Photo Above: The scene on 3 May 2021 at the Ancient City Wall in the Chinese megacity of Xian, capital of Shaanxi Province. The site was packed with tourists enjoying China’s long weekend, International Workers Day (May Day) public holiday. From April 2020 until about Mach 2022, while the capitalist world was being battered with terrible COVID death tolls and lockdowns to attempt to curve the virus spread, most people in China enjoyed the best of both worlds: very few COVID deaths and minimal pandemic restrictions. When outbreaks did occur during this time in particular areas, they were snuffed out in quick time by rapid, resolute and effective local measures so that the overwhelming majority of the population were not affected by either the disease or by pandemic restrictions.
Photo: CGTN

How and Why Australia’s
Ruling Class Media Attack China
And Why the Working Class
Must Stand With Red China

Down With the Far Right-Instigated, COVID “Freedom” Rallies in Australia –
Down With the Far Right-Instigated, COVID “Freedom” Rallies in China!

• The Similarities Between the Chinese and Australian Versions of Anti-COVID-Response Protests
• Foxconn Workers Rioted Against the Taiwanese Company’s Failure to Take Adequate Measures to Stop COVID Spread
• Protests Are Not Rare in China and these COVID Protests Were Not “China’s Biggest Protests Since 1989”
• The Western Mainstream Media Unleashed a Torrent of Disinformation and Deceit About Events in China
• The Lives Saved Through China’s COVID Response Was a Great Feat of Humanitarianism. Failing to Stop a Terrible Loss of Life from COVID in the U.S. and Australia Was Brutal
• Australia’s Capitalist Exploiting Class’ Drive to Try and Help Strangle Socialistic Rule in China is “Rational” From Their Point of View But Diametrically Opposed to the Interests of the Working Class
• Stand With Socialistic China to Stand by Working-Class Interests
• The Threat of China Being Engulfed by Capitalist Counterrevolution in the Future is All Too Real
• Socialist Rule Cannot be Protected if the Capitalists and Their Allies Have Equal Political Rights as the Working Class
• How Calls for “Democracy” in the Abstract in China End Up Being a Call for the Destruction of the Workers State
• The PRC Workers State Does Need WORKERS Democracy
• Mobilise in Action Here in Australia in Solidarity with Socialistic Rule in China

9 December 2022: Over the last five or so years, the Cold War that the U.S.-led capitalist powers have been waging against the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) has grown increasingly hot. Australia’s capitalist ruling class has been amongst the most aggressive participants in this campaign of military, economic and political pressure on Red China. Do not be distracted by recent efforts of Canberra to lower the temperature of their diplomatic disputes with Beijing. This is merely an attempt by Australia’s rulers to protect their hugely profitable trade with China from further injury while continuing to help turn the screws on the PRC. It is crucial to be aware that even while taking steps to restore diplomatic exchanges with Beijing, the Albanese government is continuing its right-wing predecessor’s anti-China military build-up of offensive weapons (including the acquisition of long-range missiles and nuclear submarines). Furthermore, two days ago during ministerial-level meetings with the U.S., it was announced that the Labor government would facilitate “increased rotational presence of US forces in Australia” – forces that are aimed against China. This will include nuclear-capable bomber task forces, fighters and future rotations of US Navy and US Army capabilities.  Meanwhile, in the South Pacific, the new Labor government has been even more aggressive than the conservative administration that it replaced in attempting to sabotage regional countries’ cooperation with Beijing. Moreover, the new Albanese government continues where Morrison and Dutton left off in waging a propaganda offensive against the PRC. It pushes the conspiracy theory that China is persecuting her Muslim, more European-looking, Uyghur minority that live in the country’s northwest – a lie that not only have no Muslim-majority countries (other than the tiny NATO-dependent European country Bosnia) signed on to during UN debates and motions but which most Muslim-majority countries, including many subservient U.S. allies like Bahrain, Egypt, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, have denounced, instead emphatically praising China’s treatment of Muslim Uyghurs. As hardline anti-PRC, ABC News global affairs editor, John Lyons approvingly noted: “Australian policy towards China has not changed one iota between Morrison and Albanese. Only the language has changed” (emphasis added).

It is not only Australian governments that are waging Cold War against the PRC. It is the entire capitalist establishment. This includes the mainstream media. In Australia, this is almost entirely either owned by billionaire tycoons – like Rupert Murdoch, Bruce Gordon (main owner of the Nine Entertainment Group that owns Channel 9, 2GB and 3AW radio stations and the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age and a whole lot of other newspapers) and Channel 7 owner Kerry Stokes – or by the capitalist regime itself, in the case of the ABC and SBS. Their choice method of staging propaganda attacks against China is to frenetically promote, as a serious possibility, some anti-PRC conspiracy theory. Then once facts decisively prove the “theory” completely false, they stop spreading the “theory” but do little to tell readers that the original speculation was false, so that most of the mud still sticks. Then they move on to promoting the next anti-PRC conspiracy theory! To see how this methodology works lets examine the media frenzy surrounding the supposed “purge” of former Communist Party of China (CPC) leader and PRC president, Hu Jintao. During October’s CPC 20^th congress, Hu was paid respect by the CPC by being seated next to his successor, Xi Jinping, during the meeting’s sessions. This is despite Hu appearing confused at times during the gathering and from earlier appearances, sadly seeming to be suffering from dementia or some other form of cognitive decline. When Hu, while appearing to have a senior moment, was ushered out of the meeting during its final session, the Western media feverishly spread a conspiracy theory that he had been purged from the CPC by Xi. This is despite the Chinese government explaining that Hu had been ill (while respectfully not mentioning any cognitive decline) and that the aging former leader was ushered out to ensure that he was given his pre-arranged rest time. It was also despite the fact that TV news reports from earlier in the congress showed Xi interacting warmly and respectfully with Hu, despite Hu reaching out to touch Xi affectionately as he was ushered out and Xi then nodding amiably to Hu when the latter speaks briefly to Xi – probably wishing him good luck – as he leaves; and despite official PRC media still mentioning Hu Jintao favourably in its post-meeting wrap up, while featuring footage of him standing next to Xi in its post-congress news broadcast. Seems nothing like a purge! Moreover, four days ago this conspiracy theory was completely blown own of the water. In PRC state media reports of the mourning ceremony for Hu’s recently deceased predecessor Jiang Zemin, supposedly “purged” Hu Jintao was mentioned several times as one of the CPC leaders present at the event. Moreover, in all three photos showing the CPC leaders viewing Jiang’s body, all three not only show Hu … but showing him standing in a pride of place position next to Xi! Yet, as far as we can tell, none of the Australian and other Western media that fuelled the speculation about Hu’s purge, which is basically nearly all the mainstream Western media, have conceded that their previous promotion of this conspiracy theory was wrong given that this “theory” has now been totally blown to smithereens. The BBC was the most despicably dishonest. After giving a lot of air to the “purge” theory or otherwise bizarrely speculating that Hu had been a victim of a power-play by Xi at the October congress, the BBC deliberately hid from their audience the presence of Hu at Jiang’s recent mourning ceremony.

Yet Another Another-China Conspiracy “Theory” Gets Blown To Pieces

Above: When former Communist Party of China (CPC) leader and Chinese president Hu Jintao was ushered out of the final session of the 20th CPC Congress in October, mainstream Western media either emphatically stated that Hu had been “brutally purged” by his successor Xi Jinping or gave much oxygen to this conspiracy “theory”. This is despite Chinese media providing the very credible explanation that the ageing Hu (who sadly seems to be suffering from dementia or some other form of cognitive decline) was unwell and despite very strong evidence that Hu was not purged at all.
Below: This conspiracy theory was definitely blown out of the water just weeks later on December 5, when Hu was shown in several photos on Chinese state media amongst top current CPC leaders at the Beijing mourning ceremony for the death of Hu’s predecessor Jiang Zemin. Moreover, not only was Hu’s presence mentioned several times by Chinese state media but he was standing in the ceremony at the front row just to the very left of Xi Jinping, thus giving honour to Hu. This was also where he was seated during the party congress. The Western media that spread the conspiracy theory about Hu never mentioned that the “theory” had now been blown to smithereens. Some like BBC News even deceptively hid Hu’s presence in their coverage of Jiang’s mourning ceremony. With their “Hu purge” theory now blown to pieces, it did not take these media long to then move on to their next anticommunist, anti-China conspiracy theory.
Photo (below photo): Xie Huanchi/Xinhua

The Chinese and Australian Versions of Anti-COVID-Response Protests

In recent years, among the main targets of the establishment media’s propaganda is China’s response to the pandemic. In order to distract from the fact that the PRC has responded so effectively that her death toll from COVID is less than one-third that of Australia’s … even though she has a nearly 60 times greater population (!!!), the Western media have denounced China’s COVID response as “draconian”. So the media were absolutely ecstatic when demonstrations broke out in several Chinese cities, the weekend before last, against the PRC government’s COVID response. Bearing blank pieces of A4 paper, apparently as a condemnation of censorship, these demonstrations were basically the Chinese version of the large, Far Right-instigated, anti-lockdown, anti-masking rallies seen in Australia, the U.S. and Europe over the last couple of years. One big difference is the size of the protests. In China, despite megacities cities like Shanghai having roughly the same population as all of Australia, each of the protests have thus far only been, at most, hundreds strong. This compares to the COVID “Freedom” demonstrations in Australia which have been up to tens of thousands strong in several cities. Moreover, despite the Western media’s best efforts to insinuate the opposite, the recent protests in China have met with much public hostility. Thus when a handful of China-style “Freedom” protesters held a rally in Guangzhou last week, they were surrounded and angrily scolded by a much larger gathering of local community members. The public shouted at the protesters: “You are not here to help us, you are here to create trouble” and “We Cantonese are very generous, if you need money we can give you some [implying that the demonstrators were paid by Western forces to protest]”.

Despite the huge difference between Western and PRC society, there were nevertheless similarities between the Western “Freedom” protests and their Chinese version. For one, both promoted the conspiracy theory that the COVID-response measures were a deliberate attempt by governments to take away political freedoms. This claim is irrational – for it is against the interests of decision makers in both countries to have economic life constrained by COVID-response measures. To be sure, Australian governments certainly have been taking away people’s ability to express dissent. But they have used other pretexts to do so: including “fighting terrorism”, “combating Communist China’s influence”, “defending national security”, and “protecting the operations of essential services.” Such pretexts to clamp down specifically on their political opponents, are far, far easier for the Australian regime to justify than pandemic restrictions that inconvenience the whole population and hurt the profits of the capitalist exploiters that they serve.

Another similarity between the Australian – and indeed American and European – “Freedom” protests and their Chinese variant is that in both sets of demonstrations, those who personally have the most to gain from pandemic-response restrictions have mostly refused to participate. Frontline wage workers are the most susceptible to catching – and therefore dying from – COVID. Figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics show that during last year’s Delta outbreak, the population with the lowest 20% of incomes, which includes a large proportion of frontline workers (and their families) toiling in minimum wage, gig economy and casual jobs, were about five times likelier to die from COVID than the wealthiest 20% of the Australian population. Moreover, frontline workers employed in hospitals and aged care facilities have seen first hand the deaths caused by COVID and have experienced incredible overwork in their efforts to alleviate the horrific suffering caused by the disease. So for very good reason, only a small number of frontline workers participated in Australia’s “Freedom” protests. In the Chinese version of the protests, wage-earning working-class people seemed to have made up an even smaller proportion of the demonstrations than the ones held in Australia. Accounts by the Western media of the profile of the Chinese protesters invariably describe them as being students from elite universities, legal practitioners, journalists, marketing and finance sector professionals, private-sector business owners and the like. In other words people from China’s upper middle-class, or in the case of some of the students from elite campuses and younger professionals, those who aspire to be part of the upper middle-class.  

The class composition of both the Australian and Chinese “Freedom” protests is shaped by a defining feature of all such protests around the world – they embody a selfish impulse of those involved to endanger the lives of large numbers of other people for the sake of their own convenience and economic prosperity. This ethos of these movements naturally attracts to their ranks a percentage of the self employed and of the highly educated middle-class professionals and elite students. This is because the likes of self-employed tradies, owner truck drivers, lawyers, journalists, small shop owners and accountants are usually engaged in an individual form of work where their income-earning work does not mostly rely on collective labour. This individual means of making a living can condition a self-absorbed attitude to their broader life. Moreover, the dog-eat-dog nature of the market that self-employed tradies, small business owners and say lawyers must operate in – where every other service provider in the market is a competitor for business – or the, often furious, competition amongst the aspirational architects or accountants or analysts in a firm to please their boss and rise up the corporate tree, can condition some of these self-employed and other middle-class people to have an individualistic outlook. In contrast, wage-earning workers are often conditioned, by both the collective nature of their production and the need to unite with their fellow workers to defend their common rights, to have a more collectivist outlook. Moreover, especially for workers employed in occupations where the risk of serious work accidents is high, workers instinctively learn to look after each others safety. This sometimes involves class-conscious workers insisting on workplace safety rules being followed against bosses trying to get workers to flaunt the rules in order to speed up production. Thus for many workers, the notion of following pandemic prevention rules to look after themselves and fellow citizens come as second nature. In contrast, self-employed tradies, owner truck drivers and small business owners sometimes see rules in areas like construction standards, road safety, waste disposal and hygiene as obstacles to them making a good profit when they are being squeezed so mercilessly by cut-throat competition. Some of them similarly see COVID response rules as yet another hindrance to their quest for profits. 

To be sure in both China and Australia, organisers of the protests were, for different reasons, able to tap into legitimate grievances. In the PRC, although the COVID response has been spectacularly effective and although, based on this success, improved COVID treatment methods, the apparent reduced lethality of the subvariants of the Omicron strain presently dominant in China and the more contagious nature of these strains combined with their shorter generation interval making it very difficult to implement a dynamic zero-COVID policy, the PRC was already in the process of significantly loosening its pandemic-containment measures when the COVID “Freedom” protests occurred, a few local authorities had not adequately embraced the central PRC government’s new directives. To the extent that protest organisers in China had any success in reaching a broader audience it was through tapping resentment at the inflexibility of these particular local authorities. However, the main demands of the Chinese version of the “Freedom” protests, to end all PCR COVID testing and abolish masking requirements, are a brutal demand that – even when, as Chinese health experts believe, the Omicron strains currently circulating in China are less lethal – would allow the virus to spread uncontained amongst China’s huge population, overwhelming the health system and therefore causing unnecessary deaths of potentially tens of thousands of elderly and health condition-afflicted people.

In Australia too, the main content of the COVID “Freedom” protests was reactionary. Nevertheless, the protests were able to tap into not only frustration with the very real disruption that is caused by pandemic response measures but widespread distrust of the Australian regime. Some people opposed the COVID response measures, because for often very understandable reasons, they do not trust anything that the Australian authorities tell them. Moreover, there were very real examples of unjust COVID-related repression in Australia. This was due to the regime imposing its pro-rich, class bias and its race bias against people of colour into its pandemic response-policing efforts. During last year’s Delta outbreak in Sydney, it was the working-class suburbs in southwestern and western Sydney that were selectively subjected to the toughest lockdown conditions after authorities failed to impose lockdowns to contain Delta when it first took hold in the city’s affluent Eastern suburbs. People in the heavily Asian, African, Middle Eastern and Islander working-class suburbs of Auburn, Campsie, Granville, Fairfield, Villawood, Bankstown, Liverpool and Blacktown were slandered by the media and the NSW government and subjected to heavy-handed treatment from police and army personnel. It has been in these suburbs, as well as towns with high concentrations of Aboriginal people (like Walgett and Brewarrina) and low-income suburbs in general where people have been subjected to the highest rate of COVID-related fines. Meanwhile, the regime failed to provide the services to the peoples of southwestern Sydney needed to minimise the inconvenience caused by the 2021 Delta lockdown. Thus essential workers living in suburbs like Fairfield, who had lockdown exceptions that enabled them to travel for work outside the region, had to sometimes queue for between six to eight hours to get the compulsory test that they needed to work outside the area! For these reasons, some migrants from these areas did participate in the “Freedom” protests out of revulsion with the way that residents in their suburbs were discriminated against.

Yet, given that it is migrants – especially from Tonga, Samoa, Iraq and Lebanon – who have disproportionately suffered the most deaths from COVID in Australia, which naturally makes these communities less partial to anti-pandemic-response protests; and given that these “Freedom” protests have in part been led by white supremacists, the rallies had disproportionately few people of colour participating. And alongside billionaire Clive Palmer’s hard right United Australia Party (UAP), conscious white supremacists really have been driving the “Freedom” protests. The fascist character of many of the movement’s instigators was most evident in Melbourne on 20 September 2021. Then, Far-Right activists – and some self-employed tradies that they roped in – attacked the headquarters of the left-wing CFMEU construction workers union. The “Freedom” horde assaulted union officials and damaged union headquarters.

In China, just like here, protesters shouted slogans for “freedom” and against censorship. But what established the character of some of the protests most clearly is the part that got the Western ruling classes most excited: that in the street protest in Shanghai and the one in Beijing, some of the demonstrators had chanted “Down with the Communist Party!” and “Down with Xi Jinping!” Now media footage of the Shanghai protest shows that it was a minority of the crowd chanting those slogans with many staying silent. Indeed at the Shanghai protest many participants also sang the Communist Internationale at one stage, although there were plenty in the crowd that did not join in too. Yet it was also true that no one in the Shanghai protest moved to immediately remonstrate with the man who started off the anticommunist chants and tell him to stop – although a Reuters news report said that when a small number of participants at the Beijing demonstration shouted out demands for the CPC and Xi Jinping to step down they were quickly rebuked by some fellow protesters. It seems that the protests were diverse in their composition. Nevertheless, it is also clear that those with a conscious agenda of capitalist counterrevolution were seeking to embed their movement within the grievances of those tired with pandemic response measures. Moreover, although many in the Chinese COVID “Freedom” rallies were not anti-communists, it is also true that a fair percentage of the organisers had sympathy for Western-style “democracy” – which in practice means a tyranny of capitalist oligarchs that is only a democracy for the rich. Given that – even polls done by Western organisations have shown that – a large majority of China’s population is currently both emphatically sympathetic to the PRC’s socialistic political order and strongly suspicious of the capitalist system in the West, this puts many of those driving the Chinese “Freedom” protesters on the relative Far Right of China’s political spectrum, even though they were not racial supremacists like their counterparts in the likes of the U.S., Germany and Australia.

