Photo Above: Last week hawkish ALP Defence Minister, Richard Marles announced a massive intensification in the Australian regime’s military build-up targeting China. This includes the spending of billions of dollars to acquire long-range missiles. The government said that it will speed up the delivery of HIMARS rocket systems (like the one shown above) and acquire other long-range missiles.

It is in Working Class People’s Interests to Stand
with Socialistic China against Australia’s Capitalist Rulers

Defend Socialistic Rule in China
Against the AUKUS Regimes’
Political and Military War Drive!

1 May 2023: The Labor government has escalated the scale of the AUKUS nuclear submarine project first organised by the former right wing government. Prime minister Anthony Albanese announced that the Australian regime will start receiving nuclear submarines from the U.S. from the mid 2030s and later build nuclear submarines with the technology and direction of its American and British counterparts. The official project cost is now $368 billion. But last week it was revealed that Defence had quietly provisioned an additional 50 per cent contingency for the project. This pushes the real cost up to half a trillion dollars!

Nuclear-propulsion allows submarines to operate for longer and further from shores before refueling. In other words, Australia’s capitalist rulers are not acquiring the subs for use around Australia’s shores. The nuclear submarines will be used to join the U.S., British and other Western capitalist militaries in threatening China in waters off her own coastline. The AUKUS regimes are barely doing anything to even hide this fact. All this raises the frightening possibility of the Armageddon scenario – a future U.S./British/Australian/NATO war unleashed against a country with almost 1,500 million people!

Long before the navy will receive its first AUKUS submarines in 10 to 12 years, Australia’s capitalist regime is right now engaging in a massive military build-up. Last October, it was revealed that the Labor government would allow the U.S. to deploy nuclear capable B-52 bombers in Northern Australia. The upgrading of NT bases necessary to allow for this was part of last week’s announcements by hawkish ALP Defence Minister, Richard Marles, of a huge anti-China military escalation. The plan includes the acquisition of long-range missiles. As the Albanese government made clear, the focus of the military expansion will be on projecting more power further north from Australia’s shores. In other words, the pretense of the military’s purpose being to defend Australia from invasion threats (of which none exist) will be quietly dropped in favour of openly preparing to join war moves against Red China thousands upon thousands of kilometres from Australia’s shores. Pro-war hardliners are so emboldened by the militarist political climate that the war-mongering Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) and right-wing extremist Shadow Defence Minister Andrew Hastie (who is notorious for having a few years ago spearheaded the white supremacist cause celebre’ to give special “refugee status” to rich white South African farmers) all criticised the expansion plans for not pouring even greater resources into the military build-up!

To justify their military escalation, the Australian ruling class and its Western allies have been trying to portray China as a “threat”. They rant that, “China’s military build up is now the most ambitious of any country since the end of the Second World War”, while deceptively covering up the truth that China’s annual defence spending is almost three times lower than that of the U.S. despite having more than four times as many people as the United States. Moreover, even before the sharp escalation announced by the Labor government last week and before the AUKUS expenditure comes online, Australia’s military expenditure per head of population is actually six times higher than China’s. More importantly, while over the last 40 years the U.S. and Australian imperialist regimes have together killed hundreds of thousands of people by twice invading Iraq and then later unleashing air strikes in Syria and Iraq which often “collaterally” killed large numbers of civilians, carried out the most hideous war crimes during their two decade-long occupation of Afghanistan and conducted a racist, colonial occupation of Somalia in the mid-90s, while the NT’s U.S./Australia Pine Gap spy base’s pinpointing of missile strikes helped the U.S. and NATO to bomb to death thousands of people in Serbia in 1999 and destroy Libya in 2011, while the Australian military twice occupied East Timor in order to ensure that the political order there facilitated the theft of the country’s offshore oil and gas wealth by greedy Australian corporations, while from 2003 the Australian military, police and bureaucrats carried out a more-than-decade-long, defacto neocolonial takeover of the Solomon Islands and while the Australian regime caused the death of up to 20,000 people after they orchestrated a decade-long war and blockade of the South Pacific island of Bougainville in the late 20th century after the people there rose up against the arrogant trampling of their rights by an Australian-owned mining company, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has not fought one single shooting war or engaged in one single occupation of another country during these entire last 40 years! The only concrete examples of so-called “Chinese aggression” that imperialist propagandists have been able to point to is China “invading” a few disputed, uninhabited pieces of rock off its own coast … in the South China Sea. The whole China “is increasingly aggressive” narrative is in fact complete rubbish from start to finish! We say: No to long-range missiles for the Australian military! No to the deployment of U.S. B-52s in the NT! Torpedo the AUKUS submarine deal! All U.S. troops and bases out! Close Pine Gap!

Why Are They Targeting the Peoples Republic of China?

Given that 35% of Australia’s exports are bought up by China, many wonder why Australia’s capitalist rulers are risking such a hugely lucrative trade by antagonising their, by far, biggest customer. Some on the Left answer this question by claiming that the Australian ruling class is joining the West’s war drive against China only because it is servilely bowing to American demands. However, this is not, in fact, the case. The truth is actually even more confronting! And that reality is that Australia’s capitalist ruling class is just as committed to the political and military Cold War drive against the PRC as its U.S. senior partners and for the exact same reasons. Those reasons all stem from one fact: that China is a country not under capitalist rule but one under socialistic rule. Although from the early 1980s, China’s compromise-seeking rulers bent to the worldwide dominance of capitalism and allowed the capitalists to gain a dangerous foothold in the Chinese economy, the backbone sectors of her economy – including her banks, fuel, power, ports, shipping, aviation, steel and aircraft, shipbuilding, train and auto manufacturing sectors – remain under the dominance of socialistic public ownership. This system of collective ownership that favours working-class people was created by China’s toiling classes in a massive anti-capitalist revolution in 1949. Although China’s transition to socialism is fragile and incomplete and the working class hold on power there is held indirectly via a middle-class bureaucracy, the capitalist powers see the existence of a workers state in a country with nearly 1.5 billion people with all the hostility that a capitalist boss views the presence of a militant trade union in their business.

