reform period (1978 to
present), local officials have been evaluated and
promoted primarily based on their ability to meet
economic development and family planning.<sup><a
id="post-115998-endnote-ref-12">[12]</a></sup> In
2011, the Party launched National “12<sup>th</sup>
Five-Year Plan” for Environmental Protection with
ambitious targets to reverse environmental degradation.
That plan has been caught in the class struggles in the
party between the coal barons and other sections of
Chinese capital and by 2016 the Party announced th13th
Five year plan announcing that the old forms of
industrialization had run its course..</p>
<p>The leadership in China launched another plan to
transcend the old polluting industries with the China
2025 project. Labelled as <strong><em>Made in China
2025</em></strong>, this new turn seeks to engineer
a shift for China from being a low-end manufacturer to
becoming a high-end producer of goods. To centralize
this vision, the government’s Ministry of Industry and
Information Technology released a Made in China (MIC)
2025 document in 2015 – pushing for leadership in
robotics, information technology, and clean energy,
among other sectors. These sectors are central to the
so-called next generation technologies (nexgen), which
refers to the integration of big data, cloud computing,
and other emerging technologies into global
manufacturing supply chains. “Chief among these are
electric cars and other new energy vehicles,
next-generation information technology (IT) and
telecommunications, and advanced robotics and artificial
intelligence. Other major sectors include agricultural
technology; aerospace engineering; new synthetic
materials; advanced electrical equipment; emerging
bio-medicine; high-end rail infrastructure; and
high-tech maritime engineering.”<sup><a
id="post-115998-endnote-ref-13">[13]</a></sup> The
foundations for this pace of scientific transformation
had been laid in the seventies when there was the
project of science walking on two legs.<sup><a
id="post-115998-endnote-ref-14">[14]</a></sup> In
terms of science policy, it referred mainly to the
balance China has sought to achieve between “pure”
science and applied technology.</p>
<p>The China 2025 program has since become a bone of
contention for US capitalist’s administration, and has
partly been responsible for the increased competition
between the US and China. The US policy leaders have
been alarmed by this new turn in China and the current
tensions in the trade war is linked to the threats that
sections of the US military industrial complex sees from
this new direction of China. Presenting this new
direction of China as a threat to global trade, the
Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) of the USA and other
think tanks have been effusive in outlining the dangers
to US hegemony from this new direction in China.
Anticommunist scholars of the USA such as Peter Navarro
who made a name out of China bashing rose to the
position of being an adviser to President Trump on
trade. His coauthored book <strong><em>Death by China:
Confronting the Dragon – A Global Call to Action</em></strong>,
had been a staple among those in the US policy circles
who carried forth the old anti-communism of the Cold War
era. His assessment on China is that “China is basically
trying to steal the future of Japan, the U.S. and
Europe, by going after our technology.” Of course such a
paradigm also conveniently obscures the myriad of
political, social, and economic impacts causing a
decline in the structural competitiveness of the US in
numerous ‘nexgen’ industries and sectors which is being
produced by the increasing financialization of
capitalism in the US.</p>
<p><strong>The so called Thucydides Trap.</strong></p>
<p>Realist scholars in the USA have also been raising the
‘alarm’ about the rise of China. John Mearsheimer in his
2014 book, <strong><em>The Tragedy of the Great Power
Politics</em></strong>, argued in the last chapter,
‘Great Power Politics in the twenty first century,’
that, if the China continues growing rapidly, the US
will once again face a potential peer competitor, and
great-power politics will return in full force. Trapped
by the history of realism, and visions of hegemony,
Mearsheimer argued China cannot rise peacefully. In this
understanding, there can only be one major power and the
emergence of alternative centers of economic and
political power will inevitably lead to warfare.
Professor Graham Allison of Harvard University has added
to this militaristic understanding of history with the
study, <strong><em>Destined for War: Can America and
China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?<sup><a
id="post-115998-endnote-ref-15">[15]</a></sup> </em></strong>In
this book, Allison argued that in 12 of 16 past cases in
which a rising power has confronted a ruling power, the
result has been bloodshed. This kind of rhetoric has
been backed up by a new direction of the planning for
war against China. The 2018 National Defense Strategy of
the United States has been explicit that the US needs to
be prepared for war with China. <sup><a
id="post-115998-endnote-ref-16">[16]</a></sup>
Mainstream scholars of International Relations have not
yet fully grasped the <strong><em>Meaning of the Second
World War</em></strong> and the argument made that
capitalist competition will lead to war. The more
developed the capitalist state, the more deadly the
competition. Historical materialism and an understanding
of imperialism will reveal the impulse of capital to
seek to resolve economic challenges by military means.
