Nigel Harris Archive | ETOL Main Page
China & World Revolution
From International Socialism (1st series), No.78, May 1975, pp.22-25.
THE WORLD is governed by imperialism, but imperialism does not impose one order on the world. As Lenin outlined, the system is governed by the vicious rivalries of the powers that dominate it. That imposes a common discipline on all the rest. It makes the world one system, not a series of countries added together, nor a First, Second and Third Worlds. Ruling classes command the separate provinces of the whole and compete with each other, but they are not, and could not be, independent of each other anymore than one capitalist firm could be independent of its rivals in one country. The ruling classes are far from equal. The small cluster of ruling classes in the industrialised countries dominate their junior partners, their gangers and chargehands, in the majority of economically backward countries. There is indeed a great divide between the oppressing and oppressed ruling classes but they are both ruling classes. And that means that each depends on the exploitation of other classes, workers and peasants. Ultimately, the ruling classes both compete with each other and have a common interest – just as firms do inside countries. Altogether, they constitute a world ruling class facing a world working class and peasantry.
Between the First World War and the 1950s, many of the backward colonial countries were dominated by the struggle for political independence from the ruling classes of the industrialised countries. Without a serious international working class alternative, the anti-colonial struggle was waged by class coalitions of one sort or another. Whether led by middle class people or by part of the old pre-imperialist ruling class, it was an important challenge to imperialism that inflicted defeats upon it.
However, once in power, the new regimes faced different problems. Now they needed either rapid economic development so that national power rose to the level of the new regimes’ ambitions, or the spread of the revolution into the heartlands of imperialism. Without one or the other, without establishing national power on a par with the imperialist powers or breaking them from within, the world system inevitably begins to recolonise them. It is not necessary to do so by the direct use of force; indeed, military intervention is the least important method of incorporation. Through trade, capital movements and political influence, the world order subdues its rebels. The law of value of the world market begins to reassert its hegemony over the entire world.
Supporters of China’s policies argue that the rivalries between powers should be used to weaken the system, and that this aim is what explains the different phases of China’s foreign policy. It obviously makes sense to try to do this, provided it does not jeopardise the central task, building an alternative basis of power in the working class. Without this, the fiercer the rivalries between the powers, the more pressure on workers to support their own ruling classes. The system is not at all ‘weakened’ if there is no worker challenge to it – it merely becomes increasingly barbaric and oppressive. And barbarism does not automatically promote a revolutionary response unless there is a workers’ party proposing a real alternative. If improvishment and savagery produced revolutions spontaneously, the world would be continuously topsy-turvy with revolution.
A revolutionary government is concerned, not with building a conventional level of power, but the growth of an alternative source of power, the world working class. The enemy is capitalism, both its multinational and its backward national sections.
How does all this relate to China’s foreign policy? China is still weak in conventional national power, too weak to influence events on a serious scale. But, because of the politics and class position of its leadership, it is incapable of developing an alternative system of power, the international working class. The Chinese leadership pursued the same class collaboration abroad that it accepted in its rise to power and in its time in power. The end product is the same, reformism. In the struggle for power, the Communist Party in essence invited the Chinese capitalists to unite with workers and peasants under its leadership to isolate the ‘handful of reactionaries’ and build a powerful Chinese nation. Abroad, it invites foreign ruling classes to unite under its leadership to isolate the ‘handful of reactionaries’, namely the ‘two superpowers’ (the United States and the Soviet Union), and build a prosperous world order. In order to isolate one ‘superpower’, the Soviet Union, it is necessary to give tacit support to anything that opposes it, including NATO and the Common Market, regardless of whether this conflicts with the interests of European workers. It is similarly necessary to give tacit support to SEATO or the five power Commonwealth agreement for policing south-east Asia, lest the Soviet Union intervene to ‘fill the vacuum’ (The Times, October 23, 1972).
The Chinese Communist Party’s class collaboration policies were part of the reason why the effect of the Chinese revolution on the world class was so small. The 1917 Russian revolution and the work of the Comintern spread the impact of workers’ power round the world. It created Communist parties in most countries, including China. It was a call to a world class, not to ‘oppressed’ ruling classes, and the aim was the creation of an ‘international Soviet Republic’, not a group of allied ruling classes constituting a ‘Third World’. The Chinese Communist Party rejects the need for a centrally disciplined Comintern because it does not accept that there is one world working class. It looks at the world as a national ruling class, not as the Chinese workers’ section of a world class. Therefore, the United Nations is an adequate forum.
Ninety nine per cent of the external relations of the People’s Republic are with other governments. It accepts the terms of such relationships and the terms of the rivalry between the advanced powers – bribery (through aid), manipulation, and the private meetings and secret assurances of important leaders. No matter if the leader happens to be a most reactionary ruler, king, Shah, or Sheikh; how he treats his people is his ‘domestic concern’. It means also doing favours to ensure the stability of the existing ruling classes, as Chou En-lai has twice done in Vietnam for the United States. The Chinese Prime Minister admitted in 1972 what had long been known, that ‘he had wrongly persuaded the Vietnamese to make concessions at Geneva in 1954 to get a settlement; he was wiser now than then.’ (Times, interview, July 13, 1972) Wiser he may have been, but it did not prevent the Chinese Government inviting President Nixon to Peking in February 1972 without consulting its supposed allies in Vietnam who were still fighting US forces. There was much barely concealed anger in Hanoi, but again this did not prevent China (and the Soviet Union) using all pressure to persuade the North Vietnamese to accept President Thieu as the legitimate negotiator for the South, a concession they had hitherto refused to countenance.
