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From Labelling Chinese Students as Communist “Spies” to Persecuting a Socialist Political Prisoner:
Cold War Witch-Hunting Returns … Mixed With White Australia Racism
21 February 2019 – Seven months ago, the Australian government
granted a visa for Canadian white supremacist, Lauren Southern, to come here on
a speaking tour. Southern calls to keep out people from Asia and Africa, ridiculously
claiming that immigration leads to “white genocide.” In late 2017, the government
also allowed racist provocateur, Milo Yiannopoulos, to tour. A misogynist who
calls for women to be banned from driving, Yiannopoulos used this tour to brand
Muslims as “rapists” and to insult the art produced by Aboriginal people as
“really shit.” Emboldened by his rants, neo-Nazi groups unleashed violent assaults
against the African community living in the Kensington suburb where his
Melbourne event was held. Yet while the government has allowed the likes of Southern
and Yiannopoulos to enter, two weeks ago they banned Chinese-Australian
businessman, Huang Xiangmo, from re-entering Australia. Unlike the far-right
figures that the Australian regime have allowed in, Mr Huang, has not been
inciting racial hatred. In fact, he has been involved in events supporting racial
unity. Moreover, while the likes of Southern and Yiannopoulos have no residency
status here, Huang is actually a permanent resident of Australia – one whose
wife and son live here. So why is Mr Huang
being treated much worse than purveyors of racial division have been?
For the Australian government to revoke the permanent residency of
a person who has committed no criminal offence is not only highly unusual: it
is, perhaps, completely unprecedented. So why has the Morrison government –
with the ALP’s acquiescence – banned Huang? It is because he has made
statements sympathetic to the Peoples Republic of China (PRC). The ASIO spy
agency cited his past leadership of the Australian Council for the Promotion of
the Peaceful Re-unification of China – a group that shares Beijing’s views on
the Taiwan, Hong Kong and Tibet issues – as one of the main reasons why it ordered
the cancellation of Huang’s residency. The media claim that Huang has used
large political donations to push this pro-PRC agenda. Even if that were
actually true – and it is far more likely that Mr Huang’s donations are merely yet
another case of wealthy businessmen protecting their interests by currying
favour with politicians – then so what!
It is not illegal to express sympathy for political positions held by Beijing
and it is not illegal for people who hold those views to make political
donations. To strip a person of permanent residency based on their advocacy for
positions held by Red China is an outrageous attack on democratic rights. The decision amounts to asserting that a
person who expresses sympathy for a socialistic country should not be accorded
the rights of other residents.Right-wing
politicians and the mainstream media will speak forever about protecting
“freedom of speech” when they defend the “right” of extreme racists to whip up
hatred against racial and religious minorities. Yet they want to curb any “free
speech” that involves sympathy for the Peoples Republic of China! There is
another irony to this saga. The PRC is, by far, Australia’s largest source of
export income. Yet, while the ruling
class is happy to make a fortune selling goods to the PRC they are determined to
stop anyone saying anything positive about her!
Now as a billionaire businessman Huang Xiangmo is hardly our cup
of tea. All capitalist businessmen – including Mr Huang – are the class enemies
of working class people. However, Huang is certainly not being attacked by the
Australian ruling class because he is a capitalist exploiter (or else it would
be the likes of Andrew Forest, Gina Rinehart and Clive Palmer who would have
had their rights stripped long ago). Far from it! Mr Huang is being persecuted, in fact, in the opposite way – because for his own reasons he has chosen
to express sympathy for certain goals of a socialistic country. In short, he
is being attacked for the wrong reasons by the wrong people. Therefore, we add our voice to those demanding that Huang
Xiangmo’s cancelled permanent residency be immediately restored.
While welcoming prominent overseas racists like Milo Yiannopoulos and Canadian white supremacist, Lauren Southern, to enter Australia and spread their racist filth, in February the Australian government banned permanent resident Huang Xiangmo from re-entering Australia because of his participation in groups sympathetic to the Peoples Republic of China. Above: Huang Xiangmo at an October 2017 gala event of the Australian Council for Promotion of the Peaceful Reunification of China, which he then headed, to commemorate the 42nd anniversary of the implementation of Australia’s Racial Discrimination Act. The Sydney event which united 2,000 people from different races featured performers from more than thirty different ethnicities including from Indian, Korean, Arabic, European and Chinese backgrounds. A month after this event organised by Huang Xiangmo’s group, despicable Milo Yiannopoulos was allowed to enter Australia for a speaking tour which he used to brand Muslims as “rapists” and to insult the art produced by Aboriginal people as “really shit.” Below: Milo Yiannopoulos enters a speaking event at parliament house where he gave encouragement to this country’s most extreme racist politicians. Waiting to listen are One Nation senators Pauline Hanson and Malcolm Roberts in the front row, fascist Fraser Anning in the second row on the left and bigoted Nationals MP George Christensen elsewhere in the audience.
Of course, the government knows that the masses – for good reason
– dislike billionaires. That is why it is convenient for them to ratchet up
their attacks on pro-PRC Chinese people by targeting a person like Mr Huang.
Yet what others should realise is that if they can so blatantly trample on the
rights of a person with such connections to the political elite then what are
they going to do to working class people of Chinese background who speak
positively about the PRC? The Australian regime’s timing of their move against
Huang seems to be designed to intimidate.
The ripping up of his permanent resident’s visa was announced right when the
community were marking New Year’s Day! The message has not been lost on the
community who to their credit have refused to take this attack lying down. There
is a small anti-communist part of the Chinese community who hate the PRC
because their landlord/capitalist ancestors were deposed from their tyrannical
domination of China by the 1949 Revolution or because they are linked to the capitalist
classes who still rule Taiwan and Hong Kong and these people celebrated the
attack on Huang. However, 128 Chinese community organisations signed a statement
declaring that, “What happened to Mr Huang Xiangmo today may happen to any of
us tomorrow.” The statement rightly insisted that:
“The unfair treatment suffered by Mr Huang has dealt a heavy blow to the legitimate political participation of people from Chinese or other ethnic minorities. It made the underprivileged people from the Chinese community and other ethnic minorities even more vulnerable.”
Indeed, the revoking of Mr Huang’s residency is but the latest
event in the ruling class’ escalating witch-hunt against the large, pro-PRC
portion of Australia’s Chinese community. Mainstream media are running hysterical
articles condemning local Chinese organisations, student groups and Chinese-language
media for supposedly “threatening Australian sovereignty” by “covertly exerting
influence” as proxies of the Communist Party of China (CPC). Ironically, the
media group spearheading the claim that most of Australia’s Chinese media are
not independent and, instead, are covertly controlled by Beijing is the itself
not at all independent ABC which is owned and thus controlled by the Australian
capitalist state! Not surprisingly, the ABC’s board of directors is dominated
by corporate bigwigs and heads of business associations. The ABC and other
media have, as in the persecution of Mr Huang, been spurred on by leaked
statements from anonymous figures in ASIO and the Australian Federal Police
(AFP) as well as “senior diplomatic figures.” Talk about “covertly exerting influence”! Shadowy ASIO spies and
others are quoted complaining about pro-PRC Chinese “silencing” anti-PRC forces
through “vilification.” For ASIO spies to
complain about “voices being silenced” is the height of hypocrisy. This
is a feared organisation with a history of using infiltration and sabotage to
disrupt the activities of leftist dissidents, Aboriginal rights activists and
other progressive and anti-racist forces.
Pro-PRC Students Targeted
The main target of attacks on the Chinese community have been
pro-PRC international students from China. They have not only been slandered by
the media but have faced attacks from the likes of, now former, foreign
minister Julie Bishop and Australia’s highest-ranked foreign affairs
bureaucrat, Frances Adamson. These officials have made thinly veiled threats
warning Chinese students not to spread propaganda or “blindly condemn” those
within university circles who attack the PRC. Laughably, their attacks on Chinese students have been made in the name
of upholding Australia’s supposed “openness and freedom of speech.” Except that Chinese students are not supposed
to say anything positive about the PRC or to expose the flaws in the arguments
of anti-PRC crusaders.
Worryingly, the campaign against pro-PRC students is starting to
move from denunciations to repression. ANU Professor, Geremie Barme, made a
thinly veiled call for ANU student, Lei Xiying, to face disciplinary action. Why? Because Lei made a series of passionately
pro-Red China videos that went viral. Consider the difference with the way Lei
has been hounded with how lightly Nationals senator Barry O’Sullivan has gotten
off for his despicable comment two days ago about “us having a biosecurity
breach from some bloody old Chinaman that brings in his favourite sausage down
the front of his undies.” Meanwhile, a package of draconian “foreign
interference laws” are now going into force that everyone knows are aimed at
supporters of China. The laws could be used to jail those who advocate
political positions held by Beijing. If Australia’s
current course is not resisted, some leaders of Chinese community organisations
and student groups could well face criminal prosecution in the future.
The Beginning of a New McCarthyism and the Resurgence of White Australia Racism
There definitely is a racist aspect to the ruling class campaign against pro-PRC Chinese people. It is an expression of the refrain of racist rednecks that “we let you into the country so the least you could do is … [shut up and stay out of politics!]” It amounts to making people of Chinese background second-class citizens. Which other ethnic minority will next be targeted for expressing a view that the Australian regime deems to not adhere to what they decree to be “Australian values”? Palestinian community members who campaign for the liberation of Palestine? People from Latin American backgrounds who protest against Washington and Canberra’s efforts to incite a right-wing coup in Venezuela?
The Australian government’s attempts to deny a big part of the Chinese
community the political rights formally accorded to others is stained with the
same white supremacist methodology as the discriminatory laws it has placed on
Aboriginal people in the NT – and now certain other parts of Australia – that
prevent them having the same access to social welfare as other citizens. Moreover,
the mainstream media’s witch-hunting of Chinese community organisations and PRC
international students cannot be separated from their racist vilification of
the Muslim community and African youth. Similarly, the Australian regime’s
demonisation of Huang Xiangmo and their cancellation of his visa has parallels
to the way that Peter Dutton brands refugees as “rapists”; and to the way that
both the Liberals and ALP insist on denying these persecuted refugees residency
in Australia.
However, racism is not the only factor here. After all would a
pro-imperialist person of Hong Kong background have his residency cancelled if
he expressed opposition to Hong Kong’s re-integration into China? Not a chance!
The attempts to silence the pro-PRC part of the Chinese community is not only
racist, it is anti-communist. It is
an attempt by the Australian regime to gag any voice speaking in defence of
socialistic China or any other workers state. Now Mr Huang, as a capitalist
businessman is hardly a communist. Rather, knowing that the right to capitalist
exploitation is not guaranteed in Red China – a reality that is good for China’s
masses – Huang and some other Chinese capitalists seek to stave off their
businesses from being nationalised by trying to ingratiate themselves with the
CPC. Similarly, former Labor senator Sam Dastyari, who was unfairly
witch-hunted out of politics for having once made the patently true statement
that the South China Sea issue is China’s internal affair, is no revolutionary.
Yet, that even Huang and Dastyari could be persecuted shows the dangers that actual
leftists and supporters of the PRC workers state face today. Indeed the way
that they were victimised for the slightest displays of “softness” on the CPC
is reminiscent of the Cold War witch-hunt in late-1940s and 1950s Australia and
the U.S. (where it became known as McCarthyism). Back then anyone not critical
enough of the then most powerful socialistic state – the USSR – or who had any
They suffer in silence and follow cialis samples the point to ‘keep quiet and carry on’. Suffering from erectile dysfunction once or twice is 25mg barato viagra bad enough that they are suffering from this disease in private now they have to discuss it with people and explain what’s wrong with them. For instance, 10 mg tablets of Lipitor for a 30 day supply may cost you $80 or more in America but only $40 or viagra fast less in Canada. How does it work? This is cialis viagra canada a common question heard from people across the world. connection with people in the local communist parties was branded a traitor and
driven out of their job. In Australia, several Communist Party of Australia
(CPA) leaders were jailed alongside communist trade unionists. In a
witch-hunting atmosphere that almost saw the CPA banned in 1951, the government
even raided CPA offices.
Is this what is going to happen again? Ten screenwriters and directors in the U.S. and their families protest their impending imprisonment. The people, who became known as the Hollywood 10, were jailed by the American regime in 1948 for up to a year for refusing to answer questions about their possible communist sympathies. The late 1940s-1950s anti-communist witch-hunt saw hundreds of Hollywood actors, writers and directors driven out of their jobs and blacklisted. Thousands upon thousands of teachers, wharfies, seamen, university academics and government employees also lost their jobs on the basis of the slightest alleged sign of communist association. Meanwhile, hundreds of communists and alleged communists were jailed. In Australia, several Communist Party of Australia leaders were imprisoned alongside communist trade unionists.
Anyone who thinks that such an anti-communist witch-hunt could
never happen again because “society has progressed” should look around the
world and think again. Less than five years ago, South Korea’s capitalist
regime banned the country’s third largest parliamentary party (the Unified
Progressive Party) and jailed several of its leaders, because that party was
not hostile enough to North Korea. In the Ukraine, Bulgaria, Latvia and
Lithuania laws are in force banning people from displaying communist symbols.
In the Ukraine, these laws are used to prevent the country’s pro-communist
parties from standing in elections. Moreover, in the Australian state’s latest
attacks on pro-PRC Chinese, the methods of 1950s McCarthyism are being re-deployed.
This is seen in the line spun by ASIO that they knows things about Mr Huang but
can’t tell us … because it’s secret so you just have to believe them! This
apes FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s “Loyalty Security Reviews” during the U.S. Cold
War witch-hunt where suspected communists were not allowed to know who was
accusing them and were often not even told what they were accused of! Meanwhile,
the media’s branding of PRC students as “spies for the Communist Party of
China,” Canberra’s exclusions of Chinese tech giant Huawei because of “security
concerns” and the media’s ritual blaming of China for every cyber hack without
any evidence all have more than a whiff of an impending McCarthyite witch-hunt.
There is a factor that makes this impending Cold War witch-hunt
potentially more dangerous than its earlier version. That is the fact that the
main country targeted by today’s Red Scare is an Asian one (rather than the
majority white Soviet Union) and the fact that there is a large diaspora from
that country living here. This makes White Australia racism even more a
component of today’s new McCarthyism than its earlier variety – all the more so
because it dovetails with a period of increasing racist attacks on all people
of colour. Already, the combination of anti-communist hostility to Red China
and White Australia racism have led to a surge in racist violence against
Chinese background residents. In October 2017, three Chinese high-school
students were bashed by racists at a Canberra bus stop. Two months before this,
a white supremacist student at ANU pulled out a baseball bat during a lesson
and beat and tried to kill his tutor of Chinese origin and four other Chinese
students. Especially when one knows the post-1788 history of this country –
from the Gold Rush anti-Chinese pogroms to the 19th century
anti-Chinese laws to the White Australia Policy – it is understandable why some
people of Chinese descent are fearful.
The emerging Cold War witch-hunt in Australia is starting to
expand beyond targeting supporters of the PRC. This is seen most clearly in the
case of Chan Han Choi, a socialist political prisoner in Australia. Choi is
facing charges of helping the DPRK to export its produce in violation of cruel
UN economic sanctions which if true would only make him a great humanitarian
and partisan of socialism. He has outrageously been denied bail over the last
14 months, in part, on the grounds that he is a DPRK supporter, which the
prosecution claims means that he has no loyalty to Australia. Thus this is, as with the persecution of Mr
Huang and the slandering of pro-PRC students, yet another case of people being
denied the rights accorded to others on the basis of their sympathy for a
socialistic state.
13 April 2019, Sydney: A placard at the rally in defence of socialist political prisoner in Australia, Chan Han Choi, connects Choi’s imprisonment with the broader emerging new Cold War witch-hunt against supporters of socialistic states.
The Real Truths About “Democracy”
and “Foreign Interference”
Supporters of socialistic states have always faced the threat of repression in capitalist countries. For they embody the greatest fear of capitalist rulers: that the exploited masses will unite to depose them from power. If in many periods, socialists have been able to operate legally in Australia it is only because the ruling class thinks that it is more effective to rule the masses by maintaining a facade of “democracy.” Yet no one should be fooled into thinking that the Australian government democratically represents the needs of the majority. Under this country’s current system it is the big business owners who, through their ownership of the media and their huge resources to fund political parties, pay for political advertising, establish think tanks and hire lobbyists who thoroughly shape political discourse. The whole state machinery – including ASIO, police and bureaucrats – has been created for enforcing the rule of the capitalist exploiters at home and enforcing the superexploitation of the peoples of Australia’s neo-colonies abroad (ASIS the overseas operation’s counterpart of the ASIO organisation that is targeting the pro-PRC Chinese community at home has for example been involved in spying on East Timorese officials during negotiations over the Australian ruling class’ attempts to normalise its plunder of Timorese oil resources). That is why no matter who wins elections, the resulting governments always enable tycoons to leach incredible wealth while overseeing a large amount of homelessness, poor living conditions for so many Aboriginal people and the frequent throwing of large numbers of workers out of their livelihoods at the whim of greedy bosses. Today, these same governments – as well as top bureaucrats and ASIO spies – are warning Chinese students that their political discourse must comply with what they deem to be “Australian values.” However, a state machine that does not govern for the interests of the majority should have no right to determine which values people are supposed to adhere to. So we hope that more people – both citizens and international students – will refuse to be bound by the values decreed by a regime that only governs for the interests of the greedy, big end of town.
The Australian ruling class is actually not even truly wedded to
the notions of “free speech” and “democracy” that it claims to be defending
against Red China’s influence. To be sure, they do find it easier to rule by
maintaining some formalities of “democracy.” Yet when they feel the need to
dispense with these – as they did during the late 1940s and early 1950s – they
will not hesitate to try and do so. Today, we are again entering such a period.
The ruling class is slowly moving away from the norms of “free speech” and
“democracy” (all in the name of saving
these!) because they are shaken by a crisis of confidence. The Great
Recession that struck the capitalist world a decade ago really did damage the
self-belief of the capitalist ruling classes of the world. Although Australia
did not suffer a recession, Australia’s capitalist rulers know that their
economy was only saved by exports to China’s booming, socialistic state-owned
enterprises. Meanwhile, capitalist rulers around the world see growing
resentment amongst the masses. Although, at the moment, mass disgruntlement has
led more to support for far-right forces and only to some degree to a leftist
radicalisation, the exploiting classes know that this could quickly change.
Moreover, they see a socialistic power in China going from strength to strength
– and it terrifies them! Very
immediately, the influence of a socialistic power in the South Pacific is
enabling countries like PNG, Fiji and Vanuatu to start to free themselves from
Australian imperialist domination.
In this context, the Australian ruling class has an interest in manufacturing
a “China threat” and an “agents of Chinese influence” scare. This helps them to
“justify” to the public an expensive military build-up aimed against
socialistic China and North Korea, aggressive policies against Chinese
assistance to South Pacific countries and greater political support to
anti-communist movements within the PRC. On the other hand, the Red China scare
also enables the Australian regime to defend moves to curb leftist dissent and
civil liberties within Australia. Moreover, their vilification of a big chunk
of the Chinese community helps them to divert the working class masses that
they exploit away from the real source of the masses’ troubles. Although much
of their scare-mongering about CPC interference is contrived, to some degree
they are also truly concerned about the influence of PRC students in Australia.
For example, what happens when the Australian class mates of these students
find out that these PRC students, who they know have experienced life in both
the PRC and Australia, actually like the PRC and don’t feel repressed there?
How will the Australian ruling class be able to justify a hostile policy
against its biggest trading partner then? And what if the friends and
classmates of some Chinese students even start thinking that China’s
socialistic system has certain advantages? Heaven forbid!
Although the Australian ruling class is today hyping up the issue
of “foreign interference” they actually have no specific stance on the issue per sé. They are hostile to
pro-socialist influence but welcome any foreign interference that serves their
capitalist interests. Thus, the ruling class welcomes U.S. interference as they
need U.S. power to guarantee their predatory neo-colonial subjugation of South
Pacific countries. The Australian state welcomes large numbers of U.S. troops
in Darwin, hosts U.S. military bases at several locations and established the U.S.
Studies Centre at Sydney University to promote U.S. influence in Australia.
The PRC actually goes out of its way to avoid interfering in the
internal affairs of other countries. Even all but the most extreme anti-China
hawks in Australia do not claim that the PRC is actually trying to change
Australia’s political system. Supposed PRC “interference” is at most aimed at
ameliorating Canberra’s hostility to the PRC and at opposing anti-communist
Chinese groups exiled in Australia. However, the assumptions behind Beijing’s attempted
“non interference” policy is flawed for a couple of key reasons. For one, all
countries – and key events within them – inevitably affect other countries
whether it is by design or not. On the negative side, for example, the rise of extreme
right-wing forces around the globe has definitely encouraged fascist groups
within Australia. This is partly through white supremacists here being
emboldened by seeing the ascendancy of Trump and far-right parties in the likes
of Italy and Austria and partly through Australian speaking tours by interfering
far-right bigwigs like Southern and Yiannopoulos. On the other hand, the
Aboriginal rights struggle in Australia drew inspiration from the militant
black liberation movement in the U.S. and vice versa.
The second problem with Beijing’s policy of “non interference” is that it is premised on the expectation that if the PRC does not interfere in the affairs of capitalist countries, the latter will, in turn, not interfere in China’s internal affairs. However such a reality is not what is happening! Although the PRC genuinely does not seek to threaten the social system in the capitalist countries, the capitalist powers do everything possible to undermine socialistic rule in China. Washington – with Canberra’s support – provides massive financial, media and political support to anti-communist groups within China from “pro-democracy” neo-liberals to yuppy Hong Kong students sympathetic to British colonialism to a tiny but violent minority within the Uighur community of right-wing anti-communist, religious extremists. That is why the PRC should take the gloves off and abandon the CPC leadership’s failed policy of “non interference.” It should seek to influence events in the capitalist world – not by covert methods – but by openly proclaiming the advantages of the socialist system, by attributing its own economic successes to socialistic public ownership and by supporting the struggles of the working class and oppressed in the capitalist world. A powerful example of the latter was when the PRC, in the early 1970s, twice feted delegations of some of Australia’s leading Aboriginal rights activists (see: http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/images/history/1970s/china/chinadx2.html).
One thing that the rising tensions between the PRC and capitalist
Australia have proved is that no matter how much the PRC tries to avoid
interfering in the affairs of an imperialist country, she will still face
prejudice and accusations of “interference”. That is why, in a sense, the PRC
has nothing to lose if it were to start openly and aggressively promoting the
socialist cause within countries like Australia. If she did so she would start
to win significant sympathy amongst Australia’s working class people. For example,
if the Australian masses, angry at the greed of the local banks, heard that the
PRC has a sound financial system based on public ownership of all its key banks,
they would find that rather attractive. And it would provide badly needed
encouragement to their own struggle for socialism.
Resist the Attacks on the Pro-PRC Chinese Community! Resist the New McCarthyism!
Today, the pro-PRC section of the Chinese community is facing not only the resurgent White Australia racism that is targeting all people of colour in this country but particular vilification in the context of an emerging, new Cold War witch-hunt against supporters of the socialistic PRC. This needs to be resisted by mass mobilisations on the streets. However, this is the task of not only the Chinese community but the entire left-wing and working class movement in Australia. For the Australian regime’s attacks on a large section of the Chinese community is an attack on all working class people. For one, the racism that this campaign is inciting divides working class people and thus weakens our ability to unite to fight for our rights. Secondly, the persecution of supporters of Red China could well turn into a broader witch-hunt against trade unionists and leftists. The McCarthyite witch-hunt in the U.S. first began with persecution of supporters of the USSR and then progressed to repression against all communists and eventually targeted people who advocated for social welfare and public health which were seen as communist policies. In Australia, the late 1940s and 1950s Cold War witch-hunt saw the regime first attacking communists and then using that to target all trade union militants. If the Australian ruling class’ current campaign against PRC supporters is not pushed back we can imagine that soon all avowed communists within Australia will face persecution; and later trade union militants and those who advocate policies that are also pursued by Beijing – such as extensive public housing and public ownership of key industries – will be targeted. Thirdly, the U.S. and Australian imperialist drive against the PRC is against the interests of working class people. Although the PRC’s government has allowed too much capitalist intrusion into China, the PRC remains a workers state where all the key sectors are under public ownership. This is a great treasure for all the workers and downtrodden of the world that must be protected.
With the capitalist rulers increasingly insecure, ever more
worried about their system’s decay and ever more fearful about the stunning
development of socialistic China we will only be able to put an end to racist
scapegoating and Cold War-style witch-hunting when we sweep away this capitalist
system for good. However, to advance the struggle towards that goal we need to
fight right now to resist racist attacks on any victimised community and to oppose
all crackdowns on pro-socialist political expression. And our struggle for
workers liberation here will surely be stronger if we can ensure that the
world’s most populous country continues to remain a workers state.
