Revolution, Anti-Imperialism, Defending China: Answering a CPC Apologist

29 August 2024

The High and Mighty Fourth International Has No Right to Criticize Socialism with Chinese Characteristics

At present, revolutionary conditions are not maturing around the world. Most of the so-called revolutions around the world advocated by the Trotskyists will fail like the Communist Party of Finland once did. Internationalism is the ideal of all Marxists, but please take a look at whether the current class situation is really as severe as you say. As the Fourth International, which does not know much about the actual situation in China, it has no right to clamor that "the CPC has done something wrong." You don't understand China's national conditions at all. "June 4th" itself is a counter-revolutionary, reactionary event for bourgeois liberalization, but you have glorified it as supposed "resistance to oppression, workers' self-defense." In fact, the main role at that time was played by students. You are absolutely ridiculous! Secondly, you have also distorted "One Country, Two Systems." This resolutely safeguards the overall interests of Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan and the fundamental well-being of compatriots! It is to minimize possible armed conflicts between compatriots and to peacefully resolve the issue of the reunification of the motherland. But you say it is so-called "compromise with capitalists", which is laughable. Your criticism of the CPC is no different from the emphasis and rhetoric of those reactionary newspapers and media in the West. Trotsky's theory has never been put into practice in any country. Practice is the only criterion for testing truth. You haven’t even done any testing. All you do is take Trotsky’s books and excerpt them to criticize others all day. This is the manifestation of dogmatism. To continue to clamor for "permanent revolution" without having a clear understanding of the world situation is a manifestation of leftist deviation; to blindly criticize Stalin and elevate Trotsky because of the contradiction between Stalin and Trotsky and the shortcomings of the Stalinist system is a typical manifestation of historical nihilism. Instead of uniting the current socialist forces, you are fighting among each other. This is not an international communist movement, and you are no longer worthy of it.

The very fact that you chose to write this letter, defending the “mighty” Communist Party of China (CPC) against a relatively tiny international Trotskyist group¹, is indicative of the world-shaking pressures and crises rocking China today. We will take this opportunity to spell out a revolutionary response to the issues you raise.

All can tell that all is not well. For us, this is because China’s entire economic model has been integration into the U.S.-led world order. The disintegration of that model is obvious in the face of Trump’s rising tariffs. The U.S. has put the squeeze on its subordinates – from Germany to South Korea - to cut trade with China. Even China’s supposedly “no-limits” alliance with Putin’s Russia is coming under the threat of U.S.-Russia rapprochement.

The recent National People’s Congress described a “complex and severe situation of increasing external pressure.” These are the “surging torrents” that Xi Jinping himself described in the past. However, the CPC’s program of peaceful co-existence will blind it to the necessary course that could strengthen China’s position: preparing the working class at home and abroad to confront imperialism.

Your letter presents an ardent defense of the CPC’s present course, including its policy of “One Country, Two Systems.” In our view, it is precisely this fantasy of peaceful co-existence with the imperialists and the domestic Chinese bourgeoisie that underpins the CPC’s road to national disaster. In following this strategy, it is incapable of “uniting the present socialist forces,” an aim that you present. This is because that course means unity with the enemies of the international workers movement and the People’s Republic. The only way to unite socialist forces is in the struggle against imperialism, thus defending China.

Of course, as a proponent of the CPC, you can easily point to China’s increase in automation and technological upgrading. You can also point to its gigantic industrial base, which can build ships far faster than the U.S. and its allies. The material and military progress of the Chinese workers state is something the ICL and all genuine Trotskyists welcome. But the reality is that China’s present wealth cannot be sustained in total isolation – keep in mind that Deng’s reforms were instituted precisely because Mao’s autarky had left the economy paralyzed. Trade with the rest of the world is unavoidable. But as long as the rest of the world is dominated by US imperialism, the threat of imperialist encirclement and economic blockade will not disappear.

This means the task of Communists must be to unite workers against both the liberal and reactionary wings of the imperialist order, strengthen their basic defensive struggles and put them on the road to workers power. A program to conclusively defeat imperialism is the only means to develop socialism, including in China. Workers in China must sweep out the CPC regime, which is totally opposed to this perspective. Absent this, the CPC’s road through the coming crises will threaten the workers state itself.

