NEWS & LETTERS, April - May 2008
Lead
Flames of revolt in China
by Bob McGuire
The widespread uprisings of Tibetans against Chinese control in March seemed to take Chinese authorities and exiled leaders by surprise. What began as demonstrations on the 49th anniversary of the 1959 revolt against rule from Beijing caused security forces to step back briefly before the army and militia led a bloodbath, maybe 400 dead, to begin to regain control of the capital city Lhasa.
But outbreaks ranged far beyond Lhasa throughout the Tibetan Autonomous Region and beyond its borders into Tibetan populations in Gansu and Qinghai provinces. The government in Beijing urged on suppression of the revolt by accusing Dalai Lama supporters not only of trying to "split Tibet from the motherland," but also of the equally treasonous charge, in 2008, of "undermining the Olympics."
Then similar charges were asserted in Xinjiang. Overwhelming the indigenous Uighur population by moving in ten million ethnic Chinese Han settlers has reduced Uighurs to less than half of their own autonomous region. Uighur opposition groups have been routinely tarred as separatists, Muslim extremists and terrorists, and the Bush administration includes them on Washington's Terrorist Watch List.
But now Beijing announced, without evidence, that they had uncovered an unlikely plot between al-Qaeda and the Uighur group ETIM to use suicide bombings to disrupt the upcoming Summer Olympics, which is intended as a showcase for the transformation of "the world's workshop."
Protesters abroad have already taken advantage of the run up to the Olympics to attack China over Tibet and/or its complicity in genocide in Darfur by disrupting the journey of the Olympic flame through the streets of London, Paris and San Francisco (see article page 10). Ironically, the idea of the Olympic flame was a fakery of grandiose pageantry concocted by Hitler for the 1936 "Nazi" Olympics, as it was called by groups as mainstream as the Amateur Athletic Union when attempting to organize a boycott.
What has come to an end is more than half a century of official disregard for the question of self-determination for Tibetans. Now the degree of opposition to China's policies has compelled Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to meet with the Dalai Lama in India, and Prime Minister Gordon Brown to announce that he will not attend the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics.
CHINA'S LABOR POWER
The development China will show off during the Olympics documents the fruit of the natural resource that drew foreign capital in ever greater quantity: China's labor power. China's rate of economic growth has averaged well over 9% for the last 25 years, and in 2007 was 11.5%, while in the U.S. we wonder how long a recession will last.
Attracting foreign capital to China's export processing zones depended from the beginning on extracting the maximum labor power from their workers and paying them the minimumÑand suppressing the resistance that would naturally occur. In 1986-87, when Shanghai workers joined with students and intellectuals in a series of demonstrations for democracy and freedom, they were bloodily suppressed.
Similarly it was immediately after workers formed autonomous trade unions in the midst of the ongoing occupation of Tiananmen Square in 1989, that tanks killed over 3,000 there and in Changsha. In the aftermath of these massacres, it was primarily workers who were targeted for execution.
This eight-fold growth in China's economy has pushed it ahead of Germany to become the third largest in the world, behind only the U.S. and Japan. Even more startling, China has just passed the U.S. as the global leader in terms of production alone. Where the rust belt economy in the U.S. seems to be challenged to maintain aging bridges, roads and rails, China will have built more miles of new rail lines in five years by 2010 than the rest of the world has built in over 20 years. The new rail line to Lhasa extends Beijing's ability to assert its position in Tibet and to the borders of South Asia.
WORKERS' CONDITIONS WORSEN
All this has come with a price tagÑchildren bought or kidnapped to work as slaves in brick kilns, workers routinely locked in their dormitories behind factory doors. Workers in state-run enterprises lost the subsidized housing that came with the job, or found themselves out of work altogether as lifetime jobsÑthe "iron rice bowl" systemÑdisappeared.
Likewise, peasants would routinely be evicted from their land as it was turned over to some entrepreneur well connected to local Communist Party officials. As a result security forces have confronted an average of over 70,000 job actions, blockades and even armed resistance each year.
The result is a growing rift between those who have created the wealth and foreign and Chinese capitalists who enjoy it. In the midst of this accumulation there are between 150 and 200 million workers and former peasants forced from the land, mostly unemployed, searching for even subsistence jobs in factories and construction.
