Read China's Lips

[Os Cangaceiros]

NEW HAVEN – The Chinese have long admired America’s economic dynamism. But they have lost confidence in America’s government and its dysfunctional economic stewardship. That message came through loud and clear in my recent travels to Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing, and Hong Kong.

Coming so shortly on the heels of the subprime crisis, the debate over the debt ceiling and the budget deficit is the last straw. Senior Chinese officials are appalled at how the United States allows politics to trump financial stability. One high-ranking policymaker noted in mid-July, “This is truly shocking… We understand politics, but your government’s continued recklessness is astonishing.”

China is no innocent bystander in America’s race to the abyss. In the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990’s, China amassed some $3.2 trillion in foreign-exchange reserves in order to insulate its system from external shocks. Fully two-thirds of that total – around $2 trillion – is invested in dollar-based assets, largely US Treasuries and agency securities (i.e., Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac). As a result, China surpassed Japan in late 2008 as the largest foreign holder of US financial assets.

Not only did China feel secure in placing such a large bet on the once relatively riskless components of the world’s reserve currency, but its exchange-rate policy left it little choice. In order to maintain a tight relationship between the renminbi and the dollar, China had to recycle a disproportionate share of its foreign-exchange reserves into dollar-based assets.

Those days are over. China recognizes that it no longer makes sense to stay with its current growth strategy – one that relies heavily on a combination of exports and a massive buffer of dollar-denominated foreign-exchange reserves. Three key developments led the Chinese leadership to this conclusion:

etc

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/roach7/English

[RED DAVE]

If it acts like capitalism, sounds like capitalism and stinks like capitalism, then it must be ...

http://i51.tinypic.com/ehhc3r.jpg

RED DAVE

[A Revolutionary Tool]

RED DAVE you just don't understand the grand Socialist Strategy of the COMMUNIST Party of China. If they were really capitalist like you say would they have invested so much in U.S. assets, allow private companies to come in and exploit workers, or have Chinese companies oversees exploiting those workers? Come on someone needs a reality check...

[A Revolutionary Tool]

On a serious note I would be worried if I was Chinese too, after all a lot of the debt is owed to China, who are they going to export shit to when we tank assuming that we wouldn't bring them down with us?

[RadioRaheem84]

And now taking the money they've made exploiting Chinese workers and investing into exploiting North Korean workers! Two socialist nations working together for the people!

[AnonymousOne]

And now taking the money they've made exploiting Chinese workers and investing into exploiting North Korean workers! Two socialist nations working together for the people!

Indeed, you see the Communist Parties of China and North Korea realized that Lenin didn't mean a Dictatorship of the Proleteriat, but rather a Dictatorship Over the Proleteriat. :laugh:

[mosfeld]

RED DAVE you just don't understand the grand Socialist Strategy of the COMMUNIST Party of China. If they were really capitalist like you say would they have invested so much in U.S. assets, allow private companies to come in and exploit workers, or have Chinese companies oversees exploiting those workers? Come on someone needs a reality check... Chinese socialism was generally reversed after the Dengist coup in 1976, which gradually de-collectivized the people's communes, privatized major sectors, sought heavily imperialist investments and foreign companies, reversed services such as free health care, as well as other acts.

Roughly 130 million Chinese, according to the UN, earn under $1 a day or less. Child slave labor was in some areas practiced, to which the Chinese regime turned a blind eye to until public outrage forced them to intervene in the situation.

Transnational companies such as Nike, Coca-Cola, Puma etc, actively exploit the Chinese proletariat, particularly the migrant workers. These transnationals often do not have to adhere to Chinese labor law, resulting in burdensome sweatshop labor, underpayment, unbearable working conditions, bureaucratic management, little or no social security, etc. And all of this is encouraged by the state, which generally always sides with the bourgeoisie in labor disputes and encourages foreign investment. A Party official in Guangdong elaborated: "We have so many migrant workers but not many capitalists to choose from. Don’t we need to speak on behalf of capitalists for development? Development is the core value and that was Deng Xiaoping’s instruction"

The peasantry is heavily taxed and their money is used to finance urban consumption and the government. Today, China has the widest urban-rural gap in the world.

The Chinese regime invests heavily in Africa, like in Sudan, where they fueled the civil war through arms trade and took up to 70% of Sudan's oil exports, and has several thousand troops throughout the continent. For more info on Africa, take a look at "Chinese imperialism in Africa (http://en.internationalism.org/wr/299/china-africa)".

If this shit is what you're fighting for and if this is what you consider socialism then I feel very sorry for you.

