Chinese Revolution at 50

["Greg Butterfield" <theredguard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

-------------------------
Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Oct. 14, 1999
issue of Workers World newspaper
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THE  CHINESE REVOLUTION AT 50: ONE-FOURTH OF HUMANITY IS
FREED

[The following is excerpted from speeches by Workers World
editor Deirdre Griswold at meetings in New York and Detroit
celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Chinese Revolution.]

The People's Republic of China is a huge country and a
huge topic. The Marxist movement can learn a great deal
about the problems and potentials of revolution in the
imperialist era by studying the many struggles and turning
points in People's China's 50 years of history.

The purpose of tonight's meeting, however, is primarily a
celebration. We are celebrating a great victory for one-
fourth of the world's people. When the Red Army marched into
Beijing in 1949, and Mao Zedong pronounced his famous words
in Tiananmen Square--has stood up"--it represented a victory
over hunger. A victory over landlord brutality. A victory
over the most extreme suppression of women. A victory over
the foreign humiliation and exploitation of a great nation.

China has made enormous progress in these 50 years. A
comparison with India is very telling, since they are the
two most populous countries in the world, and 50 years ago
shared the same deep problems.

The vast majority in both countries were oppressed
peasants whose lot became even harsher when feudal rule was
reinforced by capitalist colonialism. Famines occurred with
regularity, killing off millions of people at a time. The
energies of those who survived were riveted on how to get
food to dull their constant hunger pangs.

But with the Chinese Revolution, the peasants and workers
liberated themselves. Today, China's literacy rate is 83
percent, compared to only 53 percent in India, according to
United Nations figures. An astonishing 99.9 percent of girls
are enrolled in primary school in China; in India, nearly a
third of the girls are not in school.

More than half the children under five in India are
malnourished and underweight. The figure for China is less
than one-third that: 16 percent. The ratio of personal
ownership of telephones and computers is three times greater
in China than in India.

All these figures are from an article in the Week in
Review section of the Sept. 19 New York Times. If they are
biased, it is to the detriment of China, given the editorial
policy of that newspaper.

U.S. PROPAGANDA SOWS CONFUSION

How does U.S. imperialism, which has attacked the Chinese
Revolution from day one, evoking the "Red Menace" and the
racist "Yellow Peril" at the same time, explain China's
development? Will it finally admit that a truly
revolutionary struggle, led by the Communist Party, was
necessary to raise up the Chinese masses? And that a
bourgeois pacifist movement--what the Times calls a
"nonviolent independence movement with a strong commitment
to British-style democracy"--was incapable of liberating the
Indian masses?

No. The Times article finds a creative way to avoid the
problem. It says that China has moved ahead because it has
combined "authoritarian" politics with capitalist market
reforms, while India is "semi-socialist" and can't reform
its economy because it's so democratic it can't get the
"popular support" needed.

The bourgeois mind is inscrutable, indeed.

If we understand it correctly, this capitalist newspaper
is saying that only capitalism brings development, that
China is more capitalist than India, and that the
involvement of the Indian people in politics makes it hard
to implement things like education, health care, improved
nutrition and so on.

In order to justify the plunder of the globe by capitalist
corporations, the Times has turned reality on its head.

India is not socialist. It is a country where the
capitalist class is firmly in the saddle. The state plays a
role in the economy, as in virtually all capitalist
countries, but it is a bourgeois state.

In China, there was a socialist revolution that unleashed
the energies of the people and freed the resources of the
country for development. It wasn't "chemically pure," as the
founder of Workers World Party, Sam Marcy, wrote way back in
1950. But then, no revolution is.

The working class in China was a tiny percentage of the
population compared to the vast peasantry. The need to
industrialize and develop China has been behind all the
struggles since then over economic policy.

Nevertheless, beginning in the 1920s, Marxist ideology was
embraced by the revolutionaries in China. Capitalism was
already a world system, and it was becoming clear that the
only way an oppressed country could liberate itself was by
breaking the chains of capitalist imperialism--not just the
political and military bonds, but the economic relationship
as well. This could only be done through a mass struggle to
overthrow the old ruling classes--a socialist revolution.

In 1978, after Deng Xiaoping became China's leader,
reforms were carried out allowing market forces to play a
role in China's economy. But even though this has allowed
the growth of a bourgeoisie and has widened inequality, it
has not reversed the class character of the Chinese state.

