China, Imperialism and the Left

The original link of China Labor Forum: https://chinaworker.info/zh-hans/2021/07/19/30185/

Telegram link of China Labor Forum: https://t.me/chinaworkerISA

Twitter link of China Labour Forum: https://twitter.com/OctRevolution1 7

If you are interested in subscribing to "Socialist" magazine, please send an email to: chinaworker.isa@gmail.com

This article is the second half of an article by Per-Åke Westerlund on the rise of imperialism in China. The first half of "Chinese State Capitalist Imperialism" has been published on the China Labor Forum website.

In recent years, as the Sino-US imperialist conflict has intensified, a group of international leftists have taken an increasingly uncritical attitude towards the Chinese Communist regime (the so-called communist regime), denying its internal oppression and external oppression in countries along the “Belt and Road” .

Most of the economic facts in the first half of this article will not be questioned by “left-wing” supporters of the CCP regime. They defend the de facto imperialist practices of the Chinese regime, either by whitewashing them or by claiming that they benefit the people of those countries. These commentators, usually with Stalinist or Maoist political backgrounds, were also derided as "tankies" because they supported the repression of Hungarian workers in 1956 and Beijing in 1989, etc. by sending tanks. Although capitalism has long been restored in Russia and China, these people still believe that these regimes still have "progressive" elements.

When Chinese leaders seem to get along well with the U.S. president and multinational corporations, the CCP's apologists are embarrassed. In 2014, Xi Jinping's speech to the Australian Parliament won a standing ovation. A year later, then-British Prime Minister David Cameron spoke of a "golden era" of Sino-British relations. In 2015, Xi shared a carriage with Queen Elizabeth and described Conservative Britain as China's "best friend in the West". British Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne led a trade mission to Xinjiang and was praised by Chinese state media for talking only about business and not talking about the abuse of Uighurs and other ethnic minorities. And as recently as early 2020, Trump also praised Xi as a close friend. None of the above can be explained by those "tank factions" who now claim that Beijing is the vanguard of resistance to U.S. imperialism.

While capitalist politicians and economists are welcome in China, socialists or anyone who tries to connect with struggling workers and youth have been arrested or deported. This is because true Marxists and socialists, in the tradition of Marx, Luxemburg and Lenin, are opposed to all capitalist governments and imperialist forces. In "Imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism", Lenin emphasized and pointed out that although Britain, France, the United States and Germany were more developed, Tsarist Russia was also a developing imperialist force. In the preface to the 1920 edition, Lenin emphasized Russia's oppression of Finland, Poland, Courland, Ukraine, Khiva, Bukhara, Estonia, and other non-Great Russian regions, while also stating that when writing in 1916, He replaced Russia with the case of Japanese imperialism in order to avoid censorship in Tsarist Russia.

Today, tankists and Chinese apologists claim that those arrested and exiled and their supporters do not know the truth. This in itself is an endorsement of the dictatorship and its methods of repression. They also claim that socialists cannot use liberal, bourgeois or public service media as sources. In fact, the kind of reporting that accuses all mainstream bourgeois media of being CIA propaganda is often the only argument made by supporters of the CCP. What about the Marxist tradition? Marx never hesitated to cite bourgeois newspapers, such as the British conservative press reporting on the counter-revolutionary crackdown after the failure of the Paris Commune. Marx himself worked for ten years as a reporter for the New York Tribune, the largest newspaper in New York with ties to the Republican Party. Marxists have no illusions about the impartiality of capitalist media versus CCP state media, it is purely a matter of critically examining facts and sources.

The criticism of the tankists today is nothing compared to the anti-Trotsky movement led by Stalin in the 1930s. Trotsky's scientific critique of Stalin's dictatorship was accused of being no different from right-wing elements or even Nazi forces. They were tight-lipped about the class differences between them, with bourgeois commentators longing for capitalist counter-revolutionary action, but Trotsky for a new workers' revolution for a workers' democratic socialist workers' state. And this fundamental class distinction does not mean that the Gulag concentration camps are only imagined by the right wing. Tanks criticize the source of those quotes, but the real point of contention is their support for Stalinism, Maoism, and today's state capitalist regimes.

