https://www.icl-fi.org/print/english/wv/1160/hong_kong.html
Workers Vanguard No. 1160
6 September 2019
Defend China! Imperialists Hands Off!
Hong Kong: No to Counterrevolutionary Rampage!
Expropriate the Tycoons!
SEPTEMBER 2???For three months, anti-Communist mobs have rampaged through
Hong Kong. They have blocked roads and stopped public transport, beaten
opponents and Chinese mainlanders and bombarded police with bricks and
Molotov cocktails. Protesters have raised mass-distributed placards with
the appeal, ???President Trump: Please Liberate Hong Kong??? while singing
the U.S. national anthem and waving American flags. Anti-China
demonstrators have vandalized the Legislative Council building and
raised the British flag, demanding the return of Hong Kong???s former
colonial master. Aiming to end China???s control over its capitalist Hong
Kong enclave, protesters are openly calling for imperialist intervention.
The U.S. State Department has repeatedly declared its support to the
counterrevolutionary protests, as have the British and Canadian foreign
offices. Democratic Congressional leader Nancy Pelosi joined with an
array of Republicans in demanding U.S. intervention and pushing punitive
legislation against Beijing. The U.S. rulers have funded, advised and
helped organize the protesters as part of their strategic goal of
overturning the 1949 Revolution and returning China to capitalist
enslavement, with themselves as the chief robber barons.
China is not a capitalist country but a workers state. However, the
workers state has been deformed from its inception by the rule of a
parasitic bureaucratic caste that politically suppresses the working
class. Since taking power through peasant-based guerrilla war, the
Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has followed the Stalinist dogma of
???socialism in one country??? and its corollary, ???peaceful coexistence???
with imperialism. The CCP regime from Mao Zedong???s time to today has
opposed the revolutionary internationalist program of Marxism. But
despite bureaucratic mismanagement and corruption, the overthrow of
capitalism led to historic social advances. While four decades of
???market reforms??? have led to large-scale foreign investment and the
emergence of individual capitalists on the mainland, the economy remains
controlled by Beijing, with the most important sectors collectivized and
owned by the state.
Today in Hong Kong, we have a military side with the forces of the
Chinese deformed workers state, including the police, against the
anti-Communist mobilizations. This position stems from our unconditional
military defense of China against imperialism and domestic
counterrevolution. Such defense does not imply the least political
support to the Beijing bureaucracy, whose backing of capitalism in Hong
Kong under its ???one country, two systems??? rubric bears no small
responsibility for the current crisis. As Trotskyists who seek to make
the working class conscious of its historic task to bring about a
socialist future, our perspective is the mobilization of the working
people of Hong Kong and mainland China to stop the counterrevolutionary
forces.
In 1997, the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist)
joined in cheering as the British imperialists relinquished their Hong
Kong colony. At the same time, we warned that the CCP???s pledge to
maintain capitalism there was a dagger aimed at the Chinese workers
state (see ???British Colonialist Rulers Leave, Finally???Beijing Stalinists
Embrace Hong Kong Financiers,??? WV No. 671, 11 July 1997). In 1984,
Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping explicitly promised British prime minister
Margaret Thatcher that the ???previous capitalist system and life-style???
would remain unchanged.
Since 1997, Hong Kong has been integrated into the People???s Republic of
China as a capitalist Special Administrative Region, where every
decisive aspect of the government is under Beijing???s control. The
People???s Liberation Army (PLA), garrisoned in the enclave, guarantees
that. Hong Kong???s Basic Law was established by China???s National People???s
Congress, and the territory???s principal executive officers are appointed
by the central government in Beijing. The members of its highest court
are in turn appointed by the Beijing-approved chief executive. The CCP
has made itself directly responsible for maintaining capitalism in Hong
Kong, where the capitalist class is politically organized, with its own
parties, newspapers and other media. Beijing???s policy has nurtured Hong
Kong as a breeding ground for counterrevolution and an outpost for
imperialist spying and intrigue. Upholding the interests of the Hong
Kong bourgeoisie against those they exploit and oppress is a massive
betrayal by the CCP of the working people there and on the mainland
itself. We say: Expropriate the tycoons!