High-Level Coordination of Those Seeking to Hijack
Frustrations over COVID-Response Measures

Those instigators of the Chinese “Freedom” protests with a broader political agenda seemed to be very deliberate in their attempt to hijack frustrations over COVID-response, just as those with an extreme white nationalist agenda were here. It is remarkable how coordinated the Chinese protests were. The protests were held almost simultaneously in several cities, using similar slogans and similar methods – like the use of the blank A4 pieces of paper. Such a level of coordination can only be achieved if protest organisers already knew each other prior to the actions. This could be attained to a partial degree through social media discussion even if instigators have not physically met. However, as the Western media have told us ad nauseum, discussion about protests on this issue had been censored on social media. Moreover, in Australia, or anywhere else for that matter, the only way a high-level of coordination in protests over any issue could arise is through activists having networked in earlier actions. The first protests in any movement over any issue often lack coherence. Yet what happened the weekend before last were the very first COVID “Freedom” protests in China – all the other COVID-related protests in China were highly localised outbursts against specific local authorities about very local concerns and did not target the central PRC government, let alone raise broader slogans about “freedom”, “democracy” and “censorship”. Therefore, key organisers could not have networked through meeting at earlier such events, because there have not been any! This means that some of the key instigators of the Chinese protests could only have been able to network with each other, because they had already, earlier, been brought together over a shared belief about some other issues – like a shared agenda of promoting, at least aspects of, Western-style “democracy” or at the more extreme end, the weakening of or overthrow of socialistic rule in China. Indeed Western media accounts of the Chinese protests defacto acknowledged this … and celebrated it!

Moreover, the timing of the coordinated protests was more than interesting. Everyone in China knows that on 11 November, the central government announced measures loosening pandemic restrictions and reducing the scope of PCR testing. Western media outlets headlined: “China Cities Reduce Mass Testing as Nation Eases Covid Measures.” So why just two weeks later, as more local governments were announcing easing measures, would some people want to instigate COVID “Freedom” protests? They could only have wanted to, because in seeking to channel frustrations over the inconvenience of pandemic restrictions into support for their broader agenda, they realised that they were … running out of time! The more that measures eased, the less resonance for their agenda these forces would get. It was now or never for them!

There were clear signs of external boosting of the “A4 protests”. For example, a few of the placards in the Shanghai protest reportedly had errors in the Chinese character writing indicating that the writers of the signs did not know well the simplified Chinese characters used in the mainland but rather were native users of the old-style characters still used in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Moreover, those scrutinising the Shanghai protest have said that two known anti-communist activists of Taiwanese background participated and confronted police, including an employee of Radio Free Asia (the U.S. government’s station that it uses to beam anti-communist propaganda into the PRC, Vietnam, DPRK and Laos) of German citizenship. Trotskyist Platform is unable to independently confirm whether this last detail is correct or not. However, what we can say is that Western-funded and trained anti-communist groups would have been involved in supporting and even, to a more or lesser degree, partially instigating the “A4 protests” – just as they did the 2019 pro-colonial riots in Hong Kong. This is apparent even from looking at the website of the U.S. government agency for foreign interference, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). As well as detailing on their website the total of $US2.5 million that they provide to various components of the anti-PRC movement of that (small) section of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang that happen to be anticommunist, the further $US1.4 million that they give to various anticommunist Tibetan groups (including $US18,000 for an Australian anti-PRC group called the Australia New Zealand Tibetan Youth) and the hundreds of thousands more that they continue to donate to the anti-PRC movement in Hong Kong, the NED also details the massive $US6.54 million (that is nearly $A10 million!) that they unleashed to bankroll 26 separate anti-communist organisations doing work within the rest of the PRC. Top on the NED’s list of recipients for work in the mainland PRC and handed out a $581,224 donation is an organisation whose name gives the U.S. government’s overall agenda away: the Center for International Private Enterprise, which in plain speak means the Center for International Capitalism. Similarly, among the recipients are several unnamed groups whose agenda is, “To empower entrepreneurs to protect their property rights”- in other words to “empower” capitalists to protect their “rights” to the fruits of their exploitation of workers labour in China, which fortunately is not truly guaranteed in Red China. However, most relevant to the “A4 protests” are the many, also unnamed, Chinese anticommunist groups receiving big money from the NED with stated agendas like, “To educate and train civil society activists on democratization and social movements, and to provide a platform for discussion of democratic ideas and civil society activism, fostering critical links among those who support democracy in relevant locations.” You can bet that at least some of these groups, bolstered by U.S. government money and the “education and training” that they were thereby able to dispense to “civil society activists” about “social movements”, would have been active in China’s November 26 to 28 “Freedom” protests! We should add that in addition to the more open interference conducted by the NED, the CIA and other Western regime agencies surely also provide more covert funding to counterrevolutionary groups inside China. Moreover, the total funds allocated by Western regime institutions is probably dwarfed by the financial resources poured in by Western anticommunist NGOs – including ones operating under the guise of being “human rights defenders” – which are known for receiving huge donations from capitalist tycoons.

It should be stressed that all we have said above about the Chinese rallies applies only to the highly coordinated “A4 protests”. We are not speaking about the spontaneous protests that have erupted at various times at particular neighbourhoods against local authorities or the protest in Urumqi (capital of Xinjiang Province) on November 24. That protest against the lockdown in parts of Urumqi following a deadly fire was aimed against the local government and implicitly appealed to the central government to pressure local authorities.

Foxconn Workers Riot Against the Company’s Failure to
Take Adequate Measures to Stop COVID Spread

Even more different to the November 26-28 “Freedom” rallies than the Urumqi demonstration, was the mass workers protests at the huge Foxconn plant in central China’s Zhengzhou. The Foxconn factory makes iPhones for Apple. The Western media gave their audience the impression that these Foxconn protests were aimed against the PRC’s zero-COVID policies. Nothing could be further from the truth! As some of the anti-PRC media had to admit in the fine print: the Foxconn workers actions last month were not at all directed against PRC governments, even the local ones. Instead, it was aimed entirely against the company. Moreover, in as much as the workers’ actions were related to COVID it was not in opposition China’s COVID-response measures. Instead, workers complained that Foxconn was endangering their lives by putting newly recruited workers in the same dormitories as COVID-positive workers. Moreover, the main complaint of workers was actually over wages. The company had deceived workers by promising a much higher wage than they delivered. In response, militant workers bearing the red, pro-communist PRC flag, confronted the lying bosses and rioted. They also walked out of the factory compound and caught buses out of the factory in their thousands. They did so not only over the company’s failure to pay the promised wages, but out of a fear of catching COVID. As even pro-Western Al Jazeera had to report:

“One worker, Fay, said he feared catching COVID and anguished about whether to stay on for two more weeks to claim a bonus for completing his three-month contract. Eventually, he says, he crawled out through a hole in a green metal fence.

“`In the end, I decided that my life was worth more.’”

So you see, the Chinese Foxconn workers actually wanted more rigorous COVID-response measures, not less! In other words, the Foxconn workers’ actions were aimed in the very opposite direction to the A4 “Freedom” rallies. Indeed, if those angry, COVID-concerned Foxconn workers who had streamed out of the plant later came across one of those “Freedom” rallies (which did not begin until several days later) demanding that COVID-response measures be halted and claiming that the threat of the virus has been greatly exaggerated, the workers may well have shown their displeasure at the yuppies and right-wing students gathered at the “Freedom” protest in a more than verbal manner.

The Western capitalist media’s lying portrayal of the Foxconn workers struggle was not only one of their typical attempt’s to slander the PRC’s COVID response but also an attempt to deflect blame from the company that workers were fighting against. So why would the Western media want to protect Foxconn? Well you may very well not know this, because the media went to great lengths to either downplay this important fact, or simply not report it at all, but Foxconn is not a PRC company, Foxconn is a TAIWANESE company. The imperialist media seek to hide this truth, because not only do they want their audience to transfer their revulsion at Foxconn’s greed onto the PRC, they also want to protect the reputation of Taiwan. The latter is the province of China that the defeated capitalists fled to after China’s 1949 toiling people’s revolution. The fleeing capitalists took with them China’s gold reserves that they looted as well as their own ill-gotten personal wealth. The overthrown capitalists seized the island and made it their base from which they hoped to one-day launch a counter-revolution to restore capitalist rule to the mainland. As a result, this rebel capitalist province received massive economic aid from the U.S. and other capitalist powers to build itself up as an industrial power, as well as ever increasing amounts of military hardware. They managed to turn Taiwan into the West’s unsinkable aircraft carrier aimed against Red China.

The treatment of workers in Zhengzhou by Foxconn, whose biggest stake is an $A8.3 billion shareholding held by Taiwanese tycoon Terry Gou, in fact typifies the severe oppression of workers within Taiwan itself. Indeed, this intense exploitation by Taiwanese bosses was recently noticed here. Another Taiwanese corporate giant, 85 Degrees Café had ripped-off, so cruelly, eight Taiwanese students that it had brought to Australia that even Australia’s limp Fair Work Ombudsman fined the company the second largest amount that it has ever imposed on a single company. In last month’s ruling, the billion dollar Taiwanese company was found to have underpaid each of the students over $A50,000 in just 12 months!!! The Taiwanese corporation forced the students who had come here on a working holiday visa to toil between 60 to 70 hours per week in the company’s Sydney factories and retail stores for wages of, only, between $A1,650 to $A1,750 per month. Moreover, although Taiwan is no longer under martial law – as it was in the first four decades after 1949, when, in a notorious period known as the White Terror, the capitalist dictatorship executed tens of thousands of communist sympathisers, other dissidents, members of the island’s indigenous people and anyone with the slightest association with communists – workers right to resist their exploitation remains severely restricted in Taiwan. For example, workers in Taiwanese workplaces with less than 30 employees are not allowed to form a union that can bargain over workplace conditions. Moreover, Taiwanese teachers, public servants and defence industry employees are completely banned from going on strike and the those working in the island’s utilities, health sector and telecommunications industry are barred from taking any meaningful strike action as well. Most infamously, Taiwan’s capitalist bosses often subject their workers to harsh, military-style control. This militarisation of labour combined with the South Korea-style, hyper-capitalist social values that dominate the island – which results in many parents mercilessly berating their children if the latter do not score top marks at school while adults who are unable to obtain careers with high incomes are often outcast as a “failure” – together mean that Taiwan has a very high suicide rate. Indeed, the island’s suicide rate is double that of the socialist-ruled part of China.

When Foxconn set up factories in mainland China, it tried to bring Taiwan-style militarisation of labour to its plants in the PRC. Accentuated by the fact that workers in the PRC, especially those who had previously worked in her socialistic state-owned enterprises (known for their relaxed work environment and overstaffing in comparison with capitalist firms), were not used to such cruel management regimes, this resulted in a spate of suicides at Foxconn’s Chinese factories in the early 2010s. Eventually, pushed by mass workers protest actions, the PRC government cracked down on the Taiwanese corporation, forcing the latter to improve its employees’ working conditions. However, as recent events have proved, Foxconn still mistreats its workers. This calls on the PRC authorities to more decisively repress the greedy Taiwanese corporation.

The oppression of Taiwanese workers has only intensified over the last few years. À la John Howard and his notorious Workchoices industrial relations laws, in 2017-2018, Taiwan’s anti-PRC extremist president and darling of the Western ruling classes, Tsai Ing-wen and her Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) government pushed through new laws that significantly diminished workers rights. This was despite large protests and mass hunger strikes by desperate workers. As a result, workers can now be made to work 12 days in a row with only 8 hours break between full shifts. Furthermore, the laws exempted employers of flight attendants, public transport drivers, domestic workers and caregivers from even those minimal restrictions on the amount of hours that they could coerce these workers into toiling. The new laws also slashed the number of public holidays in the island by nearly 40%.

The most brutally exploited workers in Taiwan are the island’s three-quarter of a million migrant workers from countries like Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Sri Lanka. Just like during feudalism, these workers not allowed to move jobs to a different employer. Amongst the sectors where indentured labour is most prevalent is amongst the quarter of a million, mostly women, migrants working as domestic maids for wealthy Taiwanese families. These domestic workers often toil from 5am in the morning until 10pm at night, seven days a week for a nominal minimum wage equivalent to $A190 per week. In practice, they often receive much less because employers frequently refuse to provide workers the income promised by their contracts or use loopholes in the contracts to take away most of their wages as expenses. Moreover, labour-hire brokers – with the permissiveness of the Taiwanese regime – usually force migrant workers to pay them exorbitant administration, recruitment, “training” and travel fees. Often, this means that Taiwanese employers or their brokers are able to ensnare migrant workers into debt bondage – in which workers pushed into debt are forced to do whatever their bosses want to try and repay debts that they will realistically never be able to repay. In other words, many migrant workers in Taiwan are doing forced labour. Some migrant women workers in Taiwan trapped in debt bondage have even been coerced in this way into toiling as sex workers.

The estimated 160,000 migrant workers toiling in Taiwan’s huge deep sea fishing industry face amongst the most barbaric conditions of all. Many are forced to do up to 21 hours per day of back-breaking work for a paltry nominal minimum wage of just $A154 per week. Ship captains and their bodyguards often brutally beat these workers or deny them food and water if they are perceived to not be toiling fast enough or if they make unintentional errors in their work. In a few notorious cases, captains and their bodyguards have even murdered migrant workers and dumped their bodies out to sea – but the full extent of such murders is not known because of the Taiwanese capitalist regime’s intention to deliberately turn a blind eye to, or downplay, such crimes. Moreover, in practice, most migrant fishermen toiling in Taiwan’s fishing industry receive far less than even the paltry, minimum wage. They are usually pushed into contracts stipulating well below the nominal minimum wage. Additionally, not only do the brokers take back a big chunk of the wages in fees, but the Taiwanese fishing firms extract “accommodation” and “food” costs from the workers even while forcing them to sleep in squalid conditions with inadequate food and water, even when they are in port. Indeed, some Taiwanese ship-owners with-hold paying their workers anything at all for months … and a few never pay their workers at all! As a result of all this, many migrant fish industry workers are desperate to quit and return home. However, by using transhipments at sea to get fish to market and take on supplies, Taiwanese deep water shipping vessels are able to operate for years without needing to call at a port, meaning that migrants workers enchained into forced labour have to wait years before having a chance of escaping their plight. Moreover, many are often trapped not only by debt bondage but through having their passports being held by their bosses and sometimes by even being physically incarcerated as virtual slaves. There have been confirmed cases where Taiwanese bosses lock migrant fishermen in underground bunkers when they return to the island’s shores or keep them imprisoned in over-crowded houses with the help of guards.

If one looks hard enough, it is possible to find in a small number of mainstream media outlets a number of accounts of Taiwan’s human trafficking of migrant labour and the appalling lack of workers rights in the island more broadly. However, mostly this information is deliberately buried by the mainstream Western media and is certainly not highlighted at all. In Australia’s capitalist media in particular, accounts of the brutal exploitation of workers in Taiwan are almost completely censored. For Taiwan is a protected species as far as the Western media is concerned. Such burying of the reality faced by working-class people in Taiwan is of course a violation of all the claimed ethics of “openness” and “fairness” that Australia’s mainstream commercial and government news organisations claim to stand by. Yet it is hardly a surprise. Taiwan’s continued existence as a rogue province of China not under the PRC is one of the imperialist ruling classes’ main means to provoke conflict with socialistic China.

A True Freedom Protest

“Rare Protests in China” that were “China’s Biggest Protests Since 1989”? Really?

Despite their efforts to misrepresent and thereby co-opt into their anti-PRC narrative the Foxconn protests, it was the A4 “Freedom” protests that really had the Western ruling classes excited. Their media have cheered that these COVID “Freedom” rallies have been, as a 28 November ABC News article explicitly claimed, “China’s biggest protests since 1989.” Alongside this assertion, the media have insisted that these recent demonstrations were “rare” examples of protest in China. Ironically, if you look back carefully over Western media articles over the last few years, they have reports on many, many other protests in China. Quite comically, on each occasion the media report that “this is a rare example of protest in China.” However, if all these “rare” protests have been going on, then protests cannot be that rare in the PRC! To be sure, socialistic rule in China is currently not administered in its ideal form – that is a workers democracy where all who defend the rule of the working class and socialism are able to freely advocate their views and scrutinise and criticise the policies of governments and state institutions. The currently, bureaucratically deformed nature of the Chinese workers state means that there are restrictions on the scope of what should be legitimate protest – that is those that are not aimed at mobilising the forces of capitalist counterrevolution. Yet, contrary to the impression that the Western media would like to give, protests are actually very common in China. Indeed, one could even say that Red China’s people have a tendency to protest at the drop of a hat. It is estimated that there are on average somewhere between 300 to 500 protest actions in China every day. Today, protests in the PRC are mostly ones associated with workers strikes (which are usually aimed against private sector or Western/ South Korean/Taiwanese-owned enterprises where workers conditions are well below those at the PRC’s state-owned enterprises), protests by residents against the operation or opening of a nearby polluting factory and quite often, actions against perceived wrong decisions or bureaucratic excesses of local authorities – the latter protests usually appealing (often with success) to the central PRC government to crackdown on local authorities.

Moreover, the media’s claim that the recent A4 rallies were the largest protests in China since the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests is simply not true. In fact, there have been dozens of other protests that have been far larger. Here are just a few. In the late 1990s, China saw a huge number of protests by workers at state-owned enterprises (SOE) against privatisations and downsizing that had been pushed by pro-market then premier Zhu Rongji. Often the rebelling workers would march behind a portrait of Chairman Mao. In one action in Sichuan Province’s Nanchong, thousands of workers at the Jianlihua silk factory angered over lay-offs and pay cuts seized the general manager and took him hostage:

“They loaded Huang [the manager] into the back of a flatbed truck and forced him into the painful and demeaning `airplane position’ – bent at the waists, arms straight out the sides.  Then they … paraded him through the streets [of Nanchong] just like the Cultural Revolution … Workers from other factories joined the spontaneous demonstration … 20,000 people took part.”

