National Oppression in Xi’s China: A Trotskyist Answer

Not so long ago, the U.S. and its allies were in full propaganda mode, charging the Communist Party of China (CPC) with genocide due to the mass internment of Uyghurs and other Muslims in Xinjiang. Hitting back, the Xi Jinping regime defended the crackdown, in which people could run afoul of the authorities for the lengths of their beards or for praying too fervently, as necessary for China’s unity and defense against separatist “extremists.”

Since then, the imperialists have somewhat dimmed the spotlight on Xinjiang. Instead, they are concentrating their anti-China efforts on military buildup and the trade war launched by the Trump White House. For their part, the Chinese Stalinists have declared victory against “splittism.” The internment camps, which they passed off as “re-education” and “training” centers, are closed. Calm has seemingly descended on Xinjiang, and the government is even encouraging tourists to visit the province. The China of workers and peasants born of the 1949 Revolution is safe, the CPC declares, and the way clear for achieving “common prosperity.”

This “Chinese dream” is a complete illusion. The regime’s measures in Xinjiang, expanding on earlier policies in Tibet, are part of an entire program of forcible sinicization. This is a deadly danger not only to China’s minorities but to the People’s Republic (PRC) itself. From the internment camps to the schools, where education in minority languages is being eliminated, the CPC leadership has created a powder keg of resentment and hatred among peoples who will never accept their oppression. This is a precious gift to the imperialists, who wield the cause of Uyghur and Tibetan liberation as a means to weaken and vanquish the PRC.

The Marxist left has fallen on either side of the line drawn by the CPC. The British Socialist Workers Party (SWP), the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI) and International Socialist Alternative (ISA) have condemned the repression in Xinjiang but embrace counterrevolutionary “democracy” as the answer. Others, like the U.S. Workers World Party, the Party for Socialism and Liberation and the British-based “Friends of Socialist China,” have hailed the Beijing Stalinists for defeating the “terrorist” threat. Neither side offers a way to defend China’s workers, peasants and national minorities against imperialism and counterrevolution.

The CPC sells its chauvinist campaign as necessary for internal stability and national unity against imperialist threats. The effect is the exact opposite. By building a wall of hostility between Han and minority workers and peasants, the CPC divides the very people who must be united in struggle against imperialism and counterrevolution. The task for communists is to forge anti-imperialist unity between Han workers and China’s national minorities and join their causes in a fight to oust the CPC parasites and take power in their own name.

The purpose of this article is to begin developing a program that can do that, including by raising the call for an independent socialist Xinjiang. In doing so, we are not blazing a new path. In fact, we are returning to the road paved by the Communist International in V.I. Lenin’s time, including the early CPC, and continued by Leon Trotsky’s Fourth International. This is the necessary starting point for Marxists.

From Lenin’s Internationalism to Stalin’s Chauvinism

Even the most anti-communist historians admit that the Bolsheviks’ championing of self-determination in the tsarist “prisonhouse of peoples” was crucial to the success of the October Revolution in 1917. What they rarely acknowledge is the continuity of that struggle contained in the constitution that established the USSR. Written in 1923 and adopted the following January, the document enshrined the right to self-determination for its constituent republics and wielded that right as part of the fight for world revolution. The constitution declared that

In late 1922, Lenin had waged a fierce battle against the vicious abuse of Georgian Bolsheviks by J.V. Stalin and his cohorts in the party leadership. This struggle spurred Lenin to insist that the right to separation be guaranteed in the USSR. At the same time, the new constitution mandated a high degree of centralization, particularly to meet the needs of the Soviet economy. Thus it embodied a contradiction between the need for centralism and the demands of national development for the non-Russian peoples.

For Lenin’s Bolsheviks, Soviet democracy and revolutionary internationalism provided the means to resolve disputes arising from this conflict in a progressive way. However, the party bureaucracy under Stalin would soon bury both of these principles after usurping political power beginning in late 1923. Trotsky described what this meant for national minorities in his analysis of the degeneration of the workers state, The Revolution Betrayed (1936). He noted that while “the tendencies of cultural autonomy and economic centralism come naturally from time to time into conflict,” this contradiction is “far from irreconcilable.” Trotsky continued:

Trotsky acknowledged that “the Soviet bureaucracy still continues to carry out a certain part of the progressive work, although with immoderate overhead expenses.” This was certainly the case in more backward areas such as Central Asia, where the extension of Soviet rule led to a flowering of national development for Kazakhs, Uzbeks and others. David Brophy’s Uyghur Nation: Reform and Revolution on the Russia-China Frontier (Harvard University Press, 2016) documents how Uyghurs living in that area developed a national consciousness for the first time, with many becoming Communists in the process. This development fortified the links between Uyghurs, Kazakhs and Kyrghyz in the USSR and their brethren in Xinjiang.

