The following is an excerpt from the 3 August 2007 article titled, “China: Struggle Between Pro-Communist and Capitalist Forces Heats Up,” that appeared in Issue 8 of Trotskyist Platform.

The article provides important analysis as to why left-liberals and social-democrats in imperialist countries like Australia can be rabidly hostile to the socialistic Peoples Republic of China.

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Why White, Middle Class Soft-Lefts Don’t Like Red China

… it is important to point out that people’s attitude to Red China varies according to where in the world they live. In many Third World countries, especially in Africa, there is quite some sympathy for the PRC. China is looked up to as a country that has freed itself from the subjugation by colonial powers that people in these countries still suffer under. And the PRC is respected as a state that has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of terrible poverty. But in imperialist Australia, it is true that public opinion can be quite anti-China. Such feelings are of course not uniform. Many Australians who are able to afford to travel to China, find that despite all the prejudices that they went with, the real China does not quite match the negative picture painted by the mainstream media. And local tertiary students who have friends that are overseas Chinese students find that their Chinese friends do not at all act like they are ground down victims of the supposedly bleak, totalitarian society that Falun Gong would have you believe exists in the PRC. However, attitudes to China in Australia are haunted by that big evil spirit that hangs over this country: White Australia fears of big Asian countries. Sometimes these fears are openly racist. At other times they take on a “nice”, liberal-version of white supremacy under which the non-white Asian masses are to be loved … as long as they are not organised in a powerful and successful country like the PRC, in which case they are a threat to Australian values. In this worldview, it is the mission of Australian “democracy” (which is really only a democracy for the capitalists) to save the Asian masses from the morally inferior regimes in their own countries.

Workers in Australia are of course influenced by the anti-PRC stance of the current pro-ALP leadership of the workers movement. The strongest anti-PRC views in this country however come from embittered descendants of expatriate Chinese capitalists/landlords, from right-wing conservatives and also from the left-liberal sections of the middle class. It is worth examining in greater detail here the latter category of people. Typically, they are well educated, potentially upwardly mobile, of Anglo-Celtic background and are Greens or Democrats voting. To understand where these people are coming from in their anti-China, anti-communist hostility, one needs to understand the nature of the middle class in wealthy imperialist Australia. The middle class or as Marxists define it, the petit bourgeoisie are a very broad layer (including the self-employed and non-boss professionals) who are neither exploiters of labour nor people whose labour is directly exploited by capitalists. The left-leaning layers of the middle class are people rightly angered by the injustices and irrationality of capitalism. But the problem with this section of the population is that because they do not directly experience exploitation of their labour by business owners in the way that workers do, they tend to downplay the centrality of the question of which class owns the means of production and the question of which class rules. Instead, they become obsessed with questions of form; like questions of constitution, legal rights and the issue of how democratic the organisation of the state is. Those questions are of course important. But they are subordinate to the question of which class the laws and any “democracy” serves. That is lost on the middle class. They see a big train whizzing close past and that scares them. They keenly observe the shape of the locomotive but forget to notice what the train is actually carrying … or which direction it is headed in. When the liberal petit bourgeois looks at the PRC they see only the suppression of “rights,” unable to distinguish between harmful bureaucratism on the one hand and the necessary suppression of capitalist “free” holding of property “rights.” They are not able to understand that the PRC state, in a rather deformed way to be sure, still defends an ownership system that favours working class people.

The above explanation actually puts the best possible face on Aussie middle class hostility to Red China. But there is another very different side to it. Many in the Australian middle class dream of making it into the upper class, if not as direct capitalist owners, then as henchmen for the capitalists, like managers and high-level bureaucrats. And many a middle-class leftist who has not sufficiently gone over to the side of the working class, quietly prepares a Plan B course to becoming a ruling class high flier. While at a leftist demonstration they sneak a quick peek at their watch and wonder if they should have been spending all that time they were at the rally instead pursuing their own capitalist ambitions. At the same time, more affluent middle class people sometimes have a relative or friend who is part of the capitalist class. For all these reasons, the liberal petit bourgeois don’t like it when a workers state (even a healthy one) takes measures to suppress the capitalists’ freedom to operate. In the case of China, they scream with indignation, for example at the PRC’s attempts to squeeze capitalist Taiwan, that base for counterrevolution that was created when the former exploiting class took over the island after being kicked out of power in the rest of China in 1949.

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The middle class liberal is also prejudiced against the PRC because he or she is in general skeptical that communism is possible. In part this is a wilful cynicism. Someone who wants to become an exploiter likes to soothe their conscience with the thought that there can be no other system but capitalism. But sometimes middle class doubts about communism are genuinely felt. Someone who has not known anything but the cutthroat arena of small-business competition and the back stabbing world of ladder-climbing professionals is of course skeptical about a system that seeks to unite people’s labour in service for the common good. But working-class people, especially those who are part of a well-unionised workplace, have a different experience. When workers sacrifice their own career prospects to collectively defend from the boss a victimised worker or when they risk the sack to go on strike for the common good of workers they are in a way unwittingly rehearsing for the future grand act of communism. To be sure, workers today are themselves influenced by the prejudices of the middle class and by the overall values of capitalist society. But their own experiences make them open to being eventually won to supporting the struggle for a communist future. And of course, unlike the better-off sections of the middle class in imperialist Australia, workers ultimately have no choice but to fight for socialism. That is why the main base in the fight for communism and the main foundation of support in the West for the Chinese and Cuban workers states must be built within the working class. And when the working class acts as a powerful pro-socialist force they will draw behind it not only the other sections of the oppressed but a chunk of the middle classes as well.