China

A group of Labour Party members, has launched a campaign to cut the standard working week to four days rather than five, with no loss of pay.

It’s a good initiative, at a time when, for almost the first time since the early 19th century, and despite all the talk about new technologies displacing human labour, average work hours per week are now increasing.

The Marx Memorial Library’s annual oration at the grave of Karl Marx will be given, bizarrely, by Minister Ma Hui a senior official from the Chinese Embassy in the UK. The Chinese government is by no stretch of the imagination Marxist or socialist.

A protest outside the Chinese Embassy in London on 5 February indicted the “ethnic cleansing” and “cultural genocide” of the Uyghur people, a Turkic Muslim oppressed group in China.

Many Uyghurs see their battle as one for self-determination for what they call “East Turkestan, but the Chinese authorities have clamped down heavily. About 70 people came, mostly Uyghurs. Chants included “Freedom for East Turkestan” and “End the Torture”, and emphasised that the protest was about “being human, and everyone’s concern”, not about religion.

Jen Kirby, writing for American news website Vox, has described the system of surveillance and repression in Xinjiang put into place since 2016, when Chen Quanguo was appointed head of the regional government. Xinjiang, in the north west of China, is home to ten million Uighur Muslim people.

“Increased surveillance and police presence accompanied [Quanguo’s] move to Xinjiang, including his ‘grid management’ policing system.

News of state repression against China’s Uyghur people have become prominent in recent months. Reports at the UN estimate up to a million are held in internment camps.
China denies the mass detention and points to constitutional guarantees of equality and religious freedom, but the mounting evidence is discrediting such pretences.

At Ideas for Freedom 2018: Socialism Makes Sense Demaine Boocock will be leading a workshop on The class struggle in China.

Below is a link to some suggested reading for the session.

Click here for a PDF of the reading.

As I write on 10 April, US stock markets are recovering after dipping in the wake of tit-for-tat tariff announcements by US president Donald Trump and by the Chinese government on 4-5 April.

Trump and then the Chinese authorities have announced new 25% tariffs on a range of imports from each other. Those are bigger than and additional to the new tariffs introduced by Trump in March on steel and aluminium, and the Chinese retaliations for them.

In October, the 19th national China Communist Party (CCP) congress took place in Beijing. China’s president, Xi Jinping, used the propaganda event to push his distinct brand of CCP rhetoric, which sounded vacuously futuristic and echoed the party’s nationalistic and imperially ambitious past.

To achieve the “Chinese Dream” would be “no walk in the park”, he declared, it would require “more than drum beating and gong clanging to get there” (Xi Jinping, cited in Phillips, 2017).

Right-wingers are trumpeting the claimed prosperity of the US economy since Trump’s election, and of the British economy after Brexit. A closer look shows the prosperity as very partial.

Stock market prices in the USA have risen strongly since November 2016, though no more than their general rising trend since they hit bottom in March 2009. The slice of corporate profits in total US income is as high as it was at its pre-2008 peak, which in turn was the highest since 1965.

I was born in a steel town – Stocksbridge, about 9 miles west of Sheffield. The steelworks were huge and employed at its peak 6,500 workers. The sirens which marked the start and end of shifts, the roar of furnaces, the clanging of shunting trains and machinery, were constant background noise to my early years.