The core problem, however, was unresolved. The only basis for finally overcoming national divisions and achieving the voluntary amalgamation of peoples is the elimination of scarcity. This requires the overturn of capitalist rule internationally and the development of a global socialist economy. But from the former USSR to China today, the ruling bureaucracies seek accommodation with the imperialists and not their overthrow, which would threaten their own privileged positions. As a consequence, these regimes favor the dominant nationality in their societies as they administer scarcity, all the while taking the best for themselves and their families.

Under Stalin and his successors, the Soviet constitution’s guarantee of self-determination became a dead letter. Added to other social grievances, the bureaucracy’s Great Russian chauvinism fueled national resentments, especially in the USSR’s Baltic republics and in Eastern Europe, that were seized on by the imperialists during the Cold War. For their part, by the late 1980s many hardline Russian Stalinists were joining forces with outright fascists in the “red-brown coalition.”

To defeat the nationalists on all sides required a revolutionary vanguard that would win the leadership of oppressed national minorities, uniting them with the mass of Soviet workers in a fight for political power and joint struggle against imperialism. The ICL tackled this question at our Eighth International Conference in 2023. We upheld Trotsky’s call for an independent Soviet Ukraine, which he raised on the eve of World War II to rally support for political revolution in the USSR and socialist revolution in capitalist states with Ukrainian national minorities. Applying this framework to China today, one of the ICL’s conference documents declared:

This document was a corrective to our tendency’s longstanding deformation of permanent revolution. Similarly, its application to China is a correction to our articles “Communal Violence in Xinjiang” (Workers Vanguard No. 941, 28 August 2009) and “‘Free Tibet’: Rallying Cry for Counterrevolution in China” (WV No. 695, 28 August 1998), both of which rejected the fight for self-determination as a crucial part of the program for political revolution in China.

Uyghur Nation: Fact vs. Fiction

China, whose people are more than 90 percent Han, is not the same as the former USSR, where Russians made up barely half of the population. Also, China was not a weak imperialist country before its revolution but a country carved up and subjugated by British, American, Japanese and other powers. The task of national unification and liberation from imperialism, a driving force in each of China’s revolutions, was achieved only with the smashing of capitalist rule in 1949. All the same, the crucial lesson applies to China as it did to the Soviet Union: if Marxists do not raise the banner of liberation for national minorities, then the imperialists and reactionaries will.

Developing a Marxist program for Xinjiang starts with a materialist understanding of the Uyghur question. In July 2019, Beijing’s State Council Information Office issued a paper titled “Historical Matters Concerning Xinjiang” to defend its crackdown. Asserting that “the various ethnic groups in Xinjiang have long been part of the Chinese nation,” it claimed that the Uyghur identity “came into being through a long process of migration and integration; it is part of the Chinese nation.” This is pure deception.

The Uyghurs have been under Chinese rule for less than half of their existence as a people. Culturally rooted in what is known historically as Turkistan, the Uyghurs came under the control of the Han, Tang, Yuan (Mongol) and finally the Qing (Manchu) dynasties—with enormous gaps in between—as those realms reached their greatest geographical extent. Even then, imperial China exerted at most only weak control. After the Tang rulers lost even that in the eighth century, “there would not be direct rule over Xinjiang by a China-based state for almost exactly one thousand years” (James Millward, Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang [Columbia University Press, 2007]). The name the Qing gave the region—Xinjiang, meaning New Frontier—shows just how un-Chinese it is.

