By Peter Main
This year marks the 75th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China under the rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Those 75 years have seen dramatic changes both within China and in its relations with the rest of the world.
The CCP’s victory ended more than a century of foreign interventions and wars that had brought the country to the very brink of disintegration. It also ended the plunder of the country by Chiang Kai-shek, Washington’s preferred puppet.
The first 40 years of the CCP’s rule saw the replacement of capitalism in the form of a degenerated workers state, modelled on Stalin’s Soviet Union. But repeated abrupt changes of policy took place as the party grappled with the impossibility of balanced economic development within the Stalinist straitjacket of Socialism in One Country. By 1976, when Mao died, economic growth was not even matching population growth.
Within months, the faction within the CCP that had long favoured some degree of ‘market reform’ took the power under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping. The impact of his first reforms was most pronounced in agriculture. Freeing farmers from the dictates of the ‘People’s Communes’ and allowing the direct sale of produce immediately brought increases in output, up to 15% per year for several years. At the same time, Commune workshops and light industry, never subject to central planning, began to be turned into profit-oriented businesses.
Restoration
Given the continued existence of state owned and planned industry, this generated two pricing systems, free market and planned. Inevitably, this encouraged a black market of corrupt trading and that, in turn, led to inflation – and widespread discontent. At the same time calls for further marketisation, now including industry, increased. This in turn fuelled the Democracy Movement, which culminated in the occupation of Tiananmen Square, ended by the massacre on 4 June 1989.
Within three years, the CCP leadership decided to dismantle central planning, privatise the smaller units of state industry and turn the bigger ones into state owned corporations run on commercial lines. But in contrast to the Soviet Union, there was no ‘big bang’. On the contrary it took several years to complete the transition. Nonetheless, it was the decision to end planning that transformed China into the 21st century ‘workshop of the world’.
Throughout these decades of turbulence and change, one feature was permanent, the rule of the CCP. The source of its strength lies in its control of the entire administrative apparatus. Even before it took power in 1949 it already governed territory with a population of 100 million. In the ‘liberated zones’, it was the party that oversaw civilian life while its armed wing, the People’s Liberation Army mobilised forces first against the Japanese and then against Chiang’s Guomindang.
The Communist Party
After 1949, much of what was left of Chiang’s administration was assimilated into the CCP’s model of government, subject, of course, to the party’s approval.
And what a party! Having lost its original working class base in the slaughter of Chiang’s White Terror in 1928 and most of its remaining members during the Long March, the CCP was rebuilt as a rigidly hierarchical Stalinist party with the disciplinary standards required by war.
Clearly, the party itself was deeply affected by the reforms. That, however, did not change its ethos or its constitutionally defined ‘leading role’. Today, it has 98 million members and they play leading roles in almost every aspect of Chinese life.
Wherever there are just three members in an institution or enterprise, they must form a party cell and the next higher level appoints one as the cell leader. This creates a chain of command that stretches from Beijing down to every village and neighbourhood, every large business, every university department, every school in the land.
Nonetheless, the composition of the party has continued to change. Over half the members now have a degree and 35 million are described as ‘managers, professionals, administrators or party officials’. While 26 million are farmers or fishers, only 6.7 million are workers.
Such a huge membership base is undoubtedly a source of strength, but it can also become a fatal weakness. In a capitalist economy there are inevitably different rates of growth, different priorities and different problems in different sectors, in different cities and different provinces. These are sure to find expression within the party and the tensions thus created are the cause of the increasingly autocratic rule of Xi Jinping.
Although the party has overseen China’s rapid capitalist development, to the point where it is now a global, indeed imperialist power, it remains rooted in the administrative and security apparatus that it created.
China’s capitalists, however, are well aware that the party’s policies are creating obstacles to their economic interests. This is most obvious with regard to the construction sector, where the policy of financing local government largely through land sales has led to the indebtedness not only of huge companies like Evergrande and Country Garden, but also many provincial and local governments.
The knock-on effects on the rest of the economy are plain to see; manufacturing output fell in each of the last five months and the research company Caixin reported further declines in new orders, both domestic and for export. The government response at the end of September was to lower the reserve ratio for banks and interest rates. The Shanghai and Shenzhen stock markets immediately rose by some 15%, but that in itself will make little difference to the economy as a whole.
In the six months before National Day (1 October), the China Labour Bulletin logged over 700 strikes across China, the overwhelming majority against non-payment of wages, frequently a result of employers closing down and fleeing. Even such a high number of strikes does not produce any visible organisational expression. Under the dictatorship of the CCP any independent working class organisation is unlawful and defiance is dangerous.
Nonetheless, the figures show that the working class is very far from docile. In fact, as a class now some 800 million strong including dependents, it has a wide experience of struggle and has succeeded in forcing significant legal concessions and higher wages. The continuing downturn in the economy is likely to encourage more defensive struggles.
The interests of both of the major classes of capitalist society, bosses and workers, therefore, are severely limited by the CCP’s bureaucratic dictatorship. Certainly, as long as most of the bourgeoisie continues to benefit from the exploitation of workers that the party’s regime ensures, they will not organise against it but try to influence it from within. However, any continued economic decline will exacerbate divisions within the party and these will be deepened further by rising working class militancy.
In such a scenario, not only economic but democratic demands can mobilise millions. Revolutionaries will argue for the democratic self-organisation of the workers in both their workplaces and their districts, independent of any bourgeois parties that might also be launched. To coordinate and lead the workers’ struggles, a new workers’ party is necessary, a party committed not only to the overthrow of the CCP’s bureaucratic dictatorship, but of the capitalist system that it restored.
The 75-year history of the People’s Republic of China has been stormy. It has created both the newest imperialist power and the biggest working class the world has ever seen. This guarantees further storms which will have a truly historic impact on the whole world. To navigate a way through those storms and build a new, socialist society will need not only a new Communist Party in China but a new, Fifth International.
