China

Beijing pushes HK revolt underground

Hong Kong’s Confederation of Trade Unions (HKCTU) is being forced to disband in the face of a brutal offensive by the Chinese government. The HKCTU is the only body coordinating independent unions in Hong Kong. It has long supported universal suffrage against the rule of Hong Kong by the pro-CCP and tycoon-dominated Legislative Council and the Beijing-appointed Chief Executive. At its press conference on 13 September, the HKCTU announced that it was recommending disbandment to a general meeting of its affiliates on 3 October. Vice Chair Leo Tang, one of the three remaining Executive Committee...

Hong Kong: fear and defiance

The Hong Kong Alliance has refused to hand over data on its supporters to the HK police. Its only leader still at liberty, Chow Hang-tung, has been taken into custody. Along with Lee Cheuk Yan (chair of the Alliance, and already jailed) and Albert Ho, he has been charged with “incitement to subversion”. The HK Alliance is the organisation that organised the annual 4 June Tiananmen commemoration. Five weeks earlier, the teachers’ union HKPTU , similarly threatened with investigation on grounds of subversion, had dissolved itself. That HKPTU decision signalled to individual teachers that they...

A global fight for justice and freedom

This is the speech socialist activist Maxine Mallon (pictured above protesting at the Home Office against the Nationality and Borders Bill) gave recently about the democracy struggle in Hong Kong and its wider implications and connections.

Defend teachers and union rights in HK!

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has now opened up an attack on the very existence of independent trade unions in Hong Kong. On Saturday 31 July, the main Hong Kong teachers' union, the HKPTU, was accused by the Communist Party and Chinese state media ( People’s Daily and Xinhua) of being a “malignant tumour” that needed to be “eradicated”. A couple of hours later, the Education Department of the Hong Kong government announced it had broken off all relations with the HKPTU, refusing to talk with them – in effect withdrawing recognition. On 10 August, after a series of retreats, the HKPTU...

Clampdown in Hong Kong

July 1 is a day of two anniversaries in Hong Kong. It is the 24th anniversary of the day when Britain "handed over" Hong Kong to China – from one colonial power to another. It is also the second anniversary of the 300,000 strong demo in Hong Kong against the Extradition Bill. That bill, which was later dropped, would have allowed the Chinese regime to extradite people from Hong Kong to China to face charges made by the Chinese regime against them. At the end of the 2019 demonstration, young protestors besieged and managed to break into Hong Kong’s parliament, its Legislative Council (LegCo). A...

The "No Cold War" campaign launch

On 16 June 2021 I attended the launch of the British section of the No Cold War campaign, jointly hosted by No Cold War and the Tricontinental Institute. If you want to watch the video you can watch it here on YouTube . The speakers were Fiona Edwards, (Stop the War Coalition national officer and former student organiser for Socialist Action); Lowkey (anti-imperialist rapper and political activist); Jodie Evans (co-founder of women's anti-war activist group Code Pink); Anna Chen (writer, broadcaster, and poet); Martin Jacques (former Eurocommunist, now a Chinese government apologist academic)...

John Ross: from Trotskyism to power-worship

The Morning Star’s most prolific and enthusiastic apologist for the Chinese ruling class, Carlos Martinez (who also considers North Korea to be “socialist”), likes the book China’s Great Road: Lessons for Marxist Theory and Socialist Practices . He praises the author, John Ross, for making it “very clear that China’s successes are those of socialism”. The Morning Star website puffs Ross’s book as its no.1 must-read. What makes China socialist? Martinez, paraphrasing Ross, explains: “Even with the huge quantities of private capital and the presence of foreign investment and the existence of...

Lab leak theory very unlikely

Jim Denham makes apt criticisms of the Morning Star in his article in Solidarity 596 , for yet another article that is both demagogic and championing the Chinese ruling class. Yet he is gives too much ground to the continued viability of a lab leak theory of SARS-CoV-2's origins. Contrary to what Jim's article implied, the WHO mission did investigate the possibility of a laboratory leak. They found "direct zoonotic spillover... a possible-to-likely pathway; introduction through an intermediate host... a likely to very likely pathway; introduction through cold/ food chain products… a possible...

4 June protests show solidarity

Over 600 protesters gathered outside the Chinese Embassy in London on 4 June to mark the 32nd anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. The commemoration was a far more left-wing and consistent one this year than previously. John Moloney of the civil service union PCS; Vicky Blake, president of the University and College Union (UCU); Pete Radcliff from the Labour Movement Solidarity with Hong Kong campaign; and other socialists spoke. The message was quite clear: this is not a battle against “China” as a whole, but one against the repression of the Chinese state and in solidarity...

Don't even investigate, says Morning Star

As matters stand the balance of scientific opinion is that the Covid-19 pandemic probably started by a virus jumping from an animal host to humans in the Wuhan wet market or elsewhere. But we don’t know and may never know. The Biden administration in the USA is launching an investigation, which includes considering the idea that the virus leaked from a lab. Of course the Biden administration will have political motives in including that idea, just as the Chinese authorities had their motives for promoting the theory that the virus came from outside China. But it is not pursuing Donald Trump’s...

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