[RED DAVE]

RED DAVE you just don't understand the grand Socialist Strategy of the COMMUNIST Party of China. If they were really capitalist like you say would they have invested so much in U.S. assets, allow private companies to come in and exploit workers, or have Chinese companies oversees exploiting those workers? Come on someone needs a reality check...
On a serious note I would be worried if I was Chinese too, after all a lot of the debt is owed to China, who are they going to export shit to when we tank assuming that we wouldn't bring them down with us?
If this shit is what you're fighting for and if this is what you consider socialism then I feel very sorry for you.(emph added)

Lighten up, Comrade.

RED DAVE

[Jose Gracchus]

How was 76 in China a Dengist "coup"?

[mosfeld]

Mao's Death and the Capitalists' Coup

On September 9th, 1976, Mao Tsetung died. As the masses in China, alongside millions in every country throughout the world, mourned this immeasurable loss, the revisionists in China rejoiced and prepared their takeover. With "official" successor Hua Kuo-feng at their head, and based upon the portions of power they had already seized, including within the armed forces, they were able to mount a military coup d'état within a month of Mao Tsetung's death, and arrested the Four and their close supporters. Proletarian rule came to an abrupt and brutal end in China, bringing back like a rude wake-up call Mao's warning in his 1966 letter to Chiang Ching of the possibility of the Right using some of his words to stage an anti-Communist coup d'état in China after his death but also assuring her that they would know no peace.

In fact many knew it was the end of the revolution and saw right through the barrage of political propaganda, and for this reason the coup was presented alongside gleaming gun barrels, as if to illustrate another important point of Mao's. The mass media announced that the Four were the "real revisionist Right", that they, especially Chiang Ching, were KMT renegades, that these Four Chiang Ching, Chang Chun-chiao, Yao Wen-yuan, and Wang Hung-wen along with a goodly number of their comrades, were actually enemies of Mao; it was even fancied that Mao would have supported this clampdown against "counter-revolution". The low political level of the invective revealed the magnitude of the coup-makers' quandary and, in a desperate need to consolidate power, they quickly supplemented it with an even lower, that is gutter-level, slur campaign, filled with the wildest personal slander they could think of as well as insignificant incidents they exaggerated into mad fairy tales.

These modern-day Confucians, working at the same time to tighten tradition's chains with the rumour mill they generated, chose to most savagely victimize the woman, Chiang Ching. As the Chairman's wife she was also supposed to suffer and bear the responsibility for all the "evils" China had ever experienced, ancient or modern, but especially during the Cultural Revolution. For these capitalist roaders, the worst of these "evils" was, of course, having to endure almost 30 years of Mao leading the masses to revolutionize the society they wanted to get rich off of and, related to that, their failure to unseat Mao and his revolutionary comrades from the centre of power long before.

Yet people resisted. In many ways. One of the major accusations at the historic 1980-81 "trial" would be that of plotting an armed rebellion in Shanghai against the coup d'état. Chang Chun-chiao and others had a strong political following in this city, forged through the sharp struggle and important changes of the Cultural Revolution. Shanghai was famous for the January Storm, when millions of workers, joined by peasants and students, seized back power from the revisionist-led Municipal Party Committee in 1967. In August 1976, as expectations of a showdown in the Party grew, arms and munitions were handed out to the million-strong Shanghai militia that had been set up by the Shanghai Municipal Revolutionary Committee several years earlier.

After news of the Four's arrest filtered out, detailed plans were laid to block the harbours and airports, to shut down the press and radio, to launch work stoppages and demonstrations and mobilize the militia men and women, along with the garrison command of Shanghai. An older Communist leader, Zhu Yong-jia, a close comrade of Chang Chun-chiao and head of the writing group of the Shanghai Party Committee, rallied the revolutionaries to prepare for action, calling on them to "do a Paris Commune. If we cannot keep up the fight for a week, five or three days would suffice to let the whole world know what's happening...." In other words, this rebellion would be a declaration that a revisionist coup in China had taken place and that it was being actively resisted by revolutionaries. Most reports are based on Hong Kong newspapers and even accounts by the revisionist press itself, so details of the plan are scanty.

The rebellion was delayed when the leaders were purposely called to Peking, and it seems the revolutionaries lost the initiative for the full-scale uprising they planned as the coup-makers swept into the city to prevent it. Nonetheless, there was reportedly armed fighting in some militia units on October 13th, one week after the Four were arrested, and as soon as word of the arrests spread on October 10th, thousands of people gathered every day at key headquarters to see what actions the leaders would take. Zhu had correctly pointed to the crucial need for "quick, decisive action drawing wide support" not only in Shanghai but throughout the country.[42,40] For a number of reasons the leadership failed to move at the critical moment. This underlines even more the importance of the decisive, unwavering stand of defiance of Chiang Ching and Chang Chun-chiao.

