China’s widening crackdown
The recently imposed
eleven-year sentence on the Charter 08 author Liu Xiaobo is just the tip
of a growing iceberg of repression in China, argues CHEN LIZHI. The
following is edited extracts from a longer article carried in the Spring
2010 issue of Socialist magazine, produced by Chinese supporters of the
CWI.
THE CHINESE REGIME’S
crackdown on dissent is intensifying. In recent years, the one-party
dictatorship of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has become more and
more repressive, adopting a policy of ‘zero-tolerance’ towards any form
of political dissent or civil discontent. In the past year, one
high-profile trial has followed another, with courts handing out longer
prison sentences to drum home their message to government critics on the
left and the right.
At the same time, new
measures have been announced to clamp down on the internet and to muzzle
the more inquisitive sections of the media. Most recently,
non-government organisations (NGOs) have been targeted. In a 8 February
edict from the Ministry of Education in Beijing, the charity Oxfam Hong
Kong was accused of "trying hard to infiltrate China", with its chairman
branded "a key member of the opposition camp". Last year, the Gong Meng
Open Government Initiative, a legal aid group which helped families hit
by the melamine-tainted milk scandal, was forced to close and its leader
was detained.
One case that has attracted
enormous attention worldwide is that of Liu Xiaobo, who was sentenced to
eleven years in prison last Christmas for allegedly "inciting subversion
of state power". Liu is a prominent dissident and well-known
intellectual since the 1989 Democracy Movement in Beijing. This is the
third time he has been jailed. Before his arrest in December 2008, he
and another 300 dissidents drafted and co-signed Charter 08, a manifesto
based on the Czechoslovak Charter 77, which calls for human rights and
democracy, but also a market economy and privatisation in China. The
Charter now has over 10,000 signatories.
But Liu Xiaobo’s case is just
the tip of the iceberg. China today is experiencing the most serious
crackdown for a decade or more. This raises important questions about
where China is going, and why the regime feels so threatened despite
what appears to be great economic successes.
Why is repression increasing?
THE CURRENT WAVE of
repression is aimed not only at so-called pro-US and pan-democratic
dissidents, but also against the left-wing and Maoists as well as
‘non-political’ victims of government policy. Last October, 34 people
were arrested for attending a ‘national conference’ in Chongqing
organised by the Chinese Communist Party (Maoist), an illegal
underground Maoist party. Eight of them, and several others arrested
later, have been put on trial for "engaging in terror actions and social
disorder". From the early 21st century, leftists in China have been
branded as ‘dangerous radicals’ by the government. Dozens at least of
left-wingers, mostly Maoists, have been put in prison since then.
The list of victims of the
current repression is much longer. Every year, hundreds of dissidents
are thrown into prison or so-called ‘re-education through labour’ camps,
or exiled from China. But in the period 1995 to 2005 there was a
relative ‘thaw’ and few high-profile dissidents were jailed, unlike the
situation today. According to official statistics, charges of
‘endangering state security’ have risen sharply, with more than 1,700
people arrested on such charges in 2008, a big jump from 742 the year
before and only 296 in 2005.
The Chinese regime has a very
complicated, brutal, but also decentralised (and largely ‘deregulated’)
state punishment system. According to Apple Daily (Hong Kong), there are
at least 700 named political prisoners in Chinese prisons (2009), and
probably many more in labour camps. ‘Re-education through labour’ is a
distinctive system, which China copied from the former Soviet Union, but
with ‘Chinese characteristics’. Who gets to be ‘re-educated’, and for
what reason, is decided by the police department rather than through the
judicial system. Sentences can be up to four years. In addition to 1.5
million normal prisoners, there are 200,000–300,000 people in such
camps. China is also the country that carries out the most executions.
In 2008, according to Amnesty International, 1,718 people were sentenced
to death in China, nearly five times more than Iran (346) which occupies
second place.
Why, when economic growth is
surging, is state repression increasing rather than easing? This is
because the accumulating contradictions that accompany rapid growth –
growth that is very unbalanced and chaotic – have made the CCP regime
more and more afraid of losing control of society and its own ability to
restore ‘order’. Mass unrest and crime have both risen in 2009,
according to the ‘Annual Report on China’s Rule of Law’ issued by the
Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) in February 2010. In a damning
indictment of government economic policy this report warns, "the wealth
gap is widening and the proportion of people in poverty is growing".