So how does socialistic rule in China threaten the interests of Australia’s capitalist ruling class and the rulers of other capitalist powers? For one, when China engages in infrastructure construction, resource development and other major projects in developing countries, it is usually China’s giant state-owned enterprises that spearhead the projects. But these socialistic enterprises are not mainly driven by profits but by broader PRC national goals – including building good relations between China and other developing countries. As a result, they offer their host countries very good terms. Although this is great for the developing countries that cooperate with China, this is very bad news for, say, the Australian capitalist corporations that had been making an absolute fortune by looting the natural resources of the likes of PNG, East Timor, Fiji, Indonesia and the Philippines and super-exploiting the toil of workers there. With China’s socialistic state-owned enterprises offering developing countries access to infrastructure development, capital and technology without ripping them off, these countries are giving some projects to China that they would previously have had to give to Australia’s plundering corporate bigwigs. Moreover, with China’s public sector firms offering such good deals, South Pacific and southeast Asian countries are using the “threat” of turning to China to claw better terms from Australian companies that continue to be granted projects. Either way, without actually meaning to do so, the PRC’s socialistic enterprises’ mutually beneficial cooperation with countries in this region is causing Australia’s capitalists to lose money – lose big money! And we know how greedy capitalists behave when their profits are threatened!

Secondly, as huge as the income is that Australia’s big end of town gains from trade with China, working class rule there (as tenuous and bureaucratically deformed as it is) impedes their possibility of gaining much, much greater profits from operations within that country. Currently, with China’s real wages by far the fastest growing in the world, bosses there, including foreign investors, have to pay wages that are much higher than in capitalist countries with comparable income levels. This is especially the case when one adds the extra payments that worker-hiring business owners must make in China – including not only into a collective workers’ superannuation fund but into individual accounts for workers to use to buy or rent homes and into collective medical insurance, unemployment insurance, maternity support and accident insurance funds that together add up to not just around 10% of wages as bosses’ super payments and compo insurance does here … but to some 40% of wages! Moreover, the dominance of the PRC’s socialistic public sector over the most profitable sectors – like banking and finance, oil and gas, mining, infrastructure construction, defence and telecommunications – greatly restrict the amount of profit that capitalists can make within China. However, if capitalist rule were restored to China, Australian and other rich Western capitalists would not only gain a bonanza from looting these sectors but would be able to greatly increase their extraction of profits from Chinese workers’ labour as any new capitalist regime in China would drive down real wages and workers’ conditions to satisfy its new capitalist masters. And the more that their own decaying system lurches from one economic crisis to the next, the more desperate are the capitalist powers to prop up their failing system by gouging massive super-profits via the nightmarish scenario of turning China into a giant sweatshop for capitalist exploitation – like they have already done to their existing populous, semi-colonies like the Philippines, Indonesia, Bangladesh, India, Nigeria, Brazil and Mexico.

Most worryingly for the Australian and other capitalist ruling classes, the existence of a workers state in such a large country as China – and one that has successfully lifted all her people out of extreme poverty and is rapidly improving the living standards of her people – shows the working class masses of their own countries that it is viable for them to seize state power and build a system based on socialist, common ownership of the backbone sectors of the economy. Right now, with China still catching up from the terrible poverty of her pre-1949 capitalist days when she was a cruelly subjugated neo-colony of the imperial powers, per capita incomes in China are several times below that of the richest of the capitalist countries. This, therefore, makes socialism seem less attractive to the less politically aware layers of the masses in Western countries than it otherwise would. However, the Australian and other Western capitalists know that if the PRC’s rapid socialistic development is not choked off, then living standards in China will catch up with those in even the richest of the capitalist countries within two or three decades. If and when that happens, they know that large sections of their own populations will demand socialism in their own countries. After all, if socialistic rule in a huge country can deliver average incomes comparable to even the richest of the capitalist countries, then why would the working class masses living in the capitalist countries want to tolerate a system that brings with it economic crises, lack of secure jobs, unaffordable rents, dwindling real wages, bullying bosses, social decay and disharmony and racist oppression and violence against First Nations peoples and minorities. This is why the capitalist ruling classes in Australia and other Western countries see the PRC as an “existential threat.” It is not the type of existential threat that they portray to their own masses: which is as some sort of aggressive, war-mongering power. Rather, China is an existential threat to the capitalist rule that exists in most of the world because despite China’s inward focused rulers doing nothing to consciously encourage revolutionary struggle in the capitalist world – which is an incorrect and anti-internationalist policy – the mere example provided by the successes of socialistic rule in a country with nearly one in five of the world’s people threatens to eventually inspire the masses in the capitalist world to fight for socialist revolution in their own countries. Given China’s massive population, if the PRC’s per capita GDP were to even approach that of the richest countries, then her economy would be so huge that the scale of her cooperation with developing countries would undercut the ability of the Western imperialist ruling classes to plunder these ex-colonies to such an extent that these Western capitalist rulers, who rely on such imperialist looting to prop up their decaying systems at home, would face implosion of their own economies.

Given that it is rational from the point of view of the Australian capitalist class – if any political option that an obsolete, doomed class takes can be considered “rational” – to stridently oppose socialistic rule in China, it is little surprise that virtually the entire capitalist establishment is behind the campaign to destroy the Chinese workers state. A few big-time capitalists had been softly critical of the former Morrison government’s provocative anti-China rhetoric for damaging Australian exports to China. However, they are now satisfied after the new Labor government slightly dialed down the severity of Canberra’s anti-PRC language, while continuing to intensify the anti-China military build-up and more aggressively interfere in the region to damage South Pacific countries’ mutually beneficial relations with the PRC. Amongst mainstream politicians, all agree on enmity to the PRC’s socialistic system, with just a few critical of particular aspects of the Cold War drive – like the nuclear submarine project. Former prime minister, Paul Keating, is a partial exception. Keating also opposes the PRC’s system but believes that since China’s rise as the pre-eminent Asian power is inevitable, Australian governments should accommodate this rise and try to put guardrails around it rather than try in vain to oppose it. However, the unanimity of the rest of the capitalist establishment around confronting the PRC is evident in the fact that all sections of the mainstream media – from the hard right Murdoch media to the mainstream conservative Channel 9/Sydney Morning Herald to the centrist ABC to the progressive-liberal Guardian newspaper – have been spewing out an endless torrent of ever-more rabid, anti-PRC propaganda.

