The growing turmoil in Chinese society–protesting workers, rioting peasants, political struggles both inside and outside the Communist Party, and the weaknesses of the foreign policy of the government–cannot be adequately understood without grasping the profound transformation in the relation of classes that has occurred over the past 25 years, and especially during the last decade. What began in 1978 as “market reform” and “opening up to the outside world” has now produced a social formation that is capitalist in all but name. This society has radically altered the forces of production, leading to the rapid “modernization” of the economy, with very high rates of growth, and increasingly full insertion into the current form of “globalized” capitalism. But at the same time, it has radically altered the relations of production, from a socialist system where workers and peasants had at least a partial proprietary claim to their jobs in the factories and their labor on the land–with all the benefits of social security, housing, education, and health care that came with it–into one where they have been stripped of these rights and brutally subordinated to a reemerging capitalist class, both inside and outside the state structure.
This shift in the relationship of classes is generating a series of crises facing the Chinese leadership that they have no apparent way to resolve without further turmoil:
1
The “reform” period has resulted in the reproletarianization of the working class and “refeudalization” of the peasantry. Workers in China are facing an almost unprecedented crisis as the country moves from socialism to capitalism in a global market system that has no place economically for their previous form of employment. The state-owned industries that were the heart of the socialist economy were never meant to be able to compete within the capitalist world, with its fundamental and brutal disregard for the condition of the working class. Organized in such a way as to provide lifetime jobs for virtually all Chinese workers, the SOEs were to this extent truly “socialized,” i.e., playing a collective societal as well as economic function. Though not “worker-owned” in any immediate sense, they gave the working class as a whole participatory rights in the “work units” that were not only places of employment, but the primary source of housing, health care, education and other forms of social securities, such as old age retirement pensions. As a result, they sacrificed a degree of economic efficiency to serve larger socialist goals.
In the countryside, the communes created during the Great Leap Forward and continuing until the beginning of “reforms” in 1978, played a similar function. Though ownership of the land was held by the national government, it was at the local level that decisions were made as to the allocation of fields and work assignments, with the sharing out by each commune of its collective produce based on a complicated formula of distribution, but one in which the peasants themselves had a direct participatory role. On this basis, each family knew that its economic security rested on communal labor, which also provided for the other basic necessities of life, such as health care and education, as well as being the primary organizer of such projects as roads, irrigation and environmental protection.
Though the Chinese workers and peasants remained unchanged in formal terms from their previous class categories, therefore, both had been fundamentally transformed. From an exploited proletariat with no proprietary control over their work or lives, the workers of China became a kind of “post-proletarian” class, with limited but meaningful rights to both their jobs and the products of their labor in the form of social securities and practical benefits. Peasants were similarly “defeudalized,” no longer answering to a class of mandarin landowners and officials, but participating in both collective production and the sharing out of its rewards. Though still subject to the ultimate control of higher state and party authorities, they had shed their previous oppressed and exploited social status.
With the coming of “reforms” and “opening up,” however, and increasingly over the intervening years, both workers and peasants have been effectively expropriated of their collective rights. The privatization of state industries, more often than not accompanied by corruption, and the forced reversion to “individual responsibility” farming, putting the burden of survival on each familial unit without any social support, has expropriated both the working class and the peasantry of any residual participatory right in the society, as well as stripping them of their practical means of life support. In the process they have once again been resubordinated to an exploiting class of managerial bourgeoisie, “feudal” party and state authorities in the countryside extracting insupportable fees and taxes, and both private entrepreneurs and foreign capitalists seeking “cheap labor” among the newly disenfranchised Chinese masses. Thrown on the mercy of the global economy, and with the profit motive increasingly the only measure of economic success, tens of millions of unemployed in the cities, and over a 100 million displaced “farmers” floating around the country seeking work wherever they can find it, have produced a social crisis of vast and rapidly growing proportions. When workers protest and peasants riot, therefore, it is not only a desperate expression of their immediate economic needs, or the disappearance of social securities, education and health care. It is also a growing revolt against the loss of their former class status, and the demand that government once again “serve the people.”
2
At the top of the society, a similar crisis is brewing. The emergence of an open and increasingly self-confident capitalist class has brought to a head the contradictions of the present state and party structure. The various options for resolving the conflict inherent in these changing relation of classes, though each may have a logic within its own terms, present highly problematic paths for a smooth transition to a “new” system of political economy or the ideological props needed to give it at least a limited facade of legitimacy.