China's Apartheid Policy in Xinjiang

The huge network of concentration camps, disappearances, rapes, torture, etc. in Xinjiang shows that the actions of anti-Uyghurs and the vast majority of Muslims in Xinjiang are not fictional, but cruel facts. The escalation of the oppression of the Uyghurs coincided with the restoration of capitalism and imperialism in China. Xinjiang's natural resources and strategic location, a key part of Xi Jinping's Belt and Road Initiative, and fears of ethnic revolt have contributed to Beijing's escalation of repression in Xinjiang and East Turkestan.

Until the 1950s, the Han population in Xinjiang was less than 5%. But this phenomenon changed with the influx of a large number of Han immigrants in the 1990s when capitalist restoration and exploitation emerged. Today, there are about 12 million Uyghurs, less than half of Xinjiang's total population, while Han Chinese account for more than 40 percent.

The CCP’s rule over Xinjiang is to “implement a pass inspection system, build concentration camps, and build a grid-based police control system, replicating the South African apartheid era and Israel’s minority control system.” He lived in Urumqi for two years and continued to study Xinjiang. The scholar Darren Byler wrote. Another turning point was the war on terror launched by George W. Bush after 9/11. The CCP was quick to apply Western rhetoric and branded all Uyghurs suspected terrorists.

An article in the U.S. left-wing magazine Monthly Review claimed that reports of the Xinjiang crackdown and concentration camps were all support for U.S. imperialism, which was strongly opposed by Bailer and 35 other international scholars. Their replies believed that China's policy was a deliberate misappropriation of Western counterterrorism policies, and that Islamophobia on both sides of the United States and China should be condemned.

The responses also make it clear that Beijing's policies are rooted in capitalism: "The links between capitalist expansion and the oppression of indigenous peoples are familiar to the left, and refusal to recognize and criticize these changes is deliberately blind," Bailer said in an interview. "Strongly Condemns U.S. Military Action". He described China as state capitalism and Xinjiang's system as "terrorist capitalism". The Xinjiang government has accused Bailer of being a "CIA agent." This is a charge that the Xi regime and its foreign supporters, Chinese nationalists, have routinely made against critics of the Xi regime, including Chinese feminists and labor activists.

A key turning point in Xinjiang's modern history was the July 2009 riots. Motivated by racism, two Uyghur migrant workers were killed in a Guangdong factory. A few days later, Uyghur youths in Urumqi held a peaceful march with Chinese flags to call on the authorities to investigate the fatal brawl in Guangdong, only to be shot by armed police. The root causes of the unrest are growing discrimination and oppression, such as Chinese replacing Uyghur as the only language in schools, land grabbing from Uyghurs, and restrictions on religious clothing and customs.

"People's War on Terrorism"

In response to some desperate terrorist attacks, the Chinese government in May 2014 announced a "people's war on terror" to target the Uyghur community. Socialists have always opposed personal terrorism as a failed method that will always lead to stronger repression rather than advancing the fight against oppression as this example shows. An internal pass system forced 300,000 Uyghurs out of Urumqi and restricted travel through checkpoints, and a system of concentration camps was introduced. In 2017, Xinjiang has become a complete police-ruled society.

By the beginning of 2017, the government had recruited "nearly 90,000 new police officers," increasing Xinjiang's public security budget by more than 356 percent to about $9.2 billion, Bailer's report showed. And "due to widespread underemployment, Uyghurs have been recruited in large numbers into the military."

In addition to advanced monitoring, a personal telephone and computer inspection system for Uyghurs has also been implemented. "The two Hangzhou-based tech companies Dahua and Hikvision alone have been awarded more than $1.2 billion in contracts to build security infrastructure in the Uyghur region." These security technologies have become China's exports to authoritarian regimes.

