Although the confirmed seven-day average of new COVID cases in China has been sharply declining recently, the press in Asia is reporting that public hospitals in major cosmopolitan centers are being swamped with COVID patients presenting with fevers and respiratory symptoms. All this takes place but a matter of days after the complete abandonment of Zero COVID.
Workers at a hospital in Beijing, Tuesday, Dec. 13, 2022. [AP Photo/Andy Wong]
Over the past two weeks, centralized testing has been dismantled and the “mobile itinerary cards” on cell phones that track travel history have been deactivated. The true magnitude of COVID infections and their locations have quickly grown dark on the map of the pandemic. Now, only the number of those who are reported sick and dead, can provide an indication of the scale of China’s growing public health crisis.
Health officials in Beijing said at a briefing on Monday that 22,000 patients had attended fever clinics the day before, a rate 16 times higher than the prior week. An eye surgeon speaking on conditions of anonymity with the Washington Post indicated that half the hospital staff where she worked had recently tested positive for COVID. She added, “Patients who visit the fever clinic have grown several times compared with last week, and it’s likely to go one for weeks or even months more.”
The sudden surge in patients has caused confusion in health systems and the level of panic among official responders and the population at large is palpable in the reports being given by health workers to the media.
While hospitals have been ordered to expand their staffing, stock more medical resources and intensive care supplies, the number of hospital beds and ICU capacity will be unable to meet the deluge of patients densely populated cities are expecting. Over the counter anti-fever medications are running short in supply and price gouging is being reported for such goods. Meanwhile, close contacts and those infected with mild symptoms are being told to stay home, running the risk of infecting their friends and families, including the elders in the household who are most vulnerable.
Chinese state media has been asking the population to avoid using the emergency hotlines unless severely ill. At the Beijing Emergency Medical Center, call volumes have jumped six-fold with 30,000 calls per day. Where previously long lines were waiting for testing, now they are queuing outside hospitals and pharmacies.
Illness among medical staff and workers means the beginning of disruption for health and basic services. These mean delays and staffing shortages which wreak havoc on organizing shifts and the smooth transitions required for the safe administration of care to patients. Healthcare workers are being called in from their days off and vacations to cover for colleagues who have fallen ill.
With COVID restrictions lifted and testing requirements being abandoned, hospitals will become vectors of new infections for those seeking care for other health conditions. A medical worker said that at his hospital in Beijing patients are being asked to sign disclaimers acknowledging admission may result in catching COVID. Urgent procedures and treatments will have to be withheld in order to attend to the immediate care of those who have fallen ill, and treatable ailments may thus become life threatening.
A medical worker at a Beijing hospital who withheld his name reported that more than half of the staff had been infected and the nurse-to-patient ratio had quadrupled to one in 10. Over two-thirds of the 1,000-bed hospital was engaged in treating COVID patients. Many families seeking medical attention are being turned away due to high patient loads.
The numbers being reported by the National Health Commission no longer reflect reality. Prominent pulmonologist and epidemiologist, Dr. Zhong Nanshan, who was a leading advisor in managing the crisis when the pandemic first broke out in Wuhan three years ago, told state media, “We can see that hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands of people are infected in several major cities.”
Zhong, who previously promoted the traditional Chinese medicine, Lianhua Qingwen, for the treatment of influenza, is playing a critical role in downplaying the dangers posed by COVID, comparing the pandemic’s fatality rates to the flu. “The death rate from Omicron is around 0.1 percent, similar to the common flu, and the infection rarely reaches the lungs. Most people recover from the variant within seven to 10 days.”
Like his counterparts in the west, Zhong presents boosters as means of mitigating the impact of the inevitable spread of the pandemic. “It’s unlikely people will stay put for the 2023 Lunar New year holiday so I advise those who travel home to get booster shots so that even if they are infected, symptoms will be mild.” During the holiday, hundreds of millions of Chinese head back to their provinces to reunite with their families which will only exacerbate the spread of the coronavirus.
Responding to these developments, Dr. Zhang Wenhong, chief of the Infectious Diseases division at Shanghai’s Huashan Hospital told his staff that the months ahead will be difficult. If the Chinese Communist Party elects to let the virus runs its course in one massive surge, he stated, the catastrophic impact of the infections on the health system will drive mortality rates higher than those projected in the best-case scenario that is being presented. He added that he disagreed with Zhong’s claim that Omicron only attacks the upper respiratory tract and declared that he is seeing cases of pneumonia too.
Two hundred million of China’s 1.412 billion population are over the age of sixty-five and 40 million are over eighty. They are the least boosted with the current versions of the Chinese COVID vaccines and are at highest risk. The level of COVID fatalities in the US and Europe with Omicron suggest that there could easily be more than 500,000 deaths among the elderly in China in the next several months.
If access to health care is severely impacted and resources exhausted, however, the estimates made by several prominent studies that somewhere between 1.5 to two million people could die of COVID in China are reasonable and harrowing. Though the vaccination campaign has recommenced to get shots into older Chinese arms, the upheaval caused by the current surge will certainly redirect resources to immediate care and the vaccine campaign may very well fall far short of what is being promised. Currently the seven-day average in COVID vaccines have only reached a startlingly anemic 700,000 per day.
Professor Ali Mokdad at the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation and chief strategy officer for population health at the University of Washington, in a statement to Japan Times, said, “It will be all over the country almost at the same time, but first in urban areas and then in rural because of the crowding. It will be one month from now when we see very high number of cases, and mortality will come two weeks later. It will never come back down to where it is now.”
In response to these developments, the population isn’t responding with joyous shouts of “freedom” and celebration of the end of Zero COVID and lockdowns. A sense of dread grips the country. With cases and illnesses expected to swell, people are staying home, avoiding public venues and spending. Many have canceled trips and are afraid it will be impossible to avoid infection.
