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China: Student protests shake bureaucracy
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- some areas they =-ace ioom of the press and - #= ons and in an as yet confus- =: az. called into question the existing igns of bureaucratic rule. In Shanghai, ine students are reported to have been , oined by workers protesting against inflation.
The protests in the ruling munist" Party Yaobang, Deng forty years, has and resigned.
The student protests were partly over living conditions and the method of allocation of jobs, but quickly became dominated by demands for "democracy and freedom" • Unfortunately for the bureaucracy, their policy of an "open-door" to the capitalist world let in news of demonstrations in Europe and the democratic rights won by workers in the West, encouraging the students to take to the streets.
have opened up splits bureaucracy. "Com- General Secretary Hu Xiaoping's side-kick for "made a self-criticism'
Disputes
As Militant and the Militant International Review have explained, the planned economy has meant huge progress, but the control of society by a bureaucratic caste, uncontrolled by the working class, distorts and clogs up production. The bureaucracy responds to these problems by sharp swings from one policy to another. Deng Xiaoping championed economic modernisation, imported technology and incentives to managers and entrepreneurs to counter the effects of the bureaucratic centralisation of the previous period (see Lynn Walsh's articles in Militant numbers 819 and 820 for a detailed explaination of the meaning of Deng's reforms).
But the "liberalisers'" had no intention either of going all the way back to private ownership of the economy, or of introducing anything so dangerous as democratic rights for the masses, which are incompatible with the bureaucracy's control of society. Rong Yiren, the richest of the fat cats who have profited from economic reform, expressed horror at such an idea in a magazine interview in which he declared the students' "naive ambitions" showed their lack of understanding of China's past. "We can learn something from capitalist countries, but that doesn't mean that everything is good in those countries" he said. 8
Deng Xiaoping
All the privileged layers are united in their opposition to the control of society by the masses. But different sections of the state machine have more or less influence according to whether a policy of centralisation or decentralisation is carried out. Thus there are continual disputes within the bureaucracy and its political expression, the 'Communist' Party.
The different wings have used past protest movements, such as the Cultural Revolution and The Hundred Flowers Movement, to dislodge their rivals, taking care to clamp down on them once this narrow objective has been achieved. Initially, the latest protests seem to have been encouraged by Hu Yaobang's supporters. This section of the party leadership had noticed trouble brewing in 1985 when students demonstrated against a visit by the Japanese prime minister, reflecting discontent at the "second Japanese invasion" of consumer goods which are often substandard or even dangerous. liegal posters are reported to have demanded "remove corrupt and greedy officials", , "boycott foreign goods" and "oppose those who betray their country to enrich themselves". They instructed the 200,000 full timers of the "Communist " Youth League to "go among young people to address their concerns" so that they could be informed of the moods of the youth.
Towards the end of last year demonstrations started in Hefei,
the ap-
parently encouraged by Hu and some intellectuals who wished to extend freedom of expression for the sake of scientific and technological advance. Some may have flirted with the idea of China becoming a liberal capitalist "mixed" economy, but for the most part they had no clear aims beyond that of intellectual freedom. However, the movement spread to Beijing and other cities. The students refused to obey the authorities' dictates and some began to grope towards a programme of political revolution to overthrow the bureaucracy. The government leaders took fright at the prospect of losing control of the streets and began to denounce "anti-socialist elements"" they said were behind the protests. While not confronting the students head on, they have stamped on those in their own ranks whose "liberal' tendencies encouraged the demonstrations, hence Hu's resignation and the expulsion from the party of, Professor Fang Lizhi, the Vice-President of Hefei University, and other intellectuals who have compared China unfavourably to the capitalist world. Hard-liners, who favoured economic reform, have been able to crush the movement towards democracy because all the bureaucracy fear the spread of protest action to the working class.
