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

6^th 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 foot-binding. The new revolutionary power ripped the key industries away from the capitalists and placed them into the collective hands of all the people. This new economy dominated by public ownership enabled China’s rapid industrial and social development. The life expectancy of Chinese people was lifted from only 34 years at the time of the 1949 revolution to 66 years at the time of Mao’s death in 1976. This was a truly stunning achievement in uplifting human welfare. No society has ever seen such a great accomplishment in social progress which was all the more impressive since it occurred in a country with such a massive population – where one in five of the world’s people live. Since then, the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) has continued to uplift hundreds of millions of its people from the terrible poverty inherited from the pre-1949, capitalist-feudal times. Indeed, over the last 35 years the entire net poverty reduction in the world is due to the poverty reduction in socialistic China.

The Chinese Revolution not only liberated the Chinese masses, it shook the whole world. Those fighting capitalism around the globe, including in Australia, were given a fresh burst of confidence by the revolution’s triumph. The capitalist rulers around the world were terrified, especially in the Eastern Pacific rim. Around the world, there were many progressive struggles that took part of their inspiration from the Chinese Revolution including the victorious anticapitalist revolutions in Cuba and Vietnam and the militant wing of the Black liberation movement in the U.S.A.

Pro-Capitalist Forces Working Feverishly to Destroy Socialistic Rule in China

The timing and venue for tonight’s pro-PRC demonstration was chosen for a specific reason. Pro-communist Chinese performing art groups, reflecting the sentiments of many working class Chinese migrants, had planned a Red Songs concert tonight at Sydney Town Hall. The concert organised by the International Cultural Exchange Association Australia (ICEAA) was to be held in honour of Mao Ze Dong and was to coincide with the 40^th anniversary of his death.  A similar concert had also been scheduled to be held in Melbourne on September 9.

Mao was the leader of the 1949 revolution that brought the Chinese masses such great benefits and it is, thus, understandable why the Chinese masses and indeed millions of leftists around the world adore him. Many trade union activists today may not be aware that the key slogans of the militant sections of the Australian trade union movement – like “Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win” – are, in fact, quotations taken from Chairman Mao. To be sure, Mao also did make some serious political errors. However, Mao is today rightly remembered most for his most significant act – leading the 1949 anti-capitalist revolution. Furthermore, in China today, Mao is seen (although not completely historically correctly) as a symbol of egalitarianism and consistent socialism. Those who sing the praises of Mao most strongly in China today are often the most determined communists. They are often opponents of the pro-market reforms introduced by post-Mao Chinese leaders that have led to greater inequality and a degree of capitalist exploitation. In commemorating Mao, those set to participate in the planned concert were expressing support for the 1949 Revolution and solidarity with socialistic rule in the PRC.

The planned concert, however, met with shrill opposition from a coalition of anti-communist groups. These included Chinese exile groups devoted to overthrowing socialistic rule in the PRC as well as Australian anti-communist groups built up during the Cold War against the socialistic, former USSR. They called their coalition the “Embrace Australian Values Alliance” – a name that would make far-right nationalists proud! The Alliance put out statements and a petition full of outrageous lies about Mao – even claiming he was “one of the most cold-blooded dictators in human history, surpassing the cruelty of Hitler….” This hysterical anticommunist campaign was not mainly about presenting a particular assessment of a historical figure. Rather, it was about the present and the future. In attacking Mao, the leader of the 1949 Revolution that gave birth to the Chinese workers state, the opponents of the concert were attacking the 1949 Revolution and socialistic rule in China.  This became even clearer later as the Alliance vowed to make war on “Communist soft power.” A spokesman for the Alliance complained about alleged Chinese government influence in Chinese-language media in Australia and railed against the emergence of pro-China groups in Sydney and Melbourne.

The anti-PRC alliance held daily rallies outside Sydney Town Hall. Christina Wang, chief executive of the ICEAA – the group organising the Red Songs concert – had her car vandalised. However, what made the anti-communist movement influential was the massive support that they received from the mainstream Australian media. The media churned out a series of articles lauding the anticommunist Alliance and reporting as a fact its lurid claims about Mao and communism. Even for a media notorious for bias and anticommunist hostility, the coverage of this dispute was notable for the shamelessness of its one-sidedness.  This hostility to the Mao Commemoration concert from the media was a reflection of the Australian capitalist rulers’ stance on the matter. After all, it is they who own and control the media. Thus, the newspapers leading the charge against the concert were The Australian/The Daily Telegraph –   owned by the influential, billionaire Murdoch family – and the The Sydney Morning Herald, belonging to Fairfax Media which is owned by a range of wealthy capitalist investors and which also owns the right-wing radio station 2GB – notorious for the racist rantings of Alan Jones. SBS and the ABC, both of which are government owned, were also at the forefront of the campaign against the Red Songs concert.