Dr. Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute in La Jolla, California, told Bloomberg, “Unless they get uptake of better vaccines and boosters quickly across the whole population, it looks like lockdowns will no longer hold and a huge surge is in store. It looks like major trouble is brewing.”
Sri Lankan President Ranil Wickremesinghe who is also finance minister, ended the parliamentary budget debate last Thursday insisting that his government will implement its harsh austerity measures to the letter whatever opposition emerges against them.
Sri Lankan President Ranil Wickremesinghe arrives at the parliamentary complex in Colombo, Sri Lanka on Aug. 3, 2022. [AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena]
Complaining that the country faces “adverse repercussions today due to the short-sighted popular decisions taken in the past”, Wickremesinghe said: “Unpopular decisions have had to be taken for the future prospects of the country.” While insisting electricity tariffs will be increased, he reiterated the point: “We have to make tough decisions… We are here because we didn’t take tough decisions.”
The electricity tariff increase is only one measure of the “tough decisions” that the government is determined to implement. Others include the privatisation of State Owned Enterprises (SOEs), slashing price subsidies for electricity, water and fuel, increased taxes on working people even as inflation soars, and amending the labour laws to facilitate the destruction of hundreds of thousands of jobs.
These budget austerity measures are fully in line with the dictates of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as the pre-condition for an emergency loan facility to provide temporary relief amid the country’s acute financial crisis.
The government had already increased electricity bills by 75 percent in August. Now the cabinet has approved a further increase of 70 percent in two stages in January and June next year.
The government also increased water rates by 127 percent in August for two million families. Prices for fuel and cooking gas increased by 200 to 300 percent earlier this year. Ending price subsidies for water and fuel will add to the intolerable burdens facing workers and the rural poor.
The government has already appointed a committee to draft laws to break up the Ceylon Electricity Board to 15 entities in preparation for privatisation while vowing to expedite the sale of Sri Lanka Telecom and the Sri Lanka Insurance Corporation. These privatisations will inevitably lead to major job losses and further price increases.
At the conclusion of the debate last Thursday, the budget was passed by 123 to 80 votes. Most MPs of the ruling Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP), the discredited party of the ousted president Gotabhaya Rajapakse, voted for the budget.
The Wickremesinghe government lacks any popular support and is completely dependent on the SLPP’s parliamentary majority. Since ousting of former president Gotabhaya Rajapakse in mid-July by a popular uprising that began in early April, the SLPP has been fractured. With A few exceptions, the SLPP MPs who sit as “independents” in parliament voted against the budget.
The main opposition parties—the Samagi Jana Balavegaya (SJB) and Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP)—voted against the budget, despite the fact that they insist that seeking IMF assistance and accepting its austerity demands is the only means of addressing the country’s economic crisis.
The Tamil bourgeois parties, including the Tamil National Alliance (TNA), abstained in the vote, thus helping the government pass the budget. In exchange, Wickremesinghe for a vague “promise” to solve the problems of the Tamil people by convening an all-party conference.
This sordid deal underscores the contempt that the Tamil ruling elites have for the masses who will be hard hit by the austerity measures. They are interested above all in a power-sharing arrangement with the Colombo government that boosts their political and economic position at the expense of Tamil working people. Like the SJB and JVP, the TNA is committed to a deal with the IMF.
Workers are already engaged in struggles against the austerity measures. Last week, thousands of workers, including from telecom, insurance, banks, electricity, railways, healthcare and free trade zones, participated in protests in Colombo and other cities against the budget provisions. Last Monday, postal workers joined a one-day strike.
The government and the ruling class as a whole fear that the harsh austerity measures put forward in the budget will spark a new wave of working class struggles and opposition among the rural poor. The government is preparing to crush this growing popular opposition.
During the budget debate, on November 23, Wickremesinghe threatened to crush anti-government struggles imposing a state of emergency and deploying military and police forces. He has imposed the draconian Essential Services Act to ban strikes in the electricity, petroleum and health sectors. He has used the repressive Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) against anti-government protesters, including leaders of the Inter University Students’ Federation (IUSF).
As the government prepares for state repression, the 2023 budget bolsters funding for the armed forces and the police. While education and healthcare are being starved of funds, the military and police have been allocated 539 billion rupees ($US1.46 billion) in the budget.
Photograph Source: Benh LIEU SONG (Flickr) – CC BY-SA 4.0
Britain has entered an era of legalised larceny by the politically well-connected some 150 years after the Victorians ended what they execrated as the “Old Corruption”. By this they meant the toxic system whereby the ruling elite enjoyed a parasitic relationship with the state enabling them to obtain jobs and money through patronage, partisanship and purchase.
Generals appointed because of their wealth and social connections, rather than ability, produced spectacular debacles, such as the Charge of the Light Brigade. The best-known achievement of the Victorian reformers was the Northcote-Trevelyan Report of 1854 that intended to produce a Civil Service in which “none but qualified personnel will be appointed”.
The old corruption
Fast forward 170 years to the allegations against Baroness Michelle Mone over PPE procurement which so “shocked” Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and notice how many of the worst ingredients of the “Old Corruption” are re-emerging in modern Britain. The Victorians did not use the term to mean exclusively those doing anything illegal, but, then as now, the system was all the more pernicious because so much that was destructive to good government was permitted. We have yet to reach the stage, as happened long ago in Russia and the oil states of the Middle East and Africa, where government has become a looting machine run by a kleptocracy, but we are further down this road than most people in Britain imagine.