Since the end of the Cold War the western leaders have
attempted a military management of the international
system with implications for West Asia in the invasion
of Iraq and war drums against Iran, and in Africa in the
creation of the US Africa Command. In Asia, this
militarism over the past decade has been manifested
under President Obama’s ‘pivot to Asia’ and currently
under President Trump’s ‘Free and Open Indo-Pacific
Strategy’.<sup><a id="post-115998-endnote-ref-17">[17]</a></sup></p>
<p>When Thucydides was writing about the Peloponnesian
War, he was writing about small societies that were not
enmeshed in global value chains. Moreover, these wars
were limited in geographical scope and did not arise out
of competition between capitalist powers. Nuclear power,
the rise of the Global South and the tremendous
importance of the rising states renders the kind of
analysis that refer back to 19<sup>th</sup> century
imperial rivalries, out of date. The political leader of
China communicated this reality to the leaders of the
USA in 2015 when he noted,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“There is no such thing as the so-called Thucydides
Trap in the world. But should major countries time and
again make the mistakes of strategic miscalculation,
they might create such traps for themselves.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Imperial Two Track Strategy on the Chinese
Revolution</strong></p>
<p>While one section of the US bourgeois is planning for
war with China, the other section is working hard to
strengthen the capitalist classes in China so that they
can become fully compliant and subservient allies of
international capital. Since the ‘reform’ era, thousands
of western corporations have invested in China to profit
from the cheap labor and absence of environmental
regulation. Whether it is companies (such as Walmart and
Apple) who profit from the cheap labor conditions or
General Motors, Boeing, Microsoft and Google, western
capitalists operating in China have developed a strong
alliance with Chinese capitalists. The leaders of the
US-Chinese business Council have been most aggressive in
strengthening the Chinese capitalist class. The Officers
and Directors of the US-China business Council reads
like a who’s who of corporate America. <sup><a
id="post-115998-endnote-ref-18">[18]</a></sup></p>
<p>While one faction of international capital complain of
theft of intellectual property and piracy of Chinese
state corporations, another faction has set about
strengthening neo liberal capitalist ideas among the
Chinese intelligentsia. This has become most evident
with the activities of private capitalists such as
Stephen A. Schwarzman, CEO and Co-Founder of Blackstone
group of Wall Street. In 2013, Schwarzman founded an
international scholarship program, “Schwarzman
Scholars,” at Tsinghua University in Beijing to educate
future leaders about China. The US$350 million program
is modeled on the Rhodes scholarship that had been
started by Cecil Rhodes at the start of the twentieth
century to train loyal servants of empire. It is one
indication on the ideological subservience of the top
intellectuals in China as to the operations of the world
system that they would agree to work with known
international capitalists in their premier university
such as Henry Paulson and Stephen Schwarzman. It means
that the Chinese do not care that they will be training
their future leaders to be imperialists such as Cecil
Rhodes.</p>
<p><strong>Chinese education and imperialism</strong></p>
<p>J P Morgan and Blackstone are the ones with the money
they will finance institutions to promote individualism
and the accumulation of capital for a few. These Wall
Street magnates invest in University education in all
parts of the world to reproduce the most conservative
ideas about society. The current Chinese political
leadership at all levels see the training of their
children in the USA and capitalist Europe as the basis
of the future ideological and intellectual development
of China. Very rich Chinese donate to keep top Ivy
League colleges in North America as thriving centers of
capitalist scholarship at precisely the moment when a
generation of youth are looking for resources to
redirect education and social planning.</p>
<p>From the most recent reports in the financial papers,
there are close to 300,000 Chinese students in higher
education in the USA, this does not include Community
colleges. In the spirit of internationalism, it will be
important for Chinese students to study in all parts of
the world, but the question, is, what do they study?
