CHINESE CAPITALISM ( 1 )

 CHINA AND CAPITALIST PROPERTY RIGHTS

On 16 July British industrial capital’s representative body, the CBI, gave its somewhat begrudging support to what it had called, on 16 May, ‘an expensive option of last resort’, namely the nationalization of British Steel. Despite their reservations about potential compensation costs and a (probably) valid fear of a negative impact on future investment, for the moment we can assume that industrial capital is okay with bearing the tax burden of a reported daily subsidy of £1.3m. In the ‘national interest’ of course (tinyurl.com/yc58wxjs).

Nationalization might be welcome news for British Steel’s 2,700 workers, but it is less than welcome in China, if we are to judge by the 17 July report on the Global Times website, one of the Chinese state’s English mouthpieces.

According to the site, the Chinese Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) is dead against this nationalization. MOFCOM points out that British Steel is (was) a subsidiary of China’s Jingye Group, and says the British government has undermined Jingye’s ‘legitimate rights and interests’ and is severely damaging Chinese companies’ confidence in investing in the UK’. Somewhat in agreement with the CBI then. MOFCOM is also ‘pledging to take strong measures to safeguard [these] lawful interests’, although they don’t go into details about what these measures might be.

It is clear from the article that the Chinese state supports Jingye’s demand for compensation for its ‘substantial financial investments in continuous operations [and] equipment upgrades’ since 2020. There is also a clear statement that the state will defend the interests of any Chinese company whose UK investments are threatened in future. Again, a position with which the CBI doubtless concurs, and the type of position it would expect the British government to adopt should any of its members be threatened by some uppity foreign politicians.

Let’s pause a minute though. Isn’t the country concerned always referred to as ‘Communist China’ by the capitalist media? Run by the Chinese Communist Party? Filthy Marxists, every last one of them then.

Filthy Marxists pledged to defend the ‘legitimate interests’ of private property – after all, Jingye Group is a privately owned company with 40,000 employees. As it is privately owned, there is no share price but it claims an internationally recognised ‘brand value’ of almost £14 billion, putting it in the top 4 of Chinese steel producers (tinyurl.com/nhe4sv5r).

So ‘Sinified Marxism’, a Marxism tailored to the Chinese context, is defending private property now. Understandable, given that 60 percent of Chinese GDP is created in the private sector. This is why the Private Sector Promotion Law came into effect in May 2025, ‘promoting the private sector […], strengthening legal protections and injecting fresh momentum into a key driver of the world’s second-largest economy’. It ‘aims to optimize the development environment for the sector, ensure fair market competition, and promote the growth of both the private economy and private entrepreneurs’ (Global Times).

We can assume that the CBI would be less begrudging in its support for such a law but it does somewhat contradict the Chinese constitution which tells us that: ‘The socialist transformation of private ownership of the means of production has been completed’. Perhaps steel works aren’t part of the means of production – could this be a case of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’?

Leaving that aside for now, what we can’t quite understand, with all that capital washing about, is how that same constitution can state that ‘the system of exploitation of man by man [has been] abolished’. Nor how, beginning slowly around the time the constitution was published (1982), billions of dollars of private capital have flowed into China in the form of foreign direct investment (FDI), peaking in 2021, when $344 billion was invested. Could it be that the foreign capitalists and their fund managers all failed to carry out due diligence, that none of them had studied the economic situation, that they had no idea that there is no exploitation in China, hence there is no possibility of their capital being able to return a profit, the sole aim of capital?

Answer? No, capital is only attracted to China to buy labour power in the expectation that it will generate surplus value – in other words, it goes only with the idea of exploiting the working class – the constitution is just so much tosh.

Let’s take another example, again from the Global Times (3 March 2026). It discusses the state’s plan to increase ‘support for financial development by optimizing preferential tax regimes for funds and single-family offices, attracting global capital convergence. Hong Kong is projected to become the world’s largest cross-border wealth management center in the coming years’. A single-family office, by the way, isn’t for the average family, it’s just for the ones that have so much money that they can afford to employ their own staff to manage their investments.

In other words, the Chinese state is trying to make it cheaper and more profitable for capitalists to gamble in HK’s stock exchange casinos.

What the ruling clique in China has learned is that they have to do exactly the same as any other government – whether of the left or of the right. That is, create conditions in which capitalists are confident that they will be able to scoop up surplus value to their heart’s content.

Quite how long private capital will put up with the Chinese Communist Party supping at its table remains to be seen.

CHINA AND AMERICA

After more than twenty years of waging a propaganda war against each other and working up suspicions and hatred among their respective working classes, the American and Chinese mobster politicians are to seek some kind of reconciliation.

To those numbered in their millions all over the world, who mouthed and continue to mouth the slogans of Chinese capitalism denouncing “American imperialism”, and equally to all those who mouthed the phrases of American capitalism denouncing “Chinese expansionism”, it must seem as bewildering as were the Catholic church to suddenly get together with the League of Militant Atheists. After mountains of vitriolic propaganda, oceans of hate and the widespread belief that a real and unbridgeable ideological chasm separates the two sides, what explanation can there be for such a momentous reversal of attitudes?

Such about-faces are far from unheard of in the double dealing world of lies and hypocrisy which is capitalism. Stalin and the Bolshevik heads of Soviet capitalism got together with Nazi Germany and, after denouncing the war as imperialist, wound up on the side of British and American imperialism against their former Nazi friends. Conversely, Churchill who had spent twenty-five years denouncing the Soviet regime as a “cancerous growth”, wound up as head of British capitalism, supporting Soviet state-capitalism against Hitler and Mussolini (whom he had formerly admired).

Russia and China are capitalist countries, whose foreign policies, quests for world markets, world investments and military power only make sense when seen as part of the world-wide rivalry that characterizes capitalism everywhere.

If the British capitalist class (or most of them) are jubilant at the prospect of multiplying their profits in the European market of 250 million people, large sections of the American capitalist class must have been biting their nails for years at the frustration of missing the pickings of the Chinese market.

During the years since 1948, trade, and even more so investment, has been rigidly restricted between Western capitalism and China. Successive American governments have pursued a policy of “containment”. For many years developing Chinese capitalism depended heavily on Russian equipment and technicians. But during the last ten years when the Russian and Chinese rulers have been embroiled in mutual abuse, technicians have been withdrawn. All this has forced capitalism in China to rely on its own resources and know-how. It has been found that containment and trade embargoes only meant less reliance on the outside world and a greater impetus for developing internal technology.