Signs of the retreat from the standards of honest and competent government to which the Victorian reformers aspired are today visible everywhere. What makes this decline so serious is the vast size of the sums of money now being wasted or misused. The most flagrant example of this was the waste of £12 billion spent on defective or over-priced PPE during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Probably, the figures are too gargantuan for people to take on board, but in a report published on June 2022, the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee, scarcely a muckraking body, spelled out the losses: equipment worth £4 billion did not meet NHS standards, £2.6 billion was not of a type or standard preferred by the NHS, £4.7 billion was written off because too much had been paid for it, and £673 million was spent on PPE that was defective.
The theft of the century
What we are really looking at here is one of the thefts of the century. The Government brushes aside this enormous useless expenditure of public funds, most of which ended up in somebody’s pockets, blaming it on an unprecedented emergency with which ministers were heroically seeking to cope. They argue that no time was available to check on PPE suppliers, however inadequate or dodgey they subsequently turned out to be.
This dubious argument silences many potential critics, aided by a certain naivety in Britain about the traditional mechanics of corruption. Our nineteenth-century ancestors would not have been so simple-minded, and would have been instantly suspicious of such self-serving government pretensions. They would not have been taken in by its claim that it was only its laudable enthusiasm to fend off disaster that regrettably led to so-many well-connected companies close to the Conservative Party winning profitable contracts.
And they would have been right: a study by the New York Timesin December 2020 found that out of a sample of 1,200 Covid-19 related central government contracts worth £16 billion, about half of which worth £8bn, “went to companies either run by friends and associates of politicians in the Conservative Party, or with no prior experience or a history of controversy. Meanwhile, smaller firms without political clout got nowhere.”
The best moment to strike
I have heard too many excuses about an existential crisis producing understandable errors too many times during corruption scandals in the Middle East to believe them. People intending to steal billions from a government are not fools. They put a great deal of thought into their planning. They must have insiders working for them, but they must also avoid official scrutiny by departmental committees and oversight bodies.
A war is the best moment to strike for anybody intending to plunder the public purse without their activities being closely monitored. I was in Iraq after the US invasion in 2003 when the entire military procurement budget of $1.2 billion disappeared, nominally spent on some Soviet helicopters too old to fly purchased from Poland and a contract with a Pakistani company for military equipment worth hundreds of millions of dollars scribbled on a single sheet of A4 paper in such poor hand writing that Iraqi officials could not tell what had been ordered.
Wars may be good for mass thefts but a pandemic turns out to be even better because of the general panic. People plotting to part a government from its money have a nose for this sort of chaos and know how to exploit it. They know how to sniff out and pay off influential people they need to help them, safe in the knowledge that their lobbying is legal with no risk of punishment aside from reputational damage. If unmasked as secret influencers, they can hide behind the unlikely claim that they were paid a lot of money by some very tough and worldly-wise people – for whom they then did almost nothing to further their interests.
Another superficially plausible way to downplay the current avalanche of scandals is to say that nothing much new is happening and there have always been such scandals. So there have, but the lobbyists and influencers are now playing for much higher stakes than previously with tens of millions of pounds in the offing. Past scandals such as “cash-for-questions” in parliament or MPs’ expenses commonly involved paltry sums.
Looting government was easy in the eighteenth century because so many functions of government were out-sourced, a notable example being the East India Company with its own empire and army. Such outsourcing was a recognised feature of “Old Corruption” because profit was prioritised over performance and regulatory control was minimal. Much the same now happens in modern Britain as state functions are outsourced and degraded in the supposed interests of efficiency.
At the heart of the Northcote-Trevelyan Report was a determination that future members of the civil service would be appointed on merit and they would not lose their jobs following a change of government. But when Liz Truss became prime minister and Kwasi Kwarteng chancellor of the exchequer in September, almost their first act was to sack Sir Tom Scholar, the permanent secretary at the Treasury.
Or go back a couple of years to May 2020 at beginning of pandemic in 2020 when Baroness Dido Harding of Winscombewas appointed by the Health Secretary Matt Hancock to establish NHS Test and Trace to prevent the spread of Covid-19 among an unvaccinated population in England. The complicated task was taken out of the hands of experienced local officials and handed over to Harding, assisted by consultants paid £1,000 a day. Even in corrupt cynical eighteenth century Britain, people might have jibbed at that.
Last month, a coroner ruled that the death in December 2020 of two-year-old Awaab Ishak had been caused by “prolonged exposure” to mould spores in his family’s rented flat.
Awaab was initially hospitalised with flu-like symptoms and difficulty breathing. He was readmitted to urgent care two days after being discharged, suffering respiratory failure, and died of cardiac arrest. A pathologist told the inquest into his death that Awaab’s throat was swollen enough to hinder his breathing, with exposure to fungi the most likely cause.
Petition started after the death of Awaab Ishak [Photo: Screenshot: change.org]
The child’s parents, Faisal Abdullah and Aisha Amin, had complained about the mould to landlords Rochdale Boroughwide Housing (RBH) for three years, even requesting rehousing. A health visitor also raised concerns, asking for the rehousing request to be prioritised.
RBH were dismissive, writing the problem off as “unsightly” but not a serious risk,and placing what senior coroner Joanne Kearsley called “too much emphasis… on the cause of the mould being due to the parent’s lifestyle.” The housing association failed to address the lack of adequate ventilation in the property.
Awaab’s parents have called for the entire board of RBH to resign, warning that tenants remain “in danger” so long as the current leadership is in post. The housing association’s head Gareth Swarbrick was eventually sacked by the RBH board, but only after public outrage at his refusal to step down.
Awaab’s unsafe home was one of many on the estate run by RBH.
According to the Mirror, the association received 106 complaints about mould and damp in the year after Awaab died. An investigation by Manchester Evening News this August found another three households on the same estate who said their children had been hospitalised with issues related to damp and mouldy homes, with reporters shown letters from GPs advising families to move. The BBC described other properties with mould that resembles “black slime on the walls”.
