Protesting against Covid restrictions in Beijing, China, on the last week of November after deaths in a fire in Urumqi (Picture: Alamy/ Thomas Peter)
The protest movement that recently erupted in China seems to have taken even many Chinese people by surprise. Hundreds, and sometimes, thousands of people have taken to the streets in cities, including Shanghai, Beijing and Wuhan. Their demands stretch from the lifting of stringent Covid restrictions to democracy. Some even insist on the fall of the government.
Chinese student activists in Britain told Socialist Worker that anger at the government comes from many different places—but they didn’t imagine protests on this scale. “I didn’t expect things to go this far,” one student, Eric, said. “China hasn’t had massive protests for the last few decades.
“I’ve never seen anybody gather like that in Shanghai. I didn’t expect the slogan to be so bold either. It turned into ‘Take down the government’ and ‘Take down the Chairman’. It’s mostly what young people in China think, but no one dared to speak out.”
“In my hometown Wuhan there was also a protest, but they didn’t come out with bold slogans,” Eric added. “They want to take down Covid restrictions—they just wanted to get on the street to take down the barriers.”
Eric explained that the protests have become a focus for many different grievances at the government. “It’s not just a Covid protest, it’s a combination of all kinds of political protest that’s in the atmosphere,” he said. You have to see it from an economic view. The Chinese government has been in lockdown for two years.
“My parents, their generation, they all have something to say. They are all expressing complaints that they can’t make any money. Living is very hard right now. This atmosphere is in every generation and every social class. But the younger generation is the first to carry it out.”
Alvin, another student, also explained that a lot of grievances built up against the government during lockdowns. They then exploded in a wave of resistance and solidarity. “There are so many different protests—they are not only about the Covid policy,” he said. “One example is the Foxconn factory.
“Workers there had been promised bonus payments that fell through. They felt like they were cheated. Secondly they were angry at the testing regime, so they started going back home. They had to walk their way home. They were like refugees in China.
“Because of the zero-Covid policy they couldn’t come through cities. Many local people helped them spontaneously. They left food on the road.” Alvin added, “Many people are starving in so many places—it’s like everyone is suffering. After three years of lockdown the economy is sabotaged.
“And after Xi Jinping extended his presidency earlier this year, it destroyed a lot of people’s trust in the Communist Party. For young people, it’s like they’ve been really disappointed with the government. You have to work 9am to 9pm, six days a week. They’ve been complaining about that for a long time.”
So, said Alvin, the protest has been coming a long time. Yet, “I’m still surprised that people are saying down with Xi Jinping, down with the government. I’m also surprised at the solidarity among people. People started spontaneously gathering together online and offline.
“People also see in their own repression the experience of the Uyghur people. Many people now realise and believe there was a genocide against the Uyghur people. Many Shanghai people were wearing Uyghur people’s clothes. That was very touching. Many of my friends cried at pictures of those videos.”
Eric and Alvin are pseudonyms
What sort of “socialist” society sends in heavily armed cops to break up students’ anti-lockdown demonstrations? And then uses force against workers striking for health and safety at a firm making phones for a giant US multinational? The answer is China, described by its rulers as being “socialist, but with Chinese characteristics”.
The global superpower is led unopposed by a communist party that wraps itself in the red flag. The party traces its history back to an enormous wave of class struggle in factories and on the land in the 1920s. Today, its leaders are more likely bosses than proletarians.
The top 20 richest members of parliament—all card-carrying party members—have a combined wealth of £435 billion. Meanwhile, some 40 percent of China’s population live off just £125 a month. It’s all a long way from the party of peasants led by middle class intellectuals that came to power in a revolution in 1949.
The Communists, ragged from years in internal exile, had grown massively in the fight against Japanese invasion in the 1930-40s as the central state apparatus decayed. People were faced with a choice between pillaging local warlords or a rising party that reduced rents and treated peasants as human beings.
Naturally, thousands defected to the side of the Communists and their leader Mao Zedong. Together they beat back the Japanese invasion, swept aside the beleaguered Kuomintang party of the rich, and thwarted the imperialist fantasies of the West.
But unlike the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Chinese Revolution was nationalist not socialist in character. Workers didn’t lead peasants in the founding of a new, democratic society that collectively they would govern. Instead the Communist Party took hold of the existing state machinery and put its own personnel in charge of it.
Mao was clear that his Communists were not trying to overturn the existing society, but instead build a new, modern capitalism in China. “We cannot say the bourgeoisie is useless to us,” he warned. “It is very useful. The workers do not understand this because in the past, they have had conflicts with the capitalists in the factory.
“We should therefore explain the situation to the workers.” The bosses were only too pleased to reciprocate. “The new regime has so far brought prosperous living conditions to all and sundry,” wrote one business journal. “Private trade is doing well and profits are high.”