Fight back against the
racist, red-baiting witch-hunt against the pro-PRC Chinese community! Oppose
all the Australian regime’s racist attacks on Aboriginal people, Muslims, youth
of African descent and refugees! Defend the right of supporters of the PRC to
express our views! Resist the drift towards a new Cold War witch-hunt against
leftists! Fight to free socialist political prisoner in Australia Chan Han
Choi! Stand by the PRC – defend and
strengthen socialistic rule in China!
From Labelling Chinese Students as Communist “Spies” to Persecuting a Socialist Political Prisoner:
Cold War Witch-Hunting Returns … Mixed With White Australia Racism
21 February 2019 – Seven months ago, the Australian government
granted a visa for Canadian white supremacist, Lauren Southern, to come here on
a speaking tour. Southern calls to keep out people from Asia and Africa, ridiculously
claiming that immigration leads to “white genocide.” In late 2017, the government
also allowed racist provocateur, Milo Yiannopoulos, to tour. A misogynist who
calls for women to be banned from driving, Yiannopoulos used this tour to brand
Muslims as “rapists” and to insult the art produced by Aboriginal people as
“really shit.” Emboldened by his rants, neo-Nazi groups unleashed violent assaults
against the African community living in the Kensington suburb where his
Melbourne event was held. Yet while the government has allowed the likes of Southern
and Yiannopoulos to enter, two weeks ago they banned Chinese-Australian
businessman, Huang Xiangmo, from re-entering Australia. Unlike the far-right
figures that the Australian regime have allowed in, Mr Huang, has not been
inciting racial hatred. In fact, he has been involved in events supporting racial
unity. Moreover, while the likes of Southern and Yiannopoulos have no residency
status here, Huang is actually a permanent resident of Australia – one whose
wife and son live here. So why is Mr Huang
being treated much worse than purveyors of racial division have been?
For the Australian government to revoke the permanent residency of
a person who has committed no criminal offence is not only highly unusual: it
is, perhaps, completely unprecedented. So why has the Morrison government –
with the ALP’s acquiescence – banned Huang? It is because he has made
statements sympathetic to the Peoples Republic of China (PRC). The ASIO spy
agency cited his past leadership of the Australian Council for the Promotion of
the Peaceful Re-unification of China – a group that shares Beijing’s views on
the Taiwan, Hong Kong and Tibet issues – as one of the main reasons why it ordered
the cancellation of Huang’s residency. The media claim that Huang has used
large political donations to push this pro-PRC agenda. Even if that were
actually true – and it is far more likely that Mr Huang’s donations are merely yet
another case of wealthy businessmen protecting their interests by currying
favour with politicians – then so what!
It is not illegal to express sympathy for political positions held by Beijing
and it is not illegal for people who hold those views to make political
donations. To strip a person of permanent residency based on their advocacy for
positions held by Red China is an outrageous attack on democratic rights. The decision amounts to asserting that a
person who expresses sympathy for a socialistic country should not be accorded
the rights of other residents.Right-wing
politicians and the mainstream media will speak forever about protecting
“freedom of speech” when they defend the “right” of extreme racists to whip up
hatred against racial and religious minorities. Yet they want to curb any “free
speech” that involves sympathy for the Peoples Republic of China! There is
another irony to this saga. The PRC is, by far, Australia’s largest source of
export income. Yet, while the ruling
class is happy to make a fortune selling goods to the PRC they are determined to
stop anyone saying anything positive about her!
Now as a billionaire businessman Huang Xiangmo is hardly our cup
of tea. All capitalist businessmen – including Mr Huang – are the class enemies
of working class people. However, Huang is certainly not being attacked by the
Australian ruling class because he is a capitalist exploiter (or else it would
be the likes of Andrew Forest, Gina Rinehart and Clive Palmer who would have
had their rights stripped long ago). Far from it! Mr Huang is being persecuted, in fact, in the opposite way – because for his own reasons he has chosen
to express sympathy for certain goals of a socialistic country. In short, he
is being attacked for the wrong reasons by the wrong people. Therefore, we add our voice to those demanding that Huang
Xiangmo’s cancelled permanent residency be immediately restored.
While welcoming prominent overseas racists like Milo Yiannopoulos and Canadian white supremacist, Lauren Southern, to enter Australia and spread their racist filth, in February the Australian government banned permanent resident Huang Xiangmo from re-entering Australia because of his participation in groups sympathetic to the Peoples Republic of China. Above: Huang Xiangmo at an October 2017 gala event of the Australian Council for Promotion of the Peaceful Reunification of China, which he then headed, to commemorate the 42nd anniversary of the implementation of Australia’s Racial Discrimination Act. The Sydney event which united 2,000 people from different races featured performers from more than thirty different ethnicities including from Indian, Korean, Arabic, European and Chinese backgrounds. A month after this event organised by Huang Xiangmo’s group, despicable Milo Yiannopoulos was allowed to enter Australia for a speaking tour which he used to brand Muslims as “rapists” and to insult the art produced by Aboriginal people as “really shit.” Below: Milo Yiannopoulos enters a speaking event at parliament house where he gave encouragement to this country’s most extreme racist politicians. Waiting to listen are One Nation senators Pauline Hanson and Malcolm Roberts in the front row, fascist Fraser Anning in the second row on the left and bigoted Nationals MP George Christensen elsewhere in the audience.
Of course, the government knows that the masses – for good reason
– dislike billionaires. That is why it is convenient for them to ratchet up
their attacks on pro-PRC Chinese people by targeting a person like Mr Huang.
Yet what others should realise is that if they can so blatantly trample on the
rights of a person with such connections to the political elite then what are
they going to do to working class people of Chinese background who speak
positively about the PRC? The Australian regime’s timing of their move against
Huang seems to be designed to intimidate.
The ripping up of his permanent resident’s visa was announced right when the
community were marking New Year’s Day! The message has not been lost on the
community who to their credit have refused to take this attack lying down. There
is a small anti-communist part of the Chinese community who hate the PRC
because their landlord/capitalist ancestors were deposed from their tyrannical
domination of China by the 1949 Revolution or because they are linked to the capitalist
classes who still rule Taiwan and Hong Kong and these people celebrated the
attack on Huang. However, 128 Chinese community organisations signed a statement
declaring that, “What happened to Mr Huang Xiangmo today may happen to any of
us tomorrow.” The statement rightly insisted that:
“The unfair treatment suffered by Mr Huang has dealt a heavy blow to the legitimate political participation of people from Chinese or other ethnic minorities. It made the underprivileged people from the Chinese community and other ethnic minorities even more vulnerable.”
Indeed, the revoking of Mr Huang’s residency is but the latest
event in the ruling class’ escalating witch-hunt against the large, pro-PRC
portion of Australia’s Chinese community. Mainstream media are running hysterical
articles condemning local Chinese organisations, student groups and Chinese-language
media for supposedly “threatening Australian sovereignty” by “covertly exerting
influence” as proxies of the Communist Party of China (CPC). Ironically, the
media group spearheading the claim that most of Australia’s Chinese media are
not independent and, instead, are covertly controlled by Beijing is the itself
not at all independent ABC which is owned and thus controlled by the Australian
capitalist state! Not surprisingly, the ABC’s board of directors is dominated
by corporate bigwigs and heads of business associations. The ABC and other
media have, as in the persecution of Mr Huang, been spurred on by leaked
statements from anonymous figures in ASIO and the Australian Federal Police
(AFP) as well as “senior diplomatic figures.” Talk about “covertly exerting influence”! Shadowy ASIO spies and
others are quoted complaining about pro-PRC Chinese “silencing” anti-PRC forces
through “vilification.” For ASIO spies to
complain about “voices being silenced” is the height of hypocrisy. This
is a feared organisation with a history of using infiltration and sabotage to
disrupt the activities of leftist dissidents, Aboriginal rights activists and
other progressive and anti-racist forces.
Pro-PRC Students Targeted
The main target of attacks on the Chinese community have been
pro-PRC international students from China. They have not only been slandered by
the media but have faced attacks from the likes of, now former, foreign
minister Julie Bishop and Australia’s highest-ranked foreign affairs
bureaucrat, Frances Adamson. These officials have made thinly veiled threats
warning Chinese students not to spread propaganda or “blindly condemn” those
within university circles who attack the PRC. Laughably, their attacks on Chinese students have been made in the name
of upholding Australia’s supposed “openness and freedom of speech.” Except that Chinese students are not supposed
to say anything positive about the PRC or to expose the flaws in the arguments
of anti-PRC crusaders.
Worryingly, the campaign against pro-PRC students is starting to
move from denunciations to repression. ANU Professor, Geremie Barme, made a
thinly veiled call for ANU student, Lei Xiying, to face disciplinary action. Why? Because Lei made a series of passionately
pro-Red China videos that went viral. Consider the difference with the way Lei
has been hounded with how lightly Nationals senator Barry O’Sullivan has gotten
off for his despicable comment two days ago about “us having a biosecurity
breach from some bloody old Chinaman that brings in his favourite sausage down
the front of his undies.” Meanwhile, a package of draconian “foreign
interference laws” are now going into force that everyone knows are aimed at
supporters of China. The laws could be used to jail those who advocate
political positions held by Beijing. If Australia’s
current course is not resisted, some leaders of Chinese community organisations
and student groups could well face criminal prosecution in the future.
The Beginning of a New McCarthyism and the Resurgence of White Australia Racism
There definitely is a racist aspect to the ruling class campaign against pro-PRC Chinese people. It is an expression of the refrain of racist rednecks that “we let you into the country so the least you could do is … [shut up and stay out of politics!]” It amounts to making people of Chinese background second-class citizens. Which other ethnic minority will next be targeted for expressing a view that the Australian regime deems to not adhere to what they decree to be “Australian values”? Palestinian community members who campaign for the liberation of Palestine? People from Latin American backgrounds who protest against Washington and Canberra’s efforts to incite a right-wing coup in Venezuela?
The Australian government’s attempts to deny a big part of the Chinese
community the political rights formally accorded to others is stained with the
same white supremacist methodology as the discriminatory laws it has placed on
Aboriginal people in the NT – and now certain other parts of Australia – that
prevent them having the same access to social welfare as other citizens. Moreover,
the mainstream media’s witch-hunting of Chinese community organisations and PRC
international students cannot be separated from their racist vilification of
the Muslim community and African youth. Similarly, the Australian regime’s
demonisation of Huang Xiangmo and their cancellation of his visa has parallels
to the way that Peter Dutton brands refugees as “rapists”; and to the way that
both the Liberals and ALP insist on denying these persecuted refugees residency
in Australia.
However, racism is not the only factor here. After all would a
pro-imperialist person of Hong Kong background have his residency cancelled if
he expressed opposition to Hong Kong’s re-integration into China? Not a chance!
The attempts to silence the pro-PRC part of the Chinese community is not only
racist, it is anti-communist. It is
an attempt by the Australian regime to gag any voice speaking in defence of
socialistic China or any other workers state. Now Mr Huang, as a capitalist
businessman is hardly a communist. Rather, knowing that the right to capitalist
exploitation is not guaranteed in Red China – a reality that is good for China’s
masses – Huang and some other Chinese capitalists seek to stave off their
businesses from being nationalised by trying to ingratiate themselves with the
CPC. Similarly, former Labor senator Sam Dastyari, who was unfairly
witch-hunted out of politics for having once made the patently true statement
that the South China Sea issue is China’s internal affair, is no revolutionary.
Yet, that even Huang and Dastyari could be persecuted shows the dangers that actual
leftists and supporters of the PRC workers state face today. Indeed the way
that they were victimised for the slightest displays of “softness” on the CPC
is reminiscent of the Cold War witch-hunt in late-1940s and 1950s Australia and
the U.S. (where it became known as McCarthyism). Back then anyone not critical
enough of the then most powerful socialistic state – the USSR – or who had any
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driven out of their job. In Australia, several Communist Party of Australia
(CPA) leaders were jailed alongside communist trade unionists. In a
witch-hunting atmosphere that almost saw the CPA banned in 1951, the government
even raided CPA offices.
Is this what is going to happen again? Ten screenwriters and directors in the U.S. and their families protest their impending imprisonment. The people, who became known as the Hollywood 10, were jailed by the American regime in 1948 for up to a year for refusing to answer questions about their possible communist sympathies. The late 1940s-1950s anti-communist witch-hunt saw hundreds of Hollywood actors, writers and directors driven out of their jobs and blacklisted. Thousands upon thousands of teachers, wharfies, seamen, university academics and government employees also lost their jobs on the basis of the slightest alleged sign of communist association. Meanwhile, hundreds of communists and alleged communists were jailed. In Australia, several Communist Party of Australia leaders were imprisoned alongside communist trade unionists.
Anyone who thinks that such an anti-communist witch-hunt could
never happen again because “society has progressed” should look around the
world and think again. Less than five years ago, South Korea’s capitalist
regime banned the country’s third largest parliamentary party (the Unified
Progressive Party) and jailed several of its leaders, because that party was
not hostile enough to North Korea. In the Ukraine, Bulgaria, Latvia and
Lithuania laws are in force banning people from displaying communist symbols.
In the Ukraine, these laws are used to prevent the country’s pro-communist
parties from standing in elections. Moreover, in the Australian state’s latest
attacks on pro-PRC Chinese, the methods of 1950s McCarthyism are being re-deployed.
This is seen in the line spun by ASIO that they knows things about Mr Huang but
can’t tell us … because it’s secret so you just have to believe them! This
apes FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s “Loyalty Security Reviews” during the U.S. Cold
War witch-hunt where suspected communists were not allowed to know who was
accusing them and were often not even told what they were accused of! Meanwhile,
the media’s branding of PRC students as “spies for the Communist Party of
China,” Canberra’s exclusions of Chinese tech giant Huawei because of “security
concerns” and the media’s ritual blaming of China for every cyber hack without
any evidence all have more than a whiff of an impending McCarthyite witch-hunt.
There is a factor that makes this impending Cold War witch-hunt
potentially more dangerous than its earlier version. That is the fact that the
main country targeted by today’s Red Scare is an Asian one (rather than the
majority white Soviet Union) and the fact that there is a large diaspora from
that country living here. This makes White Australia racism even more a
component of today’s new McCarthyism than its earlier variety – all the more so
because it dovetails with a period of increasing racist attacks on all people
of colour. Already, the combination of anti-communist hostility to Red China
and White Australia racism have led to a surge in racist violence against
Chinese background residents. In October 2017, three Chinese high-school
students were bashed by racists at a Canberra bus stop. Two months before this,
a white supremacist student at ANU pulled out a baseball bat during a lesson
and beat and tried to kill his tutor of Chinese origin and four other Chinese
students. Especially when one knows the post-1788 history of this country –
from the Gold Rush anti-Chinese pogroms to the 19th century
anti-Chinese laws to the White Australia Policy – it is understandable why some
people of Chinese descent are fearful.
The emerging Cold War witch-hunt in Australia is starting to
expand beyond targeting supporters of the PRC. This is seen most clearly in the
case of Chan Han Choi, a socialist political prisoner in Australia. Choi is
facing charges of helping the DPRK to export its produce in violation of cruel
UN economic sanctions which if true would only make him a great humanitarian
and partisan of socialism. He has outrageously been denied bail over the last
14 months, in part, on the grounds that he is a DPRK supporter, which the
prosecution claims means that he has no loyalty to Australia. Thus this is, as with the persecution of Mr
Huang and the slandering of pro-PRC students, yet another case of people being
denied the rights accorded to others on the basis of their sympathy for a
socialistic state.
13 April 2019, Sydney: A placard at the rally in defence of socialist political prisoner in Australia, Chan Han Choi, connects Choi’s imprisonment with the broader emerging new Cold War witch-hunt against supporters of socialistic states.
The Real Truths About “Democracy”
and “Foreign Interference”
Supporters of socialistic states have always faced the threat of repression in capitalist countries. For they embody the greatest fear of capitalist rulers: that the exploited masses will unite to depose them from power. If in many periods, socialists have been able to operate legally in Australia it is only because the ruling class thinks that it is more effective to rule the masses by maintaining a facade of “democracy.” Yet no one should be fooled into thinking that the Australian government democratically represents the needs of the majority. Under this country’s current system it is the big business owners who, through their ownership of the media and their huge resources to fund political parties, pay for political advertising, establish think tanks and hire lobbyists who thoroughly shape political discourse. The whole state machinery – including ASIO, police and bureaucrats – has been created for enforcing the rule of the capitalist exploiters at home and enforcing the superexploitation of the peoples of Australia’s neo-colonies abroad (ASIS the overseas operation’s counterpart of the ASIO organisation that is targeting the pro-PRC Chinese community at home has for example been involved in spying on East Timorese officials during negotiations over the Australian ruling class’ attempts to normalise its plunder of Timorese oil resources). That is why no matter who wins elections, the resulting governments always enable tycoons to leach incredible wealth while overseeing a large amount of homelessness, poor living conditions for so many Aboriginal people and the frequent throwing of large numbers of workers out of their livelihoods at the whim of greedy bosses. Today, these same governments – as well as top bureaucrats and ASIO spies – are warning Chinese students that their political discourse must comply with what they deem to be “Australian values.” However, a state machine that does not govern for the interests of the majority should have no right to determine which values people are supposed to adhere to. So we hope that more people – both citizens and international students – will refuse to be bound by the values decreed by a regime that only governs for the interests of the greedy, big end of town.
The Australian ruling class is actually not even truly wedded to
the notions of “free speech” and “democracy” that it claims to be defending
against Red China’s influence. To be sure, they do find it easier to rule by
maintaining some formalities of “democracy.” Yet when they feel the need to
dispense with these – as they did during the late 1940s and early 1950s – they
will not hesitate to try and do so. Today, we are again entering such a period.
The ruling class is slowly moving away from the norms of “free speech” and
“democracy” (all in the name of saving
these!) because they are shaken by a crisis of confidence. The Great
Recession that struck the capitalist world a decade ago really did damage the
self-belief of the capitalist ruling classes of the world. Although Australia
did not suffer a recession, Australia’s capitalist rulers know that their
economy was only saved by exports to China’s booming, socialistic state-owned
enterprises. Meanwhile, capitalist rulers around the world see growing
resentment amongst the masses. Although, at the moment, mass disgruntlement has
led more to support for far-right forces and only to some degree to a leftist
radicalisation, the exploiting classes know that this could quickly change.
Moreover, they see a socialistic power in China going from strength to strength
– and it terrifies them! Very
immediately, the influence of a socialistic power in the South Pacific is
enabling countries like PNG, Fiji and Vanuatu to start to free themselves from
Australian imperialist domination.
In this context, the Australian ruling class has an interest in manufacturing
a “China threat” and an “agents of Chinese influence” scare. This helps them to
“justify” to the public an expensive military build-up aimed against
socialistic China and North Korea, aggressive policies against Chinese
assistance to South Pacific countries and greater political support to
anti-communist movements within the PRC. On the other hand, the Red China scare
also enables the Australian regime to defend moves to curb leftist dissent and
civil liberties within Australia. Moreover, their vilification of a big chunk
of the Chinese community helps them to divert the working class masses that
they exploit away from the real source of the masses’ troubles. Although much
of their scare-mongering about CPC interference is contrived, to some degree
they are also truly concerned about the influence of PRC students in Australia.
For example, what happens when the Australian class mates of these students
find out that these PRC students, who they know have experienced life in both
the PRC and Australia, actually like the PRC and don’t feel repressed there?
How will the Australian ruling class be able to justify a hostile policy
against its biggest trading partner then? And what if the friends and
classmates of some Chinese students even start thinking that China’s
socialistic system has certain advantages? Heaven forbid!
Although the Australian ruling class is today hyping up the issue
of “foreign interference” they actually have no specific stance on the issue per sé. They are hostile to
pro-socialist influence but welcome any foreign interference that serves their
capitalist interests. Thus, the ruling class welcomes U.S. interference as they
need U.S. power to guarantee their predatory neo-colonial subjugation of South
Pacific countries. The Australian state welcomes large numbers of U.S. troops
in Darwin, hosts U.S. military bases at several locations and established the U.S.
Studies Centre at Sydney University to promote U.S. influence in Australia.
The PRC actually goes out of its way to avoid interfering in the
internal affairs of other countries. Even all but the most extreme anti-China
hawks in Australia do not claim that the PRC is actually trying to change
Australia’s political system. Supposed PRC “interference” is at most aimed at
ameliorating Canberra’s hostility to the PRC and at opposing anti-communist
Chinese groups exiled in Australia. However, the assumptions behind Beijing’s attempted
“non interference” policy is flawed for a couple of key reasons. For one, all
countries – and key events within them – inevitably affect other countries
whether it is by design or not. On the negative side, for example, the rise of extreme
right-wing forces around the globe has definitely encouraged fascist groups
within Australia. This is partly through white supremacists here being
emboldened by seeing the ascendancy of Trump and far-right parties in the likes
of Italy and Austria and partly through Australian speaking tours by interfering
far-right bigwigs like Southern and Yiannopoulos. On the other hand, the
Aboriginal rights struggle in Australia drew inspiration from the militant
black liberation movement in the U.S. and vice versa.
The second problem with Beijing’s policy of “non interference” is that it is premised on the expectation that if the PRC does not interfere in the affairs of capitalist countries, the latter will, in turn, not interfere in China’s internal affairs. However such a reality is not what is happening! Although the PRC genuinely does not seek to threaten the social system in the capitalist countries, the capitalist powers do everything possible to undermine socialistic rule in China. Washington – with Canberra’s support – provides massive financial, media and political support to anti-communist groups within China from “pro-democracy” neo-liberals to yuppy Hong Kong students sympathetic to British colonialism to a tiny but violent minority within the Uighur community of right-wing anti-communist, religious extremists. That is why the PRC should take the gloves off and abandon the CPC leadership’s failed policy of “non interference.” It should seek to influence events in the capitalist world – not by covert methods – but by openly proclaiming the advantages of the socialist system, by attributing its own economic successes to socialistic public ownership and by supporting the struggles of the working class and oppressed in the capitalist world. A powerful example of the latter was when the PRC, in the early 1970s, twice feted delegations of some of Australia’s leading Aboriginal rights activists (see: http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/images/history/1970s/china/chinadx2.html).
One thing that the rising tensions between the PRC and capitalist
Australia have proved is that no matter how much the PRC tries to avoid
interfering in the affairs of an imperialist country, she will still face
prejudice and accusations of “interference”. That is why, in a sense, the PRC
has nothing to lose if it were to start openly and aggressively promoting the
socialist cause within countries like Australia. If she did so she would start
to win significant sympathy amongst Australia’s working class people. For example,
if the Australian masses, angry at the greed of the local banks, heard that the
PRC has a sound financial system based on public ownership of all its key banks,
they would find that rather attractive. And it would provide badly needed
encouragement to their own struggle for socialism.
Resist the Attacks on the Pro-PRC Chinese Community! Resist the New McCarthyism!
Today, the pro-PRC section of the Chinese community is facing not only the resurgent White Australia racism that is targeting all people of colour in this country but particular vilification in the context of an emerging, new Cold War witch-hunt against supporters of the socialistic PRC. This needs to be resisted by mass mobilisations on the streets. However, this is the task of not only the Chinese community but the entire left-wing and working class movement in Australia. For the Australian regime’s attacks on a large section of the Chinese community is an attack on all working class people. For one, the racism that this campaign is inciting divides working class people and thus weakens our ability to unite to fight for our rights. Secondly, the persecution of supporters of Red China could well turn into a broader witch-hunt against trade unionists and leftists. The McCarthyite witch-hunt in the U.S. first began with persecution of supporters of the USSR and then progressed to repression against all communists and eventually targeted people who advocated for social welfare and public health which were seen as communist policies. In Australia, the late 1940s and 1950s Cold War witch-hunt saw the regime first attacking communists and then using that to target all trade union militants. If the Australian ruling class’ current campaign against PRC supporters is not pushed back we can imagine that soon all avowed communists within Australia will face persecution; and later trade union militants and those who advocate policies that are also pursued by Beijing – such as extensive public housing and public ownership of key industries – will be targeted. Thirdly, the U.S. and Australian imperialist drive against the PRC is against the interests of working class people. Although the PRC’s government has allowed too much capitalist intrusion into China, the PRC remains a workers state where all the key sectors are under public ownership. This is a great treasure for all the workers and downtrodden of the world that must be protected.
With the capitalist rulers increasingly insecure, ever more
worried about their system’s decay and ever more fearful about the stunning
development of socialistic China we will only be able to put an end to racist
scapegoating and Cold War-style witch-hunting when we sweep away this capitalist
system for good. However, to advance the struggle towards that goal we need to
fight right now to resist racist attacks on any victimised community and to oppose
all crackdowns on pro-socialist political expression. And our struggle for
workers liberation here will surely be stronger if we can ensure that the
world’s most populous country continues to remain a workers state.