The inquest into Awaab’s death unleashed a torrent of similar reports from across the country, in council, housing association, social rented and private rented properties under local authorities of all political stripes. The common factor is that they are occupied by working-class families left to rot by negligent landlords in poorly built, insulated and maintained homes which they can barely afford to heat.
A woman with a potentially terminal lung disease she believes was caused by mould told the Guardian she was taking her private sector landlord to court after years of inaction. She pays £1,400 a month to live there.
The BBC reported the cases of Noorullah Hashmi in a housing association property, whose two young children have suffered multiple chest infections since they moved in, and Vicky McLaughlin in a council house in Birmingham, whose three children suffer from asthma—believed to have been brought on and exacerbated by their living conditions.
Selenawit Asfaha was ignored by her private landlord for five years, reported Bristol News, before the Environmental Agency intervened. She also developed asthma while living in a mould-ridden house.
According to the latest English Housing Survey, 3.5 million occupied homes did not meet the Decent Homes Standard in 2020, with two-thirds having at least one Category 1 hazard—the most severe, indicating a risk of death, paralysis or permanent loss of consciousness—and 941,000 serious damp.
Mould is rife, affecting an estimated 120,000 social housing households, and 176,000 private renting households. The problem is so serious and widespread that the Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health now suggests doctors ask about living conditions when presented with a child with a respiratory condition, describing this as a “critical issue for child health.”
These health hazards frequently go unaddressed by landlords. In a 2021 report, housing ombudsman Richard Blakeway reviewed a representative 410 mould and damp complaints and found maladministration in more than half of the cases.
Blakeway told BBC Radio 4 last month that his office had seen “a significant increase in the casework on damp and mould,” publishing the 2021 report “because we were so concerned about what we were seeing”.
This public health crisis is a symptom of a housing system in which the basic human right to shelter is subordinated to the rampant profiteering of private landlords and cost-cutting of central and local government.
The social housing system has been run down by Tory and Labour governments alike, with the loss of 24,000 homes a year on average since 1991, leaving one million households on the waiting list. Families have been forced into the cripplingly expensive private rented sector which has more than doubled its share of the housing system in the last two decades. Just in the last year, average rents have increased 12 percent to £1,078 a month, according to property website Zoopla.
Both sectors leave huge numbers of people in squalid conditions. Roughly 13 percent of social rented homes and 21 percent of private rented homes are rated non-decent nationally.
An already bleak situation will be made far worse this winter, as soaring energy prices leave families unable to heat their homes. Professor of Environment Engineering for Buildings Catherine Noakes, wrote the BBC, “warned that mould conditions could be made worse this winter if people don’t put on the heating because of high energy bills.”
Just two months before the verdict was given on Awaab’s death, the Institute of Health Equity (IHE) published a report titled Fuel Poverty, Cold Homes and Health Inequalities. Looking at their impact over the last eight years, the authors wrote, “If fuel poverty and cold homes were a concern in 2014, now, with the rapidly increasing price of energy, they are likely to become a significant humanitarian crisis.”
Lead author Professor Ian Sinha, Consultant Respiratory Paediatrician at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital, Liverpool, commented on its release that he had “no doubt” children would die this winter as a result.
The report noted, “Cold homes are more prone to damp and mould, both of which contribute to developing asthma and acute asthma attacks. Damp and mould may contribute to approximately 10–15 percent of new cases of childhood asthma across Europe.”
Furthermore, “it is estimated that 1.7 million school days are missed across Europe due to illnesses associated with damp and mould. UK children miss more school days due to disease burden from damp than any EU member state, with rates over 80 percent higher than the EU average.”
The government’s response to the inquest into Awaab’s death has plumbed the depths of cynicism. Housing Secretary Michael Gove mouthed support for “Awaab’s law”, championed by his parents, to require landlords to investigate the causes of damp and mould within 14 days of complaints being made and provide tenants with a report on the findings. A petition in support has gained over 150,000 signatures.
Even as Gove spoke, the government was planning to instruct councils to examine “behavioral factors” when deciding whether to take action against landlords, giving license to the excuse used by RBH against Awaab’s family.
Stephen Battersby, vice president of the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health, told the Guardian he worried that “the draft guidance will provide an even greater opportunity for landlords to blame the tenants for dangerous housing conditions, such as dampness and mould.”
Five days after the largest raid in German history, it is becoming increasingly clear how extensive the right-wing terrorist network is against which it was directed.
On December 7, some 3,000 special police force officers searched 150 properties across Germany. Since then, 25 people have been held in pre-trial detention, and 29 others are under investigation. The attorney general accuses them of being members or supporters of a terrorist organization. But they are only the tip of the iceberg.
Querdenker and anti-vaxxer demonstration in Frankfurt am Main, March 2022 [Photo by Ostendfaxpost / wikimedia / CC BY-SA 4.0]
The right-wing terrorist network, which draws on the milieu of Reichsbürger, QAnon supporters, self-styled “lateral thinkers” (Querdenken) and coronavirus deniers, is estimated to number in the tens of thousands. It includes members of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and other far-right parties and reaches deep into the state security apparatus and social elites.
The Office for the Protection of the Constitution (as Germany’s domestic secret service is called) numbers the supporters of the monarchist and anti-democratic Reichsbürger at 23,000 alone, 2,000 more than a year ago. It considers 10 percent to be prepared to use violence.
Reichsbürger (literally, Citizens of the Reich) dispute the legitimacy of the post-war Federal Republic of Germany and believe that the German Reich (Empire), founded in 1871, continues to exist. Acts of violence repeatedly come from their ranks, 239 being registered in the last year alone. In the spring, for example, a Reichsbürger supporter in Baden-Württemberg deliberately ran over a police officer during a traffic check. Another fired an automatic rifle at approaching officers who wanted to confiscate the illegal weapon. Nevertheless, the judiciary and police handle Reichsbürger, who also have numerous supporters in the state security apparatus, with kid gloves.