So why were the Australian capitalist rulers – as shown by the behaviour of the media that they control – so hostile to the Red Songs concert? Why are they so hostile to socialistic rule in China? After all, it is Red China – especially its booming socialistic state-owned enterprises – that is holding up the Australian economy by buying approximately one-third of all Australian exports. Well, in the cold calculation of the capitalist exploiting class, any loss of sales that they would suffer from a Chinese economy weakened by capitalist restoration pales in comparison to the fabulous profits they could reap if they succeeded in restoring capitalism in China and turning it into one gigantic cheap labour sweatshop. Although, as a country still pulling itself up from the extreme poverty of its pre-socialist days, the per capita GDP and hence wages in China are comparatively low compared to Australia, the wages there are rather high for a country of its per capita wealth. This means capitalists investing in China make far less profit than they otherwise would. Furthermore, wages in socialistic China are growing at amongst the fastest rate of any country in the world – having grown at over 10% a year for the last decade! Additionally, bosses must pay to Chinese workers, in addition to the regular wage, a high social wage that goes into funds accessible by workers in times of specific need. This includes unemployment insurance, a maternity leave fund, a superannuation-type pension fund but where the bosses must pay into it with an amount equal to around 20% of the regular wage rather than the 9% here and a health insurance fund for the worker that the bosses must pay into with an additional amount equal to approximately 10% of the regular wage. Then there is a fund to be used by workers to buy a house/apartment which the boss must pay into with another 10% on top of the regular wage. Western capitalists seeking to exploit workers in China also have to deal with a pro-worker Labour Law. This law, which was introduced in 2008 in the face of vociferous dissent from Western investors, encourages unions and collective bargaining, mandates that unions must be consulted before any change to working conditions, strongly curbs casualisation of the workforce and restricts the bosses ability to retrench workers – for example, banning the laying off of long-term workers within five years of retirement or workers who have previously been injured at the workplace.  Consequently, sweatshop-type factories – owned mainly by Taiwanese, Hong Kong, Western and Japanese bosses – that arose to some degree in China after pro-market reforms were introduced in the 1980s and 1990s, are being squeezed out. Nike and Adidas, who are amongst the big companies most notorious for sweatshop exploitation, have long ago packed up their factories in China and moved them to lower wage countries, despite China having much higher quality infrastructure.

Add to this a PRC state machine that is suspicious of capitalist exploiters (and with a propensity to ­– with little warning ­– come down on them hard and confiscate their capital) and a working class that has a tendency to not only go on strike but to rebel by blocking roads, by occupying workplaces and even taking bosses hostage – all because they have a healthy sense of entitlement in what is their workers state – and you can see why the Western, Japanese and overseas Chinese capitalists are obsessed with trying to smash socialistic rule in China. They know that if they can overthrow the workers state, they could turn China into a huge version of the cheap labour factory belts of Indonesia, Bangladesh or the Philippines.

There is another reason why the world’s capitalist powers are intent on overthrowing the PRC. Although the Beijing government goes out of its way to appease the imperialist powers, the U.S., Australian, Japanese and other capitalists understand that the most populous country in the world remaining under any form of socialistic rule is still a potential threat to capitalist domination of the globe. Furthermore, the mere existence of a workers state in China provokes fears among the capitalist ruling classes around the world that, one day, the toiling masses in their own countries will also make an anti-capitalist revolution and boot them out of power.

Refusing to Accept the Silencing of Pro-Red China Voices

In the end, the anticommunist groups and the Australian ruling class, through its hounds in the media, succeeded in their campaign against the Red Songs concert. Just a few days before the event, the City of Sydney, in an undemocratic act of censorship, cancelled access to the Town Hall venue for the concert. This cancellation was ordered despite the fact that the event itself had nothing to do with the City of Sydney and was never in any way endorsed by them. The concert organisers merely paid to hire the venue like other members of the public hiring a venue for an event. The City of Sydney claimed that their reason for cancelling the venue access was the fear of violence between concert goers and opponents and cited advice from the police. Yet, it is telling that when racist bigot Pauline Hanson two months ago spoke at the ABC’s Q & A program, the police mobilised huge forces to prevent anti-racist protesters from disrupting the event. Similarly, when the filthy white supremacists in the “Reclaim Australia” movement held violence-inciting rallies against Muslims and non-white “ethnic” people over the course of the last 18 months, the authorities also massively mobilised to protect these fascists amid the spectre of determined anti-racist counter-demonstrations. Yet, when people wanted to attend a concert honouring the leader of a great socialistic revolution, the authorities say it must be cancelled to prevent violence.  Of course, we expect nothing better from the organs of the Australian capitalist state: a machine that has been built up and is being constantly renovated to enforce the rule of the capitalist exploiting class over the exploited masses. However, it is important to diligently expose the role of the capitalist authorities to the masses.

In the face of the City of Sydney’s cancellation of the venue access to the Sydney event and intimidated by the mainstream media and anti-communist groups’ vicious campaign, the concert organisers then themselves cancelled the Melbourne event. Emboldened, the anti-communists groups stated their intention to carry out still more aggressive actions to demonise the Chinese workers state. Leaders of the Embrace Australian Values Alliance vowed to “organize more events to raise awareness among Australians of the ‘dangers of Mao poison and red poison.'”

The nasty campaign to censor the pro-Red China concert and the campaign of lies against socialistic China and Mao is part of a conscious plan by the capitalist media and the anti-PRC NGOs to ensure that the Australian public will support the Washington-Canberra drive to destroy socialistic rule in China. They want to justify to the Australian population, the Australian government’s participation in the U.S.-led campaign of military and diplomatic intimidation of the PRC over the South China Sea. They want to win public support for the Australian capitalist state’s military build up and its hosting of 1,500 U.S. troops in Darwin, both of which are clearly aimed against socialistic China. Indeed, the anticommunist propaganda campaign aims to push “public opinion” to support a still more aggressive policy towards the PRC. It aims to justify a further increase in U.S. and Australian financial, media and diplomatic support for the various anti-communist NGOs – both within China and in exile – which seek to overturn socialistic rule in China.

