During last September’s APEC summit, thousands of anti-war youth and leftists participated in demonstrations. The actions centred on opposition to the invasion of Iraq and, to a much lesser extent, Afghanistan. The protesters were a diverse bunch but many saw themselves as anti-capitalist. But while these actions were occurring there were also other rallies taking place in Sydney with a quite different purpose. Right-wing forces had seized on the APEC visits of the leaders of China and Vietnam to hold a series of anti-communist events.

These anti-communist actions mainly consisted of people from the right-wing portions of the Chinese and Vietnamese communities. They held a rally at Sydney’s Belmore Park on September 8 around the same time that the anti-war APEC protest was marching from Town Hall to Hyde Park. The main Vietnamese group involved is called the Vietnamese Community of Australia. This organisation is dominated by those who were directly involved in, or supported, the blood-soaked former U.S. puppet regime of South Vietnam and who fled when the Vietnamese masses liberated the country from imperialism and capitalism. They long to reverse the result of the Vietnamese Revolution and campaign here in Australia to have the defunct flag of the former South Vietnamese regime flown at official events. Similarly, the Chinese groups involved in the anti-communist actions represent the interests of those descendants of the pre-1949 Chinese exploiting classes that still want to be able to rule China like their ancestors once did. Also central to the whole project are privileged elements within the Chinese community that have ties to the big business ruling elites in the likes of Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore. These forces know that, while Beijing has allowed capitalism to make significant inroads into China, capitalists do not have a free hand there as they are constrained by a workers state that is based on the still existing communal ownership of the majority of China’s key industries, banks, infrastructure and land.

The Chinese political groups that have been orchestrating the local campaign against the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) include “Free China,” Falun Gong and the Federation of Democratic China. These organizations are despised by the pro-Peoples Republic and working class sections of the Australian Chinese community. Particularly hated is the Falun Gong, the most active anti-China, anti-communist force. “All bullshit,” angrily says a Chinese man passing a Falun Gong poster. Indeed! Falun Gong specialize in making lurid claims that their members are being killed in China to “harvest organs.”

So what is this Falun Gong. They pose as a spiritual group that is supposedly being persecuted in the PRC because of its harmless religious views. But they are no more a simple religious group than are the actively right-wing Christian political forces in America. To get a sense of what these and other anti-PRC organizations are about you only need to look at who their backers are in the West. One of the most active supporters of the “rights” of Falun Gong is one David Kilgour. Kilgour is a right-wing ex-member of the Canadian parliament and the former Canadian Secretary for the Asia-Pacific. He is the co-author of the “Report into allegations of organ harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners in China,” a work which follows in the long tradition of “disinformation” practiced by North American imperialism.

Kilgour was the featured “honourable” speaker at the anti-PRC, anti-Vietnam events that were held in Sydney by Falun Gong and co. during APEC week. Let’s take a look more closely at who this David Kilgour is. One of Kilgour’s main agendas is to promote the imperialist intervention in Afghanistan in the face of widespread opposition to it in Canada. “Canada Should Stay in Afghanistan, Despite the Costs,” was the headline of an article he wrote in the Embassy Magazine (Ottawa) on July 4 last year. He is also a staunch opponent of the rights of gay and lesbian people. Indeed, Kilgour even left the Canadian Liberal party in 2005 because he was too bigoted to stomach a bill that they introduced giving certain rights to same-sex couples. In his explanation “Why I Left the Party” (National Post, 19 April 2005), Kilgour concludes that “the government’s same-sex marriage bill (C-38) represents a clear departure from the Liberal’s successful tradition of moderate liberalism …. “

Kilgour’s political positions bring him into a natural alliance with Falun Gong. From its main book of “law,” Zhuan Falun, onwards Falun Gong too promotes bigoted “values.” The group raves that the Communist Party government in China has been soft on homosexuality. In the Zhuan Falun Fajie (1997), Falun Gong founder and leader Li Hongzhi who the group claims has supernatural powers writes that: “All varieties of messed up and depraved things are taking place in China and abroad: homosexuality, ‘sexual liberation,’ drugs, gangs – everything.” Li Hongzhi also advocates inflammatory ideas on racial “purity.” He describes children born of mixed-race relationships as “defective persons” and when he toured Australia in 1996 he even claimed in a speech in Sydney that heaven itself is segregated: “the yellow people, the white people, and the black people have the corresponding races in heaven. Anybody who does not belong to his race will not be cared for. This is the truth, and it is not that I’m making up something here. What I am telling everyone are heavenly secrets.”

