IN an extraordinary speech given at his annual press conference, the outgoing Chinese prime minister, Wen Jiabao, warned that China risks a ‘historical tragedy’ along the lines of the Cultural Revolution launched by Mao Zedong in the 1960s.
The Cultural Revolution was Mao’s attempt to halt the rise of the section of the bureaucracy he called the ‘new mandarins’. Mao called out the youth, who purged the ‘Mandarins’ and stood them in the corner with dunce’s caps on their heads for opposing his policy of socialism in a single country and a ‘Great Leap Forward’ to communism.
With Mao’s death the youth were driven back, and the open capitalist roaders took over, pushing their theory of one state, under the dictatorship of the proletariat, made up of two social systems.
This has led to China propping up a bankrupt United States through buying its debt from its share of the spoils from the opening up of the New Economic Zones (NEZ), where US and other foreign capital super-exploits the working class.
However, in the last five years the Chinese workers have been driving up wage rates in the NEZ through revolutionary strike actions, while the US has been trying to force the bureaucracy to revalue its currency upwards to cut Chinese exports to the US, and thus throw large numbers of workers out of work in the NEZ in the process.
It is the mass revolutionary movement of the working class and the rural population against the NEZ capitalists and their allies in the ruling Stalinist bureaucracy that has brought about the semblances of a political revolution that has scared the pants off of Wen.
This ‘tragedy’ can only be averted, according to Jiabao, if the bureaucracy presses ahead ‘with both economic reform and political structural reform in the leadership system of our party and country’, ie, makes a major right turn that will bring China to the brink of the restoration of capitalism.
The reference to the dangers of another ‘cultural revolution’ is aimed at the sections of the bureaucracy who are closer to the working class, and very fearful of the workers’ response to a further right turn.
It seems that the just-purged Bo Xilai – who rose rapidly from running the huge inland city of Changquing, to the central government where he was the minister of commerce – is a leader of this section of the bureaucracy.
In Changquing he gained a reputation for leading a major crackdown on the massive corruption and organised crime that gripped the city.
At the same time as posing as the incorruptible defender of the poor and an heir to the Maoist revolution, Xilai was happy to equally promote the influx of foreign capital into the city and, as minister for commerce, the entire country.
Clearly this position to continue the twin economies theory of the Chinese bureaucracy is now redundant as the major wing of the bureaucracy seeks to move further to the right.
The impact of the world crisis of capitalism on the deformed Chinese workers state is revolutionising the working class and terrifying the bureaucracy.
The left-wing, represented by Xilai and others like him, fear that a headlong rush into open capitalist restoration will inevitably lead to the political revolution that will overthrow the entire bureaucracy.
Both wings of the bureaucracy are right to fear the working class and peasantry.
The working class must take advantage of this crisis of the Stalinist bureaucracy to build a section of the Fourth International in China to lead the political revolution to overthrow the ruling Stalinist bureaucracy, expropriate the foreign capitalists and introduce rule through workers and peasants soviets, as part of the world socialist revolution.
