China

Self determination for Hong Kong!

It is now two months since 12 June, when the Hong Kong police fired 150 canisters of tear gas and rubber bullets at protesters. That caused a city-wide outrage against the excessive use of force, which forced the Chief Executive on 14 June to “indefinitely delay” introducing the proposed extradition law. The conflict has now escalated further, with a protesters’ occupation shutting down the airport today (12 August), after a horrific series of street battles over the weekend. After their initial victory on 14 June, the protesters continued to press for their five demands: • full withdrawal of...

Hong Kong confronts the CCP

Chan Ying writes from Hong Kong Within an explosive period of six weeks, we have seen protest marches totalling close to five million people, together with the most heavy-handed use of police firepower since 1997. The invasion of the Legislative Council building went viral around the world. This level of sustained social protest has not happened since the march of 1.5 million people in Hong Kong against the Tiananmen massacre in June 1989. Hong Kong has had enough. This is our city’s reaction to decades of Beijing’s undermining of the “one country, two systems” accord, signed with Britain in...

Self determination for Hong Kong!

After protesters stormed Hong Kong’s (largely unelected) Legislative Council on 1 July, there is a real risk that China will invade the territory. To international outcry about plans to ease extradition from Hong Kong to China — in effect, to give legal cover to the Chinese government “disappearing” dissidents, as it did with five bookshop workers in 2015 — Xi Jinping’s government has replied that all the issues in Hong Kong are China’s “internal” business, and no outsiders should comment. Hong Kong was separate from China, as a British colony, for 150 years. After the Stalinist takeover in...

Hong Kong: a Yankee plot?

Throughout the recent dramas in Hong Kong, Britain’s “socialist daily” the Morning Star, said precisely… nothing. No coverage at all until after the Hong Kong government had backed down. Then that after-the-event coverage was (as we shall see) even more revealing than the previous noncoverage. Perhaps the people who run the paper (i.e. the Communist Party of Britain – the CPB) thought their readers wouldn’t be interested — but then, the paper recently carried a lengthy and highly diplomatic report of a CPB delegation to China. Since 9 June, up to two million people in Hong Kong — more than one...

China: a “socialist superpower”?

From the Morning Star (07/06/2019) it seems that their people had a wonderful time on a recent visit to what they describe as “the world’s socialist super-power.” “Earlier this year”, reported the Morning Star, “Communist Party of Britain (CPB) representatives took part in a joint delegation of Communist parties from northern Europe and North America following an invitation from the International Department of the Communist Party of China (CPC)”. CPB Executive member Jonathan Havard told the Morning Star: “Their utilising capitalism to move forward to a modern First World society is entirely...

From St George to Xi Jinping

The Times (18 May) has splashed our denunciation of the wearing of the old Russian imperial emblem, the St George Ribbon, by some members of Lewisham Momentum. The incident is only a specially gaudy display of the general political trend of the section of the Labour supposed-left which gravitates around the Morning Star. The Morning Star is the continuation of the Daily Worker, which for decades from 1930 was a mouthpiece for the regimes of Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev. It saw the old USSR as “socialist”. It based that claim largely on the fact that all sizeable industry in that regime was...

Four days or 996?

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. From 1945 to the early 1980s, workers shortened their average work week at rate of about 20 minutes per year. Then the decrease slowed to five or 10 minutes a year. After 2008 progress stalled, and now it is being reversed, at the same time...

Invite of Chinese "Communist" Official is an insult to Chinese workers and to Marx

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. China’s crackdown on the Uyghur population has made the headlines recently with the UN reporting nearly a million Uyghurs are currently held in internment camps. The Uyghur people are a Turkic, majority-Sunni Muslim ethnic minority group in China’s northwestern Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Despite the Communist Party’s claims of equality...

Uyghurs protest at Chinese embassy

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. Under the pretext of fighting “terrorism” — after some...

China: 10 million Uighurs face state terror

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. “As the Economist reported, authorities divide each city into squares, with about 500 people. Every square has a police station that keeps tabs on the inhabitants. So, in...

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