From the time the 1911 Revolution toppled the decrepit Qing rulers, bourgeois nationalists have insisted that China’s unification and its ability to resist the imperialists requires the adherence of national minorities to a single state led by the more “advanced” Han. With some minor variations, this notion is baked into Stalinist ideology as well. Underpinning this view is the myth of five peoples—Han, Manchu, Mongolian, Tibetan and Hui (as all Muslims were originally labeled)—sharing thousands of years of history that point to their merging into a single nation.

Sun Yat-sen, founder of the bourgeois-nationalist Guomindang, would accept no redrawing of the borders established by the Qing. It was fine to grant autonomy to national minorities. But when Mongols seized the opportunity provided by the fall of the Manchus to declare independence in 1912 (as did the Tibetans), Sun raised a call to arms to put down the rebellion and would soon harden the Chinese nationalist program into one of forced assimilation.

How the CPC Turned Han-Chauvinist

It was the October Revolution that taught Chinese revolutionaries that freedom for oppressed minorities was not counterposed to China’s own liberation. On the contrary, those struggles needed to be united as part of a world revolution against imperialism. That perspective animated the early CPC led by Chen Duxiu. The manifesto adopted at the party’s second congress in 1922 called for “the achievement of a genuine democratic republic by the liberation of Mongolia, Tibet, and Sinkiang [Xinjiang]” and their free federation with China (quoted in A Documentary History of Chinese Communism [Harvard University Press, 1966]). These and other democratic demands, it declared, “are all in the interests of the workers, peasants, and petty bourgeoisie and are prerequisites for their liberation from their present oppression.”

The CPC was put to the test when Soviet troops entered Mongolia in 1921 in pursuit of a counterrevolutionary White army that had fled there. The Red Army teamed up with the nationalist Mongolian People’s Party and routed the Whites, resulting in Mongolia’s national independence. The CPC supported the Soviet intervention and Mongolia’s separation from Chinese rule, against Sun Yat-sen’s firm opposition. The Guomindang would go on to charge the CPC with treason for supporting Mongolian independence.

The CPC retained the call for self-determination up to the mid 1930s. This was in the aftermath of the bloody crushing of the Second Chinese Revolution in 1927 by Chiang Kai-shek’s forces, a tragedy prepared by the Communists’ liquidation into the bourgeois-nationalist Guomindang. After that historic defeat, the CPC was transformed into a peasant-based guerrilla army, winning control of a slice of territory called the Jiangxi Soviet. But things changed radically again with the onset of the Stalinist Comintern’s popular-front policy in 1935. Communist parties were now directed to seek political alliances with “progressive” bourgeois parties that would supposedly be friendly toward the Soviet Union. In China, the CPC dutifully sought an alliance with Chiang to resist the Japanese occupation.

It was indeed necessary for Communists to build a united front against the occupation and to win leadership of the national liberation struggle away from the Guomindang. But the policy of the CPC under Mao Zedong was the negation of such an anti-imperialist united front. To draw in the “national bourgeoisie,” the party exempted “patriotic” landlords from expropriation, a betrayal of its peasant base. It likewise cast off its former advocacy of self-determination, which had become a weight around its neck.

Despite occasional rhetoric to the contrary, Chinese Communists now joined Guomindang nationalists in opposing any separation from China. Mao made this clear in “On Coalition Government” (April 1945), which listed among its programmatic demands: “Give the minority nationalities in China better treatment and grant them autonomous rights.” As one authority put it, for Mao as for Sun and Chiang, “the principle of self-determination applied only to the evolutionarily fit and historically dynamic Han majority” (James Leibold, Reconfiguring Chinese Nationalism: How the Qing Frontier and Its Indigenes Became Chinese [Palgrave Macmillan, 2007]).

Revolution and Oppression in Xinjiang

Chiang, however, was far more interested in fighting the Communists than in going up against the Japanese occupiers, and civil war resumed following Japan’s defeat in World War II. The result was the utter collapse of the Guomindang as it fled to Taiwan. Yet the CPC stuck to its chauvinist position when it took power in 1949 and ushered in the rule of a Stalinist bureaucracy committed to “socialism” in its own, and only its own, country.