The priorities of capitalism in China are the same as in other powerful capitalist countries. They exploded their first A-bomb in October 1964 followed by their first H-bomb two years later. From then on it was only a matter of time before they mastered the rocket techniques for delivering them. This marked a significant turning point in how the West regarded the threat of China. When China put her first satellite into orbit in April 1970, Time magazine (11 May 1970) discussed the prospects of rockets and guidance systems and declared, “Peking beyond any doubt will, within weeks or months, possess at least the first elements of a nuclear missile force.” The article went on to review the likely impact on other countries and said “As Japan assumes a larger role in Asia, the country may feel the need for the superpower weapons to match its growing international status”. Which is all very ominous and shows how commercial struggles and military power go together.

During this period there was diminishing opposition to China’s entry into the so-called United Nations. It became known that despite all the mud-slinging, American and Chinese representatives had for years been meeting secretly in Warsaw.

True to their dedication to profits and military force, it took the possession of nuclear weapons to make American capitalism take Chinese capitalism seriously.

Nixon has pulled off the political coup of a life time—if things continue to go in a direction favorable to both sides. Which is not bad considering he does not officially recognise the existence of the Peking government. However, these get-togethers can burst into flame one moment and freeze over the next. But no doubt the masters of mass head-fixing on both sides will be ready to blame each other if it all turns sour. Just as Nixon and Chou-En-Lai will be seen on television smiling and embracing each other, having forgotten the threats of war and mutual destruction so the threats will be revived and the smiling forgotten, if after all it does not come off. An additional irony is that it should fall to Nixon to go sweet-talking in China, since it was he who first made his name as a red-baiter in the post-war years.

Peace is avowed as the heart-felt desire of both sides. And no doubt many millions of ordinary workers will welcome the prospect of diminished hostility. Any sign of hope will be grabbed at by a generation that has seen nothing but wars and military build-ups. But here again there is plenty of evidence to show how hollow these hopes are. There have been hundreds of conferences since the end of the Second World War and the major powers (America, Russia, France, China and Britain) have endlessly negotiated and yet there have been 73 wars including Korea and Vietnam, between 1945 and 1968. Many times hopes have been built up of reducing nuclear weapons, but despite negotiations they have steadily proliferated. After years of friendly relations, Russia and China came close to war in 1969. These two giants keep up the pretence of being different from imperialist America and Britain and used to heap admiration upon each other as “socialist” brothers. Yet they were driven to each other’s throats by the same sordid territorial ambitions as any openly capitalist countries.

What chance is there of China and America forming a relationship where commercial, strategic and territorial ambitions do not clash? It is precisely these interests which make capitalism what it is. The struggles for trade, investments, strategic positions and profits, make clashes inevitable.

The war in Vietnam has dragged on despite years of negotiations. All the suffering, death and destruction are as nothing to the negotiators who ruthlessly stick out for the interests they represent. China may now be expected to use her influence to pull American chestnuts out of the fire. Despite their support for North Vietnam and all the years of anti-American propaganda, such a service to American capitalism must now be regarded as a good bargaining lever. During 1966 China supplied the American air-force with steel for building air-bases in full knowledge of what this meant for their allies in the North. So both sides are well versed in the arts of cynicism and double-cross.

The Japanese government seems enthusiastic at the prospect of a new approach to China. Japan fought a long and bitter war to get her hands on the loot from China. What they failed to achieve by arms they now hope to achieve through the circulation of commodities. Japan is in an expansion frenzy and is hungry for raw-materials and markets.

There may be a period of mad scramble to get into China with capital investments to develop industry and extract minerals, but in the long-term, another massive rival for markets will emerge. Capitalism can operate in no other way. The smiles and frowns of politicians only reflect the prevailing situations presented to them by capitalism.
The final irony, to this latest stage of developments between China and America, might be Russian opposition to China’s entry into the UN. The Russian ruling class too have established “better relations” with Washington, so they may well play it cool. Their reaction will in any case be calculated to create whatever pressure is need to make Russian interests felt in what is going on.

Regardless of the public face they show, Russia, China and America will watch each other very closely. They are each in the same game for what they can get. The fact that friendly relations may exist for a time between each of them, should delude nobody. Trade does not mean trust. They will continue to spy on each other. Investments do not receive peace. They will each maintain their nuclear and other weapons.

Only the working class can get rid of this system of mutual suspicion, rivalry and war. This will involve establishing a world community where trade and investments and military force will have no place. Neither will the cynicism and hypocrisy of politicians.

WHAT’S HAPPENING IN CHINA

The so-called communist rulers of China are in trouble. They are trying to achieve two impossible feats; to make exploitation popular with the Chinese workers and to kid them along that the form of capitalism which is developing there is socialism.

The latest campaign to accomplish this is called the “Socialist Education Campaign”, now in full swing, which was recently commended by the Chinese premier as being “of great revolutionary and historical significance”. Such campaigns are no novelty in “communist” China, where the workers seem to need a lot of convincing.

Previous campaigns have been passed off as methods of getting rid of the remains of capitalism or as part of the building-up of a “communist” system of society, or as the eradication of specific errors and failings of the Old China. They were represented as a necessary process of cleaning up and modernising the social structure and they dealt largely with problems that were laid at the door of the old era.

But this time it is different, in that the government leaders have to deal with problems which, they frankly proclaim arise directly from the present system of society. The “Socialist Education Campaign” is teaching workers, both in industry and the civil service, to deal with the new problems caused by the creation of a modern, technically developed state from a recently backward country. It is this which enables Premier Chou-En-lai to assign “historical significance” to the current campaign.

To enable them to reconcile awkward facts with an incorrect interpretation of society, the Chinese have to be dosed with plenty of “communist” education.

One problem with which they have to deal is that of the new “managerial class”. Mao-Tze-tung, Chou-En-lai and the rest of the old die-hards of the Communist Party, were tough, unscrupulous but courageous labour leaders tested in battle and called upon for great personal sacrifices in prompting the Communist Party to the leadership of what they may have once believed was a different system of society.

But the old guard are getting older, and they are finding it difficult to select their successors from the ranks of the new business bureaucracy who seem to be taking their place. These young people are slick, well educated executive types who are rising to the top in the nationalised concerns and government departments. They have little understanding of political theory, little desire to make personal sacrifices, but, like business executives the world over, are ambitious to rise in the hierarchy and enjoy the luxuries which only the possession of money makes possible. Such is a thumb-nail sketch of one of the groups that the die-hards are trying to impregnate with so-called communist ideology. But the die-hards are as horrified at this developing class, as the swan was when it found it had hatched a duckling. Capitalist society develops along its own lines, irrespective of the muddled thinking of its apologists.

An Tzu-wen, Director of the Organisation Department of the Party’s Central Committee, considered the nature of some of these groups in some detail in an article which appeared in the Party journal Red Flag on 22/9/64 and which was reported in the China Quarterly April/June 1965. An is primarily concerned with the campaign to train successors to the present leadership. He distinguishes between the older cadres of pre-liberation vintage who have failed to adapt themselves to the technical and organisational development going on, and the younger ones who have not the political benefit of those who went through the Civil War.

