China

Jack Cleary explains why the workers and students are in bloody conflict with China's 'socialist' rulers For three weeks in May and June, the Chinese government lost control of a large part of Beijing.It lost control of its capital city to the people who live there, spearheaded by the students and workers demanding radical democratic reform. They paraded with a home-made replica of the Statue of Liberty, but their anthem was the Internationale, the song of revolutionary socialism all over the world ever since the French workers took another capital city, Paris, out of the hands of the French...

An assessment of the leading thinker of post-Trotsky "orthodox Trotskyism", the "Fourth International". 'The leadership oriented itself without any synthesised understanding of our epoch and its inner tendencies, only by groping (Stalin) and by supplementing the fragmentary conclusions thus obtained with scholastic schemas renovated for each occasion (Bukharin). The political line as a whole, therefore, represents a chain of zigzags. The ideological line is a kaleidoscope of schemas tending to push to absurdity every segment of the Stalinist zigzags. Blind empiricism multiplied by...

“China is basically controlled by the capitalists. All I can do at the moment is speak up for the workers,” declared Qing Tong, formerly one of China’s hundreds of millions of workers who migrate from the countryside to work in big-city factories, but now a writer and able to speak to the 'Financial Times' (17 July). “It seems that the government chooses not to see certain things, so we must keep shouting complaints into their ears non-stop. Only after they hear us will they start seeing.” Qing used to work at Foxconn, the gigantic Taiwanese-owned factory complex with 400,000 workers where...

“China is basically controlled by the capitalists. All I can do at the moment is speak up for the workers,” declared Qing Tong, formerly one of China’s hundreds of millions of workers who migrate from the countryside to work in big-city factories, but now a writer and able to speak to the Financial Times (17 July). “It seems that the government chooses not to see certain things, so we must keep shouting complaints into their ears non-stop. Only after they hear us will they start seeing.” Qing used to work at Foxconn, the gigantic Taiwanese-owned factory complex with 400,000 workers where iPods...

When the arch-Tory newspaper the Daily Telegraph runs exposés of working conditions in your factory, you should know something is up. Terry Gou, the 59-year old Chinese billionaire who owns Foxconn, must be a little shaken-up. Foxconn is one of the world’s biggest technology companies, producing components for blue-chip giants such as Dell, Sony and HP. Its highest-profile client is Apple, for whom it produces iPhones, iPods and iPads. It has become the centre of a recent scandal after several workers committed suicide (with others making suicide attempts), unable to cope with the pressure of...

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“The Chinese Communist Revolution was the greatest event of the 20th century after the October 1917 Russian Revolution.” Statements like that were for decades common on the Trotskyist left. Even among those of us who believed that a new working-class “political revolution” was necessary against the Stalinist regime established over all of mainland China in 1949. The Chinese revolution was seen as a giant step forward, albeit in a twisted and deformed way, in an ongoing world revolution against capitalism. With China, fully one third of the land mass of the globe was under Stalinist control —...

Original introduction to the 1970 edition The articles that follow were written and published while the events themselves were still unfolding, during the crucial 1948–9 period when the Maoist party was still conquering China. Without benefit of 20–20 hindsight, without benefit of documents and research that became available only afterward, Jack Brad called all the shots. Their contemporaneity gives these articles a sense of immediacy and vividness which historical contemplation cannot provide. But that alone would not be enough reason to publish them in 1970. The point is that, after two...

1909–12: democratic upheaval. Abdication of the last Emperor, formation of the Guomindang (1912), followed by a period dominated by the rule of regional warlords. 1919: May 4th Movement — student protests at Japan’s acquisition of German rights in China under the Versailles Treaty. 1920: Formation of Chinese Communist Party. 1924: Communist Party (under pressure from Stalin and his friends in Moscow) joins Guomindang. USSR sends military advisers to help Guomindang. 1927: Guomindang, led by Chiang Kai Shek, seizes Shanghai and massacres Communist workers there. In December 1927 CP attempts an...