On your point regarding internationalism, which you state is merely an “ideal” that we cannot fulfill in this present period of low class consciousness, it is obviously true that the working class and the left have been pushed back significantly in the post-Soviet period. However, to use the backwardness of consciousness and weakness of organization to therefore abdicate the fight for international proletarian revolution is the greatest treachery. The breakdown of the U.S. world order is also seeing a revolutionary response: uprisings like those in Bangladesh are becoming more common in this turbulent period.

Our role cannot be to stand aside and do nothing (like the CPC is doing). It must be to seek leadership of these struggles by showing how defense against the imperialist onslaught (whether tariffs or wage cuts) requires class struggle and not reliance on the trade-union bureaucrats or the CPC. It is through Communists guiding struggle, whether that is a simple strike or the run-up to the October Revolution, that revolutionary consciousness is hammered into shape and the class conflict is carried through to the end. What you end up denying is the fundamental dictum of Marxism: the point is not to understand the world but to change it.

“One Country, Two Systems”

The CPC’s actions in Hong Kong and toward Taiwan pretty clearly show the bankruptcy of “One Country, Two Systems” as a road to “peaceful reunification” and the reduction of what you call “armed conflicts between compatriots.”

In Hong Kong, the policy meant a close alliance with the local real estate capitalists who dominate the city. With the CPC appearing in cahoots with the big capitalists (whom you call “compatriots”!), the discontent of youth and workers in the city was directed toward a liberal, counterrevolutionary course. Defenders of the CPC will say that this was easily handled by the arrest of a few CIA stooges in the city. But the problem will not go away as long as the CPC bureaucracy upholds the alliance with the real estate moguls and bankers who drive the sky-high rents in the city. Neither will the anger against the stamping out of democratic rights disappear. Instead, this will simmer and blow up again when the imperialists put the squeeze on China.

What did the CPC’s crackdown in 2020-21 represent? While justly attempting to push back against the pressure of U.S. imperialism (through its various tentacles like the National Endowment for Democracy), it did so in a way that left the city as a capitalist enclave intact. The police force, directed often by British field commanders from the colonial era, fired tens of thousands of rounds of tear gas at hundreds of thousands of working-class and petty-bourgeois youth. We do not endorse throwing petrol bombs against the Hong Kong police. Such actions, would be seen as an attack on institutions of the workers’ state, risk reinforcing support for the CPC bureaucracy among the Chinese masses. However, it is impossible to beat patriotism into the heads of youth with a steel baton. This will only inflame their pro-U.S. imperialist illusions.

For Hong Kong workers and youth to be waving red flags instead of American flags, Communists must present them with an answer to their discontent. On the one hand, we must show how the only way to secure democratic liberties is through defense of the People’s Republic against imperialism (this being the only way to win the support of the broader Chinese working class on the mainland). On the other hand, those workers must understand that only by expropriating the Hong Kong (and mainland) capitalists can the material roots that feed counterrevolution be eliminated.

The CPC’s course was the total opposite: While the right for trade unions to protest was constricted, Western banks like Deutsche Bank have retained voting power in the new “patriots only” election system. Whole labor unions were forced to disband, pushing the rank-and-file into the camp of counterrevolution. Meanwhile, the pro-CPC unions were busy handing out discount vouchers and campaigning against migrants, rather than organizing an alternate anti-imperialist class struggle pole for Hong Kong workers.

The crackdown in Hong Kong was then used by the capitalists in Taiwan as justification for a much more hardline pro-U.S. position. After that stirring performance, the offer of “One Country, Two Systems” rather stinks to most across the Strait.

How to deal with Taiwan? Firstly, Taiwan is ruled by capitalists--the same capitalists who fled the PLA during and after the 1949 revolution. A basic point of Marxism is that they act in their class interest. Capitalists aren’t stupid enough to give up their control, particularly when they are separated from the mainland by a gigantic strait and not the Shenzhen River. So peaceful reunification is out of the window. What about armed reunification under the CPC? The framework of “One Country, Two Systems” would offer the masses in Taiwan only more repression along with the maintenance of capitalism. This is a lose-lose scenario. Without a social revolution on the table, many workers in Taiwan will be either passive or driven to support imperialism against the PLA. This is to make reunification happen under the hardest possible conditions.

