By Miguel Sorans, a leader of Socialist Left/IWU-FI. 12 July 2021
A hundred years have passed since the founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It came into being on 1 July 1921, in the heat of the enthusiasm, the triumph of the 1917 Russian revolution opened up. They founded it underground with 50 members.
One hundred years later, the CCP claims to have 92 million members. It governs the most populated country in the world, with 1.4 billion inhabitants, under the exploitative rules of the capitalist-imperialist system. The same CCP that in 1949 led a socialist revolution has restored capitalism, in a process that began in 1978.
In 1949, the Chinese revolution shook the world. In the most populous country on earth, the dictatorship of Chiang Kai Shek fell. A socialist revolution led by Mao Zedong drove out imperialism and expropriated the Chinese landlords and bourgeoisie.
China had an overwhelmingly poor peasant population. Periodic famines were the tradition. Thanks to the bourgeoisie expropriation and planning, and despite the bureaucracy of the CCP and the lack of freedoms, the Chinese people’s life changed completely.
Since the beginning of the socialist revolution in 1949, China has been emerging from its millennia-long backwardness. Most important were the social achievements. In the 1960s, it was common to hear “almost a billion Chinese had eaten a bowl of rice, own a watch and a bicycle.” In the late 1970s, the average food consumption (in calories) was slightly above the world average and 14 American countries. They provided schooling to 96 per cent of children.
These social gains were lost because of the restoration of capitalism in China. Since 1978, the CCP led by the late Deng, a process of return to capitalism began. The entry of capitalist laws and over 70,000 multinationals meant millions of workers and peasants working in semi-slave labour, with poverty wages, the collapse of the free state health and education systems and further deterioration of the environment.
The 16th Congress of the CCP in November 2002 changed its statutes to incorporate the “capitalist militants” under the new theory of “triple representation”: workers, peasants, and capitalists. Thus assimilating the new Chinese bourgeoisie.
Under the leadership of Xi Jinping they pretend to hide their capitalist-imperialist character by announcing that after 100 years they continue to develop “socialism with Chinese peculiarities in the new era, fundamental achievements of the adaptation of Marxism to the Chinese context” (by Zou Xiaoli, Ambassador of China in Argentina, in Clarin, 30 June 2021).
In reality, what exists in China today is the complete opposite of Marxism and socialism. It is a one-party dictatorship that has restored capitalism and rules by exploiting and repressing millions and millions of Chinese workers and peasants.
We reproduce some articles that may be of interest
Communist Party Conclave: More capitalism for China (2013) Miguel Lamas
China: CP conclave hardens capitalist dictatorship (2017) Miguel Lamas
China: A “modestly affluent society” with millions of poor? (2020) Miguel Sorans
The Chinese and Indo-Chinese Revolutions (1968) Nahuel Moreno