Which Professors do they gravitate towards? Do they
study imperialism, contemporary class struggles,
reparative justice, environmental science to support
environmental repair in China or the physics of the
future to alleviate the suffering of workers everywhere?</p>
<p>The reality is that many Chinese students overseas see
themselves as being apolitical, while the 70 per cent
that study economics, business, entrepreneurship or the
other offerings of schools funded by the bankers, they
study and internalize the most conservative brand of
neo-liberal capitalism. This training of neo
conservatives for China has been supported by the new
foreign policy of China based on ‘harmony’ that promotes
Confucius Institutes in all parts of the world. The
Confucius Institutes are the embryo of the 21st century
Chinese imperial project that stands against the rights
of workers, women and oppressed nationalities.
Ironically, conservative elements of the USG are leading
efforts to close these institutes in the United States,
along with prohibiting investments into the United
States by Chinese private capitalists, because both have
been labeled as new threats to America’s national
security.</p>
<p>Side by side with these Confucius institutes, the
current Chinese state has unleashed hundreds of
thousands of rapacious capitalists (and would be
capitalists) to Third World societies. The very negative
social impact of these ‘investors’ has led some western
commentators to label China as the new imperialist
state.<sup><a id="post-115998-endnote-ref-19">[19]</a></sup>
Some in the left have offered a specious thesis of China
as a ‘sub imperial state’ <sup><a
id="post-115998-endnote-ref-20">[20]</a></sup> while
some former Marxists pontificate <em>When China Rules
the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth
of a New Global Order.</em> <sup><a
id="post-115998-endnote-ref-21">[21]</a></sup></p>
<p><strong>Whither the Chinese Revolution</strong>?</p>
<p>The capitalists from North America have used their
military power to dominate the global trading, currency
and financial system. In the last capitalist depression
and subsequent war 1929-1945, one of the triggers of war
was the competitive devaluations. Today the devaluations
and currency wars have been accompanied by trade wars,
information warfare and cyberwarfare. The Chinese
peoples are trapped in the old international trading
system and currently the state of China holds more that
US3 trillion outside China, mostly in US Treasury. Paul
Craig Roberts suggested that China simply pull out their
money from western securities. This is not a realistic
alternative in the short run. The alternatives must be
internationalist and rooted in what is good for
everyone, especially in the Global South. Unfortunately,
projects of the political leadership in China to
diversify their holdings of US Treasury point to
building <em>One Belt One Road</em> to Europe.</p>
<p>In the throes of the financial crisis, the leadership
pivoted to the Global South with the initiative called
Brazil, Russia, India China and South Africa (BRICS).
However, the underdevelopment of the study of capitalism
influenced the thinkers behind the BRICS bank to accept
neo-liberal principles of economics while US
imperialists sought to suborn Brazil and India out of
the new initiative for South -South Cooperation. It is
in the spirit of 1949 where there is now another
opportunity for Chinese society to come up with real
alternatives that are protracted and will avoid outright
warfare. In this delicate balancing, the Chinese
leadership can either be socialist and internationalist
or based on strategic planning and alliances for China
to be the co imperialists with the USA in the so called
G2 as proposed by Zbigniew Brzezinski among others. In
the short run, the ASEAN plan for the Regional
Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) is proposing a
form of economic partnership that can neutralize the
plans of the US capitalists for war in Asia. The Asian
Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the BRICS bank
can carry out aggressive swap arrangements to support
Iran, Russia and Venezuela in this current geo-political
and economic war.</p>
<p><strong>Socialist reconstruction and transformation</strong></p>
<p>It was within the womb of capitalism in Britain and
Germany where Karl Marx developed a critique of capital.
Vladimir Lenin of Russia deepened this initial study of
capital with his grasp of the changes from industrial
capital to monopoly capital or the era of imperialism.