The fight against the filthy rich capitalists in Hong Kong is directly
linked to the struggle of the proletariat throughout China against the
corruption and inequality fostered by the Stalinist bureaucracy, which
acts as a transmission belt for the pressures of the capitalist world
market onto the workers state. What???s needed is a proletarian political
revolution that sweeps away the Stalinist bureaucracy and puts power in
the hands of workers, peasants and soldiers councils. Such a regime
would be based on a perspective of international proletarian revolution,
preparing the groundwork for eliminating scarcity in a world socialist
order.
Imperialist Machinations
Who pays the piper calls the tune, as the saying goes. The U.S.
government???s National Endowment for Democracy (NED) has poured millions
of dollars into organizations behind the protests, from the Hong Kong
Human Rights Monitor and the parties of the ???pan-democratic??? camp to the
Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions, affiliate of the anti-Communist
International Trade Union Confederation. Such organizations are the main
components of the Civil Human Rights Front, the chief organizer of the
current protests. Joshua Wong, the Western media???s poster boy for
anti-China protests, is also tied to the NED.
As journalist Dan Cohen described in a useful Grayzone (17 August)
expos??, a key fixture at (and bankroller of) the protests is Hong Kong
tycoon Jimmy Lai. Known as the Rupert Murdoch of Asia, Lai built a media
empire based on scandalmongering, celebrity gossip, anti-Communism and
anti-China bigotry. His press is notorious for waging a chauvinist
campaign against ???anchor babies??? from mainland China, depicting
mainlanders as hordes of locusts descending to devour Hong Kong???s
resources. In July, Lai traveled to the U.S. for meetings with National
Security Advisor John Bolton, Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of
State Mike Pompeo, among others, requesting continued U.S. assistance
for ???resisting??? Beijing. He later declared: ???We in Hong Kong are
fighting for the shared values of the U.S. against China. We are
fighting their war in the enemy camp??? (CNN, 28 August).
The U.S. and other imperialist powers pursue a multipronged strategy for
capitalist counterrevolution in China. One approach is financing and
promoting reactionary mobilizations like the Hong Kong protests.
Washington also seeks to use its economic might like a battering ram, as
in the current tariff war through which the Trump administration, with
solid backing from the Democrats, aims to thwart China???s economic and
technological development (see ???U.S. Imperialists Ramp Up Trade/Tech
War,??? WV No. 1157, 21 June). At the same time, the U.S. is increasing
military pressure on China, conducting regular military exercises near
the Chinese coast, flying bombers over the South China Sea and
repeatedly sending Navy warships through the Taiwan Strait. These moves
are all part of a strategy of military encirclement of China by the U.S.
and its allies.
The State Department recently approved Taiwan???s requests to buy $2.2
billion dollars??? worth of tanks and missiles and $8 billion in advanced
fighter jets. From the time of the 1949 Revolution, when the Chinese
capitalist regime fled to Taiwan, and the onset of the Korean War the
following year, the U.S. has viewed the island as its ???unsinkable
aircraft carrier,??? the front line in a future war. The ICL stands for
the revolutionary reunification of Taiwan with China, through social
revolution to overthrow capitalism in Taiwan and workers political
revolution against the CCP bureaucracy on the mainland.
As revolutionaries in the world???s predominant imperialist power, the
Spartacist League/U.S. is dedicated to forging a Leninist vanguard party
that can lead the multiracial American working class in the struggle for
a workers government that would expropriate the capitalist exploiters.
Central to this perspective is winning the most advanced layers of the
proletariat to oppose its rulers??? machinations around the world, not
least those directed against the Chinese deformed workers state. Workers
can???t win new gains without defending those already won!
???One Country, Two Systems???: Danger to the Chinese Revolution
To launch the current wave of anti-China protests, organizers in late
spring seized on an extradition bill being debated in Hong Kong???s
Legislative Council, claiming that it would undermine the territory???s
autonomy. The proposed law would have done no such thing. The measure,
which was suspended in June, would have simply established an
extradition process???not just between Hong Kong and the rest of China but
also between Hong Kong and every country in the world that did not
already have such an agreement. By treating mainland China like a
foreign country, the law fell entirely within the CCP???s framework of
maintaining a distinct capitalist administration in Hong Kong. The ICL
has no position on this legislation because we do not seek to advise the
Beijing bureaucracy on how best to administer capitalism in Hong Kong,
since we oppose it remaining a capitalist enclave.
