https://iclfi.org/pubs/spart-letters/2025-tiananmen
To our Trotskyist comrades in the Fourth International:
I would like to refute your recent article, “Revolution, Anti-Imperialism, Defending China: Answering a CPC Apologist” (https://iclfi.org/pubs/spart-letters/2025-icl-cpc).
To begin with, the June Fourth Movement was essentially a counterrevolutionary movement. First, the students wanted to restore the Western model, which is clearly a retrogression in socialist China. China, at least in name, remains a socialist country in terms of its social system. Therefore, reverting to the Western model is inherently flawed. Second, regarding the workers movement you mentioned, the strength of the workers is indeed immense. As a nominally socialist country, China possesses the greatest proletarian force, and that movement was a tangible demonstration of proletarian strength. This is an undeniable fact, and comrades of the Fourth International have also taken note of it.
Second, Hong Kong is indeed a base area of capitalism, but the People's Republic of China, as both a socialist and nationalist state, has two approaches to handling matters: one is the national approach and the other is the socialist approach. Although China currently does not utilize the socialist approach.
Third, I believe that members of the Fourth International should conduct serious investigations in China to confirm whether most of the things written in the articles are true or not. The articles visibly lack firsthand research on China, leading to a flawed understanding of its complex realities. Moreover, hostile capitalist members have infiltrated the Fourth International. Please carefully differentiate them and perform some gentle purges.
Finally, long live invincible Trotskyism.
Long live invincible Maoism.
Long live invincible Marxism.
Best regards,
Revolutionary greetings
ICL reply:
Dear comrade,
Thank you for writing to us. Below is our reply to your three points:
First, regarding the 1989 movement. The death of Hu Yaobang brought out thousands of students to mourn the reform-minded General Secretary. Simply put, he was seen as less brutal and corrupt than the rest of Deng’s gang. Soon the students began formulating general democratic demands against the bureaucracy. Many students and intellectuals were looking toward CPC reformers like Zhao Ziyang.
Herein lies the contradiction: the justified aspirations of the masses for more civil liberties and against the bureaucracy (i.e., the demand to publish the incomes of top bureaucrats and their children) had to be broken from both the program of right-Communist reformers and the liberals (like Fang Lizhi). The CPC-reform faction shared the same class-collaborationist program as Deng Xiaoping: concessions to capitalists and world imperialism, which fomented mass working-class discontent. On the other hand, the victory of bourgeois liberals would mean counterrevolution and China’s enslavement to world imperialism.
To break the student movement from illusions in the CPC reformists and the bourgeois liberals, revolutionaries needed to offer a program that could link their demands for democracy with the powerful industrial proletariat that was rebelling against growing capitalist relations. This would give their yearning for democracy a class content. Many of the students’ demands were not only supportable but were championed by the working class as it entered the struggle. We agree that for China to adopt the “Western model” (counterrevolution) would be an immense step backward. As Trotsky laid out, we are not for “general” (bourgeois) freedoms--we are for proletarian democracy to “shield the country…from capitalism.” But to have written off all students as counterrevolutionary would have meant complete abstention from the fight for proletarian democracy.
The entry of the working class into the Tiananmen struggle qualitatively changed the character of the movement. Workers brought their own demands against the strengthening of capitalist relations and its effects like skyrocketing inflation--including that unions should supervise the state bureaucracy. The formation of their own organizations and forces, such as the “Workers’ Dare to Die Corps,” marked the beginnings of a political revolution. The heavy battalions of the working class, from aerospace factories to steel plants, came out in this period.
The mistake we believe you make is to simply paint the “good” workers as a mass for proletarian revolution while the “bad” students were for capitalist restoration. If things were so clear-cut, the workers and students would be on opposite sides of the barricades, not part of the same movement. In any struggle there is a mix of consciousness, ideas and contending programs. What was necessary was to advance a Leninist-Trotskyist program for political revolution: one that fought for the leadership of the working class in the struggle and won the students away from illusions in the right-reform faction of the CPC. An example of the students’ illusions in the bureaucracy was that they refused arms when offered by PLA soldiers, who were rebelling against orders to repress the protests!
A further mistake is not seeing things in motion. You write that the students “wanted to restore the Western model.” As we have shown above, this was not true--they mostly had illusions in CPC reformists. However, it is indeed correct that the main trend among the student exiles after the crackdown was pro-imperialist. Those students, smuggled out of China often by the CIA, were subsequently given fancy scholarships at American universities. Communists must of course oppose those students crossing the Rubicon to counterrevolution. Yet what drove those renegades in that direction? The repression of the CPC bureaucracy!