Like Kilgour, Falun Gong also champions the invasion of Afghanistan. For example, when Australian troops departed for Afghanistan’s Oruzgan Province last March, the Falun Gong newspaper Epoch Times reverberated the lying imperialist pronouncements that the military’s role would be to “aid in rebuilding war-torn settlements.” It declared that “Australian soldiers have been part of an international coalition against terrorism in Afghanistan since October 2001” (Epoch Times website, 6 March 2007, by Epoch Times Sydney staff). Similarly, the editorial line of Falun Gong publications has been to support the U.S.-led occupation forces in Iraq. Following the second anniversary of the Iraq takeover, a featured Special to the Epoch Times (website, 4 May 2005) piece titled, “Taking Stock Two Years After Iraq’s Liberation” [!] expressed the hope that the occupation forces “will finally win the central front of the global war against the terrorists.”

Not surprisingly, then, Falun Gong has won solidarity from the U.S. Congress and from none other than the chief imperialist “human rights” advocate himself, George Bush. The group is also known to get support from U.S. intelligence agencies. The organisation is certainly well supplied financially – putting out free newspapers and masses of glossy colour posters, hosting flashy entertainment shows and even sponsoring major Chinese New Year events in Sydney.

It is not, however, simply the ultra-conservative social “values” of Falun Gong that attract support from U.S. and Canadian ruling class politicians. Mostly, it is the fact that the group is politically committed to the destruction of Communist power, in any form, in China. For the purposes of fostering capitalist counterrevolution in the likes of China and Cuba the Western powers utilize a range of forces. Earlier, in order to undermine the USSR and the (deformed) workers states in Eastern Europe, the imperialists had supported a range of “dissident” forces in those countries from monarchists and fascists to liberal “democrats” to bogus “labour rights” advocates and social democrats. Today, Washington and co. do not seriously think that right-wing crackpots like Falun Gong could take power in China. But they do know that the campaigns that this group wages can injure the Peoples Republic. Falun Gong’s incessant slanders against the PRC gives those Western middle class elements looking for a rationale to hate Red China some “valid reasons” for doing so and furthermore deters would-be leftist supporters of the PRC from following through on their political impulses.

The U.S. and its allies hope that the weight of anti-PRC sentiments in the West will have a bearing on the outcome of factional struggles within China itself where the situation is precariously balanced between forces seeking to maintain the PRC’s socialist-type foundations and elements pushing towards capitalist restoration. Backing anti-Red China groups is, of course, just one aspect of a multi-faceted strategy that the imperialist ruling classes are using to try and weaken Chinese pro-socialist forces. So what are some of the other aspects? Well, for one there is the constant demand by U.S. government officials and visiting businessmen for the PRC to “liberalise” and privatise its majority state-owned banking system. Then there is the behind-the-scenes support that Western capitalist politicians are giving to campaigns to boycott the Beijing Olympics. And then there are the brazen efforts (mostly unsuccessful) by Western corporate organisations like the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai to scuttle China’s new pro-worker labour law, a law that cracks down on abuses of workers rights, especially in the private sector.