One fundamental contradiction to be resolved is the growing tension between the older state structure of the economy and the newly arisen private sector, both domestic and foreign. Though the SOEs are today largely “privatized”–either by being sold off or by operating for the private profit of their managers and associated party authorities–and despite a growing alliance between those inside and outside the “public” sector, there remains a divide between those whose power still derives primarily from their hold over the statist structures from the past and those who want a free hand to openly pursue their non-state approaches. This is not a battle of classes, but of what are essentially the two branches of the emerging bourgeois class, each of which has its own economic base and strategic goals. As the private sector increases its proportion in the overall economy, its advocates demand more and more freedom from governmental control, thus challenging those who rose to power and continue to exercise it primarily through the state and party.
Any resolution to this growing contradiction must therefore be at least as much political as economic. The primary effort to reconcile these competing intra-class factions is the theory of the “Three Represents,” which has been touted as a great new contribution to the progression of socialist thought by the now gradually retiring President and Party Secretary Jiang Zemin, placing him in the pantheon of Chinese leaders alongside Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. This theoretical concept has as its main proposition that the working classes, i.e. the proletariat and peasantry, are no longer the primary forces for the building of socialism, but rather those who are the “leading elements” in the rapid drive to “modernize” China, that is, the capitalists, managers and technocratic professionals. Now enshrined as part of the official program of the state, it has been accompanied by the opening of the doors of the party to “qualified” private entrepreneurs, those who accept, at least on paper, the guiding hand of Communist authorities and the goal of socialism.
This attempt to merge politically, as they are increasingly bound together economically, the two branches of the emerging bourgeois class in China is nevertheless fraught with danger. The most obvious problem is the growing illegitimacy of calling the party and state “socialist,” much less “communist,” when they are the power base for capitalists. Already weakened ideologically by their obvious abandonment of any allegiance to the principles of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought and their open advocacy of the “market” economy, the Chinese leadership now faces the problem of “selling” the idea that those who have openly capitalistic goals can somehow lead the masses to socialism. Keeping a growing portion of the new capitalist class, the private entrepreneurs, out of the institutions of the party and state, however, may be even more threatening, as they are already demanding a larger role in political power to match their expanding economic strength. To abandon them to their own devices is a certain recipe for future conflicts.
3
This crisis of legitimacy is not unlike that of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) of Mexico, which faced a similar dilemma of no longer representing the revolution of the peasants and workers on which its claim to single party authority and state power was initially based. Though “institutionally” linked to bureaucratic and quasi-official labor unions exercising monopoly power, it had clearly become an extremely corrupt party of the capitalist class. The result was a revolt of a large proportion of the Mexican people, in which leading elements of the bourgeoisie themselves took part, demanding a multiparty system, leading to the presidential election of Vicente Fox, leader of the PAN and a former Coca Cola executive, as representative of the capitalists who opposed statist domination. The Chinese leadership may similarly find that it too can best serve the interests of the new bourgeoisie by abandoning its reliance on a single party, in effect choosing the protection of capitalist class interests over the state institutions that have been the source of power up to now. There are already local experiments underway in certain coastal and southern provinces, where the “market economy” is most advanced, to weaken the exclusive hold of the CCP, and allow non-Communist political participation.
Such a change, however, would constitute a cataclysmic alteration in the political basis of authority in China, and open up a “Pandora’s box” the consequences of which cannot be easily predicted. The attempts already underway to resolve this contradiction, notably the theory of the “Three Represents” and the closely related opening up of party membership to private entrepreneurs, have produced strong resentment and unusually public protests from those who refuse to passively abandon any last remnant of its once “Communist” past. At the same time, new demands for democratization of the political system are beginning to rise not only from the previous ranks of “dissidents,” but from ever wider sectors of the population–workers and peasants suffering from corruption, intellectuals and professionals who want greater freedom to pursue their ideas and careers without the control of the party and state, and businesspeople who want broader political choices. Though not yet a fullblown crisis, their voices are more and more difficult to silence.
The growing convergence of economic polarization, rebellion among the workers and peasants, political incoherence, and loss of ideological legitimacy is producing new openings for oppositional forces in China. The increasing level of organization in the struggles of workers and peasants, open discussion of alternative systems of politics, critiques of the economic and social consequences of “marketization,” and the use of new techniques of communication, notably theWeb, are creating space for the emergence of a higher level of resistance. The leadership, until now, has responded almost exclusively by attempting to crush any organized opposition, while loosening up slightly on the more private expressions of dissent. The newly installed leadership, under Hu Jintao, seems to be more sensitive to the growing crisis and the need to ameliorate the worst abuses. But the government has no more radical plan to meet the growing demands for change than a vague social democratic program of increased welfare benefits and unemployment pay. Even if fully implemented, which is extremely unlikely, such projects cannot begin to repair the devastation faced by an enormous proportion of the Chinese working classes, nor address the ever more vocal demands of the population, including the still small but rapidly growing middle class, for a greater participatory role in political decisionmaking.
