In late September, Meng Hongwei, a Chinese security chief and the president of Interpol, the international police organization, flew to China from his home in France—and disappeared. On October 7, Interpol announced he had resigned his position after a “watchdog” for China’s arch-capitalist “Communist” Party reported online that Meng was “’suspected of violating the law and is currently under the monitoring and investigation’ of China’s new anti-corruption body, the National Supervision Commission” (foxnews.com, 10/7).
As imperialist powers China, the U.S., and Russia prepare for World War III, they need more intense fascism, both to control and attack the working class and to discipline their own ruling classes. With its one-party system and significantly state-owned economy, unconstrained by the charade of electoral “democracy” or presidential term limits, the Chinese rulers have a head start on the rising fascist U.S. bosses—a potential advantage in the global conflict to come.  President Xi Jinping is imposing unity from above in a public crusade against corruption, acts of Small Terrorism (versus the Big Terrorism of the state), and political disagreement. Meng’s arrest sent out a flare that even the Chinese Gestapo is not safe:
The appeal by Meng’s wife for justice and fairness echoed pleas from the families of scores of people who have fallen out favor from the Chinese Communist Party under President Xi Jinping’s rule. Some of them might have been pursued by Chinese authorities under Meng’s watch as vice minister for public security.
Such targets, who have been subject to arbitrary detention and made unexplained disappearances, include pro-democracy activists, human rights lawyers, officials accused of graft or political disloyalty and the estimated one million ethnic minority [Uighur] Muslims…. [see CHALLENGE, 9/26].
Xi, China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong, has overseen a harsh crackdown on civil society that is aimed at squelching dissent and activism among lawyers and rights advocates.He has also used a popular and wide-ranging anti-corruption campaign to boost supervision of the party and as a powerful weapon with which to purge his political opponents (foxnews.com, 10/7).
Four days before the news broke on Meng’s fall from grace, world-famous actress Fan Bingbing, the highest-paid celebrity in China, was fined $129 million for tax evasion “and other offences” (bbc.com, 10/3). Xi was sending another message: The rich are expected to contribute their share to China’s war plans and ambitious national projects for global dominance, namely the one Belt and Road infrastructure initiative and Made in China 2025, a bid for supremacy in robotics, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and cybersecurity, among other tech sectors. Though U.S. President Donald Trump is imposing tariffs on more than $250 billion in Chinese imports, China has shown no signs of backing down from the escalating trade war or its ambition to be the world’s number-one economy. As Chinese Commerce Minister Zhong Shan noted, “The U.S. should not underestimate China’s resolve and will” (Bloomberg News, 10/9).
China’s rising militarism
One aspect of rising fascism is the funneling of massive resources into military forces and equipment, a prelude to inter-imperialist warfare. In April, China deployed its first ever “Made in China” aircraft carrier. In the last decade alone, it has built more than 100 warships and submarines (Asia Times, 9/10/18).
In taking on the U.S., China’s bosses may choose not to go it alone. Last month, China staged its largest joint military exercise with Russia, which “has the largest [nuclear] arsenal of any country and is investing heavily in the modernization of its [7,000] warheads and delivery systems” (icanw.org]. The exercise coincided with the Eastern Economic Forum attended by Russia, China, and Japan (Economist, 9/6).  
Fasicsm strikes the Internet
According to the September/October issue of Foreign Affairs, the U.S. main-wing bosses’ authoritative publication, “the United States has ceded leadership in cyberspace to China.” While reaping “the economic, diplomatic, national security, and intelligence benefits that once flowed to Washington,” China’s rulers are also molding an Internet “that guides public opinion, supports good governance, and fosters economic growth but also is tightly controlled so as to stymie political mobilization and prevent the flow of information that could undermine the regime.”
One hallmark of fascism is ideological control over information—or disinformation—to serve the nationalist, racist agenda of capitalist bosses in crisis. At the same time, the Internet provides unprecedented power and reach for surveillance of workers and any capitalists who aren’t with the program. As Foreign Affairs notes:
Over the last five years, Beijing has significantly tightened controls on websites and social media. In March 2017, for example, the government told Tencent, the second largest of China’s digital giants, and other Chinese technology companies to shut down websites they hosted that included discussions on history, international affairs, and the military….Officials ordered telecommunications companies to block virtual private networks (VPNs), which are widely used by Chinese businesses, entrepreneurs, and academics to circumvent government censors….Beijing also announced new regulations further limiting online anonymity….
In an even more Orwellian move, authorities have rolled out a sophisticated surveillance system based on a vast array of cameras and sensors, aided by facial and voice recognition software and artificial intelligence. The tool has been deployed most extensively in Xinjiang Province, in an effort to track the Muslim Uighur population there, but the government is working to scale it up nationwide.
Workers in China fight back
Despite the fascist onslaught from the Chinese state, which has fought to bury real communism since the defeat of the Cultural Revolution in the 1970s, workers are not taking their oppression lying down. In response to a broken system that reserves decent health care for the wealthy, desperate patients and their families are rebelling at hospitals and clinics. Attacks on doctors “are so common that they have a name: ‘yi nao,’ or ‘medical disturbance’” (New York Times, 9/30).
As living and job conditions in China worsen for hundreds of millions of workers, a new surge of student activism is beginning to challenge the fake-left Chinese ruling class. These struggles are bringing together generations of Marxists, showing the potential for an organized communist movement in China.  In Huizhou, a group of recent university students converged from across the country and “attempted to put the party’s stated ideals into action” (NYT, 9/28) by organizing mistreated factory workers.
Carrying portraits of Mao and singing socialist anthems, they espoused the very ideals that the government fed them for years in mandatory ideological classes, voicing grievances about issues like poverty, worker rights and gender equality — some of communism’s core concerns (NYT, 9/28).
As more than 50 activists were arrested for the heresy of putting these ideas into practice, they began singing “The International.” Even in the hostile soil of today’s China, communist ideas will not die. The Progressive Labor Party looks to build our revolutionary organization worldwide. and especially in the face of rising fascism.  Join us!