Last week’s raid was apparently carried out because the Interior Ministry and Attorney General feared imminent attacks against state institutions, which would also have endangered the lives of high-ranking government officials and politicians.
The German parliament Bundestag building, the Reichstag Building photographed through a slit in a blind at the chancellery in Berlin, Germany, Wednesday, Dec. 7, 2022. Officials say thousands of police have carried out a series of raids across much of Germany against suspected far-right extremists who allegedly sought to overthrow the state in an armed coup. [AP Photo/Markus Schreiber]
Those arrested are said to have planned to invade the Bundestag along the lines of the American coup plotters of January 6, 2021, capture members of parliament and government, trigger riots across the country and then carry out a coup.
Attorney General Peter Frank said the group was pursuing the goal of eliminating democracy in Germany “by using violence and military means.” Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (Social Democratic Party, SPD) said the investigations provided “a glimpse into an abyss of terrorist threats from the Reichsbürger milieu.”
In the meantime, numerous details have been released to the public about those arrested, whose names the attorney general only disclosed in the form of initials. Many of them have been known for their right-wing extremist views and activities for years or decades. A striking number were or are members of the military or the state security apparatus. In any case, it soon became clear that the authorities were by no means as surprised about the “abyss of terrorist threats” as Interior Minister Faeser now claims.
In the mid-1990s, the 69-year-old Rüdiger von Pescatore, who is said to have led the “military arm” of the group, was the commander of a paratrooper battalion of the 25th Airborne Brigade, a predecessor of the KSK special forces unit. He left the Bundeswehr (Armed Forces) in 1999 because he had taken weapons from old East German stocks, and was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment on probation. Of the 165 pistols and rifles that disappeared at the time, only 11 have ever turned up again.
The 54-year-old Peter Wörner is a trained elite soldier in the KSK. On Instagram, there are also photos showing him with American special forces in the US. He was a member of the same battalion as Pescatore in the 1990s. He is part of the “prepper” scene and has recently worked as a survivalist trainer. In April this year, officers found firearms, ammunition, magazines and other weapons in his home.
Wörner is also said to have had contact with the group that planned to kidnap Health Minister Karl Lauterbach and then organize a coup. This group blew apart in the summer, with the media reporting about it.
Maximilian Eder, 63, was a colonel in the Bundeswehr and led an armoured infantry battalion in Kosovo in 1999. Before retiring in the autumn of 2016, he served for a time in the KSK. With the onset of the pandemic, he became a leading figure in protests against anti-COVID measures.
During the flood disaster in the Ahr Valley, the retired colonel showed up in uniform, set up a “command centre” and authorised deployment orders. His “chief of staff” was Peter Wörner. Eder eventually had to pay a €3,500 fine for the unauthorized wearing of a uniform. Shortly before his arrest, in a video, Eder called for a coup before Christmas.
Andreas Meyer, 58, an active KSK soldier, is also among the accused. The staff sergeant was deployed several times as a logistician in Afghanistan and has published a book about his experience. He is said to have smuggled members of the group into barracks using his military ID.
Several police officers are also among the accused. Chief Inspector Ivonne G. works as a criminal investigator in the Minden-Lübbecke district police department in North Rhine-Westphalia, according to information from news weekly Der Spiegel. She is said to have attracted attention in the past as a coronavirus denier. A state security officer from Lower Saxony, who is also accused, is said to have been on sick leave for some time. Michael Fritsch, a chief detective in Lower Saxony, has already been removed from his position. He is a Reichsbürger and was the lead candidate of the Querdenken party dieBasis for the 2021 federal election.
During the raids, police found a substantial arsenal of weapons: nine-millimetre pistols, swords, knives, stun guns, combat helmets, night-vision equipment and the service weapons of a female and male police officer who are among the suspects. In addition, the group is said to possess a dozen Iridium satellite phones at a cost of €1,500 each, which work even if the cell phone network breaks down.
Heinrich XIII Prince Reuss, who is considered the ringleader of the group, has long been known for his anti-Semitic statements and his support of Reichsbürger ideology. At a digital fair in Zurich, Switzerland, for example, he agitated against the power of “Jewish big capitalists” and declared that the Federal Republic was not a sovereign state but was dominated by the Allies to this day. The speech was published on YouTube.
His strange name comes from the fact that in the noble family of Reuss, all male descendants are called Heinrich. To avoid confusion, they are numbered with Roman numerals—starting anew with each century.
The family has distanced itself from Heinrich XIII, calling him a “bitter old man” who subscribes to “conspiracy-theory misconceptions.” But his role is no accident. Old aristocrats who—as Reuss did for 30 years—litigate for the return of expropriated Juncker property and dream of the restoration of the German Reich and old Prussian glory are to be found in abundance in the right-wing extremist milieu.
Long before Beatrix von Storch, born Duchess of Oldenburg, became a member of the AfD, she campaigned for the restitution of the large aristocratic estates expropriated after the war.
An example of the arrested group’s close ties to the AfD is Berlin judge Birgit Malsack-Winkemann, who represented the far-right party in the Bundestag for four years. Her judicial appointment was confirmed by the Berlin Administrative Court as recently as October, even though the police had long been investigating her for forming a terrorist organization and her contacts with the AfD’s ultra-nationalist “Flügel” (“wing”) grouping, her racist statements against refugees and her participation in a Querdenken demonstration in Berlin were well known.
However, Malsack-Winkemann is only one link between the terrorist cell and the AfD. Among the accused are at least two others who are or were active at regional level in the AfD.
