Background to the upheaval in China

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The leadership of the Chinese Communist Party in 1963: Prominent among them are Mao Tse-tung (4); Deng Xiaoping (3);

SOCIALIST ACTION JULY 1989 15 By NAT The following are excerpts from a talk given at a Socialist Action forum in San Francisco on June 16.

To understand the current situation in China it is important to understand the origins and evolution of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

The nucleus of the CCP was established in May 1920 by a representative of the Communist International-or Third International-who had been sent to China. The CCP was formally founded in July 1921.

The founding cadre of the CCP had been inspired by the example of the Russian Revolution of October 1917. The declared goal of the CCP was in complete harmony with the goals of the Communist International founded by Lenin and Trotsky's Bolshevik Party in March 1919.

This goal was to establish the Communist International as a world party of the working class for the purpose of organizing to carry out a socialist revolution and end exploitation and oppression in every country of the world.

In the subsequent four years of class struggle, the CCP grew into a mass party of tens of thousands, with influence over millions. A dynamic working-class upsurge had shown the enormous social power of the workers in the course of a series of insurrectionary mobilizations, general strikes, and factory occupations.

This was in line with the Communist International's strategic orientation toward a struggle for a workers' government in every country of the world.

Stalin's road to defeat But as Stalin was gaining decisive control over the Soviet Communist Party and the Communist International, he ordered the fledgling Communist Party of China to enter the Kuomintang, the political party that was the main bulwark of Chinese capitalism, and accept its discipline.

The CCP and the workers of China at the very beginning of the revolutionary situation which had opened up in 1925 were politically disarmed by this policy of subordination to the leaders of Chinese capitalism.

The rationale that Stalin used to justify this policy was based on what was called the "two-stage theory." It went like this: The Chinese revolution was a bourgeois revolution against semi-feudal landlords and against imperialist domination that could only be led by the Chinese capitalists.

Therefore, the Chinese workers and peasants were obligated to follow the lead of the capitalist class in the struggle for national liberation. The Stalirists thereby blatantly skipped over the jointly shared interests in landlordism and capitalist exploitation of both landlords and capitalists.

The socialist revolution-which would mean the emancipation of the workers and peasants against landlords, capitalists, and world imperialism—was put off to some time in the distant future. And by the same token, the democratic revolution itself was derailed.

In reality, Stalin's "theory" was a smokescreen for keeping the Chinese revolution confined-regardless of its devastating counterrevolutionary consequences—to maintaining capitalism. The Chinese workers and peasants subsequently paid for Stalin's treachery with their blood.

The Shanghai insurrection On March 21, 1927, the revolutionists in the CCP led the Shanghai workers in an armed insurrection. They succeeded in smashing the power of the Northern warlords and occupied Shanghai with armed workers.

But they were prevented by Stalin from establishing a revolutionary workers' regime and organizing a military defense against a threatened assault by Chiang Kai-shek because, according to Stalin, it would destroy "Kuomintang-CCP collaboration" and obstruct Stalin's "two-stage" line.

Three weeks later, on April 12-as Leon Trotsky and his supporters in China had began an attack Shanghai. Hog-tied by Stalin's pro-Kuomintang policy, the CCP was unable to stop the crushing of the insurrection and the slaughter of thousands of fighting workers.

In the days that followed, Chiang Kai-shek hunted down the Communists and other working-class fighters just as today we see Deng Xiaoping hunting down the leaders of the anti-bureaucratic insurgency. Three months later, by July 1927, the Second Chinese Revolution was defeated.

"Bloc of Four Classes"

Following this defeat, the CCP turned its face away from the workers and oriented exclusively toward the peasantry. Under the leadership of the CCP, China's peasants fought a war for over 20 years against the and Chou En-lai (6).

semi-feudal landlords and capitalists of China and an invading Japanese imperialist army.

But throughout this period, the Stalinized CCP's strategic objective was limited to winning a coalition government with the Kuomintang in line with Stalin's "Bloc of Four Classes" orientation. The CCP continued to reject the goal of a workers' government.

The CCP, in effect, blocked an anticapitalist workers' struggle from taking place in the cities of China. Mao, as party chairman, continued to lead the CCP in line with this policy from 1935 on.

The CCP built a peasant army, which despite its unbroken policy in favor of a strategic alliance with Chinese capitalism, was impelled by the logic of civil war to drive Chiang Kai-shek and his government of capitalists and landlords off the mainland of China.