It is hardly just U.S. and Canadian conservative forces that are supporting the anti-communist crusade against the PRC. Australian politicians like former Victorian Liberal Party parliamentarian Victor Perton have also been very active in supporting the likes of Falun Gong. But it is not just right-wing politicians who are involved. Some Labor Party figures, the Democrats and the Greens Kerry Nettle and Bob Brown are also hard-core supporters of anti-communist Chinese exile groups. The China policies of the latter group of politicians reflect the prejudices of pseudo-progressive layers of the Aussie middle class. They are comfortable layers living in a feel-good environment where people are at pains to flaunt how broad-minded they are but in practice are reluctant to challenge the essential features of the current Australian political system. The people in these social strata hate China because they hate to acknowledge that workers states actually exist. No, to accept that would rob these “socially conscious” people of their favourite excuse for refusing to break out of their cosy political habitat:  that “there is no other choice” but to “very grudgingly” accept Australia’s capitalist order.

Regrettably, some of the far-left here have also lined up behind the anti-PRC, anti-communist agenda. The Solidarity and Socialist Alternative groups in particular were supportive of the anti-PRC campaigns during APEC and tried to meld them in with the main, leftist anti-war APEC protests. Why did they do this? Why would leftists who have been building demonstrations against the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions and who are actively against homophobia and racism end up being staunch defenders of a group like Falun Gong that supports the imperialist occupations, that equates homosexuality with murder and whose leader advocates racial segregation? Of course, these anti-PRC leftists would claim that they are merely standing up for “human rights” and “democracy.” But these same socialist groups correctly expose imperialist-backed “pro-democracy” forces in Iraq and Afghanistan so why line up behind such forces in China – especially when these Chinese pro-Western organisations have an agenda so heavily focussed against communism? The unfortunate answer to that question is that “socialist” hostility to the PRC is a form of capitulation to middle class, small-l liberal views. You see, socialists who are overly worried that their less radical friends and potential recruits think them too left-wing can say: “Look, we are not only against capitalism here but we are against the Communist Party dictatorship in China too.”

The all too convenient “theoretical justification” that some leftists use for an anti-PRC stance is that China is simply “another capitalist country.” One of the harmful effects of this false analysis is that it paints a very demoralising picture of the world to anti-capitalist activists. It makes out that in no country in the world have the toiling masses been sufficiently effective to retain state power. All the leaders of the APEC countries are the same, capitalism is all powerful. Now, if that were actually true then of course we would have to face that reality squarely. But why write off 20% of the world’s population (ie. in China) as being under capitalist rule when the imperialists themselves realise that this is a major part of the world that they do not actually have under their thumb? Indeed, the fact that China is not part of the imperialist fold gives the oppressed of the world a breathing space in which to organise resistance. It is, for example, a key reason why, to date, Iran has not been massively bombed. For in contrast to other powers like Britain, Germany, Japan and Canada, China has to some degree obstructed the U.S. and Israel’s war drive against Iran. Indeed, one of the demands that U.S. officials were making around APEC is that the PRC be more aggressive towards Iran (Associated Press, 6 September 2007.)

In fact, if you look behind all the diplomatic niceties of the APEC conference, you will see that the events actually showed that APEC is not simply one seamless bloc of 21 leaders with all the same agenda. Right on the very Saturday morning of APEC, Bush, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and former Australian PM John Howard made a swipe against China. The three government heads held a meeting to strengthen their countries’ trilateral security arrangements – arrangements that are widely known to be directed against the PRC and North Korea. The Australian government’s participation in that provocative trilateral summit showed its true agenda with respect to the PRC. Aware that China’s massive mineral purchases are holding up this country’s economy, Canberra is careful to maintain the appearance of friendly relations with Beijing. But the Murdoch media and some members of the Australian foreign policy bureaucracy have been pushing to adopt a more openly hard line against the PRC. So has the U.S. government. When Dick Cheney visited Australia last February his main aim was not only to reconfirm Howard’s support for the Iraq occupation but to also strengthen U.S./Australia cooperation against China. Washington’s policy continued through APEC as well. On the Wednesday before APEC, Bush arrogantly berated the PRC over its financial policy and over “dissidents.” Washington was determined to pursue this anti-PRC agenda no matter how much the Chinese leadership adhered to its (ultimately futile) policy of building friendly relations with capitalist governments. Bush continued with his anti-PRC attacks on the Thursday before APEC when he held a Sydney meeting with Chinese leader Hu Jintao. The Commander in Chief of the killing of tens of thousands of Iraqis - and of the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp - criticised the PRC over “human rights.” 