Fight back against the
racist, red-baiting witch-hunt against the pro-PRC Chinese community! Oppose
all the Australian regime’s racist attacks on Aboriginal people, Muslims, youth
of African descent and refugees! Defend the right of supporters of the PRC to
express our views! Resist the drift towards a new Cold War witch-hunt against
leftists! Fight to free socialist political prisoner in Australia Chan Han
Choi! Stand by the PRC – defend and
strengthen socialistic rule in China!
What a Comparison between Red China & Capitalist Countries Says About:
Socialism vs Capitalism
15 May 2018 – When Donald Trump grabbed hold of the U.S. presidency some 15 months ago, he promised to “make America great again” through a program of racism, protectionism and tax cuts for the rich. Having slandered Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and “criminals,” a central part of his platform was and continues to be to build a “great, big wall” to keep Mexicans out. Since taking office, he has encouraged U.S. border authorities to be even more brutal in attacking would be migrants from Latin America. As neo-Nazis and other rabid white supremacists cheer him on from the sidelines, he has promised measures to keep out Muslim migrants. Indeed, Trump has already implemented executive orders that greatly restrict visits from several Muslim-majority and other non-white majority countries. Today we saw the fruits of another election promise that he has just fulfilled – to move the U.S. embassy in Israel to the expected capital of the proposed re-born Palestinian state: Jerusalem. The move was meant to be a message to the Israeli regime that they can do anything they want to the subjugated Palestinian people and the U.S. superpower will be openly behind them. The Israeli authorities certainly got the message! They have proceeded today to open fire on Palestinian protesters, massacring over 60 people so far and injuring well over a thousand people. Meanwhile, Trump’s defining legislative victory in his first year in office is a tax plan that cuts taxes for corporations and the very rich while throwing 13 million lower income people off from access to health insurance and forcing spending cuts that will hurt the working class and poor the most.
In contrast, when Xi Jinping was re-elected chairman of the Communist Party of China (CPC) at its five yearly congress last November and when the CPC outlined its vision for the future at the meeting, the agenda could not have been more different to that of America’s capitalist rulers. A central aspect of the congress was to re-assert the CPC’s drive to make sure that no person in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is living in abject poverty by 2020. The congress’ other stated policy goals were to increase social welfare coverage, curb property speculation, reduce the income gap and reduce pollution. The overall vision presented was to make China a “modern socialist country” that is “prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced, harmonious and beautiful” by 2050.
The very different agendas presented by the leaders of the U.S., the world’s most powerful capitalist country, and the PRC, the world’s most powerful socialistic country, says a lot. It says a lot about the contrast between societies where it is the capitalists who rule and those societies which are based on socialistic rule. In the next, main part of this article we present some hard facts comparing socialistic China with the capitalist countries.
However, we must note here that while capitalist rule was smashed in China through its 1949 Revolution and while a new workers state has been built with an economy in which socialistic public sector enterprises form the backbone, China is still not yet a fully socialist society. A fully socialist society is one where not only have the capitalists been deposed from power and where the working class masses have built an economy based on socialistic state-owned enterprises but one where people are actually paid according to the work that they do. Over a period of time, such a socialist society will eventually progress to a communist one. A communist society is a community where people receive payment for their work according to their needs and where all social inequalities between different layers of the population have been overcome as everyone’s manifold and varied abilities are, quite naturally, given equal value and respect without the need of a state or any kind of administrative or bureaucratic mechanism to maintain order over society from above. The leaders of the CPC do not claim that China is already communist. Indeed, they state that the PRC is still a long way from even fully accomplishing the stage of socialism. Socialism can only be reached when the capitalists have been completely vanquished and the exploitation of workers by private business owners no longer exists. However, in China, alongside the dominant public sector, a significant private sector exists where capitalists exploit workers’ labour. Of course, these capitalists in China cannot operate with the “freedom” that they do in countries where it is the capitalists that have state power. In the PRC it is the toilers who, even if in a deformed way, through the CPC, hold social power. Hence we use the description “socialistic China.” This description alludes to the fact that in a sense China is in a transition from capitalism towards socialism. Yet, this is only in a sense. For although China has definitely moved in the direction of socialism since 1949, this movement has not always been in this forward direction over the last 68 years. What is more, there is no guarantee that China will progress all the way to socialism instead of falling back into the abyss of capitalism like the former USSR eventually, sadly, did.
For the private sector bosses that exist in China are not satisfied with their present lot where they are allowed to make capitalist profits in some industries but where their rights to make such profits are not only restricted but are always somewhat tenuous. So these capitalists – and the much larger layer of managers, lawyers, economists and journalists who cosy up to them – are constantly pressing for greater “rights” for capitalist exploiters. Most significantly, so too are elements within the right-wing of the CPC and the government – the sections of the ruling bureaucracy who are closest to the capitalists. Many in this entire pro-private sector layer are actually hell-bent on outright capitalist counterrevolution. However, given the current balance of forces, they often dare not openly promote such an agenda. Instead, they lobby for right-wing reforms that would increase the economic clout and social weight of private sector capitalists and, hence, their ability to push for outright capitalist restoration in the future. Batting in the same direction are the capitalist powers around the globe who use military, political and diplomatic pressure to batter socialistic rule in China from the outside. Inevitably then the threat of capitalist counterrevolution in China is all too real.
The PRC’s course towards socialism will only be assured once capitalist rule is overthrown in the most powerful capitalist countries around the world. That would relieve the military pressure bearing down upon the PRC and remove the main source of backing for the counterrevolutionary “dissidents” and NGOs operating within China. The deposing of capitalist rule in the West and Japan would also allow China to get access to the generally more advanced technology of the richer countries without having to allow excessive investment into China from capitalist corporations from these countries. Marx and Lenin always insisted that socialism can only be securely built on the basis of a productivity of labour higher than that of capitalism. Once the working class have secured state power in the most technologically advanced countries through revolutionary uprisings this will become possible: not only in these countries but in China and, indeed, the rest of the world too.
Given that the richest countries in the world currently remain under capitalist rule, it is not yet possible for the PRC or the other four workers states – Vietnam, Cuba, the DPRK (North Korea) and Laos – to progress all the way to complete socialism. Indeed, for this reason
a fully socialist society – and therefore a communist one – has not yet existed in this world. Nevertheless, the 1949 Chinese Revolution, like the October 1917 Russian Revolution, the Cuban Revolution and the Vietnamese Revolution, represents a terrific victory for the toilers and downtrodden of the world. They have not yet been able to produce fully socialist societies but they have, nevertheless, made massive leaps in the direction of socialism. By comparing these socialistic societies with capitalist ones we can get some sense of how very different a future socialist world will be from the current capitalist dominated one that we live in.
Prior to China’s 1949 anti-capitalist revolution, the masses there suffered terrible exploitation and hardships. This photos shows peasants having to carry over 300 pounds of tea on a journey of over 180 kilometres.
When we do a comparison between China and the capitalist countries in terms of indicators of socioeconomic structure, social progress and social ills, it will become obvious just how different the PRC is to actual capitalist countries. However, we cannot make such a comparison between China and the imperialist, rich capitalist countries like the U.S. and Australia. For at the time that China’s heroic toiling masses pulled her up onto a socialistic path in 1949, China was in a vastly inferior position to countries like the U.S.A and Australia. Prior to its 1949 Revolution, China had suffered over one hundred years of humiliation at the hands of Western and Japanese imperialism. After the British imperialist drug pushers crushed China’s resistance to their “right” to turn half that country’s people into opium addicts, the British forced China to cede its strategically located port city, Hong Kong, in the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing that followed the Opium War. This “treaty” also opened the way for the British to be granted “extraterritoriality” – meaning that its citizens residing in China were exempted from being subjected to Chinese law! Subsequent acts of imperialist aggression by Britain and other colonial powers forced China to later also concede extraterritoriality to the U.S., France, Netherlands, Italy, Germany, pre-1917 capitalist Russia and Japan. All this bullying and unequal treaties enabled the colonial powers to bleed China dry by dominating its markets and by brutally exploiting its workers in “concession” zones in key cities like Shanghai and Guangzhou (then called Canton). In contrast, colonial powers like Britain, the U.S.A and Australia grew fat from exploiting not only China but most of the rest of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the South Pacific and South America. Meanwhile, U.S. capital was partly amassed through slave labour exploitation of black people. Australia’s crucial agricultural sector was, for its part, built on the back of severe exploitation of Aboriginal workers who were largely denied access to their own wages as well as semi-slave exploitation of kidnapped Melanesian and Polynesian labourers from Pacific lands like Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands.
By the time of the foundation of the revolutionary PRC in 1949, the richer capitalist countries like the U.S. and Australia were in a far different position to that of China. At that time, Australia had an average per capita income nearly 17 times larger than that of China. The U.S. for its part had a per capita income over 21 times higher than China’s. Needless to say, given their vastly different starting points in 1949, it would be extremely unreasonable to make a comparison of indicators of social well-being between China and the richer capitalist powers. This is doubly so when it comes to any comparison between China and Australia, given that Australia has 50 times as much land per person as does China; and has much, much greater land, energy, mineral and water resources per person than China. To be sure, since the Chinese toilers pulled the country onto a socialistic path in 1949, China has made a lot of headway in catching up to the richest of the capitalist countries. While its income per person is still several times below that of the most economically advanced of the capitalist countries it has almost caught up in areas like literacy and life expectancy and even surged ahead in some areas like public transport and renewable energy.
China Then and Now. Left: Many women in pre-1949 China were subjected to the barbaric practice of foot-binding. For supposedly aesthetic reasons, young girls had their feet bound tight until their toe bones were broken so that their feet could be put into a cone shape. This left women crippled and with greatly reduced mobility for life. Right: Women acrobatic fighter pilots in the Peoples Republic of China. The 1949 anti-capitalist revolution and the resultant creation of a workers state greatly improved the position of Chinese women.
To fairly compare China with a capitalist country we need to compare it with a capitalist country that is not only similarly populous but one that at the time that China was launched onto a socialistic path was at a similar level of development. We find such a capitalist country in India. Although the Indian working class, poor peasants and working class women have waged brave struggles against the greedy capitalists and rural landlords that subjugate them, thus far the Indian exploiting classes have managed to hold on to power. India is yet to be uplifted by its own anti-capitalist revolution.
Capitalist rule in India has left hundreds of millions of its people suffering horrific poverty.
Like China, India had been raped by colonialism. India gained its formal independence from Britain in 1947, while China was ripped free from neocolonial domination through its 1949 Revolution. At this time, India was actually in a far more favourable position than China. Not only was it not burdened with the international isolation that came from being a socialistic country but its per capita income was over 87% higher than that of China’s (see figures from Maddison Project Database 2018, Groningen Growth and Development Centre, University of Groningen, https://www.rug.nl/ggdc/historicaldevelopment/maddison/releases/maddison-project-database-2018). However, by the time that China first announced pro-market reforms in the late 1970s, 30 years of socialistic rule had enabled her to catch up with and overtake (by over 45%) India in terms of per capita income and shoot way past India in areas like health care and education. Today, after nearly 70 years of socialistic development versus continued capitalist rule in India, China is way ahead by every measure of social progress. This is evident by looking at Table 1 below – a comparison which uses figures from largely UN or Western sources. The indicators which especially show how much more progressive the socialistic society in China is over the capitalist one in India are those related to the status of women and to poverty levels. As the table shows, China has at least a ten times lower proportion of people in poverty than India. Furthermore, the figures used in this comparison actually underestimates this difference since the figures for India are quite current while those for China are many years old – and since then China has made huge advances in uplifting people from poverty.
When the working class of India unite all that country’s oppressed – from impoverished landless tenant farmers, to low-caste people, to the Muslim religious minority, to subjugated nationalities like the Kashmiris to the downtrodden women of India – to make a socialist revolution, then the Indian masses will also rapidly pull themselves out of poverty and subjugation.
Socialism Works!
What Table 1 above shows is not only how much socialistic rule has enabled the PRC to improve the lives of its people but also how different her economic structure is compared to a capitalist, ex-colonial country like India. Thus, in socialistic China all urban land is publicly owned and all rural land is owned by collectives of the rural community. Although China’s post 1978 reforms greatly weakened the practice of agricultural production through collectives by the granting of 30 year “use rights” to individual farmers, the continued collective ownership of agricultural land has protected farmers from the return of landlordism. By contrast, most agricultural land in India remains owned by wealthy landlords and capitalist plantation owners, resulting in a life of terrible hardship for poor tenant farmers and agricultural labourers.
Most notably, Table 1 shows the dominant position of state-owned enterprises in China. Actually, if anything, the figures tend to underestimate the dominance of public ownership amongst the PRC’s biggest companies. Over the last few years several of China’s biggest state corporations have merged. This has resulted in a smaller number of state-owned companies but ones of even more gigantic size. In the PRC, publicly-owned enterprises dominate all the strategic economic sectors including steel, oil/ gas, power, banking, insurance, aluminium, mining, telecommunications, automotive, aviation, rail, shipping, ports, shipbuilding, aircraft manufacturing, train manufacturing, defence, space, robotics, high-end computing, wind turbines, electronics components, media, cinema, publishing, building materials, infrastructure construction and computer chip manufacturing. Even many consumer sectors have socialistically-owned enterprises playing a key role in them. Thus, China’s biggest real estate developer is state-owned Vanke, its main TV manufacturers and exporters are state-owned Hisense and TCL, its biggest air-conditioner producer is state-owned Gree, its huge whitegoods manufacturer is collectively-owned Haier, its biggest liquor producer is state-owned Kweichow Moutai, its largest food processor, manufacturer and trader is state-owned COFCO, its biggest mobile phone manufacturer is majority state-owned BBK Electronics (producer of the Vivo, OPPO and OnePlus brands) and state-owned enterprises even play key roles in hotels, tourism, department stores and supermarkets. Unfortunately, there are some big capitalist players present in areas like retail, property, internet, e-commerce and light manufacturing. Yet even some of China’s most well-known “private” brands like computer producer, Lenovo, are actually state-controlled and have state-owned companies as their biggest shareholders. Meanwhile, another of the most prominent “private” Chinese brands, Huawei, is avowedly employee-owned with many believing that this company headed by a former Peoples Liberation Army officer is actually a state corporation hiding its true ownership to avoid facing restrictions from Western governments.
In contrast, state-owned enterprises play a much, much smaller role in capitalist India than they do in Red China. Nevertheless, for a capitalist country, India has a relatively large state sector. However, in a capitalist society, such state-owned companies are not socialistic enterprises or even a step towards this. In a capitalist country, a state-owned company is an enterprise owned by a state that exists to serve the big end of town capitalists. In particular, state-owned enterprises in a country like India serve to ensure that sectors necessary for the overall functioning of the economy are adequately covered so that the capitalist private business owners can make huge profits elsewhere or through corrupt association with the supposedly “public sector” firms. In contrast, in a socialistic country like China, the state firms are administered by a workers state. They are not there to assist the capitalists to make profits but to form the backbone of the entire economy and to dominate the economy’s most lucrative sectors.
Rather than operating purely according to the profit motive, state-owned enterprises in socialistic China are often guided to meet broader social goals including boosting of employment, training of skilled workers, creation of opportunities for the disabled and pioneering development of new industries deemed to be important for the whole society and her economy. Most importantly, these socialistic state enterprises have played the decisive role in China’s poverty alleviation drive. Acting contrary to the capitalist practice of choosing investments according to which venture will bring the highest rate of profit, China’s state-owned enterprises have been directed to build up industries and create jobs in the most poverty-stricken parts of China. This has played a key role in enabling the PRC to lift nearly 70 million people out of poverty (as defined by its poverty line based on the World Bank definition of abject poverty) in just the last five years. As far as low-income people are concerned, socialism simply works! This is the case even when it is applied in a state where its practice is deformed and uneven.
Hyderabad, India, 2 September 2016: Trade unionists march during a massive general strike by 150 million Indian workers for higher wages. When the Indian working class – with doubly oppressed women at the forefront – lead the poor peasants, downtrodden castes, subjugated nationalities and the destitute of that country in socialist revolution, the Indian toiling classes will rip themselves free from exploitation and poverty in the same spectacular way that the Chinese masses have.
Apologists for capitalism will, of course, try to avoid dealing with a comparison between socialistic China and capitalist India by insisting that China be compared with the wealthiest of the large capitalist countries. They would say that since China is the most powerful of the socialistic countries and the U.S. is the most powerful of the capitalist countries, it is the U.S. that China should be compared with. No doubt they would also argue that since China is the most populous of the socialistic countries it should be compared to the most populous of the richer, “successful” capitalist countries: which is the U.S.A again. As we have noted earlier, given China’s vastly inferior position to the U.S. at the time that its revolutionary masses pulled it up onto the socialistic path in 1949, such a comparison would be very unfair and misleading. However, while we cannot compare China and the U.S. in areas directly affected by the level of economic development where the imperialist U.S.A’s massively advantageous position in 1949 allows it to still retain an edge, we can compare the two countries in areas like economic structure, social realities, social problems and government policy direction. Table 2 below shows that comparison.
In Table 2 we also compare socialistic China with another populous capitalist country in addition to the U.S.: Russia. We have chosen to include Russia in this comparison partly because she is the world’s number two capitalist military power (indeed, Russia is the world’s number two military power full stop, second only to the U.S. and not too far behind in this regard). Much more significantly, Russia is a capitalist power that is not part of the NATO fold and currently not at all a U.S. ally – indeed, right now Russia is being ostracised by most Western powers. Furthermore, we have chosen to include Russia in this comparison partly because the particular structure of capitalism in Russia is somewhat different to that in the U.S. Russia has, compared to the U.S., a relatively large state sector. As Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky noted during Soviet times: if in the tragic case that capitalist counterrevolutionaries were to destroy the Soviet workers state, the new counterrevolutionary regime would maintain a large, nationalised sector for a long time. Although the 1990s “shock therapy” saw massive privatisation in, the then, newly capitalist Russia and although the Putin government is today embarking on a renewed privatisation program, Russia’s state sector remains larger than that in, say, the U.S.A or Australia. A look at Tables 1 and 2 show that capitalist Russia’s state sector has approximately the same relative size as that in capitalist India. This is, of course, still much smaller than the relative size of the public sector in the socialistic PRC. Furthermore, as in India, the state-owned enterprises in Russia are administered by a state serving the interests of the capitalists, a state notorious for siphoning off the profits and assets of “public sector” enterprises to crony capitalists.
Table 2 below illustrates the proverbial “Great Wall” that separates socialistic China from both the U.S. and Russia when it comes to economic structure, distribution of economic power and state policy direction. The table shows that despite China having a lower per capita income, its society is far freer from social ills like violent racism, suicide and murder than either capitalist America or capitalist Russia. Furthermore, the PRC government’s policy direction is far more favourable to low-income people. Table 2 also proves that the argument that “at least people have more freedom” under capitalism is bogus. A resident of the U.S.A is nearly six times more likely to be imprisoned than a resident of China, while a resident of Russia is more than three and a half times as likely to be incarcerated as a resident of the PRC. Moreover, a person living in the leading country of the “free world”, the United States of America, is 136 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than a person living in China!
The Fight For Socialism and the 1917 Russian and 1949 Chinese Revolutions
In summary what Table 2 shows is that whether we are comparing Red China with the U.S. or with a current capitalist rival to the U.S.A like Russia, whether we are comparing the socialistic giant with a capitalist country with a relatively small state sector or a capitalist country with a relatively large state sector, as far as the interests of the masses are concerned socialistic rule is far better and more humane than capitalist rule. And if we make the fair comparison between countries that were at similar levels of development at the time that they diverged in political direction – which we do in Table 1 where we compare India and China – we see that socialistic rule – even if in a deformed form – delivers a far better life for the working class masses than does capitalism.
If a socialistic state burdened by excessive capitalist intrusion and bureaucratic deformations can achieve so much then it indicates the tremendous benefits that healthy workers states administered by democratic workers councils will bring in the future. However, this poses a question: Why is the workers state in China – as great as its achievements have been – bureaucratically deformed and corroded today by a significant capitalist sector? To begin to answer this question we need to go back to China’s heroic 1949 revolution and examine how it was different to the October 1917 Russian Revolution. There is an important difference between the October 1917 Revolution and the other great anti-capitalist revolutions that have been accomplished – including the 1949 Chinese Revolution. The social force that spearheaded the 1917 Russian Revolution was the urban working class which led the other oppressed masses of the cities and rural areas. These workers were brought together by collective labour in large workplaces and by the reality that any defence of their interests against their exploiting bosses could only come through their collective efforts. To be sure, it still took the tireless efforts of a determined communist party to solidify the workers together. However, the production and economic interest imperatives pulling workers together made it possible to unite this revolutionary class through its own organizations, the factory committees and soviets, and it was these elected workers organizations that exercised power in a truly sovereign way immediately after the 1917 Revolution. In contrast, the anti-capitalist revolutions in China, Vietnam and Cuba were spearheaded by poor tenant farmers and rural workers. Like the urban working class of Russia in 1917, these toilers had to fight with great heroism and self-sacrifice to achieve these tremendous revolutionary victories for the downtrodden. However, unlike the urban working class, the tenant farmers worked as individuals (albeit ones forced to hand over a big chunk of their produce to their landlords) operating separately from and even in direct market competition with each other. This mode of production inevitably had its reflection in the way the farmers related to each other. Thus, at times the tenant farmers had to be held together somewhat artificially from above by the more politically aware communist cadres. During the revolutionary wars, the burning necessity to defeat the landlords kept the poor farmers together but afterwards, especially, party cadres were required to smother centrifugal tendencies that would otherwise have torn the unity of the farmers apart. As a result, unfortunately, the workers states produced by these revolutions were not based on truly democratic mass organisations of the toilers but on organisations in which the party leadership had to bureaucratically hold things together from above. In such a structure, especially once the fervent idealism of the actual revolution inevitably dissipated, those exerting bureaucratic control inevitably secured privileges for themselves. Their privileged position, in turn, had a conservativising influence upon them. In China, the ruling bureaucracy instituted pro-market reforms from the late 1970s onwards that, while they have, to a degree, stimulated economic growth, have increased inequality and dangerously allowed the capitalist private sector to gain greater influence.
Today, for China and the remaining workers states to progress further along the path to socialism, they need not only the assistance of workers’ revolutions in the richer countries but, also, a domestic transformation supplemental to the toiling people’s revolutions that created these workers states in the first place. They need the working class masses to thoroughly defeat emerging capitalist-restorationist forces and push aside those individuals within the bureaucracy and the more right-wing factions of the Communist Party of China who are bending to these capitalist elements. The working class masses will have to assume administrative control of society in the form of democratically elected workers councils. Such a movement would likely be led by genuine communist working class elements within – but possibly also outside – the CPC. Unfortunately, the program of the current CPC left – which tends to be based on a section of the middle-class bureaucracy rather than the working class masses themselves – is quite flawed and largely accepts the general thrust of the current government’s excessive tolerance of a capitalist sector. However, when strongly communist workers take the lead, this would likely spark – if not, actually, be led by – a left-wing, communist revival within the CPC itself. So, when a resurgent Chinese working class moves to defeat emerging capitalist-restorationist forces, one would expect the left-wing of the CPC and a chunk of the bureaucracy to follow or, more often, simply accept (even if somewhat grudgingly) the new reality rather than oppose it. It would, likely, only be right-wing factions of the CPC and the bureaucracy that would actually join the capitalists in actively opposing such a progressive transformation.
In contrast to the difficult birth of the revolution in China, the urban working class-led, October 1917 Revolution that overturned the bourgeois-landlord Russian Empire produced a workers state with a political structure and direction that, if only in its early days had it been buttressed by the support of sweeping revolutions abroad, would have been sufficient to one day carry the USSR all the way to complete socialism. However, the failure of the young communist parties in Europe to take advantage of revolutionary opportunities in the period immediately after the 1917 Revolution left the young Soviet workers state terribly isolated. Meanwhile, Russia and the other parts of the USSR were economically devastated by, firstly, the World War that preceded the revolution and, then, the four years of Civil War that followed when the Soviet masses had to defend their revolution from the overthrown and, yet, still ruthless and resurgent Russian capitalists along with all their international allies. Under these conditions of encirclement and economic scarcity and with the masses exhausted from years of wars, a bureaucratic layer that had emerged to manage the scarcity and help oversee the rebuilding of the young workers state was allowed to come to the fore and take over the political administration of the country. This was achieved by squeezing out the more revolutionary, internationalist wing of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union whose ranks had, tragically, been diminished as so many of the finest and most idealistic of the communist workers had, naturally, been amongst the first to leap to the revolution’s defence and so perished on the Civil War’s many frontlines. However, despite this bureaucratic degeneration that took place in the mid-1920s, the USSR still remained a workers state based on the socialistic, collectivized economic system that was established after the Russian Revolution.This system brought terrific improvements to the education, health, cultural life and standard of living of the masses. Nevertheless, the presence of a bureaucratic administration – with all its accompanying corruption and lack of real worker involvement in decision making – prevented the socialistic economy of the USSR from reaching its full potential and made the masses cynical about politics. All this made the USSR brittle in the face of the gigantic military, economic and political pressures it faced from the capitalist powers who were and still are determined to crush any workers state. When a small layer of capitalist counterrevolutionaries backed by Washington and Canberra, amongst others, made its bid for power in the USSR in 1991, the Soviet masses had, in fact, become so depoliticized that most of them did not resist in any effective way at all – even though many were, in truth, fearful of the consequences of capitalist restoration.