Timothy Cheek, Living With Reform: China Since 1989, Fernwood Publishing Ltd, 2006

Then in in March 2002, more than 100,000 sacked SOE workers protested across Northeast China against privatisation and under-payment of redundancy benefits. Such sentiments were unleashed again in particularly militant form in July 2009, when some 30,000 workers occupied the steel plant in northeastern Jilin province owned by state-owned Tonghua Iron & Steel after the company was sold-off to a privately owned, that is capitalist, company. In their struggle to resist the privatisation and the planned layoffs, workers beat to death the general manager appointed by the new capitalist owners! Within hours, the local government publicly announced that the privatisation had been cancelled. Just weeks after the Tonghua struggle, thousands of workers at the Linzhou Steel Company, in Henan Province, occupied the factory to oppose the sell-off of the SOE to a privately owned company. Workers mobilised behind a banner with a clearly pro-collective ownership – and therefore pro-communist – sentiment: “Learn from the Tonghua Steel workers! Defend collective wealth!” They also took hostage the assets-control state official managing the privatisation. Within days, their struggle also resulted in victory. Ever since then, there have barely been any attempts at privatisation of any sizable SOE in China.

On 14 August 2011, up to 70,000 people marched through the Chinese city of Dalian to demand the re-location of a chemical plant. The protest succeeded after the city government agreed to move out the plant. However, four years later, there was a militant protest in Linshui county, in Sichuan Province, that was aimed in the opposite direction. Some 20,000 residents demanded that a proposed high-speed railway that had been planned to pass through the county not be amended to another route that would bypass the area. Protesters carried banners demanding: “We want development, prosperity and a railway”. Note, that this was already two and a half-years after Xi Jinping became PRC leader, which the Western media have been claiming led to the constriction of all opportunities for protest in China.

Ten months later, about ten thousand workers at the Shuangyashan coal mine in Heilongjiang Province rallied to protest against the local government for failing to ensure that the, then semi-bankrupt, state-owned Longmay Group pay on time the wages it promised to continue paying workers after the mine was idled. Pushed by this and similar protests, the Xi Jinping government modified its supply-side structural reforms that were originally intended to reduce overcapacity and overstaffing at state-owned coal and steel plants. Beijing now moved to ensure that the SOEs with excess capacity establish operations in other areas, including agriculture, forestry and services, so that the excess workers can be transferred into new jobs. At the same time it turned the focus of its coal and steel sector capacity reduction drive from the SOEs to the closing down of smaller capitalist-owned operations.

However, Mao-portrait bearing rallies appealing to the CPC central government to act against local authorities and workers actions calling to “Defend Collective Wealth” and protect the PRC’s socialistic SOEs, are all not the type of protests that the Western capitalist media want to highlight. If the Australian media were honest they would not label the recent COVID “Freedom” protests, “China’s biggest protests since 1989” but rather call them, “China’s biggest protests since 1989 that had an agenda attractive to Western ruling classes” – that is protests that either included anti-communist elements or had the potential to grow into one aimed at undermining socialistic rule in China.

The Australian media’s attempts to convince their audience that protests almost never take place in China is part of their push to create an impression of China as a repressive, “authoritarian” country in contrast to the “democratic” West. As part of this, they hyped up any repression of the A4 protests. For example they focussed on the arrests by PRC police of a handful of protesters – who from video footage appeared to be sitting on road intersections. However, in actual fact, PRC authorities have been rather mild in their response. The few detained were released within hours and at this stage it does not appear that a single protester actually remains held in detention or charged. Compare this with how Australian authorities dealt with COVID “Freedom” protests here. For example in just one COVID “Freedom” rally in Melbourne alone (on 3 November 2020), police arrested 404 protesters after having earlier unleashed capsicum spray against the demonstrators. Then in August last year, a court in Sydney sentenced an anti-lockdown protest organiser to eight months in prison. Let’s be clear: we have little sympathy for any repression faced by the, often Far-Right, organisers of these anti-pandemic response protests. Nevertheless, the contrast between the harsh repression against “Freedom” activists here and the relatively mild treatment of COVID “Freedom” protesters in China is striking given the determination of the Australian media to portray the differences between the Australian system and the PRC one as one of “democratic” Australia versus “authoritarian” Communist China.

Moreover, as those who stand up for workers rights, activists in support of public housing, staunch anti-fascists, sympathisers of socialistic China and climate activists can all tell you, the supposed right to protest and express one’s political views in Australia is inhibited. And the regime has been progressively restricting this right even further. In April this year, the right-wing NSW government, with the ALP’s support, passed laws that allow for people accused of illegally protesting on public roads, bridges, and industrial estates to be jailed for up to two years. Seven days ago, when the Australian media still hadn’t stopped screaming about the supposed repression of right-wing COVID “Freedom” protests in China, a Sydney court outrageously imprisoned a climate activist for 15 months for a protest in April. Deanna Coco was given this extreme sentence for blocking one-lane of the Harbour Bridge for merely 25 minutes. Moreover, on June 19, NSW police conducted an operation against climate activist group, Blockade Australia that makes the PRC’s police seem like teddy bears. When the climate group was merely having a meeting camp northwest of Sydney, police organised camouflaged undercover officers to literally hide in the bushes to spy on the camp. When the spies were detected by camp participants, police unleashed a fearsome force of 100 riot police, helicopters, the dog squad and uniformed cops to descend on the camp and arrest dozens of the group’s members. As a result of this and a subsequent raid, ten activists have been charged, two of whom were imprisoned after being denied bail. Four of the activists are facing up to ten years in jail. The charges allege that the activists were … planning to commit a crime in the future, by engaging in an unspecified future direct action to advocate measures to mitigate climate change! Meanwhile, the Australian regime is seeking to jail former Australian Army lawyer David McBride for up to 50 years for revealing to the media some of the details of the appalling murder of civilians and unarmed prisoners by the Australian military during its occupation of Afghanistan. And let’s not forget the complicity of Australian governments in the brutal ongoing persecution of Julian Assange for bravely reporting details of the U.S. regime’s heinous murder of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A Torrent of Disinformation and Deceit

Their deliberate misrepresentation of the Foxconn protests and their lie that the blank A4 paper-bearing COVID rallies were the biggest protests in China since the 1989 were hardly the only chunks of deception that the Australian mainstream media have engaged in during the last couple of weeks. So let us identify some of the different streams that have contributed to the torrent of disinformation that they have engulfed the Australian population with over events in China. One of the favourite claims of the Western media is the notion that “China’s zero-COVID policy has crashed the country’s economy.” Yet in the first year of the pandemic, while the economies of the U.S., Australia, India and other capitalist countries dived into recession, the PRC economy was the only major economy to have positive growth during that year. The following year, the PRC’s economy surged by a remarkable 8.1%. Now, in the third quarter of this year, the PRC’s economy grew at a very decent 3.9% year on year. This compares with a 2.4% annualised growth of the Australian economy and a 0.8% annualised contraction of the British economy. So, so much for China’s pandemic response “crashing her economy”! Crucially, the PRC has been able to handle her pandemic response through methods that have kept the prices of food and other essentials in check. Today inflation in China is running at only 1.6% per year, in contrast to an inflation rate of 6.9% in Australia, 6.8% in India and a whopping 11.1% in Britain. To be sure, the Omicron spread in China this year has slowed her economy from its usual very fast pace. However, although pandemic response measures do reduce economic activity, the spread of the harmful virus is itself very damaging to production. As we have seen here in Australia, people falling ill with COVID has created shortages of frontline workers, while the understandable fear of catching the virus has caused many to voluntarily shy away from usual activities – thereby reducing consumer demand for services in many areas. Indeed, even the ABC’s business editor, Ian Verrender conceded – not when speaking about China of course but about Australia – that “it wasn’t the lockdowns at the root of the economic catastrophe that has befallen us in the past two years. It was a highly contagious virus.”

One of the most cynical mantras repeated endlessly by Australian ruling class’ media is the claim that China’s pandemic response efforts are now failing. Or, in the words of ABC’s chief, anti-PRC propagandist, Bill Birtles, “China now has the worst of both worlds” – that is strict pandemic restrictions on people and a rampant virus spread. Oh, really? Let us check the facts on how bad or otherwise the COVID spread in China really is. The facts are that over the last month, there were 593 COVID deaths in Australia, whereas in mainland China, with its huge population, there we just nine deaths! In other words, in terms of deaths per head of population, in Red China the COVID situation is currently about 3,700 times better than it is in Australia! Doesn’t sound like “China has the worst of both worlds” at all!

Another key piece of deception that the mainstream Western media engaged in is by deliberately giving the strong impression that (although often not explicitly stated so that they could claim that they are “not lying”) China’s people have been basically locked down or subjected to other restrictive measures throughout the whole three years of this pandemic. The truth however is that other than for the initial early 2020 lockdown in Wuhan and the surrounding parts of Hubei Province, when China was facing the rapid spread of a new virus that no one knew much about, as well as a small number of lockdowns for periods in other cities like Xian, the overwhelming majority of China’s people were never put into a stay at home lockdown for any period during most of 2020 and all of 2021. Thus while residents of Melbourne have been locked down citywide for cumulatively four months during the pandemic and Sydney residents were locked down for three and a half months during last year’s Delta outbreak, residents in Shanghai, Shenzhen, Chongqing, Chengdu, Tianjin and most other large cities in China never had to endure a confined to the home lockdown during the first two years of the pandemic. Moreover, while very small proportions of Beijing and Guangzhou were locked down for short periods and other parts of the cities faced short-term restrictions on travel outside the city during particular outbreaks, most of the residents of these megacities also did not experience any lockdowns whatsoever in 2020 and 2021. Indeed, other than for mandatory mask wearing in public transport and other high-risk areas and the blocking of tourist travel into China, the PRC’s rapid and aggressive suppression of outbreaks when they did occur ensured that, for most of 2020 (after the Wuhan outbreak was suppressed) and all of 2021 and into March 2022, most Chinese people were able to go about their lives as if there was no pandemic at all. Outbreaks, of course, still did occur during this time in particular areas. However, when they did, they were snuffed out in quick time by rapid, resolute and effective local measures so that the overwhelming majority of the population were not affected by either the disease or by pandemic restrictions. One could actually say that for two years of this pandemic, the PRC had the best of the both worlds: a lesser proportion of her people subjected to lockdowns than in say Australia and a far, far lower death toll.

This changed from about March this year as the more infectious but apparently less lethal Omicron strain became dominant. Nevertheless, the PRC’s efforts to protect her people’s well-being have continued to be remarkably successful. All year, 599 people have died from COVID in mainland China compared to 14,102 deaths in Australia despites its much smaller population. However, to stop the 2022 spread of Omicron, the PRC was compelled to lockdown significant parts of several cities at various times. Most notably, China’s most populous city, Shanghai, which had avoided any lockdowns earlier, was placed into a strict lockdown in early April that lasted just under two months. Although tighter than the lockdowns in Australian cities, it is still notable that the duration that even Shanghai residents have been locked down for is only half the duration that residents in both Melbourne and Sydney have endured. To obscure this reality, the Western mainstream media have engaged in deliberately deceptive coverage of China’s pandemic containment measures. They have reported lockdowns of particular suburbs, or even just small neighbourhoods, of cities as if those entire Chinese cities have been locked down. Meanwhile, in order to make the number of people under lockdown in China sound much larger than is actually the case, they lump in to their figures of the number of people facing “lockdown measures” (by adding the word “measures” to “lockdown” the Western media believe they have found a means to engage in this slight of hand) the amount of people experiencing only partial restrictions in their local areas – like the closure of karaoke bars and internet cafes – but who are not locked down. They are then able to quote a total number of people supposedly facing “lockdown measures” that sounds large … helped by the fact that any number for either good or bad sounds large when one is dealing with a country of nearly 1.5 billion people! Yet two can play this game. We can use this same method and, looking at the question from the opposite angle, point out that there are hundreds of millions of people in China, perhaps even the majority – including the overwhelming majority of residents in both Beijing and Guangzhou – who have never had to endure a Sydney or Melbourne-style confined-to-the-home compulsory lockdown during this entire pandemic.

So why then has the PRC been able to protect her people from COVID so much better than every other large state in the world – including the Australian, U.S., Japanese, Indian, Russian and Saudi Arabian regimes? It is true that after the Australian and other capitalist rulers progressively abandoned any serious moves to contain COVID in the course of 2022, as they put business profits ahead of the lives of the elderly and ahead of the wellbeing of frontline workers and their families, it was the PRC’s determination to continue to put people’s lives first – including when necessary through targeted lockdowns – that enabled her to protect her people far better than the capitalist regimes. However, what about in 2020 and 2021, when governments in countries like Australia were locking down people in their biggest cities for considerably longer than their counterparts in China? There have been three key methods that have been responsible for the PRC’s success in containing COVID. The first is the provision of effective head to toe protective gear for all their workers most vulnerable to catching COVID. Take a look at most photos of health workers and testing staff in Australia during the pandemic and compare that with those of their Chinese counterparts. One will see that the Chinese workers have the benefit of far more comprehensive protective clothing and masking to protect them from acquiring COVID. The second feature of China’s COVID response has been test, test, test! During the height of the pandemic, whenever there was an outbreak, China PCR tested not only close contacts of known cases but the entire population of whole areas where the cases had been. This testing continued until the outbreak was suppressed – with residents often tested as frequently as once every two days. Additionally, frontline workers at high risk of catching COVID are being tested very frequently even if no known cases in their residential areas exist. Crucially, since COVID is often first transmitted into an area via frontline workers of working age and good health before it is passed on to elderly and sick people, the PRC’s frequent testing – and thus early COVID-positive detection – of frontline workers has been able to minimise virus transmission onto her vulnerable elderly and ill populations. Thirdly, during the height of the pandemic, the PRC moved almost every single COVID infected person into a hospital or makeshift hospital until they had cleared the virus. This ensured that not only were all COVID patients given proper care – thus avoiding the awful situation that we had in Australia during the Delta outbreak when people were dying from COVID at home before even being taken to hospital – but that those infected did not pass the virus onto others including older members of the same household.

The PRC’s winding back of its pandemic containment measures, which began before the protests, mainly involve a winding back of this third method – by moving to home quarantine for those with mild or asymptomatic cases. Additionally, the PRC has largely wound back the the use of Method 2. Mass testing of every single person in whole areas or cities where an outbreak occurs will no longer be conducted. However, frequent PCR testing of health sector workers, nursing home staff, childcare workers, school employees and certain other frontline workers will continue. The loosening was based on the declining severity of the Omicron variants present in China, the wide availability of antiviral medications for infected people that had not been available earlier, the Chinese medical system’s greater experience and competency in treating COVID patients and a rate of full vaccination of over 90% of China’s entire population (note that this proportion is relative to China’s entire population and not just to the over 16 year-old population as vaccination figures are reported in Australia). By comparison, at the time much of Australia abandoned strict pandemic preventive measures when NSW on 17 February 2022 removed the requirement for QR check-in before entering hospital venues, retail premises and gyms and removed all density limits on hospitality venues and nightclubs, antiviral medications were not available in Australia (at the time none had even been listed on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme) and Australia’s vaccination rate was lower than China’s was at the time of her recent loosening of COVID containment measures (at the time the number of vaccine doses delivered in Australia numbered 2.04 times its total population whereas by 28 November 2022 China had delivered vaccine doses that numbered 2.45 times her entire population – the ideal figure should be above 3 when all those older than age three have had at least three doses and the elderly and COVID-vulnerable have had four doses). It remains to be seen whether China’s changes are timely, as seems to be the case, or whether, under the pressure of private sector business owners, the self-employed and overseas capitalist governments wanting the Chinese market to operate at full throttle in order to prop up their deteriorating economies, PRC authorities have loosened COVID containment measures slightly too quickly. It is very possible that the PRC has managed to truly see off the pandemic with a very low number of deaths and can return to a situation when most people are not seriously inconvenienced by virus containment measures while COVID deaths are kept to a very low level (as was the case between April 2020 and March 2022). However, there is a small possibility that the PRC may need to partially bring back certain measures if the new guidelines lead to a spike in COVID deaths before the pandemic fully wanes.

The three key methods, referred to in this section of this article, that underpinned the PRC’s COVID response during the height of the pandemic (before vaccines and anti-viral treatments were available or when far more deadly COVID strains like Delta were dominant) could not have been utilised by most other countries even if they wanted to. To provide the massive amount of hazmat suits, medical grade masks, other personal protective equipment and COVID testing kits needed for a PRC-style pandemic response required manufacturers to switch over their production to making these items in quick time. To conduct mass PCR testing and processing on the scale that the PRC conducted required a massive mobilisation of human resources. So did the organisation and transport of large numbers of infected people into centralised quarantine and the provision of food and other services to such a large number of patients. Moreover, the required creation of new hospitals and makeshift hospitals in the space of weeks to suppress new outbreaks in a city was a Herculean task. None of this could be accomplished in societies where the construction companies, manufacturers, transportation firms, pathology firms and other key sectors are under the ownership and control of profit-driven private companies. Such capitalist firms would be loathe to rapidly switch over their operations to providing large amounts of protective gear, testing kits and makeshift hospitals at a low enough price for governments to afford, especially when they knew that the costly re-orientation of their operation to provide the new product would only bring in revenue for the duration of the pandemic. The PRC was only able to implement her three principle pandemic-response methods because her key means of production, distribution and infrastructure construction are under public ownership and because even her private companies are ultimately subordinate to the workers state. In other words, it was the PRC’s socialistic system that made her hugely successful pandemic response possible. It is notable that of all the countries in the world with a population greater than 15 million people, the two countries with the lowest COVID death rate per million residents are both socialistic countries: the PRC and the DPRK (North Korea).

What is “Brutal” and What Is Not?