It is from An’s article that it is possible to build up a picture of the various groups he sees developing around him. His criticisms have been publicised to the greatest extent possible in the Chinese national press and on the radio. He said that the gravest dilemma for the Chinese leaders may be the conflict between their own background and the need for modernisation in economic planning.

Chou-En-lai made it clear in his report last December that one of the main motives behind the “Socialist Education Movement’’ was the need to prepare the country for economic expansion. He speaks of the need for a “scientific and realistic approach”. An calls on the older cadres to adapt themselves and he describes the movement as “a mass movement for studying Marxist-Leninist and Mao Tse-tung ideology with emphasis in its flexible interpretation and application”.

The Chinese Government are training the new managerial class to a degree which must involve contact with the thinking of the outside world and they are at the same time inducing the old die-hards to work efficiently in the fervent atmosphere of industrial capitalism, misnamed “socialist expansion”.

Another section being “educated” are the Chinese followers of the Russian communist party. Since it now seems that many of the interests of the Chinese ruling class are opposed to those of .the Russian, Chinese supporters must be “re-educated” to enable them to make an intellectual somersault. China is living in a capitalist world jungle and must be prepared, in its own interests, to support a war against its erstwhile “comrades”. There must be no fifth column in the Chinese camp.

Another homegrown problem is the rise of the wealthy farmer, a new economic group since the seizure of governmental power by the Chinese “communists”. With their surpluses of commodity crops they have made a mockery of the food and clothing rationing which still obtains in China. The black market is now known as the free market and is officially recognised by the Government. Any of the rationed goods can be obtained at a higher price and this is part of a process whereby the rural rich are becoming richer. Universal rationing for all has become rationing by price, officially lauded by the authorities. This, of course, is the state of affairs to which the workers of the rest of the world are accustomed, whether they are starving in the backward countries or the “affluent” of western capitalism.

China has had a somewhat different history of social development to the West over the centuries, so that capitalism there is a little different from capitalism here in some of the details. But Chinese workers have basically the same economic interests as the workers here; and the so-called communist government there behaves domestically and in its foreign policies, like the capitalist power that in fact it is.

LIFE & TIMES – WORK IN CHINA AND THE UK

The other day I had a conversation with someone who told me he’d recently visited China and, having worked there in the past, now found things significantly changed. The context of this was a university academic, a social scientist, coming to speak with his trade union’s volunteer personal case officer (myself). He (I’ll call him Simon) was dissatisfied with his work situation largely owing to the volume of work he was being given, consisting of teaching, administration and research. In particular he was concerned that the teaching and administration had become so overwhelming that he was being left with little time to get on with and publish his research, which is what would dictate the progress of his career. What could be done? I made a few suggestions, among which was an approach by the union to his head of department protesting at his treatment and its apparent unfairness. He seemed happy with this – as a first step anyway.

‘Dire’
But in mentioning China at the start of our conversation, he’d also told me that, on his recent visit there with his wife, also a social scientist and herself Chinese, both of them had been offered jobs at a Chinese university. They’d thought about it but decided not to take up the offer because the current situation in China was ‘dire’ (his word). This made me curious, so after talking about Simon’s current employment issues, I asked him what he meant by ‘dire’ in relation to China. He was only too ready to explain.

He said there were three main reasons. The first one had been of particular concern to his wife – a noticeable increase in what he called misogyny. He explained that China’s ‘one-child’ policy having been abandoned quite some time ago, the government was concerned that the population now wasn’t replacing itself and so was putting considerable pressure on women to have more children and stay at home to bring them up. Women insisting on being employed were being portrayed almost as betrayers of the nation. The second thing was that they had noticed, since they last spent time there, that the climate had become noticeably more repressive. This manifested itself, for example, in university academics having to seek special permission simply if they wanted to spend a weekend away in another city or another part of the country and in it having become more difficult to get colleagues they knew to speak openly about any subject that might be considered sensitive or political. The third thing was that it was being made increasingly difficult for foreigners to obtain visas to stay in the country or to continue residence there, one consequence of which was that it was not unusual for western media correspondents not to have their visas renewed. Simon also told me they noticed a definite deterioration in economic conditions with signs that the government seemed nervous about possible unrest or protest and was seeking ways (eg, the furore about Taiwan) of distracting attention from deteriorating prospects and living conditions for its citizens. He ended by wondering, tongue in cheek of course, whether, given the increasingly repressive atmosphere, a comparison with the Ming dynasty might not be appropriate.

Xi Jinping: a ruler for ever?

All of this is anecdotal of course, but there does seem a lot of backing for Simon’s take on China from a good many other sources. For example, recent newspaper coverage has reported on the shrinking of China’s population and government concern about the low birth rate leading potentially to a loss of young workers. China’s apparently permanent leader Xi Jinping has been quoted as referring to women playing ‘a unique role in promoting traditional virtues’ and to the ‘need to cultivate a new marriage and childbearing culture to tackle the ageing population’. There is also evidence that, after decades of relatively high economic growth under a mixture of state and private capitalism, China’s economy is losing momentum, with significant downturns in various sectors (eg, building and construction, property, private tutoring, data management and transfer), unrest and unemployment leading to strikes and demonstrations among workers and also concern within the small Chinese private capitalist class, some of them fabulously rich, about government crackdowns, as the one-party regime seeks to tighten its control over both state and private economic activity.

As long ago as the 1980s, many people thought that China was moving towards less authoritarian, more democratic political institutions. Such hopes were dashed by the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, but there are again some commentators who consider that the current regime will find it difficult in the longer term to contain social unrest and this may lead to more enlightened government policies or at least a relaxation of repression – as happened for example in Eastern Europe where, against most people’s expectations, seemingly stable regimes crumbled almost overnight. This is obviously to be hoped for, since not only is the current anti-democratic, repressive regime an obstacle to the needs of continuing capitalist development, bumping up against the free circulation and exchange of ideas that need to go with that development, but it is also an obstacle to the subsequent development of socialist consciousness that we are looking for.

Socialism (with Chinese characteristics?)

To return to Simon and his wife, their perception of the way the Chinese regime currently operates (which it laughably called ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’) and their rationale for not staying there seem fully corroborated. There seems little doubt that their work situation and their freedoms, academic and otherwise, would have been far more restricted in China than in the UK. Of course, Simon had complaints about the way he was being treated by his employer here. But at least he was able to seek to address this via his trade union, a body independent of government or other ‘higher’ authority. How much more difficult would he have found the same kind of thing in China, where unions do exist but are closely government monitored and controlled? Would the outcome be a cancelled visa? Anyway, hasten the day when all such autocracies give way to at least the limited democracy that capitalism can offer and provide the ground for workers to decide collectively that they want to move on the road to that genuine alternative system of society beyond the system of wages, money and profit, which we call socialism.

THE WISDOM OF CHINA?

