With China now the world centre for industrial super-exploitation - low wages, no right to independent trade unions, and flagrant profiteering including by multinational investors - surely no "socialist" or "leftist" still sympathises with the Chinese government?
They do. On 3 October the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), a tiny diehard group, held a "celebration" for the 60th anniversary of Mao's seizure of power.
The star speaker was George Galloway MP.
On 7 November, the same holdout-Stalinist group has a meeting, dated to commemorate the 1917 workers' revolution in Russia but actually (according to publicity for the meeting) focused on celebrating the record of the USSR in the 1930s, after the Stalinist counter-revolution and at the height of the Great Terror. The old Maoist line was that the USSR was good until Stalin's death, when it became "revisionist".
The star speaker on 7 November is Bob Crow, general secretary of the RMT rail union.
Harpal Brar, leader of the CPGB(M-L), is also leader of the Stalin society.
The anti-Stalinist socialists currently pursuing very friendly political relations with Galloway and Crow should ask them some questions.
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Stalinist
This just goes to show why true communists should not work with the likes of the chief trade union bureaucrat Bob Crow or the quasi-Stalinist, pro-Islamist MP George Galloway. Galloway's speech praising Maoist China is available on YouTube.