The defeat of Chiang was primarily the result of the internal decay and loss of self-confidence by the Chinese capitalists and their resulting fear of sharing power with the CCP.

But true to its "Bloc of Four Classes" strategy, Mao and the CCP immediately set up a coalition government with those capitalists who remained in China after the Kuomintang was driven into the sea.

The Stalinists followed a policy which ruled out the overthrow of capitalism in both word and deed. The new government headed by Mao Tse-tung blocked the workers from carrying out a struggle against the capitalist class and prevented the peasants from taking the land from the landlords.

A workers' state is formed Only after imperialist intervention in the Korean War, and after U.S. troops drove the North Korean army across the Yalu River and pursued them up to the Chinese border, was the Stalinist regime forced to drive the capitalists out of the government and state apparatus and to break their social and economic power.

China's capitalists, inspired power of the U.S. imperialist army on its border, mounted an effective campaign of economic sabotage. They hoped that as the imperialist army swept through China, they would be reinstalled in exclusive governmertal control over China.

In 1950, the Mao government-its very existence threatened by this fifth-column inside China's borders—was compelled to unleash the peasants who were straining for a piece of land. An agrarian reform was carried out by revolutionary peasants which eradicated landlordism throughout China.

Mao was also forced to cautiously mobilize workers to hold the insurgent capitalists at bay while the peasants confiscated the land. By 1953 his regime was compelled to follow this logic to its end; expropriating and nationalizing the great bulk of industry, banking and commerce, and establishing a planned economy.

By these acts, the Mao regime destroyed the social and economic base of capitalist power inside China. A social revolution was carried through. China had been fundamentally changed. China had become a workers' state— a form of society in transition between capitalism and socialism.

But this workers' state came into existence grotesquely deformed. No sooner had the new government removed the threat from imperialism and its capitalist fifth column in China, than it began to demobilize workers and peasants, placing them under the yoke of a bureaucratic-military dictatorship.

To this day a hardened bureaucratic dictatorship has blocked the natural development of workers' control over the economic system and democratic control over the political life of the new state.

Contradictory sides of new state If you were to make the mistake of believing the capitalist media, you would think that the Chinese people, during the recent upheaval, were longing for a return to so-called capitalist "freedom." You would think they were dying to turn their land back to the landlords, and that they were holding their breath until the capitalists were given back the industrial, commercial, and banking property that the revolution took from them.

No, only scoundrels and fools would have you believe that Chinese workers and students and peasants are longing for the "good old days" of capitalist barbarism, unemployment, famine, and pestilence.

Just compare where China is todaydespite the crimes of the Stalinist bureaucracy—to India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. I think this is a very fair comparison. China in 1950 was at least as economically backward as these three nations-formerly all part of British India before its independence. Today, capitalist barbarism, pestilence, and faminewith literally millions of homeless people sleeping in the teeming city streets-still prevail in these nations.

The anti-capitalist revolution of the early 1950s is understood by the Chinese people as a great conquest. And despite the crimes of the bureaucracy, this conquest has resulted in a guarantee of a certain minimum living standard-the so-called iron rice bowl-denied the workers and peasants of all other economically backward capitalist nations.

Singing the Internationale

What the Chinese masses have risen up against is not the socialized economy, but against bureaucratic privilege, economic mismanagement, and a political dictatorship which parallels, in its methods, those of fascism in power.

Chinese students and workers have risen up against bureaucratic privilege and nepotism. They are outraged that a Communist Party which claims to be the political heir of Marx, Engels, and Lenin-even if not Trotsky—is led by a bloated bureaucracy that denies nothing for itself from the storehouses of the nation, which they themselves say belong to the people.

And now that bureaucratic mismanagement of the economy has caused great economic dislocations—including the reintroduction of unemployment and accelerated inflation— Deng Xiaoping and company make workers, peasants, and rank-and-file soldiers pay for their mistakes, as their purchasing power is eroded by inflation.

Is it therefore any mystery that the masses who rose up against the Chinese Stalinists sang the Internationale-and that they denounced these tyrants as "fascist"—not "Communist" beasts?

The great majority of capitalist media reporters and commentators grudgingly admit that no one in China who had been in Tiananmen Square and other demonstrations called for the reintroduction of capitalism in China. Even capitalist government spokespersons are forced to admit that the Chinese people are not against socialism, but only want to make it live up to its great promise.

In a nutshell, that's why the unfolding struggle is most accurately described as the first barrage of the coming Chinese political revolution.

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