At the same time, oil and natural gas contributed more than half of Xinjiang's GDP. Large-scale industrial agriculture, mainly cotton and tomato, also developed. This is not an "ethnic conflict", but a unilateral attack from the government level. In this way, Xinjiang has both the character of a racist system of apartheid targeting Uyghurs and the character of colonial economic exploitation. Compared with Han residents, Uyghurs face discrimination in housing, jobs and wages. The massive infrastructure projects are being built to secure future profits and strengthen Beijing's grip.

Numerous people witnessed rape and torture, and children were taken away from their families. About a million Uyghurs were sent to concentration camps, and everyone knew someone was being detained. This is done to mentally attack the Uyghurs, building loyalty to the CCP and its supreme leader, Xi Jinping, through a humiliating process. In addition, Beijing has selected Uyghur "leaders" to represent the Xinjiang government.

The racist and anti-Uyghur features of CCP policies are most evident in their forced family planning policies, which include denial of economic and legal rights, forcing Uyghur women to accept IUD implants, and worse. Although China denies the actions, even the official China Statistical Yearbook and Xinjiang Statistical Yearbook show how Xinjiang's birth rate has halved in two years -- and that's after the Han population is included. Between 2015 and 2018, birth rates in the two largest Uyghur regions fell by 84 percent.

These facts were first published internationally by researcher Adrian Zenz, a Christian fundamentalist and right-winger. But those who have used Zenz's political stance to discredit him, including the Chinese state media, ignore that his arguments come from official Chinese statistics. He was the focal point of pro-CCP propaganda, but these facts were also confirmed by the stories told by women in the camps.

The system of concentration camps is built to different levels of prison standards, with practices ranging from anti-Uyghur language and cultural propaganda "education" and forced labor in factories to the forced installation of contraceptive rings, sterilization of women and torture.

The CCP later stopped denying the existence of concentration camps, instead saying they were for "re-education," "vocational training," and the promotion of women's "healthy fertility." They portrayed all criticism of the camps as US imperialist propaganda, but never offered any credible investigator access to the camps. Yet U.S. imperialism's current criticism of the Uyghur situation is also pure power politics and hypocrisy. The issue of the treatment of Uyghurs is far from new. In 2002, the United States worked with China to capture 22 ethnic Uighurs in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and put them in the notorious US torture camp at Guantanamo Bay. None of them were ruled jihadists or linked to al Qaeda, but the last three were not released until 2013. Trump's 2017 travel ban on Muslims was also applauded by Chinese leaders.

When 48 of the largest U.S. companies in China were asked to comment on policies against Uighurs, only six responded, and only one expressed limited criticism. It is clear that the US imperialists used the Uyghur concentration camps and the treatment of the Uyghurs to engage in a cold war with China, but they were by no means an ally in the struggle of the oppressed.

Taiwan, China and the United States

Taiwan was the focal point of the Sino-US imperialist Cold War. It is also a de facto country with over 23 million inhabitants. After the victory of the Chinese Revolution in 1949, Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang fled to Taiwan, and the Kuomintang continued to use the country name "Republic of China" on the island in hopes of eventually returning to the mainland. Since then, both the CCP regime in Beijing and Chiang Kai-shek's successor in the Kuomintang have adhered to the "one country" stance. In Taiwan, capitalists and the Kuomintang have been compromising on the Chinese Communist regime on the mainland for decades due to the strong pull of the Chinese economy. Even Taiwanese nationalist politicians from the now-ruling DPP have not gone too far in challenging Beijing.

This has also been the position of the U.S. government since the 1970s, when Nixon and subsequent presidents formally recognized the "People's Republic of China" rather than the "Republic of China," making trade and profit a priority. Militarily, however, U.S. imperialism maintains a close alliance with Taiwan because of its strategic location and as a focal point for pressure on Beijing.