The important contribution of Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg
was to grasp the centrality of militarism in modern
imperialism. The attempt to build socialism in the USSR
imploded after 74 years. Western triumphalism after the
fall of the Soviet model proclaimed that there was no
alternative to capitalism. However, workers and poor
people in all parts of the world are revolting against
the oppressive conditions of Financialization, the new
era of imperialism. Three hundred million workers in
China trapped by the Hukou system want freedom of
movement and the ‘right to the city.’ From Egypt to
Ecuador and from Wukan in China to Iraq, workers,
students, poor farmers, oppressed women and unemployed
are in combat against capitalism. Many Chinese youth
agree with the global youth movement for a clean
environment.</p>
<p>Capitalism is a global system and we know that the
transition to a new system will be long. However, while
those opposed to capital are on this road, they will
have to clean up the environment. This is the number one
task so that the workers and small farmers can have a
good quality of life. We have to have clean water and
food that does not kill children. These are basic rights
of humans in all parts of the world. Those who believe
in the linear conception of socialist transformation
argue that China will have to industrialize and urbanize
further in order to move to a true socialist path.
Linearity in thought in China from the ‘reformers’ merge
with the plans of those who promote the silencing of the
workers and peasants.</p>
<p>Imperial intellectual cultures serviced by corporations
provide information and organization for the capitalist
classes using the moribund Breton Woods Institutions to
enforce onerous conditionalities on working peoples.
World Bank and western concepts of democracy, human
rights and governance reinforce western liberalism and
cannot serve the interests of Chinese peoples. It is for
this reason why many progressive scholars are confounded
when they hear the formulation of ‘socialism with
Chinese characteristics.’ When one conceptualize 21st
century socialism, the progressive forces of the world
are excited by the prospects for socialist
reconstruction and a new science that supports research
to strengthen the organization of workers and to build a
new internationalism.</p>
<p>We are in the midst of a very exciting future. New
technologies in solar, biotechnology, robotics and
information technology opens up vast opportunities for
the socialist project. Instead of promoting Henry
Paulson, Henry Kissinger, Stephen Schwarzman and titans
of empire, Chinese communists should be energized by the
anti-capitalist project in a way that inspires the
Chinese youth to be self-confident and be
internationalists. The project of western capital in
Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong is to propagandize the
Chinese youth to strengthen international forces and the
local real estate capitalists who are called
‘developers.’</p>
<p>The task of building internationalism in the social
sciences is also linked to building an anti-racist
curriculum in China. This will have to be carefully
thought out to avoid the excesses of the past.
Intellectual and ideological struggles are deadly and
those with power will not give up power easily.</p>
<p>In the celebration of the 70 years after coming to
power, China can be constructive by working directly
with Cuba to halt the counter revolutionary forces in
Venezuela. This will entail an even bigger social
investment in education and social questions in a place
such as Venezuela. The future cooperation between
Venezuela, Cuba, Argentina and Bolivia will give the
socialist forces internationally the intellectual,
financial and political leverage in a moment when
imperial intervention will get desperate.</p>
<p>Internationalism will require solidarity with the most
oppressed. I will again draw from Samir Amin’s analysis
when he noted,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“My central question is this: is China evolving
toward a stabilized form of capitalism? Or is China’s
perspective still one of a possible transition to
socialism? I am not asking this question in terms of
the most likely “prediction.” I am asking it in
altogether different terms: what inconsistencies and
struggles have emerged in China today? What are the
strengths and weaknesses of the approach adapted (to a
large extent capitalist in fact)? What advantages do
the (at least potentially socialist) anticapitalist
forces have? Under what conditions can the capitalist
approach triumph and what form of more or less
stabilized capitalism could it produce? Under what
conditions could the current moment be deflected in
directions that would become a (long) stage in the
(even longer) transition to socialism?</p>
<p>The fact that the Chinese project is not capitalist
does not mean that it “is” socialist, only that it
makes it possible to advance on the long road to
socialism. Nevertheless, it is also still threatened