Therefore, we in Trotskyist Platform could not sit idly by and allow those pushing for capitalist counterrevolution to use intimidation to silence those who stand by socialistic rule in China. We could not allow them to spread their anti-Red China lies unanswered. Therefore, we organised at short notice a rally outside what was to be the concert venue, at the very time the concert was to begin, to condemn the anti-communist campaign against Red China and to hail the terrific gains of China’s 1949 anti-capitalist revolution. As well as Trotskyist Platform (TP) supporters, other staunch anti-fascists also participated in the action. Among the placards we carried on the day included: “Defend Socialistic China Against Intimidation By Capitalist Powers. Down with the Capitalist Australian State’s Military Build Up That Targets Red China! U.S., Australian Militaries: Stay Out of the South China Sea” and “Down with all groups seeking to restore capitalist rule in China! No return to the extreme exploitation, poverty and oppression of women of pre-1949 China!” As we emphasised in the call out for the rally, it is in the interests of the working class and all the oppressed in this country to stand in defence of the Chinese workers state:

… if counterrevolution overwhelmed the PRC, it would not only mean terrible suffering for the Chinese masses but would embolden Australia’s capitalist rulers to unleash yet more vicious anti-union laws, yet more attacks on social welfare, yet more racist state brutality against Aboriginal people and still more racist scapegoating of Middle Eastern, Asian and African communities. On the other hand, if insurgent Chinese capitalists, the anti-communist NGOs that serve their interests and their imperialist godfathers are defeated, it would greatly invigorate the worldwide struggle against capitalism.

This evening’s demonstration received much interest from passers-by with many ethnic Chinese people, in particular, stopping to take photos, listen to speeches and pick up rally leaflets. There were also a few dozen people who came to Town Hall because they had not been informed that the concert had been cancelled. Many of them expressed anger that the City of Sydney had cancelled the event.

The Threat of Counterrevolution from China’s Insurgent Capitalist Class

Socialistic rule in China not only faces the threat from world capitalist powers and the anti-communist NGOs that they sponsor. In China today, alongside the socialistic state-owned enterprises that dominate her economy, are a layer of capitalists owning private businesses. Fortunately these capitalists do not yet rule China. But they are doing what they can to prepare to grab the one thing that could expand their “right” to exploitation: state power. Regardless of their pretensions of standing for “democracy,” it is these fledgling Chinese capitalists – and their godfathers in the West – whom the anti-Red China dissidents (and the exile organisations that back them) actually serve.

As Trotskyist Platform (TP) spokesman Samuel Kim explained at the rally, these Chinese capitalists re-emerged in the late 1970s when, under the pressure of imperialist encirclement, the Chinese Communist Party allowed the development of small private sectors under a “Reform and Opening Up” policy.  Although the “Reform and Opening Up” policy has within limits achieved its stated goal of contributing to increased economic development in some areas, it has also led to greater inequality and increased corruption. The new layer of capitalists that emerged used the influence that wealth buys to push for further openings for the private sector. Today in China there are – although in a far lower percentage of the population than in the U.S. or Australia – capitalist billionaires. To be sure, the PRC state still maintains the key sectors of the economy under socialistic public ownership – including all the major banks, ports, oil/gas companies, big mines, airlines, most heavy industry and all the major aircraft, rail and car manufacturers – and thus administers a form of workers’ control over society. Yet the layer of Chinese capitalists is restive and ambitious and is being nurtured at every level by the overseas Chinese capitalist ruling classes in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore as well as by the imperialist rulers of the U.S., Western Europe and Australia. The wealth of these private business bosses – and of the more numerous managers and high-flying professionals serving them – certainly brings with it some influence. There is today in China a layer of academics, economists, journalists, lawyers and politicians promoting the interests of China’s capitalists. Such elements are to be found even within the Communist Party of China (the CPC) and governing departments. Meanwhile, the mainstream of the ruling CPC bureaucracy itself partially bends to this pro-capitalist layer. Today, for example, the Beijing government is giving special incentives to new private companies, pushing for sell-offs of minority stakes in some state-owned enterprises to capitalist shareholders and cutting overcapacity in the coal and steel sectors in a way that will downsize some state-owned enterprises. PRC leaders are not, at the moment, at all calling for any major privatisations and the proposed measures do not in any sense spell capitalist restoration. However, although there are other trends acting to actually strengthen the socialistic public sector, if the slated reforms are implemented (there is much resistance to these measures) they will – other things being equal – increase the size and weight of the capitalist exploiting class and, thus, give this layer greater political influence and ability to organise for a future capitalist counterrevolution.

The working class under the leadership of consistent, resolute communists is the only force within China that can be relied on to resolutely defeat the political influence of the capitalists and curb their economic influence. It is the force that can smash capitalist restorationist forces in a way that will re-invigorate China’s drive to socialism. We saw the Chinese working class playing that role in July 2009 at the Tonghua Steel enterprise in North-East China’s Jilin Province. After the factory was privatised and workers threatened with job and pension cuts, tens of thousands of workers occupied the plant – some even beating the new capitalist boss to the death – and demanded the enterprise revert to state ownership. Within hours the privatisation was reversed and the factory returned to socialistic public ownership. Today, among the demands that true communists within the Chinese working class and CPC must fight for include:

• • Stop all partial (and of course all full) privatizations of state-owned enterprises.

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• • In the necessary cuts to overcapacity in the steel and coal sectors, all cuts should come by closing down the often unsafe and polluting private enterprises in the sector and not from any cuts to state-owned enterprises. All workers in the closed down enterprises should be guaranteed transfer to good paying jobs in state-owned enterprises.

• • Extend to the private sector the anti-corruption, austerity drive (that has seen the arrest of many corrupt government officials over the last few years). For all the wealth and enterprises owned by private businessmen who offer a bribe, however small, to be immediately confiscated and turned into public property.

• For all capitalists, that is all private enterprise owners using hired labour, to be barred from being legislators in China’s national and local peoples congresses (parliaments).

