However, the 1949 Revolution was deformed from its inception under the rule of Mao Zedong’s Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime, which represented a nationalist bureaucratic caste resting atop a collectivized economy. Unlike the Russian October Revolution of 1917, which was carried out by a class-conscious proletariat guided by the Bolshevik internationalism of Lenin and Trotsky, the Chinese Revolution was the result of peasant guerrilla war led by Mao’s Stalinist-nationalist forces.
Patterned after the Stalinist bureaucracy that had usurped political power from the proletariat in the USSR, Mao’s regime preached the profoundly anti-Marxist notion that socialism—a classless, egalitarian society based on material abundance—could be built in a single country. In practice, “socialism in one country” in China, as in the USSR of Stalin and his heirs, meant opposition to the perspective of workers revolution internationally and accommodation to world imperialism.
In particular, China’s alliance with American imperialism against the Soviet Union, begun under Mao in the early 1970s and continued by his successor, Deng Xiaoping, contributed to the eventual destruction of the USSR through capitalist counterrevolution in 1991-92. This was a historic defeat for the international working class and oppressed peoples throughout the world. The post-Soviet period has seen the increased pressure of world, especially American, imperialism —economic, political and military—on China. Thus the Pentagon has been actively pursuing plans for an effective nuclear first-strike capacity against China’s small nuclear arsenal, a strategy openly proclaimed by the Bush gang in Washington.
The International Communist League stands for the unconditional military defense of the Chinese deformed workers state against imperialist attack and capitalist counterrevolution. The Chinese working class must sweep away the Stalinist bureaucracy, which has gravely weakened the system of nationalized property internally while conciliating imperialism at the international level.
We stand for a proletarian political revolution to place political power in the hands of workers and peasants councils. The urgent task facing the Chinese proletariat is to build a Leninist-Trotskyist party as part of a reforged Fourth International to prepare and lead this political revolution, standing at the head of the toiling masses and directing the spontaneous and localized struggles of the workers toward the seizure of political power.
Is the CCP Restoring Capitalism in China?
Ever since the Deng regime introduced market-oriented economic “reforms” in the early 1980s, an increasingly influential current of Western bourgeois opinion has maintained that the Communist Party itself is gradually restoring capitalism in China while keeping a tight grip on political power. This position was widely and loudly trumpeted late last year when the 16th Congress of the CCP legitimized party membership for capitalist entrepreneurs. “China Turns Its Back on Communism to Join Long March of the Capitalists” was a typical headline in the Western press, in this case that of the London Guardian (9 November 2002).
In fact, this congress did not introduce a significant change in either the social composition of the CCP, which after all has 66 million members, or its functional ideology. According to an official survey, of China’s two million private business owners 600,000 are party members and have been for some time. The overwhelming majority of these were longtime CCP managerial cadre who took over the small state-owned enterprises they were running when these were privatized over the past several years.
Some groups that falsely claim to be Trotskyist have embraced the now-conventional wisdom in Western bourgeois circles that “capitalist roadism” has decisively triumphed among those governing China. Commenting on the 16th CCP Congress, the British-centered tendency led by Peter Taaffe wrote: “China is on the road to complete capitalist restoration, but the ruling clique are attempting to do this gradually and by maintaining their repressive authoritarian grip” (Socialist, 22 November 2002). By labeling China’s government an “authoritarian” capitalist-restorationist regime, the Taaffeites and their ilk can justify supporting imperialist-backed anti-Communist forces in China in the name of promoting “democracy,” just as they supported Boris Yeltsin’s “democratic” counterrevolution in the USSR in 1991.
In maintaining that China continues to be a bureaucratically deformed expression of proletarian state power, we do not deny or minimize the growing social weight in China of both the newly fledged capitalist entrepreneurs on the mainland and the old, established offshore Chinese bourgeoisie in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Many a top government and/or party official has a son, younger brother, nephew—or, as in the case of Chinese president Hu Jintao, son-in-law—who’s a private businessman.
Nonetheless, the political power of the main body of the Beijing Stalinist bureaucracy continues to be based on the core collectivized elements of China’s economy. Furthermore, the economic policies of the CCP regime are still constrained by fear of social—especially working-class—unrest which could topple it. This came close to happening in 1989 when student-centered protests for political liberalization and against corruption triggered a spontaneous workers revolt that was then suppressed with great bloodshed by regime-loyal army units.
A capitalist counterrevolution in China (as in East Europe and the former USSR) would be accompanied by the collapse of Stalinist bonapartism and the political fracturing of the ruling Communist Party. The economic policies of the Beijing Stalinist regime that encourage capitalist enterprise (and the corresponding rightward shifts in the bureaucracy’s formal ideological posture) have increasingly strengthened those social forces that will give rise to imperialist-backed, openly counterrevolutionary factions and parties when the CCP can no longer maintain its present monopoly of political power.
This can be clearly seen today in the capitalist enclave of Hong Kong, the one part of the PRC where bourgeois oppositional parties exist. Last summer, Hong Kong’s Democratic Party organized mass, anti-Communist mobilizations openly supported by the Bush administration in Washington and its junior partners in London.