the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Dec 2, 2024
This article is translated from the October 10 issue, #2932 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.
At the end of the 19th century, feudal China was divided up and ruled by Western imperialist powers. China’s last imperial dynasty, corrupt and incompetent, eventually fell. A nationalist party, led at the time by Sun Yat-Sen, proclaimed the country a republic in 1911, calling for a modern, capitalist China, independent of imperialism. But China instead fell into the hands of warlords and disintegrated.
From 1925 onwards, a new revolution began to mature. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was founded in 1921 under the impetus of the Third International, which sought to extend the revolution begun in Russia. The Party organized thousands of workers, with the aim to put an end to the domination of feudal lords and imperialism.
The International, under Stalinist leadership, forced the CCP to merge with the Nationalist Party of China (Kuomintang), then led by Chiang Kai-shek. Workers and Communists seized power in Shanghai in 1927, only to hand that power over to Chiang Kai-shek. Chiang turned around and had thousands of them shot, drowning the workers’ revolution in blood.
It was all the more tragic because a victorious Chinese revolution could have breathed new life into the workers’ revolution worldwide and given Russian workers a chance to counter the Stalinist bureaucracy.
After the defeat of 1927, the Chinese Communist Party found itself isolated in the countryside, cut off from the working class. It was led by Mao and under the influence of the Stalinist apparatus, which had a policy to form People’s Fronts, that is, alliances with bourgeois parties. Over the course of the 1930s, the CCP became a radical nationalist party.
In 1937, the Kuomintang and the CCP, which dominated certain provinces, stopped fighting each other and joined forces against Japan, which was then extending its hold over the whole of China. The Japanese occupation was particularly violent, and its defeat in 1945 set off a big peasant uprising. The CCP’s aim was to form a coalition government with Chiang Kai-shek, a position long supported by American imperialism. It was Chiang who broke ranks.
The Kuomintang was loathed by large sections of the population, including the bourgeoisie, who were fed up with its corruption and parasitism. The CCP saw its influence grow. At the end of 1945, the Kuomintang attacked Mao’s troops, who had gained the support of revolting peasants and the urban petty-bourgeois city-dwellers. The CCP, however, hesitated for a long time before supporting this revolt. In order not to alienate the so-called patriotic landlords, it had only a moderate agrarian program of rent reduction. After long hesitation, because no compromise with Chiang materialized, and because part of the bourgeoisie looked favorably on the CCP, Mao made up his mind. In summer 1946, the order went out: “Share the land.” The Communist Party thus chose to lead the peasants in revolt to seize power. Chiang’s armies were defeated. Mao’s armies often entered the cities without firing a shot.
The working class, carefully kept at bay, played no part in Mao’s seizure of power. On October 1, 1949, Mao officially proclaimed the People’s Republic of China. Chiang fled to the island of Taiwan under American protection. The Chinese revolution of 1949 gave birth to a bourgeois state, aimed at modernizing Chinese society, ensuring its economic development by freeing the country from the direct tutelage of imperialism and sharing feudal lands. The new regime, supported by the progressive petty bourgeoisie, put an end to many reactionary aspects of the old society, particularly with regard to the status of women. The new bourgeois state soon came up against a section of the Chinese bourgeoisie itself, who fled to Taiwan and Hong Kong, and against imperialism. From 1949 to 1971, American imperialism, which still supported Chiang Kai-shek, placed China under embargo. Faced with this opposition, the State nationalized and developed industry by overexploiting China’s vast peasantry.
At the end of the 1960s, it was the United States, bogged down in Vietnam, in search of a foothold in the region, that changed its policy. This led to the re-establishment of diplomatic relations, most spectacularly with the 1972 meeting between U.S. President Nixon and Mao. Economically, China became a virgin market to conquer, and an inexhaustible source of cheap labor.
Under Chinese state control, Western capitalists were welcomed with open arms. China integrated into the world economy as the workshop of the world, a subcontractor to Western and Japanese trusts. The Chinese state made itself their agent, maintaining order in the factories, and promising the developing bourgeoisie to reap some of the fruits of workers’ exploitation.
This bourgeoisie, now made up of a few hundred billionaires and several million millionaires, owes its fortune and positions to the Chinese state, to which it is closely linked. The working class has also grown considerably stronger. Millions have left the countryside in search of work in urban centers. Counting these 295 million “mingong” in 2022, they now number almost 800 million, a formidable force that the Chinese and Western bourgeoisie are wary of, for while the Chinese working class is fiercely exploited, it also fights fiercely.
Today, imperialism has to reckon with a Chinese state it still does not control, and which has developed the ability to compete with it in certain areas. Containing that state has been the policy of the major Western powers since 2011, marked by the rise of protectionist barriers, the deployment of military forces in Asia, and a heightened risk of war.... The revolution of 1949, which took place within a national, bourgeois framework, led to a new impasse. But China’s working class, now the largest in the world, linked by a thousand ties to the European and American working class, can be a decisive force in the future.