To obscure the truth that socialism was responsible for the PRC’s extraordinarily effective pandemic response is part of why the capitalist powers have been so intent on denigrating her COVID response. Thus, when their media have to acknowledge the PRC’s low COVID death rate, they say that it is only due to the use of “brutal” methods. In attempting to sell this narrative, these ruling classes employ one of their favourite tactics in their propaganda war against Red China. They pick out one particular bad act of a PRC state institution at one moment in time in one particular part of China (and it is always easy to find some examples of such particular events in China since it is such a huge, diverse and sprawling country) … and then claim that this is what is happening in all parts of China, at all times! So accounts of one overzealous local official (or more likely in China’s case a neighbourhood volunteer) in charge of COVID response in one neighbourhood, of one suburb, of one city of China, who has the doors welded of a couple of houses to ensure that its residents stay inside during a lockdown following their earlier breach of the lockdown in that particular neighbourhood at that particular time becomes translated into a claim by Western ruling classes that: “Communist China’s authorities are everywhere and at all times welding shut the doors of residents under lockdown!”

To “justify” their narrative, the mainstream media have supported the conspiracy theory that the November 24 fire at an apartment building in Urumqi that killed ten people was made worse because fire trucks were obstructed due to COVID response measures. PRC authorities have denied the rumours. But let’s say that the conspiracy theory actually is true. Then ten people died, in part, as an inadvertent result of the PRC’s COVID response. That is a tragedy. But the PRC’s pandemic response has also meant that her total COVID death toll is currently 5,235 when it would have been over 4.8 million deaths had China had the same COVID per capita death rate as the United States. Those extra 4.8 million deaths would have been a tragedy on a scale immeasurably more horrendous than the ten deaths from the Urumqi fire. And that is the point! The PRC’s COVID response, far from being “brutal”, has been a great feat of humanitarianism that has saved the lives of the nearly five million people who would have additionally died had she responded to the pandemic the way the U.S. ruling class did.

Now, let’s look at what really is “brutal”. “Brutal” is when a regime allows COVID to spread so wildly that the hospital system is engulfed, patients are dying on mass, already under-staffed hospitals are battered by health workers themselves being struck ill by COVID and those health workers lucky enough to be COVID–free are overwhelmed. Here is how a senior ICU nurse in Sydney described her work during the pandemic in Australia to the ABC’s Background Briefing program:

“In those four or five months that Delta hit, I had more patients pass away on me than I’ve ever had in my nursing career. And it’s not something that you can just go home and act like it’s fine….

 “By mid-January [2022], the simplest way to describe it is absolute chaos. We are seeing ICU filled back up with COVID patients, and a lot of nurses are now close contacts or isolating and unable to come to work….

“There have been times where I’ve been so exhausted that, after a drive home, I sit in the car for half an hour because I don’t have the energy to get out of my car and walk inside the house.

“I’ve heard stories of nurses having to leave their patients in a pool of faeces and urine for a few hours because they’re so busy keeping patients alive and there was no back up.”

Four days ago, even with the worst of the Omicron wave having receded for the moment, Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital still had to beg parents not to send their children there because waiting times at its Emergency Department had blown out to 12 hours. The next day, the city’s Alfred Hospital cancelled “elective” surgery and other hospitals have deferred some surgeries too. Now that is a truly “harsh” situation. However, to truly understand what is “brutal”, consider the following. If the Australian regime had responded as effectively to the pandemic as the PRC did and thereby kept Australia’s per capita death rate down to the level that China had, there would have been just 94 COVID deaths in this country. Instead, there have been 16,441! Those extra 16,347 COVID deaths in Australia occurred because the Australian ruling class failed to respond to COVID as effectively as the PRC did. Granted that the capitalist system in Australia means that Australian governments could never approach the PRC’s pandemic response success even if they wanted to. Nevertheless, part of the additional deaths was due to the regime consciously abandoning determined pandemic response, at a certain stage, in order to maximise business profits. The resulting extra thousands of deaths that occurred in Australia is not just “brutal”, it is actually an indirect form of mass murder – mass murder of mostly lower income people for the sake of the profits of super-rich business owners. Moreover, the remainder of the additional thousands of deaths in Australia compared to Red China is due to the inherently flawed and brutal nature of the capitalist system.

Hypocritical Western Media Says: Down with “Freedom Movement” in the West! Support the “Freedom Movement” in China!

The most striking feature of the Australian mainstream media’s reporting of COVID-related events in China over the last couple of weeks is the fact that while they hailed the recent Chinese COVID “Freedom” rallies, only a year or two earlier, they had nearly all been … strongly condemning the COVID “Freedom” rallies in Australia! Take for the instance the “progressive-liberal” Guardian online newspaper. Their stance on the anti-COVID-response protests in Australia and other Western countries is typified by their article from 12 February of this year, which, with plenty of justification, was headlined: “The global ‘freedom movement’ is a carnival of crank and conspiracy – and very dangerous.” Yet, just nine months later, this same Guardian was cheering on the Chinese “freedom movement”. This enthusiastic cheering of the Chinese demonstrations was despite the fact that just like the “carnival of crank and conspiracy” here, many Chinese “Freedom” protesters also voiced crank claims that the that the virus is really not that serious and repeated the same conspiracy theory as the “global freedom movement” that pandemic response measures are a deliberate plot to take away people’s freedoms … even when two weeks prior to their protests the PRC began gradually easing restrictions.

Moreover, given that most people in China have been locked down for a lot shorter time than those of us who live in Sydney and Melbourne, albeit having to do far more PCR tests, the frustrations of those participating in the Chinese version of the “very dangerous”, “carnival of crank and conspiracy” had even less justification than those demonstrating here. Indeed, precisely because people in China have on average been locked down for less time than here, protester anger and chants at the Chinese “freedom movement” rallies (and we are here speaking of the A4 protests and not the Urumqi one) – unlike the most intense manifestations of their Australian version – were not directed mostly against lockdowns. Instead, the main chant at most of the protests was: “I don’t want PCR test, I want freedom.” In the Beijing protest on the morning of November 28, Reuters reported that demonstrators chanted: “We don’t want masks, we want freedom. We don’t want COVID tests, we want freedom.” However, the Guardian and other mainstream Australian news outlets have been careful not to highlight too much the actual demands of the Chinese “Freedom” protesters. To admit that many of their chants were directed against mask wearing makes them sound too much like the pro-Trump Hard Right and clearly does show commonality between the Chinese version of the “freedom movement” and the Western “carnivals of crank and conspiracy.” Moreover, to emphasise the fact that the main demand of the Chinese protests was against PCR testing would make the Chinese protesters sound petty to the Guardian’s Australian readership. After all, more than 16,400 people have died from COVID in Australia, thousands more are suffering the debilitating effects of long COVID, hospitals are overwhelmed, nurses are exhausted to the point of breakdown and Sydney and Melbourne were each locked down for three and a half to four months … and some yuppies, rich kids and young wannabes in China complain about merely having to do PCR tests! Furthermore, the Guardian and the rest of the mainstream media never pointed out that the demands of the Chinese protesters were as obviously irrational as the “freedom movement” here. In Australia, the “freedom movement” simultaneously opposed lockdowns on the one hand and vaccines and vaccine mandates on the other – even though mass vaccination is precisely one of the most crucial tools for avoiding lockdowns. Meanwhile, in the Chinese “freedom movement”, participants opposed PCR testing and mask wearing … even though testing and mask wearing is absolutely crucial to avoiding the rampant virus spread that necessitates lockdowns!

It should be noted that unlike the likes of the Guardian, the ABC, SBS, the Sydney Morning Herald and all the main free-to-air TV channels, the most hard-right, shamelessly reactionary section of the media have supported, or at least legitimised, the Far Right-instigated “Freedom” protests in Australia. In fanatically also supporting their Chinese variant one could say that the Hard Right media were at least being consistent. Indeed, the Hard Right outlets had a field day pointing out the hypocrisy of their liberal rivals when the latter supported the Chinese “freedom movement” after having opposed the Western version. Thus a 2 December article in Murdoch’s disgusting, Fox News outlet screamed as its headline: “Media outlets praise anti-lockdown protesters in China after condemning American demonstrators as ‘extremists’”. Of course in correctly identifying the glaring contradiction in their liberal and mainstream-conservative rivals, the hard-right media’s conclusion is the diametric opposite of ours: while we say that the Far-Right instigated COVID “Freedom movements” should be opposed in both the capitalist West and in socialistic China, the Hard Right insist that they should be supported in both places.

The hypocritical stance of the overwhelming majority of the capitalist media to the “Freedom” protests in Australia and China also extended to their attitude towards the police response to the protests. When police have clamped down upon “anti-lockdown” protesters in Australia, the media have supported this. Thus when “Freedom movement” protesters marched in Sydney in July last year, ABC News reported in a favourable tone, and without any criticism, when NSW Police arrested and charged 57 of the participants and then established a strike force to hunt down and charge still more protesters. The ABC also had zero objection to NSW police minister David Elliot responding to the protest by threatening more severe repression, when they quoted the police minister warning that, “Those that are calling for this to happen again next week look out because these 400 officers will turn into 4,000 if needs be.” Yet when PRC authorities have more mildly dealt with the protests – whether that be the spontaneous, localised protests against local restrictions or the highly coordinated, recent A4 protests – the Australian media have rushed to describe the Chinese police response as “harsh”.

It is not just the bulk of the mainstream media that has taken a diametrically opposite stance towards the “Freedom movement” in Australia and the one in China. Most of the rest of the capitalist establishment have done the same. This February, when tens of thousands of “Freedom” protesters descended on Canberra to oppose vaccine mandates and other pandemic-response measures, then opposition leader, Albanese said that the protesters were ignoring the pressure health systems were under and the hard work of healthcare workers over the previous months. Pointedly, Anthony Albanese told the “Freedom” demonstrators in Canberra to “Go home.” However, the Albanese government definitely hasn’t been telling Chinese COVID “Freedom” protesters to “Go home”! Instead, the Albanese government effectively endorsed their rallies. A spokesperson for Albanese’s foreign minister, Penny Wong, stated that: “We urge Chinese authorities to engage constructively with protesters and address the concerns they have raised.” So you see, Australia’s ruling class establishment have no principle when it comes to supporting or opposing pandemic response measures – rather their only true principles are to maximise profit for the capitalist bigwigs and to do whatever it takes to denigrate and undermine socialistic rule in China.

All Wings of the Capitalist Class Are Hostile to Socialistic China

Despite the mutual contempt that hardline right-wing sections of the media on the one hand and their “progressive”-liberal rivals on the other have for each other and despite their big differences on many issues, not least on their attitudes towards the “Freedom movement” protests in the West, they and the rest of the mainstream media take an identical stance towards China. And that stance is not only support for the Chinese COVID “Freedom” protesters but extreme opposition to the PRC state in every way possible. Similarly, all Australia’s different pro-capitalist political forces, despite their bitter disputes, are united in supporting this Cold War drive. This ranges from the violent, extra-parliamentary white supremacist outfits (including the ones prominent in Australia’s “Freedom movement”) to Pauline Hanson’s racist One Nation Party and the UAP to the Liberal-National Coalition to the TEAL independents to the ALP to the Greens. The latter, to be sure, do not support aspects of Canberra’s military build-up – like the acquisition of nuclear submarines. However, the Greens still support the U.S.-Australia alliance that is aimed against China, albeit calling for it to be amended. More importantly, they zealously participate in the entire propaganda campaign that is aimed against the PRC and support all anti-PRC, anticommunist groups within China.

The common anti-PRC stance of all the pro-capitalist political factions is a reflection of the determination of Australia’s entire capitalist class to help strangle socialistic rule in China. As this U.S.-led Cold War drive gets hotter and hotter, even the faint noises, previously heard from the likes of former ALP politicians Bob Carr and Paul Keating, in opposition to the fanaticism of the campaign, have largely dissipated. In any case they never objected to the goal of undermining socialistic rule in China. They only wanted it to be done in a less provocative manner that would not damage Australia’s lucrative trade with China. The same agenda was held by a small number of the capitalist bigwigs that had massive, very direct trade interests with China, like iron ore miner FMG’s main owner, Andrew Forrest. However, with the Albanese government having moderated the language of its dealings with China, even while simultaneously driving ever harder the Cold War campaign against the PRC state, Forrest has now expressed his satisfaction with the Australian government’s China policy. Simultaneously, Forrest made clear his endorsement of the despicable Western slanders against China over supposed mistreatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, telling the Sydney Morning Herald (16 November) that: “We’re [i.e. China and Australia] not going to agree on Xinjiang. And my fellow Chinese business leaders, and other people I speak to, all know where we [i.e. Australia’s ruling elite] stand.” Indeed, even when Forrest was objecting to the intensity of Canberra’s loud denunciations of Beijing, he was in good part playing a double game. The greedy billionaire wanted to publicly appear like he was opposing excessive attacks on China so that he could protect his reputation with Chinese trade partners but he was at the same time supporting the political forces that have been waging one Cold War attack against the PRC after another. Australian Electoral Commission figures for the last two years that political donation records have been published show that Forrest’s FMG donated nearly $100,000 combined to both the Liberal Party and the ALP at the very time that they were both stepping up their campaign against the PRC. Moreover, in September 2019, when then U.S. president Donald Trump hosted then prime minister, Scott Morrison for a state dinner at the White House to further strengthen the Washington-Canberra anti-PRC alliance … Andrew Forrest attended as one of the invited special guests.

This common position of the capitalist establishment against Red China exists throughout all the Western powers. In the U.S., the hard right, Trumpian wing of the capitalist class is in a bitter conflict with the liberal-mainstream conservative wing. Less than two years ago, that conflict resulted in a violent and deadly confrontation at Washington’s Capitol building. Yet all wings of the capitalist class still manage to cooperate on passing, ever-more extreme ,anti-PRC motions in the congress. It is important to note that such unity does not even exist on the question of the war in Ukraine. Although the bulk of the U.S. capitalist class supports using Ukraine to wage a proxy war against Russia, there is a significant wing of the American ruling class that thinks that it would better serve their interests to build closer relations with Russia. This is reflected in the fact that over a quarter of Republicans in congress favour, at least to some degree, a rapprochement with Moscow. Their reason for this stance however is that they think that the U.S. should retard its predatory pursuits in Eastern Europe to stop driving Russia closer towards the PRC. These rabid anti-communists want a policy that can entice Russia into a grand U.S.-Russia inter-capitalist alliance against Red China.

The Three Closely Related Reasons
Why Australia’s Capitalist Rulers Oppose the PRC

So why are the Western capitalist ruling classes so hostile to the PRC? In particular, why are Australia’s capitalist bigwigs risking harm to their immensely lucrative trade with China by antagonising the latter? Amongst some on the Left there is a myth that this is only because Australia’s rulers are mindlessly “following America”. However, the truth is that Australia’s capitalist exploiting class is as opposed to the PRC as their American senior partners. This is for three closely related – but ultimately one and the same – reasons.

For one, China’s mutually beneficial cooperation with South Pacific and southeast Asian countries is undermining the ability of Australian corporations to plunder these countries. Australia’s imperialist rulers have long had a neo-colonial grip over the South Pacific. They dictate to South Pacific governments. They distort local administrations for their benefit – often with the help of Australian judges, upper bureaucrats and military and police officials dominating key positions in the state machinery of Pacific countries. This is in the service of the rich owners of Australian-owned multinational corporations who reap billions of dollars in profit by pillaging natural resources, exploiting cheap labour and monopolising markets in what they consider to be “Australia’s backyard”. For example, just one such Australian-owned corporation, oil and gas giant Santos – notorious at home for arrogantly dismissing the opposition of the Gomeroi Aboriginal nation to their Narrabrai coal-seam gas project – makes obscene profits from owning all of resource rich Papua News Guinea’s operational oil fields as well as a big chunk of the liquefied natural gas flowing out of both East Timor’s seabed and PNG. However, China’s cooperation with countries in “Australia’s backyard” is allowing Pacific countries to loosen the Australian ruling class’ stranglehold over their countries. You see, the Chinese companies building up infrastructure in the South Pacific and operating other projects there are largely very different to the Australian ones operating in the region. These Chinese firms are mostly not owned by rich, profit hungry shareholders but are under public ownership – that is they are under the collective ownership of all of China’s people. In other words, they are socialistic state-owned enterprises (SOEs) that do not operate mainly to maximise profits but rather for broader social goals needed by China’s people. These include maximising employment, developing poorer areas of China and building up the infrastructure of developing countries friendly to China so that they are better able to trade with her. When operating abroad, these SOEs are directed to help China gain a good reputation and build friendship with especially fellow developing countries by engaging in truly win-win cooperation. As a result, South Pacific countries have increasingly chosen to give development projects to Red China’s SOEs rather than to profit-obsessed Australian corporate bosses.

At other times, governments in the region have used the prospect of turning to Red China as a means to pressure the Australian imperialists to reduce their level of plunder. Take for instance East Timor and its struggles to stop Australian energy giants from stealing the lucrative resources in the Greater Sunrise gas field off its coast. Despite the field lying entirely on East Timor’s side of the seabed mid-line between East Timor and northern Australia, the Australian capitalist regime, aided by their spying on the East Timorese government’s confidential conversations about its resource negotiations with Canberra, bullied East Timor into signing a treaty granting the Australian ruling class 50% of the field’s upstream revenue. However, later in 2018, the Australian government had to back down somewhat. They signed a new treaty that while still allowing Australian corporations to steal a large portion and still preventing the East Timorese from having clear sovereignty over their gas field, now gave 70% to 80% of the upstream revenue from Greater Sunrise to East Timor. Part of the reason for Canberra’s back down was to try and restore its regional reputation following the high-profile exposure of its heinous spying on East Timor. However, the Australian regime’s partial retreat was also motivated by a wish to dissuade East Timor from turning further to China for development cooperation. In other words, whether it is by its SOEs winning development projects that would have been otherwise snared by Australian-owned corporations or by compelling the Australian ruling class to moderate its plunder of South Pacific countries, socialistic China is, unintentionally to be sure, making Australia’s capitalists lose money in the South Pacific. And we are talking here of big money – in the order of tens of billions of dollars over the last two decades. We know that when capitalists face the loss of large profits they become extremely ruthless. And that is why Australian capitalist rulers’ are so obsessed with coercing South Pacific countries to weaken their ties with Beijing. This compulsion to protect their lootings in the South Pacific also explains why the Australian imperialists are so determined to contribute to the combined West’s anti-China Cold War – if anything with even greater fanaticism than their U.S. senior partners.