The Hong Kong demonstrators and their spin doctors in the bourgeois
media have raised holy hell about supposed police violence. From the
likes of the New York Times, this is sheer hypocrisy. In reality, the
Hong Kong police have been highly restrained, focused on containing and
dispersing protests rather than stopping them. Compare their conduct
with the brutal cop state of siege that descended on Ferguson, Missouri,
after protests broke out over the racist police killing of Michael Brown
in 2014!
In Hong Kong, the restraint of the police expresses the policy of the
CCP bureaucracy. The organizers of the protests are aiming for the
overthrow of the Chinese deformed workers state. But Beijing is at pains
to respect Hong Kong???s formal autonomy, which is written into its ???one
country, two systems??? pact with the enclave???s capitalists and their
imperialist masters. However, rather than appeasing the protesters, the
CCP bureaucrats??? concessions have only emboldened them.
The Hong Kong bourgeoisie is not of one mind concerning the protests.
While Jimmy Lai and his ilk openly support the mobilizations, Li
Ka-shing, the richest man in Hong Kong, as well as several real estate
tycoons and some banking interests have recently called for calm. They
worry that the chaos around the protests is harming business. More
broadly, several bourgeois financial analysts have warned that
intervention by the PLA???or by the People???s Armed Police stationed across
the border in Shenzhen???to stop the unrest would cause capital flight and
other damage to Hong Kong???s economy.
Hong Kong under the tycoons has well earned its reputation as a
white-collar sweatshop, where office workers routinely slave away for 12
hours a day with eight hours??? pay. With the CCP???s blessing, a frenzy of
land speculation has driven up rents to the extent that working adults
are unable to leave their parents??? homes, often sharing tiny rooms with
several people. In one of the most expensive cities in the world, full
of designer shops and luxury hotels, a fifth of the population falls
below the poverty line. ???Immigrants??? from the mainland constitute some
of the most oppressed sectors of the population, while the plight of
Hong Kong???s hundreds of thousands of domestic workers, overwhelmingly
from the Philippines and Indonesia, shines an especially harsh light on
the enclave???s class divide. Meanwhile, venal CCP bureaucrats and their
cronies and relations use Hong Kong to park their money or channel it
out of China, and also as a venue for shopping sprees.
Hong Kong???s toilers should be a natural ally of the powerful and
combative proletariat on the mainland. An authentic communist party in
China would mobilize the working class against the counterrevolutionary
protests on the basis of the workers??? class interests, championing as
well the interests of the oppressed petty bourgeoisie. Expropriating the
tycoons and converting their property holdings into low-cost public
housing would resonate deeply with the population, as would replacing
the luxury shops and restaurants with canteens and cooperatives run by
and for working people.
These demands cut against the CCP???s class collaboration with the Hong
Kong bourgeoisie, which has been the political basis for the relatively
small pro-China counterprotests that have taken place in Hong Kong and
internationally. The counterprotests have been designed to be compatible
with the interests of the tycoons, whose ???patriotism??? hinges on their
ability to reap profits from their investments on the mainland. The CCP
also appeals to patriotism in calling for an end to protests. The
Stalinists do not call on the working class to act: As a brittle ruling
caste, the Beijing bureaucracy fears that workers??? mobilizations would
represent a challenge to its rule.
For the CCP, maintaining capitalism in Hong Kong serves to promote
foreign investment on the mainland by reassuring overseas capitalists
that it???s safe to do business with China. Hong Kong remains a major hub
connecting China with the global capitalist economy. Beijing???s policy
toward Hong Kong is in keeping with its opening of whole areas of China
to investment by the offshore Chinese bourgeoisie and the imperialist
powers, including in the Special Economic Zones.
Any isolated workers state would need to seek foreign investment. Under
revolutionary leadership, this would be done under the democratic
control of the working class organized in soviets (councils), supported
in countries like China by peasants councils. A revolutionary workers
and peasants government in China would renegotiate the terms of foreign
investment in the interests of working people. The domestic capitalists,
on the other hand, would simply be expropriated and their property used
in the interests of society as a whole. To defend and extend the gains
of the 1949 Revolution, such a regime would strengthen central economic
planning and re-establish a state monopoly of foreign trade.