This anti-PRC unanimity extends to the other imperialist countries as well. All pro-capitalist factions in all Western imperialist countries are hostile to the PRC. In the developing countries the story is different. Many governments in these countries have good relations with the PRC because her mutually beneficial cooperation with these countries is enabling them to achieve greater independence from their Western imperialist overlords. However, a few of these regimes fear the message sent to their own masses by the successes of socialistic rule in China so much that they choose to align with the anti-PRC Cold War drive. Thus, the right-wing Philippines regime led by Bongbong Marcos, son of the corrupt, hated dictator Ferdinand Marcos, is increasingly aligning itself with the U.S.-led, anti-PRC war drive. The same applies to the far-right Hindu chauvinist, Modi government in India. For India’s capitalist exploiting class, the achievements of socialistic rule in China are especially threatening. This is because, since China and India have similar huge population sizes and both were freed from colonial/neo-colonial domination around the same time – in the late 1940s – a comparison between the two countries provides the fairest assessment of the relative merits of socialism versus capitalism. Indeed, at the time of China’s 1949 Revolution, India’s per capita income was 87% higher than China’s – that is, almost double. Yet today, workers’ wages are several times greater in China than in India, life expectancy is 11 years higher and the social position of women is far better. While extreme poverty has truly been overcome throughout China, hundreds of millions of people continue to live in abject poverty in India with ramshackle housing, inadequate food and very often suffering under debt bondage to creditors. India’s capitalist ruling class are, therefore, terrified that the masses in their country will notice the much better life for the masses across the border in China and demand socialism in India too. That is why Modi has taken that country into the Quad anti-PRC alliance with the U.S., Australia and Japan.

The Imperialist Powers All-Sided Campaign to Destroy Socialistic Rule in China

No exploitative ruling class in history has lost power without using all available means to cling on to it. So it is the case with capitalist ruling classes today. When they have seen the masses threatening their rule, they have quickly switched from claiming to be “democrats” to instituting the most violent fascist or other brutal authoritarian political orders in order to protect their class rule. This is what they did, for example, when they turned to Mussolini in Italy, to Hitler in Germany, Franco in Spain, Suharto in Indonesia and Pinochet in Chile to save their rule by murderously crushing the radicalised working class masses and leftists. With the successes of socialistic rule in China undermining the ability of the imperialist rulers to super-exploit the “Third World” and on course to eventually inspire the overthrow of capitalist rule in even the richest of the capitalist countries, the Western imperialist regimes are preparing to use every means possible to crush socialistic rule in China. And that includes being prepared to risk the destruction of human civilisation as we know it by unleashing nuclear weapons. The Biden regime’s decision last week to deploy submarines armed with nuclear ballistic missiles to the Western Pacific – aimed against China and North Korea – for the first time in four decades and the U.S. and Australian governments plan to deploy nuclear armed U.S. B52s in Darwin are signs of this.

However, the capitalist powers’ preferred means to destroy the Chinese workers state is to use political and economic means to foment a capitalist counterrevolution there. At minimum they intend to squeeze China so hard with all-sided pressure that it chokes off her development. That is why Washington has restricted micro-chip and other high-tech exports to China. With this same purpose of damaging the PRC’s economy, the Australian regime has joined the U.S. and a few of its Western counterparts in using the bogus cover of national security to limit the market access in Australia of some Chinese companies and products – including Huawei and Tik-Tok – and block several Chinese investment projects. The AUKUS regimes and their imperialist allies hope too that if they can cause economic woes in China this will create dissension and revolt within her borders.

Meanwhile, the Western capitalist ruling classes are giving huge support to those outfits within China seeking to restore capitalism there. The website of the U.S. government agency for foreign interference, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), admits to giving a range of such groups nearly $17 million in funding. This includes almost $900,000 to a group called the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE) – in other words the Centre for International Capitalism – and huge amounts to various Chinese groups committed to “empowering 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 guaranteed them in Red China. The NED also funds anti-PRC exile groups including an Australian anti-communist group called the Australia New Zealand Tibetan Youth. Yet, such open imperialist funding of capitalist counterrevolutionary groups is dwarfed by the amount of covert backing from the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies and the amount of funding provided by Western anti-communist NGOs – the latter often flush with donations from wealthy capitalists. Whenever anti-communist forces within China stage actions, Western ruling classes are quick to declare their political solidarity with them in order to encourage these movements. Last November, when small groups in China – a component of which were anti-communists openly seeking to destroy socialistic rule – held the Chinese version of the Far Right-led COVID “Freedom” rallies opposing pandemic restrictions (in the Chinese case this was mainly, nominally directed against PCR testing and mask wearing), the Albanese government effectively declared its support for the protests … despite strongly opposing such COVID “Freedom” protests in Australia. Earlier in 2019, when pro-colonial rich kids in Hong Kong attempted a violent anti-communist uprising, the right-wing Morrison government and the ALP and Greens hailed the anti-communist forces. 

A key means that the imperialist ruling classes use to undermine socialistic rule in China is through their governments, media and NGOs saturating the world with anti-communist, anti-PRC propaganda, in the hope that some of it will make its way into China. They rant that China is “not a democracy”, while hiding the fact that the “democratic” structures in the West, which theoretically give each person equal rights, are designed to enable the rich capitalist class to – through their ownership of the media and their greatly disproportionate financial ability to fund political advertising and political parties, hire lobbyists and establish think tanks and NGOs – thoroughly dominate all political discourse to such an extent that the “democracy” is in effect only a dictatorship of the capitalist class over the working class masses. Most deceitfully, the Western ruling classes claim that China is “brutally persecuting” her more European-looking, Muslim, Uyghur minority. To justify this lie, they seize on China’s measures to curb that small section of Uyghurs – spearheaded both by capitalist Uyghurs angry that socialistic rule is curbing their ability to get even richer and a larger number of extreme religious fundamentalist elements who want to impose an ISIS-type regime and who are furious that the PRC’s secular, socialistic system has given Uyghur women too many freedoms – who are intent on overturning socialistic rule in the areas where Uyghurs reside in Northwestern China. Those measures involve putting into boarding schools for both socialist political education and vocational training those Uyghurs who have provided minor support to religious fundamentalist terrorist groups or other violent anti-communist forces. The Western propaganda deliberately ignores the truth that this practice is a very humane alternative to what happens in Australia to Islamic fundamentalists engaged in equivalent acts against the regime here – which is to be locked up for years in Goulburn Supermax prison on terrorism convictions.