The Significance of Socialistic China’s Success in Poverty Alleviation
When the 1991-92 capitalist counterrevolution destroyed the former Soviet workers state, propagandists for capitalism around the world declared that this was “proof” of the “superiority of capitalism over communism.” Indeed the big business-owned media, school curricula and mainstream politicians were so incessantly drumming this message that even many self-declared progressive-minded people would parrot the refrain that “communism is a great idea but it doesn’t work.” Most distressingly, they would parrot this supposed “theory” as if it were their own profound revelation! Yet the effects of capitalist restoration in the former USSR and the Eastern European countries demonstrate the complete opposite. Capitalist counterrevolution led to an unprecedented drop in the life expectancy of the people, the reemergence of mass unemployment and a sharp drop in industrial output. The position of women dived in all the countries where capitalism was restored and the relative ethnic harmony of the peoples that existed in the socialistic days was replaced by inter-ethnic blood feuds and the growth of murderous, far-right racist gangs. What all this actually proved is how much more progressive the former socialistic system had been in comparison with the restored capitalist rule. This is the case even though the workers states that had existed prior to counterrevolution were – as the PRC is today – bureaucratically deformed.
I make it a point never to bring sand to the beach. unica-web.com cialis 5 mg This kind of pills just provides a cure for impotence as viagra shop . buy viagra italy http://www.unica-web.com/archive/2015/Palmares-UNICA-2015-2.pdf In the support to the nursing house, material incitement in addition to the passionate confirmation of thinking touch realize a feeling of prosperity and wellbeing. It is not anything else, but only because of the adverse side effects, immediately get in touch with a doctor. levitra online salesHowever, the most powerful refutation of the capitalist claim that “communism is dead” comes from the ongoing, living history of the PRC. The fact is that the world’s most populous country remains under socialistic rule. What’s more, under this system, the PRC has made terrific achievements in improving the health, education level and standard of living of its people. Indeed, the overwhelming majority of the upliftment of people from poverty in the world over the last few decades has taken place within China. Put another way, if you exclude the PRC’s progress in poverty alleviation, there has been very little net reduction in poverty in the world. Contrary to the triumphal claims of capitalist ruling classes 26 years ago when the USSR collapsed, today’s China, despite its imperfections, is proving that it is socialism that is the superior system. This has been most evident since the Global Financial Crisis and Great Recession hit the capitalist world nearly ten years ago. Since then much of the capitalist world continues to be mired by high unemployment or a large number of people working insecure, casual jobs with less hours than they want. Capitalist societies are seeing deteriorating social services, growing homelessness and a terrifying growth of racist attacks against ethnic and religious minorities. In the international arena, the world’s richest capitalist powers like the U.S., Britain, France and Australia are still more aggressively causing death and suffering around the world through predatory wars and sanctions. In contrast, the socialistic PRC charged through the period of the Great Recession with her economic growth rate never dropping below 6% per annum. She has spent the period since then massively increasing low-rent public housing, expanding coverage of health insurance to the whole population and spectacularly extending high speed rail throughout the country. Instead of waging predatory wars on poorer countries, the PRC has been increasing aid, infrastructure development support and economic co-operation with African, Central Asian, Latin American, South Asian and Pacific countries.
Having suffered so badly under neo-colonial domination, China was at the time of its 1949 Revolution massively poorer and more backward than the richest capitalist countries. Over the following seven decades she has caught up greatly but still has a per capita income some seven times lower than the U.S. Nevertheless in areas like health care and education for the masses, the Peoples Republic of China has almost completely caught up. In other areas like public transportation, socialistic China has surged ahead. Left: A typical long-distance train in today’s U.S. Right: One of the many high-speed trains that today criss-cross throughout the extent of China. Red China has not only the fastest trains in the world but her high-quality, high-speed rail system is by far the most extensively used and longest high-speed network in the world with a length of over 25,000 km.
The capitalist media have had a great deal of trouble “dealing” with the PRC’s obvious successes. They always try to find something on which to attack “Communist China.” One area that they thought they were on a winner on is pollution. China is the world’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide gases. But this is only because China has the most number of people in the world! Per person, China’s emission of CO2 gases is actually nearly two and a half times less than both the U.S. and Australia’s (see: https://www.ucsusa.org/global-warming/science-and-impacts/science/each-countrys-share-of-co2.html#.W9uZ2_ZuIc9 ). Then there is the obvious reality that while the PRC is diligently instituting policies to reduce pollution like promoting electric cars, favouring renewable energy and further expanding public transport, the leader of the capitalist “free world” rants – and tweets – that the concept of global warming is … a conspiracy created by China!
At other times, the propagandists for capitalism have to grudgingly accept China’s development successes. Yet when they admit this they suddenly stop referring to “Communist China” but, instead, claim that these successes are due to “Chinese capitalism” or more recently to “state capitalism Chinese style.” As part of this big lie, they claim that China only started making progress after it started instituting market reforms in the late 1970s, which the Western media, when they need to, deceitfully equate with capitalist restoration. However, the truth is that the achievements that the PRC has made over the last four decades have been based on the terrific advances in health care, education and heavy industry development during the first three decades of its existence. Thus, in the period from the founding of the socialistic PRC to the time that the pro-market, “reform and opening up” policy was first instituted, China achieved a miracle in health care improvement unprecedented in the rest of the world. In just these 29 years, the PRC increased the average life expectancy of its people from 34 years to over 67 years … and this in the world’s most populous country!
What has made it easier for the Western media to avoid crediting socialism for China’s obvious success in poverty alleviation is the PRC leadership’s own reticence to stress the PRC’s socialistic character in international forums and meetings. As part of its policy of pursuing “friendly relations with all countries irrespective of their social system” – i.e. of attempting to have “friendly coexistence” with capitalist powers – China’s ruling bureaucracy seeks to avoid “offending” the capitalist rulers of the U.S.A, Australia and all the rest of them by speaking too proudly about its socialistic system in the international arena. Instead, they seek to stress any “common” features that China shares with the capitalist countries. They have tried to show that China, her system and her corporations are not all that different to those in capitalist societies.
Fortunately, this practice is starting to change to some degree. For the recent 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth, China donated a giant bronze statue of Marx to his hometown of Trier in western Germany. The anniversary itself was given a very high profile by the Chinese government and official media. This included a grand commemoration meeting involving all of China’s top leaders at the Great Hall of People. Speaking in front of a giant portrait of Marx that faced his audience of 3,000 participants, PRC leader Xi Jinping stressed the importance of maintaining Marxism as China’s guiding ideology. He also called for Chinese communists to study, learn and practice Marxism. Furthermore, one of the notable aspects of the 19th Congress of the Communist Party of China congress that was held late last year was that it signalled that the PRC’s ruling party would start speaking more proudly about its socialistic course in the international arena. Indeed, official Chinese statements have, for the first time in decades, even advocated the path of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” as a model for other countries – albeit only for other “developing countries.” This is still a long way from an internationalist policy of supporting revolutionary class struggle of the working class masses in the capitalist countries. Nevertheless, what this partial shift means is that it will now be harder for the capitalist-owned media to insinuate that China’s social achievements have no connection to socialism.
Moreover, as the open hostility to China of the U.S. and Australian ruling classes intensifies, the mainstream Western media and capitalist politicians have themselves found it more necessary to speak of “Communist China” as they launch one anti-China scare campaign after another. Despite this, most of the socialist left in Australia – including the three biggest far-left groups: Socialist Alliance, Socialist Alternative and Solidarity – claim that the PRC is just another capitalist country. This bogus “analysis” forms a convenient excuse for these groups to avoid the difficult and often unpopular task of defending the PRC against capitalist attacks. Instead, the “China is capitalist” “analysis” enables these groups to join the U.S. and Australian rulers in supporting anti-communist, anti-PRC movements. For example, Socialist Alternative’s report on the 19th Congress of the Communist Party of China (see: https://www.socialistalternative.org/2017/11/20/xi-jinping-strong-chinas-strongman/) attacks the PRC with many of the same arguments used by the most right-wing Murdoch media hacks. They cover the anti-socialist essence of their position by, of course, claiming that China is just conducting another form of capitalism. Yet they can’t help exposing the fundamentally right-wing content of their stance. For example, their article hails the now dead, Western media-lionised, neo-conservative “dissident” Liu Xiaobo and his wife. An ardent supporter of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, Liu Xiaobo’s Charter 08 calls for the privatisation of China’s dominant state-owned enterprises, while masking the capitalist restorationist essence of his platform with calls for “democracy” – “democracy” intended to enable pro-capitalist forces to gain greater “rights” to leverage their wealth to grab back power. Indeed, the article published by Socialist Alternative attacks the imperialist powers for not having done enough to back Liu Xiaobo and his ilk. More generally, sounding like hard right-wing neo-cons themselves, they berate Western capitalist governments and media for not standing up to China and even for “political subservience” to her! Let’s get real! Western capitalist regimes have been sending their war ships thousands of kilometres from their own shores to provoke China in waters near her coast. They have provided massive funding for anti-communist Chinese NGOs, “dissidents” and exile groups and given huge arms shipments to the anti-PRC, capitalist Chinese enclave of Taiwan. In Australia, joint U.S.-Australia spy bases and the U.S. military base in Darwin, as well as Australia’s own military build up are aimed largely against the PRC and her socialistic North Korean neighbour and ally. Meanwhile, the mainstream Western media have launched one anti-China propaganda campaign after another – most recently focussing on buttressing the Turnbull government’s claim that China is “interfering” in Australian affairs. And yet we have supposedly socialist groups claiming that Western capitalist governments and media are “politically subservient” to China and her ruling Communist Party. Those sort of loony claims would make outright fascist groups like Jim Saleam’s Australia First Party or Nick Folkes’ Party for Freedom proud!
In order to mobilise support for its drive to help put the military and political screws on socialistic China, the right-wing Australian government have been running a scare campaign to accuse the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) of “interfering” in Australian politics. As we go to press, the Liberal-National coalition and the ALP have agreed to ram through draconian new anti-“foreign interference” legislation. This legislation will not only threaten most people’s rights, but will especially target anyone with sympathies for Red China, while at the same time ensuring that anti-PRC NGOs and activists harboured and nurtured by Australian and U.S. authorities face minimal opposition. As has always been the case, those most rabid in leading the anti-communist scare campaign have often been the same politicians in the forefront of spreading racism and hostility to workers unions. Thus spearheading the anti-China drive is Liberal MP Andrew Hastie. On May 22, Hastie used parliamentary privilege to launch a hysterical rant accusing the Chinese Communist Party of covertly seeking to influence Australia’s media, universities and politics. This same Andrew Hastie, was the previous month at the forefront of the hard-right, racist campaign for a special intervention to give white South African farmers refugee status on the ridiculous basis that they are being “persecuted.” Not only do these white farmers not suffer a rate of criminal attack any more than other people in South Africa, they are also a capitalist layer notorious for brutal exploitation of black farm workers on land that had been earlier stolen from the black people of that country. Some of these privileged farmers also form the key support base of the terrorist, South African fascist group the AWB and other, even more violent white supremacist extremists. Right: Last year two white South African farmers were found guilty of attempted murder and kidnapping after video emerged showing them forcing a terrified young black man into a coffin and threatening to set him alight as they closed the coffin lid on him. Left: Lakelands, WA: Andrew Hastie warmly greets racist supporters of “refugee status” for white South African farmers at a forum he organised to support their “cause.
Let’s Worker Harder to Advance the Struggle For Socialism!
The success of the Peoples Republic of China in lifting people out of poverty and improving their lives is undeniable. The capitalist media try to distract from this by attacking China over any issue they can dredge up. As a huge country with one in five of the world’s people and one where the basic socialistic order is contradicted by insurgent capitalist elements, one can of course find many true, negative stories about China. Indeed, you could probably find tens of millions of them. Yet, one will find hundreds of millions of positive stories! When the capitalist media and governments are forced to acknowledge the positive social advances in China they try to credit “capitalism” or “Chinese-style state capitalism” for it. Those wavering socialist groups that claim that China is capitalist in order to avoid having to defend her are actually helping the capitalist media in this bid to promote the capitalist system. They are saying that the hundreds of millions of people so quickly pulled out of poverty by China, the provision of low-rent public housing to tens of millions of Chinese people over the last few years and the roll-out of an excellent country-wide high-speed rail system by a country that 70 years ago was one of the poorest on earth have all been achieved … under capitalism!
Yet as people say: the proof of the pudding is in the eating. And as Tables 1 and 2 above prove, if we test what China’s society has produced versus what capitalist societies have, we see not only how much better China’s system is for the masses but how different it is to that of comparable capitalist societies.
So what conclusions should we draw from these comparisons in terms of our practical work? Firstly, we must acknowledge that these comparisons prove that the ascendancy of a workers state in China in 1949 represents a great advance for the masses relative to capitalism. Therefore, the working class of the world must unconditionally defend China and the other socialistic states (Vietnam, Cuba, North Korea and Laos) – as bureaucratically deformed and/or weakened by capitalist intrusion as they are – against capitalist military threats and pro-capitalist political and economic forces. Secondly, the comparisons show that, even when in a distorted and incomplete form, socialistic rule is far more progressive than capitalism. That proves how much better a fully socialist world will be for the masses than the capitalist-dominated one that we live in today. So, from Australia to Indonesia to India to Russia to the United States, let’s re-double our efforts to fight for world socialist revolution!
References for What a Comparison between Red China & Capitalist Countries Says About: Socialism vs Capitalism:
United Nations Office on Drug and Crime site, UNODC Statistics, Intentional homicide, counts and rates per 100,000 population, for 2014 – latest year available when retrieved 21 December 2017, https://data.unodc.org/ (then click “Crime and Criminal Justice” and then “Homicides” and then “Homicide Counts and Rates” and then search by country criteria entering China as the country).
United Nations Office on Drug and Crime site, UNODC Statistics, Intentional homicide, counts and rates per 100,000 population, for 2014 – latest year available when retrieved 21 December 2017, https://data.unodc.org/ (then click “Crime and Criminal Justice” and then “Homicides” and then “Homicide Counts and Rates” and then search by country criteria entering India as the country).
As Russia has only a monthly minimum wage and the U.S. only hourly minimum wages, while China has both, two comparisons of relative minimum wages are given (one between China and the U.S. and the other between China and Russia). The two comparisons lead to quite different numbers for China, as China’s hourly minimum wages are per capita relatively much higher than those based on its monthly minimum wage, as the authorities set higher hourly wages to protect incomes of part-time workers. Note the figures actually greatly underestimate Chinese effective wages as Chinese employers are in addition to the actual wage required to put into various employee funds a further amount equivalent to around 50% of their direct wage payments – including medical insurance, old age insurance, unemployment insurance, a housing fund and accident insurance.
Minimum wages for the U.S. were taken from United States Department of Labour site, Minimum Wage Laws in the States – September 30, 2017, https://www.dol.gov/whd/minwage/america.htm, Retrieved 11 December 2017
For China given that wages vary from province to province and within different areas of the province, figures are based on dividing the annual minimum wage of areas by the per capita GDP for the particular area as given by Wikipedia, List of Chinese administrative divisions by GDP per capita, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_administrative_divisions_by_GDP_per_capita , Retrieved 11 Dec 2017 for the year 2016. The lowest ratio shown in the table is for the Shanghai region for the calculations based on hourly minimum wage and for Beijing for the calculations based on the monthly minimum wage; and the highest is for the Tibetan Autonomous Region for both comparisons.
For the U.S., given that wages vary from state to state, figures were based on dividing the annual minimum wage of states by their per capita GDP for the state as given by Bureau of Economic Analysis site, Regional Data – Per capita real GDP by state, https://www.bea.gov/iTable/drilldown. cfm?reqid=70&stepnum=11&AreaTypeKeyGdp=1&GeoFipsGdp=XX&ClassKeyGdp=naics& ComponentKey=1000&IndustryKey=1&YearGdp=2016&YearGdpBegin=-1&YearGdpEnd=-1&UnitOfMeasureKeyGdp=levels&RankKeyGdp=1&Drill=1&nRange=5, Retrieved 11 December 2017.The lowest figure is for District of Columbia (with a similar figure for Wyoming) and the highest is for Arizona.
The figure is based on dividing Russia’s annualised minimum wage by per capita GDP calculated based on a gross GDP for 2016 given by Fact Sphere – Project Russia site, Russian GDP Volume, http://www. factosphere.com/macro/gdp/%5C%5CFILESERVER%5Cmacro%5Cgdp%5Cforecasts, and a 2016 population given by Worldometers, Russia Population, http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/russiapopulation/
United Nations Office on Drug and Crime site, UNODC Statistics, Intentional homicide, counts and rates per 100,000 population, for 2014 – latest year available when retrieved 21 December 2017, https://data.unodc.org/ (then click “Crime and Criminal Justice” and then “Homicides” and then “Homicide Counts and Rates” and then search by country criteria entering China as the country).
United Nations Office on Drug and Crime site, UNODC Statistics, Intentional homicide, counts and rates per 100,000 population, for 2014 – latest year available when retrieved 21 December 2017, https://data.unodc.org/ (then click “Crime and Criminal Justice” and then “Homicides” and then “Homicide Counts and Rates” and then search by country criteria entering U.S. as the country).
United Nations Office on Drug and Crime site, UNODC Statistics, Intentional homicide, counts and rates per 100,000 population, for 2014 – latest year available when retrieved 21 December 2017, https://data.unodc.org/ (then click “Crime and Criminal Justice” and then “Homicides” and then “Homicide Counts and Rates” and then search by country criteria entering Russia as the country).
These figures exclude the many hate-crime murders (about which statistics are hard to find) in Russia and the U.S. by people without direct connection to the Far Right.
The Western mainstream media which is ever eager to find negative stories on China has been able to report no case of a hate crime murder in China (other than that committed by anti-communist forces based on ethnic minorities – like Uyghur-based religious fundamentalists – against members of the majority Han ethnic group).
Persian Gulf War I (1991), intervention in Somalia (1992-1995), Intervention in Haiti (1994-1995), intervention in Bosnian War (1994-1995), bombing of Yugoslavia (1999), invasion of Afghanistan (2001-present), invasion of Iraq (2003 – ), war on Libya (2011), U.S. drone strikes in North-West Pakistan (2004-present), American-led intervention in Iraq-Syria (2014-present), U.S.-led involvement in Yemeni War (2015-present).
Involvements in wars in Georgia and Abkhazia (1991-1993), intervention in Transnistria War (1992), intervention in Tajikistan Civil War (1992-1997), First Chechen War (1994-1996), Second Chechen War (1999-2009), Russia-Georgia War (2008), intervention in Syria (2015-present).
Free a Pro-North Korea Political Prisoner in Australia!
Above, Sydney, December 2017: Australian Federal Police officers arrest Chan Han Choi. The Australian regime has since then imprisoned this pro-DPRK political prisoner in harsh and isolating conditions. Below: A rare image of the face of Chan Han Choi, socialist political prisoner in Australia.
14 March 2018: Like in other capitalist countries, the government and mainstream media in Australia make wild claims about supposedly gruesome “prison camps” in North Korea (the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea – the DPRK). Yet, there is little evidence for this. The main supposed “evidence” are the stories of a few of the defectors from North to South Korea. Yet only a small percentage of the defectors make such claims. Moreover, even though these defectors represent that tiny proportion of North Korean citizens who think that life would be better in the capitalist world – if only because North Korea’s people have been so squeezed by severe UN sanctions – hundreds upon hundreds of these defectors actually end up going back to North Korea because they find life in the capitalist South so harsh and unfriendly! And that is very telling. Because for a defector to return they have to undergo great risk to sneak past a brutal South Korean regime that actually jails any person who is caught trying to return to North Korea. The few defectors who do make claims about “human rights” atrocities are those eager for the celebrity status and the resulting fortune that their tales of “suffering” can bring them in a South Korean society ruled by an ultra-rich capitalist class eager to demonise the socialistic DPRK. Moreover, many such high profile defectors have famously slipped up by accidentally contradicting their own earlier accounts; thus proving that their tales are indeed inglorious works of fiction (see for instance: http://thediplomat.com/2014/12/the-strange-tale-of-yeonmi-park/).
Yet, while most of the claims against North Korea are bogus, there is something that is patently true: and that is that there is right now a supporter of North Korea who is a political prisoner in Australia. This pro-DPRK person who is being jailed by the Australian regime is 59 year-old, Chan Han Choi. He is an outspoken sympathiser of the DPRK. Chan Han Choi is a working class Australian who rents a dwelling in Sydney and worked as a hospital cleaner until his arrest by the Australian Federal Police last December. Neighbours describe the now imprisoned man as “polite”, “nice” and “softly spoken.”
However, Chan Han Choi faces decades in jail after Australian police arrested him on charges of attempting to raise money for the DPRK – in violation of UN sanctions – by trying to broker the sale of North Korean coal to private buyers in Vietnam and Indonesia. They also claim that he discussed the sale of North Korean technology and expertise to overseas buyers, which they allege could have been used for missile componentry and guidance. Thus, they claim that he violated Australia’s hypocritical weapons of mass destruction act. Australian Police admit that he did not actually sell anything, just supposedly planned to. We have no way of knowing whether the claims are based on fact. But given the racist, anti-working class and pro-capitalist bias of Australia’s legal system we wouldn’t be surprised if Chan Han Choi is simply being persecuted for what, basically, amount to thought crimes. Yet, even if the claims against him turn out to be partially or fully true, he is no criminal from the standpoint of the Australian – and, thus, international – working class. Quite the opposite! In that case, Chan Han Choi was simply trying to help people being ground down and potentially starved by some of the most severe sanctions ever imposed on any country. These sanctions imposed at the behest of the U.S., Japanese, Australian, South Korean and other capitalist regimes ban 90% of all North Korean exports – including her main exports coal, textiles and iron ore and other minerals. They also ban all North Koreans from working abroad, freeze out the DPRK’s financial entities and limit North Korean people’s import of crude oil and refined petroleum products. Similar UN sanctions imposed on Iraq in a thirteen year period from 1990 are estimated to have caused the death of up to two million Iraqis (!!) due to increased rates of malnutrition, lack of medical supplies and diseases from lack of clean water. The U.S., British, Australian and other imperialist countries that pushed these sanctions actually killed even more people from the sanctions than they did from their subsequent brutal invasion of Iraq. Even the UN’s own agency, UNICEF, estimated that the first eight years of the sanctions alone had caused such an increase in infant and child deaths in Iraq that it led to the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children under the age of five (https://www.unicef.org/newsline/99pr29.htm). If what the Australian regime allege Chan Han Choi did turns out to be true, he was laudably trying to save the children of North Korea, their mothers and the other people of the country from meeting a similar fate.
Kamal, an Iraqi child lies in pain from illness. He died three days after this photo was taken from a lack of medicine. Sanctions imposed on Iraq from 1990-2003 caused the death of up to two million Iraqis due to lack of medical supplies and increased rates of malnutrition. If Chan Han Choi indeed attempted to help the DPRK evade sanctions then he committed a truly heroic, humanitarian deed aimed at helping the people of North Korea avert the kind of calamity that Iraqi children and adults endured. Although the DPRK’s socialistic system enables her to direct resources to the needy in a way that makes her population better able to avoid the level of catastrophe that sanctions caused in capitalist Iraq, the extreme sanctions do still cause many hardships to her people.
However, what Chan Han Choi allegedly tried to do was not only a selfless act of humanitarianism. If he, indeed, did try to enable the North Korean people to sell items to raise money he was, importantly, standing by a workers state. The DPRK is a socialistic state based on public ownership. The system of collective ownership of the means of production in North Korea means that the DPRK is, even when faced with the most extreme sanctions, able to provide jobs for all its workers as well as genuinely free education, free health care and almost free housing to all its people. To be sure, the workers state in North Korea is bureaucratically deformed – mainly as a result of intense imperialist pressure and isolation in a capitalist-dominated world. Nevertheless, the socialistic state that was formed from the overthrow of capitalist and landlord rule in the northern part of Korea at the end of World War II is a huge advance from capitalism. It represents a historic gain for the world’s working class in their struggle against the capitalist exploiters; just like a workers victory in a big strike does – but in a much bigger way. Working class people of the world must, therefore, defend to the hilt this conquest. In standing by the DPRK workers state, in whatever way that he did, Chan Han Choi should be considered a hero to the toiling classes of not only Korea but to the working class and all downtrodden of Australia and, indeed, the whole world.