The following anecdote, recounted in Adeeb Khalid’s Central Asia (Princeton University Press, 2021), says it all. The scene is a meeting between Mao and Stalin’s envoy Anastas Mikoyan at the field headquarters of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) just prior to its final victory. Quoting from Mikoyan’s own memorandum, Khalid writes:

Within a year after marching into Beijing, the PLA had seized control of both Xinjiang and Tibet. This laid the basis for great revolutionary change, but within the strict confines of Stalinist nationalism. The social gains for Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Tibetans and others were immense, from mass literacy and medical care to agrarian revolution. The CPC encouraged publishing and education in minority languages, many of which were written down for the first time. Yet all these advances were overseen by party secretaries, hand-picked by the central government, who put down any independent expression of the will of the masses.

The new regime also encouraged mass Han migration to Xinjiang to reduce the preponderance of national minorities. This population transfer mainly came via the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, a paramilitary organization directly answering to the central government. Initially composed of demobilized PLA troops, the Corps, which accounts for a fifth of Xinjiang’s GDP, remains overwhelmingly Han in composition.

The constitution adopted for the People’s Republic in 1954 codified the subordinate status of national minorities. It decreed that Inner Mongolia, Tibet and Xinjiang were autonomous regions, not federated republics as prescribed in the USSR. While the constitution banned discrimination against minorities and declared that they were free to use their languages and preserve their customs, it flat-out stated: “All the national autonomous areas are inseparable parts of the People’s Republic of China.”

As a cover for its Han chauvinism, the government listed 56 national and ethnic groups (minzu) as constituting China’s population. It might seem ecumenical of the Stalinists to put every minority they could find (or invent) on the same level as the Han. In reality, this was a justification for opposing self-determination. The minzu label was slapped onto everyone from mountain ethnicities which had been under Chinese rule for millennia to the peoples of Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia and Tibet, which had developed their own cultures and socio-political systems, i.e., the basis for their self-determination. But as minzu, the only “right” they were given was to join in a long march toward assimilation into one, Han-dominated Chinese nation.

The CPC appeals to deep-seated sensitivity among the masses that any form of separatism would undo the 1949 Revolution’s historic achievement of national unification and open the door to the imperialist enemy. But it’s the Stalinists’ program that divides the masses, weakens their capacity to fight against imperialism and constantly threatens to tear the country apart. This is precisely what has played out in Xinjiang.

Packing the Powder Keg

Since 1949, autonomy for national minorities has proved to be phony and the bureaucratic fist all too real. This was especially the case during the Cultural Revolution, when Maoist cadres cast their attempts to sinicize minority populations as a way to destroy “feudalist” obstacles. That campaign threw back economic and cultural development immeasurably.

After the Cultural Revolution subsided and Mao died, Deng Xiaoping eased up on minority peoples in order to entice them to embrace market reforms. But this was just a phase in Beijing’s bonapartist rule. The underlying tensions remained, threatening to burst open at the next turn of events.

That came with the collapse of the USSR. CPC leaders determined that they could avoid the fate of their Soviet counterparts by keeping an iron political grip on the masses and pacifying them by raising living standards as China opened up to globalization. Over the next three decades, China did indeed experience explosive growth. But this development also intensified social problems. In Xinjiang, economic advances failed to redress either the segregation of the indigenous population from Han residents or the ingrained poverty of the province’s southern, overwhelmingly Muslim section. As China’s coastal areas boomed, migrant workers from poorer areas were denied residential permits (hukou) and the social benefits that came with them.

The September 11, 2001 terror attacks marked a major turning point. Having served the imperialists by supporting the Afghan mujahedin against the Soviet Army in the 1980s, Beijing now joined the “global war on terror,” throwing a net of repression over Xinjiang. Cycles of crackdown and blowback ensued. While small numbers of Uyghurs joined armed Islamist formations in the Middle East, thousands fled for their lives to Europe, Türkiye and the U.S. Among them was Rebiya Kadeer, a wealthy Uyghur businesswoman who went on to head the CIA-backed World Uyghur Congress.

In that period, Xinjiang experienced multiple attacks on police outposts and other instruments of central government control. Chinese authorities mainly blamed the East Turkistan Islamic Movement, a shadowy group reputedly linked to either Al-Qaeda or the Taliban. Sean Roberts gives ample evidence that the attacks were uncoordinated in his The War on the Uyghurs (Manchester University Press, 2020). Whatever the case, as usual in such situations some attacks were indiscriminately aimed at working people from the oppressor nationality. A major atrocity was a March 2014 attack by knife-wielding Uyghurs at a train station in the southern city of Kunming in which some 30 people were killed.