Those who oppose imperialism ought to stand against the imperialists’ hounding of the Chinese workers state – no matter how far China may currently be from a “model socialist” society. Fortunately, there are already sections of the Australian left that do in some way stand against the anti-PRC, anti-communist crusade. For example, in an article written soon after APEC by its General Secretary, Peter Symon, the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) correctly stated that:

"Many [Australian people] have been brought up on the White Australia policy and respond to the anti-China media campaigns and the policy of excluding refugees which clearly has a racist basis.
Some of the left echo the media hype and keep on stoking the campaigns of Tibetan and Taiwanese independence. These are already lost causes and have no basis in historical fact. Then there is the religious Falun Gong campaign which is quite active in Australia. It is promoted by the political right-wing in a number of countries and is nothing more than an anti-communist campaign parading in a religious garb.
There are quite a few on the left who are also caught up in the media campaign  which asserts that China is ‘going back to capitalism’. They don’t even ask themselves the question: why should the media object to China going back to capitalism if that were really true?"

Guardian, 12 September 2007

At the big September 8 anti-war APEC rally itself, Trotskyist Platform (TP) carried a placard that appealed: “Fellow Anti-Capitalists: Do NOT buy the Dick Cheney/Bush/Falun Gong Right-Wing Agenda Against Red China – Defend the World’s Largest Workers State!”

Of course, among the groups that do oppose anti-communist attacks against the PRC there are many differences in viewpoint. For example, TP does not subscribe to the CPA’s beliefs that it is possible that the foreign policies in the world could ever be guided by the classless doctrine of “non-interference in the affairs of another country.” The reality in this globalised world is that all countries necessarily affect what happens in other countries. The actual question is not interference or “non interference” but this: will the imperialist countries be able to get away with subjugating poorer countries and fostering counterrevolution in the non-capitalist states or will it be the workers movements of different countries and the workers states that are able to gain the supremacy in the global class struggle by effectively giving solidarity to the toilers’ struggles in other lands. In other words, the question is not “interference” or “non-interference” but capitalism or socialism.

Nevertheless, despite these different stances amongst the communist left, there exists a basis here for building a united-front campaign to solidarise with China against capitalist threats. Such a campaign should include the CPA, Trotskyist Platform and pro-communist immigrant groups and would seek to broaden out to win a section of the Cuba solidarity movement as well as Marxist activists within the union movement. To build the movement will take much patient and persistent work. But the need for such a campaign is critical. As a TP leaflet distributed at the APEC anti-war protests stressed: “We must never allow the allies of imperialism to destroy the anti-capitalist revolutions in China and Vietnam! ♦

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February 5, 2008: Thirteen months ago Victorian police publicly open up a new front in the daily war they wage against the masses on behalf of their masters in the ruling class. Not content with their war of attrition against indigenous people and workers who stand up for their rights in the workplace, they escalate the targetting of Melbourne’s burgeoning African community. Then Police Association secretary, Paul Mullett, declares that the Sudanese “come from a lawless background” and “really have to be properly educated about Australian society’s standards.” (The Australian website, Jan 5 2007)That is, an education at the end of a barrel of a gun, hard lessons taught with a face pressed against the pavement of the street where you live, “choke-slammed” to the ground by a cop, “punched and kneed”, punched while handcuffed, slapped and choked, a lesson in humiliation as you are forced to strip naked below the waist in public. In fact, a litany of violent degradations that form the (at least) 19 official complaints against police victimization in Victoria between March 2006 and December 2007 and that, one must conclude, are just the scrapings at the surface of the violence directed against people of African origin now living in Australia.