Until this year, workers in the foreign-owned enterprises had no union rightsÑcould form no autonomous unions and were ineligible to join the official All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) as full members. As of Jan. 1, a new labor contract law took effect. The proof that the new law provides more protection than no law at all would be the dire threats that China's competitive position on labor costs is in jeopardy.
Industrialists are publicly seeking to weaken provisions on job security and limits on overtime. Government spokesmen are issuing assurances that these newly covered workers are not getting an "iron rice bowl," and some companies are using labor goons to attack labor organizers spreading the word about the new law.
On the other hand, this law attempts to further centralize control of labor in the ACFTU. This is the state union that failed to fight for even the proper severance pay when state-run enterprises across the country shut down or were privatized. In several intense battles over severance in Liaoning in Manchuria in 2004, the union stood by while workers were jailed for protesting. Severance pay is a guarantee in the new labor law; why will they do better next time?
Half a century ago Charles Denby, the founding editor of News & Letters, spoke for many workers when, as he participated in the UAW as a Chrysler production worker, he said the labor bureaucracy is the last defense of capitalism. How much more is that true under state-capitalism, where the union represents the state, the boss of the state-run enterprises and the protector of the foreign-owned enterprises?
FEEDING THE BEAST
Much of the wealth produced in this extraordinary expansion is neither on display in brand new construction, nor hidden away in corporate coffers, but is continuing to feed the beast. There is an insatiable need for energy and raw materials to continue to expand.
Two-thirds of China's energy needs are satisfied by coal. In China's coal mines, that means production at any cost. That cost has been in miners' livesÑas many as 10,000 coal miners reported killed each year, never less than 5,500. Whether state-run mines or wildcat operations, rules that are enforced are those for production, not safety.
The demand for energy and raw materials has driven Chinese diplomacy and its expanded international presence. State enterprises are running metal mines in Peru and Chile and coal mines in South Africa and above all oil.
In country after country, especially in Africa, wherever there is oil not locked up by the West, China is there. They have projects in Angola and $50 billion on future projects. But their most notorious presence in Africa is in Sudan. There they are offering not merely money, but diplomatic protection to insulate Sudan's rulers from international consequences for the ongoing genocide in Darfur. In the UN Security Council, China will veto any demand for sanctions, and so, as defenders of Darfur have charged in demonstrations, China is complicit in the massacres.
China at the moment depends on imports for 40% of its petroleum needs. But as production continues to expand, its traditional oil fields like Daqing in Manchuria have already been surpassed by oil and gas production from Xinjiang.
Expanded exploitation of Xinjiang's energy resources, which Beijing is counting on for a full ten years' worth of national energy needs, accelerates the influx of the Han population, which has left Uighurs strangers in their own land. Oil field jobs have generally gone to Han workers, while Uighurs who are pushed off grazing lands lose their livelihood.
MARXISM AND CHINESE IMPERIALISM
In 1950 the newly-formed People's Republic of China moved troops into Tibet and claimed sovereignty as the successor to the old Chinese Empire. From that point on they have portrayed the army as liberating Tibetans from the theocratic rule of Buddhist lamas. Likewise, control of Xinjiang is framed as the alternative to rule by Muslim extremists.
Some who accept this, even some who consider themselves Marxists, are in danger of repeating their dangerously mistaken attitudes in the 1990s: lining up with Milosevic's pursuit of a Greater Serbia. They bought the premise that Serbia was "more socialist" than Bosnia and Kosova, whose people also were tarred as Muslim extremists, so that even their right of self-defense could be disregarded.
Compare that attitude to Lenin hailing the 1916 Easter Rising in priest-ridden Ireland. It was not an explicitly socialist revolutionÑamong the leaders martyred by the British, only James Connolly was an avowed socialist. Yet in the tradition of Marx, Lenin looked to Ireland to spark revolution in England and across Europe.
Upon the Bolsheviks seizing power in Russia, Lenin chose not to defend the boundaries of the Tsar's empire, but insisted on self-determination for Finns and Poles.
The Beijing Olympics that Hu Jintao will reign over as leader of the party, army and state, is intended as a showcase for the wealth and strength of this emerging state-capitalist economic and military power. Even production will be sacrificedÑthe worst polluting steel plants and other factories will be shut down in August for the duration.
But even as some dissidents are jailed at least through the Olympics, far more journalists will descend upon Beijing than in 1989 when, by chance, there were international reporters to witness the Tiananmen Square demonstrations. There might yet be a glimpse of the other China, at whose expense the showcase China has been built.
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