THIS week, as part of the 90th anniversary of the foundation of the Chinese Communist Party, the party general secretary and China’s president, Ho Jintao, issued a stark warning to the ruling Stalinist bureaucracy.
In a speech televised throughout the country he warned: ‘If corruption does not get solved effectively, the party will lose the people’s trust and support.’
Referring to, what he called, China’s headlong economic growth, Ho Jintao said that it had thrown up ‘all kinds of conflicts and problems’, mainly a yawning gap between rich and poor.
What prompted this remarkable criticism of the CCP was the massive pressure on the bureaucracy from the Chinese working class and especially a new generation of young workers who are rising up against low pay and the extreme exploitation in the New Economic Zones, where foreign capital has been super-exploiting the working class.
This has been seen in a wave of strikes against the foreign-owned companies in these ‘New Economic Zones’, where goods are manufactured chiefly by migrant workers from rural areas who have been forced into the towns and cities.
The south eastern city of Xintang, a centre of the massive garment industry, recently underwent four days of protest and riots.
Such is the anger of the Chinese workers, that the normally subservient Stalinist official trade union organisation, the All China Federation of Trade Unions, has been forced to adopt a campaign of actively representing their members in pay demands through negotiations with factory managers and leaders of the business Federation.
At the Honda car plant in Southern China, the ACFTU secured a 30% pay raise for production line workers, while only a year ago local union officials had sided with management against a strike by workers over pay.
The Chinese Stalinist leadership are right to be afraid of this revolutionary movement of the working class, led by the youth, in what is a deformed workers’ state.
The economic ‘miracle’ in China’s New Economic Zones has been achieved through keeping the currency, the yuan, weak, depressing wages to poverty levels and keeping the price of manufactured goods low, creating a paradise for the bourgeoisie of the world, and a massive surplus for the Chinese government.
This in turn has fuelled a currency war with the US imperialists, who are demanding that China revalue the currency up to stop cheap exports and at the same time open up the vast Chinese market to US imports.
The Chinese bureaucracy, which has used its vast reserves of money to invest and buy up whole swathes of industry in Europe and the US along with supporting a bankrupt US economy by purchasing US government bonds, now finds itself caught between the growing demands of imperialism and a revolutionary upsurge of the working class.
Any attempt to bow to US demands and drive up the currency will inevitably lead to mass unemployment and a revolutionary upsurge and political revolution to overthrow the bureaucracy.
At the same time, the US imperialists are making it clear that this currency war will, in time, be swiftly supplanted by a shooting war.
This was spelt out by Hillary Clinton on her recent visit to the Philippines where she pledged to arm the country as part of the US drive to bring together the forces to confront China.
For US imperialism the only way to resolve its debt crisis is through the overthrow of the Stalinist regime in China and the restoration of capitalism.
For the Chinese working class the only way forward is through the political revolution to overthrow the Stalinist bureaucracy and establish rule through workers and peasants soviets, as part of the world socialist revolution.
