Class Struggle Continues...

“China’s New Red Guards – The Return of Radicalism and the Rebirth of Mao Zedong,” by Jude Blanchette, 2019

This is no real return to the Cultural Revolution.  Instead this book details the decades’ long vacillating fight between left, center and right in China after the fall of the ‘Gang of Four’ in the late 1970s and how it has evolved into a battle over Mao Zedong’s legacy.  What passes for the Chinese left has lost every battle since 1978 – over privatization, over peasant land rights and land leasing, over planning, over capitalist membership in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), over WTO membership, over the spread of private enterprise and banking.  Yet class struggle never dies if a proletariat exists – it is automatically generated by the contradiction. 

 

There are now over 100 billionaires in positions within the CCP and state apparatus.  This ‘reform’ in 2001 by Jiang Zemin was one of the impetuses for the development of a new left that opposed neo-liberalism and class collaborationism.   

Blanchette is a member of a ‘strategic advisory firm’ in Arlington Virginia, so probably peddles his research to everyone.  He gives an historic account of the fight between the dominant neo-liberal wing of the CCP hierarchy and the ‘left’ – which is variously described as New Left, ‘conservative’ Old Left, nationalist or neo-Maoist.  Most of this left is centered in universities, among some Party intellectuals and economists, in small lecture halls and bookstores and on various sites on the internet like Utopia and Maoflag.  The web-sites are widely read, starting when they first accused some Chinese policies and figures of being neo-liberal.  From this reading, these groups have few real ties with the proletariat, except perhaps in the recent Jasic factory struggle. 

Blanchette understands that praising Mao in a political debate in China is a way to get some protection from censorship, jailing, job losses or worse, as Mao and Marxism still have credence in the country’s history and ideology.  So the handling of the various forms of the neo-Maoist left by the top bureaucracy and PLA is nuanced – sometimes involving repression and sometimes promotion.  The centrists actually use the left to give themselves a role as a balance. Xi Jinping uses them to promote the CCP and national greatness.  Others are jailed. Marxists openly advocating Chinese Trotskyist perspectives on the other hand would be immediately arrested and perhaps shot.

Blanchette points out that there is now a split in the neo-Maoist left between those who support the CCP and Xi and those who want to form a new party to fight capital.  All of this is still framed as disputes over Mao ZeDong’s legacy.  It involves debates about the validity of the Great Leap Forward, the Anti-Rightist Campaign and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.  The neo-Maoists find zero problems in Mao’s actions and policies, while Chinese pro-Western market liberals condemn them completely. These are the only two simple views permitted.  Nuanced views that the Great Leap Forward was an example of a justified but adventurist and voluntarist attempt at industrialization or a view that the GPCR was an ultra-left and bureaucratic version of political revolution are off the map. 

Utopia Chinese Website

Blanchette covers in detail the various developments in this ideological struggle, from 1979 criticisms about the ‘feudal idolatry’ of keeping Mao embalmed to China’s attack on Vietnam.  He covers Deng Ziaoping’s early 1992 southern tour to Guangdong cementing ‘Reform and Opening’; the dismantling of a large part of the state sector in 1996 leading to millions of layoffs; the founding of Utopia as a leftist site critical of this vast opening to capital in 2003;  left bureaucrat Bo Xilai’s rise and fall in the CCP in 2012; the split in the new-Maoist movement between Utopia’s support of Xi and the founding of an underground China Maoist Alliance in 2015, and finally the Jasic strike in 2018.

THE NEW COLD WAR

Blanchette calls the Chinese ‘paranoid’ when they worry that the U.S. is trying to undermine China and the CCP.  He ignores the clear U.S. trade war goals in dismantling parts of Chinese planning and what remains of the state-led economy, along with the new U.S. military policy of anti-Chinese military encirclement.  This includes bans on software like HuaWei and now hysteria over something called TikTok. The “New Silk Road Initiative” also worries the U.S., as they see it as competition for U.S. corporations. While China is taking defensive actions in response to the U.S., there is also a large factor of the New Silk Road / Belt and Road Initiative that reflects the need for Chinese capital to expand beyond the borders of China. This is another warning bell for Marxists.

Blanchette considers China to be ‘state capitalist’ without proving his contention. He uses the term ‘conservative’ to describe the Chinese who do not want to open society to privatization and capital, a different meaning than in the U.S. where it has the exact reverse meaning.  The term ‘reform,’ which used to mean progressive, now means the reverse in both countries.  This is a worthwhile book to understand the politics and paradoxes of China, home to the largest proletariat in the world.  A place not to be ignored.

Other reviews on this subject below, use blog search box, upper left:  “Jasic Factory Struggle,” (Ma) “China on Strike,” “Striking to Survive,” “Two Sea Changes in World Political Economy,” (Halabi) “Is the East Still Red?” (Blank) “From Commune to Capitalism,” (Hu)“The End of the Revolution,” (Hui) “The Rise of China,”(Li) “The Implosion of Contemporary Capitalism,”(Amin) “The Fall of Bo Xilai,” (Zhao) “Maoism and the Chinese Revolution.” (Liu)       

And I bought them at May Day Books, which has the cheapest new book prices in the city and many books on China from a left perspective, along with writings by Mao Zedong.

Red Frog

December 24, 2019