Modern Day McCarthyism in Australia in the Service of the Anti-China Cold War

The imperialist rulers have another motive for their anti-PRC propaganda: to make their own populations accept their Cold War drive. To further this purpose, the Australian ruling class has a still more sinister means: to whip up fear and hatred of China by, in an ostentatious way, persecuting organisations and individuals for being supposed Chinese “agents” or “tools for Chinese foreign interference in Australia.” In the most recent case, two weeks ago Sydney man Alexander Csergo was placed into solitary confinement after being subjected to a high-profile arrest, with the Australian Federal Police (AFP) ranting about “espionage”, merely for allegedly providing, for a fee, alleged Chinese officials with open source information (that is from the media and public websites and publications) about “Australia’s national security”. If the accusation is true, this is no different to the numerous people in China hired by Western think tanks, government agencies and media organisations to collect open source information about China’s political and security matters. In another high profile case, Australian citizen and former U.S. fighter pilot, Daniel Duggan, has been imprisoned in harsh conditions here for extradition to the U.S. for allegedly training Chinese military pilots more than ten years ago – even though it is not illegal under Australian law to do so. Then, later this year, a prominent member of Melbourne’s Chinese community, Di Sanh Duong, will face trial under Australia’s authoritarian “foreign interference” laws because he committed the “dastardly act” of organising for his Chinese community organisation to … make a $37,450 donation to the Royal Melbourne Hospital, allegedly so that it will give Chinese people a good name! Meanwhile, the work of the Chinese language-teaching Confucius institutes has been curbed after Australian politicians engaged in truly bonkers accusations that the language schools were tools for Chinese “foreign interference”.

This modern-day McCarthyist repression has another purpose: to silence the voices of those who dare to speak positively about the PRC. In June 2020, the AFP and ASIO secret police subjected the home of then NSW state MP, Shaoquett Moselmane, to a massive raid three months after he made the manifestly true statement that China had responded effectively to the COVID pandemic. Then his own party, the ALP, followed through further on this witch-hunt by refusing to re-nominate Moselmane for his Senate position for the recent state election, effectively dumping him from parliament. The previous year, Chinese international students were subjected to an intimidating interrogation by Australia’s secret police because they organised a large march in Sydney opposing the pro-colonial, anti-China riots in Hong Kong. Meanwhile, the media and the likes of ASPI have been demonising any Chinese community organisation in Australia that refuses to take an avidly anti-PRC line as a “tool of Chinese foreign interference.” There is a reason why Australia’s capitalist ruling class is especially determined to silence pro-PRC voices in the Chinese community. They know that other Australian residents will realise that Chinese international students and migrants from the PRC who have lived in both China and Australia are the best qualified to speak about the realities of life in the PRC. The capitalist class is worried that by speaking positively about life in China, these members of the Chinese community will undermine support for the anti-PRC Cold War and, moreover, could potentially “infect” others here with sympathy for socialism.

We Must Defend Socialistic Rule in China from
All Aspects of the Imperialist Campaign to Destroy It

For the very same reasons that it is in the interests of the U.S. and Australian capitalist rulers to destroy socialistic rule in China, it is in the interests of the working class of this country and the world to rally to its defence. The existence of socialistic rule in China and its stunning successes in poverty alleviation gives confidence to the working class masses in the capitalist world that capitalist rule does not need to be accepted – that another alternative is possible.

That is why the workers movement and all socialists must oppose the U.S., British, Australian and other Western regimes’ all-sided campaign to destroy the PRC workers state and the other workers states in Vietnam, Laos, North Korea and Cuba. Here in Australia, we must demand: Down with the Australian regime’s aggressive military buildup against the PRC! U.S./Australian/British/French warships stay out of the South China Sea! No arms shipments to, or diplomatic contacts with, Taiwan’s anti-working class regime! Oppose the Albanese government’s neocolonial meddling in the Pacific – Down with their efforts to intimidate the Solomon Islands and other countries that choose to establish economic and security cooperation with the PRC! Stop the support for anti-communist, anti-PRC exile groups in Australia from the U.S. and Australian regimes and pro-capitalist NGOs! Lift the discriminatory restrictions on Huawei and TikTok! Down with the hysterical campaign against the Confucius Institute language schools! Free Alexander Csergo and pilot Daniel Duggan! Drop the charges against hospital donor Di Sanh Duong! Scrap Australia’s McCarthyist, anti-PRC “foreign interference” laws! Down with the persecution of those Australian Chinese community organisations that refuse to join the Cold War campaign!

If we are to be able to oppose the capitalist ruling class’ Cold War drive against Red China, we must oppose the entire propaganda campaign that is used to “justify” it. We must expose the disgusting lie spread by the Western ruling classes that the PRC is “brutally persecuting” her Uyghur Muslim minority. We must, for example, point out that countries representing 85% of the world’s population have refused to sign on to this claim and that a very large number of countries, including most Muslim-majority countries – as well as the Organisation of Islamic States – have instead praised China’s treatment of Uyghurs after sending fact-finding missions to China’s northwest.

Similarly, we must refute the claim of the imperialists and exiled, anti-communist Tibetans that China is oppressing her Tibetan minority. We must explain that at bottom the clash over Tibet is not between Tibetans and China. Rather it is between, on the one hand, the now exiled, theocratic former rulers of Tibet – and their descendants – who mercilessly exploited and punished their serfs and still long for the day when, with the help of the imperialists, they can once again lord it over the Tibetan masses and, on the other, the former Tibetan serfs – and their descendants – who eventually liberated themselves from feudal serfdom with great assistance from China’s socialist revolution and who today rule the PRC’s Tibetan Autonomous Region. We need to point out that nearly all Tibetans today, just like nearly all Uyghurs, can not only speak their own language – unlike many actually persecuted people like most of Australia’s First Nations people who have been cruelly cut off from their tongue by brutal colonial dispossession – but actually learn to read and write their own language in China’s schools (unlike in the old Tibet when nearly all the serfs who made up 90% of Tibet’s population were kept illiterate) alongside learning the country’s national language, Mandarin. We must stress too that a recent video showing the Dalai Lama, in a public event, kissing a young boy on the lips and then asking the boy to “suck my tongue”, causing the boy to soon after pull away his head, should not be seen just as an isolated, inappropriate sexualised exploitation of a child. Rather, the Dalai Lama’s behavior is a throwback to what the monk aristocratic class that he headed was doing in the old feudal Tibet. As even anti-PRC journalists sometimes have to admit, it was the norm for Tibet’s then monk rulers to rape the young boys who the serfs were forced to give up for monastic slavery.

