Communist Party of China

Will the Boat Sink the Water? The Life of Chinese Peasants.
By Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao.

To mark the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre,

April 21, 2009 – Socialist Voice – On October 1, the People’s Republic of China will mark the 60th anniversary of its foundati

[For more discussion on China's recent economic and political developments, click HERE.]

By Charles Kernaghan

[This is an excerpt from the introduction and executive summary of a report released by the National Labor Committee in February 2009, High Tech Misery in China: The Dehumanization of Young Workers Producing Our Computer Keyboards. Click here to download the full report in PDF format.]

“I think it’s fair to say that personal computers have become the most empowering tools we’ve ever created. They’re tools of communication, they’re tools of creativity, and they can be shaped by their user...The Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow.” -- Bill Gates

``We feel like we are serving prison sentences.” -- factory worker making Microsoft keyboards

The new assembly line: Making computer keyboards and other peripherals for Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Lenovo, Microsoft and IBM

By Martin Hart-Landsberg

Against the Current -- Interest in the post-1978 Chinese market reform experience remains high and for an obvious reason: China is widely considered to be one of the most successful developing countries in modern times. The Chinese economy has recorded record rates of growth over an extended time period, in concert with a massive industrial transformation. Adding to the interest is the Chinese government's claim that this success demonstrates both the workability and superiority of "market socialism."

There are those on the left who share this celebratory view of the Chinese experience, believing that it stands as an effective rebuttal to the neoliberal mantra that still dominates economic thinking. Therefore, they encourage other countries to learn from China's gradual, state controlled process of marketization, privatization, and deregulation of economic activity. A small but significant number share the Chinese government's view that China has indeed pioneered a new type of socialism.

By Chris Slee

The Chinese revolution was one of the most important events of the twentieth century. The victory of the revolution in 1949 was a major defeat for imperialism. The new Communist Party government carried out democratic measures such as land reform, and improved the conditions of workers and peasants through the spread of health care and literacy. It began expropriating industry, and within a few years had nationalised all capitalist enterprises. It proclaimed that the revolution had entered the socialist stage.

A Lego recreation of Jeff Widener's 1989 photograph of "The unknown rebel".

But the new state was bureaucratically distorted from its inception. The bureaucrats enjoyed substantial privileges. They repressed dissent amongst workers, peasants, students and intellectuals. And they engaged in violent power struggles amongst themselves, undermining the gains of the revolution.

By Eva Cheng
Beginning in late 1978, the Communist Party of China's ``reform and door opening'' program has purportedly sought to strengthen China's socialist course by introducing market mechanisms to speed the development of the productive forces. However, by the 1990s, especially in the second half, when state-owned enterprises were privatised en masse, displacing numerous workers and increasingly depriving retired workers of their hard-earned entitlements, the CPC's claims of staying on the socialist path had become a subject of hot debate.

The corruption and degeneration of a section of the CPC were issues even before the so-called reform, and were certainly made worse by the influx of foreign capital in the 1980s. This added to growing frustration with workers' worsening plight, forming the backdrop to the student protests beginning in 1986-87 and escalating into a series of bold mobilisations in early 1989, which Beijing answered by massacring the protesters on June 4, 1989.

By Gong Xiantian
[Subtitled “An open letter prompted by the annulment of section 12 of the constitution and section 73 of the General Rules of the Civil Law of 1986”, this paper by Beijing University Professor Gong Xiantian was dated August 12, 2005. The translation for Links is by Eva Cheng.]

As a member of the Communist Party of China (CPC), a citizen of the People’s Republic of China, a professor who has engaged in years of research on the teaching on law, someone with party spirit, conscience, knowledge and experience, I am of the view that the Property Law (Draft) of the People’s Republic of China (abbreviated as Draft from here on) violates the fundamental principles of socialism and will roll the “wheel of history” backwards. In the absence of amendments of a principled nature, the National People’s Congress has no right to legislate the Draft because it violates the Constitution (see appendix)!

China today confronts revolutionary socialists with some intriguing and controversial questions. How far have capitalist production and social relations been restored? Does this constitute a social counterrevolution that has rolled back the post-capitalist property relations established since the 1949 revolution? And what are now the strategic goals and tasks for revolutionaries?

China’s ruling Communist Party (CP) bureaucracy’s persistent rhetoric that it is still firmly for socialism has sent confusing indications as to where the decollectivisation of rural and industrial production—under the so-called “economic reform” since 1978—might be taking China. The CP has claimed that these were merely manoeuvres to speed up the development of productive forces, much needed to take China beyond its current primary stage of socialism. Even if it was the genuine intention, it at best represents the view of only one faction at the power centre. Ultimately, however, neither intentions nor proclamations matter. Their social consequences—their implications for the property and social relations in Chinese society—are what’s crucial.

This resolution was adopted by the 18th Congress of the Democratic Socialist Party of Australia, held in Sydney, January 5-10, 1999.

I. Theoretical framework

1. For orthodox Marxists, as Lenin explained in his 1917 book The State and Revolution, the state is a centralised organisation of force separated from the community as a whole which enforces, through special bodies of armed people and other institutions of coercion, the will of one class, or an alliance of classes, upon the rest of society.

By Liu Yufan

Liu Yufan is a leader of the Hong Kong socialist group Pioneer.