The way to liberate the Uyghurs is not to attack the institutions of the workers state. Nor is it to carry out indiscriminate terror against Han people. The task is to unite the Uyghurs’ just cause with the struggles of China’s working masses against the Stalinist bureaucracy. Attacks such as the Kunming incident keep the oppressed at each other’s throats, strengthening the hand of the CPC regime.

In fact, smashing the Islamic “enemy within” became the main rationale offered by Xi Jinping to justify mass internment in Xinjiang. Xi got the ball rolling after becoming president when, in 2014, he traveled to Xinjiang and announced a crackdown that would show “absolutely no mercy” to “terrorists.” Stability in Xinjiang was of paramount importance for the regime. While relatively sparsely populated, the province makes up one-sixth of China’s landmass and is a big oil, petrochemical and agricultural center. Above all, Xinjiang was slated to be a key logistics hub for Xi’s signature One Belt, One Road program.

The response to the “anti-terror” campaign was anything but submissive. Yet more attacks led to more countermeasures, resulting in scores more deaths by the end of 2014. In 2017, the CPC unleashed its ultimate effort to suppress Muslim minorities. Its centerpiece was the herding of more than a million Uyghurs, Kazakhs and others into the internment camps. This was coupled with the imprisonment of untold numbers of “extremists” and even people like Rahile Dawut, a CPC member and anthropologist renowned for her research into Xinjiang’s cultural history. Dawut is currently serving a life sentence for “splittism.”

For National Liberation and Socialism!

Everyone knows how Western propaganda mills screamed about “genocide” in Xinjiang. To this day, the pro-CPC left denounces any such talk as lies feeding the imperialists’ anti-China campaign. It’s not a question of semantics. Of course, the capitalist powers lie through their teeth to advance their agenda. But mass internment was Chinese government policy. What the CPC’s apologists deny is the very purpose of this effort: to eradicate the Uyghurs’ national identity.

And it’s not just the Uyghurs. As in Xinjiang, the CPC regime has made Mandarin the language for elementary education in Tibet, and the Mongolian language is also under attack. Thousands of children have been forced into distant boarding schools where they don’t hear their parents’ language. Even the Hui Muslims are under attack, as mosques are closed or forced to replace domes and minarets with a more “Chinese” look.

At the same time, there are billboards, banners and museum exhibits all over China celebrating eons of interethnic harmony, as well as tourist traps where you can choose to watch people in colorful native attire dance and sing. The Friends of Socialist China crowd actually points to such displays to claim that the country is on the road to becoming a prosperous and harmonious society, just as Xi Jinping says. In fact, this is all a flimsy cover for what’s really happening: forced assimilation, at a forced-march pace.

Even the regime’s more benign policies deepen divisions in China. Take the way minorities are awarded extra points on the gaokao exam, which helps determine who gets into what university. Some point to this as proof that Uyghurs and Tibetans are not oppressed. Actually, this policy serves the same purpose as the internment camps, since the CPC sees the universities as a means of assimilation into the Han nation. Nonetheless, it has created enormous resentment among Han youth. With China’s economic slowdown creating a mass of unemployed graduates, a degree from a top-flight university is the best bet for a good job. So, Uyghurs and Tibetans have become scapegoats for the scarcity of resources when the main culprits are government bureaucrats and profiteers.

The Stalinists think that their crackdown in Xinjiang has given them the currency to buy social peace. But what they got is fool’s gold. As Trotsky noted of Stalin’s regime, it “defends the proletarian dictatorship with its own methods; but these methods are such as facilitate the victory of the enemy tomorrow” (“The Class Nature of the Soviet State,” October 1933). He explained:

There are many potential sources for such shocks. The intractable crisis in China’s housing market, the increasingly unstable world situation and the U.S. trade war all threaten the economic growth the CPC counts on to keep the population in line. On top of that is the rise in military pressure exerted by the U.S.-led imperialists.

The Stalinists’ response is not a revolutionary call to arms but a doubling down on enforcing “stability” at home and wooing trade partners abroad. This can only sow more seeds of crisis, including over national grievances currently suppressed by the CPC’s draconian measures. The revolutionary answer is to mobilize the proletariat through a program that fuses defense of national minorities with demands speaking to the needs of China’s workers and peasants, from jobs for youth to decent, affordable housing and good social benefits.