The top priority for the work of Australian socialists with regards to China, however, is not what we think should be done by Chinese communists but what should be done right here to help defend the conquests of the 1949 anti-capitalist revolution. If there is a movement of leftist and worker activists in places like the U.S. and Australia publicly mobilising actions in defence of the PRC workers state it will boost the morale of the many Chinese workers and leftist intellectuals – including leftist elements within the CPC – who are truly committed to socialism. It will, thereby, encourage them to intensify their efforts to defeat capitalist restorationist forces and renew the PRC’s course towards socialism.

Making it much harder to build actions here in defence of Red China is the fact that most socialist groups in Australia are actually on the other side of the fence on this key issue. That is, they line up behind the imperialist drive to destroy the PRC workers state. Not wanting to stand firm in the face of the intense anti-communist propaganda against the PRC, they try to justify this position by concocting the theory that the Peoples Republic of China is actually just another capitalist country (rather strange then why the PRC’s biggest capitalist trading partners are still intent on overthrowing the state there!) and that, therefore in opposing the PRC, they are simply opposing just another capitalist state. The most rabid in pushing this line are the Solidarity group and Socialist Alternative (SAlt). The latter even wrote in solidarity with “dissident” Liu Xiaobo (see Socialist Alternative, 19 November 2012, http://sa.org.au/node/74), a right-wing neo-con who was jailed in China for trying to organise a movement to overthrow China’s socialistic state and institute a system where privatisation of state-owned enterprises and land would take place. This “dissident,” who is defended by SAlt, is funded by the U.S. government’s notorious National Endowment for Democracy and openly supported the U.S invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, supports Israel’s genocidal oppression of Palestinian people whom he calls “provocateurs” and calls for China to be brought under Western colonial rule for hundreds of years (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/dec/15/nobel-winner-liu-xiaobo-chinese-dissident).

Albeit in a less rabid fashion, the Socialist Alliance group also takes a similar stance on China as Solidarity and SAlt – despite having a small number of members who courageously take a pro-PRC position. This was seen most starkly in April 2008 during a period of especially sharp division within Australia between supporters of socialistic rule in the PRC and enemies of the PRC. This battle took place over an Olympic torch relay in Canberra for the Beijing Olympics. Socialist Alliance had then joined in with mainstream anti-communists, descendants of the former serf-slave owning ruling class of the old feudal Tibet, hard-line Vietnamese anti-communists  who hate the PRC as much as they hate the Socialist Republic of Vietnam and the neo-Nazi “National Anarchist” group in an anti-PRC protest that sought to disrupt the torch relay. However, their efforts that day were drowned by a 30,000 strong counter-rally by pro-communist Chinese people which we in TP joined in solidarity.

One bona fide left group, other than TP, that does not take an anti-PRC position is the Communist Party of Australia (CPA). However, unfortunately, despite a few members being determined to take a strong stand on this question, the CPA seems to be embarrassed by its position. It bends to the prevailing winds of mainstream sentiment by swaying away from taking an activist stance in defence of the Chinese workers state. What all this means is that those of us who do understand the need to actually campaign in defence of socialistic China must work triply hard to expose anti-communist lies against the PRC (including those being parroted by nominal socialists), promote solidarity with the PRC within the broader Left and the workers movement and organise further actual actions in support of the PRC workers state.

Anti-PRC Frenzy Hits Cold War Proportions

Tonight’s rally was held at a time when anticommunist hostility to the PRC from the Australian establishment has hit Cold War proportions. The last few weeks have seen yet more hostile rhetoric against the PRC from Australian politicians and the mainstream media over the South China Sea issue. Thousands upon thousands of kilometres away from Australia’s shores, the Australian and U.S. capitalist rulers’ “concern” over the South China Sea issue is just a way to torment the PRC with military and diplomatic pressure. Meanwhile, the last few days have seen the right-wing Liberal/National Party government and the media hounds run a witch-hunting campaign against Labor senator, Sam Dastyari over a $1,671 travel bill of his that was paid for by a private Chinese company which they have claimed has links (which seem rather tenuous) to the Chinese government. Those attacking Dastyari claim he took the money in exchange for making comments favourable to China. They cite a statement that he once made, in a moment of honesty, that, “the South China Sea is China’s own affair.” In the face of the conservatives’ attack, Dastyari completely renounced his earlier statement on the South China Sea issue and slavishly and repeatedly professed his loyalty to the ALP’s hawkish anti-PRC stance on the question. As a Laborite social democrat, it is a given that Dastyari does not have any consistent commitment to the interests of the working class which his ALP claims to stand for. Yet, the attack on Dastyari is completely unfair and can only feed into anti-PRC hostility. The amount he received from this Chinese company was tiny compared to the high income that politicians receive and hardly likely to sway his opinion on such a key issue. Furthermore, the size of the donation is a pittance compared to the donations that local capitalists give to politicians. For example, Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce had once received a donation from Australian billionaire, Gina Rinehart, that was 30 times greater than what Dastyari got. Even if in the hypothetical case, Dastyari did take the money in exchange for a commitment to not buy into the aggressive campaign against China over the South China Sea, he would only be guilty of taking the right stance on the issue (albeit very briefly) for the wrong reason. From the standpoint of the working class and oppressed – whose interests reside with defence of the PRC workers state – this is hardly a crime. His real crime is that he then completely reversed this correct position for the sake of his lucrative career as a parliamentary politician. However, that only puts him on a par with all the other parliamentarians out there.

