China

Throughout Asia the post-war period has been one of vast social upheaval. What happened in Europe after the First World War is now happening in Asia after the second. Without the organising technology of modern society which links together great areas and peoples and without extensive industry which creates a more homogeneous and substantial working class, Asia’s revolutions have taken varied forms. In no case have these changes been organised by a socialist revolutionary party basing itself on the workers. Leadership has fallen to national bourgeois classes, social democrats (Burma) or to...

The central strategy of the Chinese CP armies is clearly not geographic. While their march below the Yangtze has brought huge territorial acquisitions, the main military objective is the destruction of Kuomintang armies rather than conquest of specific objectives. This kind of piecemeal strategy is an essential characteristic of the Stalinist conquest. It is based on military advance strictly planned and regulated by the top leadership. The great masses of the village and city are deliberately kept quiescent. Their support is solicited, but only as benevolent neutrals. On the day of launching...

From Peiping last week the Chinese CP news agency announced completion of preparations for a definitive conference to be held late summer to form a new national government. One of the aspects of the bureaucratic revolution is the Stalinist emphasis on continuation in office of the old functionaries of lower rank wherever possible. The CP seeks to win to itself whole sections of the old administration whom they desperately need to operate their governmental structure. Recently new schools were established where “ex-Kuomintang officials learn to serve the people.” Beside the smaller fry CP...

A turning point has been reached in the Chinese bureaucratic revolution. Recent events have forced the hands of the new rulers. They are now in the process of accelerating a change in policy which they had expected to accomplish gradually, or as Mao Tse-tung never failed to emphasise, “by stages.” The Stalinist government has increased taxes and revenue in kind in order to feed its newly conquered cities. In fact, it has attempted to woo the workers, from whom the party has been alienated these last 20 years, by tying wages to the rice-price index. This has been done in Shanghai and Nanking as...

The assembly convened by the Chinese Communist Party has proclaimed a new state from the capital at Peiping. Mao Tze-tung, head of the party, is also chief of state; Chou En-lai, one of the party’s top triumvirate, premier and foreign minister. Communist Party domination is indisputable and complete in all sections of the new government. In the larger framework of the international balance of power the problems are only becoming apparent and new ones will arise. The US has been outflanked in the entire North Pacific, for example. With Manchuria under the Russian thumb, with connections to the...

The fall of Canton brings a close to a two-and-a-half year civil war in China. Except for the rice bowl of Szechuan, deep in the Yangtze valley, every major section of traditional China is in CP hands. Canton is not simply another city. It was the heart of native capitalism. As long ago as the middle of the 16th century this city became the major trading port with the Portuguese and later with the Dutch and British. During the last century, it was here that the only major popular resistance was organised by the commercial classes over the heads of the corrupt imperial government at Peking...

The battle of Formosa which has raged over Washington these past weeks is now concluding its first phase. Truman’s announcement that the United States has no intention of intervening, since Formosa is Chinese territory and must be settled by Chinese political forces, does not close the matter. But it reduces the opposition to the position of critics rather than potential makers of policy. Intervention was discarded because it could not serve the higher political interests of US diplomacy, which is now shifting its base to India and Japan. The State Department, for example, is heavily involved...

Deng Xiao-ping, the second paramount leader of the People’s Republic of China, died on 19 February at the age of 92. He had reached an advanced stage of Parkinson’s Disease and eventually suffered respiratory and circulation failure. His last published photograph, in a wheelchair, was in October 1994. For at least the past two years he has been too ill to assert his political power as the regime’s final arbiter. All the various political factions and tendencies within the Chinese Communist Party had long been jockeying for position in preparation for this eventuality. At this time of writing...

The Washington Post reported in January this year that unemployment is the highest now since the CCP took power in 1949. Government figures of urban joblessness stand at 18 million, and that is without counting joblessness among the 160 million urban-based migrant workers. The figures are most likely double this in the countryside. “Mass incidents” (defined as a strike, demonstration, blockade, or another public unrest involving over one hundred people) were estimated at 127,467 in 2008 (a substantial increase on the last officially released figure of 87,000 in 2005). If the trend from the...