Furthermore, all the Western capitalists know that the continued existence of socialistic rule in China prevents them from turning that country itself into their semi-colony. The Western imperialists not only want to be able to dominate China’s giant market but want to be able to exploit its huge workforce with the same ferocity that they currently exploit workers in the sweatshops of the other populous Asian developing countries like India, Bangladesh, Indonesia and the Philippines. To be sure, since pro-market reforms in the 1990s, China’s leadership allowed capitalists from the U.S., Japan, Western Europe, Australia, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore to extract profits from the labour of mainland Chinese workers. Moreover, as a sprawling and diverse country, there have been some local cases in China of severe exploitation, especially in Western and Taiwanese-owned factories. Nevertheless, since the working class cling onto state power in China, albeit in a deformed and incomplete form, workers wages in China are significantly higher than in the capitalist countries with similar per capita income. Notably wages in the PRC are clearly higher than in her fellow Asian countries Malaysia and Thailand. This is even more so if one adds the approximately 40% of additional labour costs that bosses in China must pay on top of wages (as compared to the less than 12% that bosses on average pay here for superannuation and accident insurance). These go into not only a collective workers pension fund but also into individual workers’ housing provident accounts for Chinese workers to use to buy or pay rent on their homes, as well as into four additional collective workers’ funds for, respectively, unemployment insurance, maternity payments, work-related injury insurance and medical insurance. Moreover, pushed by demands and strikes by workers, since the mid-2000s, Beijing has introduced a pro-worker industrial relations law and carried out a very welcome campaign of harsh repression against greedy bosses that violate workers legal rights or workplace safety regulations. All this together with a court system that – the opposite to Australia – favours workers in disputes with private business owners has led to major improvements in conditions for Chinese workers and a dramatic fall in deaths from workplace accidents. The PRC has come a long way in terms of workplace rights for workers since the 1990s and early 2000s.

Moreover, over the last two decades, workers in socialistic China have enjoyed, by far, the fastest rate of growth of real wages in any major economy. This is not only in comparison to the developed capitalist countries – like Australia where real wages are lower than they were ten years ago and Britain and Italy where wages have plunged even further. The PRC has boosted her workers’ real wages much faster than other developing countries too. Data from the International Labour Organisation’s last Global Wage Report (2020-2021) show that by 2019 (the last year for which ILO data was published), China’s average real wages had more than doubled from what it had been just eleven years earlier; indeed far more than doubled, growing to 2.3 times what it had been! This stunning rate of real wage growth enjoyed by Chinese workers is three times higher than in India, nearly six times larger than in Brazil and infinitely higher than in U.S.-plundered Mexico where workers suffered a real wage cut of 15% during that period. As a result, the likes of Nike and Addidas long ago stopped manufacturing in China and many other Western firms in low-end manufacturing have followed suit. Despite China’s giant market, highly skilled workforce and “First World”-quality infrastructure, these Western corporations are finding it hard to make a sizable profit in China and are transferring their operations to lower wage countries or even back to their home countries.

Therefore, everyday it is becoming clearer to the tycoons running the U.S., Japan, Australia, Britain, Germany, France and the other imperialist countries that the continued existence of socialistic rule in China will thwart their dreams of raking in a fantastic profit bonanza there. Yet these capitalists cannot shake this dream. For as large are the profits that they currently rake in from trading with Red China’s, still, solidly growing economy, they know that they could make far, far more should socialistic rule be destroyed there and they are able to superexploit China’s enormous, well-trained workforce. Moreover, the more that Western rulers’ economies slide towards a new deep recession, the more that they need their hoped-for neocolonial rape of China to prop up their own croaking systems. This is one of the key reasons why the Western capitalist rulers are so hell bent on doing whatever it takes to overturn socialistic rule in China.

However, the capitalist powers also have a far less ambitious but, for them, even more important reason for wanting to destroy the Chinese workers state. For, they understand all too well that the existence of working-class rule in China, in however an incomplete manner, could encourage the working-class masses in their own countries to also struggle for state power. This is despite the fact that the national-centred, compromise-seeking Chinese leadership, goes out of its way to reassure the capitalist rulers in the West that it will do nothing to encourage the class-struggle in the capitalist countries. However, the mere existence of socialistic rule in the world’s most populous country signals to the toiling classes of the world that socialism is indeed possible and that capitalist rule is not “the natural order of things” that must be endured. Therefore, when the capitalist rulers in the West claim that Red China presents an “existential threat”, they are actually right … but not for the reasons that they present to the masses! Contrary to their hysterical propaganda, China does not threaten other countries with predatory interference or wars of conquest. After all, the PRC is the only world power not to have fought a single shooting conflict in the 21^st century. Indeed, China has not been involved in a single war for the last 44 years! However, the continued successes of socialistic rule in China does “threaten” to, in the future, inspire the masses in the capitalist countries to fight for socialism.

Even today, it would be striking to the most conscious pro-working class activists in Australia that while in Australia the tycoons have continued to get even richer during the pandemic while workers real wages have continued to plunge, in China it is the exact opposite: the billionaires are losing a chunk of their wealth while the real incomes of Chinese workers and welfare recipients continue to climb. Thus, whereas Australia’s 200 richest tycoons increased their wealth by 16% in just the last year, in the PRC, the wealth of billionaires fell by 18% during the same period, while workers real wages kept on growing in China. Per head of population, China now has six times fewer Australian-dollar billionaires than Australia does.

The inspirational effect of the PRC’s socialist course is muted by the reality that due to the extreme poverty of China’s pre-1949 capitalist days, when she was a brutally exploited neo-colony of Western imperialism, China’s per capita incomes – and thus average wages – still remain many times below that of the richest of the capitalist countries. However, the gap in per capita income between China and the Western countries is being gradually closed every year. As a result, even now, the wages of some workers in the more affluent parts of China like Shanghai and Beijing are higher than they are in the lowest wage parts of the U.S. – in its Deep South. One can say that if the capitalist powers do not first succeed in crushing socialistic rule in China or at least in squeezing the PRC so hard that it chokes off her development, then the per capita income of the PRC will catch up with that of the richest of the capitalist countries in the space of two or three decades. If that were to happen, why would a politically conscious worker in the West then want to accept capitalist rule? Why would they want to put up with a system of inequality, lack of job security, greedy bullying bosses, decaying social services, growing homelessness and periodic economic crises when a socialist system based on workers collective ownership of the key economic sectors is able to produce comparable incomes? Should per capita incomes in socialistic China be allowed to catch up with that of the richest countries, then the Western capitalist order would truly face an immediate “existential threat.” Therefore, the imperialist ruling classes know that they only have a limited amount of time in which to strangle, or at least decisively constrain, China’s socialistic development. That is why they are so obsessive in their opposition to Red China.

Dashed Hopes for a Cold Capitalist Restoration From Above

If the capitalist powers’ hostility to the PRC has become even more fanatical in recent years this is not at all because China has become “more aggressive”, as they claim. Rather, it is due to internal developments within their own countries and within China itself. For one, the late noughties Global Recession, from which many major capitalist economies never fully recovered, has shaken the confidence of capitalist ruling classes in their own system. Moreover, they cannot but notice the growing distrust of their “own” masses in their regimes in the context of inadequate social services and stagnant or falling real wages. All this makes them even more fearful of the example provided by a socialistic country with a rapidly growing standard of living. These fears have been magnified by the strengthening of China’s pro-socialist character over the last few years. You see, in the 1990s and early noughties, China’s socialistic public sector was being eroded by privatisations and a growing capitalist private sector. Alongside these structural economic changes the emerging capitalist class – and a craven upper middle-class layer around them – more loudly demanded ever greater “rights” for private sector “entrepreneurs” to “freely” exploit. With these partial changes in the economic structure and power dynamics of Chinese society, the ideas associated with capitalism – like selfish individualism and worship of those with wealth – gradually gained traction within sections of the Chinese masses. Fresh from finally strangling to death the socialistic USSR, the triumphant Western capitalists looked at China and expected that it was only a matter of time before the PRC heads the same way as the USSR. However, China’s working-class masses had very different ideas. They waged militant struggles against privatisation and agitated against the emerging capitalist class. Pushed by their demands, in the mid-noughties, China’s then Hu Jintao-led government moved to curb privatisations. By the late noughties, with the economic crisis then engulfing the capitalist world having vindicated staunchly anti-capitalist groupings within the CPC, with the 2009 Tonghua and Linzhou steel workers struggles against privatisation showing workers determination to defend socialistic public ownership and with a 2010 strike wave against Japanese-owned auto manufacturers bringing workers demands to the fore, Hu Jintao and Co. moved onto a more aggressive pro-socialist course. The Beijing government began actually renationalising many enterprises – especially in the coal mining and steel sectors. It also focussed its housing policy on massively increasing the amount of public housing.

The right-wing of the China’s ruling Communist Party – the section of the party most under the pull of the capitalists – however pushed back in 2012 – the last year of Hu Jintao’s term. This right-wing influence appeared to continue into the first three or so years of Xi’s presidency. However, the Western capitalists’ hopes that Xi would lead major reforms that would weaken China’s socialistic state sector were dashed. Under the push of the Chinese masses and a new workers strike wave in 2014-2015, Xi Jinping’s administration started veering to the left in the middle of last decade. Corrupt capitalists have been brought to heel and their assets confiscated and turned into the people’s collective property. Xi’s anti-corruption campaign, by deterring private bosses from bribing state officials to gain an unfair advantage, has diminshed the ability of the private sector to grow in influence relative to the socialistic public sector. Indeed, over the last several years, China’s socialist sector has grown much faster than the private sector, thereby reinforcing the economic supremacy of socialist economy in the country.  Thus in the first three quarters of this year, the revenue of China’s socialistic public sector grew by 9% year on year, much faster than the country’s overall economic growth, while the output of the private capitalistic sector was at best stagnant.

Moreover, from late 2020, Xi Jinping’s government moved more decisively to the left under the slogan of “curbing the disorderly expansion of capital”. It cracked down on excessive profiteering by tech capitalists, introduced further curbs on property speculation and made decisive steps to guarantee the wages and rights of gig workers. Although China’s capitalists, via the more liberal, right-wing of the party – personified by the CPC’s then number two ranked official, premier Li Keqiang – again pushed back at the start of this year significantly slowing the momentum to the left, the Communist Party of China’s (CPC) five yearly congress held in October, endorsed a step to the left relative to the previous congress five years earlier, albeit notably pulling back (unfortunately) from the stronger anti-capitalist measures of the late 2020 to 2021 period. Thus the main document voted up by the congress, emphasises struggling “for common prosperity” – which in China means focussing on lifting the incomes of low-income groups and “adjusting” (i.e. curbing) excessive incomes of the rich. The document also stresses increasing social welfare and emphasising green development. Crucially, although the document upholds, incorrectly, the party’s long-standing line to “encourage, support, and guide the development of the non-public sector” it set up guard rails against pro-capitalist backsliding. Thus, not only does the document approved by the CPC congress reassert the need to “unswervingly consolidate and develop the public sector” but refuting the push of the party’s right-wing to “streamline” and “make leaner” SOEs – i.e. downsize them – the document stressed that the ruling party would ensure that SOEs, “get stronger, do better, and grow bigger.” Alongside this emphasis on protecting China’s socialistic SOEs, the CPC congress notably retired or removed from the party’s leading body (its central committee) prominent advocates for the private capitalist sector – including premier Li Keqiang, the party’s previously number four ranked leader Wang Yang and governor of the Peoples Bank of China, Yi Gang (although there are signs that the CPC’s new number two ranked official and the person slated to become the new premier next March, Li Qiang is also somewhat pro-private sector). Moreover, distinct from its somewhat banal statements of China’s commitment to socialism that it would make in the decade and a half after the 1991-92 capitalist counterrevolution in the former USSR, today the CPC, pushed by the sentiments of the most politically conscious sections of the Chinese masses both within and outside the party, very emphatically asserts that the PRC will be unwaveringly sticking to a socialist path. The congress document’s main theme is for the CPC “to lead the Chinese people of all ethnic groups in a concerted effort to realise the Second Centenary Goal [i.e. at the 2049 hundredth anniversary of China’s 1949 Revolution] of building China into a great modern socialist country in all respects.” Given this reinforcing of the socialist character of the PRC over the last decade and a half, the capitalist powers have all but abandoned their hopes that merely through China’s engagement with the capitalist-dominated, world economy and through their own heavy prodding, capitalist restoration will inevitably gain the ascendancy with the aid of a significant section of the CPC leadership. The imperialists realise that they will need to greatly ramp up their military, economic, propaganda and political pressure upon the PRC if they are going to be able to make socialistic rule crumble, or at least weaken, in China. And that is what they have doing!

What may have especially alarmed imperialist ruling classes is that the CPC congress document emphatically asserts that: “Scientific socialism is brimming with renewed vitality in 21st-century China.” Capitalist ruling classes are terrified that such statements of confidence in Marxism from the leaders of the world’s most populous country will not only undercut their lying efforts to convince their own populations that “communism is dead” and that “China is actually just practicing capitalism under the rule of an authoritarian Communist Party” but could “infect” their disgruntled populations with a belief that fighting for communism is worth considering.

Above: COVID deaths per million residents in a range of countries as of 12 January 2023. The figures for China includes deaths in the period from 8 December 2022 to 12 January 2023 after China significantly loosened COVID restrictions in the light of the weakening strength of the Omicron variants present in China and the great improvement in COVID treatments (in both China and internationally), including antiviral medications. On 14 January 2023, China announced her COVID deaths for this period. The loosening did lead to a spike in COVID deaths in China relative to the very few deaths in China in the previous three years as a large proportion of China’s population became infected with COVID. However, because China had earlier successfully protected her people from the more deadly COVID strains and because when most of her people were infected in the December 2022-January 2023 period it was with much weaker Omicron strains, China avoided having anywhere near the death rates of the countries with the highest per capita COVID death rates, like the U.S., India, Britain, Russia, Canada, Brazil and Turkey, which had most of their deaths when the more deadly strains (including Alpha, Gamma and Delta) were rampant and before anti-viral treatments (and largely also vaccines) were available. Indeed, even during the five week period up to 12 Jan 2023 when China had her highest COVID death rate, her death rate per resident was slightly lower than in Australia in the same period and much lower than Australia’s when this country had its equivalent loosening in February 2022. This is for several reasons. Firstly, when Australia opened up, no antiviral medications were able here – they were only listed in the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme several months later. In contrast, several anti-viral medications were available in China by the time that she loosened her COVID restrictions in December 2022. This includes Chinese anti-viral medications, which independent studies have confirmed as being just as effective as their Western counterparts. Also available in China is Pfizer’s Paxlovid, which however due to the exorbitant price that the American pharmaceutical company charges for the medication is available only to those at very high risk of developing severe COVID; this is the same as in Australia after Pfizer’s anti-viral pill became available here three months after Australia opened up (to this day Pfizer’s Paxlovid is only available in Australia to those 70 years of age or older or to those 50 years of age or older with at least two additional risk factors for developing severe disease). Secondly, China has been more effective in triaging high-risk patients for higher-level hospital care. This is because China’s grassroots-centred COVID response based on neighbourhood committees and local community activists means that those at high-risk have their health status and well-being frequently checked up on. Thirdly, China’s vaccination rate was significantly higher when she loosened her COVID response in December 2022 than when Australia opened up ten months earlier. Fourthly, China has a much lower proportion of people who are seriously ill with other ailments than in the U.S., Australia or other Western countries. This is because, being a country catching up from the terrible poverty of her pre-1949, neo-colonial capitalist days, China does not have the same availability of highly advanced medial care that is able to extend the lives of very ill cancer and heart patients in the richest countries for those able to afford the treatment. China’s relatively high life expectancy – her average life expectancy overtook that of the U.S. in 2020 – is instead based on quality preventative medicine, a healthier lifestyle and diet of her people and good primary hospital care. This is reflected in the fact that while China’s average life expectancy is still more than six years lower than Australia’s, her HALE – healthy life expectancy at birth, an indicator of the average number of years that a person can expect to live in “full health” – has caught up to being within a couple of years of that of Australia’s. With a much lower proportion of very ill people kept alive by advanced medical treatments than in the likes of Australia and the U.S. – that is a much lower proportion of the very people most vulnerable to dying should they be infected with COVID – China would be expected to have a much lower proportion of her COVID cases perish from the disease, even discounting other factors.
As a combined result of these four factors, even after China’s relative surge in COVID deaths in the period from 8 December 2022 to 12 January 2023, her total COVID death rate per million residents is still 15 times lower than that of Australia’s and 75 times lower than that of the U.S.! The success of China, Laos and other socialistic countries in responding to COVID shows the advantages of their systems based on common, social ownership of the strategic sectors of their economies. The capitalist powers fear that their own populations will understand this and thus gain greater sympathy for socialism. This is part of the reason why the Western capitalist ruling classes have escalated their propaganda war against the PRC over the last three years and sought to slander her pandemic response.
Sources for figures: Worldometers, Xinhua

Stand With Socialistic China to Stand by Working-Class Interests

Although it is rational from the point of view of Australia’s capitalist exploiting class – if anything that an obsolete class running a decaying system does can be considered rational – to seek to strangle socialistic rule in China, such enmity towards the PRC is completely against the interests of the working class of Australia and the rest of the world. For starters, waging Cold War against the PRC risks Australia’s trade with China that is greatly beneficial to Australia’s masses. Last year, Australia exported nearly $178 billion dollars of goods and services to China. If that revenue were divided up equally amongst the ten million households that compose Australia’s 26 million population, each household would receive a whopping $17,800 per year from exports to China! The damage to this trade caused by the PRC’s understandable reaction to the Australian regime’s barrage of provocations against her is yet to be truly felt. Although China has restricted Australian exports of barley, wine, beef, timber, lobsters and coal, the price of Australia’s by far biggest export to China, iron ore, rose so sharply that the value of Australia’s overall exports to China actually rose substantially last year. However, that trend is now reversing (although Australia’s overall export numbers to all countries are temporarily helped by the present abnormally high prices for it coal and gas exports). Furthermore, regardless of the shorter term fluctuations in iron ore and energy prices, the reality is that with China transitioning quickly towards a more low carbon, higher tech economy, the longer term trend is for growth in China’s iron ore and fossil fuel demand to wane. Therefore, with iron ore sales no longer able to mask the damage done to other Australian exports to China, this country’s masses could begin to see the full harm to their living standards resulting from their rulers’ hostile policy towards the PRC. For although the Albanese government’s toning down of Canberra’s anti-PRC rhetoric may lead to a temporary improvement in Australia’s trade relations with China, in the longer term, the Australian regime’s escalating military build-up targeting the PRC, its aggressive attempts to stifle Pacific countries mutually beneficial cooperation with Red China, its support for exiled anti-communist Chinese groups in Australia, its backing of the anti-China propaganda campaign over COVID, Hong Kong, Uyghurs and Tibet and its attacks on members of the Australian Chinese community who dare to express any sympathy for the PRC will all inevitably lead to new breakdowns in trade relations with China in the future.