For the very reason that he has heroically stood by working class interests, the Australian capitalist regime is imprisoning Chan Han Choi in especially harsh conditions. He has not been granted bail since his arrest some three months ago. Even though he has not been convicted of any crime and is still in the early stage of court proceedings, the Australian regime has outrageously detained him in a maximum security jail. Moreover, they have classified him as an Extreme High Risk – Restricted (EHR-R) prisoner which is the harshest, highest security classification that can be given to any prisoner. The EHR-R category was sold to the public as a measure reserved for those considered to be an extreme risk to others and “a threat to order and security within jails” (https://www.smh.com.au/news/national/baddestofthebad-convicts–ehrr/2008/10/17/1223750306676.html). It was said to be reserved for crime bosses and suspected terrorists. Yet, Chan Han Choi not only has no violent history but is not even accused of conducting or planning any violent act.
EHR-R prisoners receive the lowest stipend to buy food. They are allowed less phone calls than other prisoners and these phone calls and any postal mail must be in English. All EHR-R prisoners have their phone calls listened to and mail opened, read and copied. The inhumane system is designed to make it very hard if not impossible for friends and family to visit as prospective visitors must first go through a weeks long security check and then wait to have their visit approved by the Commissioner of Corrective Services. Chan Han Choi’s detention in the most gruesome conditions possible in an Australian prison camp are clearly an attempt to break his spirit and isolate him.
Australian Working Class: Stand by the DPRK Workers State! Oppose the Sanctions!
Precisely because the maintenance of the workers state in North Korea is in the interests of the Australian and whole world’s working class, the U.S., Australian, South Korean and other capitalist ruling classes are hell bent on destroying the DPRK. They see the existence of socialistic rule anywhere as a threat to their capitalist rule at home. And they are right! The existence of workers states – in however a tenuous and distorted form – necessarily sends a message to the working classes still subjugated under capitalism that another alternative is possible; that capitalism is not inevitable. And this terrifies the imperialist ruling classes of the U.S., Australia and Japan. Furthermore, they have a particular fixation on targeting the DPRK because over six decades ago during the 1950-53 Korean War, the North Korean masses did the unthinkable. Incredibly, they faced down and beat off a combined attack from the most powerful imperialist countries in the world: including the U.S., Britain, Australia, France and even the apartheid South African regime of that time. Ever since then, the U.S. and its allies have had a particular obsession with crushing the DPRK alongside their usual hostility to all workers states. That is what the extreme sanctions that they have imposed on the DPRK are all about. They want to weaken the DPRK workers state and starve its people into submission.
In order to deter public opposition to their threatening campaign against the DPRK, the U.S. and Australian regimes – and the big business or government-owned Western media – have been portraying the DPRK as a dangerous “threat” to peace. They even make out out that the DPRK is hell-bent on attacking Western countries with a nuclear first strike. This is a ridiculous assertion. The DPRK has made itself very clear that its nuclear weapons program is purely for self-defence. If one believes the notion that a country’s mere acquisition of nuclear weapons makes it a grave threat, what does that say for the U.S. which has nearly 7,000 nuclear warheads … as opposed to the DPRK which has at most a few dozen and those not yet extensively tested. What is more, the U.S. regime, with the support of Australian imperialism, is the only government to have ever actually unleashed nuclear weapons on human beings. We should never forget their horrific war crimes in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. In contrast, although Western media have themselves stated that North Korea has long had enough conventional missiles to quickly destroy Seoul as well as other cities in South Korea and Japan, she has never even started to make such an attack. This despite all the provocations she has faced. Indeed, the DPRK has actually never attacked a foreign country. The only war she has ever been involved in is the 1950-53 Korean War when her people with the backing of hundreds of thousands of Chinese communist volunteers defended the socialistic state against the imperialist godfathers and the capitalist regime that rules the south of the country.
Let’s also not lose sight of the fact that it is not North Korea that twice attacked Iraq, that totally destroyed Libya and that devastated Serbia in the 1999 war on Yugoslavia. It is not North Korea that is committing an ongoing series of war crimes by murdering tens of thousands of civilians in Afghanistan (and more recently Syria and northern Iraq) through air strikes which the bombers knew would kill many civilians. No: all these crimes were the foul handiwork of the U.S. rulers and always with the direct or indirect assistance of their Australian, British and other junior imperialist partners. It is these capitalist powers that are the real threat to the world’s peoples and not at all the DPRK. What the DPRK’s nuclear weapons program does “threaten” to do is to make the North Korean people less intimidated by the menacing military “exercises” that the U.S., Australian and South Korean capitalist regimes regularly stage on her doorstep. Most importantly, North Korea’s highly effective weapons program “threatens” to make it harder for the capitalist powers to launch a new Korean War against her. That is why the Western capitalist powers are so obsessed with stopping the DPRK acquiring a nuclear missile capability.
Magnificent launch! North Korea’s 4 July, 2017 test of its Hwasong-14 intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) was a great success. Some four months later, North Korea successfully tested her still more powerful Hwasong-15, proving that it has developed an ICBM that can reach any part of the U.S. mainland. Meanwhile, in September last year, the DPRK tested a powerful thermonuclear bomb that could be loaded onto an ICBM. It is this rapid development of a nuclear deterrence capability that forced the war-mongering U.S. regime to finally agree to the DPRK’s decades-long call for a peace summit between the leaders of the two countries. It is not wrong for the DPRK’s leaders to try to cut a deal to ameliorate the threats she faces from imperialism. However, North Korea must not give up its nuclear weapons capability. As the 2011 NATO-led destruction of Libya showed – after that country gave up its nuclear weapons in exchange for recognition by the West – “security guarantees” given by imperialist powers are, in the end, worthless scraps of paper.
In targeting the DPRK, the imperialist powers have in their mind an even bigger target. That target is the DPRK’s neighbour and ally, the Peoples Republic of China (PRC): the world’s largest socialistic country. Although decades of pro-market measures by China’s government has dangerously allowed capitalists to gain a foothold in China, these capitalists do not hold state power there. China remains a workers state whose key economic sectors are dominated by socialistic state-owned enterprises. It is this that has enabled the PRC to spectacularly lift hundreds of millions of its people out of the terrible poverty of its capitalist days. However, the greedy ruling classes of the capitalist powers know that the presence of such a socialistic power as China is a threat to their “right” to bully and exploit most of the world. That is why they are working feverishly to contain China’s rise and foster capitalist restoration there. The assertion that China’s development is “challenging Australia’s interests” that’s contained in the Australian regime’s foreign policy White Paper unveiled in November and the increasingly frequent government and media scare campaigns alleging that China is “aggressively influencing” Australian affairs show the efforts that the capitalist rulers are going to in order to mobilise the population behind their anti-PRC campaign; just as they manufacture the bogey of a “North Korean nuclear threat” to deceive the masses into accepting their war drive against the DPRK.
Beijing, March 2018: PRC president Xi Jinping toasts Kim Jong-un during the latter’s first overseas trip since becoming leader of the DPRK. The meeting shored up the badly needed socialist alliance between China and the DPRK. A major reason why the U.S. and Australian imperialists are targeting North Korea is to indirectly squeeze her socialistic neighbour and ally, the PRC.
A key method that the Western capitalist rulers use to tighten the military, diplomatic and economic screws on the PRC is to menace its socialistic neighbour, the DPRK. That is why the PRC government’s policy of seeking to meet the imperialist powers half-way over the DPRK is harmful to socialistic rule in China itself. The PRC should recall the internationalist spirit of its heroic support to the DPRK during the Korean War. She must immediately end participation in all sanctions against the DPRK and, instead, strongly stand by her socialistic neighbour – including by defending the DPRK’s development of a nuclear deterrence.
Should the imperialists powers succeed in using some combination of military power, intimidation and extreme sanctions to bring down the socialistic order in North Korea they would be able to greatly embolden the forces of capitalist counterrevolution in China as well. And if the, currently fragile, workers state in China were to be smashed by capitalist counterrevolution it would be a terrible disaster for the working class and downtrodden of the world – on a par with the 1991-92 destruction of socialistic rule in the former USSR. Capitalist restoration in China would lead to hundreds of millions of Chinese people being plunged back into poverty while the country would be turned into one huge sweatshop for exploitation by not only local Chinese capitalists but by Western and Japanese ones – just like in the pre-1949 capitalist-feudal China. This would then be used as a giant wedge to drive down the wages and conditions of workers around the globe – including in Australia. Meanwhile, triumphant capitalist rulers from the U.S. to Mexico to Britain, Germany, Egypt, India, Thailand, the Philippines and Australia would be emboldened to attack the rights of workers and the oppressed in their own countries, just as they did after the overturn of socialistic rule in the USSR. That is why it is doubly important for the working class and all the downtrodden of Australia and the entire world to stand by socialistic rule in China and North Korea and to also defend the other workers states in Cuba, Vietnam and Laos. By standing by the DPRK in whatever way that he did, Chan Han Choi has taken the side of the international working class in this crucial battle. For this stance he is being persecuted by the Australian regime. The working class and downtrodden of Australia and the world must stand by him. We must demand: Free Chan Han Choi! Drop all the charges now!
Chan Han Choi should be considered a working class hero. However, we do not advocate that other working class people politically aware enough to understand the need to defend socialistic states like the DPRK do what he is alleged to have done. The reason is that the chances of getting caught are too high. Australia is a police state where the authorities engage in massive spying on the population for the sake of enforcing the interests of the big end of town. As the 2013 unveiling of classified documents provided by former U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) contractor, Edward Snowden, proved, the Australian spy agency, the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD), is part of a sinister global surveillance apparatus involving the American NSA, the UK’s GCHQ and Canada’s CSEC. These Five Eyes partner agencies are harvesting email contact lists, searching email content and tracking and mapping the location of cell phones of millions of everyday internet users as well as secretly accessing Yahoo and Google data centres to collect information from hundreds of millions of account holders. The Sydney Morning Herald of 29 August 2013 also reported that:
The nation’s electronic espionage agency, the Australian Signals Directorate, is in a partnership with British, American and Singaporean intelligence agencies to tap undersea fibre optic telecommunications cables that link Asia, the Middle East and Europe and carry much of Australia’s international phone and internet traffic.
Meanwhile the powers granted to the ASD, ASIO, the police and other repressive police and spy agencies are being ever increased. Therefore, covert activities to support working class interests and workers states are not the best strategy. What we need to do is to openly appeal to the interests that the Australian working class and downtrodden have in defending socialistic states in order to mobilise these layers in solidarity with the workers states as part of the fight for the workers’ own liberation.
Why a Working Class Immigrant from South Korea Living in Australia Would Want to Stand By the DPRK
When the Federal Police (AFP) announced the arrest of Chan Han Choi, the Australian media got itself all excited and jumped on the story. They made this headline news and pointed to it as “evidence” of the “North Korean security threat.” Yet, before long they realised that this story could punch a hole in their narrative about North Korea. They have spun the lie that everyone in South Korea is fearful and hostile to the North and that North Koreans themselves are desperate to escape to capitalist South Korea. Yet here is a man who grew up and worked in South Korea – and what’s more then lived in “democratic” Australia – and then allegedly took a huge risk to support North Korea in a way that, the cops admitted, sought no personal gain. On ABC current affairs programs, reporters and anti-DPRK “Korea experts” twisted themselves in knots trying to “address” this question. One expert admitted that there are people in South Korea who do support North Korea. Of course, they didn’t go into why. So let us fill in the blanks here. The reality of South Korea is that working class people there face a harsh life in that cut-throat, dog-eat-dog capitalist society. A very high proportion of workers in South Korea work as casuals with no job security whatsoever and minimal rights. Yet even with a large number of part-time workers, South Koreans endure one of the highest average working hours in the world. The brave trade unionists involved in organising to fight for workers’ rights face brutal repression. Currently, at least nine leading South Korean trade union activists are languishing in jail. Among those are the leader of the country’s biggest oppositional trade union federation, the KCTU. KCTU head Han Sang-gyun is currently serving a three year jail sentence for … organising a series of street marches that blocked traffic! Far from being the “democracy” portrayed by the mainstream Australian media, South Korea is a brutal capitalist dictatorship. Just over three years ago, the South Korean regime banned the left-leaning Unified Progressive Party (UPP) and stripped its MPs of their parliamentary seats for not being hardline enough against North Korea. This party had been the third biggest party in parliament with a vote share slightly larger than that which the Greens receive in Australia. With the aid of such repression, the South Korean regime is able to impose cruel living conditions on the working class. For example, there is no universal old-age pension in South Korea and there are large numbers of homeless people forced to sleep in train stations every night (see: https://www.trotskyistplatform.com/an-eye-witness-account-of-capitalist-south-korea/). Little wonder that the country has the fourth highest suicide rate in the entire world.
Han Sang-gyun, the former president of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) – South Korea’s biggest oppositional trade union federation – spent almost two and a half years behind bars for organising workers’ protest rallies. South Korea is a capitalist dictatorship that jails several trade unionists and brutally represses workers rights.
Given this harsh reality of life for working class people in capitalist South Korea, it is no surprise that there are people there sympathetic to the DPRK. Indeed, in the mid-1960s, the Western imperialists were terrified about how much sympathy there was for the DPRK in South Korea. Since, at that time, North Korea had better levels of health care, education and working conditions than the South, the U.S. was so fearful for the stability of their Cold War frontline state that they started pouring massive subsidies into South Korea. It is this aid which underpinned South Korea’s supposed “economic miracle.” Nevertheless, there continued to be a large degree of sympathy for North Korea amongst the South Korean masses up until the 1991-92 destruction of the USSR that left the DPRK isolated and led to a large drop in living standards there. Even today, the most politically aware working class people in the South remain sympathetic to the DPRK at some level. North Korea is seen by some in the South as the real, independent Korea whereas South Korea is viewed as a lackey of U.S. imperialism, founded by former collaborators with the much hated previous Japanese colonial occupiers of the whole Korean peninsula.
Seoul, August 2017: South Korean people protest against “Ulchi-Freedom Guardian” (UFG) – the U.S.-South Korea war games that were menacing North Korea. They also condemned Donald Trump for his threat to unleash against North Korea, “fire and fury like the world has never seen.” Especially given Trump’s escalation of U.S. terror bombing in Afghanistan and his regime’s ever more callous disregard for civilian life in their air strikes in Syria and Iraq, this was indeed a chilling threat. However, the DPRK’s subsequent demonstration that it has developed a credible nuclear deterrent has compelled Trump to promise to suspend future joint U.S.-South Korea-Australia war games as part of trade-offs with the DPRK leadership. Such concessions wrested from imperialism, while welcome, can only be temporary until these capitalist powers are swept away from within. This female sex booster cialis canadian prices works very similar to the way our inner world mirrors the natural cycles. If you try to leaf through the pages of the Bible and communicates them to the cialis canada online modern secularized men, the man of science. It effectively inhibits the PDE 5 enzymes and increase the significant viagra pill for woman http://deeprootsmag.org/2014/08/24/sorrow-suicide/ role of cGMP. Some symptoms and reactions can include depression, low immunity, disorders of the skin, adrenal, thyroid, heart, and vessels, etc. viagra in italy
If the lavishly paid journalists in the mainstream media were struggling to explain why a person who had grown up in South Korea would risk his freedom to support North Korea, they were completely unable to deal with the fact that this person who had allegedly harmed Australian “national security” interests for the sake of North Korea was also someone who had lived here for almost three decades. After all, they could not pass him off as someone brainwashed by religious zealots – as they could with ISIS supporters – as sympathy for the DPRK is not based on religion. Yet, if one looks at the reality faced by working class people in Australia, especially those from Asian and other non-white ethnicities, then why someone like Chan Han Choi would want to stand by a socialistic state opposed by the Australian ruling class is not really such a mystery after all. Even as the profits of corporations go through the roof and the likes of Andrew Forrest, James Packer, Gina Rinehart, the Lowy family and all their ilk amass ever more billions, the income of most workers are not keeping up with price increases and many workers face the reality of casualisation and having almost no job security. Meanwhile, especially with governments slashing public housing, landlords are charging exorbitant rents which means that low-income workers living in urban areas are being squeezed tight. As a cleaner, Chan Han Choi would face both low pay and poor job security. In the suburb where he rents a house, the average rent for a two bedroom house is $510 per week – that’s more than 80% of the after-tax minimum wage! Who can then blame a low-income worker renting in Sydney for being sympathetic to a state like the DPRK. In North Korea, even though sanctions and threatening military encirclement severely constrict the economy and hence people’s wages, at least rent is almost free and workers don’t have to face the indignity of being bullied by greedy capitalist bosses and high-handed landlords and their agents.
People take and watch rides in one of North Korea’s many fun parks. Contrary to the propaganda of the mainstream Western media, North Korea’s people enjoy a vibrant entertainment and cultural life. Photos: Trotskyist Platform
Furthermore, like other Asian-descent residents of Australia, Chan Han Choi would likely have experienced the racist hostility that this capitalist society engenders. It is Aboriginal people who have always suffered the brunt of White Australia racism. In a society which churns through the unfortunate targets of racism, one after the other, almost according to the changing whims of fashion, it is Muslims who are currently the number two victim. Over the long term, however, it is Asians who have been second only to Aboriginal people in being subject to racist oppression in Australia. Asian-origin residents – especially the majority who are not wealthy enough to shield themselves somewhat from the brunt of racist hostility – face threats or even real acts of violence from rednecks on the streets, abuse on public transport, bullying of their children at school and discrimination in employment. Chan Han Choi had a lot of good reasons not to have loyalty to the Australian ruling class and the socio-political order that they have created. Indeed, so do, ultimately, all working class people in this country!
Political Prisoners and Persecution in Australia
Chan Han Choi is certainly not the first person in Australia jailed for standing by the interests of the working class and oppressed. In 2004, Victorian secretary of the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union Craig Johnston was jailed for nine months for leading a completely justifiable, militant protest of dozens of union activists through the offices of two companies that were involved in the union-busting sacking of 29 workers. In the same year, several Aboriginal people and their supporters were jailed for periods ranging from a few months to up to two years for their involvement in a brave resistance struggle in Redfern that responded to the racist police murder of 17 year-old Aboriginal youth, TJ Hickey, and subsequent continued police intimidation of the Redfern black community. Then nine months after the Redfern resistance struggle, several Aboriginal people on Palm Island, off the coast of Queensland, were persecuted for their participation in a hundreds-strong uprising on the island that responded to the bashing to death of 36 year-old Aboriginal man, Mulrunji Doomadgee, by a racist cop. Several of the arrested community members were jailed including the leader of the struggle, Lex Wotton, who spent in total three years in jail. Meanwhile, the murdering policeman, Chris Hurley, got off completely free! The authorities had intended to jail Lex Wotton and the other Palm Island and Redfern Aboriginal resistance heroes for considerably longer but a spirited on the streets campaign in support of the persecuted people – culminating in a stop-work action by Maritime Union of Australia-organised waterfront workers in Sydney in support of Lex on the day of his sentencing hearing – made the ruling class and their courts realise they could not get away with even more severely, unjust sentences.
Two peace activists are also amongst the people who have been political prisoners in Australia in recent years. David Burgess and Will Saunders were each jailed for nine months of weekend detention for simply painting the words “No War” on the Opera House in March 2003, in protest at the then impending U.S. and Australian invasion of Iraq. That brutal invasion murdered hundreds of thousands of Iraqi people and was sold on the now notorious lie that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. However, unlike the jailed peace activists, those who ordered and implemented the blood-soaked invasion and perpetrated the “weapons of mass destruction” hoax were never brought to justice.
Aside from jailing some of the people who have taken firm stands for the interests of the oppressed, the Australian regime carries out daily repression against many others participating in pro-working class and leftist struggles. Over the last few years, they have persecuted in the courts well over a hundred trade unionists from the CFMEU construction workers union as well as other unions. Many of these union officials and activists have received hefty fines and other punishments for the “crime” of standing up to greedy bosses or leading industrial action. Two participants in last year’s ten thousand-strong, Invasion Day protest against the Australian regime’s brutal oppression of Aboriginal people have also been fined and given criminal records. Outrageously, they were convicted for rightly attempting to protect the crowd against a dangerous and unprovoked police charge into the rally which ended up with the marauding police barging over a woman so forcefully that she was knocked into a coma and sustained a level of permanent brain damage. Of course, no police were charged or disciplined over their riotous behaviour. Meanwhile, in a few months time, four pro-working class activists will be on trial after heavy-handed riot police arrested them following their involvement in a spirited, eighty-strong union/community/leftist protest occupation of public housing dwellings in the inner city suburb of Millers Point. The struggle rightly demanded that these homes, from where the NSW state government had driven off the working class tenants, be again made available to those on public housing waiting lists or the homeless rather than be sold off to wealthy developers and speculators as the government plans. Police have also arrested dozens of activists during protests against the Australian government’s brutal treatment of refugees. In December, five activists from the Whistleblowers, Activists and Citizens Alliance were fined a combined $20,000 for hanging banners on top of the Opera House that read “Australia: World Leaders in Cruelty #BringThemHere” and “Evacuate Manus”.
The fact is that the Australian state is far from a “democracy” where every person has an equal say in shaping its direction. Instead, it is ultra-rich business owners who through their ownership of the media and their greatly disproportionate ability to fund political parties, pay for political advertising, finance NGOs and use financial and career inducements to sway politicians and bureaucrats alike who monopolise the “democratic process” and the agenda and outcomes of elections. Moreover, the state machine which Australian parliaments administer is itself tied by thousands of threads to the capitalist elite. This racist, rich peoples’ state was originally founded to murderously uphold the dispossession of this country’s first peoples and to subjugate the poor. Ever since, whenever this state machine attacks the resistance of the masses to their own oppression – like when police attack union picket lines, courts ban workers’ strikes (as they did when they banned the Sydney rail workers strike that was to take place on January 29), the justice system persecutes union activists and the riot cops attack worker, anti-racist and leftist struggles – the institutions of this repressive machine and its enforcement personnel become ever more hardened in their role as enforcers of the current, anti-egalitarian social order. The imprisonment of political prisoner Chan Han Choi in inhumane conditions is simply a particularly cruel example of this capitalist state in action. It is notable that just two months before Chan Han Choi was arrested, the very same agency that arrested him, the Australian Federal Police (AFP), was busy intimidating the union movement. The AFP conducted heavy-handed raids on the Sydney and Melbourne offices of the Australian Workers Union over trumped up allegations about union donations to political campaigns more than twelve years ago.
Left, November 2011: Police attack striking workers and their supporters at the picket line outside the Baida poultry plant in North Laverton, Victoria. Right: Police attempt to intimidate the union movement by making a provocative raid on the Sydney office of the Australian Workers Union (AWU). The 24 October 2017 intrusion was part of simultaneous raids by the Australian Federal Police on the Melbourne and Sydney AWU headquarters. The police and other state institutions in Australia exist to enforce the interests of the rich big business owners over the exploited working class. Their imprisonment of a committed supporter of a workers state – Chan Han Choi – in inhumane conditions is fully in keeping with this role.
This capitalist nature of the Australian state conditions its “human rights” practices. Today, due to the rampantly racist nature of Australia’s justice system and continuing discrimination against Aboriginal people in every aspect of their lives, Aboriginal people are the most imprisoned people in the entire world. Meanwhile, the Australian regime locks up innocent refugees and migrants branded “illegal” in hell-hole prison camps in Nauru, Manus, Christmas Island, Villawood and elsewhere. Let’s never forget too the horrific crimes of the Australian capitalist regime in the PNG-controlled island of Bougainville. When the people of Bougainville rose up in 1989 against the arrogant destruction of their land and the refusal to pay any decent compensation by Australian owned mining giant CRA (which later merged with a British company to form Rio Tinto), the then ALP-led Australian government directed its puppet PNG government to brutally put down the resistance. They provided arms, intelligence and helicopter pilots flying as “mercenaries” to aid the war. Then they helped to enforce a cruel years-long blockade of the island. As a result, in all, some 15,000 to 20,000 people on the island were killed as a result of either gunfire or the lack of medicines and food caused by the blockade. Later, the Australian government and Australian-owned corporations Woodside Petroleum and BHP so savagely plundered the oil wealth of East Timor that the people of that resource-rich country have the highest rate of child stunting in the entire world! Figures from the United Nations Children Fund, WHO and World Bank show that 57.7 % of all children under five in East Timor have stunted growth due to malnourishment (see page 120 of Global Nutrition Report 2016, https://data.unicef.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/130565-1.pdf )! All this due to the greed of the Australian regime and the corporate bigwigs that this regime serves.