We need to also explain that the anti-PRC attempted revolt in Hong Kong in 2019 was not a struggle for genuine democracy for all but an attempt by Hong Kong’s upper class and upper middle-class rich kids to maintain their privileged position in the face of their fears that the PRC would gradually bring aspects of socialism to Hong Kong. These pro-colonial rich kids and their U.S., British and Australian backers only wanted Western-style “democracy” because they knew that such a system would enable them to leverage their wealth to dominate all political discourse and elections – just like their class does in Western capitalist “democracies.”

We must also refute the positive portrayal given by capitalist politicians and media to Taiwan’s rulers. We must point out that the Taiwanese regime are the political descendants of the murderous deposed capitalist rulers of China who fled to the island with their ill-gotten wealth following China’s 1949 anti-capitalist revolution and who took over the island in order to use it as a base to foment capitalist restoration in all of China. This is equivalent to Andrew Forrest, Gina Rinehart, the Murdochs and their ilk fleeing the mainland to Tasmania in the wake of a workers revolution here and taking over Tasmania in order to retain it as a capitalist foothold in Australia. As for the so-called “democracy” in Taiwan that the Australian ruling class rave about, it is just like here – in practice only a democracy for the rich. Moreover, in the case of Taiwan, this “democracy” was built on the White Terror period during the first four decades of Taiwan’s existence, when the capitalist regime there carried out a reign of bloody political repression that saw them murder thousands upon thousands of communists and other leftists and imprison hundreds of thousands more. Today, Taiwan’s “democracy” continues to repress the workers movement, with large sections of Taiwan’s working class banned from taking industrial action. Taiwanese workers are subjected to long working hours and harsh military-style regimentation. As a result, suicide rates in capitalist Taiwan are two and a half times what they are in the socialistic mainland of China. The most brutally exploited workers in Taiwan are migrant workers from countries like Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Sri Lanka. Especially for those migrant workers toiling as domestic maids or in Taiwan’s huge deep sea fishing industry, Taiwan’s “democracy” means very low pay, over 100 hours of work per week and, for many, “debt bondage” and working conditions close to slavery. The PRC is completely justified in wanting to reunify China by reincorporating the rogue province of Taiwan. The mistake of the PRC leadership is that they promise to accommodate Taiwan’s capitalist class in doing so under the “one country, two systems” formula. Instead, we say that the PRC must foment socialist revolution in Taiwan in order to liberate the island’s cruelly exploited working class. For one China under one socialist system!

To oppose the Western imperialists’ war drive against socialistic China we must also stand for the defeat of their proxy war to subordinate Russia. Although Russia is itself ruled by a capitalist exploiting class and although the escalation of the war in Ukraine in February last year was initially mostly a squalid inter-capitalist battle for territory in which the working class had no side, the U.S., Australia and other Western powers intervened into the conflict to such an extent that quickly the war’s initial content was overshadowed by the conflict between the imperialist powers that dominate the world and an economically weaker Russia that they are determined to further weaken and stifle. If their proxy war can be defeated, the Western regimes will be significantly weakened and their ability to mobilise support for their campaign against Red China will be undermined. That is why it is important that we stand for the defence of Russia in this war. We must demand the ending of all arms shipments to Ukraine, the end to all U.S./British/Australian/German training of Ukrainian troops and the lifting of all sanctions against Russia.

Supporting the Imperialist Political and Propaganda War against the PRC
Means Fueling the War Drive against Her

Despite the incessant anti-China propaganda, there is much opposition to the AUKUS nuclear submarine project amongst some sections of the masses. Some of this is due to the gigantic cost of the scheme, especially when the government claims that it can’t find funding for a desperately needed increase in public housing, adequate funding for the NDIS and public hospitals and resources for a meaningful across the board increase in Jobseeker. There are also worries about nuclear accidents and the submarines displacing a civilian port where they are based, alongside fears that the submarine base will become a target for military attack, all of which are fueling understandable local opposition to the prospect of the submarines being based in the NSW South Coast’s Port Kembla, which is said to be one of three to five sites under consideration as a possible base site. Then there is opposition to provoking a war against China. As a result of such sentiments, many unions and even ALP branches have declared their opposition to the nuclear submarine project.

Aware of this opposition, the Greens have come out against the nuclear submarine project and the open drive towards military conflict with China. At the same time the Greens fully support the political and propaganda war against the PRC. Thus, they joined the rest of the parliamentary parties in strongly backing the 2019 attempted anti-communist uprising by the pro-colonial, Hong Kong rich kids. It is notable too that the Greens most outspoken opponent of AUKUS, senator David Shoebridge has been at the same time the most avid promoter of anti-communist hostility to the PRC. He has joined extreme right-wing, former Liberal MP (and now leader of the far right United Australia Party) Craig Kelly in supporting the claims of the far-right, extreme-homphobic, Chinese pseudo religious group, Falun Dafa that China has been executing Falun Dafa prisoners in order to harvest their organs. Given that Falun Dafa says that heaven is segregated into separate sections for White, Yellow and Black races in which people of mixed race have no place, avidly supported Donald Trump and promoted nutty COVID and anti-Vax conspiracy theories, anyone who is not prejudiced by their own hostility to the PRC workers state would deduce that Falun Dafa’s claims about organ harvesting are as bonkers as the rest of their right-wing extremist assertions. But that does not include Shoebridge! Also, it was Shoebridge who spearheaded the McCarthyist witchhunt that expelled the Confucius Institutes from teaching the Chinese language at NSW schools. Mixing rabid anti-communism with nationalist xenophobia, as he attacked the then NSW Coalition government from the right, Shoebridge outdid the likes of a Peter Dutton, an Andrew Hastie or an ASPI fanatic when he ranted that:

“Under the arrangement there are Chinese government appointees working directly inside the NSW Education Department. No foreign government officials should be inside the NSW government…. 