Workers strike
The following article shows some of the social effects of the economic reforms and the rule of the bureaucracy. Deng's modernisation programme was generally accepted by the population, but while workers accept the need to expand production, they are repelled by many of the actual effects of the programme. The scope for corruption among officials has expanded, prices have risen and bonuses have shrunk in the factories, which now have to turn a profit as autonomous units. Twenty thousand tractor workers and bus workers in Beijing have taken industrial action on this question. The bureaucracy has to avoid the spread of protests by workers at all costs. At this stage they will probably be able to do so. Sooner or later they will make another sharp change in policy and reassert centralised control, even though this will create as many problems as the current policy. The recent movement has indicated that the needs of the Chinese people will conflict more and more with the rule of the bureaucratic clique and will force students, peasants and workers to take up the programme of political revolution and workers' democracy.
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'Liberalisation'
-preparing the ground for new explosions THE BRITISH capitalist press has enthusiastically reported the tion" of China in recent years. There has been a sharp turn from an economy run with extreme bureaucratic centralism to a limited reintroduction of capitalist rela- The policy of "autarchy"developing the economy in isolation from the rest of the World- has been modified by offering an "open door" to the capitalist West. This meets with the British bosses' approval as they join the scramble to pick up extra trade. An article in the magazine Granta by Orville Schell-a frequent visitor to China-shows some of the social effects of the "new line". It illustrates an increasingly clear differentiation between a layer of bureaucrats and the mass of the population in every aspect of daily life and the consequent growing discontent amongst layers of the population. This is not the indignant protest of an of "liberalisation"
. On opponent previous visits to China the author seems to have pined for the picturesque streettraders that proliferate in the squalor of other Eastern cities. He notes with interest the reappearance of the pedi-cab, a vehicle which presents us with the image of one human being straining on a bicycle to haul another human being around. "Sensitivity to the socialist niceties" was responsible for the disappearance of this slightly updated rickshaw in the early "seventies, he tells us.
That such public humiliations vanished was really a symptom of the tremendous gains of the Chinese Revolution. Improved health care has meant that the average life-span is now 70 years old or more while in Shan-Tung province before the revolution it was 40! Infant mortaliiy is down to 2 per cent. 95 per cent of the population are literate, compared to 20 per cent before 1949. In the 1930's famine killed over a million people in one province alone; in 1984 China produced is first ever grain surplus-a harvest nearly four times as big as in 1949. Staring from virtually nothing, industry 1o0 has taken great strides forward. All this is entirely because of the abolition of reudal relations on the land and capitalist ownership of industry.
The regime has tremendous support secause of this enormous progress. Speculation as to whether China is "gorg back to capitalism" is ludicrous. The :ounter-revolution that would be By Tony Cross necessary to pull out the roots of the planned economy would be absolutely impossible. But the progress of the Chinese Revolution is slowed down by the rule of the bureaucracy that has controlled it from the start.
Mao Zedong and the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party marched into power at the head of a peasant army, acting independently of the working class. The state machine was thus in the hands of the Red Army leadership alone, unchecked by workers' democracy. Without the involvement of the masses in running the state or the economy, the bureaucracy zig-zags between policies: centralisation and decentralisation; industrialisation and going back to the land; national isolation an "open-door"
tionals. Since the '70's the violent disruption of the "Cultural Revolution" has been countered by Deng Xiao-Ping's abrupt turn to the right.
Criminals prosper In the press and Party Conferences the bureaucracy no longer expresses itself in the pseudo-Marxist dogma behind which Mao and the 'Gang of Four" concealed their privileges. The Communist Party has launched the slogans "Get rich by working" and "To get rich is glorious" to encourage limited private enterprise in the town and country. A section of the bureaucracy itself has taken these instructions all too seriously. The Party Secretary of Hai Feng County was found to have defrauded the state of 70,000 yuan (£23,000) and taken bribes from people who wanted to leave the country. A national audit has revealed that the Government lost $1.19bn because of irregularities in state departments enterprises including "excessive operating costs, unreported or concealed profits, fake losses, tax evasions and issuing of goods to employees". Some of the youth have gone a little further. Gangs have appeared who practise murder, robbery, ransacking houses and the kidnapping of young women to sell them to peasants who can't find wives.
