Lead article
June 1999

China's rulers play nationalist card as mass unrest grows

Bob McGuire

Two anniversaries loom over other events in China in 1999—the 80th anniversary of the May 4, 1919 uprising and the tenth anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre. The Communist Party observed the anniversary of the May Fourth Movement with its annual polite ceremony, claiming for itself the legacy of that 1919 resistance to Japanese expansion in Shandong by students, merchants and urban workers that developed and spread mass activity and liberatory ideas, above all Marxism.

Also in May, thousands of Chinese university students took to the streets in reaction to the May 7 U.S. bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, beginning a week of daily demonstrations at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing and other symbols of the U.S. across China. By week's end organized groups of workers had joined these emotional anti-American protests. Genuine as was the popular outrage over the attack, these were demonstrations that China's rulers welcomed and managed. They were shut down after six days by those in fear of where any mass movement could lead.

All this came on the eve of the other anniversary, the tenth year since the June 4, 1989 massacres in Tiananmen Square and Chengdu. The same slogan on signs protesting the embassy bombing—"blood debt to be paid in blood"—was ten years ago directed at the army and party for the slaughter of over 3,000 protesting workers and students. That debt has not yet been paid.

It is significant that the last mass celebration of the anniversary of the May Fourth Movement was by students and workers in 1989, in the face of police harassment. A university student-initiated hunger strike for freedom and democracy occupied Tiananmen Square and created space for workers as well to gather and create autonomous trade unions which frightened China's state-capitalist rulers.

RISING TENSIONS OVER NATO BOMBING

The Chinese government has opposed any form of NATO/U.S. intervention in Yugoslavia over Kosova, which it justifies as non-interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign state. The official press in China has made no mention of Milosevic's campaign of ethnic removal and genocide within Kosova. Official pronouncements exceed in virulence even that of Russia which vehemently opposed NATO expansion to its very border.

Popular feeling was only intensified by the Chinese government's demand of an apology for the embassy bombing, while withholding for days word of Clinton's first attempts at such an apology. The U.S. explanation—that this hi-tech military campaign had been undone by using an old map—thus sounded incredible, even after NATO bombs damaged the Swedish and Swiss Embassies and devastated a barracks of the Kosova Liberation Army (KLA), which the KLA had wrested from Serb forces more than a week before.

China's support of Milosevic shows they are of one mind when it comes to national minorities, as seen in how the Uighur and Tibetan regions have autonomy only on paper.

While Clinton's visit to China last year was intended to base his foreign policy legacy on the "special relationship" with China, since then cracks in their relationship have become crevasses. Campaign fund investigations, failure so far to usher China into the World Trade Organization, accusations of nuclear espionage and even expanding military exports to Taiwan are being perceived in China as the sole world power treating what it regards as its "junior partner" with contempt.

STATE-CAPITALISM IN CHINA

Foreign policy is always for internal consumption, and there are reasons for the rulers to play the card of nationalism. Even the symbolic end of colonial dismemberment of China with the return of Hong Kong after a century and a half in 1997, and Macao at the end of this year, does not change that.

A border remains between Hong Kong and the rest of China to stop the flow of people, but not the free flow of capital. And enforcing barracks-style labor discipline on workers in the coastal export industries for the benefit of foreign and native capitalists alike smells like the extraterritorial rights that colonial powers enjoyed in 1919.

The year 1989, and the precariousness of power that Tiananmen Square exposed, still threaten China's rulers. Jiang Zemin arrived from Shanghai after the June 4, 1989 massacres to assume the top titles of army, party and state as designated successor to Deng and actually did succeed him. Previous designated successors Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang were removed following 1986-87 marches and the 1989 Tiananmen Square movement, respectively.

Jiang could personally distance himself from the decision to crush demonstrators on Tiananmen Square if one ignores the wave of executions of worker-activists in Shanghai in the aftermath of June 4, and in his 1997 visit to the U.S. he hinted at mistakes made then. But continued imprisonments of opponents or even journalists, and the policy of expulsion in hopes of marginalizing voices of opposition, spell out official policy.