In addition, Alexander Q., who runs a QAnon channel on Telegram with 130,000 subscribers, is said to be among the supporters of the terrorist cell. During the Ahr Valley flood disaster, he spread the lie that the flood waters had washed up the corpses of 600 children who had been locked up and killed in order to extract a rejuvenating metabolic product from them.
One can only understand the emergence of the terrorist cell against the backdrop of years of the trivialization and promotion of far-right groups by the secret service and other state authorities.
In 2003, proceedings to ban the far-right German National Party (NPD) failed because the Supreme Court judges concluded that there were so many security agency employees in the party’s leadership that the NPD was “in substance, an operation of the state.”
When president of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Hans-Georg Maassen, advised and promoted the AfD at least two dozen state informants were part of the support network of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Union (NSU), without the state allegedly knowing of their existence. The connections between the NSU, the secret service and the murder of Kassel District President Walter Lübcke remain murky to this day.
With the return of German militarism and the Ukraine war, the crimes of the Nazis and their collaborators are being systematically trivialized. The establishment parties have integrated the far-right AfD into parliamentary work and adopted its policies—letting the virus rip in the pandemic, refugee-baiting and implementing a massive military build-up.
Jiang Zemin, former Chinese president and general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), died on November 30 at the age of 96. During more than a decade in office, Jiang presided over the extension and acceleration of capitalist restoration following the crushing of the Tiananmen Square protests in June 1989. This had devastating consequences for the working class. Thousands of state-owned enterprises were restructured and sold off or shut down; tens of millions of jobs were destroyed; and essential social services were demolished.
Former Chinese President Jiang Zemin at closing ceremony of the 18th Communist Party Congress in Beijing, Wednesday Nov. 14, 2012. [AP Photo/Lee Jin-man]
Jiang was installed as CCP general secretary amid the political turmoil generated by mass protests that started in April and May 1989 at Tiananmen Square in central Beijing. While initiated by students who limited their demands to calls for greater education funding, a free press and the right to form independent student bodies, the protests extended to other major cities and significantly began to draw in young workers, who voiced their own class demands.
Deng Xiaoping’s pro-market agenda of “reform and opening up,” launched in 1978, had led to rising social inequality and increasing hardship for workers. Millions of former peasants were left landless and migrated to the cities in search of jobs. Price controls were lifted and inflation soared to 18.5 percent in 1988. The government reacted by cutting back credit and re-imposing import restrictions, leading to huge job losses as private enterprises tightened their belts or shut down.
While CCP leaders, most prominently the party’s general secretary Zhao Ziyang, had sought to compromise with student leaders, the grievances and demands of workers threatened the very stability of the regime. With the formation of the Beijing Workers Autonomous Federation and similar independent workers’ organisations in other cities, demands were raised for an investigation into the corruption and nepotism rife in the party’s upper echelons.
Matters came to a head after some two million people marched through the centre of Beijing on May 17, 1989. The majority were workers and their families under the banners of their work units or enterprises. Terrified by the mass movement of the working class, Deng sided with hardliners in the CCP leadership demanding the sacking of Zhao, the imposition of martial law and the mobilisation of the military.
On May 20, Premier Li Peng imposed martial law. Zhao was placed under house arrest and 100,000 soldiers from the Beijing Military Region were ordered into the city. On the same day, Deng turned to Shanghai party boss Jiang Zemin as the replacement for Zhao as CCP general secretary.
Just days later, on the evening of June 3–4, the regime unleashed the crackdown to clear protests out of Tiananmen Square and suppress all opposition. The deadliest clashes took place in working-class suburbs as workers sought to block troops moving toward central Beijing. An estimated 7,000 were killed and 20,000 injured. In the nationwide repression that followed, the harshest sentences, including lengthy jail terms and the death penalty, were meted out to workers’ leaders.
Who was Jiang Zemin?
The formal installation of Jiang as CCP general secretary did not take place until June 24, 1989. He was widely regarded as a compromise choice between the pro-market “reformers” around Deng and the faction led by Li Peng and Chen Yun, who blamed the pro-market policies for the political unrest and demanded a slowdown in their implementation. While Zhao was made the scapegoat, the criticisms were also implicitly directed at Deng who had been Zhao’s backer and the chief architect of “reform and opening up.”
Jiang had no substantial base of support within the party. He was the first party leader who lacked any significant connection with the CCP’s founding and early years, or with the People’s Liberation Army that seized power in the 1949 Chinese Revolution.
Jiang was born on August 17, 1926 in the city of Yangzhou, to the northwest of Shanghai. His father, an accountant/manager, gave up his 13-year-old son for adoption by the family of his brother Jiang Shangqing, a CCP activist killed in an armed clash in 1939. Jiang Zemin trained as an electrical engineer in Shanghai, joined the party in 1946 while at university, graduated in 1947 and was employed at an ice cream factory.
Jiang in 1962
After the CCP took power, Jiang worked as an engineer in state-owned enterprises, including the First Automobile Works in the north-eastern city of Changchun for six years. He went to the Soviet Union in 1955 for further training, including at the Stalin Automobile Works. On returning to Shanghai in 1962, amid the Sino-Soviet split and the withdrawal of Soviet technical specialists, Jiang was appointed deputy director of the Shanghai Electric Research Institute. In 1966, he was appointed as director and deputy party secretary of the thermal engineering research centre in Wuhan, established by the First Ministry of Machine Building.
While he lost his position amid the upheavals of the 1966–76 Cultural Revolution, Jiang was not among the specialists, intellectuals and “capitalist-roaders” who were publicly vilified or dispatched to the countryside for re-education. After being sent to a cadre training school, he was appointed deputy director of the ministry’s foreign affairs bureau and in 1970 sent to Romania as head of an expert team to establish machinery manufacturing plants, returning in 1972.