It goes even further. Discretion is needed in domestic reports of foreign events lest it offend friends abroad. The Chinese masses were told nothing of the Watergate affair, nor are they invited to understand the events in Northern Ireland. When relations improved with the Filipino dictator, Marcos, reporting of the Huk revolt disappeared, and the southern Muslim rebellion has never featured in China’s newspapers. There was nothing on the events in East Bengal, nor the youth revolt in Ceylon, nor even the appalling destruction of the Indonesian Communist Party in 1965. In the same way, events in the countries which China is wooing are not allowed to affect relations – while Chou En-lai assiduously flattered his Egyptian hosts in 1965, they were putting avowed supporters of China on public trial.
To play the diplomatic game, you need to keep all the cards in your own hands, not display them. You need to preserve the ability to make quick changes without reference to some other audience, either one at home or a popular movement in some other country. The switch from attacking the United States as the major threat to the Soviet Union as the main enemy was a change of gear that seemed to wreck a foreign policy of two decades standing. At one moment, as Foreign Minister Chen Yi put it 1965,
‘Peaceful co-existence with US imperialism which is pushing ahead its policies of oppression and war, is out of the question’.
At the next, Peking was offering Nixon what was seen as a great diplomatic coup to relieve him of domestic embarrassment. There were no great gains from the concession. Taiwan remains under the Kuomintang. But China is now a member of the United Nations!
Chinese foreign policy shifts and changes, just as domestic policy does, but it always clings to the central aim of achieving an association of ruling classes, and working class interests in the countries concerned are sacrificed to this. At one stage, it was the grand alliance of North Korea, North Vietnam, Indonesia, Ghana and Cuba. But the Russians mobilised to prize loose Korea, Vietnam and Cuba, and the leadership of Indonesia and Ghana fell through a hole in the structure of their domestic class coalitions. For a time, it was the European imperialist powers who were the key. Indeed, Mao went so far as to describe it thus:
‘France itself, Germany, Italy, Great Britain – provided the latter stops being courtier of the United States – Japan and we ourselves: there you have the Third World.’
(French Parliamentary delegation, 1965)
Then policy shifted back to the task of piling up votes for the crucial debate on China’s entry to the United Nations. Then back to wooing European imperialism – Heath and many of the European foreign ministers were feted, wined and dined at the expense of the Chinese masses. But with dissension in the Common Market and economic weakening, policy turned again to the ruling classes of the backward countries.
In 1974, Teng Hsiao-p’ing tried to impose some order on these shifts in a speech to the representatives of the ruling classes of the world in the United Nations:
‘The world actually consists’, he said, ‘of three parts, or three worlds that are both interconnected and in contradiction to one another. The US and the Soviet Union make up the First World. The developing countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America and other regions make up the Third World. The developed countries between the two make up the Second World.’
(Peking Review 15, 12 April 1974)
The world apparently has a class system of ruling classes in which the smaller imperialist powers are a petty bourgeoisie, and the economically backward countries’ ruling classes, the workers and peasants. The ‘workers and peasants’ include such unlikely members as Hailie Selassie (until his fall), the Shah of Persia, the Mafia that runs Thailand, the Chilean and Brazilian juntas. The scheme is a dreamworld designed to hide the great divide that cuts through every country and every district of the world, between the world ruling class and the world working class peasantry.
The Chinese Communist Party needs to obscure reality, both to conceal the class divide inside China and its weakness abroad. It has no power to oppose the Soviet threat except national military preparedness. It cannot appeal to workers in Russia or anywhere else to defend a workers’ regime in China, because it is not a workers’ regime. What it can do abroad is to try and win allies among other ruling classes and prevent the Soviet Union winning them. That is, at the end, an illusory power, since all its good friends who have been bribed or have dined in Peking, will also be happy to sit on the sidelines and watch the Sino-Soviet war as an entertainment. The American and European ruling classes, in particular, will watch to see whether there are any profits for them in such a confrontation. And the United Nationa which it cost China so much to enter and to which it has contributed so heavily since, will undoubtedly deplore the loss of life and urge moderation on the belligerents.
For the Chinese leadership, there is no objective structure of classes, or power, only relationships to be manipulated. Japan in 1971 was a dangerous militaristic and imperialistic threat to the Pacific region. But in 1972, after the Peking visit of Prime Minister Tanaka – now dismissed for corruption – the Japanese ruling class is described as no longer seeking power in the Pacific and the People’s Republic has now agreed to supply Japan with oil (up to 50 million tons by the 1980s). The Chinese leadership is not concerned with what a revolutionary Japanese worker might make of this strange somersault.