Which Class Will Rule?
In Hong Kong, one of the most ardent champions of ???democratic???
counterrevolution is Socialist Action (SA), which fraudulently passes
itself off as Trotskyist. (Along with the U.S. Socialist Alternative, SA
is part of the self-declared majority of the recently split Committee
for a Workers??? International, CWI.) Writing off China as capitalist, SA
has issued a series of leaflets offering tactical advice to the protest
organizers and calling ???for united mass struggle of Hong Kong and China
people against the CCP dictatorship??? (chinaworker.info, 19 July). SA???s
main ???contribution??? has been to agitate for a one-day general strike to
bring down the Hong Kong government and defeat the CCP regime. Their
program, in short, is to sell out the workers to their direct class
enemies: the Hong Kong bourgeoisie and its imperialist godfathers.
In fact, the counterrevolutionary protests have been overwhelmingly
based on the petty bourgeoisie and hostile to the working class. The
much-touted August 5 ???general strike,??? preceded by a ???bankers strike??? on
August 1, was primarily a mobilization of students, lawyers,
accountants, teachers and other professionals. Many employers encouraged
their staff to take the day off and participate. The city was paralyzed
as protesters blocked traffic and stopped public transport, threatening
transport workers. Likewise, workers were attacked during the airport
occupation of August 12-13, when hundreds of flights were stopped at one
of the world???s busiest airports. Protesters have also vandalized the
offices of the pro-Beijing Hong Kong Federation of Trade Unions.
Embracing the call for free elections, which is aimed at toppling the
Beijing-loyal local administration, SA is solidly in the camp of
counterrevolution in Hong Kong. There it unites with people demanding
that the enclave either become a protectorate of U.S. imperialism or
return to the days of British rule, when the mass of the Chinese
population lived in squalid slums and slaved away as dirt-poor laborers
while Communists and trade-union militants were systematically
repressed. Only in the lead-up to the handover to China did the British
rulers grant a modicum of democratic rights, to be used as a weapon
against the Chinese workers state.
SA???s program for Hong Kong and China is in line with the sordid history
of the CWI, which avidly supported the imperialists??? campaigns against
the Soviet degenerated workers state. In August-September 1991, the
CWI???s forebears in the Militant tendency joined the capitalist
restorationists on Boris Yeltsin???s barricades in Moscow. In contrast,
our Trotskyist international tendency fought in defense of the workers
state, distributing tens of thousands of leaflets calling on Soviet
workers to crush the counterrevolutionary forces led by Yeltsin and
backed by the George H.W. Bush White House.
The question posed by the crisis in Hong Kong is not ???dictatorship or
democracy??? but ???which class will rule???? In their drive to destroy the
Soviet Union and the bureaucratically deformed workers states of East
and Central Europe, the imperialists promoted all manner of reactionary
forces, including those who waved the banner of ???democracy??? against
Stalinist ???totalitarianism.??? The purpose was to overthrow the Communist
regimes by one means or another, including using elections in which
peasants and other petty-bourgeois layers as well as politically
backward workers could be mobilized against the workers states.
A glimpse of what awaits China???s toiling masses if the 1949 Revolution
were to be overturned can be seen today in the countries of the former
Soviet bloc, where living standards have been massively thrown back and
where such ???democracy??? as exists is a paper-thin facade for the class
dictatorship that defines all capitalist societies. A quarter-century
after capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union, China is the
largest of the remaining countries where capitalist rule has been
overthrown. Capitalist counterrevolution in China would be a further
massive victory for world imperialism and a defeat for workers and the
oppressed across the globe.
The call for bourgeois democracy is a call for counterrevolution. We are
for proletarian democracy???a government of elected workers, peasants and
soldiers councils that would make decisions about the development of the
economy and the organization of society. Under the leadership of China???s
massive working class, non-proletarian sectors such as the peasants and
Hong Kong???s office workers would in fact have far more of a voice in how
society is run than they do in any capitalist republic. As Lenin
explained of the 1917 October Revolution that brought the working class
to power in Russia:
???The bureaucratic machine has been completely smashed, razed to the
ground; the old judges have all been sent packing, the bourgeois
parliament has been dispersed???and far more accessible representation has
been given to the workers and peasants; their Soviets have replaced the
bureaucrats, or their Soviets have been put in control of the
bureaucrats, and their Soviets have been authorised to elect the judges.