Porcelain, Filigree and Philosophy
Ever since those many delightful commodities— porcelain, silk, embroidery, cloisonné enamel ware, carved jade and ivory, paintings, wallpaper and the like—were brought into Europe in quantity, there has also been an invisible import. A civilization that could produce such works of art stimulated curiosity, and many thoughtful people tried to understand the remarkable and impressive social theories that dominated Chinese life at the time. They saw a chance to use these ideas, which, though old in China, were newly imported into Europe. Chinese philosophy propounded theories which were particularly useful to the spokesmen for those who were finding that the feudal system of society on the Continent was becoming outmoded.

Did China influence the French Revolution ?
Confucianism became popular, though it was not generally recognised that this was only one of three systems of thought in China. Chinese philosophy, in the Europe of the 17th and 18th centuries, meant only Confucianism which was so eminently to the taste of those who wished to overthrow feudalism. As Maurice Collis remarks in The Great Within, men had freed themselves from the limitations imposed by mediaeval theology and its scholastic metaphysics; they were tiring of the half-mythological speculations of the Renaissance: they had set their feet in a new rational world. The condition of society and the structure of the state, these were the practical problems which they were trying to pose and solve. What was therefore their surprise at perceiving that 2½ thousand years ago in China a philosopher had devoted his attention almost precisely to the same problems and found an answer that worked out in practice.

Similar conditions anywhere at any time give rise to comparable thoughts. Some present-day sinologists say that China thus had its effect on the French Revolution. But history shows that new economic classes in society have little difficulty in rationalising their aspirations. If they cannot find a ready-made philosophy then their thinkers will produce one. If the French bourgeoisie had not been introduced to Confucianism it is doubtful if there would have been any difference in subsequent events. The thinkers in Europe felt that their men must act well if possessing right knowledge and this could only be acquired by the reasoning mind. This was all very modern at that time: it was clearly connected with the great advance then taking place in mathematics and the natural sciences.

Famous men who plugged Chinese Philosophy

Leibniz (1646-1716) made great use of Jesuit missionary publications and in his correspondence mentions “the work of Confucius, the King of Chinese philosophers, which has been published this year in Paris.” In 1697 he published his Novissima Sinica, in which he argued that just as Europe had sent missionaries to China so should China send to Europe to give instructions in government and morality.

Holding such views it is not surprising to find that his metaphysics are tinged with Confucian ideas.

Quesnay (1694-1774) was known as the European Confucius. It was he who, after a study of the Chinese classics, formulated a political philosophy derived from them with the practical object of inducing the Monarchy in France to model itself upon the Imperial Government of China. He saw that the French government was heading for revolution but argued in his book Le Despotism de la Chine (1767) that it could be reformed and saved if Louis XV should become an enlightened despot in the Chinese classic sense.

Voltaire (1694-1778) was another enthusiastic follower of Confucius, and in his play the plot turns upon the thesis, of which the Chinese were so fond, that as soon as the Outer Barbarians (as Europeans were called in China) come under the influence of Confucian culture they mend their ways and lead the moral life.

The feudal system of society in France at this time threw up the theory that the king can do no wrong. Some sinologists declare Chinese theories (including that of the Emperor ruling on approval, so to speak, and that if his rule does not win popular approval he must be dismissed), were a revolutionary force in feudal Europe and helped to influence the social revolution to capitalism which followed. Though men can learn from early history, in general it is the prevailing economic set-up that forms the basis upon which men build their ideas and policies.

Some say “Good old Confucius,” but we say . . .
Even at the present time it is quite normal for the professional sinologists to advocate that the West would do well to follow the teachings of Confucius, and it may be a coincidence, but they seem to find in the teaching of the Old Master many virtues which it would be in the interests of our ruling class to inculcate in us. Such as humbleness in the presence of superiors and submissiveness to the State conservatism of ideas. Some even plug the old French Jesuit theory that Confucius was practically God.

The object here is to delve into this controversial subject to see if the tenets of Confucius can be helpful to the working-class movement

But first let us consider what Confucius advocated. He lived about 2½ thousand years ago and China at that time was in a period of great change. Until then there was ample land for expansion, but the population was increasing along with wealth. State boundaries became contiguous and this was a further cause of the friction which developed into internecine warfare as the more powerful Chinese States swallowed the weaker. But on the other hand, the people still obtained their livelihood from agriculture. Farms in river valleys had to be drained, then dykes built to contain floods. Farms on higher ground necessitated water systems to supplement the rain which in that country is uncertain. The maintenance work on these water installations was heavy and done by human power. Fairly large groups were required to co-operate in this work and so large family groups composed of several generations was the normal unit of society. This, then, was the milieu into which Confucius came. The prevailing insecurity induced him, as is quite usual in such circumstances, to look back to the good old days when the ruling classes exploited their subjects without having to fight for this right. They needed a code of ethics in order to enable their subjects to live peacefully together in these great family units and to keep the unit always submissive to the State, and Confucius, the conservative sage, obliged by consolidating the philosophy which bears his name, though the tenets were practised before his time.

Chinese Ship of State drops the Pilot
This philosophy was useful in China just as long as this system of farming lasted, but in 1949, when a capitalist government seized control they promptly dropped Confucianism as no longer suitable. Workers work harder if their income is kept for their wives and children and not shared amongst many relatives. The modern State taking over control of waterworks dispenses with the need for the old organisations. Ring out the old, ring in the new, cut out the deadwood, including Confucianism —this is Capitalism in China. Mao tse-tung, himself a Confucian scholar, leads this refrain. The ancient wisdom of China arose in an ancient system of society, but now, both have passed away. It is futile to try to resurrect the past.

Why Socialists reject Confucianism

Confucianism does not arise from Capitalist conditions and cannot be used by those living in Capitalism— the Chinese themselves recognise this. It is doubtful if any philosophy makes anything but nonsense outside of the conditions which give rise to it. It is no accident that Christianity, the religion of the slaves of the Roman Empire and which was found such a consolation for the slaves of later times, has failed so utterly to take root in China, a land of yeoman farmers living since time immemorial in civil service controlled State where, domestic work apart, slavery was virtually unknown.

We in the working-class movement have a Socialist philosophy which is all-embracing and leaves no vacuum to be filled by other systems of thought. It deals with the labour theory of value, the class struggle and the materialist conception of history, which point the way to a classless system of society where the means of life will be held in common. Arising from this we have an attitude towards trade unions, war, morals, marriage, property rights, the wages system, trade, religion, yes, and even Chinese philosophy. We leave the nostalgic yearnings of Confucius to the spokesmen who find part of it useful to capitalism, while we are content to explain it, and in so doing, demonstrate the correctness of the materialist conception of history which is the pillar of our Socialist outlook.