Those Claims About “Atrocious Human Rights” in North Korea
So what of the capitalist powers’ propaganda about “atrocious human rights” in the DPRK. Other than for dubious claims from certain defectors, the main “evidence” that capitalist politicians and media present for their assertions are restrictions placed on those who visit North Korea. Visitors do face some additional restrictions in the DPRK. For example, while North Koreans freely use mobile phones, visitors must leave their mobiles in lockers at the airport before picking them up on their way out. There is a level of paranoia in the DPRK about Western visitors. However, this is a paranoia borne out of reality. The North Koreans know that the capitalist powers really are out to destroy their socialistic system and will use any means possible to do so – including by sending in agents disguised as tourists or journalists to stir up trouble. For today, the DPRK is the most embattled country in the world. Not only do her people face the most grinding sanctions imposed on any country, they also face constant threat from the most fearsome military power in the world – the United States. The U.S. has close to 30,000 troops ready to attack the DPRK across the border in South Korea. Moreover, the hard right-wing, racist U.S. president, Donald Trump, has openly threatened to “totally destroy North Korea.” The people of North Korea know that this is no idle threat. During the Korean War, the U.S., Australian and other capitalist armies actually did all but “totally destroy North Korea” (but still failed to defeat her) as they dropped millions of litres of napalm to repeatedly burn Pyongyang and other North Korean cities to the ground. Long after the war, some U.S. war criminals boasted of their deeds:
Over a period of three years or so, we killed off — what — 20 percent of the population,’ Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, told the Office of Air Force History in 1984. Dean Rusk, a supporter of the war and later secretary of state, said the United States bombed `everything that moved in North Korea, every brick standing on top of another.’”
The Washington Post, 24 March 2015
It is with this background that we should look at the case of Otto Warmbier, an American who was imprisoned in North Korea and died a few days after his release. Warmbier’s tragic death has been used by Trump and the Western establishment as an excuse to escalate their war drive against the DPRK. The son of a wealthy company owner, Otto Warmbier, was a university student who had the self-declared aim of becoming an investment banker. While on vacation in North Korea, he was sentenced to jail after he snuck into a staff-only area of his hotel and attempted to steal a pro-socialist poster declaring: “Arm ourselves with strong socialism.” Security footage released by North Korea shows him ripping down the poster but then abandoning it because it was too large to carry off. He later confessed to the deed saying that a member of a Methodist Church in Ohio had made a large bet with him to take down a North Korean political poster and bring it back to the U.S. as a trophy. Warmbier added that the Z-Society – a shadowy, secret society in the university traditionally based on elite, upper class students – had encouraged him in this act. The Western media screamed at the severity of the sentence given to Warmbier. The sentence was on the harsh side. However, if one knows the mass murder that the imperialists committed during the Korean War, then one can understand how North Korean people would view Warmbier’s act with the same anger that Jewish people, Roma people, LGBTI people and leftists would view a German person taking down a sign at a memorial to victims of the Nazi holocaust or an Aboriginal person would look at a white Australian who defaced a site commemorating a racist massacre of Aboriginal people.
A month into Warmbier’s sentence, he suffered brain damage that according to North Korea was caused by an adverse reaction to medication given to treat an infection. The DPRK later released him on humanitarian grounds and he returned to the U.S. in an unconscious state. American doctors assessed that his brain damage had been caused by a lack of oxygen to the brain caused by cardiac arrest. However, even the viciously anti-DPRK Western media reported that his American physicians found no evidence of physical abuse or torture and that scans of Warmbier’s neck and head were normal outside of the brain injury. Indeed, when Otto’s grieving parents falsely claimed that his body showed signs of torture, the American coroner who had investigated the matter denied that there were any signs of torture, even adding that Warmbier had been “well nourished” and that, “We believe that for somebody who had been bedridden for more than a year, that his body was in excellent condition, that his skin was in excellent condition” (https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/otto-warmbier-had-breathing-tube-n-korea-exam-shows-n805191). Warmbier’s death was indeed tragic: for although his deed in North Korea was that of an arrogant, American rich kid he did not deserve to die for that. Yet, the most likely root cause of his death was the extremely severe sanctions imposed on the DPRK. These make life and medical care more rudimentary in North Korea than they otherwise would be; and since, as in every other country in the world, conditions for prisoners are not as good as for other residents, this makes life for prisoners poorer as well and, thus, increases the probability of prisoners getting serious infections while reducing the range and quality of available medication. In a way, what Chan Han Choi was allegedly attempting to do – easing the effects of sanctions on North Korea – would have helped people like Warmbier as well.
In the very worst case – and there is absolutely no evidence for this at all – it is possible that North Korea may not have provided an adequate quality of medical assistance to Warmbier in the early part of his incarceration (yet that North Korea was able to hand to the U.S. sets of MRI brain scans of Warmbier shows that North Korean doctors certainly did make valiant efforts to treat him later). However, even if one assumes that this worst possible variant occurred, the DPRK authorities’ treatment of Warmbier was not anywhere as brutal as the way Western Australian police treated 22 year-old Aboriginal woman, Julieka Dhu. Ms Dhu died in police custody in August 2014 just days after being imprisoned, so outrageously, for the late payment of fines! Unlike Warmbier, who the American coroner admitted showed no evidence of having been physically hurt in custody, Julieka Dhu was definitely physically harmed by police. In one case, video footage shows a police officer yank a very ill Ms Dhu violently by the arm and then cruelly leave her to flop down and smash her head on the concrete cell floor. The cop does not even then check to see if Ms Dhu had been further injured. And while DPRK authorities at least attempted to treat Warmbier’s medical condition, Julieka Dhu was cruelly denied treatment on multiple occasions – even when she cried out in pain from the severe infection that she was suffering. Yet the way the Australian media have handled the two cases could not be more different. They reported on Ms Dhu’s case as a tragic occurrence and in a small number of reports as a case of police neglect and discrimination. However, never did the mainstream media – and certainly never did any ruling class politicians – use the case to highlight the barbarity of the Australian regime. In contrast, the tycoon and government-owned Australian media railed that Warmbier’s death shows the “terrorist and brutal nature of the North Korean regime.” For Warmbier was a white American, yuppy rich man who died following imprisonment in a socialistic country. Whereas Julieka Dhu was a low income, Aboriginal woman killed by the criminal neglect and racist brutality of Australia’s capitalist authorities.
Right: Barbaric Western Australian police grab dying Aboriginal woman, Julieka Dhu (Left), by the armpits and drag her, handcuffed, through a police cell like an animal, while telling her to shut up as she moaned in pain. She died just minutes later from a severe infection. Her death was caused by being repeatedly denied adequate medical treatment after she was cruelly jailed for non-payment of fines. Unlike, Ms Dhu, there is no evidence that American man Otto Warmbier, who died in the U.S. after earlier imprisonment in North Korea, was ever harmed by DPRK state authorities. Yet the mainstream Western media ranted that his death showed the “terrorist and brutal nature of the North Korean regime,” while refusing to make anything nearing the same conclusions about the Australian capitalist regime responsible for killing low-income, Aboriginal women, Julieka Dhu – and for killing countless other Aboriginal people in custody. Furthermore while Warmbier’s death was indeed tragic, an American adjunct professor at the University of Delaware, Katherine Dettwyler made a sharp point about the issue (for which she was witch-hunted and driven out of her university teaching position), writing that Warmbier was “typical of the mindset of a lot of the young, white, rich, clueless males who come into my classes …. I see him crying at his sentencing hearing and think, ‘What did you expect?’ … These are the same kids who cry about their grades because they didn’t think they’d really have to read and study the material to get a good grade. His parents ultimately are to blame for his growing up thinking he could get away with whatever he wanted. Maybe in the US, where young, white, rich, clueless white males routinely get away with raping women. Not so much in North Korea” (see: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/06/26/professor-who-said-clueless-whitemale-otto-warmbier-got-what-he-deserved-wont-be-rehired/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.4e442960d6dc).
The truth is that Julieka Dhu’s case is hardly an exception in Australia. Police and prison guards here have outright murdered Aboriginal people both in and out of state custody. Eddie Murray, John Pat, Lloyd Boney, David Gundy, Daniel Yock, Colleen Richman, TJ Hickey, Mulrunji Doomadgee and David Dungay are the names of just a small proportion of the Aboriginal people who have been bashed, rammed, hung, suffocated, lethally injected or shot to death by Australian state authorities in recent years. Indeed, so many Aboriginal people have been killed in state custody that relative to the total current Indigenous population, approximately one out of every 1,200 Indigenous people have died in Australian prison camps or police cells since 1980. For the U.S. and Australian regimes to make accusations about North Korea based on the death of Otto Warmbier or based on highly contentious accounts from a handful of detectors is not only deliberately misleading, it is also the height of hypocrisy. Indeed, in U.S. prison camps the number of people dying in custody numbers from some 4,000 to 6,000 every year! This is in part because the U.S. regime is so biased against blacks, Hispanics and the poor of all races that the U.S. is by far the world’s biggest jailer. Indeed, the U.S. regime imprisons it population so much that the total number of people that it incarcerates, 2.4 million (!!), is more than three-quarters of the entire population of free-living residents in North Korea’s capital city, Pyongyang. Put another way, imagine if the overwhelming majority of the population of North Korea’s biggest city was locked up in jails – well that is what is happening … not at all in North Korea but in the United States of America!
There are a few people that the DPRK state does indeed deal ruthlessly with. These are mostly those that try to subvert its socialistic system and open the road to capitalist restoration. In this way, the DPRK workers state is acting just like staunch trade unionists on strike do when they take firm action against filthy scabs trying to cross a picket line; it is resolutely acting to defend the collective interests of the working class. In a sense, the DPRK can be thought of as one huge, more than 70 years-long strike against capitalism by its masses. It is a yet unfinished struggle because two-thirds of Korea still languishes under capitalist rule and because the workers conquest in the northern part of Korea is so threatened by imperialist powers. And just as the more up against it a workers strike is, the more harshly they must deal with strike-breaking scabs, so also the more embattled a workers state like the DPRK is, the more firmly they must deal with counterrevolutionary enemies.
Although the DPRK acts strongly against pro-capitalist threats to the workers state, it is very gentle in its treatment of the working class masses. Thus, while many Australian workers lucky enough to have a job spend a large proportion of their time worried about being bullied by their boss or about being the next one to be retrenched, the DPRK offers its masses a relaxed work life and a guaranteed right to full-time, secure employment. Indeed, this guaranteed employment, the tenderness of the DPRK state towards its masses and the society’s laid back work culture combine to mean that the North Korean state actually sometimes struggles to spur adequate productivity from its workforce!
There is, however, a more serious defect in the DPRK workers state. As well as rightly coming down hard against those trying to undermine socialistic rule, the state also represses genuinely pro-socialist elements who raise dissenting views to government leaders on various issues. It is possible – although not certain – that North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un’s uncle, Jang Song-thaek, was executed because he led a rival faction of the DPRK government (by contrast the claim made by Western governments and media that the DPRK leader had his half-brother Kim Jong-nam assassinated at Malaysia’s Kuala Lumpur International Airport is far from proven and the killing is more likely to have been the work of Western or South Korean intelligence agencies desperate to further isolate the DPRK by poisoning her relations with Malaysia – the one capitalist Asian country that had friendly, diplomatic ties with North Korea). Suppression of alternate views from those loyal to the workers state is actually harmful to socialistic rule in North Korea – as it prevents the free discussion of ideas necessary to work out the most effective course for the embattled workers state to navigate. This lack of workers democracy reflects the fact that although the DPRK has an egalitarian system based on socialistic public ownership, there is a somewhat privileged bureaucratic layer who believe they know what is best for the country and who fear their, fairly petty, privileges being questioned by the masses. However, as long as the DPRK faces such intense threats from the capitalist powers, it will be hard for her to be re-directed onto the road of socialist democracy that the workers state needs to follow. For as long as such acute threats remain, much of her masses will be resigned to accepting the administration of a know-it-all, slightly privileged bureaucracy because they fear that any political turmoil could open the way for a far, far greater evil: capitalist restoration and the return of domination by imperialist powers. Moreover, just as any half-heartedness and weakness (even serious ones) in Australian union leaders – and even any corruption on their part – does not change the main point that trade unions are workers organisations that must be uncompromisingly defended from the capitalist bosses and their state, so too the lack of socialist democracy in North Korea does not change the fundamental fact that the DPRK is a socialistic state based on public ownership that must be unconditionally defended against capitalist military and political threats.
The U.S., South Korean and Australian governments and media have made much of the execution of Kim Jong-un’s uncle and the far from proven claim that he had his half-brother assassinated in Malaysia. However, we need to put any problems in North Korea in perspective. In the U.S. or Australia one does not need to be a factional rival to a political leader to be killed by the authorities. One only needs to be the wrong skin colour or a person living in poverty … and accused of being intoxicated or of infringing a traffic law! In 2016 alone, U.S. police killed 1093 people on the streets of America! (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database). Then there are the horrific crimes of the U.S. and Australian regimes abroad. Together in the anti-communist Korean and Vietnam Wars they slaughtered more than five million people, killed hundreds of thousands more in their two wars against Iraq, their invasion of Afghanistan and their more recent indiscriminate bombing campaigns in Syria and northern Iraq. Then there are the U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia – conducted with the support of joint U.S-Australia spy bases in Australia – which have killed thousands of civilians. The fact is that other than from the standpoint of the capitalist big end of town whom these racist, rich peoples’ states serve and that of a broader upper-middle class layer who are comfortable under the current social order, it is the U.S. and Australian regimes who are the most atrocious violators of the human rights of the world’s peoples. Compared with these regimes, the North Korean rulers come off as saints!
Australia’s Capitalist Rulers and
Their Obsession with Attacking the DPRK
It is not surprising that there is a pro-DPRK political prisoner jailed in an Australian prison camp. When it comes to attacking the DPRK, the Australian capitalist ruling class is not merely following the U.S. out of loyalty to the superpower that protects its own plunder in the South Pacific. Rather, the same motives that drive Washington’s hostility to the DPRK drive Canberra’s own enmity to North Korea. Thus, just as the U.S. ruling class is bitter that it was not able to crush a small, socialistic country during the 1950-53 Korean War, so too are Australia’s rulers. They had unleashed a massive force of 17,000 troops into the Korean War – nearly nine times what they later sent to participate in the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Moreover, as an imperialist ruling class that considers the Asia-Pacific region as its “backyard,” where it should have the “right” to super-exploit darker-skinned workers and loot natural resources at will, Australia’s capitalists know that the existence of workers states in four Asian countries – China, North Korea, Vietnam and Laos – is a big problem for them. For the mere existence of these truly independent, workers states in countries formerly subjugated by colonial powers sends a powerful message to the toiling masses in the Asian-Pacific countries still grinding under neo-colonial domination. It sends a message to the masses of Indonesia, India, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Thailand, PNG and East Timor that by taking the road of anti-capitalist revolution you too can free yourself from imperialist subjugation.
This is why Australia’s right-wing government was so annoyed by the presence of North Korean athletes, cheerleaders and artistic performers during the recent Winter Olympics in South Korea. They feared that this would damage their regime’s efforts to falsely portray North Korea as a cold, cruelly oppressed society. Meanwhile, Australian warships and the Australian military continue to take part in threatening war games on the DPRK’s borders.
The Australian ruling class is also up to its neck in the imperialist propaganda war drive against the DPRK. Former Australian high court judge, Michael Kirby, was chosen to head the UN’s “Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights” in the DPRK. This 2013-2014 inquiry was meant to produce a report condemning the DPRK in order to justify further imperialist aggression against her. And Kirby duly delivered! He produced a thoroughly deceitful report based on “accounts” from gold-digging defectors and Western-backed NGOs. Kirby in the past had tried to cultivate the image of a small-l liberal. However, as a high court judge he was a top-level judicial enforcer of the racist, capitalist order. He has also been outspoken in defending the current social order in Australia. Thus, he is a raving monarchist who insists on maintaining the Crown in the Australian constitution and was one of the principal founders of Australia’s main pro-monarchy campaign group, Australians for Constitutional Monarchy. Indeed, he is such a reactionary that none other than the hard right-wing, former prime minister, Tony Abbott, is not only an open admirer of Kirby but considers him a mentor (see this fawning article praising Kirby from Abbott: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/legal-affairs/kirby-true-to-himself/news-story/1d080f4607675de6df618f3ed3a56bbb ).
As part of fighting for its own interests, the working class and oppressed of this country must stand against the all-sided campaign of the rich ruling class to destroy the DPRK workers state. Let us stand together to say: Down with the monarchist Kirby and his lying human rights propaganda against the DPRK – Down with the monarchy! U.S. and Australian troops get out of South Korea and surrounding waters! End all the war games threatening the DPRK! Close the joint U.S./Australia military and spy bases in Darwin, Pine Gap and Geraldton that are used to prepare imperialist military attacks against the DPRK and China! End all the sanctions against the DPRK! In the same way that we must always support a strike of fellow workers against capitalist bosses, we must unconditionally defend the DPRK workers state against all the military, economic and political threats that she faces. In whatever way that he did, Chan Han Choi bravely tried to do this. For this he is being cruelly persecuted. We must stand by him and demand that he be freed immediately.
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Long Live China’s 1949 Anticapitalist Revolution! Protect the Great Benefits for Workers & the Rural Masses Won through the Revolution: Stop Imperialist Funding for Those NGOs that Seek to Overthrow Socialistic Rule in China
Force Profitable Companies to Increase Hiring – Make Them Wear the Resulting Lower Profits Stop Billionaire Bosses from Retrenching Workers! No to Slave Wage Internships and Work for the Dole! For Fully Paid, Permanent Jobs for All!
Defend the Dominance of Socialistic, State-Ownership in China’s Economy!
Above, a common site in China: youth wearing the communist hammer and sickle emblem. Mass support for communism in China has thus far constrained capitalist restorationist tendencies within sections of the ruling bureaucracy. Photo: Trotskyist Platform
2 December 2016 – Last week, Fidel Castro passed away at age 90. Fidel led the 1959 Revolution that would end up overthrowing capitalism in Cuba and bringing terrific improvements to the lives of the Cuban masses. In response to his death, Chinese president, Xi Jinping lauded Fidel’s achievements. Here are some excerpts of Xi Jinping’s message of condolences to Raul Castro, first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba:
Fidel Castro, founder of the Communist Party of Cuba and Cuba’s socialist cause, is a great leader of the Cuban people. He has devoted all his life to Cuban people’s great cause of struggling for national liberation, safeguarding state sovereignty and building socialism.
He has made immortal historic contributions to the Cuban people and to the world socialism development.
The Cuban and Latin American people lost an excellent son, and the Chinese people lost a close comrade and sincere friend. His glorious image and great achievements will go down in history.
I believe that under the strong leadership of Comrade Raul Castro, the Communist Party of Cuba, the Cuban government and its people will carry on the unfinished lifework of Comrade Fidel Castro, turn sorrow into strength and keep making new achievements in the cause of socialist construction.
Xinhua, 26 November 2016
President Xi’s fulsome praise for Fidel and Cuba’s socialistic path reflects the fact that China itself is under socialistic rule. While Cuba’s revolution came in 1959 and was the first – and to date – only decisively anti-capitalist revolution in the Western Hemisphere, China’s anti-capitalist revolution came ten years earlier. It brought the long suffering toiling masses to power in the world’s most populous country and freed China from over a hundred years of humiliating, colonial servitude at the hands of Western and Japanese imperial overlords.
However, the Australian media did their best to hide the substance of the Chinese president’s letter of condolence over the death of Fidel. They reported very briefly that Xi had sent his condolences but made sure they did not report on Xi’s praise for Cuba’s socialist system. Why? Because to do so would highlight the continued socialistic character of the Peoples Republic of China. The mainstream Western media don’t want to do this. In fact, they sometimes even try to make you believe that China has simply “gone capitalist.” To admit otherwise poses a very inconvenient fact for the capitalist media: the fact that the country with the world’s fastest growing economy that has managed to lift hundreds of millions of its people out of poverty – i.e. China – has done so while based on a socialistic system. To admit this blows sky high out of the water the main anti-communist argument that people in the capitalist world are taught from the time they go to school and start watching documentaries: socialism may sound like a fair system but it just does not work in practice.
Top, Harlem, U.S.A, 1960: Fidel Castro meets American black revolutionary leader Malcolm X. Fidel led the 1959 Revolution that would end up overthrowing capitalism in Cuba and bring terrific improvements to the lives of the Cuban masses. When he visited New York for a UN meeting the year after the revolution, he was ostracised by the American establishment. However, in an act of solidarity with the oppressed black peoples of the U.S., Castro then chose to stay at a hotel in the black neighbourhood of Harlem reinforcing his hero status with supporters of black liberation and anti-imperialism. When Castro passed away in November 2016, Red China’s leader Xi Jinping hailed Castro’s “immortal historic contributions to the Cuban people and to the world socialism development.” However, Xi did not attend the funeral for Castro, only sending his vice president Li Yuanchao, seen at the Bottom laying a wreath for Castro at the Jose Marti Memorial in Havana, Cuba. Xi’s choice not to attend Castro’s memorial was no doubt an attempt to placate the far-right, U.S. president elect Donald Trump. Fat good that did the Peoples Republic of China! Trump and Co. wasted no time in attacking China. They even broke with decades of diplomatic protocol by provocatively giving legitimacy to the renegade, capitalist Chinese province of Taiwan. The policy of severely downgrading solidarity with the international struggle for socialism in the name of “peaceful co-existence” with imperialism that is practiced by China’s leaders – as was also practiced by the post-1924 leaders of the former Soviet Union and largely by Castro too after the initial period following the Cuban revolution – harms not only the global socialist struggle but socialistic rule in China itself.
Of course, the capitalist media do very often contradict their own, sometimes used, “gone capitalist” narrative about China. They, indeed, start talking about “communist China” whenever they manage to find an area that they can attack the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) over and exaggerate a problem – like pollution – or when they misrepresent events to accuse the PRC of “human rights violations.” The lying capitalists, actually, know very well that the PRC is not a capitalist entity but a socialistic state. That is why the capitalist-owned media look for any opportunity possible to demonise China, why the U.S. and Australian regimes support anti-PRC NGOs and dissidents within China and why investment from PRC state-owned companies are especially scrutinised by Australian government authorities. Most notably, it is why the Australian military is openly being built up to join the U.S.-led crusade against China even though the PRC is this country’s biggest export market and the main reason the Australian economy has not yet fallen into a new, deep recession.
Just like the Cuban Revolution, the 1949 Chinese Revolution led to tremendous improvements for the masses in life expectancy, literacy, health care and the position of women. Socialistic rule has lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese people out of the dire poverty of its pre-1949 days with a speed and depth that is completely unprecedented in human history. However, like in, Cuba these accomplishments are not guaranteed because socialistic rule itself remains fragile in China. It is fragile because at the moment the richest and most powerful countries in the world are under capitalist rule. As the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991-92 showed, even a socialistic state that is a superpower can be destroyed by sustained capitalist military, economic and political pressure.
Furthermore, the ability of the Chinese workers state to withstand external capitalist pressure is weakened by its own bureaucratic deformations – by the fact that the administration of socialistic rule is restricted to a narrow, somewhat privileged bureaucratic layer rather than being run by democratic mass organisations of working class people. This structural deformity arose from the nature of the Chinese Revolution itself. This great revolution was made largely by tens of millions of tenant farmers led by idealistic students, teachers and other intellectuals. Awakened and led by Mao’s Communist Party of China, the tenant famers fought with immense heroism to make the revolution. However, tenant farmers, while brutally exploited by the landlords, were still infused with the individualistic strivings that one day they would produce enough to free themselves from landlord domination and make a good income from selling their produce on the market – perhaps even becoming landlords themselves. Therefore, unlike wage workers who are united by their collective labour at the workplace and thus – when under revolutionary political guidance – could self-organise through democratically elected workers councils, the individual tenant farmers could only be fully united from above. This requirement and the practicalities of waging a long, guerrilla war meant that the victorious revolutionary forces and the ensuing workers state that they created had a bureaucratic – rather than a workers’ democratic structure.
In the late 1970s, the Chinese leadership, unable to use the driving and motivating influence of workers’ democracy to push forward production, turned to market reforms to further stimulate economic activity. These reforms would come to include the creation of a capitalist, private sector. In the complicated transition from capitalism to genuine socialism it can be useful to allow a limited private sector. This is especially the case given that before the 1949 Revolution, China was an extremely poor and backward country where the capitalism that existed was intermingled with elements of feudalism. However, the introduction of a private sector and market reforms to China necessarily brought with it greater inequality, increased corruption, some degree of unemployment and a reduction in solidarity between people. Moreover, the new class of, at first small, capitalists created by the reforms used their influence and wealth to lobby for greater and greater openings for the private sector. This influence was amplified because many of these new capitalists had family or other personal ties to the administrative/party bureaucracy. Today, the degree of private sector operation in China is much in excess of what is needed or desirable for the Chinese workers state. To be sure, the private sector bosses do not control the key sectors of the economy which remain under socialistic state ownership and they do not hold state power. However, the danger that the capitalists that do exist in China could organise a capitalist counterrevolution is a very real one. We only have to look at what happened in the former USSR. It was there that market reforms in the mid-1980s, dubbed perestroika (restructuring), created a class of petty capitalists and speculators. Then Soviet leader Gorbachev did not initially intend these reforms to actually lead to a capitalist takeover and at first that is not what perestroika meant. However, the layer of capitalists that Gorbachev’s perestroika created, with backing from a section of the middle-class professionals and student intellectuals – who expected that they would be amongst those who would strike it rich if capitalism was restored – became a powerful lobby force for further perestroika. They shoved Gorbachev and Co. further and further to the right. Each new set of perestroika reforms that Gorbachev implemented strengthened the economic weight and political influence of the new capitalists and whetted the appetite of pro-capitalist students and professionals. Eventually, with the crucial backing of Western imperialism, the new capitalists and their middle class allies were strong enough to grab back state power in the ex-USSR. The forces that made this counterrevolution were actually small in number. Most Soviet workers and collective farmers were not sympathetic to the counterrevolutionary course and many were downright suspicious of the pro-capitalists. However, in the absence of decisive levels of actual struggle to defend the Soviet workers state, the counterrevolutionaries triumphed.