To be sure, Australia’s capitalists also benefit much from trade with China, especially since they seize such a disproportionately large share of this country’s national income. However, while the Australian and other Western capitalists are willing to risk their profits from the China trade for the sake of the much huger profits that they could reap if they were able to overturn the PRC workers state and turn China into a giant sweatshop for capitalist exploitation, the Australian working class would gain absolutely nothing from the strangling of socialistic rule there. On the contrary, should the capitalist powers succeed in squeezing to death the Chinese workers state, thereby leading to a new, capitalist regime there that would greatly push down Chinese workers’ wages and conditions, it would allow capitalist bosses in Australia – and the world over – to massively drive down wages and workers rights at home in a race to the bottom.

However, the main reason why it is in the interests of working-class people in Australia and the rest of the world to stand in defence of socialistic China is political. And that reason is quite simply that: the existence of socialistic rule in a gigantic country and the fact that it has achieved such successes in poverty alleviation over the last seven decades proves to the masses of the world that not only is another world other than a capitalist one possible but that such a socialist alternative is actually viable. Encouraging the masses to struggle for socialism is what we need! That is the only way that we can liberate ourselves from the capitalist reality of plunging workers’ living standards, lack of affordable housing, racist attacks on minorities and imperialist war. Moreover, even before the decisive struggle for socialist revolution in Australia is immediately posed, the fact that China is today focussing on continuously increasing the availability of low-rent public housing, cracking down on property speculation and sticking to an economic system that maintains public ownership of the banks, the oil/gas/coal sector and the power industry, can only encourage the urgently necessary struggle for a similar anti-poverty program here.

Yet, against the interests of its base, the current leadership of most of the workers movement, the ALP, is right behind the capitalists’ drive to strangle socialistic China. Exposing this betrayal, there must be a struggle to mobilise working-class people and all leftists in mass actions to defend the Chinese workers state against imperialist threats and internal pro-capitalist forces. Let us oppose the Australian capitalist regime’s anti-China military build up. We must demand: No to the Australian capitalist military acquiring nuclear submarines, missiles, or nuclear capable bombers! All U.S. troops get out of Australia! Close Pine Gap and all other joint U.S./Australia military bases! U.S./British/Australian navies get out of the South China Sea! We must also expose and politically oppose all those National Endowment of Democracy-funded groups and other anti-PRC NGOs based in Australia that are engaged in promoting anti-communist forces within China. Fight back against the propaganda war against Red China over her COVID response, “human rights”, Taiwan, Uyghurs, Tibet, Hong Kong and the Pacific!

Let us also oppose attempts by Australian imperialism to sabotage South Pacific countries’ mutually beneficial cooperation with the PRC. We must defend the right of the Solomon Islands and any other country to engage in security and economic cooperation with socialistic China to the extent that they see fit. Let us support the engagement of the PRC’s socialistic SOEs with the Pacific to help liberate South Pacific countries from the tyranny of greedy Australian imperialist corporations. If we can reduce the plunder of the Pacific by these Australian corporations that exploit us back at home, they will have a smaller war chest to resist our efforts to stand up to them and defend our rights at work.

The Threat of China Being Engulfed by Capitalist Counterrevolution
in the Future is All Too Real

Those who are truly aware of events in China, know how much has been achieved for her people by socialistic rule. Now, with the PRC having, up to now, protected her people from COVID better than any other major country in the world and with her economy continuing to head in a better direction than the capitalist countries, to many supporters of Red China it seems that the PRC is simply unstoppable. However, let us never forget that in 1957 when the Soviet Union stunned the world by putting the first human-made satellite into space and her economy was growing at more than twice the rate of the capitalist countries it seemed that the then most powerful socialistic country was also unstoppable. Yet, just 35 years later, under the tremendous economic, military and political pressure of the combined imperialist powers and with the Soviet Union’s own internal resistance weakened by bureaucratic deformations that had emerged from the mid-1920s – distortions that were themselves a result of capitalist pressure – socialistic rule in the lands of the Soviet Union was destroyed. We must never let that happen to China! To say that the PRC “is big and powerful enough to look after itself” is foolish! Those living in the imperialist countries who say this are often looking for an excuse to avoid the difficult work of opposing the Cold War drive against the PRC. We must be brave enough to openly defend the PRC workers state!

A sober assessment would tell us that despite her stunning achievements, Red China remains vulnerable to strangulation by the capitalist powers. In terms of the number of nuclear weapons, the strength of air and naval power, the PRC remains militarily much weaker than the U.S. and even weaker in comparison to all the U.S.-allied imperial powers combined. More importantly, despite having caught up so much, per capita incomes in China remain several times below that of the richest of the capitalist countries. As long as this remains the case, the PRC workers state will remain under threat.

Moreover, there is an additional factor threatening socialistic rule in China that was not present even in the Soviet Union in its final days. In China there exists a significant capitalist class that has built itself up over the last four decades. This class does not rule as in the capitalist countries … but they sure want to! They chafe at the fact that SOEs dominate China’s most strategic economic sectors. These greedy capitalists want to have full access to these potentially most profitable sectors so that they can extract huge profits in them like in the “normal”, that is the capitalist, countries. They fume at the PRC state power often “bullying” them into starting up operations in poorer regions or, more recently, switching over their operations to pandemic relief items, when all of this is not what is required to maximise profits. They bristle too at the state often siding with workers when there is a dispute over working conditions. Currently, China’s capitalists realise that they do not yet have the strength to be able to make an open bid for power. They know that the Chinese toiling classes, still filled with the egalitarian sentiment that made the 1949 Revolution, would not tolerate that right now. So, for the moment, the capitalists try to expand the sectors where they have the “right” to exploit workers in. To help them do this, these rich capitalists cynically cry poor claiming that the state is “discriminating” against them by favouring the socialistic SOEs. To push this agenda, China’s capitalists have various lobby groups, most notably the All China Federation of Industry and Commerce, as well as various think tanks that they have established – some it turns out are being funded by the U.S. government’s NED to help them protect the “property rights” of “entrepreneurs” (read capitalist exploiters). Just as dangerously, their influence extends into the most right-wing components of the CPC and the state bureaucracy who act as their, conscious or unconscious, defacto spokespeople inside the CPC and the state institutions. China’s capitalists are biding their time for when they can make an outright bid for state power. The fact that the most powerful countries in the world – and indeed most of the world – remains under capitalist rule gives them great encouragement.

Therefore, to help protect socialistic rule in the PRC and all the gains for the masses that have resulted from it, it is urgently necessary to decisively weaken the power of China’s private sector “entrepreneurs”. China’s socialistic SOEs need to be more quickly advanced at the expense of the capitalist private sector. To be sure, with China still catching up with the more advanced countries in important areas of technology, it is necessary for the PRC to continue to have certain joint ventures with Western and Japanese capitalists to help Chinese technical personnel and workers gradually learn advanced technology, skills and processes in areas where they are behind. Currently, the PRC has useful such joint ventures in the auto manufacturing, renewable energy and aircraft manufacturing industry. However, the presence of Western, Taiwanese and Hong Kong capitalists owning operations in lower tech sectors needs to be squeezed out – the PRC no longer needs them as her technology level and capital base has now long passed the stage when she needed investment from foreign capitalists in these sectors. Far more importantly, the power of China’s own domestic capitalists over the sectors that they dominate needs to be overturned. The tech, real estate and light manufacturing sectors need to confiscated from these capitalists and brought into public ownership. Additionally, the danger of the socialist economy being white anted by a large number of smaller-scale capitalists also needs to be averted by ending concessions to small and medium sized private “entrepreneurs”. Rather than rescuing such private enterprises by giving them handouts, promising such enterprises should be nationalised when in trouble.

The struggle to weaken the capitalists and strengthen the socialistic SOEs can be integrated with the PRC’s existing policies – in particular her “common prosperity” drive, her ongoing moves to further improve workplace safety, her anti-corruption campaign and her moves to curb speculation and excessive leveraging in the real estate sector. For example when a private sector firm violates China’s labour law – rather than receive a fine as it does now – it should be confiscated and brought into public ownership. The same should apply to any company that contravenes workplace safety laws or has a workplace accident that causes serious injury. Similarly, any private company found to have paid even the smallest bribe should be immediately confiscated. Despite the Western media’s deriding of it, the PRC’s moves to crackdown on property speculation under the policy that “houses are for living in and not for speculation” and its restriction of excessive borrowing by real estate developers has had a positive effect. The prices of homes have stopped rising making them more affordable for lower-income people. Moreover, some big-time property capitalists that relied on excessive borrowing and speculation have been brought to heel. In particular, China’s once richest man, Hui Ka Yan, main owner of one-time property giant Evergrande, has lost 93% of his wealth and has been pressured by authorities into selling off some of his luxury homes, private jets and expensive paintings to pay off the company’s debts. The capitalist media see this as a terrible thing and a “property crisis in China.” But with his indebted Evergrande restricted by regulations in its ability to borrow, Hui Ka Yan’s assets have been bit by bit nationalised and brought into public hands. To a lesser degree, other property capitalists have also been hit in a similar way. As a result, in a very positive development, China’s real estate sector has gone from last year having its top five firms consist of three capitalist corporations and only two SOEs to now having four of its biggest five real estate firms being socialistic SOEs. However, the private sector property developers assisted by pro-market “experts” and the right-wing of the CPC have pushed back demanding support for private developers hurt by the anti-speculation and anti-leveraging crackdown. They have been able to use the fact that the private sector’s ongoing influence in the real estate industry meant that the crackdown led to a slowdown in housing construction. As a result, Beijing has backed down somewhat and called for China’s state-owned banks to increase lending support for real estate companies including privately-owned ones (although in subsequent bank announcements the majority of extra lending is at this stage headed towards state-owned real estate firms). Such bending to the pressure of profit-driven real estate tycoons and those within the bureaucracy pushing their concerns must be intransigently resisted. The house building sector must be boosted instead by directing the real estate SOEs to increase construction and by further accelerating the provision of low-rent public housing. The housing sector is not a new, high-tech innovative sector – there is no reason for private “entrepreneurs” to be involved. The real estate sector should be brought entirely under public ownership. Dangerously powerful capitalists should be stopped from emerging from this sector.

The Danger of China’s Upper-Middle Class
Going Over to the Side of Counterrevolution in the Future

If the actual capitalist exploiters were the only force pushing for capitalist restoration in China, the threat would not be so great. For their numbers are small – especially in socialistic China. However, just below the actual capitalist business owners and the managers who act as their henchmen is an upper-middle class layer that includes many people who are economically and spiritually influenced by the capitalist bigwigs. This includes pro-capitalist economists, academics, journalists and lawyers who echo the calls of the capitalists for “greater” rights. It includes state bureaucrats who interact with the capitalists in the course of planning and regulatory decisions and who are sometimes bribed both directly and more often indirectly and subtly – for example by being taken to expensive meals and invited to posh events – by these wealthy bigshots. And more numerously, there are many young highly educated professionals who dream of being the next big tycoon or otherwise admire the capitalist high-fliers and hope to become part of their companies’ managerial and technical elite. It was a similar layer of highly educated youth and young wannabes, alongside some petty capitalists and speculators that were the main social force that drove the capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union. As long as the per capita income and overall technological and cultural influence of the richest of the capitalist countries remains higher than that in the workers state – as was the case during the times of the Soviet Union and is equally the case in today’s PRC – then younger high-skilled professionals in the workers state can fall for promises that capitalism would open up a higher standard of living for them and more exciting opportunities to engage in leading-edge innovation and globally prominent cultural pursuits (like being part of Hollywood!).

Moreover, there is an additional corrupting influence on China’s upper middle-class that did not exist in even the last days of the Soviet Union. Since, there is a sizable capitalist sector in China, some well-paid professionals are able to invest part of their savings in the stock market. They thus become beneficiaries of capitalist exploitation even if share dividends only provide them with a minority of their income. Like, the capitalist bigwigs, some of these people may have lost money as a result of the Xi Jinping government’s common prosperity drive. For example, if they held shares in platform companies they could have had considerable losses when the share price of food delivery platforms dived after Beijing last year forced delivery platforms to guarantee at least the minimum wage for delivery riders. Moreover, even other well-heeled people without shareholdings may have felt a loss of privilege from some of the common prosperity measures. Last year, as part of moves to reduce the homework burden and stress of students, to curb inequality in education and to protect parents from having to fork out ever large amounts for their children’s after-school tutoring in an education rat race against other parents’ kids, the PRC dramatically banned all tutoring firms from making a profit. This measure, by design, led to a massive reduction in the amount of after-school tutoring. The moves were very popular with not only students but with most parents. However, richer parents hoping to leverage their wealth to buy their kids an advantage over poorer kids and youth from well-off backgrounds whose younger siblings can no longer have the benefit of more tutoring to outcompete with their less affluent peers, may have felt aggrieved by their “loss of freedom” from these measures. It is without doubt that anger over common prosperity measures forms some part of why some of China’s upper middle-class and well-off university students decided to stage anti-government “Freedom” demonstrations late last month. This is no reason to conciliate such sentiments. In fact the opposite is required: the common prosperity drive must be greatly deepened and accelerated to weaken the disproportionate economic – and thus political – power of wealthier layers and thus weaken their ability to obstruct China’s road towards full socialism.

Many of those who joined the A4 protests in part because of their opposition to common prosperity measures would not have necessarily been anti-communists – at least in the subjective sense. Many may have recognised how much has been achieved in China since 1949 and be proud of the PRC’s achievements. That is why some at the “Freedom” protests sang the Communist Internationale. However, even those with such subjective feelings could still be simultaneously animated by a wish to jealously guard their upper middle-class privilege. Thus they may be particularly opposed to Xi Jinping, because they see him as the one pushing the common prosperity measures. Such people would be angered that Xi has been re-elected for a new term as CPC leader and gained greater authority within the party. Thus, some of those “A4 protesters” that still see themselves as pro-communist are likely supporters of figures like Li Keqiang in the pro-private sector, right-wing of the CPC.

It should be stressed that the middle class are not an exploiting class. As a result, it is likely that the majority of young middle-class and even upper middle-class people in China still remain supportive of – or at the least accepting of – socialistic rule. China’s growing economy and growing technological and cultural level has seen the standard of living of these layers and their opportunities for professional growth constantly increase. However, given that China remains behind the most advanced capitalist countries in income and development levels, any future difficulties in economy would see some in this layer lose their sympathy for socialism. Notably, it was during a period of economic stagnation that a sizable chunk of the Soviet Union’s most educated youth and young professionals turn their backs on socialism. That the recent upper middle-class and university student “Freedom” protests in China occurred now is no accident. Although the Western media’s claims that the Chinese economy has “crashed” is a lie, there has been a relative slowdown. Smaller-scale capitalist exploiters and the self-employed in particular have experienced a drop in incomes during the Omicron wave. The recent A4 protests, small components of which stood for weakening or even ending socialistic rule, are an indicator of the counterrevolutionary force that could arise from the upper middle-class and ambitious educated youth should imperialist military and economic pressure reach such levels that they are able to suffocate China’s economic growth.

Socialist Rule Cannot be Protected if the Capitalists and Their Allies
Have Equal Political Rights as the Working Class

Within the upper-middle class and university student, A4 “Freedom” protests in China there were slogans and chants against censorship and also for “democracy.” The latter excited the Western capitalist media who played them up. Other sources reported that at least one student protest, the one in Liangmaqiao in Beijing, even called for “democracy” while simultaneously expressing support for the CPC. Reportedly, protesters chanted “Do the Communist Party and democracy conflict? No conflict! We want democracy, freedom, and the development of the Communist Party back! That’s all! We don’t want revisionism! Don’t be revisionist!” Protesters then implied that without “democracy”, there would be capitalist counterrevolution in China: “If we don’t change, we will follow in the footsteps of the Soviet Union!” Such sentiment would be correct if protesters specified workers democracy. In that workers democracy is crucial to both the efficient running of a workers state and to the active engagement of the broadest forces amongst the toiling classes in the defence of the workers state against counterrevolutionary forces. However, calls for “democracy” in the abstract can mean many things and turns out to be downright harmful when it is called for in a workers state without insisting that it should be democracy specifically and exclusively for the working-class and its allies. To begin to explain why, we need to stress that “democracy” is only a technique of governance of a state. It does not define the purpose and content of the governance of the state. That content is defined by the class content of the state, which in modern times means either a capitalist state or a workers state. In a capitalist state, the state exists to defend the rule of the class that makes profit out of the exploitation of labour and upholds the property system in the economy that enables this: the ownership of the key sections of the economy by wealthy private individuals. In a workers state, the state exists to defend the rule of wage workers and the only organisation of productive property that can enable this: the common, that is public, ownership of the key sections of the economy by all the people.

Capitalists can rule through their state being administered in different forms: an absolute monarchy as in say Kuwait or Qatar, a theocracy as in Saudi Arabia (which is also a monarchy) or Iran, a military dictatorship, fascism as in Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy or parliamentary “democracy.” In even the most democratic of capitalist “parliamentary democracies” where every person technically has the same one vote to elect governments and the same legal “right” to engage in politics, the state is still thoroughly controlled by and serving the capitalists. This is because it is the capitalists who dominate political discourse and disproportionately shape public opinion through ownership of the media and through their enormous wealth giving them the disproportionate ability to fund political parties, pay for political advertising, finance activist campaigns, hire lobbyists and establish influential NGOs and think tanks.

