Commentary
On the
Sixtieth Anniversary of the People’s Republic of China
October 1 marked the sixtieth
anniversary of the victory of the Chinese revolution and the founding of the
People’s Republic of China under the leadership of the Communist Party of China
and Mao Zedong. The anniversary was marked by military parades in China and a
barrage of anti-communist propaganda in the western media.
Interview after interview and commentary
after commentary harps on the various failures of the Chinese revolution and
Mao Zedong, from the Great Leap Forward to the Cultural Revolution, including
the failures of the current regime to provide “democracy and human rights” to
the Chinese people. However, none of these interviews or commentaries even
attempts to either explain those failures or to put them into context. Instead,
the unspoken message is that China would have been better off remaining a
semi-feudal colony of the Europeans and the United States.
The victory of the Chinese revolution in
1949 stands on its own merits. It put an end to more than a century of China’s
subservience to the western colonial and imperialist powers. It created
conditions whereby the remnants of feudalism could be wiped out and a modern
economy and society could be built by the Chinese people themselves. It also
inspired a generation of anti-colonial, anti-imperialist national liberation
struggles throughout Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Despite various shortcomings in regard
to building a self-sufficient socialist economy, great strides were made by the
Chinese people during the next several decades. Illiteracy was largely eliminated and the rural peasantry was lifted out of abject
poverty and given control over the land. Health care, however rudimentary, was
provided to the vast majority of the people. Massive manufacturing and energy
projects were built. Some of those projects may have been less than successful,
however, given the depths of poverty from which China was emerging and the
widespread destruction resulting from almost 40 years of continuous warfare,
the advances made by China in the years following its revolution were nothing
short of spectacular.
At the same time, the strategic course
set by the leaders of the People’s Republic of China in the years following the
revolution contained the seeds for destruction of the revolution itself. From
the beginning the leadership was split on some fundamental questions, such as
how to build a socialist economy, what relations to build between China’s
numerous nationalities and what relationship China should have with the various
other countries of people’s democracy that had emerged in the post-war period.
Power struggles between the top leaders erupted on a regular basis and during
some periods, such as the Cultural Revolution, the struggles became quite
violent.
The split in the International Communist
Movement and the resulting hostilities between China and the Soviet Union
during the 1960s resulted in further setbacks to China’s development of a
self-sufficient economy. By the early 1970s China’s economy was stagnating and
unrest was growing. At this critical moment Mao Zedong decided to establish an
alliance with U.S. imperialism in order to counter the power of the Soviet
Union. In 1972 Nixon visited China and during the next few years a complex
relationship between the two countries developed, based on their mutual
animosity towards the Soviet Union. Following the death of Mao Zedong in 1976
and the rise to power of Deng Zaoping a new strategic
policy was adopted in regard to developing the economy, with an emphasis on
developing capitalist joint ventures with foreign monopoly capitalists. In the
cities, new factories were built on the basis of importing foreign capital from
the U.S. and Japan. In the countryside the gains of the poor peasants were
reversed, land was privatized and a new wealthy rural strata
emerged. By the mid-1990s millions of impoverished peasants were flowing into
the cities, creating a huge pool of surplus labour
and driving down wages. The flow of foreign capital increased throughout the
1990s, but the collapse of the international hi-tech markets in 2000 turned the
flow of foreign capital into a flood. China’s economy boomed based on the
export of cheap manufactured commodities to the rest of the world, especially
to the United States. The enormous profits generated within China have been
used both to expand capitalist development within China, as well as to prop up
the U.S. economy. During the past few years China became the largest holder of
U.S. debt, surpassing Japan.
The capitalist crisis that hit the
entire world last year has resulted in severe economic dislocations in China.
Exports declined by over 15 percent. Over 25 million Chinese workers were
thrown out of work. Wages have plummeted and working conditions have
deteriorated.
The current situation in China
demonstrates the problems that emerge when a society departs from scientific
economic and social planning. It is clear to almost everyone that socialism has
run off the rails in China and, as a result, China has returned to the
capitalist fold with all that that entails – unemployment, poverty, reliance on
foreign investment capital and economic crisis. However, the source of these
problems is not the victory of the Chinese Revolution in 1949, but the radical
departure from the goal set by that revolution. Interestingly, the western
media does not focus on these disasters for the Chinese people as a failure of
capitalism, but continues to blame all China’s problems on its decision 60
years ago to stand on its own feet.