The ‘crime’ of Liu Xiaobo
IN 2008, LIU and his
co-thinkers, including some establishment figures such as top economist
Mao Yushi and legal scholar Zhang Zhuhua, drafted and co-signed Charter
08 to call for "freedom, human rights, equality, a republic, democracy
and a constitution". Rather than an attempt to ‘subvert the state’ or
launch any form of organised opposition, Charter 08 is in reality an
appeal addressed to the CCP regime urging it to adopt political reform.
Liu Xiaobo defends capitalist ‘economic reform’, but wants the regime to
make further political reform to transform China into "a real market
economy". The regime’s punishment of Liu Xiaobo is therefore not because
his ideas represent a decisive or clear alternative, but rather because
he has challenged its authority and the interests of the ruling elite
with the publication of Charter 08 and other writings. His liberal
pro-capitalist views pose a challenge to the CCP-led model of capitalist
development.
As Liu Xiaobo mentioned in a
2006 article, today’s CCP is a party purely based on "economic
interests" and no more an "ideological" party. Keeping power was always
the utmost objective for the CCP bureaucracy, even in the early years
when, like the Stalinist Soviet Union, it rested on a top-down planned
economy with full state ownership. Therefore, when the Maoist-Stalinist
economic model entered a serious crisis more than thirty years ago, the
CCP regime shifted step-by-step into accepting and leading China’s
capitalist development, while keeping dictatorial power.
Socialists strongly protest
the persecution of Liu Xiabao and other signatories of Charter 08, as
well as the many other victims of the repression, but in no way does
this imply any support for the political ideas contained in Charter 08.
While Marxists and genuine socialists fight for basic democratic rights
including many of the demands the charter raises, we completely reject
its political conclusions, which in our opinion do not offer a way
forward for the working masses or the struggle against one-party
dictatorship.
Charter 08 calls
unequivocally for capitalism and bourgeois property relations. It
supports more privatisation, but says this should be carried out more
"fairly". In items 14 and 15, for example, it states: "We should
establish and protect the right to private property and promote an
economic system of free and fair markets. We should do away with
government monopolies in commerce and industry and guarantee the freedom
to start new enterprises. We should establish a Committee on State-Owned
Property, reporting to the national legislature, that will monitor the
transfer of state-owned enterprises to private ownership in a fair,
competitive, and orderly manner. We should institute a land reform that
promotes private ownership of land, guarantees the right to buy and sell
land, and allows the true value of private property to be adequately
reflected in the market".
If implemented, the
privatisation of farm land advocated by Charter 08, and also by sections
of the CCP hierarchy, would inevitably and quite rapidly lead to massive
concentration of land in the hands of a new landowning elite with strong
ties to finance capital, while millions more poor peasants would be
driven from their land without other means of making a livelihood.
Instead of land privatisation, socialists call for democratic and
voluntary farmers’ cooperatives to control the land and develop more
efficient large-scale farming, backed up by infrastructure investment
and cheap or even free credit from a genuine workers’ and poor peasants’
government, elected and subject to democratic control.
Similarly, the call in
Charter 08 to abolish government monopolies and encourage private
business, would not benefit the working class or the poor. This has
already been proved by massive privatisations carried out in China. It
means transferring public assets from the control of corrupt officials
to equally corrupt and exploiting capitalists, rather than allowing
working people to run these companies democratically to meet society’s
needs. Where similar neo-liberal policies have been carried out – in
democratic capitalist states such as the US and in Europe – deregulation
and the break-up of state monopolies has enormously benefited the
speculators and big capital at the expense of employees and the public.
Capitalist ‘anti-monopoly’ policies have never achieved their stated
aim, and in most cases just create private and hugely profitable
monopolies in areas such as utilities formerly under state control.
Socialists are implacable
opponents of privatisation, which has widened the gap between rich and
poor wherever and however it has been carried out. The same arguments
about ‘fair’ and ‘orderly’ privatisation are used by ruling elites
everywhere to disguise their theft of public assets. Neither is it
accidental that those societies that have carried out the biggest
privatisation programmes are far from being bastions of ‘democracy’:
Russia in the 1990s, Chile under the dictator Pinochet, and China.