Nine months later, what was started by the capitalists’ bullyboys, fanned by their police so-called “union” in Victoria, now becomes official government policy as Kevin Andrews, the now-defunct Coalition’s Federal Minister for Immigration, announces a freeze on Australia’s intake of refugees from Africa, claiming that Africans “were integrating poorly into the community.” What made Andrews’ declarations so especially appalling was that they were made only days after the bashing to death of an eighteen-year-old Sudanese boy, Liep Gony, at the hands of two young men with, one must say, very un-Sudanese sounding names. Left for dead on a nature strip near his home in the Melbourne working-class suburb of Noble Park, Liep suffers severe head injuries and succumbs to his injuries at a hospital only hours later. In the most hideous example of “blaming the victim”, Andrews even has the gall to cite this tragedy as symptomatic of Sudanese refugees’ alleged inability to integrate properly into society and their supposed connection to “ethnic” gang violence!

The response from racist Australia is immediate. The media pumps up its beat up stories of “violent” African gangs roaming the streets of outer-suburban Melbourne, a local capitalist and president of the Caxton Street Association, Sarosh Mehta, goes one step further than the politicians who serve his class interests and calls on the Minister to expel the “Sudanese troublemakers” (Sudan Tribune website, Oct 6 2007) and only a day before Liep’s funeral another young Sudanese man, seventeen-year-old Ajang Gor, while riding home on his bike from work is set upon by four men who shout racial abuse and then punch and kick him and smash a bottle on his head. Having stolen his wallet and phone, Ajang’s attackers then send racist text messages and make abusive phone calls to his brother, cousins and friends while he spends the night recovering in hospital! For Ajang and his family, along with many others in Australia’s African community, there is no question over where the real blame for all this lies: William Abur, vice-president of the Sudanese Association of Australia, declares: “This kind of abuse came out because the minister has made a very bad comment on the Sudanese community.” (Brisbane Times website, October 11 2007)

Yes, that hoary old chestnut, that handmaiden of power, the racism that bluntly carves up any chance for working class people to solidarise together and wield their superior power in numbers against their common enemy, the ruling class. A ruling class of a few war and profit mongerers who can only turn a world of beauty, prosperity and communality into a life of drudgery, boredom and wage slavery by commandeering such dirty tricks that divide and conquer, divide and conquer time and time again.

Workers of The World Unite!

It is, of course, only a matter of time before the workers of the world do truly unite and send the capitalists with all their dirty tricks packing. Australian workers have certainly been involved in particular struggles where they have not been lax to take on the ruling class and their bully boys on the frontline of the class struggle. Think of the defence of the Botany Cranes picket in Sydney last year or the fact that 2008 will mark the 10th anniversary of the mass mobilisations of tens of thousands of unionists on the picket line to try and defend the Maritime Union of Australia against Patricks Corporation, its hired ex-SAS thugs and the coppers sent to violently break the unionists’ picket line on the Melbourne docks. And today the battle line between the exploiting class and the workers’ movement at the point of production is ever so starkly drawn and the illusion that the legal system under capitalism serves the masses is ever so transparent now that many strike options for workers in Australia to go on strike in defence of their rights have been made illegal (for more on this issue please read Rip Up All Anti-Strike Laws! Cover All Workers with Industry-wide, Collective Agreements) not to mention secondary strikes or black-bans in defence of other people.

It is exactly the latter function of industrial action that brings to mind Lenin’s insistence in What Is to Be Done? that for a communist the ideal should be “the tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects; who is able to generalise all these manifestations and produce a single picture of police violence and capitalist exploitation.” And, in this sense, the Sydney Branch of the MUA surely exhibited the characteristics of such a tribune of the people when, late last year, it joined in the defence of Lex Wotton (please read Redfern Rally Defends Persecuted Palm Island Aboriginal Hero Lex Wotton and MUA Union Joins Campaign.) Moreover, Unions NSW has now also stated a position in support for this anti-racist struggle as on 29 November last year it successfully carried the motion to support the MUA Sydney Branch’s “call for the QLD Government to review the charges against Lex Wotton with a view to having them dropped” (from Minutes of Meeting held: 29 November 2007, Labor Council website.) We must now work hard to turn this worthy stance by Unions NSW towards having the charges dropped against the Palm Island hero (although we should be absolutely clear we would not trust the “independence” of any future government “review” and would fully maintain the campaign until the charges are dropped) into mass union participation at the impending April 4-7 Brisbane actions in defence of Lex Wotton.