Although the government and Murdoch media witch hunt of Dastyari was partly a way to score points against the ALP Opposition they were also using the campaign to whip up further anticommunist hostility to China. Indeed, the campaign against Dastyari comes on the heels of the ABC network running a supposed exposé of donations to political parties made by Chinese businessmen, some of whom they claim have “links” to the Chinese government. Notwithstanding such ABC efforts to outdo the Murdoch media in fearmongering about the PRC, the fact is that given that China is by far Australia’s biggest trading partner it is unsurprising that many Australian businesses – and hence a proportion of the businesses making political donations – have some links to China. Indeed, many of the donations “exposed” are simply by businessmen who happen to be Chinese migrants living in Australia who, like all other capitalists, seek to further their interests by bringing political parties under their sway through donations.  Moreover, the total of the “China-linked” donations reported by the ABC pale in comparison to the massive amounts paid by non-Chinese Australian corporate bigwigs, something which the ABC conveniently manages to forget to tell its audience. Thus, according to the ABC, businesses “with Chinese connections” gave donations to Australian political parties that totalled $5.5 million over the last three years up to 2015. Yet go to the Australian Electoral Commission’s website and if you total up all the donations in the same period they come to over $85 million. In other words what the ABC claims are “China-connected” donations come to just 6% of total listed political donations … which is barely greater than the proportion of Chinese-origin people living in Australia! The fact is that in capitalist Australia, the whole political system and electoral politics is based on patronage by wealthy businessmen. This involves not only the massive donations necessary for things like political advertising, hiring of venues for meetings and payment of full-time activists but through the capitalist tycoons who own the media being able to so significantly shape electoral debates and public opinion. The reality of democracy in capitalist countries is not one person one vote but, in reality, something more like one thousand dollars one thousand votes.

Ominously, the ABC-created furore about “China-connected” political donations targeted not only the PRC but Chinese immigrants in Australia too. So too did an article in the Fairfax-owned Australian Financial Review last weekend which hysterically claimed that Chinese tourists visiting Australia and Chinese migrants living here form a huge army of “citizen spies” that “act as a giant human vacuum cleaner, sucking up intelligence to be digested in Beijing” (http://www.afr.com/news/world/asia/australia-is-losing-the-battle-against-chinas-citizen-spies-20160831-gr5rfq#ixzz4K9x9dNM9 ). Such nutty, conspiracy theories are not only designed to ramp up hostility to Red China but end up intensifying a racist climate that has nurtured not only further attacks on Aboriginal people and Muslims but attacks on Asians too. Propaganda targeting Chinese migrants and visitors will lead to yet more violent racist assaults on the streets and in public transport and will put further wind in the sails of Pauline Hanson’s bigoted One Nation Party and even more extreme white supremacist outfits. Yet the mixing of anti-communist hostility to the PRC and anti-Asian prejudice is hardly new in Australia. When the 1949 Chinese Revolution took place there was a near hysterical mood amongst the Australian capitalist establishment as their yellow peril, white racist fear of Asians now mixed with their horror at the world’s most populous country going towards communism.

Unpicking the Tangled Web of Anti-PRC Lies

In our struggle to mobilise working class solidarity with the PRC we need to pick apart the various lies that are used to slander socialistic rule in China. One set of lies that was used much in the campaign against the Red Songs concert involved greatly exaggerating the loss of life from malnourishment during the 1959 to 1961 period in China known as the Great Leap Forward; and then to outrageously claim that what happened was equivalent to Mao’s CPC directly killing all those who died. The Great Leap Forward was a basically well-intentioned plan to rapidly industrialise China and increase agricultural production. The backdrop to it was the then recent split between the USSR and the PRC – a disastrous falling out between the two socialistic giants for which the leaderships of both states share blame. In the first few years after the 1949 Revolution, Soviet technical aid had been invaluable to increasing agricultural and industrial production in China especially given that the PRC faced sanctions and intense hostile pressure from the capitalist world. However, with the withdrawal of Soviet assistance, the CPC now attempted to industrialise China by bringing the farmers into industrial production through constructing a huge number of small-scale industrial plants and to increase agricultural production through infrastructure construction by large mobilisations of farmers. The need to achieve rapid industrialisation was given greater urgency by the growing U.S. presence in Vietnam and Asia more generally – the PRC needed to build up its industrial strength to the extent necessary to deter a U.S. attack and it needed to now be able to do this without Soviet assistance.

The problem, however, was that the technical level of the Chinese masses, who before the 1949 Revolution had been largely consigned to illiteracy and a lack of education, was not then sufficient for the scale of the industrial and agricultural leap being envisaged. Furthermore, the small scale steel and other furnaces were inefficient and the breakneck speed being proposed meant that resources were misallocated in the rush. Meanwhile, positive aspects of the Great Leap Forward program were implemented in a too hurried manner to be successful. As a result, production actually fell during the Great Leap Forward period and agricultural production especially suffered due to farmers being shifted into industrial production and large-scale public works. What compounded the problem was that the PRC leaders did not, in time, listen to the feedback from cadre in the field who were telling them that the Plan was running into serious problems and in some areas outright failing. This was due to the bureaucratically deformed nature of the Chinese workers state. Although, since the 1949 Revolution, the Chinese toilers held state power and the decisive means of production has been in their collective hands – a tremendous step forward – the actual political administration is concentrated in a bureaucratic layer aloof from the masses. Why this is the case goes back to the Chinese Revolution itself. Unlike the 1917 Russian Revolution, which was spearheaded by urban wage workers, the main forces in the 1949 Chinese Revolution were poor tenant farmers and rural workers. What did this difference between these two great revolutions mean? Well, in Russia the urban working class that made the 1917 Revolution could truly be welded together so as to be unbreakable. Not only were the proletariat assembled together in large numbers in big factories but these wage workers knew they’d make no economic headway unless they were united and thus collectively strong enough to take on the capitalist boss. To be sure, it still took the tireless efforts of a determined communist party to solidify the workers together. However, the point is that it was possible to unite the 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. This administration lasted in Soviet Russia for several years until the pressure of hostile encirclement by foreign powers led to a bureaucratic degeneration of the workers state (from that point on until its collapse in 1991-92, the USSR remained a workers state but its administration was no longer based on workers democracy). In China, the poor farmers who there played the key role in the 1949 Revolution also had to show great unity. Without this they could not have triumphed in the Civil War. However, because the tenant farmers worked as individuals (albeit handing a big chunk of their produce to their landlords) they operated 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 Civil War the burning necessity to defeat the landlords kept the poor farmers together but afterwards, especially, the CPC cadres were required to smother centrifugal tendencies that would otherwise have torn the unity of the tenant farmers apart. As a result, unfortunately, the workers state produced by the 1949 Revolution was bureaucratically deformed from its very inception.