BIRD’S EYE VIEW – NO SAFETY AT WORK, CHINA’S BILLIONAIRES

Danger: Capitalism at work

Writing about the factory regime in nineteenth-century England, Karl Marx observed: ‘But in its blind unrestrainable passion, its werewolf hunger for surplus labour, capital oversteps not only the moral, but even the merely physical maximum bounds of the body. It steals the time required for the consumption of fresh air and sunlight. … All that concerns it is simply and solely the maximum of labour power that can be rendered fluent in a working day. It attains this end by shortening the extent of the labourer’s life, as a greedy farmer snatches increased produce from the soil by robbing it of its fertility’ (Capital Vol. I, Chapter 10, 1867, tinyurl.com/9xzpn7p4 ).

The irony that Zero Hedge, a website home to howling mad libertarian supporters of capitalism (motto: on a long enough timeline the survival rate for everyone drops to zero), reminded us on May Day this year of one tragic consequence of their social system of war and want at work cannot be overlooked: ‘It’s been 10 years since the Rana Plaza factory collapse in the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka, where more than 1,100 people died and over 2,600 were injured’ (tinyurl.com/y75u85t5 ).

Workers’ rights 1 (sporadic violations) – 5 (no guarantee)
Since Marx’s day, the werewolf can be heard baying for blood worldwide. The same Zero Hedge article informs us: ‘… 87 percent of countries having violated their workers’ right to strike in 2022, up from 63 percent in 2014. According to the report, trade unionists were murdered in 13 countries last year, with Colombia the deadliest nation. Last year, the Middle East and North Africa received the worst score of the regions on the Global Rights Index with an average of 4.53. It was followed by Asia-Pacific with 4.22, Africa with 3.76, the Americas with 3.52 and Europe with 2.49. The Asia-Pacific region saw its average rating worsen slightly in 2021 from 4.17 to 4.22 the following year. While the chart considers not only garment workers but all workers generally, ITUC [International Trade Union Confederation] analysts explain that in Bangladesh, the garment industry is one of the biggest sectors, employing more than 4.5 million people. The country received a score of 5, signifying that there is no guarantee of rights to workers. According to the report, workers experienced violence in 43 percent of countries in the Asia-Pacific region, up from 35 percent in 2021. In Bangladesh, workers strikes were met with brutality by the authorities, with at least five killed, while attempts at forming unions were shut down. India and Pakistan too saw police brutality against workers, while authorities in Hong Kong clamped down on trade unions and pro-democracy organizations and human rights abuses continued in Myanmar. In China, persecuted minorities were detained by the authorities and coerced into forced labor to fuel the garment industry.’

Never-ending struggle
‘Every year more people are killed at work than in wars. Most don’t die of mystery ailments, or in tragic “accidents”. They die because an employer decided their safety just wasn’t that important a priority’ (University and College Union, 5 May, tinyurl.com/594mtbk5 ).

International Workers Memorial Day (IWMD), 28 April, commemorates those workers. But Marx was right to conclude:’ Trades Unions work well as centers of resistance against the encroachments of capital. They fail partially from an injudicious use of their power. They fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerrilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organized forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class, that is to say the ultimate abolition of the wages system’ (XIV. The Struggle Between Capital and Labour and its Results, Value, Price and Profit, 1865, tinyurl.com/ye2aszp6 ).

China, Inc.

The China Global Television Network reminded us on May Day that the dictator Xi in his 2018 New Year Address stated: ‘Happiness is achieved through hard work’ (tinyurl.com/3jmzehu8 ). Another article dated 1 May and titled ‘One in 5 young people in Chinese cities is out of work. Beijing wants them to work in the fields’ goes on to inform us:

”’Chinese students, exhausted by pandemic lockdowns and concerned about China’s ever-evolving model of state capitalism, are beginning to realize that a degree may not improve their social position, nor result in some other guaranteed benefit,” said Craig Singleton, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ (WENY News, tinyurl.com/2ya9wrjr).

There you have it in black and white: China as state capitalist. The hallmarks, such as class society, commodity production, profit motive, exploitation of wage labour, markets, etc., are not hidden. Consider, China has the world’s highest number of billionaires, many of them in the rubber stamp parliament, with a combined wealth of US$4.5 trillion. They, like the 1 percent worldwide, have been doing very nicely thanks to us. China Labor Watch has issued many reports detailing workers’ countless hours of overtime, contact with dangerous chemicals and missing wages. Their review of ‘Dying for an iPhone: Apple, Foxconn, and the Lives of China’s Workers’ is informative: ‘Well-documented in the media and by labor rights groups, those conditions include exhausting work, disciplinary management style, and increasing pressure to produce in short time frames, all for meagre wages’ (11 September 2020, tinyurl.com/3epk6nz3 ). Furthermore, China has more strikes per year than any other country, many thousands. These strikes are often unplanned, spontaneous, even chaotic, and the bosses stop at nothing to suppress them: they lie, cheat, call in the police, and hire gangsters to intimidate strikers or even beat them up.

LETTER: CHINA’S COMMUNIST PARTY

Dear Friends,
Frank Offord states that the early Chinese Communist Party consisted entirely of an affluent and educated elite—”the ordinary worker being conspicuous by his absence”. I wonder where he gets his information from, he should read Red Star over China by Edgar Snow, an unbiased account of the early days of the revolution written inside the Communist areas of North West China in 1937.
Mao tse-Tung’s father was in fact a poor peasant who had managed to increase his property and income until he acquired the status of rich peasant, employing only one labourer—his family doing most of the work. Mao himself started working in the fields at the age of six, later became an apprentice in a rice shop. He finally went to a proper school at the age of sixteen, and then against his father’s wishes and with a minute allowance. Lin Piao’s father had once owned a small factory, but had been forced out of business by extortionate taxes. Only Chou en-Lai is a member of a traditional mandarin family. It is true that the Communist Party was founded by intellectuals—so are most organisations—but this is hardly surprising considering that the peasants and workers, oppressed as they were with fiercely reactionary landlords and their attendant thugs, and by immense taxes, had no chance to come into contact with Marxist thought. Once the party had been founded the proletariat joined in large numbers.
One thing is certain, the Chinese revolution was achieved not by power-seeking members of the bourgeoisie, but by men who suffered over twenty years of continual fighting and hardship simply because they believed firmly in their convictions. Maybe these same men betrayed their convictions when they gained power, nevertheless the Chinese worker is now a responsible citizen, not a slave. Of course there will always be people seeking wealth as long as money continues to exist, and these people are worthy of our hate. The SPGB attacks everybody and everything—sometimes justifiably and sometimes not—but exaggeration will do nothing to help the cause. By taking it too far you are liable to isolate yourselves and become entirely impotent. You’ll be saying that ‘Che’ Guevara was in it only for the money next.