In the wake of Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, Jiang assumed a more directly political role. As the Cultural Revolution was wound back, the so-called Gang of Four, responsible along with Mao for the huge upheaval and excesses of the Cultural Revolution, were arrested. Jiang was sent as part of a 14-person team—the “Central Committee Shanghai Work Group”—to reassert control over Shanghai which had been the Gang of Four’s stronghold. While nominally responsible for the city’s industry and transport, Jiang was clearly involved in the purge of Shanghai party ranks.
Jiang was an early supporter of Deng’s “reform and opening up” announced in 1978. In 1979, he was installed as vice-chairman of two commissions set up by China’s State Council to boost trade and investment, including through the establishment of special economic zones (SEZs). In 1980, he led a delegation that toured SEZs in 12 countries and on his return issued a report calling for tax breaks and land leases to encourage foreign investment as well as loosening restrictions on foreign joint ventures. While provoking opposition in the party leadership, his proposals were backed by Deng and approved by the National People’s Congress.
What followed was a meteoric rise into the top ranks of the party leadership. At the 12th party congress in 1982, he became a member of the CCP’s Central Committee for the first time. In 1985, he was installed as mayor of Shanghai, the country’s largest industrial centre. At the 13th party congress in 1987, he became the CCP party secretary in Shanghai and a member of the party’s powerful Politburo. Two years later in mid-1989, he was called on by Deng to become CCP general secretary.
The crisis of Stalinism
Jiang was installed as party leader amid the profound global crisis of Stalinism that led to the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe, beginning in late 1989, and culminating in the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. As the International Committee of the Fourth International alone explained, the open embrace of capitalist restoration by the Stalinist bureaucracies did not represent the failure of socialism but was the consequence of the reactionary Stalinist conception of “socialism in one country.”
Leon Trotsky had warned in the 1930s that without a political revolution to overturn the Stalinist regime and return to the strategy of world socialist revolution, the bureaucratic apparatus would inevitably resort to capitalist restoration. As the ICFI explained, the processes of globalised production in the 1980s had undermined the nationalist perspective of Stalinism and rendered obsolete all programs rooted in national economic regulation and that would produce a deepening crisis of the major imperialist powers.
The turn to capitalist restoration in China had already been underway for a decade. The 1949 Chinese Revolution was a colossal and far-reaching social upheaval, ending a century of imperialist oppression that had mired the country in backwardness and squalor. However, from the outset, despite significant social, cultural and economic advances, the pragmatic, nationalist perspective of the CCP, rooted in the Stalinist theory of “socialism in one country,” led the country into a blind alley.
The nationalisation of private enterprises and banks, which was only completed in 1956, as well as centralised planning, were imposed along the bureaucratic lines of the Soviet Union, without any input from the working class. The state apparatus established by the CCP rested on the peasant-based Red Army, not democratic organs of workers and peasants. Soviet aid, advisers and technicians played a major role in establishing heavy industry, which suffered after their withdrawal during the Sino-Soviet split in the early 1960s.
The Sino-Soviet split not only compounded China’s isolation and economic difficulties. It also fuelled intensified infighting within the CCP leadership between Mao and his utopian schemes for peasant-based socialism, and the advocates of Soviet bureaucratic planning centred on heavy industry. Mao launched the Cultural Revolution in 1966 in a bid to oust his rivals, but the confused and convulsive social struggles drew in sections of the working class and rapidly threatened the existence of the regime. Mao was forced to send the army into the factories to bring the situation under control.
Neither Mao nor his rivals had any solution to the country’s mounting economic difficulties or the tensions with the Soviet Union that led to border clashes in the late 1960s. There was no way out within the framework of national economic autarky. Having long rejected the perspective of world socialist revolution, the CCP turned to US imperialism. Just 23 years after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, Mao met US President Richard Nixon in 1972 and forged a de facto alliance against the Soviet Union.
Mao Zedong with US President Richard Nixon in 1972
The Mao-Nixon meeting was the essential diplomatic and political pre-condition for foreign investment and trade with the West that began to flourish. Deng, who had been ostracised during the Cultural Revolution, was rehabilitated. Following Mao’s death in 1976, Deng emerged as the dominant leader in the Stalinist bureaucracy. His “reform and opening up” initiatives announced in 1978 resulted in the establishment of four SEZs, the dismantling of rural communes, the transformation of state-owned enterprises into profit-making corporations and the easing of restrictions on private enterprises.
A decade later, however, the broad involvement of the working class in nationwide upheavals surrounding the Tiananmen Square protests struck fear into the CCP leadership that was compounded by the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe. With Deng on the backfoot politically, Li Peng and Chen Yun promoted Soviet nationalised property relations and centralised planning as the example to follow, even as Mikhail Gorbachev was undermining those economic structures in the Soviet Union.
In delivering the main report to the Fifth Plenum in November 1989, Li called for the adoption of a plan drawn up by a revived State Planning Commission to enforce tight controls on credit and balance the state budget to slash economic growth and inflation. Tough new restrictions were placed on rural and provincial industries, particularly in the south of the country. GDP growth slumped to 4.2 percent in 1989 and just 3.9 percent in 1990.
Deng had sided with Li and Chen in crushing the 1989 protest movement but was intransigently opposed to the restrictions being placed on foreign investment and private enterprises. He warned that economic stagnation would undermine social stability and the CCP regime itself and insisted only by further opening up China to the capitalist market and transforming the country into a cheap labour platform for foreign capital could the necessary high levels of economic growth be achieved.