During the start of the Great Leap Forward, with the bureaucratic PRC administration not making a corrective in good time, the collapse in agricultural production led to serious malnourishment in some areas and for the first year or so a sharp dive in China’s life expectancy at birth. This was compounded by a series of natural disasters. However, contrary to the vile anticommunist propaganda which equates the CPC’s responsibility for the loss of life during this period to Hitler’s responsibility for putting millions of people in gas chambers, the fact is that even in the worst year of the Great Leap Forward, China’s life expectancy never dropped to what it was before the 1949 Revolution. And this is the point. Yes, the first period of the Great Leap Forward was a disaster and there was bad famine in some areas. However, the fact is that the reason it was so noticeable was that the anticapitalist Revolution had made such progress in feeding the Chinese masses in the previous ten years that the malnourishment now stood out. Prior to the 1949 Revolution, large parts of the Chinese population lived in frequent danger of dying from malnourishment and had little access to any decent health care at all. In the capitalist-feudal times, tens upon tens of millions of Chinese people perished in the famines of 1907, 1911, 1920-21, 1928-1930, 1936 and 1942-43 not to mention those who were dying all the time due to malnourishment. Millions more died in regular flooding like the nearly four million people who died in China’s 1931 floods. The overturning of capitalist rule and the subsequent allocation of resources to peoples’ needs not only meant that the Chinese masses could be largely properly fed but that measures were taken to greatly reduce the death toll from flooding.

Furthermore, recovery from the hardest times of the Great Leap Forward was swift. By 1960, the CPC pulled back from the most failed methods.  Moreover, some of the better aspects of the Great Leap Forward, like the mass irrigation construction program, began to bear fruit, while other programs that were at first clumsily implemented were now organised in a more effective manner.  As a result, not only did the average life expectancy and overall economic production quickly recover to pre-1959 levels, they actually quickly skyrocketed way above pre-1959 levels and have continued to grow at a solid rate ever since. And this is the overall picture. The fact is that because of the 1949 anti-capitalist Revolution, hundreds of millions of Chinese people who would have died at childbirth, or would have died while giving birth or would have died from malnourishment or lack of proper medical care, were able to live basically full lives because of the achievements of socialistic rule and a collectivised economy. That is why even elderly Chinese workers and farmers who lived through the hardest times of the Great Leap Forward are overwhelmingly still sympathetic to Mao and the CPC – which makes a mockery of the fanciful claims of the anti-communists that Mao was responsible for killing tens of millions of people.

The improvements that the 1949 revolution brought in the cultural field to the Chinese masses is just as impressive as the gains brought in nourishment and health care. Notwithstanding setbacks resulting from certain excesses during the Cultural Revolution period, socialistic rule opened up incredible cultural opportunities for the Chinese masses. Prior to the 1949 revolution, less than 20% of the population was literate. The exploited masses endured lives that were not only hard but dreary – they had little opportunity to engage in cultural pursuits. This was especially true for women from the rural masses – who were mostly prevented from leaving the house like many rural and poor urban women in capitalist South Asia still are today. Today, however, literacy for Chinese youth is basically 100% and women outnumber men in Chinese universities. Chinese youth flock to take part in various cultural and leisure activities from tourism, sport and music to opera, calligraphy, painting, dance and acrobatics. In contrast, before the 1949 Revolution, folk dancing was banned as the capitalist KMT regime wanted to ensure that the masses were submissive and disunited. In response, Mao’s Communist forces insisted on the masses’ right to dance and promoted people being able to express themselves by doing the popular Yangko folk dance in the streets. The victory of the Communist forces saw an explosion in Yangko and other folk dancing. Today, public dancing is so much a part of PRC society that China is famous for its “dancing grandparents” who hold late night dance parties on the streets – some of which are so loud that younger neighbours have complained about the rowdy pensioners!

Looking at this big picture, it was not wrong for the organisers of the Red Songs concert to refer to Mao as a great “humanitarian.” However, as Marxists, we understand that the influence (whether for positive or negative) of leaders should not be exaggerated. We understand that the decisive elements in shaping history are the clash of competing social forces and the collective struggle of the toiling masses. Thus, the way we would put it is that the heroic struggle of the exploited masses of China – who were led by the CPC that was led by Mao – overthrew the capitalist-landlord ruling class in 1949. This led to the establishment of a workers state that, despite its bureaucratic deformation, brought terrific improvements to the human rights of the worker and farmer masses and to the position of women.