Jiang simultaneously presided over the "economic miracle," the explosion of export industry while proceeding with the dismantling and privatizing of heavy state industry. China's exports to the U.S. last year exceeded $70 billion, up from less than $10 billion in 1988. For capitalists in the U.S. who think human rights equals property rights and can be measured in production output, that spells success.

China even avoided being swept into the 1997-98 Asian economic meltdown, exporting its way out by taking a share from other below-subsistence producers like Thailand and Indonesia and increasing exports to the U.S. by 12%. Little wonder that Wall Street gratefully embraced Premier Zhu Rongji on his U.S. visit, in return for unbroken access to the pool of labor that produced much wealth for foreign capitalists, including the U.S.

While adding a provision on the status of capitalists to China's constitution may have seemed long overdue to Wall Street, all it had to do is look at the original 1956 constitution that declared China state-capitalist. Not only would state ownership prove to change nothing at the point of production, in fact managers of many state enterprises after 1949 were the former owners still collecting on bonds exchanged for their factories.

It is questionable whether exports can continue to bail out the economy. China already produces half the shoes and garments sold in the U.S. Production growth has fallen from the spectacular 13% of the mid-'90s to 5%. That is part of the impetus for now-stalled negotiations to lower barriers to imports and bring China into the World Trade Organization, which has been encouraged by Clinton and by exporters of hi-tech goods and farm products regardless of draconian attacks on dissent and even the free flow of news.

REPRESSION AND REVOLT

In the last year prison sentences for activists attempting to register the China Democracy Party ranged as high as 13 years for Xu Wenli. Xu's prior imprisonment extends to the Democracy Wall period of 1979-80 when activists of the Red Guard generation tested Deng's return to power with a burst of publications on free speech and labor and peasants' rights.

Maybe even more revealing was the ten-year sentence given Zhang Shanguang for telling a reporter about farm revolts within Hunan province. He was accused of "providing intelligence to foreign organizations." Well over 100 million people have been forced by economics to leave the land and join the ever-growing "floating workforce" in the cities. Excess taxation and inventive new fees from local officials, and further confiscation of land for new factories to benefit well-connected cadres have repeatedly led to resistance and bloody suppression.

So widespread are the exactions of local officials that farmers in Hunan and Guangdong have mounted Whisky Rebellion-style resistance even to "legal" fees and police authority. If some welcomed plans to prune four million state cadres as reducing the number of leeches, in the opening stages the number of administrators has actually risen, with most cuts affecting the working class.

Layoffs from state bureaus and dismantled state enterprises mainly affect women workers. Less than 40% of the workforce, they number over 60% of the officially unemployed, even after many are directed toward domestic service for the newly rich.

Women concentrate at all levels the experience of the working class. In the coastal export zones, it is women in their mid-teens whose sweated labor propels China's economy, and who use up their working life by their mid-twenties. The permanent unemployment of many veteran workers—especially women who once had an "iron rice bowl," that is, a guaranteed job, and now have a temporary stipend or nothing at all—is what China's miracle, two-tier economy cannot forever cover up.

Under such circumstances it is predictable for a class society to disguise class differences, and nationalism is one card to play. Hence China's solidarizing with Milosevic. This is the very opposite of the nationalism of the May Fourth Movement. The authority of old Chinese maps, not national self-determination, rules government policy in nominally autonomous areas. Yet some brave journalists raised the question of supporting Kosova even after the embassy bombing and brought up the danger of playing the nationalist card.

WHITHER CHINA?

Recent reports of Chinese nuclear espionage through two decades and four administrations were, of course, filtered through the U.S. spy establishment. Whatever the merit of the charges, spy vs. spy games are what governments do, even "friendly" ones. But the controversy serves to focus attention on the military in China.

We have seen in 1989 at Tiananmen Square that control of the army, not the party, ruled the decision to crush demonstrators. Twenty years earlier the army completed Mao Zedong's preventive counter-revolution which he called the Cultural Revolution by entering the factories. But the standing of the army within China has depended upon a nuclear-armed military.

October 1 will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the official foundation of the People's Republic of China. As the People's Liberation Army approached Beijing, Mao had instructed workers not to go on general strike, but to stay at their workbenches and get out production. Time will tell how long the Chinese workers, and their own army of the unemployed, remain at their benches.