“This is a pretty stunning example of the NSW Government selling access to NSW school kids, and this time selling that access to the Government of a one-party state.

“The secrecy behind this program just increased the concern about inappropriate foreign influence, and now we see why.”

Greens NSW website, 23 Aug 2019

Moreover, while stating opposition to the drive towards war with China, Shoebridge and the Greens as a whole are fully on the side of Western imperialism in their proxy war against Russia. Yet if the Western imperialist powers triumph in their proxy war against Russia, they will be emboldened to escalate their war drive against socialistic China.

Like the Greens, the far-left groups Socialist Alternative (SAlt) and Socialist Alliance (SA) also back Western imperialism’s proxy war against Russia. Both even support Ukraine getting Western arms. In supporting the imperialist proxy war against Russia, SAlt and SA are on the side of an outcome in this Ukraine war that can only encourage the Western imperialist war drive against China – a war drive that they nominally oppose.

Still more harmfully, SAlt, SA and the Solidarity group – tragically alongside many others on the Left – back the forces seeking to destroy the Chinese workers state from within. Thus, all three groups joined the Albanese government, the Biden regime and all the capitalist media in hailing last November’s Chinese version of the Far Right-led, anti-COVID response “Freedom” protests (known as the A4 protests for the blank A4 pieces of paper held by many protesters), in which outright capitalist counterrevolutionaries were a significant component – as were a larger component of those with dangerous illusions in Western-style “democracy” who were not necessarily open anti-communists. Indeed, Solidarity and SAlt both cheered the most outright counterrevolutionary aspect of these A4 protests: that a section of the Shanghai protest started chanting, “Communist Party! Step down! Xi Jinping! Step down!” Earlier in 2019, all these groups, alongside to a lesser degree the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist), enthusiastically supported the Hong Kong pro-colonial, rich people’s attempted uprising against the PRC. They even marched in joint demonstrations in Sydney with extreme anti-communists and right-wingers (as did on at least one occasion the Socialist Equality Party) in support of Hong Kong’s imperialist-backed anti-PRC movement. In doing so these groups are not only treacherously on the side of the forces seeking to destroy the world’s largest workers state, they are also undermining the campaign against the military aspect of the war drive against China – a protest campaign that they are actively part of. For by teaching the people that they influence, primarily leftist-minded people, who are thus amongst the people who could be most easily won to the struggle against the anti-China war drive, that the PRC state is a force for reaction, it makes their leftist audience much less willing to make the effort to join actions opposing the war moves against this very same state. Indeed, one can say that the likes of SAlt, SA and Solidarity have so energetically and effectively convinced leftist youth that the PRC state should be opposed that they are now having trouble building the movement against the anti-China war drive. Yet these groups are still at it today! They ape the lying imperialist propaganda that China is brutally oppressing Uyghurs and Tibetans and unjustly repressing Hong Kong people.

Bogus Theories Used to Justify Capitulation to Movements Seeking to Destroy the PRC Workers State

Those far-left groups that back the forces seeking to destroy socialistic rule in China excuse their stance by claiming that the PRC is just another capitalist state. The breadth of left groups pushing such “theories” range from SAlt to Solidarity to SA to the Socialist Equality Party to the Australian Communist Party to the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist). Their “China is capitalist” “theories” are all just simply plain wrong! After all, if the PRC is just another capitalist country, why are Australia’s capitalist rulers at the very forefront of the imperialist drive to crush the PRC when the Australian capitalists reap such huge profits from trade with China? Now, one could incorrectly claim that the Australian capitalists are being pressured by the U.S. to act against their own interests by joining the anti-China war drive. However, the main proponents of the “China is capitalist” “theories” themselves acknowledge, quite correctly, that the Australian capitalist class is a junior imperialist ruling class in its own right and, thus, acts in its own class interests rather than that of its U.S. senior partners. So why the hell would they want to risk losing such huge profits from trade with China by antagonising the latter if it is capitalist? The capitalists are very greedy but they are not stupid – they are all-too conscious of what is in their interests! Even if Australia’s capitalist rulers had other reasons for wanting to maintain their alliance with the U.S., if China were indeed “capitalist” and an imperialist rival to the U.S., the Australian ruling class would be doing everything possible to reduce tensions between the U.S. and China in order to protect their lucrative trade with the latter. But today, the Australian ruling class, both under Morrison and Albanese, have been egging on its senior partners to be ever more hostile to the PRC. The ONLY way that one can explain why an independent imperialist country whose ruling class reaps such massive benefits from trade with China would want to wage an all-sided military and political Cold War against her is because the PRC is indeed not “capitalist” but actually a workers state.

If the PRC is actually an “imperialist” power how did it get to be so? A key plank of Trotskyist theory which has been confirmed time and time again by history is that it is impossible for the colonial and semi-colonial countries subjugated by imperialism to truly free themselves from imperialist domination unless the working class leads all the downtrodden people in the seizure of state power. Now, no leftist would contest that China before 1949 was a brutally subjugated neocolony of the imperialist powers. How then has this former neocolony “under capitalist rule” not only completely freed itself from imperialist subjugation but caught up and overtaken so many other countries in development that it is now itself, supposedly, an “imperialist” power. Trotskyist and indeed Leninist theory – and the whole course of world history – say that this is just plain impossible!

The “China is capitalist” “theories” are just an adaptation of “theory” by those leftists seeking a justification to allow them to avoid the difficult task of having to defend the PRC workers state against all forms of attack. We should add that there is a self-fulfilling aspect to their stance. For by supporting forces seeking to destroy the PRC state under the rationale that the PRC state is in fact “capitalist”, these forces are emboldening pro-capitalist elements within the PRC state bureaucracy. For example, it is apparent that last November’s anti-communist-influenced A4 protests in China have handed the right-wing of the bureaucracy and the Communist Party of China (CPC) a stick with which to beat Xi Jinping and more so the more staunchly pro-communist, left-wing of the CPC and state institutions. The right factions would have been able to argue, “the recent measures to reduce inequality (dubbed “common prosperity” measures in China) pushed by Xi have angered some of the upper middle class in our country (who were the main strata participating in the A4 protests). We don’t want to make them our enemies. We need to pull back 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.” Indeed, it seems that although the A4 protests were small, they have pushed the political mood in China slightly to the right: there is less talk now of “curbing the disorderly expansion of capital” under which the PRC was cracking down on bigshot tech and real estate capitalists and slightly more statements calling for greater efforts to specially support the private, that is capitalist, sector. To be sure, overall, the PRC’s political atmosphere is still somewhat in a more socialist direction than it had been, say, five years ago. However, by supporting last November’s anti-communist influenced A4 protests, those far-left groups claiming that the PRC is “capitalist” have actually helped the soft-on-capitalism forces within the PRC state to gain greater sway than they previously had.