4
It is only against this background of transformation in class relations in China that its behavior, and relative weakness, on the international scene can be properly understood. The newly emerged Chinese capitalist system cannot generate domestically either the investment necessary to drive its rapid economic growth or sufficient markets to absorb its ever mounting production, and it has also begun to outstrip its national resource base. China, therefore, must turn increasingly abroad for the capital, export opportunities, and natural resources–especially oil–necessary to maintain the momentum of its economy, which in turn is vital to preventing the social dislocations that are already present on an enormous scale from spinning completely out of control. Yet the steps it takes to further these goals, such as joining the World Trade Organization, threaten even greater losses for the working classes. Consequently Chinese economic power, for all its success in penetrating consumer markets in the richer nations of the world, is still a weak player in the overall system of capitalist “globalization.” As its dependency grows, therefore, it must carefully balance its national needs against the threat of resistance from those who do wield the dominant global role, which means primarily, of course, the United States.
Sino-U.S. relations are in constant flux because each country sees the other as both an economic and strategic partner and a competitor. For the United States, China is today an ally in the “war on terrorism” and in its efforts to deal with North Korea, as well as an important market and investment opportunity for its multinational corporations. But it is also viewed as a dangerous competitor in the longer term both as a growing economic power, and potentially even as a strategic challenger to U.S. domination in East Asia, if not yet globally. The Chinese too have opportunistically signed on to the “anti-terror” campaign, in large part to get a freer hand in their efforts to crush Muslim militancy in the northwestern province of Xinjiang, while hoping that their pro-U.S. stance in this area will also help to guarantee favorable treatment in the areas of trade and access to oil. But the Chinese also know that beyond the short-term alliance of the post-9/11 period, they will almost certainly once again face the threat of intervention by the United States in their attempt to reclaim Taiwan, and on such issues as “human rights” and Tibet. The U.S. declaration that it will never again allow another nation to achieve sufficient power to challenge its supremacy, and the reactivation of its missile defense program, which China no doubt correctly sees as directed largely at it, only heighten the sense of danger.
When an issue such as war on Iraq arises, therefore, the leadership of China is hesitant. On the one hand, they fear the precedent that a preemptive U.S. strike would set, should its current benign attitude toward the Chinese once again turn sour. On the other, they are loathe to take any steps that will upset the present détente in relations with the United States, and reawaken its determination to keep China “in its place” both economically and militarily. Given the high degree of nationalism among the Chinese people, the government should be able to call on their support to take a strong stand in the face of U.S. pressure. But the leadership is also afraid that allowing anti-war sentiment to be expressed in the streets will only further legitimize the right of public protest in general, and in particular the organization of the workers and peasants who are already in turmoil. Torn between fear of the United States and of their own people, the Chinese leadership waffle, tailing along behind the French and Russians at the UN in trying to prevent a new attack on Iraq, but afraid even to grant university students permission to stage anti-war protests, for fear of pushing too far their stand against an ever dangerous imperial power.
These contradictions facing the party and state leaders in China should provide an opportunity for the left to reclaim a leading role, at the forefront of the militant workers and peasants. But despite the small but growing presence of leftists both inside and outside the institutions of power providing analysis of the current situation, protests against the direction of governmental policy, a willingness to speak out, and efforts at systematic organization of the opposition, there is little prospect of their having a major impact in the near future. The left in China, as elsewhere in world today, is lacking in ideological unity, a clear program or, in most cases, close ties to the working classes, and they face severe repression of their efforts to organize. Until such limitations begin to be overcome, they will not be able to offer significant leadership to the Chinese people, no matter how great the crisis. In addition, the revolutionary history of China itself reveals weaknesses that must be addressed in any renewed effort at the building of socialism. Chief among these was the failure to institutionalize sufficiently at the local level, much less in the higher reaches of the party and state, the economic power and political rights of the working classes, allowing them to be much too easily stripped away by capitalistic “reforms.” Any renewed attempt to lead China toward a revolutionary socialist path will necessitate a much higher level of direct democratic control by the workers and peasants than was realized before. Only in this way can Chinese capitalism be confronted today.