But let the workers of Australia not forget another beleaguered community, the (until recently, at least) growing population of refugees seeking shelter in this country from war-torn Africa, a continent itself still ravaged by the bitter and bloody history of European colonialism and the yoke of capitalist servitude and exploitation. Australians of African origin, be they from Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea or elsewhere, are a small yet important component of the industrial working class in this country. And day by day African working class communities face a barrage of oppression and intimidation, from being blamed by police for minor traffic accidents they were not involved in, discrimination in the labour market and being forced to work in the unofficial cash economy at below award wages to the violent treatment so often meted out to them by the cops that recent events in Melbourne have highlighted. Yet despite all the hardships these communities have had to endure in their countries of origin and still endure in their adopted land, African people will clearly not take White Australia’s deadly racist abuse lying down.

Take, for instance, the early hours of the morning following Liep Gony’s funeral on October 11 (where overcome with grief several of the hundreds of mourners collapsed during the service and had to be taken to hospital) when a group of twenty of his friends gathered on the street where he had lived with his family in Noble Park and heroically stood up to the police harassment that did not even abate at such a sensitive moment. It took 12 police cars and 22 officers and a whole hour for the coppers to “contain” the situation. And later in the year on November 28, at around 11pm, dozens of African youths stood their ground in the midst of a confrontation instigated by police in Flemington, another Melbourne working-class suburb where many refugees from Africa have recently settled. As a young African man, Mubarak Moussa, was being dropped off from work at his home in Flemington’s high-rise public housing estate, he was accosted by cops who accused him of throwing a rock at them. Subsequently, despite his protestations, being thrown into a paddy-wagon and his younger brother who had come to his assistance having been sprayed with capsicum gas, 18 extra police vehicles quickly arrived as if from nowhere, newly equipped with head-mounted cameras. But seemingly undeterred, the community refused to be intimidated by such violent police tactics with many residents, even older women and girls, coming down from the estate. Moussa described the unfolding situation succinctly yet evocatively: “I was put in the divvy van and everyone came down. Ladies were screaming from their windows.”

And as if just to dispel any illusions that might have been brewing in the wall-to-wall Labor government-run capitalist state that had just come into being following the ALP’s Federal election victory, the party’s Victorian premier, John Brumby, was ready to help stoke the racist flames and point the finger at this besieged African community, declaring: “Any of this sort of gang activity, or group activity, or mob activity that is violent is totally anathema and totally unacceptable….It is not part of the civilized way of life that we expect from our state and Australians more generally.” This, of course, was very reminiscent of Labor’s premier in NSW, Morris Iemma who, after the despicable display of racist violence by thousands of marauding, drunken white Australians in Cronulla in December, 2005 infamously branded Muslim youth in Sydney as “grubs.”

There is only one gang, John Brumby, that truly deserves our ire and contempt and that is the gang of capitalists who you serve along with that murderous gang of coppers (the killers of TJ and Mulrunji and so many other innocents) who keep them, and you, in power.“One of the cops grabbed me and choke-slammed me to the floor and goes on top of me and five of them go on top of me and my friend,” a 16-year-old arrested at Flemington would say. “They were pushing our faces to the ground and (had their) knees on us.” Such deadly force must be strongly resisted by all workers of all colours - white, African, Middle-Eastern, Asian, Aboriginal, South American - and only then can we truly look forward to a better, brighter and peaceful future free from tyranny and injustice. ♦