In fact, Taiwan has developed into a separate government and country. The old "unification" claim has lost most of its support on the island. This is one of the reasons for the electoral defeat of the Kuomintang, which is now forced to distance itself from the formerly close ties to the CCP. The introduction of the National Security Law in Hong Kong and the abolition of democratic rights finally dispelled Taiwanese's illusion of a "reunified" arrangement of "one country, two systems". Today, only 12.5 percent of Taiwanese support reunification, 54 percent support formal independence, and 23.4 percent support the status quo, de facto independence.

Due to China's tough repressive policies, especially in Hong Kong, the only way for the CCP dictatorship to guarantee its statehood now is to pursue "Taiwan is part of China" through military action or its threats. Last year, the Chinese Air Force and Marine Corps conducted an increasing number of exercises around Taiwan, accompanied by military-tinged statements. These are partly a manifestation of Xi Jinping's attempts to flex his muscles and partly a response to the sharper image of US imperialism in East Asia that began under Obama and then intensified under Trump. That includes a new arms export pact, more frequent military operations and a previously secretive defense pact between the U.S. and Taiwan unveiled last year. The CCP's attempt to intimidate Taiwanese into support of reunification is doomed to fail and will only result in increased support for independence.

Marxists advocate the unity of the working class and the oppressed masses. And only by sticking to the correct position on the national issue can this unity be achieved. This means understanding the emotions and awareness of workers. Lenin and the Bolsheviks again pointed the way, declaring against "the right to self-determination or secession which in practice inevitably implies support for the prerogative of the ruling nation." And being seen as supporters of an oppressive state would hinder the establishment of working-class unity.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 liberated oppressed nations, but never supported foreign imperialism. Instead, the imperialist powers intervened counter-revolutionally in Russia, including against the liberation of Finland, Ukraine, and other countries.

Likewise, supporting independence does not mean supporting U.S. imperialism, and Taiwan's independence cannot be achieved with the help of the United States. In the age of imperialism, successful national liberation movements were never led by bourgeois nationalists, certainly not by imperialists. In the case of Taiwan, independence can only be achieved through mass struggles against capitalism and established parties—especially when combined with the struggles of the mainland Chinese working class against the CCP dictatorship and Chinese capitalism. In any national conflict, socialists will not support the ruling class on either side. In Taiwan, that means not supporting American, Chinese or Taiwanese capitalist parties such as the DPP and the KMT.

Hong Kong - not a colour revolution

Respondents of the CCP dictatorship - believe in some red flags and the name of the "Communist Party", not the real brutal capitalist and imperialist dictatorship. They label mass movements in Hong Kong (especially in 2019) as US-backed color revolutions.

The opposite is true. On October 4, 2019, the mass movement in Hong Kong has been going on for four months. The Guardian reported that:

"U.S. officials were reportedly barred from participating in pro-pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong after Trump promised the U.S. would remain silent during trade talks. Trump told China in a June phone call, CNN reported. President Xi Jinping made promises (…). U.S. consul general in Hong Kong Weikang Tong was told to cancel appearances at U.S. think tanks and planned speeches that have shaken protests in the region due to the gag order…”

Trump himself stated the US position: "Some say they will ban demonstrations one day. But that is between Hong Kong and China, because Hong Kong is part of China. They have to deal with it themselves, they don't need advice." The same article also noted that Trump did not want to comment on the treatment of Xinjiang and Uighurs. In his memoir, Bolton, Trump's former national security adviser, claimed Trump told Xi that the Xinjiang concentration camps were "entirely the right thing to do."

US imperialism generally discourages support for mass movements. Whenever positive references are made to bottom-up movements, Washington's focus is only on their possibility of developing credible leadership and how to quell protests.

When the movement erupted in Hong Kong in 2019, with one or two million people demonstrating, it conveyed anger, frustration and fear that the promise of democratic reform was being replaced by new restrictions on democratic rights. In a society that is deeply unequal and has few welfare systems, democratic rights are seen as precisely the means needed to improve the lives of ordinary people. The huge movement was sparked by an unpopular "Send to China" ordinance, but quickly turned into a demand for the resignation of the Hong Kong government loyal to Beijing and universal suffrage for one person, one vote. Later, the revocation of the "Send to China Regulations" could not be pacified.