Today, in China, the capitalists do not yet feel strong enough to openly call for capitalist restoration. They leave that to a rather small layer of Western-funded dissidents and NGOs. Indeed some of China’s capitalists even, rather disingenuously, sing the praises of the ruling Communist Party of China (CPC). They hope that this will save them from having their businesses shutdown – as has happened to many of their capitalist compatriots. But what these Chinese capitalists do a lot of is to use their wealth and political influence – through bodies like the private sector All China Federation of Industry and Commerce – to push for ever greater openings for the capitalist economic sector. They are assisted in this lobbying by a whole swathe of academics, economists, lawyers and journalists sympathetic to capitalism or at least to a greater role for the capitalist sector. This lobbying is indeed powerful especially when one considers that the relative weight of China’s capitalist class is far in excess of that of the capitalists in the former USSR at the time of the counterrevolution there. Fortunately, however, the resistance of the Chinese working class and staunch subjective communists to pro-capitalist measures – like privatisation – is also far greater than existed in the last period of the USSR. However, it is far from guaranteed that the political consciousness of the working class will always be sufficient to ensure that their resistance can hold back capitalist restorationist forces. The struggle in China between insurgent pro-capitalist forces and those resisting them is a finely balanced battle.
Moscow, August 1991: Western-backed capitalist counterrevolutionaries led by Boris Yeltsin make their grab for power in the former USSR. The social layers driving the counterrevolution were the small-scale capitalists and speculators bred by then Soviet leader Gorbachev’s pro-market, perestroika reforms as well as the pro-capitalist students and professionals whose appetites for making it big time in a future “free market” society were whetted by pro-market reforms. In today’s China, capitalists are bigger than they were in the USSR at the time of counterrevolution there. This shows the danger that socialistic rule in China is under today.
See-Sawing Contest
In the mid and late 2000s, the insurgent pro-capitalist forces in China were pushed back to some extent. China’s political climate in that period was shaped by increased activity of leftist tendencies within the CPC, the manifest weakness of capitalism worldwide as seen in the Great Recession and – most crucially – militant workers struggles for improved wages and conditions and against the few attempts made at privatisation during this period. The period from 2008 to 2011 in particular was the most left-wing period in China in over three decades. This period saw the nationalisation/confiscation of not only many formerly privately owned coal mines but nationalisations across a range of sectors from steel to milk processing to solar cell manufacturing.
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However, from about 2012 the political climate in China swung back to the right – at least on economic issues. China’s capitalist class and the host of economists, academics, lawyers and even CPC politicians loyal to them re-asserted themselves. This was reflected in some of the agenda of China’s new number two leader (ranking below president Xi), premier Li Keqiang. Li implemented special measures and tax incentives to help new private businesses. He also pushed for allowing private enterprises access to several areas like oil/gas, infrastructure construction, health care etc which had previously been restricted almost exclusively to publicly owned enterprises. Although the strength of pro-socialist forces is such that no CPC leader openly calls for privatisation of any of China’s major state-owned enterprises, the CPC leadership – including both premier Li and president Xi – have pushed for the sell-off of minority stakes in state-owned enterprises to private investors.
Developments over recent years in China have, of course, not all been in one direction. President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign has genuinely reduced corruption even though there is a suspicion that it has also been used against Xi’s political rivals – including those from the left of the CPC. Importantly, the anti-corruption campaign has protected the assets of state-owned enterprises from being squandered by corrupt state enterprise managers handing contracts to bribe-paying, private business bosses. In a small number of cases, the CPC’s drive against corruption and privilege in government officials has spilled over into healthy moves against opulence in the broader Chinese society. In early 2014, authorities in major Chinese cities ordered the closure of high-end clubs and expensive restaurants in public parks, scenic spots and cultural sites because these venues could not be accessible and affordable to the masses. Those high-end clubs and restaurants that were not closed were ordered to lower their prices and change their menus to turn them into places affordable by the masses. Meanwhile, formerly members-only clubs that were allowed to stay open were ordered to turn into open access venues. Alongside the anti-corruption, anti-opulence campaign, the ruling Communist Party of China has toughened its membership rules to ensure that all party members believe in the party’s stated ideology. On the one hand, this drive for ideological consistency has been, in part, used to silence leftist critics of pro-market reforms within the party. Nevertheless, it has also had positive effects. It has weeded out some ambitious professionals with little solid sympathy for communism who joined the party for merely career reasons and it has deterred capitalist businessmen from joining the party purely to enhance their connections with government. The most important positive developments in PRC politics in recent years is the continuation – and in some cases the deepening – of some of the progressive policies of the previous Hu Jintao government. This includes the moves back to universal public health care, a massive campaign to build and renovate affordable public housing, an increase in social security and pension payments and the enforcement of the drive to improve workplace safety. Most crucially, the new Xi Jinping government has re-committed to the previous Chinese government’s drive to bring every single resident in China above the national poverty line by 2020; and has moved to achieve this goal with renewed vigour.
Furthermore, many of the right-wing economic measures proposed have not been implemented much. Nevertheless, there has been a change in the political discourse from a few years ago. The suspicion of private business bosses that was sometimes seen from CPC officials and Chinese media during the Hu Jintao period, itself a reflection of healthy hostility to capitalists amongst the Chinese working class, is now more and more replaced with praise of their “innovative” capacities and their “entrepreneurship.” Sensing the mood, in March on live TV, China’s then finance minister, Lou Jiwei, ranted against the PRC’s 2008 labour law for being too pro-worker saying that it was contributing to unreasonable wage rises and making it too hard for bosses to sack workers. Although the strongly pro-worker law was not amended, Lou Jiwei’s attack on it represented a clear drive by the most pro-market wing of the Chinese bureaucracy to curb wage rises and slash employment regulations imposed on bosses.
Rightist elements of the CPC leadership – and the academic/economist circles backing them – are also using moves to cut over-capacity in China’s steel and coal sectors as a way to weaken the influence of socialistic state enterprises – state-owned enterprises being dominant in these sectors. Additionally, they are trying to use these cuts as a way to change the culture of PRC state enterprises. They want to prod these socialistic enterprises to retreat from their previous reluctance to lay-off workers and push them into operating more according to “market principles” (i.e. solely according to the profit motive). There is, indeed, over-capacity in China’s steel and coal sectors – the latter because China is moving intensively away from coal and onto renewable energy sources like hydro, wind and solar. However, not only should these cuts to overall capacity be done in a way that guarantees equivalent paying jobs for all workers moved out of these sectors but it should be done by forcibly closing the, often, poor safety and high polluting private enterprises that are part of these sectors. That would not only ensure that the tens of millions of workers remaining in these sectors have the best possible working conditions but would also make a huge boost to workplace safety in the dangerous coal sector in particular. Yet, thus far, the cuts to overcapacity seem to be roughly in proportion to the relative weights of socialistic and private enterprises in these sectors.
However, these recent pro-market measures have met with mass resistance. In March, thousands upon thousands of coal mine workers employed by state-owned Longmay Group marched through the northeastern Chinese city of Shuangyashan to protest against wage arrears resulting from the provincial government holding back support to the struggling company in order to push it into slashing the size of its workforce. A large number of similar workers’ protests and strikes have taken place throughout China in state enterprises facing similar predicaments. Meanwhile, Chinese people used social media to bitterly attack then finance minister Lou Jiwei’s criticism of China’s pro-worker labour laws. A comment made by Weibo (China’s popular social media platform) user, Se Kong Se Kong, typified the reaction to the ex-finance minister’s tirade:
Have him investigated ….
He’s no good if he’s speaking on behalf of the capitalists!
Financial Times, 10 March 2016.
All this protest and defiance from Chinese workers and leftists has had an impact. For instance, two weeks ago, rightist Lou Jiwei, was unceremoniously dumped as China’s finance minister two years before his term was due to end (he has since been given a much lower-ranking post). This was, no doubt, at least partially related to his anti-working class comments attacking China’s Labour Law and to the spirited mass opposition to his tirade. It was also reportedly connected to his pro-“free market” opposition to large state investment in infrastructure and fixed assets by local governments. Meanwhile, the huge Shuangyashan city protest by Longmay Group workers led the Heilongjiang provincial government to back down within hours of the workers’ action. The provincial government and its Governor, Lu Hao, apologised to the workers and arranged to fund the struggling state-owned company so that it could pay the workers the wages owed to them. More broadly, the PRC government has responded to workers’ concerns by stepping up efforts to ensure that workers laid off from steel and coal enterprises will be re-hired in state infrastructure projects, state-owned farms and state forestry projects immediately after – or in some cases even before – losing their previous jobs. Meanwhile, some state-owned firms cutting capacity in the steel and coal sectors have started up operations – even loss making ones – in often very different industries in order to avoid laying off workers. State owned coal companies in China’s main coal producing province, Shanxi, have set up pharmacies, solar power stations, restaurants, supermarkets and vegetable and fruit planting to move their workers into. One state-owned coal company, Qianhe Coal Industry, that had to cut its capacity, started organising its workers into production of food products – including tofu and potato noodles – in order to pacify its workforce. It is now even going to move its operations entirely from coal producing to the food products industry – even though its new area of operation is not currently profitable (Quartz, 31 March 2016).
Such moves by state-owned enterprises are significant as they undercut the agenda of rightists within the CPC and Chinese and Western “experts” who all hoped that downsizing in China’s state-owned coal and steel enterprises would help wean China’s state-owned enterprises away from their devotion to preserving workers’ jobs and push them onto the profit first path. For his part, premier Li has been forced into a partial back down in two key areas by the workers protest and leftist agitation. Firstly, Li and the rightist advisors and economists influencing him, were pushing for more unprofitable state-owned enterprises – dubbed “zombie industries” – to be forced into bankruptcy and, thus, into retrenching their workers. Although this plan is partially still going ahead, last month the PRC government announced a scheme whereby those holding the debts of enterprises would be able to swap them for equity. In other words, the mainly state-owned banks owed money by indebted companies will end up taking stakes in these companies allowing the companies to wipe out their debts and continue operation. The companies that will mainly benefit are state-owned enterprises as struggling private companies usually simply shut down and retrench all their workers when in financial trouble rather than maintaining major unpayable debts for long periods. For those private companies that are indebted the scheme will facilitate them to be effectively part-nationalised, since state-owned banks will end up owning significant equity stakes in them. Secondly, Li has, in practice, been forced to retreat from his promise to refrain from using large-scale state investment to stimulate the economy. The angry protests by state enterprise employees threatened with unemployment forced premier Li to boost state spending on infrastructure and development projects in order to create jobs for displaced former coal and steel sector workers to be moved into. For example, three months ago, the Chinese government announced an over $A300 billion plan to fund 130 projects in the north-eastern region of China – the part of the country with a disproportionately large concentration of enterprises in the steel and coal sectors.
The PRC government’s return to emphasis on state investment is driven not only by the imperative to respond to workers’ concerns but also, in part, by pure economic reality. The fact is that with the world capitalist economy – and thus demand for Chinese exports – in the doldrums and with profit-driven, Chinese private sector bosses less willing to make productive investments in the real economy because their ability to make profits has been curtailed by rising workers’ wages in China and the 2008 pro-worker Labour Law, the PRC government needs state-owned enterprises to drive growth. To put it simply: capitalism doesn’t work but socialism does and thus the PRC government, regardless of the political leanings of some of its key personnel, must once again rely on the socialistic state sector to shore up the economy. That is why despite all the special tax concessions and other incentives given to private enterprises, Chinese private investment in fixed assets grew by less than 3% in the first ten months of this year while investment by the state sector surged by over 20%.
A similar story can be seen if we look at the issue of administrative measures imposed on the housing market. During the period of Hu Jintao’s presidency from 2002 to 2012, Chinese governments imposed a series of measures to reduce housing speculation in key areas in order to make house prices more affordable to the masses and to ensure that housing construction was geared towards the needs of low and middle income earners. These measures included requirements for developers to meet certain minimum proportions of smaller housing, restrictions on the number of houses that people could own and regulations that made banks charge higher interest rates – and require higher down payments – for those buying second homes as opposed to those buying first ones. As part of these measures many major Chinese cities banned people from owning more than two homes. However, private sector housing developers and pro-“free market” economists, journalists and other “experts” complained bitterly that the measures were “distorting the market” and undermining the “healthy development of housing supply.” These voices obtained a bigger hearing from Chinese leaders in the post-Hu period and as a result in the 2013 to 2015 period some of the administrative restrictions on speculation were relaxed. However, that led to a rebound in speculation and opulent purchases of multiple house by the wealthy. Though this squeezed many lower-income people out of the private housing market, fortunately China has massively built public rental housing to enable lower income people to still get stable accommodation. In the last few months, however, the Chinese government has again returned to anti-market, administrative measures to curtail housing speculation and restrict the wealthy from buying up multiple houses.
The clearest sign that the political winds blowing to the Right in China are starting to recede was seen last month at a high profile meeting of government leaders and state enterprise heads about the direction of state-owned enterprises. The main theme of the meeting was president Xi Jinping’s insistence that it is imperative to: “unswervingly uphold the party’s leadership in state-owned enterprises, and fully play the role of party organs in leadership and political affairs (South China Morning Post, 12 October 2016). Xi insisted that any “weakening, fading, blurring or marginalisation” of party leadership in state firms would not be tolerated.” The meeting vowed to turn around the situation whereby the party’s presence in state-owned enterprises had started to gradually fade into the background over recent decades as these public sector companies became influenced by Western corporations. At the conference, which was notably held when pro-private sector prime minister Li Keqiang was away on an overseas trip, Xi also insisted that China’s state-owned enterprises are an important material and political basis for socialism and called to make these public enterprises stronger, bigger and better (Xinhua, 11 October 2016). This was a clear statement in defence of state-owned enterprises from China’s top leader and a slap in the face to others within and around the CPC trying to weaken them. Furthermore, by insisting on strengthening Communist Party control of state-owned enterprises Xi also contradicted statements by some Chinese leaders – including, to some extent, his own previous statements – calling to turn these state-owned enterprises into more profit-driven corporations. Thus, Xi’s speech at the conference ordered that state-owned enterprises should become important forces to implement decisions of the CPC Central Committee as well as to enhance overall national power, economic and social development and people’s wellbeing. This means that, at least according to the speech, the PRC state-enterprises would re-commit to maximising employment and protecting working conditions as a goal in itself, rebuffing the drive by some within the PRC bureaucracy to push the public sector enterprises into slashing their workforces. Notably, the Xinhua article on the state-owned enterprise work conference reported that Xi stressed the importance of protecting state owned enterprise workers’ rights to know, participate, express and supervise within the enterprises. He added that important matters concerning the immediate interests of workers must be submitted to workers’ congresses for deliberation and the system to ensure workers’ representation as the directors and supervisors of state-owned enterprises should also be improved.
An important positive consequence of this PRC government drive to increase Communist Party control of state-owned enterprises is that it will undercut their own plan to allow private investors to take minority stakes in state-owned enterprises. After all, if Communists are to be running these enterprises and if they are not going to subordinated to the profit motive but also be directed to meet national and social goals – like maximising employment, improving workplace safety, developing poorer parts of the country and spearheading the development of new industries– then what money-grubbing, capitalist investor in their right mind would want to put their money into them! This is especially the case when one considers that the rate of profit return on PRC state-owned enterprises is already only around half that of capitalist enterprises. These public sector enterprises – despite the often monopoly position they hold in Chinese markets – are simply not geared to the blind drive for profits and that is a good thing! Consequently, premier Li Keqiang’s “mixed ownership reform” – to bring private investment into state-owned enterprises – has often not led to the intended consequences. The most touted example of a “mixed-ownership reform” in recent years was Chinese state-owned oil refining giant Sinopec’s decision to sell-off a 30% stake in its distribution and marketing business to “private” investors. However, in the end it was other state-owned companies that bought up nearly two-thirds of this stake. A similar story occurred when China’s main oil producer, state-owned Petrochina, decided to sell-off half of its Central Asian pipelines. The announcement caused considerable excitement amongst Chinese capitalists and pro-“free market” economists and amongst Western “experts” and business journals. Yet, in the end, the entire stake simply went to another PRC state-owned company!
Profile of China’s Pro-Capitalist Advocates
Like the Western-funded NGOs seeking to undermine socialistic rule in China, locally emerged pro-capitalist voices in China shroud their agenda with calls for “democracy.” Billionaire venture capitalist Wang Gongquan (Left) is among China’s best known “pro-democracy” dissidents. He wants a Western-style (i.e. bourgeois) “democracy” so that the wealthy will be able to use their financial resources and connections to dominate the political agenda. A fan of Wang is Chinese property tycoon Ren Zhiqiang (Right), himself a very prominent “pro-democracy” advocate who opposes the Communist Party censoring publications that call for Western-style “democracy.” Ren is also an ardent critic of the PRC government’s administrative measures that restrict the rich from dominating the housing market. Showing his contempt for the poor, Ren once said that commercial residential housing is meant to be for the rich not the poor.
Smash the Political Influence of the Capitalist Class!
Despite what appears to be the first signs of a possible tilt back to the left in China in recent months, as long as there is a capitalist class in the PRC able to wield some political influence then the danger of capitalist counterrevolution is acute. Especially when capitalists within China have family, personal and cultural ties to the ethnic Chinese capitalists who rule Taiwan and Singapore, enjoy economic dominance in Hong Kong and Macao and also form a component of the capitalist ruling classes in places like Malaysia and the Philippines. Moreover, the U.S., British, Japanese, Australian and other imperialist ruling classes are working feverishly to undermine socialistic rule in China.
The response of China’s ruling bureaucracy to the threat of counterrevolution is not to organise for a struggle to outright smash the capitalist threat. Instead, they seek a balance – a truce – between, on the one hand, socialistic rule in China and, on the other, the out of power capitalists within China and the capitalist classes that rule most of the rest of the world. However, such a strategy is in the long run untenable. Socialism and capitalism cannot, ultimately, co-exist. We should remember that from the mid-1920s onwards – when the leadership of the former Soviet workers state started to move away from the truly revolutionary internationalist perspective that guided the 1917 socialist revolution – the USSR’s leaders tried a variant of the policy currently pursued by Beijing. And look what happened there!
The force that has a clear interest in waging a struggle against the capitalists to the end is the Chinese working class. Time and again, as China’s capitalists looked to be set to gain the economic weight, momentum and popular acceptance necessary to make an open bid for power, struggles of the Chinese working class and agitation by leftist elements within the CPC have intervened to push the capitalists back. Today, these forces must resist any sell-offs of minority stakes in state-owned enterprises to private investors. They must breathe life into the workers’ congresses in these enterprises and use them as a force to defend working conditions for workers and to ensure that the state-owned enterprises stay committed to overall social goals and maximising employment rather than to the blind drive to maximise profit. The Chinese working class and leftists must also defend the 2008 Labour Law against any attempt to weaken its pro-worker provisions and must, instead, fight for the strengthening of these laws. They should build workers’ committees – drawing into them staunchly pro-communist officials, police and Peoples Liberation Army soldiers – to investigate enterprises and ensure strict enforcement of the Labour Law’s pro-worker provisions. Such committees would fight for a policy whereby any private business that violates the Labour Law or any safety regulation is immediately confiscated by the PRC state and turned into a publicly owned enterprise. All these struggles should be part of a fight to smash the political influence of the capitalists and restrict the private sector to the level that is actually needed in the transition stage to socialism. Of course, the capitalists, their allies within the upper middle class and their imperialist backers would furiously oppose such a struggle. In the resulting decisive clash between the politically conscious working class and pro-capitalist forces the tightrope balancing act played by the current ruling bureaucracy would be shaken out of existence. The different elements of the bureaucracy would be flung onto two opposing sides. Those types, like pro-capitalist ex-finance minister, Lou Jiwei, who are closest to the capitalists would fall squarely on the capitalist their side. On the other hand, more subjectively communist elements and those closest to the masses would end up on the side of the working class (as would, inevitably, some careerist elements who see the inevitability of a workers’ victory). Thus, a workers struggle to smash the capitalists’ political influence and curb their economic power would not only fortify the PRC workers state but would also lead to the political administration of the PRC passing from the wavering hands of the bureaucracy and on to the control of the councils of workers and their allies that had just organised the defeat of the insurgent capitalists. The genuine communists who would guide such a struggle by the pro-socialist working class would understand that such a victory cannot be truly secure while the capitalists hold state power in nearly all the most powerful countries in the world. That is why they would link the struggle to defeat the insurgent capitalists within China to a perspective of solidarity with the workers and oppressed all around the globe in their struggles against their capitalist rulers.
The biggest impediment to such an outcome is that, currently, the international factors weighing on the class contest in China are almost entirely on the side of the insurgent capitalists. We workers and leftists in the imperialist countries need to change this and change this fast! The workers movement here should oppose political attacks on the PRC workers state from Australia’s capitalist regime (including those made under the pretext of “human rights”) and must oppose the anti-PRC Chinese exile organisations. We must build solidarity actions with progressive actions by the PRC workers state such as the implementation of pro-worker labour laws and the massive increase of public housing. The Australian working class and its allies must also stand against the U.S./Australian capitalist rulers’ military build up against China and must oppose their anti-PRC provocations in the South China Sea as the capitalist powers want all this military pressure to add to the all-round political squeeze that they are subjecting the PRC workers state to.
The incoming Trump regime in the U.S. has promised a still more aggressive posture towards China as well as a massive military build up. Today, as a blatant provocation against Red China, president-elect Trump broke with diplomatic protocol and held a phone call with the president of Taiwan, the part of China that the defeated capitalists seized when they were booted out of power by the 1949 anti-capitalist revolution. This is the first known contact between a U.S. president or president-elect and a leader of the rogue province of Taiwan since the United States broke diplomatic relations with Taiwan 37 years ago. The U.S. backs and massively arms Taiwan but adopted the diplomatic position of not recognising Taiwan as a way to way to maintain diplomatic and, hence, trade relations with the PRC while simultaneously undertaking its anti-PRC machinations. Trump’s phone call with the Taiwanese leader and their discussion about how to boost Taiwan’s military strength – inevitably against the PRC – is a signal that U.S. imperialism is going to unleash a more openly confrontational policy against socialistic China. Genuine communists living in the U.S. and its imperialist allies like Australia have got our work cut out. Let’s get to it!
Good News: China’s Arrest of Crown Executives Endangers Packer’s Barangaroo Project
Above Left, Australia, 2016: Police harass a homeless Aboriginal family in Sydney’s Belmore Park. In Australia, the legal system targets the working class and people on the lowest income. Aboriginal people are hit with severe racist, anti-working class repression with many Aboriginal people being killed in state custody. By contrast, in socialistic China, where the overall rate of imprisonment is much lower than Australia, the system is toughest on rich capitalists and corrupt government officials. Above Right: Xu Ming, one of many billionaires jailed in China. In December 2015, this capitalist exploiter, who was once one of China’s richest people, died in state custody at age 44. James Packer is used to Australia’s system where his exorbitant wealth and economic power buys great political influence. However, his assumption that things would be the same in the Peoples Republic of China have started to bring him a rude shock.
18 November 2016 – Greedy billionaire, James Packer, has been riding high. He was expecting to make an absolute fortune from his Crown Resorts casino and luxury hotel complex which will be built in the Sydney CBD’s, Barangaroo site. However, he was brought back down to earth a bit last month when authorities of the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) detained 18 of his wealthy executives. Among the high-flying Crown executives that the PRC has arrested are at least three Australian ones including Crown’s boss of VIP operations, Jason O’Connor. Those arrested are alleged to have been involved in organising the very activities that Packer’s high rollers’ casino will in good part depend on: luring high rollers from China to gamble at his casinos and other wealthier Chinese to hold their money in overseas casino accounts. Luring Chinese people to do this is illegal under PRC law. Packer and his executives knew all this. But they were so greedy that they could not help themselves and thought they would get away with it anyway. After all, in capitalist Australia, Packer and his ilk always get away with whatever they want! However, China is a very different story. In socialistic China, the “right” of business tycoons and other rich individuals to ride roughshod over everyone else and make a mockery of state laws is severely “repressed.” The PRC, understandably, does not want wealthy individuals depositing money in overseas casino accounts as that could be used to circumvent its strict capital controls which restrict the “rights” of the rich to freely move money about internationally. China also does not want corrupt businessmen and officials to use overseas casinos to launder dirty money or avoid taxes.