Their members are often ex-inmates of labour camps. But remarkably they also come from the off-spring of the bureaucracy, obviously demoralised by their parents' pilfering of the state. In 1983, eighty two sons and grandsons of army officers were accused of forming a ring of thieves responsible for the gangrape of thirty women. In 1984, gang leaders known as the 'Five Fingers" and the "Two Wolves" were arrested for 300 crimes of rape and violence, along with their gangs who were composed mainly of the sons of "high ranking cadres". The Chinese "school of Communism" seems to have a special course of bestiality! Schell remarks that the "reformed economic system" has allowed new scope 'Unemployment had left millions of youth loose on the streets of Chinese cities. In the countryside people were no longer tied to their registered address.... by the need for government coupons for grain, oil and cotton products. People could buy what they needed wherever they wanted, and were thus freed from the tightly-organised system that once held them firmly in place. And the new private sector of the economy had opened a Netherworld for criminals in China. Here in the middle of organised Chinese society, criminals were able to survive and carry on the pursuit of individual wealth, which the Chinese leadership itself now glorified."
Deng's "reforms" were themselves a reaction to the excesses of the "Cultural Revolution" which, in 1974-76 alone, were estimated to have cost 100,000m yuan (£33,000m) in industrial output, 28m tonnes of steel and 40,000m yuan in state revenue. Mao had attempted to deter the bureaucracy from overindulging in the fruits of the planned economy at the expense of industry and agriculture. He leaned on sections of the masses to "discipline" them. Of course, Mao's aim was to re-assert his grip over the bureaucracy, not to introduce real workers' democracy and workers' control and management of the economy. The "Cultural revolution" did not destroy the bureaucracy, and so was one-sided in its
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MIR Spring 1987: China
results. China was cut off from foreignproduced modern technology, and technicians, managers etc were demoralised.
However, to develop a modern economy, without the conscious participation of the working class and in the absence of revolution in the metropolitan countries, the bureaucracy was obliged to turn to the world capitalist market, to bribe the international capialists with lucrative contracts to import modern technology. Since their caste interests prevented them allowing worker's control and management to check and modify central planning, they had to use smallscale capitalist incentives to lubricate the wheels. Privilege was reinstated. But some people will go too far. In order to protect its "legitimate" privileges, the bureaucracy is forced to take drastic action against the most unrestrained criminals.
The barbarism of pre-revolutionary China is reborn, not only in the horrifying crimes outlined earlier, but also in the methods of punishment. Public executions have been revived and as an onlooker at one of these tells Schell, "there is an old custom here in China, and they've revived it again. After a criminal has been shot, his family is sent a bill for the bullet. It's a reminder that a criminal not only brings punishment on himself but shame on the whole family in which he was raised."
nfanticide returns
The most startling feature of Schell's report is the reversal of the improvements in the conditions of women, whose status had been little better than that of livestock before the revolution. In the old-style Chinese family, grand-parents arranged marriages, divorce was forbidden, widows could not remarry and all income went to the head of the family. A childbride could be any age, for example the woman General Li-Chen had been given in marriage by her family at the age of six.
One of the revolution's first acts was to abolish child marriage, polygamy and concubinage. To relieve women from the drudgery of housework a 1958 'Communist Party resolution advocated the building of housing estates including "residential quarters, community dining rooms, nurseries, kindergartens, 'homes of respect for the aged, factories, threshing floors, livestock sheds, shops, post and telecommunications offices, warehouses, schools, hospitals, clubs, cinemas, sportsgrounds, baths and public lavatories... " Unfortunately the construction of these material necessities for the emancipation of women is held back by the still backward nature of the economy.