One only has to look at the countries of the former Soviet
Union and Eastern Europe to see what a genuine counter-
revolution looks like. There the working class is in
shambles. Whole areas of the economy have shut down, or
barely pay the workers. Women are being pushed back to the
Dark Ages. Ethnic antagonisms have resurfaced--especially in
areas where foreign imperialism is scheming to get control
of precious resources like oil--and bitter wars are tearing
society apart.

HISTORICAL TRENDS DON'T ALWAYS REACH A CONCLUSION

There's a misconception that keeps cropping up in relation
to the socialist countries. It is the tendency to confuse a
trend with what would be its ultimate conclusion--if that
trend were not reversed by countervailing pressures.

In the case of the USSR, this led some to characterize it
as "social-imperialist" some 25 years before the workers'
state was overthrown. The Soviet Union did move in a
rightward direction under the pressure of U.S. imperialism
and the Cold War, but it has never been imperialist as
defined by Lenin--that is, driven to expand by the need of
finance and industrial capital for markets and cheap labor.

In the case of the USSR, the rightward trend did lead to
counter-revolution eventually. Now that the Soviet state is
no more, however, Russia is not really part of the
imperialist club ruling the world. The bourgeois clique led
by Boris Yeltsin, who is nothing but a creature of U.S.
imperialism, can barely hold Russia together as it drifts
downward to the level of a Third World country.

The Chinese Revolution has gone through several different
trends. In the 1960s, when its leaders aspired to revive
revolutionary communist ideology and were in a struggle with
the Khrushchevite revisionists in the USSR, there were many
around the world who believed this colossal socialist
country would lead the worldwide proletarian revolution. A
whole generation was inspired by China's Cultural
Revolution, which tried to prevent the reintroduction of
privilege and ruling-class values.

What reversed this trend in China was the dire need to
shake off underdevelopment. Great projects had been
undertaken in which the energies of the masses were
harnessed to build dams, dikes and roads, plant trees,
reclaim wasteland, and in other ways lift the country out of
extreme poverty. The revolutionary devotion and hard work of
the peasants and workers, organized in communes, had
transformed their lives.

But China was emerging as a world power that needed modern
technology to survive. After a long political struggle,
those who advocated pragmatism over revolutionary ideology,
and using the capitalist market as a spur to production, won
out in the Chinese Communist Party.

This trend has now prevailed for more than two decades. It
has again transformed China, but in ways that have sharpened
its internal contradictions. Once again, however, there's a
tendency among some in the progressive movement to jump to
conclusions about this trend and characterize China as
capitalist.

Certainly the growth of a bourgeoisie and of social
inequality poses a danger to China's socialist foundations.
But there are also strong countervailing factors that can
prevent this rightward trend from reaching its ultimate
conclusion.

Not least among them is the experience staring the world
in the face of what capitalist counter-revolution has
brought to the peoples of the former USSR. The results have
been disastrous for the workers and for the country as a
whole. Can communists in China be unaware of that?

Ten years ago, a counter-revolutionary attempt was made in
China behind the cloak of a student movement for democracy.
Mikhail Gorbachev, whose leadership of the Soviet CP ended
in debacle, actually visited the students in Tiananmen
Square. Some in the Chinese leadership were moving in the
Gorbachev direction at that time.

But when it became clear that imperialism was giving
enormous support to this movement, and when the
demonstration turned into bloody attacks on the People's
Liberation Army, the Chinese leadership suppressed it. It
was an assertion of the class character of the Chinese
state. It would not tolerate a counter-revolution of the
type that happened in Europe.

Since then, the market has continued to grow in China. The
imperialists now direct most of their attacks against the
Chinese state, demanding "pluralism" and the opportunity for
the bourgeoisie to organize its own political parties.

If this trend continues unchecked, then the danger of
counter-revolution will also grow. But there are other
influences on China that raise the potential for a new
reversal in political direction.

One is the growth of the proletariat from a small but
strategic social grouping to the class with the greatest
social weight. This is in the process of being realized as
China develops from an agricultural to an industrial
society.

Another is the instability of world imperialism. Already
the economic crisis that broke out in Asia a year and a half
ago has had deep political consequences throughout the
region. It has dulled the allure of the capitalist market
and enhanced the importance of central planning and economic
independence from the ravages of roller-coaster capitalism.

A big shift in the masses, particularly among the young,
was seen this May when militant demonstrations erupted after
the U.S. bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. Ten years
ago, the symbol carried by students in Tiananmen Square
looked suspiciously like the Statue of Liberty.

This time, the students carried the same statue, but with
a death mask for a face.

                         - END -

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