The True Nature of Anti-PRC NGOs That Talk about “Human Rights”

The real reason for the hostility to Red China and Mao of the anti-communist local and Chinese NGO groups that campaigned against the Red Songs concert had nothing to do with the hardships during the Great Leap Forward. Their real reason is apparent within the misnamed, “Joint Statement of the Chinese Community in Australia on Protest against Maoist Concert.” There, the anti-communist Chinese groups rail against what they say was: “landlords slaughtered in the Land Reform Movement in the period from 1950 to 1952.” What they are objecting to was the fact that after the 1949 Revolution, agricultural land that had hitherto been owned by greedy and brutal landlords was divided up amongst the formerly exploited peasants who had worked the land. The landlord holdings were then reduced to an equal share with the liberated peasants. The anti-communist groups hate this, because they reflect the interests of – and in many cases actually themselves directly are – those descendants of the former capitalist and landlord exploiting class who cannot bear to live merely as equals with the formerly exploited masses. They are seething with rage at having had their privileged position taken away and would not stop at anything to once again lord it over the Chinese masses the way their forefathers once did. Of course, there are many descendants of the deposed exploiting class of China who today are content to live and work as ordinary citizens. However, other descendants, because they see the support given to them by the Western imperialist rulers, still hold the dream of once again becoming the rich rulers of China. Alongside them are people linked to those sections of China’s new, private business-owning strata who are not satisfied with the partial openings given to them by China’s post-1978 market reforms – they want actual capitalist counterrevolution to “freely” realise their “full potential” to exploit Chinese workers. Then there are former capitalist businessmen from China’s post-1978 period who later lost their investments. Since the right to capitalist exploitation is not in practice guaranteed in China and PRC authorities – sometimes quite arbitrarily – often come down against private businesses in disputes with publicly-owned enterprises, many a post-1978 capitalist has lost out big time. These greedy jilted capitalists, like the unrepentant descendants of the deposed capitalist-landlord ruling class, are very embittered against socialistic rule and seek revenge.

For these anti-PRC forces to claim to stand for “human rights” is the vilest hypocrisy. The pre-1949 ruling class of China that they hark back to was – alongside its Western imperialist patrons – infamous for its savagery against the Chinese masses. American journalist, Jack Belden, in his book China Shakes the World (a fascinating eyewitness account of the Chinese Revolution), described how the landlords totally subjugated the families of their tenants in those days:

A rich peasant or landlord merely had to wait until a farmer was in the fields and go around to his home and force the farmer’s wife to his wishes. Short of murder, which was difficult because of the landlord’s guards and because the landlord controlled most of the spears in the village, the farmer had no recourse, especially since the landlord or his henchman was village chief and hence the police power too….

During the to and fro of the 1946-1949 Civil War, in formerly Communist-controlled areas that were seized back by the KMT capitalist forces, the KMT and landlords would publicly execute farmer activists who had participated in redistributing land from the landlord to the farmers. Those tenant farmers that participated in land reform that were not finished off by the KMT would often be buried alive by the landlords themselves. If the landlords could not find the tenant in question they would bury the farmer’s family – throwing women and children into ditches, pits and wells and covering them with earth.

Standing by such cruel right-wing terror, it is little surprise then that the anti-PRC groups that opposed the Red Songs concert themselves uphold the most reactionary politics. Thus, one of the groups that campaigned against the concert is the local-based Australian Family Association (AFA) created by fanatical anti-communist Bob Santamaria’s National Civic Council (NCC). The AFA are extreme opponents of feminism, women’s right to abortion and LGBTI rights. The NCC was Tony Abbott’s political inspiration and strongly backed him in the leadership contest he lost last year to Malcolm Turnbull. Hard right Liberal Party senator, Eric Abetz, is closely linked to the AFA and NCC. Another prominent group that campaigned against the Red Songs concert is the Falun Gong (or Falun Dafa) group. Falun Gong are a right-wing political group that operates under the cover of being a religious organisation. As well as espousing extreme opposition to communism and to the land-redistribution to poor farmers that took place with the 1949 Chinese Revolution, Falun Gong are also notable for their rabid homophobia and their extreme patriarchal conservatism on all social issues. Thus, Falun Gong bemoans that the Chinese Revolution destroyed the old Confucian family resulting in wives becoming disobedient to their husbands and children disobedient to their parents. Falun Gong leader Li Hongzhi also advocates inflammatory ideas on racial “purity” and describes children born of mixed-race relationships as “defective persons.” When he toured Australia in 1996, he even claimed in a speech in Sydney that heaven itself is segregated: “the yellow people, the white people, and the black people have the corresponding places in heaven. Anybody who does not belong to his race will not be cared for. This is the truth, and it is not that I’m making up something here. What I am telling everyone are heavenly secrets.” It is little wonder that Falun Gong hold joint meetings and actions with the extreme white supremacist, Party For Freedom (see for example this one: https://www.partyforfreedom.org.au/2014/05/06/film-night-on-chinese-government-harvesting-organs/).

Perhaps the most telling expression of the reactionary nature of the groups that campaigned against the Red Songs concert is their decision to call themselves the “Embrace Australian Values Alliance.” By this they, of course, don’t mean the values of the trade union movement when at its best – which expresses values like workers’ solidarity – or the values of integrity and anti-racism of the Aboriginal resistance movements. Rather, they mean the values that dominate Australian society – which means the values of the capitalist rulers that run this country. And what are these values? The values that see over 500 Aboriginal people killed in state custody over the last 30 years while not a single policeman or prison guard is ever convicted over the scores of Aboriginal people who were simply murdered by the state forces. The values that see desperate refugees locked up in hell-hole detention centres. The values, emanating from ruling class propaganda, that drive some people to physically attack, harass and insult Aboriginal, Asian, African and Middle Eastern people on the streets, in public transport and at entertainment and sporting venues. The values that saw the Australian military take part in the genocidal, U.S.-led war against the heroic Vietnamese Revolution and later the brutal, colonial wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and now Iraq/Syria. The values that see tens of thousands of people sleeping rough in the streets and hundreds of thousands more with no stable accommodation in this fabulously resource-rich country where the richest 200 people hoard nearly $200 billion in assets. The values that drive the mainstream media – the same ones that campaigned against the Red Songs concert – to vilify low-income single mothers and the unemployed as “free-loaders” while never blaming the greedy bosses who retrench workers at will in order to boost their profits for causing this very unemployment . These are the “values” that the anti-PRC NGOs and the Australian ruling class want to impose on the PRC. In the process they hope to subvert the PRC’s own values – socialistic values which see the number one campaign in China right now being the one to uplift every single person above the poverty line by 2020. The Chinese workers and farmers do not need any amount of the values that currently rule capitalist Australia – and neither do the Australian working class, Aboriginal people and any of the other downtrodden sections of this country.

