China

Activist Agenda: campaigns and info

A list of many campaigns that Workers' Liberty activists are involved with and support, plus info about other organising and resources.

Kissinger: war criminal but wise?

Senior Colonel Wu Qian, top spokesman of China’s defence ministry warned the United States to stop interfering in Taiwan and the South China Sea, saying (according to the Morning Star of 1 December): “We request that the US side acts in accordance with its words and takes concrete steps to honour its commitment not to support Taiwan independence”. What was remarkable about Col Wu’s statement was not what he said but what (if the Morning Star ’s report on 1st December is complete and accurate) he didn’t say. As he was speaking on the day after Henry Kissinger’s death was announced, Col Wu must...

Uyghur film director arrested

Ikram Nurmehmet, aged 32, studied cinema at the University of Marmara in Turkey and then returned to China. In 2019 he directed Elephant in the Car (which I haven’t seen) — a story of two young Uyghur men, a Chinese woman, Xiao, and a taxi driver. The taxi driver picks up all three and he soon hits it off with the two Uyghurs who enjoy some music together on the taxi’s stereo system. Xiao becomes uneasy in the presence of the two Uyghurs and eventually tells the driver to stop the taxi and she gets out. It appears that this film — and maybe others that he has directed – have angered the...

The “demographic crisis” and women’s rights in China

Moral panic and societal anxiety over “the demographic crisis” have become a consensus shared by more and more governmental officials and mainstream media of China in the past few years, accompanied by the burgeoning of the internet feminist movement and the deterioration of gender equality both at home and in work. The video showing a woman wearing a chain in a rural village in Fenxian, Jiangsu, in February 2022, who was then revealed to have been kidnapped and forced to bear eight children with a man called Zhiyong Dong, has aroused national rage and criticism against the local authorities...

Tory is “spot on” about China, says Star

To the delight of the Morning Star , foreign secretary James Cleverly has met China’s vice-president Han Zheng during the first visit to Beijing by a UK foreign secretary in five years. During the meeting, Cleverly said it was important the two governments continued with regular face-to-face meetings to avoid misunderstandings. He also said it was important to address the challenges and differences of opinion that all countries had in bilateral relations, according to Reuters. The Morning Star (controlled by the Communist Party of Britain, uncritical supporters of the Chinese ruling class and...

Keeping up with the Star

During Solidarity’s August hiatus, your columnist has dutifully kept reading the Morning Star

China and the world’s largest army

The Bolsheviks helped establish the Whampoa Military Academy for Sun Yat-Sen’s Republican China in the 1924. Many of the Guomindang (KMT) and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) generals were Whampoa students who studied together under Russian instructors with experience from the World War and the Civil War. The army the instructors were training was nationalist, not Bolshevik. Chiang Kai-Shek was its first commandant. In 1927 he made a military coup against the CCP which massacred tens of thousands of CCP cadres and worker militants and broke the back of the CCP’s influence in the cities. Left...

China has new Covid surge

New Covid surges in China and New Zealand are now easing off. New Zealand’s, running over the first half of 2023, has cost about 30% of NZ’s total Covid deaths over the last three and a half years. Most of the rest were in mid-2022, when NZ finally decided that “zero Covid” via lockdown was unworkable, and reopened social life after a big vaccination effort. NZ’s total toll has been much smaller than other countries’, because NZ’s island status help the government slow the entry of the virus. China’s figures are much less reliable, but a Chinese doctor has estimated 40 million cases a week in...

Solidarity with Chinese workers!

On 4 June 2023, we mark 34 years since the Chinese state’s massacre of pro-democracy protesters around Tiananmen Square. The students’ stand in 1989 is rightly honoured around the world. Less widely known, yet hugely significant, was workers’ action. Over several months, steel, construction, transport, office and other workers demanded democracy, denounced inequality, challenged the party-state elite’s corruption and profiteering, blockaded the army, and struck. From Beijing to Guangzhou, they organised federations independent of the state-controlled “unions”. Rebellious workers penned...

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