Reply
Edgar Snow got his information through being in China at the time, but we can refer our correspondent to what is in our opinion the best work on the subject written so far—Revolution in China by Fitzgerald, from which we quote from page 193:

“At present the Chinese Communist Party is recruited in very large measure from the educated class, the university students … It is thus not really at all a party made up of members of the toiling masses. It could not be, because the peasants are still mainly illiterate, the workmen very little educated, and too few to supply the dominant clement. The university students come from the classes which Mao Tsc-tung has stigmatized as only in part reliable, and lacking in vision and courage, the former country squires or landlords, the city bourgeois and the old official families . . . The present generation of recruits, taken into the party in very large numbers after ‘liberation’ arc mainly university students, still very young. They will form the bulk of the Communist Parly for another forty years
The new members from these mandarin families are, of course, ardent Communists, sincere believers in the New Democracy, servants of the people. They are also precisely the same group of people who have governed China for the last two thousand years. It is in their blood. They are born to rule, and whether by virtue of Confucius and the Emperor, or Marx and Mao Tse-tung, makes very little real difference. Deep rooted, not in any way destroyed by the Revolution, is the old Chinese conviction that government is an affair for the elite, for those who sit in the seats of authority, and that the qualification for such a seat is knowledge of the orthodox doctrine, not blood, nor wealth, but ‘book perfume’ is the real test.”

Regarding Mao Tse-tung’s background we can give a tip—’straight from the horse’s mouth’ by quoting the statement made by Mao himself taken down by Edgar Snow and published in Red Star Over China which, as our correspondent says, is an unbiased account. On page 121 he says that it took the five members of the family plus a hired hand to run their farm while his father devoted his time to his prosperous grain business and other activities. “The old man continued to amass wealth or what was considered to be a great fortune in that little village. He did not buy more land himself, but he bought many mortgages on other people’s land”.

It should be remembered that due to lack of development in China at that time it was not necessary for a prosperous business man to own a firm the size of say Marks & Spencer in order to be “one of the nobs”.

Mao had the equivalent of a provincial University education and graduated at the age of 25 (Mao Tse-tung by Stewart Schram—Pelican Books), and so became one of the educated elite and typical of the recruits to the Mandarin class that has traditionally ruled China right up to and including the present period of Capitalism there.

We do not hate, as individuals, either the capitalists or the wage slaves who work for them; it is the capitalist system of society which we seek to abolish and replace with Socialism.

BOOK REVIEW: NEW CHINA

China—New Age and New Outlook, by Ping-Chia Kuo. Penguin Books. 3s. 6d.

In this eminently readable book the author discusses the great changes which are going on in China. He seeks to appraise and interpret current developments as a stage in the broad sweep of Chinese history and to search out the trends that have led to the triumph of the Communist Party, and to discuss the problems involved in this process. He takes in the pertinent points in China’s past as well as what he can judge of its future. He says that with the collapse of the feudal system in 200 B.C., land was freely bought and sold and that this led to a concentration of ownership in the hands of the new privileged group and to the growing importance of the landlords as a social class. A great proportion of the peasantry continued to till the land, but did not own it, while the new class of owners exploited the peasantry.

In the course of the last twenty centuries the line of demarcation between the two segments of Chinese society became more steeply drawn. Economically, the landlords virtually controlled the tens of thousands of villages, and moreover, were the only group with the leisure to study and master politics. Thus the government had to fall back on them for the necessary personnel to operate the administrative machinery. This is why in every dynasty the Chinese government was virtually run by men of the landowning families. The tight grip on power by the landlord class was made more enduring by the adoption of Confucianism as the standard education for all officials. For twenty centuries Confucianism blocked progress and change, taught the oppressed to obey and impressed upon the minds of men the virtue of upholding the rule of the landlords. But, in recent times, the development of industry brought the seeds of change and made the collapse of the ancien régime inevitable.

The Nationalist movement, later to be led by Chiang Kai-Shek, left the landlord elite in control of the administration below country level. Thus land reform was effectively blocked. The Communist Party, on the other hand, realised that to develop the country the landlords, as a social class, must be eliminated. To obtain the support of the peasantry, they redistributed land confiscated from the landlords amongst the peasants in those out-of-the-way small sections of the country where they had seized control. This whetted the appetite for Communist Party land reform in the territory controlled by the Nationalists. The plight of the peasants was worsened by the disruption of World War II and, in 1949, the Communist Party were able to seize power on the mainland, leaving the Nationalists, backed by the U.S.A., in control of the island of Formosa. The process of modernising China has been proceeding rapidly. The large holdings of the landowners were quickly distributed amongst the peasants. Then came mutual help groups organised amongst the peasants. This was the thin edge of the wedge in converting the peasant into a landless agricultural wage worker. This primitive organisation gave way to voluntary agricultural co-operatives from which the peasant could withdraw if he so wished. Then on to the next stage—the collectivised farms and finally to the last stage, the Commune.

The Communes consist of 4,000 to 10,000 households. Their central purpose is to expand agricultural production which in turn would speed up industrialisation. The Commune makes monthly payments in the form of a basic wage classified in accordance with the graduations of the members’ work performance, plus bonuses for workers who contribute more than the norm. This is clearly a system based upon the principle of “to each according to his work,” a principle whose aim is to stimulate production. By making the production unit bigger the state makes it impossible for the peasants to pursue individual production except as wage-earners in the employ of the state. But the greatest benefit to production is that the Commune takes on industrial as well as agricultural functions. Perhaps the most dramatic aspect of this development has been the emergence of tens of thousands of small furnaces in the villages, producing pig iron or carbon steel and making farm implements. The fundamental force motivating Communist China’s new role in international affairs is her militant nationalism, which has advanced a new balance of power in the Far East and has helped to produce the tension in world affairs that we are now witnessing. For the moment, the author says, the addition of Soviet military material and Chinese man-power could create a giant army in case of war and this is partly responsible for the Sino-Soviet Alliance.

The author is typically Chinese in the practicality of his approach and in his logical method of thought unburdened by the religious thought typical of the average Western writer. To read this book is to glimpse an insight into the great depth of learning of its author, who incidentally is a Professor of History in an American University. Such a wealth of knowledge makes a mere amateur student of Chinese affairs like your reviewer feel humble. Yet Socialists know that Dr. Ping-Chia Kuo just does not really understand the world of which he writes. He reveals his belief that China is socialist and is ideologically opposed to the capitalist parts of the world. The Socialist sees a world of capitalism, but Dr. Kuo sees two worlds, with Socialism existing side by side with capitalism, and thinks that both, like sheep and goats on one farm, must be taught how to live together. In his book he makes various suggestions as to how this could be accomplished. What the Socialist views as merely the development of capitalism in China, he sees as “Socialist reconstruction” and he adds a plea to the United Nations to understand and befriend China in the interests of peace and goodwill. Nevertheless, to those who are interested in China as one of the possible bogey-men of the capitalist future, this is a useful book to read.