with a drift that moves it off that road and ends up
with a return, pure and simple, to capitalism.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Notes.</strong></p>
<p>1. Orville Schell and John Delury, <em>Wealth and
Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-first Century</em>,
Random House , New York 2013 <a>↑</a></p>
<p>2. One of the most sympathetic noncommunist account of
the Long march is in the book, by Edgar Snow, <em>Red
Star over China: The Classic Account of the Birth of
Chinese Communism,</em> Grove Press, New York 1994 <a>↑</a></p>
<p>3. H E N K E J I a n d XU HAO, “The integration of
traditional Chinese medicine and Western medicine,” <em>European
Review;</em> Cambridge Vol. 11, Iss. 2, (May 2003):
225-235 <a>↑</a></p>
<p>4. Joseph Ball, “Did Mao Really Kill Millions in the
Great Leap Forward?” <em>Monthly Review</em>, September
21, 2006</p>
<p>5. <a
href="https://monthlyreview.org/commentary/did-mao-really-kill-millions-in-the-great-leap-forward/#en10">https://monthlyreview.org/commentary/did-mao-really-kill-millions-in-the-great-leap-forward/#en10</a>
<a>↑</a></p>
<p>6. Samir Amin, “China 2013,” <em>Monthly Review</em>,
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://monthlyreview.org/2013/03/01/china-2013/">https://monthlyreview.org/2013/03/01/china-2013/</a> <a>↑</a></p>
<p>7. Ball ibid. See also the analysis of Lin Chun, The
Transformation of Chinese Socialism (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1996). <a>↑</a></p>
<p>8. Samir Amin, <em>Theory is History</em>, Springer,
2013, page 126 <a>↑</a></p>
<p>9. Samir Amin, China 2013,
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://monthlyreview.org/2013/03/01/china-2013/">https://monthlyreview.org/2013/03/01/china-2013/</a> <a>↑</a></p>
<p>10. Lin Chun, The Transformation of Chinese Socialism
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996). <a>↑</a></p>
<p>11. Figures are to be found in the article by Bill
Gates, “Have You Hugged a Concrete Pillar Today?” Gates
Notes, June 12, 2014
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Making-the-Modern-World">https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Making-the-Modern-World</a>
<a>↑</a></p>
<p>12. Jim Watson and Tao Wang, “Who Owns China’s Carbon
Emissions,” (Sussex: Tyndall Centre, 2007) <a>↑</a></p>
<p>13. Darrin Mage, “China is my Backyard: China’s
environmental degradation in a global context, <em>Georgetown
Journal of International Affairs</em>, Vol. 12, No. 2
(Summer/Fall 2011),pp. 120-128 <a>↑</a></p>
<p>14. James McBride and Andrew Chatzky, “Is ‘Made in
China 2025’ a Threat to Global Trade?” Council on
Foreign Relations, May 2019
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/made-china-2025-threat-global-trade">https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/made-china-2025-threat-global-trade</a>
<a>↑</a></p>
<p>15. Dan Connell and Dan Gover , eds, <em>China:
Science Walk on two legs</em> Avon Books, 1974 <a>↑</a></p>
<p>16. Graham Allison, <em>Destined for War: Can America
and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?</em> Mariner
Books, New York 2018 <a>↑</a></p>
<p>16. National Defense Strategy of the United States,
2018,
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://dod.defense.gov/Portals/1/Documents/pubs/2018-National-Defense-Strategy-Summary.pdf">https://dod.defense.gov/Portals/1/Documents/pubs/2018-National-Defense-Strategy-Summary.pdf</a>
<a>↑</a></p>
<p>17. Kurt Campbell and Brian Andrews, Explaining the US
“Pivot to Asia,” Chatham House, London, 2013, <a
href="http://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/files/chathamhouse/public/Research/Americas/0813pp_pivottoasia.pdf">http://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/files/chathamhouse/public/Research/Americas/0813pp_pivottoasia.pdf</a>
<a>↑</a></p>
<p>18. US- Chinese Business Council, <a
href="https://www.uschina.org/about/board-of-directors">https://www.uschina.org/about/board-of-directors</a>
<a>↑</a></p>
<p>19. Howard French, <em>China’s Second Continent: How a
Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa</em>,
Random House, New York, 2015 <a>↑</a></p>
<p>20. Patrick Bond, ‘The Rise of Sub imperialism,’
Counterpunch, 2012, <a
href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2012/11/23/the-rise-of-sub-imperialism/">https://www.counterpunch.org/2012/11/23/the-rise-of-sub-imperialism/</a>
<a>↑</a></p>
<p>21. Martin Jacques, <em>When China Rules the World:
The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New
Global Order,</em> Penguin Books, London, 2012 <a>↑</a></p>
</div>
<p> <em><strong>Horace Campbell</strong> is Professor of
African American Studies and Political Science, Syracuse
University. He is the author of <a
href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1583674128/counterpunchmaga">Global
NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya</a>,
Monthly Review Press, 2013. </em>
<strong><em>Notes.</em></strong> </p>
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