In his recent book Da Guo
Chen Lun, Liu Xiaobo attacks the ‘red-black’ alliance between CCP
officials and the rich. He argues that, "in a healthy market economy,
there is an anti-monopoly law". But regardless of what laws exist on
paper, in the real world of capitalism, wealth and power is increasingly
concentrated in a few giant companies. In the US, which is Liu Xiaobo’s
model, we see a dramatic example of this economic law – towards monopoly
– under the impact of the global capitalist crisis. At the end of 2007,
the four largest banks (Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and
Wells Fargo) held 32% of all US deposits, but this has risen to 39%
today. This is an incredible and dangerous concentration of economic
power in the hands of four unelected and uncontrolled institutions.
In history and in reality
there has never been such a ‘real market economy’ as Liu envisages. From
birth, capitalism has been accompanied by exploitation, violence and
cheating for the pursuit of profits. While he pointedly criticises the
CCP’s one-party regime, its corruption and incitement of nationalism,
these defects are not unique to the CCP, but are phenomena across nearly
all the neo-colonial world.
The evolution of China’s liberals
LIBERALISM, AND LATER
neo-liberal and conservative ideology, have grown among intellectuals in
China since the end of 1970s when the Chinese regime began its
capitalist economic reform. At that time, liberal scholars formed a
"friendly bridge" between the CCP regime, which was "opening-up", and
the western capitalist world. Liu Xiaobo was part of this trend.
But the Democracy Movement of
1989 was a key turning point that also saw the ‘bridge’ collapse. The
CCP regime, in order to repress the revolt of the working masses and
control capitalist development in China for its own bureaucratic
benefit, brutally crushed the 1989 movement and its intellectual core,
which had dared to show independence from the ruling group.
After this, part of the
former liberal-conservative layer of scholars accepted the situation
with the CCP regime leading the restoration of capitalism. This layer
then became accessories of the regime in carrying out neo-liberal
policies and attacks on the working masses. This is why currently on the
internet in China, many pro-government scholars are called ‘jiaoshou’
(the same pronunciation as ‘professor’ in Chinese, but loosely
translated means ‘wolf in sheep’s clothing’).
However, Liu and his
pan-democratic co-thinkers have remained on the other side of the
collapsed ‘bridge’ since then. As a well-known and unrepentant
opposition to CCP rule, but also to communist ideology, they have
refused to cooperate with the repressive regime. Unfortunately, however,
they have also refused to understand the reality in China and the social
and political roots of the current state of affairs.
After 20 years of struggle
with the regime, Liu and like-minded liberal intellectuals have not
discovered the true force of historical change – the working masses. In
1989, they tried to block workers and ordinary citizens from joining the
student-led protests, and put their hopes in one wing of the CCP top
brass (Zhao Ziyang). They resisted the only measures, such as a call for
a workers’ general strike and organisation of democratic defence
committees, that could have prevented the regime’s bloody crackdown.
As a part of the elite layer,
Liu and his co-thinkers have never really trusted or sought to unite
with working people in China, despite their calls for ‘equality and
democracy’. They criticise Chinese peoples’ violence and revolutions
throughout history, and see private ownership and the market economy as
the bedrock for democratic development. "I have always opposed sudden
reform taken at one step and, even more, have opposed violent
revolution... The order of a bad government is better than the chaos of
anarchy". (From the statement Liu Xiaobo was prevented from reading at
his trial).
In 1988 Liu Xiaobo was
interviewed by a Hong Kong journalist and declared that China would have
been better under a colonial system for 300 years, since Hong Kong,
under British colonial rule for over a century, had become a
‘free-market’ and a developed economy. This is completely refuted by
reality in Hong Kong, where a small handful of pro-CCP tycoons exercise
total control over the ‘free market’. It is a well-known saying in Hong
Kong that seven cents of every dollar spent goes to Li Ka Shing, Hong
Kong’s wealthiest man, because of his economic control over telecoms,
media, property, ports and retailing.
Similarly, based on Liu’s
thinking, India should be a developed, equal and free society because it
was a British colony for nearly 200 years and today is both a capitalist
democracy and federal republic – as Charter 08 calls for. However, the
reality is the total opposite: India still has the largest population of
poor people in the world and is full of social conflicts, class struggle
and even civil war in many of its states. With the exception of a
minority of privileged capitalist states, most countries with a
so-called market system and differing degrees of bourgeois democracy are
still mired in social chaos, mass poverty and inequality.