TANG PING, THE NEW CHINA VIRUS?

Usually it’s only Christmas, and maybe a week or two in summer, when more fortunate workers get to stay home for a while and put their feet up, though the break from the rat race is always too short to ever get used to.

But then we got the pandemic. Richer capitalist states collectively took a huge hit – the cost equivalent of a world war – by paying their workers to stay at home with furlough schemes. This might look like paternalistic generosity but in reality they didn’t have much of a choice. Capitalism has to have an available workforce, even when there’s no work, because workers producing wealth is how profits recover after a downturn. That’s why there’s a welfare system and why, historically, the British capitalist class tried to prevent the emigration of workers even during famines. So it was either a question of continuing to pay wages for nothing and probably bankrupting themselves in the process, or get the state – the executive committee of the capitalist class – to borrow the money and do it for them. From the government’s perspective, the enormous furlough bill was certainly more politically survivable than presiding over the wholesale economic and social destruction that would otherwise have occurred, even though it will very likely take generations to pay off the debt.

For workers this has been a true black-swan event, an unprecedented opportunity to stay at home and, basically, find out what it feels like not to be a worker, ie, not be forced to slave away in some dull and shitty job for 40 hours a week just to earn the price of their rent, food and bills.

What was the result? Well of course workers loved it, and now a lot of them don’t want to go back to work, or at least not the same work. When hotels, pubs and restaurants opened up after the lockdowns they found they couldn’t get staff, which may be because the hospitality sector is traditionally the least unionised and so generally has the worst pay and conditions. But it’s not just hospitality that’s suffering. The UK is seeing a record shortage of workers which economists are struggling to explain with a mixed bag of reasons including a spate of early retirements, Brexit, and people living on savings or starting their own micro-businesses. It’s not just the UK either, there’s a global labour shortage, estimated by the US government to be around 40 million, which is causing massive supply chain disruptions just as food and energy prices are hitting the roof. Capitalism has rarely looked so close to coming apart at the seams, though there’s no doubt it will recover in the fullness of time if workers stand by and let it.

What might not recover though is workers’ attitudes to employment after their recent prolonged holiday. For months the western media has been talking in gleeful tones about the phenomenon in China of tang ping, or ‘lying flat’. Just as the Chinese economy is set to overtake the US to become the most dominant global force, Chinese youth is apparently staging a quiet revolt against the ‘996’ turbo-capitalist culture of working non-stop, from 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week, to get ahead at any price. Instead, young people are proposing the less stressful and more humane option of taking it easy and doing the least amount of work possible to get by, aka ‘lying flat’ or, as we would call it, being a slacker. Naturally this has alarmed the Chinese ‘Communist’ Party and is one reason why it is currently cracking down on everything from karaoke to computer games to combat what it sees as a dangerously westernising trend (bloom.bg/3HyhGNd).

What would wipe the schadenfreude off the faces of western employers is if tang ping inspires workers to start spreading a new global ‘lazy virus’. And many post-pandemic workers are just in the mood to do so. Elle Hunt argues in a recent Guardian article that people should quit their job and join something called the ‘anti-work movement’, which questions ‘careerist values and the erosion of workers’ rights, while celebrating idleness’ (bit.ly/32f4NHN). Naturally Bertrand Russell’s well-known essay In praise of idleness gets a mention, although Hunt seems strangely unaware of the even-better-known The Right to be Lazy, by Marx’s son-in-law Paul Lafargue. At any rate, the argument is one that’s familiar to any socialist: what’s the point of flogging your life away solely for the benefit of the rich, when we should all be free to enjoy life and do whatever we want, just as the rich are? Now there is an ‘antiwork forum’ devoted to discussing the viability or otherwise of such a lifestyle choice in capitalism, as well as the reactions of employers to it (reddit.com/r/antiwork/). The forum has ‘gone vertical’ in the past year, with subscribers growing by 400 percent to around 900,000. Here you can find a big reading list from the likes of Bob Black, Fredi Perlman and David Graeber, plus little gems like ‘The idea of having to earn a living implies that, by default, you don’t actually deserve to be alive’. But it also includes opportunistic PC game adverts as well as dubious comments like: ‘you shouldn’t worry about your career. The world will be completely unliveable within 20 years. Just try and have a good time while you can.’ Such millennial fatalism is partly fuelled by climate change anxiety, but is also seen among today’s UK students, many of whom are spending their student loans with gay abandon on the assumption that they’ll probably never get a job earning more than the minimum £27,295 threshold which triggers loan repayments – which is undoubtedly why the government is proposing to lower the threshold to £23,000. That’s right, Rishi, kick the kids when they’re down!

On the other hand, the current labour shortages are driving up pay rates, as employers are faced with a seller’s market and forced to be a little less Scrooge-like, along with the UK government also raising the minimum wage again, this time by a comparatively whopping 60p to £9.50 an hour. All this ought to be great news for workers but unfortunately in many cases the gain on the swings is being offset by the losses on the roundabouts through the highest rate of inflation in the UK for a decade and in the US for thirty years, leading to a US net decline in wages of 1.2 percent (cnb.cx/3clYFiK).

Even so, employers are currently on the back foot as they try to increase profits with a workforce that stubbornly won’t play ball, so we should expect an epidemic of strikes in the next year or so as workers organise to press their collective advantage.

Elle Hunt does not tell us whether she’s planning to ditch her job as a journalist, however she does end with ‘The key, at this crucial juncture, is for all workers to align as a class of people’. Unfortunately she envisages this emerging class consciousness as serving only to ‘keep up the pressure on employers to make work work for us’. This is neither ambitious nor even realistic given that all profit derives from the exploitation of workers’ unpaid labour, so capitalist employment can never be made to ‘work for us’ but only for the bosses. While capitalism exists, workers are always going to be hamsters on a wheel, turning over profits as fast as they can.

So what are we to make of tang ping, anti-work and the mutterings of workers who sense they are in a strong position for once? Well, it’s a long way from revolutionary class consciousness. They’re not generally talking about getting off the hamster wheels for good, just about turning them a tad more slowly, or insisting on nicer-looking wheels and maybe better quality hamster food. And it may only be temporary. Once capitalism swings back into full operation, employers will return to grinding down workers’ pay, undermining class solidarity and stepping up their state and media propaganda against unions and opposition to capitalism. Meanwhile in China, anyone ‘lying flat’ may well find a tank rolling over them at some point.

But it’s all a step in the right direction. Workers need to be doing this, questioning their miserable existence in capitalism and asking what is the point of it all. And the fact that young people are doing just that is evidence for what socialists have always said, which is that, despite what you might think from the propaganda-wash of the movies and the media and the ‘official discourse’, capitalism never really wins the argument for capitalism because the everyday experience of it is viscerally hated by workers, even if they don’t always recognise or acknowledge the fact and they often have a tendency to blame the wrong things.