Mao and other party leaders were convinced that in the future, unless China modernised its industry at breakneck speed, the country would be crushed by competitors. That in turn made the nationalisation of large-scale industry a necessity.
Nationalisation—which even today many on the left use wrongly as a yardstick to measure socialism— was not ushered in in the interest of workers. Instead it was based on the needs of the state. Mao modelled his idea for rapid industrialisation on the Five Year Plan developed in Russia after Joseph Stalin had strangled the revolution there.
That meant squeezing ever more out of workers and investing the surplus value in heavy industry. Mao initially wrote of the need for a ten hour working day, but soon this was extended to 12 or even 18 hours.
The state capitalist system, which had replaced socialism in Russia, was now to be implemented in China. It involved key features that Marx had analysed as intrinsic to capitalism—the exploitation of labour, the extraction of surplus value and the drive to accumulate capital.
That means what Marx called capitalist “relations of production”, remained intact in China. Mao urged managers to break “workers’ activism” by lowering skilled workers’ wages to those of the unskilled and encouraging a new political ethos.
After mixed results for the first Five Year Plan, Chairman Mao Zedong launched the follow-up plan—the Great Leap Forward. He faced down growing demands from workers for a better standard of living with his own demand for yet more sacrifice.
But the plan was a disaster, especially in agriculture, and led to widespread famine that killed somewhere between 15 and 55 million people. Far from expanding the Chinese economy, the reckless plan had thrown it backwards by decades.
After the disaster of the Great Leap Forward, Communist leaders beyond Mao sought a new policy. They looked to limited economic engagement with the West to aid industrialisation and increased opening to the market domestically. Those moves required Mao to be shunted into the sidelines as a ceremonial figure.
But Mao refused to go quietly and instead launched both the Communist Party and wider society into a period akin to civil war. It lasted from the mid-1960s until 1976 when Mao died. In what was confusingly labelled the “cultural revolution”, Mao roused young people into attacking local party bosses, blaming them for the system’s economic and social failures. In response, the party machinery threw up its own militias.
Soon there was open fighting in the streets, as well as murder in the living quarters of the party leadership. For a period in the late 1960s, this cultivated image of the young struggling against the old helped sell Maoism to the new breed of young rebels fighting in the US and Europe.
Neither the modernisers that wanted to open the Chinese economy up to the world markets, nor Mao who wanted a return to state-led growth plans, had any solutions. And neither considered the needs of workers and the poor. Reformers, led by Deng Xiaoping, were in the driving seat from the 1980s onwards. They wanted the market to play a far greater role in China, and actively encouraged a “get rich quick” culture among speculators and investors.
Many of the new capitalists came straight from the ranks of the Communist Party itself. Others were the children of those that had fought alongside the party against the Japanese in the 1940s. Most of them simply siphoned off the assets of the state firms they had managed into private bank accounts. The Party mostly pretended not to notice this corruption because they wanted to encourage the more freelance capitalist elements.
They coupled this freedom to make money with harsh repression of workers and those seeking democratic reforms. For example, in Tiananmen Square in 1989 troops fired at a student-led demonstration protesting against the economic policies, killing up to 10,000. As multinational firms increasingly looked to China as a manufacturing hub, the state saw it as vital that the power of labour was kept in check.
That led to a huge and still growing inequality that lies behind much of the unrest that today stalks factories and streets alike. And it is still the rationale for the state machine that is ever ready to lash out at resistance from whichever direction it comes.
Many people understand how repressive the Chinese state is and think that makes it impossible to beat. That’s particularly true when looking at the recent struggles over Hong Kong democracy, the Uyghur minority’s demand for self-determination, and the way in which anti-lockdown protesters are treated.
But hidden beneath the surface in China are an array of struggles over the workplace, environmental conditions and education. These continue despite police and politicians’ threats, and they often win or gain concessions. That has been the case at the Foxconn factory, for example, which makes iPhones.
A series of strikes there have defied the police and forced management to both improve health and safety—and promise payments to those that leave the firm. Part of what allows the state to project an impregnable image is that usually we only see confrontations involving one section of the working class at a time.
So, strikes by one factory appear as disconnected from those at another, and utterly removed from students demanding democracy. If, however, the 29 major strikes going on across China today—according to China Labor Bulletin—were connected together it would tell us a lot more about our potential power.
That’s because the factories and offices in China, like everywhere else, are the source of all profits. When workers take action collectively they learn that together they can face down bosses, security guards and the cops. But also, the more that workers are prepared to fight, even over relatively small issues, the more it exposes divisions at the top of society.
The ruling class try their best to appear united, and that way all the orders below them tend to follow suit. But when the divisions among them start to show, even the best armed troops can become nervous about following orders.
That’s why for socialists the crucial task is to find ways of connecting different struggles together, and in turn trying to link them to the power of the organised working class. The workplace is both the bosses’ Achilles’ heel, and our biggest source of potential strength.
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