This is no pipe dream. Workers’ own experience shows that the repression meted out to minorities redounds against them as well. As the pandemic brought home, the surveillance of citizens’ every move, which was pioneered in Tibet and Xinjiang, now haunts the population as a whole. How that situation can turn against the bureaucracy was seen when protests against lockdowns swept China in November 2022. They began in Xinjiang’s capital, Ürümqi, after an apartment building fire killed ten people due to strict Covid-19 lockdown measures. Protesters in Ürümqi were mainly Han, since Uyghurs were too cowed by repression to take to the streets. But had the protests continued, they could have easily united both populations against the bureaucracy.

Faced with the CPC’s drive to wipe out the Uyghurs’ national identity, simply upholding their right to self-determination—i.e., the right to a separate state—is insufficient. We demand an independent socialist Xinjiang as part of a transitional program that can unite toilers of all ethnicities in a fight for political revolution. Here are elements of such a program:

• Free Rahile Dawut and all others charged with “splittism”!
• Rip out the surveillance cameras!
• Restore the right to education in local languages!
• No prosecution for religious practice!
• Full residency rights for migrant workers! Down with the discriminatory hukou!
• For integrated workers and neighborhood councils and militias under their control!
• For workers control of production, from the factories and oil fields to the tomato and cotton farms!
• Defend nationalized property! Expropriate the bourgeoisie, in Hong Kong and on the mainland! Defend China against imperialism and counterrevolution!
• Independence for socialist Xinjiang! For a China run by workers and peasants councils, not CPC parasites! For communist unity against imperialism!

Defend China, Oppose CPC Rule!

A revolutionary program for Xinjiang must be premised on defense of the gains of the 1949 Revolution and opposition to all independence forces seeking to smash the workers state. The bulk of the international Marxist left utterly fails this test, capitulating to liberal imperialist ideology that China is a capitalist and imperialist power. (For a full treatment of this question, see “Not Imperialist, Not Capitalist: The Class Nature of China,” Spartacist No. 69, August 2024.)

Some leftists, like the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty (Britain’s “Foreign Office socialists”), champion “democratic” imperialism as the answer to the oppression of Uyghurs and Tibetans. The triumph of this program would do nothing to eliminate their oppression but would cause a social disaster, undoing decades of material progress, unleashing bloody interethnic warfare and carving up China for pillage by foreign powers.

Somewhat more nuanced are the SWP and the International Marxist Tendency, now the Revolutionary Communist International (RCI). Both organizations wrote articles at the height of the crackdown in Xinjiang that warned against U.S. machinations, opposed anti-China sanctions and called on Han workers to defend and unite with national minorities against the CPC (“China, the Uyghurs and the Left,” International Socialism, posted 23 October 2021; “Uyghurs in Xinjiang: National Oppression and Imperialist Hypocrisy,” In Defence of Marxism, 20 October 2020).

These are necessary tasks. But the SWP, RCI, ISA et al. denounce China as imperialist, oppose its defense against the real imperialists, siding with “democracy” movements aiming to overturn the workers state. They thus betray the only basis for uniting Han and minority working people around their common interest, which is the need to defend and extend the gains of the 1949 Revolution against imperialism and counterrevolution.

The other pole on the left are political descendants of the “friends of the Soviet Union” pilloried by Trotsky in The Revolution Betrayed. Their answer to imperialist machinations against China is to put a minus where the social democrats put a plus, and vice versa. The Workers World Party is exceptionally shameless, hailing the CPC’s “vocational training centers” and concluding that “political and religious violence in Xinjiang has now been nearly eliminated, and Xinjiang is well on its way to being economically caught up with the rest of the country” (Workers World, 16 January 2024).

Singing the same sick tune, but a bit sotto voce, is the League for the Fourth International (LFI). Its one substantive statement on the Uyghurs trumpets how “official measures were taken in response to a number of murderous attacks…by Islamist forces associated with the East Turkestan Islamic Movement,” which “even the E.U., the U.N. and the U.S. have designated a terrorist organization” (“U.S. Anti-China War Provocations over Taiwan,” The Internationalist, September 2022). The LFI graciously admits that Han chauvinism “has had expressions” in Xinjiang but thunders that “the lie of ‘Uighur genocide’” is just an imperialist battle cry and a “pretext for fomenting separatism in Xinjiang and inflicting economic harm to the region.”