Of course, the bureaucrats themselves don't have to wait. For 2,500 customers 10
in Beijing the problem is solved by the Housework Service Agency, which finds cooks, maids and nannies for its clients. There are an estimated 30,000 live-in maids in the city, mainly brought in from rural areas rather like the British ruling classes domestic servants are imported from countries like the Philippines. The Shanghai-published Economic Daily explains that "although the employment of household help was criticised as gentrified, bourgeois and exploitative during the Cultural Revolution, in reality such employment cannot be abolished. " Maids are "'an inevitable phenomenon of today's urban social life" because "people" want "less housework and more time for work, study, and recreation." These 'Communists" not only employ servants but apparently don't even regard them as "people"!
But for the mass of the population, the fruits of "liberalisation" are not so sweet. In the countryside the horrifying practice of infanticide has reappeared. The breaking up of the collective farms has encouraged the peasants to have larger families—against the bureaucracy's wishes since the population is expanding faster than the economy. But more children means more labour on the family's land. However, "peasants are convinced that a female child will not be as much help in the fields as a male child and that when a daughter comes of age she will marry and go to live in the household of her husband." So a baby girl is a burden on the family.
The People's Daily reports that 'the drowning and killing of girl infants and the maltreatment of mothers of infant girls... have become a grave social problem. These phenomena are found not only in deserted mountain villages but also in cities; not only in the families of ordinary workers and peasants but also in the families of Party members and cadres." A letter from fifteen peasant women, one of whom has had nine daughters, says: "No one wants to be a mother of an excessive number of children yet not one of the fifteen of us is ready to give up. Here where we live, a mother without a son suffers so much discrimination and cruelty that we feel it is worth risking our very lives to escape it."
The bureaucracy's China Youth News seems particularly worried that " ...in 20 years time a serious social problem may arise; namely, that a large number of men will not be able to find wives." Anxious to prevent such a development, and also perhaps the small social problem of baby girls being dumped on the roadside or drowned, the bureaucracy has launched a propaganda campaign against infanticide. But it cannot cut across the material conditions which cause these horrors.
In fact, many women turn for solutions not to the 'Communist' Party but to the temples. They sacrifice to gods and spirits and seek the help of priests, sorcerers, wizards, witches and mystics. Schell comments that this is «one of the most startling indicators of regression of mores in rural China." During the Cultural Revolution "most peasants would not have dared publicly to seek help or solace in such 'feudal' practices."
Only a policy of mechanising agriculture through voluntary collectivisation and planning its links with industry, along with guaranteed social services for the old, will relieve these women from the unbearable pressure to produce sons. That they seek solace in the superstitions of feudal times is a crushing condemnation of bureaucratic rule.
Until recently, illusions in the 'revolutionary purity' of the Chinese regime were widespread in and around the European labour movement. The privileges of the bureaucracy were not readily apparent, because China had inherited such a low level of production from the era before the revolution. Only the Marxist tendency, represented by the Militant and the MIR, warned in advance that as the economy developed, so would the gap between the living standards of the bureaucracy and the masses.
Discontent grows
This process is only beginning today. The economy will continue to develop, but in a distorted manner because socialism is impossible in one country. This is the reason for the growing contradictions between the needs of the masses and the bureaucratically controlled state. An isolated economy, especially a backward one, cannot generate enough wealth to eliminate want. So the bureaucracy makes sure it satisfies its own material requirements at the expense of the workers and peasants.
The more the economy expands, the more the bureaucracy pilfers aid so reveals itself as a caste whose interests are opposed to those of the mass of the population. At a later stage the bureaucracy will be forced to make another sharp switch in policy and reverse many of the concessions made to private ownership in recent years. But the gap between the living standards of the masses and those of the bureaucracy will grow wider and wider. The Chinese working class will grow as the Russian working class has to become the largest and most powerful force in the country. The world revolution will knock on the door of the isolated Chinese revolution. All of these processes will prepare the way for a further political revolution that will sweep away the bureaucracy
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