Class Struggle Rages on in China

Donald Trump, the big-mouthed business tycoon, got elected U.S. president, running on the tide of discontent of the U.S. working class. He claimed during his campaign that the U.S. has been declining because China stole U.S. jobs. He promised that he would force U.S. companies to bring the jobs back. The first day in office, he claimed, he would label China as a manipulator of currency and threaten to put a 45 percent tariff on goods from China. Many workers in the U.S. were led to vote for him because of his tough words on China, trade and job issues.
In response to Donald Trump’s exclamations, David Barboza wrote an article in the New York Times (12/29/16): “How China Built ‘iPhone City’ with Billions in Perks for Apple’s Partner”, accusing China’s government of subsidizing Foxconn to locate its manufacturing facilities in Zhengzhou City, the capital of Henan Province. Journalists like Barboza appear to be preparing public opinion for Trump’s planned policy of getting tough with China.
But, in fact, the Chinese did not steal the jobs from the U.S. It was the U.S. multinational companies that moved jobs to China to avoid paying workers the fair wages and benefits they deserved. Fueled by their racist drive for profit, they came to China to exploit the labor force there, paying a fraction of what they would have to pay workers in the U.S..
What is missing from mainstream media reports is any acknowledgement of how it happens that Foxconn can find 350,000 well educated, healthy and disciplined workers to produce the smartphones that make Apple one of the world’s richest companies. Research in neighboring Shandong Province documented the increase in high schools in Jimu County from 1 to 87 (for a mostly rural population of 900,000) between 1966 and 1976. Without similar developments in Hunan Province during that 10 year period – the so-called “lost decade” of the Cultural Revolution – investors would never have found this huge population of trained workers now producing 350 cell phones per minute in “iPhone City.”
The willingness of new industrial workers from agrarian backgrounds to be overworked and underpaid (a “disciplined workforce”) largely rests on the residual prestige the Chinese Communist Party won during its socialist period prior to market reforms. But there have been increasing numbers of labor disturbances in China. The annual number of “mass incidents” increased from 10,000 in 1993 to 180,000 in 2010 (see graph 1), suggesting that this source of multinational profits may have its limits. Chinese workers more and more recognize that a capitalist exploiter is a capitalist exploiter, no matter what they call themselves.
Progressive Labor Party applauds the Chinese working class for its huge and growing fightback in the face of intense exploitation. Ruthless capitalist exploitation of Chinese workers enriches both U.S.-based multinational capitalists and Chinese capitalists, some of whom are members of the so-called “Communist” party of China. In 2015, the number of billionaires in China—now over 600—surpassed the number in the United States (Forbes, 2016). Meanwhile, class struggle in the U.S., at least in the form of major strikes, has been on the decline for decades, having dropped most dramatically in the early 1980s (see graph 2).
Workers all over the world want to live a decent life, free from abuse by a boss. We want to be able to raise our children and see them healthy, well cared for and well educated, not enslaved by debt or by a sweatshop boss. We want a world without racism and sexism. We don’t want to fight and die in the bosses’ profit wars. Capitalism—either the declining U.S. version or the rising Chinese version—is driven by the iron laws of the marketplace: make more profit than your competitor or die. Control markets and resources – at gunpoint where needed – or go down. Profit margins are directly tied to the rate of exploitation of the workers in whatever country they live.
These facts underlie the PLP’s strategy of one working class, one party, worldwide. Workers of the world need communist revolution to take power and run the world for our class, not for capitalist profit. Our party needs to grow explosively in every country of the world, including China, the world’s workshop and home of the greatest number of strikes today. Workers of the world, unite!