We propose a counterstrategy: the win-win program of revolutionary reunification. A workers’ China would offer the expropriation of capitalism and the parasitic real estate companies, putting up new infrastructure and extending political rights over what exists under the present bourgeois regime. This would be the program guiding Communists, including in any armed struggle over the island. To resist the potential imperialist blockade, China would forge an anti-imperialist alliance with the workers and peasants of East Asia to kick out U.S. and Japanese imperialism. Instead, the bureaucrats in Zhongnanhai are busy harassing Filipino fishermen and inflaming a pro-imperialist backlash!

June 4, 1989

The 1989 mass protests showed the same problem iterated throughout this reply: that the CPC bureaucracy undermines and corrodes the workers state. The history of this movement is a burning question, especially as China is once again increasingly facing an economic crisis. To be clear, 1989 Tiananmen was no 2019 Hong Kong. No students were waving the Stars and Stripes or the Union Jack, even though some definitely had liberal illusions (particularly in the reformist wing of the CPC). In May, the working class entered this historic fray, demanding that bureaucratic corruption be exposed and that the regime be subject to workers’ supervision and control.

Communists would have been there to harness this discontent, raising the need for workers and peasants councils to rule. This would have been a political revolution purging the workers state of its bureaucratic cancer, not a social counterrevolution bringing back capitalist rule.

More importantly, a clarion call for proletarian political revolution in the Eastern bloc would have resolved the Sino-Soviet conflict. This would have been key to uniting all the workers states against the imperialists, aiding China and the rest in developing toward socialism. This is precisely the perspective the ICL fought for in 1989-90 in East Germany and in 1991-92 in the USSR: for workers to the barricades against the capitalist counterrevolutionaries (which included many of the former Stalinists!). You can see more in this video in Chinese (https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1NZ421a7ZW/).

Why did the Tiananmen events precipitate such a massive crisis for the regime, with some PLA units refusing to put down the protests? (For many days during the crisis, Deng Xiaoping could not even be found!) Precisely because the rulers of China are not a possessing class but a bureaucratic caste. Their own power depends on the property forms of the working class, despite preventing the working class from exerting any control over society. The CPC is not a revolutionary party with a clear program to combat imperialism but a crusted layer of parasites distorting and siphoning off the planned economy. Mass workers’ mobilizations split the regime apart from top to bottom.

If the students were indeed all counterrevolutionaries, why did the bureaucracy crack down on the working class of Beijing hardest? The real threat was not the disorganized students but the proletarian battalions in heavy industry moving into struggle. Ultimately, it was the CPC’s brutal crackdown that pushed some of the students into hardened pro-imperialist agents, having been smuggled out by the CIA to the U.S.

The caste nature of the CPC makes it incredibly brittle in response to any discontent – just look at how Xi Jinping u-turned instantly on Zero-Covid after the numerically tiny “White Paper Protests” broke out. China again is facing a growing economic crisis. Youth unemployment is ballooning to the point where the bureaucracy has had to “harmonize” (delete) the figures. Teachers, bus drivers and civil servants have had their pay docked or even withheld for months as the regime struggles with a local government debt crisis. All the investments into high technology will be for naught if the anger from below is directed toward counterrevolution. Meanwhile, in the face of growing imperialist aggression, Xi Jinping doubles down on trying to appease the foreign imperialists and bring back their money. Just open a copy of China Daily’s English version to see the headline: “Xi Reiterates Support for Private Sector”!

The wheels are starting to come off of “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Continued development in a period of U.S. hegemonic breakdown will necessitate an internationalist, anti-imperialist strategy. Counterrevolution would mean the break-up of collectivized property (the basis of China’s rapid growth) in favor of the Russian-style oligarchy held down by imperialism, with living standards thrown back severely. The ICL will do its duty: to defend the People’s Republic against counterrevolution. But to do this with the program of the CPC will be a total dead end.

Don’t forget where Ligachev & Co. ended up--powerless in the face of the Yeltsin counterrevolution. The supposed hardline Soviet Stalinists had no intention of mobilizing the working class to stop counterrevolution. For that result to not come to pass, the workers and peasants of China must be won to the road of proletarian political revolution.

In closing, our answer to your statement that “Trotsky’s theory was never practiced in any country” is to simply point to his role in organizing the October Revolution and the Red Army’s successful struggle against the White counterrevolutionaries in the Civil War.

Comradely,

Qimin