The main point we made in our “Reply to a CPC Apologist” is that Communists must provide an answer for the masses’ anger and give it a direction of struggle that defends socialism--by sweeping out the bureaucratic parasites. This means absolutely no political support to the “conservatives” in the CPC. They temporarily gained an upper hand after the 1989 massacre. While these “left” bureaucrats advocated for defending state industry and slowing down market reforms, reflecting a certain pressure from the working class, they ultimately shared the same program as Deng: to defend their rule as a privileged bureaucratic caste. Hostile to unleashing the proletariat’s power through its own fighting organizations, the CPC “left” could only capitulate to Deng’s Southern Tour. No wing of the CPC bureaucracy can be trusted to defend the People’s Republic!
All wings of the CPC bureaucracy had the program of “socialism in one country,” sharing the same view as the Soviet bureaucracy, which rejected the fight for world revolution. This meant that they refused to challenge the hold of the imperialists on the world’s proletariat and oppressed. China’s ability to develop socialism is ultimately dependent on the strength of the world working class. The CPC’s program led it into a cul-de-sac of making a devil’s bargain with Uncle Sam. While China for sure needed foreign investment, the CPC fell for the trap of entering the “global race to the bottom.” To secure foreign capital, the bureaucrats held back class struggles and depressed wages. Instead, a workers’ China with an internationalist leadership would have built a fighting alliance with the world’s workers. Fomenting global class struggle would not only strengthen the proletariat in oppressed and imperialist countries but also put China in a stronger position to negotiate with the imperialists and pursue its development.
Secondly, on Hong Kong. You are correct that the CPC is “torn” between approaches. We believe this is best explained by the bureaucracy’s nature as a parasitic caste, balancing between the pressures of the imperialists on the PRC and the masses below. While they rule on top of a socialized property regime, their program is not genuinely socialist but rather that of global class conciliation.
The CPC aims to preserve itself as a bureaucratic caste with plenty of special privileges, including to funnel money out of China via Hong Kong. In maintaining Hong Kong as a stronghold of capitalism, Beijing entered into a bloc with the hated tycoons. Thus the CPC was seen as the iron hand enforcing the city’s stark inequality. It is no surprise that mass anger incited by unlivable conditions was seized on by the liberal capitalists and imperialist stooges, who used it as a battering ram against the People’s Republic. This is how the CPC’s refusal to take an international socialist approach undermines the cause of national rejuvenation.
The aim of Communists cannot be to just pressure the CPC leadership to take a “socialist approach,” never mind the fact that such criticisms would be silenced inside the party. Again, it is the policy of “one country, two systems” (alongside the CPC’s brutal crackdowns) which has totally alienated the Hong Kong masses from the People’s Republic. The past pattern of Beijing’s repression against peaceful protests (whose liberal program needed to be challenged) shows how every move by the bureaucracy has been a massive gift to the imperialists in isolating China by harping about “human rights.”
We do not rule out the possibility that under immense pressure, the CPC will expropriate the Hong Kong capitalists, and for that matter those on the mainland. While this would be a progressive policy, it would also likely be undertaken in a brutal and bureaucratic manner that alienates rather than garners support from the Hong Kong masses. Trotskyists would fight alongside the CPC to expropriate the capitalists. However, we would do so with no trust in the CPC leadership. Instead, we would urge the workers to join this struggle and advance the prospect of taking political power in their own hands.
Thirdly, on your suggestion for a “moderate purge.” Similar to our reply to your first point, we believe what you are missing is the fundamental task of Communists. It is not to moralistically identify people and essentialize them. This is the method of the CPC bureaucracy, which seeks to physically or psychologically destroy its political opponents. Our task is to struggle alongside people and raise their class consciousness. This means Communists must put forward a plan for what to do. Conducting a purge of people will not mean a purge of ideas, which have material roots.
Additionally, you wrote to say that we have gotten some facts wrong about China. It would be useful for us if you told us what those were.
While we see no reason to purge our own party, the problem you raise points to a need for a split in the Trotskyist movement between those who capitulate to imperialism by refusing to defend China and those who defend China while opposing the CPC’s program. Similarly, we believe there needs to be a split in the Maoist movement along the same lines. Establishing what are the tasks of revolutionaries in this historical epoch would be the basis for revolutionaries to join together in building a common party.
To reiterate our basic position: only a revolutionary internationalist program can most consistently defend the PRC.
Revolutionary greetings,
Qimin