Something else we always say, which any aspiring slackers should note, is that work is not the same thing as employment. Employment in capitalism is, largely speaking, a useless waste of our lives in which, if we have any sense, we do as much slacking as we can. Bosses want as much work out of you for as little money as they can get away with paying. It’s only logical that you should aim to do the opposite. The class war exists whether you like it or not, and if you’re not actively fighting it, you’re passively losing it.

But work that you like and choose to do is a very different matter. Humans are not made to be idle. We’d get bored far too quickly. Idleness would be like a prison sentence. Anyone so jaded as to believe that humans hate work should see how eager young children are to help adults by doing whatever little jobs they can. In socialism there would be no lazy attitudes because ‘laziness’ is a construct of property societies that rely on forced labour and pour judgmental scorn on anyone who resists. And there would be no tang ping either, except at the end of the day when you’re lying down for a relaxing snooze after a nice day doing exactly what you wanted.

Paddy Shannon

CHINA TAKES UP THE WHITE MAN’S BURDEN

What is at the End of the Road?

The long-term results of war are notoriously difficult to predict. Each side sees post-war events as they would be shaped by their own victory, but even when the victory of one side is decisive the result is rarely the same as the expectation. War destroys an existing balance of power and gives rise to more or less drastic adjustments, but it is beyond the capacity of most of the actors in the war-drama to see what will happen after the curtain falls on the military combat.

At present the thinking of most of those who plan the future world is clouded by wishes born of their class interests. One group want capitalism to be restored just as it was in 1939. Others, the Labour Party for example, vaguely hope and believe that capitalism will have disappeared, or will be “different.” Both groups will be disappointed. Capitalism will remain after the war, but it will not be the capitalist world envisaged by British and American capitalists. The failure of the German-Japanese-Italian gamble for dominance will not leave things just as they were, and some observers are already uneasily aware of this. A Japanese officer who told a Daily Mail correspondent (Daily Mail, September 10th) that ”if Hitler won this war every man in Japan knew they would have to fight the Germans to retain their empire,” was doubtless right, but likewise when the Axis Powers fail the East will show some developments little regarded at the moment. Only the Manchester Guardian among British newspapers appears to have interested itself in the problems that will arise then:

“China can expect to emerge from the war as one of the world’s Great Powers with all the scope and responsibility which the status entails.”— (“Manchester Guardian,” October 12th, 1942.)

One politician, Mr. Malcolm MacDonald, Britain’s High Commissioner in Canada, would not be aware of any problem. Speaking about the great 1,500 mile Alaska Highway which links up U.S.A., across Canada, with Alaska, he dealt with its present purpose as a “springboard for attack on Japan,” and then spoke customary soothing words about the important part the highway and its defence system will play

“When the war is won, in bringing our friends in the Orient, the Chinese, the Russians, the Americans, and ourselves, into much closer communication and harmony.”— (“Daily Mail,” October 17th, 1942.)

Capitalist politicians always talk in this way about the development of means of transport and communications, as if closer contact in a world given over to capitalist rivalries necessarily produces harmony. (Incidentally Mr. MacDonald is a member of the government which still, under the 1927 Trade Disputes Act, forbids British Civil servants who handle some of the international means of communication, the posts, telegraphs and telephones, to come into contact with their fellows in the Dominion, Allied and other countries in an international association, for fear, no doubt, that closer contact might produce too much working-class harmony.)

The Manchester Guardian, however, comes closer to reality in its report of discussions that are going on about China’s war aims. The principle laid down by Madame Chiang Kai-shek is that in the relations between West and East there must be absolute equality, there “must be no thought of superiors and inferiors”; but, as the Guardian adds, “To translate those simple phrases into political action is a process that will demand all the statesmanship thst the United Nations can discover” (Manchester Guardian, August 25th, 1942). In the same editorial the Guardian quotes Mrs. Pearl Buck, the writer on China, as saying that unless the problem is solved “the end will be a war in which China will not be on our side,” and Mr. Owen Lattimore, Political Adviser to General Chiang Kai-shek, says that, it is taken for granted in China and the rest of Asia “though perhaps not yet … so decidedly taken for granted in the Western democracies,” that “colonies lost in battle by countries unable to defend them and unwilling to grant them the full right of self-defence can never be subjected or returned to the status quo of December 7th, 1941.”

Mr. Lattimore envisages a great danger that will arise if Japan can one day present herself “as the defender of colonial Asia against white reconquest.”

Mr. Wendell Wilkie has added his view that “no foot of Chinese soil should be or can be ruled from now on except by the people who live on it” (Daily Telegraph, October 7th, 1942).

Up to this point the problem looks a comparatively simple one of the renunciation of territory held in China, but those who so view it forget that we live in a capitalist world which inexorably drives on each capitalist group to strengthen its commercial competitive power and to strive for expansion. Will the new Pacific Power, China, escape from this law of capitalism ? The Guardian, returning to the subject in an editorial on October 12th, 1942, is apprehensive that it will not. The following passage shows the potentialities and dangers of the situation : —

“Discussion about post-war plans seems to be as lively in Chungking as it is in Washington or London. . . . The general trend of ideas, both official and private, has just been described in an American publication by Gunther Stein, who stresses that much of it remains highly controversial in Chungking. There is agreement on one point. Japan must be disarmed, freed from militaristic rule, and effectually prevented from re-arming. Some Chinese wish to see Japanese industrial equipment and industrial skill used to aid in the development of the countries ravaged by the invaders. Territorial aims seem to vary; while the return of all territories lost since the war of 1894-5 is taken for granted unofficial ambitions go far beyond that. Korea is to have independence, but there is a desire to make Siam a Chinese protectorate, and among the areas expected to return to full Chinese rule are Outer Mongolia and Tibet, as well as Sinkiang, Manchuria and Formosa. The independence of all other nations of East Asia from colonial rule is considered essential. This includes Indian sovereignty and close Sino-Indian collaboration for the protection and development of the backward Eastern peoples”.— (“Manchester Guardian,” October 12th, 1942.)

The reader who takes in the vast implications of the above official and unofficial ambitions of the ruling class of the China that is becoming a Great Power may well ask whether they are different from the ideas of expansion of all the other powers that have aspired in the past to build up empires. The Chinese, it seems, along with India, are even to take on the “white man’s burden” of protecting “backward peoples” ! As the Manchester Guardiantactfully remarks, China expects to take a leading part in the development of an East Asiatic economic group, “and some enthusiasts seem to push this reasonable desire rather far.”

The only comment Socialists have to make is that the outlines of the new order as sketched in Chungking look remarkably like all other capitalist imperialisms, except that there is a drastic change in the cast. The remedy is not new empires for old but the abolition everywhere of capitalism, which engenders these ambitions.

Socialist Party