Review by Graham Matthews
By Chris Slee
Resistance Books, Sydney, 2010, $5
www.resistancebooks.com
China enters the 21st century as something of an enigma.
While it retains many of the external trappings of a Stalinist state (the iron rule of the Communist Party, the red flag), it nevertheless exhibits all the features of a rapidly expanding capitalist economy — a growing economy, mass migration from the country to the cities and growing labour struggle. Capitalism and Workers’ Struggle in China sheds some light on this paradox in a succinct and easy to follow argument.
Slee begins with a potted history of the Chinese revolution, culminating in the seizure of state power by the Chinese Communist Party in 1949.
The revolution “then began some initial steps in the transition to socialism”. These steps were frustrated both by the underdevelopment of the country and the CCP bureaucracy itself.
He analyses the social roots of the development of the bureaucratisation of the CCP, beginning in the liberated zones during the civil war in the 1930s. Slee notes that a brief period of liberalisation in 1956, following Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin, was halted in 1957. “Many of those who had spoken out were arrested.”
Slee traces the tragic history of the Chinese revolution, deformed by bureaucratic conflict and manoeuvre, from the “Great Leap Forward” of the 1950s, to the “Cultural Revolution” of the 1960s. Following Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, Deng Xiaoping, Mao’s greatest opponent in the CCP, ascended to the leadership of the party.
At the end of the Cultural Revolution, the US sought to make a deal with China “at the expense of Third World national liberation struggles (including Vietnam), and at the expense of the Soviet Union”.
China formed a de facto political alliance with the US in 1971. At the same time, its foreign policy moved sharply to the right.
China supported “the reactionary side in struggles in Ceylon, Bangladesh and Sudan”, even invading Vietnam at the behest of the US in 1979, and supporting the reactionary Pol Pot regime in Cambodia.
Under Deng’s regime, increasing concessions were made to international capital. Special economic zones, offering foreign capitalists cheap land and labour, were established. Agriculture was increasingly privatised, and restrictions on Chinese nationals forming private companies were eased.
“The repression of the [Tiananmen Square massacre in June 1989] helped prepare the ground for capitalist restoration,” Capitalism and Workers’ Struggle in China says. Repression helped break down workers’ resistance to the elimination of their job security and social benefits.
In 1992, Deng’s regime began all-out privatisation. By 2004, the private sector’s share of the industrial economy was 62.1%, up from zero in 1978.
Capitalist restoration has been devastating for Chinese workers. “Privatisation destroyed China’s social welfare system”.
The result was a vast rise in economic inequality. By 2001, China had a more unequal distribution of wealth than the US or Japan.
Modern China is a society in turmoil with a high and growing number of worker and peasant protest against the government and employers. Yet it remains a deeply politically repressed society.
Slee concludes that “China today can be described as a bourgeois nationalist regime. Its economy is capitalist, but the government is relatively independent of the imperialist powers … A struggle for genuine socialism still remains necessary.”