James Cogan
The 70th anniversary of the establishment of the People’s Republic of China on October 1 was commemorated in Beijing with a display of military power and obsequiousness to President Xi Jinping. Some four decades after it restored capitalist property relations, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime is wracked with perplexity and internal divisions over how to contain workers’ struggles for their social and democratic rights, and how to respond to the economic and strategic offensive of US imperialism.
In an attempt to impress and intimidate the Chinese people and the imperialist powers, the CCP marched some 15,000 troops from various branches of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) through the streets of the capital.
A detachment of the People’s Armed Police was included in the parade. The official television commentary lauded the force as “an important apparatus for social stability”—that is, for suppressing the opposition within the working class to the unchecked exploitation and political corruption that enriches the CPP-connected capitalist elite.
Chinese President Xi Jinping is shown in a painting and on screen during a parade for the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China in Beijing on Tuesday, Oct. 1, 2019. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)
In Hong Kong, where the anniversary was answered with ongoing demonstrations against the Beijing-backed government, the regime’s police gunned down a young student with live ammunition, leaving him with a serious bullet wound.
The state violence in Hong Kong is a microcosm of what takes place across China. The police are used to suppress tens of thousands of protests each year over poverty-level or unpaid wages and pensions, unsafe working conditions and the polluted environment. While precise figures are not possible due to pervasive media and internet censorship, the China Labour Bulletin reported a sharp increase in workers’ strikes in 2018.
The years leading up to 2019—which was also the 30th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre—witnessed the wholesale arrest, interrogation and imprisonment of worker and student activists, academics, journalists, lawyers, artists and advocates for ethnic minorities.
Beside repression, the regime’s only answer to the rising unrest over widening social inequality is to promote reactionary Chinese nationalism, hoping that appeals to “national unity” will contain irreconcilable class antagonisms.
Xi declared in his anniversary speech: “There’s no force that can shake the foundations of this great nation. No force can stop the Chinese people and the Chinese nation forging ahead!”
The militarist parade featured trucks towing long-range, nuclear-armed inter-continental ballistic missiles (ICBM) and submarine-launched missiles that can strike across the continental US, as well as medium- and short-range cruise missiles and anti-shipping missiles.
Effusive television commentators did not observe that US military spending is at least triple China’s, and the US nuclear arsenal is at least 10 times’ larger. Moreover, the response of American imperialism to the expansion of China’s nuclear capacities has not been to step back from a military build-up and provocations against China. Under President Barack Obama and now Trump, Washington’s reaction has been to make strategic plans for war that include the option of a “first strike” nuclear attack.
The Chinese capitalist regime faces a global economic environment wracked by instability and a trade and economic war by the Trump administration that is aimed at driving major Chinese-based companies to the wall. In recent press conferences, Trump has gloated that US tariffs have destroyed three million jobs in China and plunged the country into its worst economic situation in decades.
In the past year, foreign direct investment into China has fallen sharply as a result of US policies. Even the questionable official rate of 6.2 percent growth this year is the slowest pace since 1992—the year the CCP fully opened the country to the global economy.
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