It was a movement that caught all establishment forces and parties off guard. The pan-democrats, seen by the masses as the lost leaders in the struggle for democratic rights, played little role, with real leadership in the hands of disorganized youth.

The Xi regime sees the campaign as a threat, fearing it will spread to the mainland. However, when the Hong Kong movement was at its peak, Beijing did not intervene with its own national power. But it is clear that if the movement does not win, the CCP will organize retaliation. It is also important for Xi Jinping to show the world who among the factions is the real ruler of Hong Kong.

This mighty movement can only be victorious if it is exported to China and the way is shown through the general strike movement of the working class. Otherwise, exhaustion and confusion will eventually arise, which is exacerbated by the restrictions during the pandemic, and sooner or later, the exercise will fail. It was in the later stages of the movement that the American flag and slogans calling for Trump to intervene began to appear more widely. As the Cold War intensified, US imperialism also became increasingly critical of China's Hong Kong policy. It also has to do with the desire to maintain Hong Kong as a major business and financial centre in the region. But imposing symbolic sanctions on individual Hong Kong and key CCP officials is not the same thing as truly supporting the demands of the Hong Kong people.

The CCP dictatorship is now imposing mainlandized conditions in Hong Kong, banning democratic rights, increasing surveillance and repressive forces, imprisoning opposition politicians and trade union leaders, and using it to sow terror. Beijing knows it has no social base in Hong Kong. The pro-CCP establishment suffered a historic defeat in local elections in November 2019. Recent measures also include a complete overhaul of Hong Kong's political system, aimed at preventing something like this from happening again.

There is nothing progressive or anti-capitalist in the CCP's actions in Hong Kong. They are backed by most of the billionaire tycoons who own land, as well as major banks. HSBC, ostensibly the largest bank in Europe but now moving its headquarters from London back to Hong Kong, has publicly announced its support for the national security law. So did Standard Chartered, another British bank, "We believe the national security law will help maintain Hong Kong's long-term economic and social stability."

Against imperialism and fascist tactics

Not only the tankists, but also some other leftists are afraid to compare US-China imperialism, or to compare the methods of the CCP with fascism or military dictatorship. There is no reason for socialists to rank different imperialist powers for their brutality. During the First World War, Lenin and the Bolsheviks emphasized their opposition to all imperialist powers, while most of the Social Democratic leaders in Europe supported their "own" country, believing it to be more "democratic", or that the other side was the "aggressor".

However, being against all imperialism does not mean that all imperialisms are alike. Where the struggles of workers and the poor have driven democratic reforms, it is obviously much more likely to organize further struggles. Capitalist democracy has serious limitations, with real power in the hands of the capitalists, but it offers the possibility to organize trade unions and political parties, to speak and print (and post on the Internet), to strike and to organize demonstrations. Under capitalism, these rights are limited and must be constantly fought for, against the usurping of previous victories by reactionaries, against the destruction of trade unions, reactionary propaganda and oppressive laws.

In the 1930s, Trotsky compared Stalin's methods with Hitler's, writing that Stalin was a pupil of the latter. Commenting on the early World War II pact, Trotsky reminded his readers that he had warned that "Stalin was seeking an understanding with Hitler."

Despite the different social natures, the Soviet Union being a degenerate workers state and Germany a fascist dictatorial capitalist state, Trotsky pointed out their similarities. Fascism certainly developed as a mass movement and it was used to crush all working class and democratic organisations in Italy and Germany. But soon after the fascist party came to power, the mass movement character of fascism was replaced by a violent state apparatus.

Brutal military dictators such as Chile's Pinochet and Indonesia's Suharto smashed working-class organizations - Communist and Socialist parties, trade unions, etc. - with fascist means. And today in China, the CCP applies the same brutal methods of repression against struggling workers and other opposition groups. And in Xinjiang, a state campaign against Uighurs has combined brutal measures to exterminate their culture, language and religion with colonialism. This is China's state capitalist imperialism.