For An Internationalist Perspective to Fight for World Socialist Revolution

Having refuted the slanders against the PRC and Mao made by the anti-communists, we should say that we do recognise that Mao and the CPC did make some serious political blunders. These are, however, not the ones that the opponents of the PRC consider mistakes and are in the opposite direction to what they attack the CPC for. The errors that Mao’s CPC did make arose centrally from their perspective of subordinating the interests of the exploited and oppressed around the world to the quest for friendly coexistence with the imperialist powers. They did – and continue to do this – in the hope that this would provide a benign environment for the building of socialism in China. This was not always the CPC’s outlook. When first formed in 1921, the CPC was genuinely and proudly internationalist. However, after the CPC suffered a terrible defeat in 1927 when Chiang Kai-Shek’s KMT massacred tens of thousands of communists and worker activists in Shanghai, Changsha and Guangzhou (ironically because the CPC was terribly misled by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union which had itself gone down the ultimately failed path of seeking friendly “coexistence with imperialism”), the party began to turn its back on internationalism and took on a national-centred approach. Where this played out most harmfully was when in the early 1970s Mao made a pact with the U.S. that saw the PRC line up with imperialism against the socialistic USSR. This treachery not only contributed to the eventual defeat of the USSR but for over a decade and a half saw China line up alongside imperialism on the wrong side of many key international issues – for example, by opposing the Cuban and Soviet-backed Angolan anti-colonial struggle.

After Mao’s death, the subsequent, less left-wing, CPC leaders deepened the PRC’s pursuit of “coexistence with imperialism” and shied away from the powerful statements that Mao sometimes made in support of the struggles of the world’s oppressed (for example, in solidarity with the black liberation struggle in the U.S).

To be sure, since the collapse of the USSR, the PRC has become the number one enemy of the capitalist powers and this has sometimes pushed the PRC to take a decent stand on important questions: for example, by stating a commitment to defend Cuba against external intervention and against any threats to its socialistic system. However, what is needed is for the PRC to consistently follow a policy of using its resources to campaign for a socialist transformation throughout the world. This alone can ensure the preservation of socialistic rule in China and its eventual transformation into authentic communism. Such a foreign policy means, for example, that PRC leaders would proudly assert in international forums that China’s economic and development success are due to the socialistic character of its economy, rather than trying to re-assure the capitalists that they are not that different to each other. It would mean that the PRC much more strongly defends her socialistic sister North Korea against the threats and sanctions that she faces. Most importantly, the PRC would strongly state its solidarity with struggles of the exploited and oppressed in the capitalist countries. A glimpse of this happened when China, in Mao’s time, feted two delegations of staunch Aboriginal activists in the early 1970s (http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/images/history/1970s/china/chinadx.html). Such acts of solidarity, however, must become the norm rather than the exception.

In order to encourage the Chinese working class to insist that the PRC turns down this path of solidarity with the class struggle in the capitalist world, we need to show them that the exploited classes in the capitalist world can, indeed, be their true allies. The socialist movement in the West must do this by fighting to blunt all the daggers that imperialism has lined up against the socialistic heart of the PRC. What is needed in Australia are protest actions to oppose the anti-PRC U.S./Australia/Japan military alliance. We need to oppose Canberra’s and the Liberal/Labor/Greens politicians’ support for counterrevolutionary exile forces – the same forces that together with the might of the capitalist media managed to force the cancellation of today’s planned Mao Commemoration concert. We must also solidarise with key pro-working class acts by the PRC state – like its ongoing massive campaign to provide low-rent public housing to its masses and its spectacular crackdown some five years ago against the Rio Tinto corporate thugs who were deviously eroding China’s socially owned assets.

As the fate of the Red Songs concert showed, trying to reduce hostility to the PRC through promoting the richness of Chinese culture and even of pro-PRC culture is wholly insufficient. There is, of course, no harm at all in doing this – it is a good thing. However, the capitalist ruling class in Australia is not going to let cultural “soft power” means undercut support for their drive to overturn socialistic rule in China. The only way to build dependable and solid support for defence of the PRC is to appeal to the class interests of the working class and oppressed in Australia. That is, to explain how, on the one hand, socialistic rule in China is a massive step forward for its working class and poor and, on the other hand, how the maintenance and rejuvenation of this socialistic rule is very much in the interests of the working class and downtrodden in Australia and our struggle for our own liberation.

At tonight’s rally, Trotskyist Platform spokesman, Samuel Kim, concluded his speech by emphasising the fight for the ultimate act of solidarity that the working class and oppressed can give to the PRC workers state:

… the working class in Australia must go about waging working class struggles at home – to eventually create a socialist society. Doing so will provide the badly needed solidarity with the working class of China and help resist all capitalist exploiters threatening the workers state of China.