Tiananmen Square, May 17, 1989, Beijing, China. [AP Photo/Sadayuki Mikami]
The deepening crisis of the Soviet Union that led to its formal liquidation in December 1991 brought the political struggle within the CCP leadership to a head. The “Soviet” faction led by Li and Chen pushed to further reverse Deng’s pro-market policies, such as the existing SEZs. While Deng held no formal party or state position, he still wielded considerable political influence. Just 20 days after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, he set out on his “Southern tour” in January-February 1992, visiting the SEZs and southern cities, accompanied by top generals and the country’s state security chief.
In Shanghai, he reportedly berated Chen Yun, declaring that any leader who could not boost the economy should quit. He advocated a far greater opening up to foreign capital and embrace of the capitalist market, telling Chen: “Do not fear when others say we are practicing capitalism. Capitalism is nothing fearsome.”
Jiang Zemin’s role
Although Jiang had been installed as CCP general secretary and chairman of the powerful Central Military Commission in 1989, he was not a leading figure in the ideological infighting between Deng and his opponents. He manoeuvred between the competing factions. He later justified his manoeuvring by declaring to a biographer: “We wade across the river by feeling for stones because truth is a long road; nobody knows exactly what truth is.”
Having initially sided with the “Soviet” faction, Jiang received a thinly disguised rebuke from Deng during the “Southern tour” for failing to implement the pro-market agenda fast enough. Sensing that the political winds were shifting, Jiang fell into line. Over the next 10 years, he championed the wholesale capitalist restoration that transformed the entire country, not just a handful of SEZs, into an arena for foreign corporations to exploit Chinese labour.
Obituaries in the American and international media combine praise for Jiang’s role in opening up China to the capitalist market and foreign investors, tempered by hostility to China’s emergence as a threat to US global dominance.
The New York Times hailed “Jiang’s stewardship of the capitalist transformation that had begun under Deng Xiaoping… [as] one of his signal accomplishments” and his years in office as “the golden age of China’s embrace of globalisation.” The Guardian contrasted him favourably with current President Xi Jinping who “has isolated China with Covid regulations and an aggressive foreign policy.”
Jiang embraced Deng’s pro-market policies, declaring at the 14th CCP National Congress in 1992 that China was a “socialist market economy”—the phrase adopted by the party to disguise its headlong rush to capitalist restoration. The following year he was installed as the country’s president as well as the CCP’s general secretary.
In 1994, the CCP formally established a “labour market” by legitimising the sale and purchase of labour power. State-owned enterprises were corporatised into companies run for profit. The unprofitable ones were restructured or shut down. The better equipped, in sectors not designated as strategic, were sold off or converted into subsidiaries of foreign transnationals.
These processes were accelerated after Deng’s death in February 1997. As the Asian financial crisis began to unfold in the same year, Jiang announced to the 15thCCP Congress that the “reform” of state-owned enterprises would be stepped up. According to one estimate, from 1998 to 2002, about 34 million workers were sacked as hundreds of state-owned enterprises were sold off and thousands more shut down completely.
The heavy industries in the country’s north were particularly hard hit, leaving workers and their families devastated. The state-owned industries had been the basis for the so-called iron rice bowl, providing cradle to grave support for employees, including child care, education, health care and pensions. All that was now left to individual workers.
While formal diplomatic relations with the United States were established in 1979 under Deng, those relations were strained on multiple occasion while Jiang held power. The most serious was the 1995–96 Taiwan Strait crisis triggered by Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui’s visit to the US, which China denounced as a breach of the “One China policy.” In 1979, the US had ended all formal ties with Taipei and de facto recognised Beijing as the legitimate government of all China including Taiwan.
As China responded by carrying out military exercises and missile launches close to Taiwan, the Clinton administration dispatched two US aircraft carriers and their naval battle groups to waters off the island—one of which was sent through the Taiwan Strait.
Tensions rose again with the 2000 election of George W. Bush as US president. Bush had branded China as a “strategic competitor” during his campaign and declared he would repudiate China’s accession to the World Trade Organisation (WTO). However, in the wake of the September 11 attacks on the US, Bush sought China’s support for the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and his bogus “war on terrorism.” He did an abrupt about-face. China was admitted to the WTO in 2001, opening the way for a further expansion of foreign investment and trade.
Jiang with his wife and George W. Bush with his wife in Crawford, Texas, 25 October 2002
Jiang capped off his term in office by having his “theoretical” contribution, known as “Three Represents,” written into the CCP constitution at the party’s 16thcongress. The Three Represents was a logical extension of the policies of capitalist restoration, providing a crude justification for opening up the party to representatives of “advanced forces of production”—code for the millionaires and billionaires that the “socialist market economy” had enriched.
Jiang stood down as CCP general secretary in November 2002 and as Chinese president in March 2003 but held onto the powerful post of chairman of the Central Military Commission until September 2004. He continued to wield significant political authority, not least through the power base inside the CCP that he had built up in Shanghai, and was influential in the choice of his successor, Hu Jintao, as party general secretary, and a decade later, Xi Jinping.
Jiang, following Deng, laid the basis for the astonishing expansion of the Chinese economy, now the world’s second largest, but this has only compounded the contradictions confronting CCP leaders. The economic growth has rested, on the one hand, on the social and economic gains of the 1949 Chinese revolution, including a highly educated workforce and developed infrastructure and, on the other, a massive influx of foreign investment and technology.
The very development of the economy, moreover, has opened up staggering levels of social inequality that are again fueling acute social tensions amid an economic slowdown. It has also heightened geo-political tensions with US imperialism, which over the past decade has intensified its confrontation with China on all fronts, including advanced preparations for war.
Incapable of making any appeal to workers in China let alone the rest of the world, the CCP leadership has no progressive answer either to the danger of conflict or to the social time bomb on which it is sitting. That is the actual legacy not only of Jiang and Deng, but of the bankrupt perspective of Stalinism and Maoism on which they rested.
