Western guidebooks and the slickest of upscale marketing do their best to erode the history of communist-led revolution in China. The plain two-story building, where the Communist Party of China (CPC) was founded, is totally out of place, surrounded by upscale shops and overpriced restaurants catering to the international tourist trade.
Today, the little historic site, being a tiny island of workers’ history, has a quiet power. Yet it is in a rising sea of Chinese yuppie culture, next to giant photos of sexist models wearing the latest fashions from Paris and New York. The morning I went to Xingye Road there was a steady stream of visitors, including 20 young men in China Air Force uniforms. I also saw small groups of older men and women with weathered, solemn faces and callused hands and a group of younger adults who stood in front of the large hammer and sickle display and repeated some sort of oath with their hands over their hearts.
China’s Bosses Steal Fruits of Revolution’s Advances
Chinese capitalism is everywhere I visited in the huge country. But the historical facts persist. The option to become the dominant capitalist economic power in Asia, and soon in the world, was only available to the current Chinese ruling class because communists of Mao’s generation ended a 2,000-year-old a system of exploitation. Pre-Revolution, 95% of the Chinese people were poor, ignorant and powerless. In the years after the 1949 socialist revolution the working people built a new country with schools, hospitals, factories and farms that existed to serve the people. Over the first 25 years of the People’s Republic there was the greatest increase in literacy and life expectancy ever recorded in a large impoverished country.
How was it possible for the “red capitalists” of the CPC — still calling themselves communists — to become fabulously rich by the restoration of a capitalist market system in the 1980s? They simply took advantage of the foundation of economic infrastructure and human power (a generation of workers raised with access to food, health services and education) to start making profit. They used, and still use, the prestige of the CPC to maintain their rule.
The “Communist” Party’s prestige comes from their former revolutionary leadership that ended semi-feudal exploitation and drove out the occupying forces of Japan and the Western imperial powers in 1949. They took advantage of their positions in the CPC and made themselves CEOs. In the process many Chinese have experienced the rising level of material possessions associated with rapid industrialization, but hundreds of millions are being brutally exploited in sweatshops and have no voice in the current China. “Serve the People,” the slogan of the1950s and 1960s is dead. “To Get Rich is Glorious” is the new order.
Capitalism Sows the Seeds of Its Own Destruction
The injustice and inequality that are growing just as rapidly as the modern skylines in China form the objective basis for a new revolutionary movement for social change in China. Despite the Chinese government’s efforts to control and distort people’s understanding of their country’s history, there are still millions alive who saw it unfold and know the truth. We know from the laws of capitalism that the rosy appearance of China’s prosperity for some will not last forever. The contradictions that we know so well in mature, decaying capitalist societies like the U.S., will develop further in China over the years ahead. They are already shifting resources from human needs to massive military investment.
PLP will connect with those who seek to re-establish a movement for communism in China, as we have in dozens of other countries. The needs of our class make that essential. The power of the world-wide movement for workers’ power and equality will take a great leap forward when that happens.J