If Crown’s efforts to lure Chinese high rollers and wealthy individuals are severely curtailed, it could spell doom for Packer’s Barangaroo complex. Although the proportion of high rollers in China is tiny, China has such a huge population (60 times that of Australia) that these high rollers are, numerically, a big number. Furthermore, since gambling is outright banned in mainland China and PRC authorities have been cracking down on wealthy mainlanders travelling to Macao to gamble, Chinese high rollers now need to travel abroad to gamble. Similarly, other wealthy Chinese individuals need to deal with casinos located overseas in order to secretly move or launder money. That is why Packer was counting on luring Chinese high rollers to Barangaroo as a main income source for his casino.
One of the many positive aspects of the China arrests for working class people in Australia is that it could help the struggle to save public housing in Sydney’s Millers Point area which is right adjacent to the waterside Barangaroo site. Several of the Millers Point tenants who have been staunchest in resisting the NSW government’s drive to sell off public housing in the area are convinced that part of what is driving the government’s moves is Packer’s, very nearby, casino/hotel project. Their suspicions sound more than plausible. Certainly, it is beyond question that mainstream politicians of all stripes and states are servile to Packer. As the The Saturday Paper (12 April 2014) put it when describing the way that Packer received official backing for his Barangaroo plan:
State and federal laws and regulations have flexed or melted away in the project’s path. Ordinary rules don’t seem to apply to James Packer.
Thus, after the cabinet of corrupt then premier Barry O’Farrell openly announced its backing of the Packer plan, it appointed to head the “independent” detailed assessment of the project, David Murray, an ex-banker and a Liberal party supporter who has such close ties to Packer that he attended Packer’s first wedding! This “assessment” ended up being even more farcical than expected. The “independent” panel chose to seek their commercial advice about Crown’s proposal from Deloitte which has had a financial relationship with Crown. Meanwhile, it was uncovered that even before the “independent” panel had made its “assessment,” the NSW Premier’s department prepared it with statements to help it defend the Crown proposal from any negative media questioning! After bowing to a notably low tax rate for the planned casino, the state government then further facilitated Packer’s interests by ramming through a 2013 amendment to the Casino Control Act specifically to support Packer’s Barangaroo project. This special change to the Act had the support of not just the governing conservative Coalition but also the ALP and the Shooters Party. Even Fred Nile, supposedly a vehement opponent of gambling, campaigned strongly in favour of it. These amendments to the Act are so slavish to Packer that they ensure that Crown must be paid compensation if any future regulatory changes – like tax increases – hurt its profits. The Act even stipulates that the Independent Licensing and Gaming Authority (ILGA) cannot make any changes’s to a Barangaroo casino license without approval from Packer’s Crown! Not that the ILGA is prepared to stand up to Packer anyway. When, the following year, this “independent” authority conducted its probity check on Crown’s suitability to hold a casino license, the ILGA took only three months to pass Crown which, in the own words of the ILGA chief Micheil Brodie, “probably rates as one of the fastest assessments of a casino applicant in history”. Meanwhile, not only has Packer’s complex been infamously excluded from Sydney’s controversial lockout laws, it was granted a special exemption from workplace health and safety laws restricting smoking in indoor workplaces. As Australian Institute of Architects NSW president, Shaun Carter, put it after Crown’s casino/luxury hotel complex was granted final planning approval this June:
James Packer’s massive, $105 million luxury yacht and his $66 million private jet. Like other capitalist tycoons, Packer uses his immense wealth and economic power to gain political influence. Packer is great mates with former prime minister Tony Abbott [Above Right], current prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and most other top politicians.
In this capitalist society money buys influence. Filthy rich tycoons are able to swing political and bureaucratic decision making through giving hefty donations to political parties, through buying expensive newspaper advertisements (such as the full page ones that Packer’s Crown made promoting its Barangaroo plans) and by having membership in business lobby groups. It is well known that some of the ultra-rich also openly buy out politicians and government officials through open bribery or through purchasing them other favours – like liaisons with high-priced prostitutes. More common, however, are the softer – and yet more insidious – forms of buying influence that almost all capitalist bigwigs engage in. These include inviting politicians and bureaucrats to corporate boxes to watch the cricket or inviting them to exclusive parties and cruises on their luxury yachts. The ultra-rich capitalists also buy political influence through more subtle means – for example, through funding the arts. On 12 November 2013, the very eve of the day that the NSW parliament voted on amendments to facilitate his Barangaroo project, Packer ostentatiously announced a $60 million donation to various Sydney arts, theatre, opera and orchestra institutions by both his Crown Group and himself personally. This was intended to put pressure on any politicians who may have been considering voting down the amendment with the prospect of gaining the opprobrium of the arts community. Meanwhile, any politicians concerned that open support for Packer’s unpopular Baranagroo project could damage their image would now be re-assured that Packer’s donation would make him be seen by the public in better light. Furthermore, although $60 million is barely pocket money for a person who has a $5 billion fortune (“earned” by his and famous late father and grandfather’s ripping off of the labour of workers), it represents a lot of money to underfunded arts institutions. Imagine a talented young artist asking to get funding from a head of one these Packer-donated institutions for a project satirising the Banagaroo complex. It’s a sure bet that they won’t get very far!
We cannot, of course, forget the lobbyists – a big factor in modern-day capitalist “democracies.” It is only the super-rich who can afford to hire skilled lobbyists. Packer, for example, employed former ALP heavies Mark Arbib and Karl Bitar to use their connections to ensure that the ALP backed the casino. In general, business bosses like to employ former – and, if they can get away with it, even current – politicians and high-level bureaucrats to be on their boards in order to use the connections of these individuals to gain them extra influence in the machinery of state. Thus, amongst the board of directors of Packer’s Crown is former Minister of Communications in the Howard government, Helen Coonan. For his part, Crown CEO Rowen Craigie was a General Manager for Gaming at the Victorian TAB and held senior economic policy positions in Treasury and the Department of Industry in Victoria. Another Crown director, former Qantas boss, Geoff Dixon, was head of the Australian government’s main tourism authority, Tourism Australia, from 2009-2015: that is, throughout the crucial period when Packer was seeking government backing for his Barangaroo project. Big-time capitalists use a similar method to help ensure media support. Thus, the executive deputy chairman of Crown, John Alexander, is a director of Seven West Media – the owner of Channel 7 and its offshoots as well as Yahoo7. He is also a former editor in chief of both The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian Financial Review. Even more effective in ensuring media support is simple, direct ownership. Packer, himself, directly owns a $28 million stake in the entity that owns Channel 10. So, don’t expect this broadcaster to run any hard-hitting documentaries against Crown’s Barangaroo project anytime soon! Very helpful, too, for capitalist billionaires are the “mates” connections that they develop with media moguls and media high-fliers. James Packer is very close friends with influential, right-wing 2GB shock-jock, Alan Jones, with the 45% owner of Macquarie Media Limited (which owns both 2GB and 2UE) John Singleton and with Lachlan Murdoch, a director of News Corporation (owner of The Australian and The Daily Telegraph newspapers, a host of regional and interstate papers and 50% of Foxtel) who is, of course, the son of its chairman and controlling shareholder, Rupert Murdoch. Then there are the myriad of connections arising from Packer and his father’s former ownership of Channel 9.
Such “mates” connections also cement ties between capitalist bigwigs and the politicians that administer their state. James Packer, for instance, is such close friends with former Liberal prime minister, John Howard, and ex-treasurer, Peter Costello, that they both, once again, attended his first wedding. Packer also played golf with Stephen Conroy when the latter was Communications Minister in the last ALP federal government. Packer is good mates too with Bob Katter and former Victorian premier, Jeff Kennett. Meanwhile, recent ex-Trade Minister, Andrew Robb, had worked for Packer’s PBL company from 1997-2001. What gives individual big capitalists political clout is not only their personal wealth and connections but their control of large chunks of the economy. Capitalist politicians and high-level bureaucrats are always on the lookout for lucrative positions in the private sector to move into once their careers in government or the public service are over. Thus, big business owners can lure these politicians and bureaucrats into doing their bidding precisely because these schmucks hope that this would open up a future career for them hired either directly as executives of or as consultants for their corporations (the way that former Labor powerbrokers Graham Richardson, Karl Bitar and Mark Arbib and prominent Liberal socialite, Ann Peacock, did in getting positions in Packer companies) or by other companies looking to establish links with these corporations. Even less cynical government politicians who actually believe (wrongly!) that they are to some degree representing the people are pulled into the orbit of those with considerable weight in the economy. For in an economic system dominated by private “enterprise,” they are reliant on these firms for providing jobs and for paying taxes into state coffers. The threat of big corporate bosses to withdraw from a major project can be enough to pull government politicians into line.
For those politicians and bureaucrats that still refuse to bow down to a big capitalist’s interests, the latter have nastier means at their disposal. Just as tycoons can build up a loyal politician’s or bureaucrat’s career, the way that the Pratt family industrial capitalists – who are currently second on Australia’s rich list – were the benefactors ensuring ALP Opposition Leader Bill Shorten’s rise (the late Richard Pratt used to let Shorten use his extravagant mansion for fundraising events when Shorten first campaigned for a parliamentary seat and even made his private jet available for Shorten’s use), they can also leverage their wealth to topple the careers of those who are not loyal enough. Look, for instance, at what happened to former ALP prime minister Kevin Rudd in mid-2010. Now, Rudd was an ardent supporter of the capitalist order and, thus, hardly one to make a strong stand against capitalist bigwigs. However, in 2010 he was planning to implement a Resources Super Profits Tax that would have mildly increased the amounts of tax that big mining bosses pay. That was too much for mining tycoons like Gina Rinehart, Andrew Forrest and Clive Palmer who are not prepared to share even a fraction of their fortunes with anyone. They – and other mining capitalists – went on a massive advertising campaign against the tax that saw them spend $22 million in just six weeks. Meanwhile, their friends in the Murdoch and other media outlets backed the campaign against the new tax. All this contributed to a steep fall in popularity for Rudd and enabled his internal ALP rivals to replace him as prime minister. Dancing completely to the tune of Australia’s mining billionaires, the new Gillard government then immediately watered down the tax to such a great degree that it hardly collected any money at all! Of course, the mining tycoons’ opposition to the Resource Super Profits Tax was not the only reason that Rudd was toppled. Rudd is an arrogant individual and was not liked much by his fellow ALP politicians. However, the decisive factor in his demise then was the slump in his opinion poll numbers caused by the massive advertising and media campaign against the Resources Super Profits Tax – a campaign conducted at the behest of the filthy rich mining bosses. The Packers, too, are well aware of the power that they have to bring down politicians or top-level public servants who, even in the slightest, get in their way. And they’re quite prepared to use it! In 1993 when James Packer and his late father, Kerry, first put in a bid for a Sydney casino, James Packer famously rang a Minister in the then NSW Liberal government and said: “the old man told me to ring… this is the message: If we don’t win the casino, you guys are f_cked”.
The truth is that in capitalist “democracies” the much vaunted principle of “one person, one vote” is a farce. For it is the small number of ultra-rich capitalists who have the wealth, control of the economy and connections to influence decision making and shape mainstream public opinion. James Packer with his $5 billion fortune seems to have more influence than at least half of the 5 million or so registered voters in NSW combined. So $5 billion is equal to at least 2.5 million votes. On average that means: two billion dollars = one million votes. Now that’s much more like the true equation describing capitalist “democracy.”
To be sure, the capitalist state does not serve one particular bourgeois capitalist. Rather, in the words of the Communist Manifesto: “the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” However, the relative weight of a handful of tycoons in Australia is so great that the state almost always backs their particular interests.
Save Millers Point Public Housing!
Defend China’s Crackdown on Packer’s Greedy Executives!
Sydney, 19 March 2016: Opponents of the sell-off of public housing in the inner-city Millers Point area, including members of the MUA, CFMEU and ETU trade unions, march in protest. China’s arrest of 18 wealthy executives of James Packer’s Crown empire, including three Australian high-fliers, could undermine Packer’s Barangaroo Casino plan – thus aiding the campaign to save public housing in the Millers Point and Rocks area.
So Packer certainly had more than enough influence to instigate a sell-off of public housing in Millers Point if he wanted to. Would he want to? Yes would be a very good bet on the right answer to that question. Clearing out Miller’s Point public housing would allow the area to be turned into luxury dwellings that can be used by his casino patrons looking for longer-stay, nearby accommodation outside the hotel and for his executives overseeing the casino/hotel complex. All that would help with Packer’s project. Furthermore, even if a re-developed Millers Point site ends up not being directly used, in its majority, by patrons and executives of Crown’s Barangaroo complex, the planned complex is nevertheless driving wealthy speculators to try and grab hold of this land. Such speculators have no doubt been lobbying the government for the sell-off of public housing in the area too. The boost in property prices driven by Packer’s Barangaroo project also gives the NSW government itself more incentive to sell-off the Millers Point public housing as it means they can get higher prices at auctions than they otherwise would.
However, if the Peoples Republic of China follows through with its crackdown on Crown’s efforts to lure high rollers and other wealthy Chinese to deposit money in Crown casinos then the whole game would change. Packer’s Barangaroo project could be pushed into deep water. And if part of the economic forces that are driving the government’s sell-off of Millers Point public housing are stopped then the government will be more prepared to back down if faced with significant opposition from our side. That is why it is in the interest of the fight for public housing that we stand by the PRC’s crackdown. Furthermore, although we do not favour bans on gambling in Australia, it can only be a good thing more generally if Packer’s Barangaroo project goes splat. The whole philosophy behind the project is offensive to us egalitarians: that is, that scenic, beautiful-looking public space could be turned into a members only, high-rollers casino that only the very wealthy can afford to join and a six-star hotel that only the rich can afford to stay in.
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Whether the PRC follows through and prosecutes the rich Crown executives is still a live bet. You can certainly bet that James Packer would be using his economic and political muscle to push the Australian government into pressuring the PRC state as relentlessly as possible. However, the determination of PRC authorities to crack down on Crown’s activities was shown when the suspects were first detained. They were detained in meticulously planned and coordinated overnight raids in several cities. PRC authorities also carefully waited for a time when Crown’s Australian-based VIP international boss, Jason O’Connor, was on a trip to China to launch the raids. Under China’s legal system, suspects are first detained and questioned and then only after lengthy investigation formally arrested if police believe that there is strong evidence of wrong-doing. The fact that the three Australian crown executives were formally arrested today – five weeks after being initially detained – show that Chinese authorities believe that there is clear evidence that they have committed illegal acts.
In standing by the PRC’s crackdown on Packer’s seemingly illegal actions in China, we should be ready for a barrage of condemnation of the crackdown from the big business-owned Australian media and ruling class politicians. That’s what happened the last time the PRC prosecuted corruption from a major Australia-owned multinational. In 2009, China arrested several high-flying executives from part-Australian owned, mining giant Rio Tinto for corrupt activities. Some of these corrupt activities involved making bribes to get PRC state-owned steel companies to pay higher prices for Rio’s iron ore than they would otherwise have paid. Especially as the trial of the Rio Tinto executives took place, then Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd, National Party heavy and now deputy PM Barnaby Joyce and the mainstream media hysterically denounced the PRC’s legal procedures. It did little good. The PRC ended up handing the senior Rio executives lengthy jail sentences – including ten years for Australian Stern Hu. Rio Tinto like BHP, Packer’s Crown, Gina Rinehart and Andrew Forrest’s Fortescue may be above the law here. However, in Red China, where enterprises under socialistic state ownership play the dominant role in the economy rather than corporations owned by tycoons, the state does not in general kowtow to the demands of capitalist bigwigs.
One of the things that the Australian mainstream media and politicians may throw out to defend Packer’s arrested henchmen is the claim that the arrests are arbitrary and over the top. However, it has now emerged that PRC authorities actually issued a stern warning to Crown last year that it was engaging in illegal activities. Australian Crown bosses then responded by trying to fly under the radar of PRC authorities by making short business trips to China instead of spending long stays there. They also started formally marketing their casinos to Chinese people as trips to “resorts” rather than casinos as a way to try and deceive PRC authorities.
Another bit of propaganda that Australian media and politicians may assert in support of Packer is the notion that Crown and Australians have been unfairly singled out by Chinese authorities. However, the PRC has already targeted other overseas casino operators. Last year, thirteen executives of two South Korean casino operators, Paradise and Grand Korea, were jailed for similar crimes to what the arrested Crown executives are apparently alleged to be involved in. Meanwhile, in a massive raid a few months ago, police in the south east Chinese province of Guangdong arrested almost 800 local people for economic crimes including “organizing illegal gambling activities overseas.” Furthermore, in the actual Crown arrests, alongside the three Australian nationals, one Malaysian national and 14 local Chinese nationals were also arrested. Furthermore, eight other Chinese people not working for Crown, some of them likely high rollers, were also detained in the October raids.
If the Australian mainstream media try to give the impression that only overseas businesses and their employees have been targeted in China that too can be easily re-butted. These Crown arrests are, in fact, part of a massive anti-corruption campaign that has been running in China for over two years. Although in some cases there is suspicion that Chinese president Xi Jinping has used the campaign to undermine factional rivals within the Communist Party of China, the campaign has truly clamped down on corruption. Hundreds of high-ranking politicians and businessmen have been prosecuted. Furthermore, perhaps the best aspect of the anti-corruption campaign is that it has to some, albeit small, degree also drifted into a campaign against the opulence of the rich. Thus, in early 2014, Communist Party of China authorities in major Chinese cities ordered the closure of high-end clubs and expensive restaurants near public parks, scenic spots and cultural sites because these venues could not be accessible and affordable to the masses. It is worth noting here that Sydney’s Barangaroo area is definitely such a scenic spot. In other words, if PRC law were applied here, there would be no Crown Barangroo project (even without the casino)! By the way, in the PRC’s anti-opulence drive, those formerly high-end clubs and restaurants located near public spots that were allowed to stay open were ordered to lower their prices and change their menus to turn them into places affordable to the masses. So, if the PRC law were applied here, Packer at best would see his Barangaroo project being turned into a centre with free entry nightclubs serving cheap drinks, affordable buffet restaurants for the masses enjoying the waterside parks and a three-star hotel providing clean and cheap accommodation for working class tourists from Australia, China and other Asian and overseas countries looking for an affordable place to stay in the heart of the city.
Perhaps the most likely argument that the Australian ruling class and its media will use to oppose any PRC prosecution of Packer’s henchmen is to claim that the PRC’s legal system is “cruel” and “harsh.” However, actually, Australia’s rate of imprisonment is nearly 30% higher than China’s. What is true is that the PRC does jail business tycoons at a much higher rate than Australia. So the difference between Australia’s current legal system and the PRC’s is a matter of who is targeted by the state. In Australia, the state jails disproportionately target Aboriginal people, people from Middle Eastern and Asian derived ethnic communities and the poor. In contrast, in the PRC workers state – despite suffering from plenty of bureaucratic deformations and the distortions caused by capitalist intrusion – it is wealthy private sector businessmen and the corrupt politicians and bureaucrats who are bribed by them who are disproportionately jailed. Australia’s capitalist ruling class, of course, finds such a system “harsh” and “cruel.” However, from the point of view of the working classes of both China and Australia such a system is exactly what is needed. We should defend it! And we should defend the crackdown on Packer’s and his executives’ illegal activities in China. Let’s weaken the economic forces driving the push out of public housing tenants from Millers Point! Stop the social cleansing of working class people from Sydney CBD! It is rail workers, bus drivers, ferry drivers and their ground staff, cleaners, warehouse workers, chefs, liquor and hospitality workers, construction workers, maintenance workers, fire brigade employees, ambulance staff, sales assistants, IT support staff and other workers who together make the Sydney CBD run. Yet the overwhelming majority of these workers cannot afford to live in the area. Let’s turn this around! Let’s turn the public space that was seized for Packer’s Barangaroo project into a big public housing block for working class people! Let’s fight for a massive increase in public housing throughout Australia! Fittingly, that is exactly what the PRC is doing – having provided around 40 million new public housing dwellings over the last six years.
China’s crackdown on Crown is not only good for the Millers Point public housing struggle, it is also more broadly in the interests of the working class. James Packer is such a powerful – and in Australia seemingly untouchable – capitalist that many here are resigned to him getting his way on everything. The fact that his executives could be called to account in the Peoples Republic of China should be used to give Australian workers confidence that the filthy rich bosses of this and other corporate giants are not invincible. Every fighter against oppression and every Australian trade union activist worth their salt ought to be seizing on this setback for Packer’s Crown to challenge, right here, the greedy exploitation by all the billionaires and the corporations that they own: including the likes of Crown, BHP, Rio Tinto, Visy, Seven West, Westfarmers, Woolworths and the banks. They should be saying to their proud and strong working class base: China is cracking down on corporate greed and corruption – we need to start to do that here too!
Australian Rulers’ Union Busting Drive against the CFMEU Union Threatens Construction Workers’ Lives
22 November 2016: Remember the days when hardly a fortnight would go by without the Australian media reporting a major work accident in China that killed dozens of workers? To be sure, China is the world’s most populous country – with about 60 times the population of Australia – so everything both bad and good necessarily happens on a huge scale. Furthermore, the mainstream Western media have always been looking for any means to paint a bad picture of the socialistic Peoples Republic of China (PRC). Nevertheless, it is true that China did have poor workplace safety. The country is industrialising and developing so fast that there was a period when the technological level and safety systems simply did not keep up – leading to dangerous workplace environments. Furthermore, the late 1980s, 1990s and first couple of years of this century was a period when China’s private sector expanded in influence relative to the state-owned sector which, nevertheless, to this day still dominates the pillars of the PRC’s economy. But it is in the private sector where workplace safety is at its worst including in the foreign-invested industries owned by Hong Kong, Taiwanese, American, Singaporean, Japanese and Australian bosses.
Despite technological improvements that improve workplace safety and despite the shift in employment in Australia from heavy industry and manufacturing to less hazardous jobs in the service and IT/digital sectors, reduction in workplace deaths have been relatively modest here. In contrast, socialistic China has dramatically improved workplace safety over the last fifteen years.
Thankfully, all this is becoming in significant part old news. Through a combination of nationalisation of formerly privately owned mines, the closure of smaller, unsafe private-sector mines, a 2008 pro-worker industrial relations law, increased government emphasis on workplace safety and spirited repression of greedy bosses responsible for workplace accidents, the Peoples Republic of China has dramatically reduced deaths from workplace accidents over the last 15 years. China’s workplace safety issue is still serious and, as a gigantic country with often large-size operations, when China does have work accidents they are often on a huge scale. Yet, the PRC’s achievements in improving workplace safety are so dramatic and the failure of greedy Aussie bosses to provide a safe workplace here so harmful that it is now safer to be a worker in China than it is to be one in Australia.
So what are the hard facts on this comparison of workplace safety in Australia and the PRC. There are some complications in comparing statistics because each country lists workplace deaths in different ways. In particular, in China, a death in a traffic accident has long been listed as a ‘workplace death.’ The inclusion of traffic accidents Continue reading Workplace Safety Now Better in China than in Australia→
PROTECT THE GREAT BENEFITS FOR WORKERS & THE RURAL MASSES WON THROUGH THE REVOLUTION:
STOP IMPERIALIST FUNDING FOR THOSE NGOs THAT SEEK TO OVERTHROW SOCIALISTIC RULE IN CHINA
6th September 2016: Determined supporters of socialistic rule in China rallied this evening on the steps at the entrance to Sydney Town Hall. In this demonstration called at short notice, participants hailed the gains of China’s 1949 anticapitalist revolution and opposed the U.S. and Australian-backed anti-communist Chinese exile groups seeking to promote capitalist restoration in China.
The 1949 Chinese Revolution was one of the most momentous events in humanity’s entire history. The long-suffering Chinese masses overthrew their exploiters and took power. Tens of millions of downtrodden people participated in this heroic struggle. They achieved victory after a bitter three year civil war. On one side of the war stood the oppressed tenant farmers, workers, working-class women and idealistic students. They were organized by the Communist Party of China (CPC) which was led by Mao Ze Dong. On the other side were the brutal landlords and capitalists. These oppressor classes were served by the Kuomintang (KMT) government of Chiang Kai-Shek. The KMT was heavily armed, trained and advised by the U.S. regime. But still they lost to the Communist-led revolutionaries.
The 1949 anti-capitalist revolution freed the peasants from the tyranny of the landlords, made headway in liberating workers from capitalist exploitation and freed the Chinese people from humiliating subjugation by imperial powers. The revolution greatly uplifted women’s status from the horrific reality they faced under the previous Kuomintang regime – when many women were subjected to forced marriage and the barbaric practice of Continue reading Long Live China’s 1949 Anticapitalist Revolution!→