Democracy – where we stand
REPRESSION, CENSORSHIP and
thought control by the Chinese regime are often portrayed as ‘traits of
socialism’ by liberal dissidents and the overseas capitalist media and
governments. This is a deliberate falsehood. It is Stalinism and Maoism,
which rested on dictatorial bureaucratic control, that could not
tolerate democratic rights or dissent even within their own party. But
this has nothing in common with real Marxism and socialism. Genuine
socialists, supporters of the ideas of Lenin and Trotsky, were the main
target of Stalin’s murderous purges and massacres in the 1930s, and were
also terribly persecuted by Mao after the 1949 revolution.
Genuine socialists fight to
win and defend basic democratic rights including freedom of association,
expression, publication, and the right to strike. However, we have a
very different view of democracy and human rights from liberals and
supporters of capitalism. Socialists do not accept the idealistic view
that democracy and human rights are a ‘natural right from heaven’. The
democratic rights enjoyed by workers and the middle class in bourgeois
democracies were not simply handed down by benevolent rulers, but are a
result of consecutive class struggles especially by the working class,
from the struggles of trade unions in Britain over a century ago, to the
civil rights movement of Afro-Americans in the US. In all capitalist
countries, the rulers fought against the right to vote for the poor
masses and in particular for women. Furthermore, these rights are never
guaranteed, but must be defended again and again by struggle. There are
many examples today of ‘democratic’ capitalist governments attempting to
roll back democratic rights and limit the influence of the masses over
political leaders.
Bourgeois democracy, and the
governments it produces, are ultimately controlled by the capitalist
class and serve its interests. But as Leon Trotsky explained, the
workings of bourgeois democracy are contradictory and can come into
conflict with the wishes of the capitalists, because they also open the
possibility for the working class to organise itself and fight for
socialism. This idea was also expressed by Karl Marx in Capital:
"Democracy is the road to Socialism".
This is why socialists fight
to defend the democratic rights, limited as these are, that bourgeois
democracy allows, against authoritarian methods of capitalist rule. But
we also explain that to extend democratic rights and prevent them being
eroded or abolished, a new society of democratic socialism is needed.
Real socialism would mean the election of all representatives subject to
immediate recall and paid only a skilled workers’ wage. It would mean
democratic elections also for the boards of companies by the working
class, with board members paid only a skilled workers’ wage and subject
to recall. All aspects of life, government, economy, public services and
culture, would be democratised and opened to all, rather than run by
unelected bureaucrats or profiteers as is the case under capitalism.
Significantly, there is never
any criticism of the US and its imperialist role in Liu Xiaobo’s
statements. Liu and his co-thinkers unconditionally supported the US
invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, for example, and still describe these
as "just liberation wars" for the people of the Middle East. Globally,
for their own business interests, the capitalist powers and
multinationals collude with the CCP regime to exploit Chinese labour and
natural resources. This far-reaching collusion includes technical
cooperation in censorship of the internet, and in the repression of
individual dissidents. The incredible comment of Bill Gates recently
that internet censorship in China is "very limited" sums up the
profits-come-first attitude of the US and other capitalists. While they
cannot state this openly, the capitalists need the state repression
against the working class and masses that the one-party dictatorship
offers. The reality for hundreds of millions of Chinese who suffer under
real capitalism, courtesy of the Chinese regime and western capitalist
world, is a million miles removed from the imagined capitalism – ‘fair’
and ‘free’ – that Liu Xiaobo and his co-thinkers yearn for.
Socialists and the supporters
of Shehui Zhuyi Zhe (‘Socialist’ magazine) will continue to
actively protest the imprisonment of Liu Xiaobo and other victims of
state repression. We also demand the dropping of the absurd charges
against supporters of the Chinese Communist Party (Maoist) and their
release from detention. We call for the right of all political groups to
organise and openly campaign for their ideas. At the same time,
socialists will naturally, in the spirit of democracy, not hesitate to
criticise political ideas that do not offer a way forward for the
masses. Increased repression in China must be met with massive protests
but also with even greater efforts to publicise the socialist
alternative.