Above: One of the ways that the capitalist class thoroughly dominates political discussion and agendas in capitalist, so-called “democracies” is through using their enormous wealth to establish and fund (and thus control) “independent” think tanks. Take Australia’s two most influential and quoted-by-the-media think tanks on foreign policy and “defence” questions: the warmongering, fanatically anti-PRC, Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) and the pro-Western imperialism, Lowy Institute. ASPI is funded by not only the Australian government, the NSW Police force and the U.S., British, Japanese, Dutch and Canadian governments but also by giant capitalist-owned defence corporations like Lockheed Martin, SAAB, Thales and BAE and by other capitalist companies including Bill Gates’ Microsoft, Mark Zuckeberg’s Facebook (now called Meta), an Australian subsidiary of the Amazon company owned by the world’s fourth richest billionaire Jeff Bezos, as well as by the Property Council of Australia and Western-controlled NGOs. On the Sponsors section of ASPI’s website (Above Left – screenshot taken on 16 December 2022), three giant capitalist defence companies are highlighted as the key sponsors. For its part, the Lowy institute was established by – and is funded by – the billionaire Lowy family as well as by membership fees from major capitalist corporations – including each of the four big banks, BHP, Rio Tinto, Wesfarmers, Boeing and SAAB – and various repressive organs of the Australian capitalist state, including ASIO, the Australian Federal Police, the Department of Defence and the Office of National Intelligence. The Chairman of the Board of the Lowy Institute remains Frank Lowy (Above Right), Australia’s tenth richest capitalist, whose wealth is estimated at $9.3 billion.

Moreover, the enormous economic power of the capitalists ensures that no matter who is elected to parliament, all state institutions themselves are subordinated to the capitalists. The capitalists are able to directly and more often indirectly bribe state officials (including through the latter knowing that to get a lucrative job in the private sector after their political/bureaucratic career is over they would need to be on good terms with the capitalists). Furthermore, due to their control of the economy, key bureaucratic organisations have to consult and cooperate with the capitalist business owners. For all these reasons, capitalist parliamentary democracies no less than fascist and monarchist regimes are the dictatorship of the capitalist class over the working class. Moreover, when capitalist rule is threatened by the revolutionary masses, the capitalists will not hesitate to try to move their state to a more authoritarian or even fascist form in order to preserve their power by any means necessary.

The very opposite to a capitalist state, a workers (i.e. proletarian) state is the dictatorship of the working-class over the capitalist class. Its key roles are to prevent the overthrown capitalists and their allies abroad from taking back power and to protect the dominant role of public ownership over key sectors of the economy to ensure the working-class’ overall economic interests. Just like a capitalist (i.e. bourgeois) state, a proletarian state can have different forms. The ideal form is a proletarian (i.e. workers) democracy in which the working-class freely discuss and debate important decisions and administer their state through elected workers council, called soviets. Such a workers democracy form of administering a workers state was how the Soviet workers state was administered during its first seven or so years, albeit in very difficult conditions of Civil War for much of that period. However, a workers state cannot be administered through the form of parliamentary “democracy”. Because, although in a workers state the capitalists would have been dispossessed from ownership of key sectors of the economy, they would still have disproportionate ability to shape political discourse – including any “free elections”. Russian revolutionary leader, Vladimir Lenin explained why:

“There can be no equality between the exploiters—who for many generations have been better off because of their education, conditions of wealthy life, and habits—and the exploited, the majority of whom even in the most advanced and most democratic bourgeois republics are downtrodden, backward, ignorant, intimidated and disunited. For a long time after the revolution the exploiters inevitably continue to retain a number of great practical advantages: they still have money (since it is impossible to abolish money all at once); some movable property—often fairly considerable; they still have various connections, habits of organisation and management; knowledge of all the `secrets’ (customs, methods, means and possibilities) of management; superior education; close connections with the higher technical personnel (who live and think like the bourgeoisie); incomparably greater experience in the art of war (this is very important), and so on and so forth.

“If the exploiters are defeated in one country only—and this, of course, is typical, since a simultaneous revolution in a number of countries is a rare exception—they still remain stronger than the exploited, for the international connections of the exploiters are enormous….

“The transition from capitalism to communism takes an entire historical epoch. Until this epoch is over, the exploiters inevitably cherish the hope of restoration, and this hope turns into attempts at restoration…. In the train of the capitalist exploiters follow the wide sections of the petty bourgeoisie [the self-employed and other sections of the middle class – TP], with regard to whom decades of historical experience of all countries testify that they vacillate and hesitate, one day marching behind the proletariat and the next day taking fright at the difficulties of the revolution; that they become panic-stricken at the first defeat or semidefeat of the workers, grow nervous, run about aimlessly, snivel, and rush from one camp into the other ….”

VI. Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, 1918

That is why while capitalist “democracy” can nominally allow the “equal” rights of all to engage in political activity and then use their exclusive economic power to thoroughly dominate politics and the state, a workers state administered in the form of workers democracy CANNOT allow equal political rights for all. Instead as Lenin outlined in the above quoted work (which was a response to German left social-democratic leader Karl Kautsky who had attacked the Soviet workers state for not allowing parliamentary democracy), a workers state must EXCLUDE the deposed capitalist class from participation in workers democracy:

“… as long as there are exploiters who rule the majority, the exploited, the democratic state must inevitably be a democracy for the exploiters. A state of the exploited must fundamentally differ from such a state; it must be a democracy for the exploited, and a means of suppressing the exploiters; and the suppression of a class means inequality for that class, its exclusion from `democracy’” [emphasis added-TP].

If the overthrown capitalist exploiters are not in this way prevented from having the same rights to participate in the affairs of a workers state as the working class masses, they will use their still existing advantages – all the more so in today’s China – and their links with the capitalist exploiters ruling most of the rest of the world to take back the power.

In even a healthy workers state administered through a proletarian democracy, it is only as class differences are gradually overcome as the workers state moves towards full socialism and as the threat of capitalist restoration is diminished through the overturn of capitalist rule in some of the most powerful countries that the right to fully participate in socialist democracy can begin to be extended to elements connected with the deposed former exploiting class. Yet, simultaneously with a larger and larger proportion of the population being brought into the administration of a socialist society, the workers state itself (and therefore workers democracy with it) starts to wither away, because its purpose – the suppression of the overthrown exploiting class and their allies – becomes less and less necessary. When a fully communist society has been achieved, which means a society in which all class differences have been fully overcome, administration will still exist. But it will no longer be about the administration and disciplining of people but the administration of things.    

How Calls for “Democracy” in the Abstract in China
End Up Being a Call for the Destruction of the Workers State

In explaining why the “indispensable characteristic, the necessary condition” of a workers state is “the forcible suppression of the exploiters as a class, and, consequently, the infringement of `pure democracy’, i.e., of equality and freedom, in regard to that class”, Lenin showed how talk of “pure democracy” plays a counterrevolutionary role when used after the working class have already achieved state power:

“If we are not to mock at common sense and history, it is obvious that we cannot speak of `pure democracy’ as long as different classes exist; we can only speak of class democracy….
“`Pure democracy’ is the mendacious phrase of a liberal who wants to fool the workers. History knows of bourgeois democracy which takes the place of feudalism, and of proletarian democracy which takes the place of bourgeois democracy.”

Now a slick, nominal socialist may counter that Lenin was speaking at a time when the Soviet workers state was a proletarian democracy, whereas the PRC workers state is today not a workers democracy and that therefore Lenin’s conclusions do not apply. To argue like this would be absolutely wrong! Workers democracy is a method of administering a workers state. But the content of a workers state is the rule of the working-class over the capitalist class. Therefore, although very necessary, the need for workers democracy is completely subordinate to the need to defend the workers state. If the working-class lose state power, then any nominal “democracy” will end up only being a capitalist “democracy” in which the form of “democracy” covers up the fact that the working-class have been deposed from power and are being subjugated under a dictatorship of the capitalist class, in which the only real “democracy” is amonst the various capitalists.

Since there is a lack of genuine socialist democracy in the PRC, the disenfranchisement of the working-class masses from direct administration of the workers state diminishes their political consciousness and weakens their commitment to defending the workers state. This makes the workers state more vulnerable. However, that actually makes it all the more crucial to suppress the political activity of the capitalist exploiters. It is here important to refer here to the correct stance taken by co-leader of the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky, who after the Soviet Union’s bureaucratic degeneration in the mid-1920s continued to fight for the unconditional defence of the Soviet proletarian state while struggling to bring back the agenda of proletarian democracy and revolutionary internationalism that Lenin fought for. In response to those calling for “free elections” in the Soviet Union of 1929, that is long after the soviets and the Communist Party had become bureaucratised and true workers democracy had been suppressed in the Soviet workers state, Trotsky insisted:

“We are fighting for proletarian democracy precisely in order to shield the country of the October Revolution from the `liberties’ of bourgeois democracy, that is, from capitalism….

“It is necessary to reject and condemn the program of struggle for `the freedom to organize’ and all other `freedoms’ in the USSR – because this is the program of bourgeois democracy. To this program of bourgeois democracy we must counterpose the slogans and methods of proletarian democracy, whose aim, in the struggle against bureaucratic centrism, is to regenerate and fortify the dictatorship of the proletariat.”

L.D. Trotsky, The Defense of the Soviet Union and the Opposition (1929), Marxist Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1929/09/fi-b.htm

Indeed, today, the call for “freedom to organise”, “liberties” and “democracy” in China is actually the main slogan of the Western imperialists and their allies within China who want to see the restoration of capitalism. They know that, especially given that in China, although the working-class have overall power there is still a rich and influential capitalist class, any “pure democracy” and “freedom to organise” of all classes in China would see the Chinese capitalists and the world capitalist powers together mobilising massive financial and media resources to dominate debate, disproportionately shape “public opinion”, swing any free” parliamentary elections and re-establish capitalism.

This is why, even when coming from those who uphold socialism and the CPC, the call for “democracy” and “freedom” in China in the abstract – without specifying it must be an exclusively proletarian democracy where there will only be full political freedom for the working-class and its allies and for those organisations that uphold the workers state – is a dangerous call that must be rejected. To be sure, those students protesting in Beijing’s Liangmaqiao who made this call very likely do not want capitalist restoration. They may have been from the right-wing of the CPC who oppose Xi Jinping’s common prosperity measures and thus want more democracy in the party to resist him. Or they may be completely sincere and motivated by understandable frustration at the stifling censorship and lack of genuine socialist democracy in the PRC. The problem is that the call for “freedom” and “democracy” in the abstract in a workers state ends up being a call for opening the door to capitalist counterrevolution no matter who makes the appeal – whether they be the capitalist exploiting class and their conscious servants or sincere but misguided supporters of socialism.

This same logic by the way applies to the class-struggle in a capitalist country. Take a strike for example where the workers have set-up a solid picket to stop scabbing. Now, the capitalist enemy that want to defeat the strike will of course howl that workers are violating the rights of the scabs who want to go into work during the strike. However, there may be others who genuinely want the strike to win but simultaneously insist that workers “should have the freedom to choose” if they want to work or not during the strike. Despite their different intentions, both sets of people insisting on “free choice” for the scabs are in practice sabotaging the strike, because if scabs are able to go into work, the strike will likely be defeated.

It tends to be the middle class in both capitalist countries and workers states that are the most prone to placing excessive weight on an abstract posing of “freedom”, “choice” and democracy” without specifying for which class. Why is this? Take for instance the case of China. There, the middle class are neither exploiters of labour themselves nor are they directly exploited wage workers in the private sector who would be much further exploited if capitalist state power was restored, or, in the case of SOE workers, potentially exploited workers – because these workers are not exploited now but would be if capitalism was restored. Since, in this way, this middle class is not as directly affected by the question of which class controls the economy as the working class is, this middle class, even when sympathetic to socialism, tends to downplay the importance of the question of which class rules and the question of which class should “democracy” and “freedom” be granted to.

Of course, the attitude taken to the different sectors calling for “democracy” and “freedom” in China must be different. Those who are conscious capitalist counterrevolutionaries and in organisations funded by the U.S. government’s NED must be sternly opposed by any means necessary. On the other hand, misguided youth who in all sincerity proclaim their solidarity with the CPC while simultaneously calling for “democracy” in the abstract and “freedom for all” must be sympathetically argued with and won over. It should be pointed out to the latter group that the call for “democracy” was in fact the main slogan of the capitalist counterrevolution in the former Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries. This is hardly surprising. After all, those seeking capitalist restoration would not want to admit to the overwhelming majority of the population who would be harmed by such an outcome that they intend to replace a system where everyone collectively owns the key sectors of the economy with a system where just a few rich people will own them. So instead they called for “democracy” and “freedom.” And in both the former Soviet Union and in some Eastern European countries there were not a few people who sincerely wanted to preserve socialistic rule who were sucked in behind these calls. This was especially the case in the former Germany Democratic Republic – GDR (“East Germany”). In the middle and latter parts of 1989 there were mass protests in the GDR by people who were critical of the bureaucratised government, wanted “democracy” and “freedom” but at the same time mostly wanted to preserve the achievements of socialist economy in the DDR. However, in pushing for “democracy” and “freedom” without insisting that any “democracy” must be an explicitly proletarian democracy with freedom for only those organisations that genuinely uphold the workers state, these protesters ended up aiding the West German capitalist class and their imperialist allies in driving through a capitalist counterrevolution made largely in the name of “democracy”.

It must also be pointed out to middle-class, pro-communist youth in China who call for “democracy” and “freedom” in the abstract that, as Lenin made clear in his 1918 reply to Kautsky, the capitalists and their social democratic lackeys were screaming about a “lack of democracy” and “arbitrariness” in the Soviet workers state even when the Soviet proletarian state was still truly in the form of a workers democracy. In other words, when the capitalist powers today shout about a lack of “democracy” in China today, it is not at all because the PRC workers state is currently not a proletarian democracy – it is solely because the PRC is a workers state. The capitalists want “democracy” and “freedom of all to organise” in China purely because they want the freedom to organise a capitalist counterrevolution there – just like they demanded “democracy” and “freedom” in Soviet Russia in even Lenin’s time when the Soviet workers state was in the form of a proletarian democracy. If the PRC workers state was renovated into one truly based on workers democracy, the capitalist exploiters – and their social democratic servants – would then be howling even more loudly about a supposed lack of “freedom” and “democracy” in China.

The PRC Workers State Does Need WORKERS Democracy

The serious threat of a future capitalist counterrevolution in China mobilised under the slogan of “democracy” does not negate the need for proletarian democracy in China. In fact it actually makes this more important. For free discussion and debate amongst workers is needed not only to facilitate innovation and efficiency in China’s socialist SOEs and to resolve day to day disputes in as least disruptive a fashion as possible but is importantly needed in order to undermine calls for Western-style, that is inevitably capitalist, “democracy.” So what would workers democracy consist of in the PRC. For one, censorship of the media and social media would be loosened so that all voices who are not seeking to weaken or destroy proletarian state power or undermine the backbone role of the public sector in the economy should be able to freely advocate their ideas, robustly scrutinise government policies and in the process criticize top leaders if they see fit. Secondly, all parties and NGOs that genuinely uphold the proletarian state and publicly commit to maintaining the dominance of public ownership in the economy should be able to operate as well as compete in elections for representative bodies. Most importantly, administrative power will be held in elected councils of workers (soviets) – which would draw into them other sections of the toiling masses. Each delegate that a lower soviet elects to a higher soviet body would be recallable at any time and all full-time officials of the soviet government should be paid no more than the average wage of a skilled worker. The membership of such soviets would be modelled on that specified in the first constitution of the Soviet workers state, which decreed that: “The right to vote and to be elected to the soviets is enjoyed by … All who have acquired the means of livelihood through labour that is productive and useful to society, and also persons engaged in housekeeping which enables the former to do productive work, i.e., laborers and employees of all classes who are employed in industry, trade, agriculture, etc., and peasants and Cossack agricultural laborers who employ no help for the purpose of making profits…. The following persons enjoy neither the right to vote nor the right to be voted for, even though they belong to one of the categories enumerated above, namely: (a) Persons who employ hired labor in order to obtain from it an increase in profits ….”

The soviet form of administering a workers state is crucial not only because it excludes exploiters of labour. It is also vital because, unlike in a parliamentary system where the working-class is dispersed from each other as they are herded off to vote in elections every few years, in a soviet political administration workers debate and decide on issues collectively in their soviet meeting. In this way, working-class people more readily feel their common class interests with each other and are therefore better able to resist the political pressure of the capitalists both within and outside the country.

However, we should not be naive. Given the presence of powerful capitalists within socialistic China and given the dominance of capitalism worldwide, any freeing up of political debate and censorship within China, even within the scope of workers democracy, would be exploited by the capitalists and their allies. They would use relaxed censorship to both push their agenda and create demoralisation about the present socialist system while trying to evade censorship by claiming adherence to socialist rule. The wealthy capitalists, even while excluded from the soviets, would try to get their ideas into the soviets and their agendas echoed by proxies or politically naïve workers within the soviets. Similarly, the capitalists would also seek to use the greater freedom for pro-socialist parties in order to get worker proxies or others they influence to form new parties that again claim loyalty to the socialist order while in practice pushing to expand the “rights” of the capitalists.

That is why any moves towards genuine workers democracy in the PRC must be accompanied by a struggle to weaken the power of the capitalists within the country. For starters, there must be a demand to expel all exploiters of labour from not only all state representative bodies (which would be a requirement of proletarian democracy in any case) but also to expel all capitalists from the CPC. Late former CPC leader Jiang Zemin and his Three Represents Theory was dead wrong for allowing capitalists into the party. Just as importantly, the power of the capitalists over the economy must be weakened through confiscation of privately-owned firms in sectors where they are not needed and their conversion into public ownership. Indeed, the route to implementing proletarian democracy in China is through the working-class building mass organisations that will, in alliance with sympathetic PRC state institutions, strike decisive blows to weaken China’s capitalists and in the process establish administrative control over China’s socialistic system.

The power of ethnic Chinese capitalists outside the mainland to influence affairs within the PRC must also be combatted. The companies of the property barons, corrupt casino owners, bankers and shipping magnates that dominate Hong Kong and Macao must all be confiscated and brought into common ownership. Socialist revolution in Taiwan to overthrow the tyranny of the likes of Terry Gou and Cheng Hsueh Wuh (the Taiwanese tycoons respectively owning notoriously exploitative companies Foxconn and 85 Degrees Café) must be fomented by appealing to workers longing to free themselves from the harsh militarisation of labour at Taiwanese workplaces and to migrant workers fuming at the savage exploitation that they face in the fishing, domestic work, manufacturing and construction sectors. Let’s fight not for, “one China, two systems”, but for one China under one socialist system!