This fact alone is enough for all the oppressed classes to recognise
that Soviet power, i.e., the present form of the dictatorship of the
proletariat, is a million times more democratic than the most democratic
bourgeois republic.???
???The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (1918)
The True Legacy of Tiananmen
SA and the CIA-backed protesters as a whole falsely link their
counterrevolutionary efforts with the specter of ???June 4,??? the 1989
proletarian upheaval centered on Beijing???s Tiananmen Square that was
bloodily suppressed by the CCP regime of Deng Xiaoping. SA & Co. present
the 1989 upheaval as a mass movement for (bourgeois) democracy. It was
nothing of the kind! The events began with students demanding more
political freedoms and protesting the corruption of top CCP bureaucrats.
The protests were joined first by individual workers, then by
contingents from factories and other workplaces. Workers were driven to
act by the high inflation and growing inequality that accompanied the
CCP???s program of building ???socialism??? through market reforms. While some
youth looked to Western-style capitalist democracy, the protests were
dominated by the singing of the ???Internationale,??? the international
working-class anthem, and other expressions of pro-socialist consciousness.
Various workers organizations that appeared during the protests had the
character of embryonic organs of working-class rule. ???Workers picket
corps??? and factory-based ???dare to die??? groups, organized to protect the
students against repression, defied Deng???s declaration of martial law.
Workers??? groups began to take on responsibility for public safety after
the Beijing government all but disappeared and the police vanished from
the streets. It was the entry of the Chinese proletariat into the
protests, in Beijing and around the country, that marked an incipient
proletarian political revolution. After weeks of paralysis, the CCP
regime launched a bloody crackdown on June 3-4 in Beijing, driven by
fear not of the student protesters but of the mobilized working class.
Even after the massacre, millions of workers across China continued to
wage strikes and protests.
The workers showed enormous bravery and willingness to fight, and they
forged links with soldiers, who viewed themselves as the defenders of
socialism. Seven senior PLA commanders signed a petition opposing the
martial law measures that were ordered against the population. On their
own, however, the working class could not come to understand the need
for political revolution to overturn the deforming rule of the
bureaucracy. To imbue the working class with such consciousness requires
the intervention of a revolutionary Marxist vanguard party. We honor the
memory of the proletarian heroes of 1989, whose struggle vividly
demonstrated the revolutionary potential of the working class.
SA and its ilk spit on the legacy of Tiananmen as they serve the
imperialist drive for capitalist counterrevolution in China. Seventy
years after its revolution, China is not the country it was in 1949???a
desperately backward, overwhelmingly peasant society plundered by the
imperialist powers and ravaged by decades of civil war. Yet despite
China???s enormous advances since then, it remains economically backward
in many respects compared to the imperialist countries that dominate the
world economy. With its program of appeasing the imperialists and the
Chinese bourgeoisie and its political suppression of the proletariat,
the CCP bureaucracy constantly undermines the gains of the 1949 Revolution.
The achievement of socialism???a classless society based on material
abundance???requires an international planned economy that harnesses and
goes well beyond the technology and productive capacity of the most
advanced capitalist countries today. The road to socialism lies in
proletarian revolutions throughout the capitalist world, crucially
including the imperialist centers of the U.S., Japan and West Europe.
This perspective is necessarily linked to the fight to mobilize the
Chinese proletariat to sweep away its bureaucratic misrulers. But
revolutionary struggle needs revolutionary leadership. Our historic
model is the Bolshevik Party that, under V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky,
led the October 1917 Russian Revolution as the opening shot of the fight
for world proletarian revolution. The ICL is committed to reforging
Trotsky???s Fourth International to carry the Bolshevik banner forward.
--
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Clarence Darrow
??? I have always felt that doubt was the beginning of wisdom, and the fear of
God was the end of wisdom. ???
??? Clarence Darrow,