In contrast, we in Trotskyist Platform have influenced the intense political battle going on in China in favour of those who want to strengthen the PRC’s socialist foundations and the socialistic public sector of her economy. We have done so by initiating and building several united front actions openly in solidarity with the PRC workers state. When the 70th 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 their 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. In this way, we uplifted the spirits of staunch communists committed to the defence of socialism and demoralised those seeking an accommodation with capitalism.

Given that there are wealthy capitalists within China itching to gain greater “rights” so that they can in the future make a bid for state power, we say that it is crucial to weaken the power of the capitalists within China. We call to confiscate capitalist-owned enterprises in the sectors of China where the capitalist private sector is strongest – that is in the tech, real estate, big retail and light manufacturing sectors – and bring them into public ownership. For state takeover of promising small private enterprises that are in financial trouble – not tax concessions for them! Advance China’s socialistic state sector! We also say that China needs genuine workers democracy in order to make the PRC’s state economic sector more efficient and creative. The closer the PRC catches up with the technological level of the richest of the capitalist countries, the more crucial this will be in order to foster independent innovation in the socialist sector. However, we only have a right to make such calls for workers democracy in China and for the curbing of the private sector because we are resolutely fighting here in imperialist Australia to oppose all political, military, propaganda and economic attacks on socialistic rule in China.

The Danger that the “No War on China” Movement Is Diverted into
A Movement Appealing to the Australian Ruling Class to Be
More “Independent” of the U.S.

Given how determined the Australian rulers are to be part of the Cold War drive against Red China the slogans of any movement opposing this war drive must be carefully chosen. Local opposition to having the nuclear submarines based in Port Kembla has galvanised around the slogan “Port Kembla: No Place For a Nuclear Base.” The problem is that a movement centred on this demand will at best succeed in changing the location of the submarine base and causing inconvenience to the regime. But it will not substantially weaken the overall war drive against China. That is why Port Kembla locals initially mobilised around the possible local location of the submarine base must then be won to an understanding of the need to defend the socialistic PRC against the entire political, military, economic and propaganda campaign against her. This means that NSW South Coast-based activists that already understand the need to take this stance must not get caught up in promoting the “No Place For a Nuclear Base” agenda. Instead, they must help win others to a deeper commitment to oppose the all-sided anti-PRC Cold War drive.

There is, however, a much broader danger to the “No War on China” campaign. Given that a considerable amount of leftists believe that the only reason that Canberra is supporting the anti-China war drive is because the Australian ruling class are “compradors” of their U.S. “masters” who are “selling out” “Australia’s national interest” to Washington, there is a danger that the movement is organised around slogans calling for “Australia to break free from U.S. diktats and act independently”. Such an agenda would seem attractive to sell and a line of least resistance because it could appeal to “little Australia” nationalism and appeal to a section of the capitalist class and pro-capitalist sections of the middle class. The narrative such an agenda is based on is indeed a version of what Paul Keating outlined in his opposition to AUKUS. The problem is that this whole narrative is simply not true. As we have pointed out, Australia’s capitalist rulers are just as committed to destroying the PRC workers state as their U.S. senior partners are. Indeed, often the Australian capitalists are even more fanatical in their hostility to the PRC than their U.S. counterparts. This is because since the PRC is a workers state in Asia, her win-win cooperation with developing countries is often focused on the very same countries that the Australian imperialists consider in their “backyard”. In this way the PRC, without meaning to, greatly disrupts the ability of Australian capitalists to ravage these very countries for their imperialist super-profits. By contrast, the U.S. superpower has imperialist interests all over the world. It is notable that rather than the U.S. pressuring Australia to accept nuclear submarines, it was the Australian regime that for years lobbied the U.S. and Britain to assist it in acquiring nuclear subs. Appeals to the Australian ruling class to “act independently from the U.S.” and “refuse to be part of the buildup towards war with China” will, thus, largely fall on deaf fears. The bulk of the Australian capitalist class are committed to the campaign to destroy socialistic rule in China because they have calculated that this is in their interests. The section of the capitalist establishment represented by Paul Keating is, in fact, tiny.

There is another more fundamental problem with this approach. Even if a movement built on the line of appealing for “Australia to break free from U.S. diktats and act independently” were to mobilise a huge number of people it will not halt the war drive against China. Gven that the strategic justification for the nuclear submarines is tenuous it is quite possible that Australian governments may downsize the program, or even scrap it, in favour of acquiring other war machines – like more surface ships, more long range naval missiles and B21 nuclear-capable bombers. Yet that would hardly be a step forward for the campaign to oppose the drive towards war with China. The reason why even a huge movement based on appealing to the ruling class to change its policy because it is not in the “national interests” will not deter the capitalist class’ war drive against China is because such a movement does not politically threaten or scare the capitalists. After all, the movement will only be proposing what it thinks is good for the capitalists themselves (along with the rest of the “nation”). The capitalist class will understand that such a movement is not a step towards rebellious hostility towards them. Hence they will not be scared by the movement … they will simply ignore it!

To explain this point further, it is worth going back to one of the largest rallies in Australian history. In mid-February 2003 some half a million people marched through the streets of Sydney against the impending war on Iraq. For those who participated, the sheer size of the action was a buzz. However, the dominant political line of the march was that though this war was wrong and bad for Australia, if the shooting started then “we will support our troops” – that is, support the Australian imperialist military against the Iraqi people. Many participants did have a better, more anti-imperialist, line. But the overall line of the movement was so acceptable to the ruling class that some Liberal Party politicians participated in the protest. As a result, the movement did not scare the capitalists at all. They simply ignored the protest, despite its gigantic size, and carried on with their role in the heinous U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Soon, the ruling class’ decision to be unruffled by the protest was proven correct. Once the shooting started, the movement collapsed in size in accordance with its capitalist state-loyal line.