It would be easy to denounce the LFI for sticking its head in Xinjiang’s sands, but that would miss its real crime. From the Covid lockdowns to the military buildup against China, the LFI pushes reliance on the Stalinists to defend the workers state and resist imperialism, as opposed to mobilizing the proletariat independently to carry out these tasks. This is what explains the LFI’s love for China’s lockdowns and its failure to champion self-determination for Uyghurs and Tibetans, or anything else that would threaten “national unity” under the CPC.

Such “friends of China” reinforce the consciousness instilled by the Stalinist regime that independence for Xinjiang could only serve the imperialists who long to rip China apart. It’s safe to assume that this belief is shared by the mass of workers in China, who despise the bureaucracy but think that it’s the only thing standing in the way of counterrevolution and chaos. Trotsky provided the solution to this problem in advocating an independent Soviet Ukraine:

A Marxist Framework for Tibet

This programmatic approach is as vitally necessary for Tibet as it is for Xinjiang, even given their vastly different histories and social structures. Like the Muslims of Xinjiang, Tibetans experienced historic advances as part of the People’s Republic. This is despite the fact that the CPC kept in place the essentially feudalist lamaocracy for nine years following the PLA’s entry into Tibet. It was the introduction of extremely modest reforms that helped touch off a reactionary rebellion in 1959. Largely organized by the American CIA, the uprising was defeated, sending the Dalai Lama and his clique fleeing to India. The CPC regime then abolished his administration, as well as local slavery and the taxes Tibetans had been forced to pay to the monasteries.

Nevertheless, as mentioned earlier in this article, Tibetans as well as Xinjiang’s Muslims suffered from the Han supremacy imposed by the CPC. As in regard to Xinjiang, the CPC categorically opposes any separation of Tibet from the PRC, reinforcing prejudices that national minorities are simply too backward to advance socially outside the PRC’s realm.

This is a crystalline expression of the CPC’s anti-internationalism. No one in their right mind would think that Tibet would have any kind of progressive future in isolation from more advanced economies. But denying the Tibetans’ national rights only serves to poison relations with the Han masses of China and to let the imperialists win “hearts and minds” in their campaigns against the PRC. The answer is to fight for an independent socialist Tibet in an anti-imperialist alliance with the Chinese workers state. This demand must be part of a revolutionary program for China today.

There are other aspects of the national question in China that need to be taken up. One concerns the Mongols. While making up only one-sixth of the population of Inner Mongolia, in recent years they have waged determined protests demanding the right to education in their language. Besides defending such rights, there is the question of Mongolia’s division into two states. Trotskyists should offer the prospect of the reunification of Mongolia through political revolution in China and social revolution in Outer Mongolia. This question surely requires more discussion. What is essential is to apply a Marxist programmatic framework to all such problems.

The Internationalist Banner

China is at a critical juncture. Trying to maintain its caste rule and privileges as the world lurches from crisis to crisis, the CPC seeks to enforce the discipline of national unity while appealing for “win-win” cooperation with global finance capital and relying on fickle bourgeois allies in the Global South. That strategy threatens the death of the workers state.

Championing the struggle for self-determination against the CPC’s Han chauvinism is but one step toward cohering a Trotskyist cadre that can provide a revolutionary alternative to Stalinist misrule. What we offer is continuity with the early Comintern, with the first Chinese Communists, and with the Bolshevik cadres who established the Turkistan Bureau in Tashkent to extend the October Revolution to the East.

The emergence of a Leninist vanguard that mobilizes the proletariat of China on behalf of the Tibetan, Uyghur and Mongol masses would have an enormous impact on Nepal and the rest of the Indian subcontinent; on the former Soviet Central Asian states; on Mongolia and onward into Russian Siberia. To polarize anti-imperialist fighters against the CPC’s defeatist program of nationalism and global class collaboration, we counterpose a Trotskyist perspective: For a belt of workers states on the road to a socialist Eurasia! The ICL invites all working-class revolutionaries to join us on this march.