China

By William Briggs

January 8, 2022 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — A lie, well told, is often easy to believe. The fiction that China somehow presents a threat to our lives and lifestyles proves the point. Cold War rhetoric is accepted as truth, even when there is no ideological battlefield.

The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union was supposedly about ideas. It was presented as a battle between the forces of light on one side and the forces of darkness on the other. The idea was well marketed, and the world ran along these ‘ideological’ rails for the better part of half a century until the collapse of the Soviet Union. 

By Chris Slee

February 24, 2019 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — In 1949 the Chinese Communist Party (CP), led by Mao Zedong, came to power after more than 20 years of war.  They had fought against the reactionary Chiang Kai-shek regime, and against the Japanese invasion of China.

For a time there was an alliance between the CP and Chiang Kai-shek against Japan, but this ended when Japan was defeated.  The CP, based in rural areas, won the support of the peasants through land reform and other progressive measures.  This enabled them to win the war, despite US military aid to Chiang Kai-shek.

Initially, the revolution was intended to be democratic, not socialist.  Those capitalists who had not been closely associated with Chiang Kai-shek were allowed to continue in business.

But after the outbreak of the Korean war in 1950 there was a change.  The party’s policy became more radical