We should note that the Australian ruling class will be even more determined to see off any protests against the Cold War drive against the PRC than they were over the Iraq invasion. In Iraq, Australia’s interests in the war were only to ensure the success of their great power protector. In contrast, today, Australia’s capitalist rulers, like their AUKUS, Quad and other allies, see the matter of crushing socialistic rule in China as an existential question. Even if two million people are on the streets appealing to the ruling class to change their policy for the sake of its own “national interests”, the capitalist rulers will ignore it. By contrast, if even a much smaller, but still sizable, number of people are marching through the streets saying that they oppose the war drive against China because they stand with socialistic China against capitalist threats, the capitalist rulers would be terrified! For such a movement solidarising with a workers state against the capitalist rulers inevitably poses a future leap to a movement fighting for a workers state right here. Such a movement could, therefore, actually win concessions from the frightened capitalist class in the form of a scaling back of their war drive. This is the kind of movement that we need!

One of the most successful sets of anti-imperialist movements in history were the workers’ protests in Western countries like Britain and France that followed the 1917 Russian Revolution and that opposed the sending of troops to crush the young Soviet Russian workers state. Although several powers did send troops, the level of intervention was much less than the imperial powers wanted. For they feared that if they tried to send bigger contingents it could trigger not only mutinies but revolutions that would overthrow them. The fact that the imperial powers could not send the level of forces that they wanted to in order to aid Russian counterrevolutionaries allowed the heroic Soviet Red Army to win the Civil War against the capitalist restorationist forces.

Today, if we are to push back the U.S. and Australian imperialists’ war drive against Red China we too must build a movement that can scare the hell out of the capitalist rulers. However, to be realistic, given that the imperialist ruling classes understand that the continuing successful development of socialistic China is an existential threat to their own rule, to actually end the Western imperialist drive towards war with China will take nothing short of the overthrow of capitalism in one or a number of Western countries. That is why every move that we make in the campaign against AUKUS and the struggle against the drive towards war with China must advance the struggle towards socialist revolution. For starters that means we must never appeal to any section or party of the capitalist class, because the understanding that no section of the capitalist class can be allies of the toiling people’s struggle for liberation is key to advancing the revolutionary political consciousness of the masses. Therefore, Paul Keating can do his own thing. If he creates some dissension within the capitalist establishment well and good. Even here it is a double-edged sword. For Keating is known by politically aware workers for having presided over privatisations, the introduction of enterprise bargaining and anti-strike laws, the weakening of the union movement and the redistribution of income from the poor to rich. His speaking out against AUKUS could actually tarnish the campaign against AUKUS in the eyes of some. But the most important thing is that we must not alter the slogans of the movement to appeal to the likes of Keating. We need to, instead, set the slogans to appeal to the class interests of the working class and the pro-worker section of the middle class. What better way to do this than to appeal to the class interests that the working class have in defending a state – the PRC – that is centred on collective public ownership of the backbone economic sectors: the form of economic organisation that favours the working class masses. This too is the way to build a movement that can scare the capitalists and push them into potential backdowns. Building such a movement means taking head-on the anti-communist propaganda against Red China. No serious movement against the drive towards war against China can be built without challenging this incessant anti-PRC propaganda. So while it is correct to participate in anti-AUKUS and anti-Quad protests that have been called on other slogans, all our work in these actions should be directed towards the purpose of building a movement that openly fights for the defence of socialistic rule in China against U.S./British/Australian/NATO political, military, economic and propaganda attacks.

The Question of Defence of Socialistic Rule in China is
Not a Question That We Can Agree to Disagree On

Other than for ourselves in Trotskyist Platform, there is one other significant Left group involved in anti-AUKUS protests that also supports socialistic rule in China. That is the Communist Party of Australia (CPA). Unfortunately, the CPA largely confines its solidarity with the PRC as a workers state to the pages of its newspaper. In protests and meetings against AUKUS and the war drive against China, the CPA largely avoids solidarising with the PRC as a workers state and refuses to expose other movement participants that echo the imperialist propaganda against the PRC. 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 buildup against her. The need to oppose that anti-communist propaganda must be motivated to all that want to oppose the anti-China military escalation.

As severe as the military threats are to the PRC, the biggest threat to the 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.

As important as is the struggle against the nuclear submarine project, the overall need to defend the PRC workers state is far more important. Consider the enormous cost of the nuclear submarine deal, which will likely end up as much as at least half a trillion dollars. However, should capitalist rule be restored in China it will not only be a disaster for the Chinese masses but, by drastically driving down the wages and conditions of hundreds of millions of Chinese workers, it will lead to a race to the bottom that will send the wages and conditions of workers in Australia and the rest of the world into a tailspin. Meanwhile, the capitalists worldwide, triumphant after the defeat of working class rule in such a huge country, would feel emboldened to further attack the rights of the working class and the poor at home. This is just like how the 1991-92 capitalist counterrevolution in the former Soviet Union led to a huge increase in the rate of exploitation of workers in Australia and the rest of the world. In the end, the loss in Australian workers’ living standards that would result from the PRC workers state being drowned in capitalist counterrevolution will dwarf the gigantic costs that workers will have to bear to fund the nuclear submarine program. In summary, the need to defend the PRC workers state from internal and external threats cannot be excused on an argument that the issue of the PRC’s class character should be shelved for the sake of the “unity” of the movement against the nuclear subs.

The capitalist rulers of Australia, the U.S., Britain and other imperialist countries know that the survival of their own system demands the crushing of socialistic rule in China. To resist this drive we need to build a powerful movement that openly calls for the defence of socialistic rule in China against capitalist attack, that opposes the political and propaganda attacks on the PRC as much as the military ones, that appeals to the workers’ class interests rather than the “national interests” of Australia’s capitalist class and that advances the future struggle for socialist revolution in Australia. In order to urgently begin building such a movement, we advocate that the following central slogans be raised at protests against AUKUS and the Quad:

• Defend socialistic rule in China against the U.S./Australian/NATO rulers’ war drive and their political and propaganda attacks!
• Stand with socialistic China to stand by working-class interests!