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China & World Revolution
From International Socialism (1st series), No.78, May 1975, pp.7-8.
MODERN CHINA has been an inspiration to many thousands of socialists round the world. The revolution involved more people than any earlier popular struggle and it threw off a legacy of oppression, corruption and disunity that had been the despair of earlier generations. Once in power, the new government tackled its responsibilities with great vigour and energy, and yet seemed to remain flexible enough to adjust and shape its policies to fit the specific needs of its people. Popular enthusiasm appeared to be a buoyant tide that must sweep the country forward. And as a country, the sheer diversity and beauty – from the cold deserts of the north to the tropical jungles of the south – as well as the splendour of its cultural past, made China a sort of microcosm of the world, the place in. which mass creativity could at long last refashion its world. Photographs and film carried the message of students marching off to help the peasants, of barefoot doctors voluntarily giving up the privileges of city practice to tramp the villages, of new schools, of great factories. The contrast with the rest of Asia, particularly with the other giant, India, could not have been sharper.
For socialists abroad, China appeared as the most dedicated anti-imperialist force in the world, a giant standing alone against oppression. The style of the Cultural Revolution scattered a shower of sparks that caught ablaze in places as diverse as Calcutta, Berkeley and Rome. In May 1968, one spark – at Nanterre in Paris – set alight the most massive General Strike in the history of postwar France.
In the light of such a record, expressing any reservations about China’s role is taken as the mark of pro-imperialist agents. However, in 1971, a number of events took place which could not be shrugged off. In particular, events in Pakistan and in Ceylon raised a number of questions. What actually happened?
In the mid-1960s, China reached a close friendly alliance with the then ruler of Pakistan, General Ayub Khan. This association was reached despite the fact that the United States was supplying military and economic aid to Pakistan as a member of the Asian equivalents of NATO, the Central Treaty Organisation and the South East-Asian Treaty Organisation. Nor did it affect the well known fact that the authoritarian regime of Ayub Khan was systematically exploiting its eastern province, East Bengal. The Left opposition to Ayub in Bengal was heavily influenced by China in its politics, but was clearly weakened by the Pakistan-China relationship. Indeed, after one of the main leaders of the Bengali Left, Maulana Bashani, visited Peking, he was prevailed upon to offer critical support to Ayub Khan. Between 1968 and 1971, Pakistan exploded in revolt. In Bengal, this revolt led to the demand for independence, a demand which the Left opposed because of its critical support for Ayub Khan. In March 1971, Pakistan military forces launched a massive and brutal repression of East Bengal, which led to a mass flight of refugees into India. The role of the Left meant that the forces which championed the popular opposition were the corrupt group of middle class politicians round Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. The Pakistan attack opened the way for Indian military intervention, culminating in the new regime of Bangladesh under Indian guidance. At every stage in these events, China gave consistent public support to the general who had replaced Ayub Khan, Yahya Khan. It also extended considerable financial assistance. Indeed, without China’s support – and the implicit threat that China would open a third front against India to deter the Indian army – it is possible that the Pakistan military would not have embarked on the policy of repressing the Bengalis. The victors were India and its ally, the Soviet Union. The losers were the people of Bengal (the Chinese statements on these events are included at the end of this article).
Ironically, the appalling conditions of Bangladesh now is used by the more unthinking supporters of China as evidence that Peking’s foreign policy was correct. Yet the condition of East Bengal, including the famine of 1974, is the direct result of the failure of the revolution; Peking’s policy ensured that a corrupt ruling clique was brought to power in the new country (the Bengali Left offered no national alternative) under the domination of India. Forcing the Bengalis back under the oppression of Yahya Khan – as Peking hoped to do – would only have made present conditions even worse.
In Ceylon, in the spring of 1971, there was a major revolt of young people, the JVP rising against the regime of Mrs Bandaranaike. The regime had betrayed most of the promises on which it had won a landslide victory a year earlier. When the revolt was savagely put down – perhaps some 4,000 were slaughtered in doing so – China congratulated Mrs Bandaranaike. Furthermore, it extended its financial help to the regime.
The Chinese government sent a telegram of condolence to Franco’s Spain on the assassination of the Prime Minister, Admiral Carrero Blanco. It gave a ‘rapturous’ reception to the visit of the sister of the Shah of Persia to China at the same time as the urban guerrilla movement of Iran was being wiped out. It gave an even more enthusiastic welcome to British Tory leader, Edward Heath, when he visited China in the early summer of 1974. Just earlier, it had refused to accept as leader of a National Union of Mineworkers’ delegation to China, Mick McGahey, one of the Communist Party leaders in the NUM. China praised the Tory government’s policy of pushing Britain into the Common Market, although the British labour movement was opposed to it. The People’s Daily praised the Tory defence White Paper with its proposals to strengthen NATO and increase British military expenditure. And so on.
Each of the different incidents, raises the same central political question. Does China support the hare or the hounds? How can the government of China treat foreign governments in ways which seem directly both to contradict the development of a mass revolutionary movement and to flout the known opinions of the organised working class movement?
There were a number of answers on the Left. One opinion is that these examples were mistakes, and everyone makes mistakes occasionally. But these are not isolated occurrences. They are part of consistent policies that, in some cases, China has pursued from the birth of the People’s Republic. The leadership of China does not accept that these examples are mistakes or inconsistencies.
The mistakes arise, it is said in some circles, because foreign policy is remote from the Chinese masses who directly exercise a progressive influence over domestic policy. China is still, they say, involved in a domestic class struggle, and foreign policy mistakes are possible when the wrong class influences are at work. The Chinese leadership would not accept that China’s foreign policy is not already fully progressive. Nor would they agree that, even though there may be domestic class struggles, the hostile classes are able to command so important an institution of the central government as the foreign office. It seems more likely that the foreign socialists either do not understand China’s foreign policy or they do not understand domestic policy.
The foreign policy of China is, of course, necessarily different in style from the politics of the Chinese Communist Party. To survive in an imperialist world requires an isolated revolutionary government to deal with capitalist governments abroad, to use diplomatic courtesies, to reach trade and other agreements, to make compromises in order to secure its own survival, after all, it was Lenin who invited foreign capitalists to invest in Soviet Russia under the New Economic Policy. But whatever marginal compromises a revolutionary government might be forced to make, it cannot be allowed to contradict the aims of the Party. It is clearly self-defeating to be giving arms to a foreign government at the same time as the Party is arming the rebels against that government, to assist both oppressor and oppressed.
Of course, there are people who just shrug their shoulders. Perhaps the Chinese government has done things which are wrong. They may do damage to particular sections of the world revolutionary movement. But they are small matters in the broad sweep of history. The Bengalis – or at least, some of them – will live to fight another day. Such an argument shows a carelessness about the scarce forces of the Left that no serious revolutionary could adopt, let alone a Bengali. But is it true in any case that there are compensating victories somewhere else?
This article sets out to show that the leaders of China have pursued aims abroad that are fully consistent with their domestic policies. By examining these politics in the history of China, we shall see that there is a solution to the problems which face the Chinese government, but it is not open to the Maoist leadership to choose it.
China & World Revolution
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Last updated: 2.3.2008