At the same time, instead of hoping that the imperialists will stop interfering in the PRC’s internal affairs and start truly practicing mutual coexistence with socialistic China, which is never going to happen, Beijing should advance the struggle to extend socialism into the currently capitalist countries by speaking out in support of the working class and oppressed peoples’ struggles in the capitalist world – especially in all the imperialist countries. In summary, the struggle to bring workers democracy to the Chinese workers state must go hand in hand with the struggle to complete the victory of the working class over the capitalists within mainland China and the struggle to extend socialist revolution to the islands of China and onto the other capitalist parts of the world.

Mobilise in Action Here in Australia in Solidarity with Socialistic Rule in China

The above section outlines what we think communists in China should fight for. But we are here in Australia, so we must focus on what we can do here to help protect and strengthen socialistic rule in China. And what we need to do is to mobilise actions in defence of the PRC workers state. By doing so we will affect the balance of political forces within China in the direction of strengthening the resolve of those wanting to uphold and reinforce the socialist foundations of China’s system. We will be able to boost the confidence of staunchly pro-communist elements within China. We can show them that even within the belly of the imperialist countries most hostile to the PRC there are people willing to stand up to the capitalist ruling classes and take open action in solidarity with socialistic rule in China.

The enemies of socialism understand all too well the importance of international pressure in affecting the balance of political forces within China. Thus, while the bulk of the $A15 million in total that the NED spends on advancing its counterrevolutionary agenda for China is given to groups operating inside China, many of their grants also avowedly aim to, variously, “engage in a series of targeted international advocacy actions”, “support an international network of stakeholders to share expertise” and “respond to the increasing importance of exile and diaspora communities in countering Chinese Communist Party (CCP)” by laying “the foundation for a sustainable network of transnational youth activists through activities designed to foster joint strategizing and identification of common goals.” Meanwhile, just days after the A4 protests in China, anti-communists originating from Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China held demonstrations in Melbourne and Sydney supporting the most anticommunist of the protesters within China and promoting their goal of overthrowing the PRC state. Supporters of socialistic rule in China need to build our own actions here with the very opposite agenda!

For, although the A4 protests were very small relative to China’s massive population, it is undoubted that the massive support given to these protests by the capitalist powers and by the anticommunist section of the Chinese diaspora communities living in the West would have had some impact, however small, at least temporarily, on the balance of political forces within China. It would have obviously encouraged those within China who consciously seek capitalist restoration. However, it would have also, to some small degree, strengthened the hand of more rightist elements within the CPC and the Chinese bureaucracy who would have used the advent of the protests and the massive backing that these protests received from the Western capitalist media to argue against Xi Jinping and, more so, others more emphatically on the militantly anti-capitalist, left wing of the party and state, by saying that: “The recent common prosperity measures have angered some of the upper middle-class in our country. We don’t want to make them our enemies. We need to pullback from some of these measures – they have gone too far” and “Look how powerful the Western powers are: they can even help incite protests here within China. We cannot thumb our noses at these powerful forces – they are too strong. We need to accommodate their concerns and meet them half-way in order to mollify them.” Such rightist arguments, to the extent that they are loud enough to actually impact policy, have a disintegrative effect on socialistic rule in China. We must counteract the rightist, ultimately deleterious, pressure being exerted on the CPC and the PRC state by the imperialist ruling classes and by the anticommunist component of the Chinese diaspora communities living in the West. We need to be doing this all the time by mobilising actions here in Australia and other Western countries in solidarity with socialistic rule in China.

Unfortunately, most of the Left in Australia is on the side of those seeking to destroy the PRC workers state. When in 2019, Hong Kong pro-colonial, rich kids staged an anticommunist uprising and an assorted array of anticommunist groups in Australia held protests in support of the anti-PRC rioters – from anti-PRC Hong Kong students to anticommunists from mainland China to the far-right, Donald Trump-supporting Falun Dafa group to supporters of the defeated Western-puppet, South Vietnamese capitalist regime that fled to Australia (and their children) to prominent Australian white supremacists – the Australian left groups, Solidarity, Socialist Alternative and Socialist Alliance all joined in. Even the Socialist Equality Party, which was more tentative in its backing of the Hong Kong anti-PRC rioters, joined at least one of the anti-communist rallies in Sydney.

Today, most of these groups are at it again! Socialist Alliance ran an article in the December 9 issue of their newspaper, the Green Left Weekly, which uncritically cheers the Chinese “Freedom” protests. It repeats the disinformation of the imperialist media, including exaggerating the length of lockdowns in China. Most rabid of all in their hostility to the PRC state is the Solidarity group. The colour front cover of their December magazine is devoted to hailing the Chinese “Freedom” protests. The headline of their 4 December article is even worse. Sounding like the most rabid, right-wing anti-communists, albeit with a “pro-worker” veneer, Solidarity shouts “workers power can bring down the CCP” [i.e. CPC]. Indeed most of the article sounds like something from the Murdoch media or other extreme anti-communist, bourgeois media outlets. Not to be outdone in anti-communist hostility to the PRC are Solidarity’s rivals in Socialist Alternative (SAlt) who have their own article on the A4 protests dated 4 December. They celebrate the most reactionary section of the A4 protesters, hailing that some protesters had chanted, “Communist Party! Step down! Xi Jinping! Step down!” In cheering the Chinese version of the far-right-instigated, “Freedom” protests, SAlt are actually being more hypocritical than their Solidarity rivals. The latter had bent somewhat to the Far Right’s talking points about pandemic restriction measures in Australia. SAlt however stood firm and organised counter-rallies to the reactionary “Freedom” protests in Australia. We supported this and participated in the Sydney counter-protest that SAlt initiated last year. But by supporting the Chinese “Freedom” protests, while condemning the Australian ones, SAlt are behaving just like Albanese’s ALP and most of the capitalist media. And just like them, SAlt will be looking to seize on any spike in COVID deaths in China resulting from the recent loosening of pandemic restrictions to attack the PRC for neglecting people’s health after having just attacked her for her supposedly “draconian” measures to contain COVID!

1 October 2020: Huge, densely-packed crowds throng the Badaling section of China’s Great Wall, located about 80km northwest of Beijing, during the country’s all-week public holiday for the People’s Republic of China’s National Day. For two years after China suppressed her initial outbreak in the first three months of 2020, China had not only very few deaths from COVID outbreaks but suppressed the virus so effectively that her people were able to enjoy a life that was much closer to normal than most other countries in the world. When local outbreaks did occur, they were snuffed out in quick time by rapid, resolute and effective local measures so that the overwhelming majority of the population were not affected by either the disease or by pandemic restrictions. It is only from about late March 2022 as Omicron spread more widely in China, that sizable parts of the country’s population have had to endure lockdowns for periods – usually lasting from between one to eight weeks. Yet many of the far-left groups in Australia have joined the capitalist media in deceptively giving the impression that China has locked down her people continuously for the last three years. The Solidarity group railed against the supposed “three years of lockdowns and restrictions” in China. Sounding equally like Sky News or other of the most hardline right-wing outlets, their rival in Socialist Alternative screamed that “the Chinese Communist Party has relied almost totally on lockdowns and an incredibly punitive quarantine system.”
Photo: Yan Cong/Bloomberg

The excuse that SAlt, Solidarity and Socialist Alliance all use for opposing Red China is to claim that the PRC is actually just another capitalist state. If that was always wrong it is even more ridiculous today after we have seen how radically different and better was the PRC’s response to the pandemic. Even SAlt concede in their article that, “Unlike in the United States, where a `profits before people’ political framework often dominated, resulting in more than 1 million fatalities, China’s policy has averted mass death.” Yet if the PRC state is also a capitalist state just like the U.S. why did it not also put “profits before people.” Why wouldn’t a capitalist regime put profits first – after all that is what they have done in every other major capitalist country in the world? SAlt is also compelled to acknowledge another achievement of the PRC: that last year it overtook the life expectancy of the USA. They quote historian Adam Tooze describing this as “a truly historic marker.” Yet how under supposed “capitalist rule” has this “truly historic marker” been achieved where a huge country that 73 years ago was a backward, subjugated neo-colony with a life expectancy 33 years below that of the USA now overtakes the life expectancy of the imperialist USA. Is that not grossly over-rating what “capitalism” can achieve? And how too under supposed “capitalist rule” was China two years ago able to complete its lifting of every one of its rural residents out of extreme poverty? Are not amongst the most important reasons for needing to overthrow capitalism precisely because it cannot decisively improve the well-being of the masses, cannot lift all out of poverty and cannot truly liberate former colonies and neocolonies from imperialist subjugation? Then how has all this been achieved in a country with one in five of the world’s people? Furthermore, those leftists who claim that the PRC is just another capitalist state have another huge dilemma. How can they explain why Australia’s capitalist rulers – which most anti-PRC left groups acknowledge are imperialist rulers in their own right and not mere puppets of their U.S. senior partners – are engaged in such a hostile military build-up, propaganda war and political campaign against the PRC when the Australian economy (with the lion’s share going to the capitalists) received nearly 40% of its export income last year from trade with China? Why would Australia’s capitalist rulers risk such huge incomes – $A178 billion in total – by antagonising the PRC if the latter was simply another capitalist country? The capitalists are greedy exploiters … but they are not that stupid! The sole reason why Australia’s capitalist rulers are hostile to the PRC is because it is a workers state. That is the only way one can explain the Australian bourgeoisie’s enmity towards the PRC.

Other than for ourselves in Trotskyist Platform, there is one other bona fide left group in Australia that does not buy into the imperialist drive to destroy the PRC state. And that is the Communist Party of Australia. The December 5 issue of the CPA’s Guardian newspaper has an article on the protests in China reprinted from an overseas leftist paper. Refreshingly the article pushes back against the imperialist media propaganda over the A4 protests. The article begins with the plainly true statement: “Establishment media have seized on protests over COVID lockdowns to rehearse their favourite anti-China narratives.”

A problem however is that, aside from it seems the party’s Brisbane branch, the CPA’s stance that China is a workers state that should be supported is mostly left to its newspaper but is not reflected in the party’s actual work on the ground. Take for example, the CPA’s work in the Sydney Anti-AUKUS Coalition opposing the deal for Australia to get nuclear submarines aimed against China. Although the CPA has been a major component of the coalition, in the public meetings and rallies of the coalition, the CPA has shied away from asserting the class character of the PRC as a workers state that should be supported and has backed away from arguing the need to resist the deluge of anti-communist propaganda directed against the PRC or the need to defend the PRC against counterrevolutionary movements like the Hong Kong pro-colonial forces. No doubt some CPA comrades would argue that this is for the sake of the united-front against AUKUS. But such a stance is flawed. For one, it is precisely the effect of the massive propaganda war against the PRC that makes it harder to build movements against the military build up against her. The need to oppose that anti-communist propaganda must be motivated to all that want to oppose the anti-China military escalation. On the other hand, the more that the working-class can be convinced that the PRC is their state, the more that the workers movement can be won to taking an active stance against the multitude of threats against the PRC. Furthermore, given that the other most prominent components of the Anti-AUKUS Coalition are the stridently anti-PRC Solidarity group and the even more anti-PRC Greens senator David Shoebridge (who when he is not engaging with the coalition is vey prominently supporting the fanatically anti-PRC Falun Dafa group and whipping up anticommunist hysteria against the presence of Confucius Institute, Chinese language-teaching schools in Australia), to not challenge anticommunist attacks on the PRC over “human rights” when in an arena favourable to pushing back against such propaganda is to give these anti-PRC forces a blank cheque to spread their counterrevolutionary agitation in the other arenas where they work. More generally, the Australian population is being bombarded with anti-communist, anti-PRC propaganda. If even at events opposed to the anti-China military build up, this propaganda is not refuted then in what arena are pro-PRC leftists going to be resolute enough to openly challenge this propaganda on the ground and proudly declare solidarity with the PRC’s socialist course? Moreover, as the recent A4 protests gave a small indication of, the biggest threat to the PRC workers state is not from direct military attack but from internal counterrevolution. The military pressure of course encourages and strengthens the forces of capitalist restoration. However, it is counterrevolutionaries themselves that are the most dangerous direct threat. Let us not forget that the Soviet workers state was in the end not destroyed by military attack but by the internal counterrevolutionary forces funded and directed by Western imperialism. To argue that opposition to capitalist counterrevolutionary forces threatening the Chinese workers state should be foregone for the sake of building a united-front with anti-PRC forces on the basis of only opposing some of the military escalation against the PRC, is to fail to properly stand in solidarity with socialistic China.

If the Left and workers movement fails to mobilise struggles in open solidarity with the PRC workers state in the imperialist countries, then this will demoralise communists within China and make them feel that no one within the most powerful countries in the world is prepared to take an open stand in defence of them (the CPA president sending solidarity greetings to the 20^th congress of the CPC is nice but wholly inadequate by itself – open action on the ground is needed!). On the other hand it will play into the hands of rightist groupings within the CPC who will be able to say that “in the most powerful countries in the world, all the significant forces are against us, so we have to compromise with the imperialists – we have to make concessions.”

It is instructive to look back at what happened during the last Cold War, the 1980s Cold War against the then most powerful workers state, the Soviet Union. At the time, there were much greater numbers of people in the Western countries who considered themselves sympathetic to the Soviet Union then than there are now who support Red China. However, those parties sympathetic to the Soviet Union – including the CPA’s predecessor the SPA – joined in peace coalitions with small-l liberals and pacifists who were against war with the Soviet Union but were also unsympathetic to the workers state and bought into the anti-communist “human rights” propaganda against her. In order to avoid antagonising these bloc partners, the parties sympathetic to the USSR recoiled from ever openly showing their solidarity with the USSR through mass actions on the ground. This was a part of why the counterrevolution triumphed in the former Soviet Union. Here in Australia, not only did a good chunk of the Left – including the predecessors of Socialist Alliance and Solidarity/Socialist Alternative – criminally support the capitalist counterrevolutionary forces arrayed against the Soviet Union, but even the parts of the Left with a pro-Soviet line failed to mobilise in actual open solidarity with the workers state. This and similar behaviour by the Left in all the other imperialist countries helped push the balance of political forces within the Soviet Union in favour of the sell-outs within the Soviet leadership and the outright capitalist restorationists. This must not be allowed to happen again with respect to the PRC!

Trotskyist Platform is proud that we have been the most active group on the Left in openly standing for defence of socialistic rule in China. At demonstrations against AUKUS we have openly advocated solidarity with the PRC workers state. Among the placards we have carried at these events includes ones stating: “Down with the AUKUS Nuclear Submarine Deal! Stand with Socialistic China to Stand by Working Class Interests.” At the Hiroshima Day rally, held days after Nancy Pelosi provocatively visited Taiwan, among the signs we carried was one urging: “Resist Washington and Canberra’s War Drive Against the PRC Workers State! Condemn Pelosi’s Provocative Visit to the Rogue, Anti-Working Class Regime Ruling China’s Taiwan!”

Most importantly, we have initiated and built several united-front actions openly in solidarity with the PRC workers state. When the 70^th anniversary of the PRC occurred in 2019 during the midst of the anti-PRC, rich kid revolt in Hong Kong, we joined with the Australian Chinese Workers Association (ACWA) in building an action that saw over 60 people march through the streets of Sydney behind the slogans: “Working Class People in Australia & the World: Stand With Socialistic China!” and “Defeat Hong Kong’s Pro-Colonial, Anti-Communist Movement!” When word and photos of the action found there way back to communists in the North-western Chinese city of Xian, they were thrilled to see that people in Australia would openly take such a stance. Then, this April, we again joined with the ACWA in building an action welcoming China’s anti-poverty measures and calling for key aspects of them to be implemented here in Australia. Bringing out still larger numbers at its height than the October 2019 event, this rally built to advocate urgently needed measures in Australia that the PRC has implemented – including a massive increase in public housing, the guaranteeing of at least the minimum wage for all food delivery workers when working normal hours at a slow pace and the nationalisation of the banks – simultaneously promoted solidarity with socialistic China by pointing to her progressive, pro-working program.

Trotskyist Platform looks forward to working with other pro-PRC forces on the Left in building further united-front actions in open solidarity with socialistic China. All those committed to socialism should understand that we cannot allow the PRC to meet the same fate as the Soviet Union. The small, but notable, openly anti-communist component within the recent COVID “Freedom” protests in China and the broader raising within them of the slogans of “democracy” and “freedom” without an insistence that it must be a proletarian democracy that does not give political freedom to capitalist exploiters, is a warning sign. A warning sign that we must respond to by working harder to build actions to oppose all military, economic, political and propaganda pressure upon the PRC workers state. Let’s defend socialistic rule in China as part of our fight against the decaying, increasingly militaristic, capitalist order in Australia and as part of the struggle against capitalist domination of the world. With the masses in most of the capitalist world today facing plunging real wages and steeply rising prices, with some capitalist countries already on the verge of a deep recession and many others headed there, with extreme racist forces growing in strength within many capitalist countries and with the war-mongering Western imperialist powers waging a dangerous proxy war against a nuclear-armed country (in Russia), the need to overturn capitalist rule throughout the world is more urgent than ever.

The rule of the working-class in every country will open the way to a socialist world that will ensure a future free of unemployment and poverty for every single person on the planet. It will lead to an internationally planned, collectively-owned economy where resources and human labour, in all its creativity, will be rationally and fairly utilised to lift the living standards of all, effectively protect human lives from deadly diseases and respond to the threat of climate change. A socialist world will be one where exploitation of labour, racism, oppression of women, homophobia, imperialist subjugation of the “Third World” and war will be things of the past. Defending socialistic rule in a country where one in five of the world’s people live – however incomplete and distorted that country’s transition to socialism currently is – is essential to ensuring that the victory of world socialist revolution is completed before still deeper capitalist economic crises, the ascendancy of the fascist form of capitalism, imperialist war and climate changed-induced disasters drive the peoples of the world into a hellish existence.