CHINESE Stalinist leader President Hu Jintao has sent Prime Minister Wen Jiabao and Vice President Xi Jinping on international visits in a vain attempt to save collapsing capitalism and head off a working-class political revolution at home.
Wen met British Prime Minister Gordon Brown at Downing Street yesterday after they both addressed the Institute of Directors (IoD).
Speaking in Downing Street, the Chinese Stalinist leader said: ‘Only by working together, only by making a concerted effort, can we address the challenges we face’. Earlier, he told the IoD: ‘Confidence is very important. With confidence business people are able to invest.’
Brown, addressing the same meeting of businessmen, could barely disguise his begging bowl for bankrupt British imperialism.
He said: ‘I look forward to seeing further progress, with new contracts being signed and new opportunities emerging for our businesses. . . The strength of the relationship between China and Britain will be a pivotal force behind helping us through the downturn. . .’
In an interview with The Financial Times, the Chinese premier was even more explicit about attempting to save capitalism.
Referring to the fact that China is the largest investor in US bonds, he said: ‘We believe that it is important to stabilise the current Treasury bond market. To do so will be in the interest of shoring up market confidence, overcoming the global financial crisis and facilitating the early recovery of international markets.’
Wen has been delivering a similar message over the last few days at the Davos Summit in Switzerland, to the European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, and to government leaders in Spain and Germany.
While Wen has been in Europe, Vice President Xi has been making a five-nation tour of Latin America in preparation for the G20 summit in April.
President Hu Jintao, and the other leaders of the Stalinist Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are acutely aware that their fate is fused to that of world capitalism, ever since they began intimate collaboration with imperialism in the early 1980s.
They are ‘reaping the whirlwind’ of their theory of ‘one state, two social systems’ and sponsoring the new bourgeoisie and promoting it within the ranks of the CCP at the expense of the workers and peasants.
The impact of the world capitalist collapse has been devastating in China, where production has been geared to exports, primarily to the US. Officially, the rate of increase in GDP has more than halved from 13 per cent in 2007 to a projected six per cent in 2009. It is estimated that 20m migrant workers have lost their jobs and been forced to return to their villages.
Like US President Barack Obama and Brown in Britain, the Chinese government has launched a Rmb4tn (£400bn) fiscal stimulus package and allocated $30bn to the Agricultural Bank of China.
This is too little too late to head off the angry eruption of mass industrial action by Chinese workers.
So far this month, in Foshan the police took a factory owner to the bank at gunpoint to force him to give workers their backpay, fearing an uprising. In Dongguan there were pitched battles between textile workers and security guards, and a 1,000 teachers fought with police in Yangjiang demanding to be paid.
Like workers in Russia, who took to the streets across the country last Saturday shouting: ‘No to unemployment!’ and demanding that Prime Minister Vladimir Putin resign, Chinese workers are being driven to get rid of Hu Jintao, Wen Jiabao and company.
In Russia, workers declared: ‘We are against capitalism!’ and there were calls for the nationalisation of bankrupt enterprises and those stolen by Putin’s allies, the ‘oligarchs’ of the new bourgeoisie.
The collapse of capitalism is not only bringing the likes of Obama and Brown together with Putin and Hu Jintao.
This is forging a new revolutionary unity of the international working class in struggle, for socialism in the imperialist countries and a political revolution in the degenerate and deformed workers’ states, to overthrow the parasitic Stalinist bureaucracy.
Such a worldwide revolutionary development demands the building of parties of the Fourth International to organise and lead the working class to victory and complete the World Socialist Revolution.