Not very long ago, the Soviet Union was, according to the Chinese Communist Party, a socialist society. On the accession to power of Mr Khrushchev it became fascist at home and imperialist abroad. There was no change in the class structure of the Soviet Union which made it capitalist – if it had been socialist before – let alone fascist. If the workers had been in power, if there had existed the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, how was this wrested from them without any apparent struggle? No doubt in the future if the accidental conjuncture of forces leads to Russia and China improving their relations, the Soviet Union will pop back into the ‘socialist camp’. Of course, a real analysis of Soviet society as opposed to rhetorical phrase mongering would draw uncomfortable parallels with China itself. If, as the Chinese say, Russia is State capitalist, then on the structure China is also State capitalist.
In fact, as these examples show, analysis for the Chinese government – talk of classes and fascism – is not the basis for policy, it is a diplomatic ploy to justify things already settled for reasons of State policy.
For the Chinese leaders, the capitalist class suddenly disappears into a ‘handful’ of selfish people, easily overcome or reeducated. The lack of analysis before events, the ‘r’einterpre-tation’ of events so that they are always victories whatever happens, means that policies can never be tested in practice and no lessons can be drawn from failures (because, by definition, there are none). The leadership is infallible. There was no appraisal of the terrible defeat of the Indonesian Communists in 1965 (although they had been directly influenced and encouraged by Peking), of the Indian Marxist-Leninists between 1969 and 1971, or the Bengali Left in 1971.
The lynch-pin of China’s relations with other ruling classes is the Five Principles of ‘peaceful co-existence’ (mutual respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty, non-aggression, non-interference in internal affairs, equality and mutual benefit, opposition to imperialist policies of aggression and war). The principles are so vacuous that they are acceptable to any, including the imperialist powers themselves. They bind no-one to anything, for there is always some reason available to an aggressor to reconcile his action with the principles concerned (intervention was at the request of the ruling class concerned, is the standard excuse). Indeed, they are used against China itself; in November 1974, when China moved the United Nations seating of Sihanouk’s Cambodian regime, it was rejected on the grounds that it was interference in domestic Cambodian affairs.
For those not in the ruling classes, ‘peaceful co-existence’ does mean something, however. For the Chinese government, ‘interference’ in the domestic politics of another ruling class is a far worse crime than that ruling class slaughtering its own people (Pakistan, Ceylon etc.). ‘Peaceful co-existence’ is a conservative principle. It accepts the existing world order and guarantees it to those who benefit from it. China’s acceptance of the principle from the Soviet Union is like Chile’s Allende accepting, as a condition of power, ‘non-interference’ in the Chilean armed forces. No-one committed to the class struggle . could ever accept such a principle since it disarms the oppressed – it forbids help to workers who live in other countries, forbids the existence of a world working class.
What of the cases where China has assisted revolutionary forces? Moral support is offered unstintingly – even if not necessarily publicly – except where the Chinese government is wooing the threatened government. But China takes no initiatives in starting movements elsewhere. For example, there is no guerrilla movement operating in Taiwan (although there is a Taiwanese independence movement, anathema alike to Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Tse-tung). Practical assistance to movements that exist is flatly denied by Chou En-lai, but here is evidence that some help, very small and very exceptionally, is given (it is minute in comparison to the help given to other ruling classes). In Vietnam, there was a great of help, but that was to an established government, that of North Vietnam. In the Middle East, China gave early moral support to Al Fatah, but only a little practical assistance (most of the weaponry of the Palestine Liberation Organisation came from other sources); the help reached a peak during the Jordanian civil war, but then shifted to diplomatic relations with the Arab States (especially Egypt, Lebanon and Syria).
In Southern Africa, Peking is said to have assisted guerrilla movements against the Portuguese and against the Rhodesian regime, but again it is not clear that this has been of any great significance in the struggle. Certainly, the cash or arms involved has been trivial beside the railway finance advanced to Tanzania and Zambia (the ruling classes of which were, in 1975, busily attempting to suppress the same Zimbabwean guerrillas).
Elsewhere, the guerrillas may fight forever more, but Peking has nothing but talk and occasional holidays in China to offer. Even those may be curbed when it affects State relations: as has happened in Malaya, Thailand and the Philippines. China’s propaganda certainly emphasises popular action and rejects the ‘Parliamentary Road to Socialism’ – except in Chile or wherever else it might seem to be successful – but not the fundamental basis of a parliamentary road strategy, class coalition reformism.
The victims are the exploited. In every class coalition or alliance of ruling classes, it is their interests which are sacrificed to the exploiters. There may be temporary concessions made to encourage them, but in the end this is just the price of giving up the struggle against exploitation. Nationalism in isolation from the struggle against exploitation is no more than the old ‘divide and rule’ tactic. Long ago, Marx put it quite clearly:
‘Past experience has shown how disregard of that bond of brotherhood which ought to exist between the workmen of different countries, and incite them to stand firmly by each other in all their struggles for emancipation, will be chastised by the common discomforture of their incoherent efforts’.
(Inaugural Address to the Working Men’s International Association, 28 September, 1864).
China & World Revolution
Nigel Harris Archive | ETOL Main Page
Last updated: 2.3.2008