Despite the smokescreen put up by Hua that he was acting on Mao's behalf, on the streets of China, among many of the masses, a five-finger salute behind officials' backs was common, needing no verbalization: Mao and the Four were the revolutionaries being overthrown. A foreign observer in Shanghai during the coup reported that conversations and movements were tightly controlled, and that tension was extremely high among the people. Official posters of the Central Committee denouncing the Four were stripped from the railway station walls in Nanjing.[39] Undoubtedly many other stories have yet to see the light of day, as the counter-revolutionaries clamped down quickly and brutally, arresting and jailing known sympathizers of the Left, many of whom were executed.

The coup in China represented a tremendous blow to the peoples of the world and the international proletariat as a whole. Revolutionary China was a beacon to hundreds of millions of people who yearned to liberate themselves. For ten incredible years, the GPCR led by Mao and the revolutionary headquarters inside the Party had prevented this reversal of proletarian power and the restoration of capitalism by unleashing the conscious activism of the masses. For ten long years, breathtaking strides were being made by history's formerly forgotten and downtrodden, breaking new socialist ground for the international proletariat. In the course of all this, the revolutionary science was developed to a qualitatively new level and became recognized as Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought. New organizations and parties based on this ideology sprang into being all over the world.

To see history's most radical and far-reaching transformation of society under proletarian rule snatched away by the arrogant handful of bourgeois reactionaries inside the Communist Party usurping power for their own narrow get-rich aims was indeed unbearable. At the same time, in the very depth and breadth of the socialist revolution, Mao had laid the basis for Marxist-Leninists to pick up the weapons he enlarged and sharpened to understand both the nature of this reversal and how to continue to chart the way forward. This was not an easy task it required sharp struggle over summing up the nature of socialist society and Mao's contributions to the science as well as the events in China themselves. Yet, fired in no small way by Chiang Ching and Chang Chun-chiao's courageous stand, many Marxist-Leninist parties and organizations not only refused to abandon the course of revolution in the face of the Chinese revisionists' betrayal and the simultaneous anti-communist ideological offensive by the international bourgeoisie, but succeeded in making qualitative advances in turning around the crisis in the international communist movement and forging an embryonic international centre based on this understanding, represented today by the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement.

After the arrest of the revolutionary headquarters, the regime carried out waves of purges in the Party, and in 1977 executions began in earnest. Within two years of the coup, revolutionary committees had been abolished, and entrance exams and privilege (benefiting primarily Party officials' children) became the criteria for access to higher learning. Films and other works produced under Chiang Ching's leadership were revised or banned outright. The revisionists brought back the pre-Cultural Revolution version of the ballet White-Haired Girl, for example, featuring its central love theme. Infanticide against baby girls returned as capitalism put a premium on male offspring. As the waiting foreign vultures like Coca Cola and Mitsubishi pounced to set up new markets in China, production began to accommodate imperialism's needs and was boosted through bonuses and greater wage differentiation. In short, capitalism was restored with a vengeance. All this in a climate of heavy repression, toeing the official line, and the shutting off of the political struggle which had guided and promoted socialist construction for more than 20 years.

http://www.aworldtowin.org/back_issues/1993-19/chiang_Ching.htm

[RED DAVE]

Typical piece of nauseating Maoist bullshit. Everything was ready for an uprising, but "The rebellion was delayed when the leaders were purposely called to Peking ... ."


In short, capitalism was restored with a vengeance. All this in a climate of heavy repression, toeing the official line, and the shutting off of the political struggle which had guided and promoted socialist construction for more than 20 years.http://www.aworldtowin.org/back_issues/1993-19/chiang_Ching.htm

"Socialist" construction without workers control. That's a crock. Same kind of "socialist" construction that the Nepalese Maoists, once the poster children of Maoism, as building in the enterprise zones in Nepal.

RED DAVE

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

I don't get it, if Mao was such a great revolutionary, and was in power for 27 years, why did he create a system which Capitalists could so easily "seize"? Doesn't he hold any culpability, considering his long stint as leader and longer one as the most powerful man in the CCP?

[Jose Gracchus]

Sorry, but blogs aren't sources. The author simply takes the "coup" as an article of faith, asserts it on fiat, and then follows on taking it for granted it must be true. This is no supported, substantive argument that Deng's new rise to power was a "coup". It was Mao, after all, who rehabilitated and restored Deng.

[caramelpence]

It's also quite interesting that when the arrest of the Gang occurred, not only were there significant signs of popular support amongst the Chinese population for their arrests, the reaction of Maoist groups in other countries was by no means uniform or solidly in favour of the Gang...in fact the most common position taken by Maoist organizations, especially in Western countries, was to support the arrests and to look to Hua Guofeng to continue Mao's legacy. The pro-Gang view as put forward by the WtW article does not really convey the historical reaction of the international Maoist movement, let alone what actually took place in China.