China’s Congress of the Communist Party takes place this week. This is an important event not only for China, but globally. The Western media have concentrated on the fact that current party leader Xi Jinping will be confirmed for an unprecedented third term as party leader and thus also continue as President of China when the National Congress meets next March.
Naturally, the Western pundits are strongly opposed to Xi having a third term. The FT’s Keynesian guru, Martin Wolf reckoned Xi’s continuation in power would ‘dangerous’ for China and the world. “It is dangerous for both. It would be dangerous even if he had proven himself a ruler of matchless competence. But he has not done so. As it is, the risks are those of ossification at home and increasing friction abroad… Ten years is always enough.. It is simply realistic to expect the next 10 years of Xi to be worse than the last.” And apparently, that has been bad enough.
In part one of my analysis of China’s economic future, I dealt with the claims that China would slow towards stagnation because its investment rate was too high, the working population was falling fast and the economy needed to become like mature Western capitalist economies based on consumption-led growth. I argued that the Western capitalist model was hardly great shakes, given its regular and recurring crises and the much lower levels of consumption growth. Anyway, in an economy, consumption does not lead investment and national output. On the contrary, it is investment that leads in capitalist economies just as much as in China.
Even as Xi Jinping was promising China’s Communist Party’s national congress that China would “resolutely win the battle” in key areas of technology, employees of technology companies in China and elsewhere were being told to down tools. Dozens of the hundreds of executives and engineers with US citizenship or green cards who work in or with China’s semiconductor sector, many of them born in China, have been told by their employers – whether those are foreign or Chinese companies – to stop work while their employers seek clarification of a new US rule that bars US citizens and residents from supporting China’s advanced chip-making industry without a licence.
For thirty years, the Chinese have been scrupulously studying and analyzing the disintegration of a great power, mainly to prevent such a scenario in their homeland. They argue what was the primary cause of the disaster. The crisis of the ruling party was generated by the general socio-economic decline of the USSR, or the degradation of the CPSU, which abandoned its allegiance to Marxism, resulted in the transformation of the entire socialist system and ultimately destroyed the state ,” Zuenko explains to the agency of Russian state communication.
If it were not for the triumph of the October Socialist Revolution in Russia, perhaps in China the Communist Party, an organization that has ruled the Asian country for more than 70 years, would not have appeared on the nation’s political scene.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the political, economic and social situation in China, as in many other countries, developed in a turbulent way, although in 1911, the Xinhai Revolution shook the empire of the Asian nation, giving way to the birth of a republic, the truth is that the new government of Chinese nationalists was unable to unify the country towards the adoption of a common development policy in any of its forms.
The Chinese Communist party’s central committee recently held its sixth plenum, to discuss “the major achievements and historical experience” of the party in its 100-year-history, as well as to consider policy “for the future.” Just after this, Jamie Dimon, the JPMorgan Chase chief executive, joked that the Wall Street Bank would outlast the Chinese Communist party. “I made a joke the other day that the Communist party is celebrating its 100th year. So is JPMorgan. I’ll make a bet that we last longer,” he said, speaking at the Boston College Chief Executives Club, a business forum.
What is the experience and future for China and its Communist party rule? It seems appropriate to consider a number of new books on China that have been published that try to answer this question.
In his workCritique of the Gotha Programme, Karl Marx took his objection to the analysis of some other communists as an opportunity to put forth an analysis of what needs to happen within communist development. At least in regards to the means of production, this analysis consists of the following ideas:
-That labor is not the source of all wealth; even without labor, we would have the wealth that nature gives us. Therefore, whether society has wealth doesn’t necessarily stem from whether labor is present.
-That there’s a difference between “labor” as it’s defined under the capitalist means of production, and labor as it would be defined under fully developed communism. Whereas labor under capitalism centers around business and the acquisition of property, labor under fully developed communism would not involve these things.
As Marx articulates this: “In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”
Citizens celebrate CPC’s 100th annivesary. Photo: Yang Hui. Global Times.
Introduction
Today, July 1, 2021, is the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China. Celebrations throughout China and commemorations worldwide are taking place today in recognition of the Party’s leadership and its incredible legacy. It’s worthwhile for socialists to reflect on this legacy and, in particular, and the contemporary state of China’s political economy.
On November 9, 2013 Xi Jinping gave a talk at the Third Plenary Session of the 18th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in which he discussed the characteristic features of China’s economy after more than two decades of “reform and opening.” He recalled that at the 14th National Congress of the CPC, in 1992, the Party had re-dedicated itself to the goal of “establishing a socialist market economy, allowing the market to play a basic role in allocating resources under state macro control.” He went on to assert that, by 2013, a socialist market economy had been “basically established” but also observed that “there are still many problems.” This assessment of the situation, which remains essentially applicable to China today, reflects the complexity of China’s historical path since Liberation in 1949.
[The Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party is a textbook which was written jointly by Comrade Mao Tse-tung and several other comrades in Yenan to the winter of 1939. The first chapter, “Chinese Society”, was drafted by other comrades and revised by Comrade Mao Tse-tung. The second chapter, “The Chinese Revolution”, was written by Comrade Mao Tse-tung himself. Another chapter, scheduled to deal with “Party Building”, was left unfinished by the comrades working on it. The two published chapters, and especially Chapter II, have played a great educational role in the Chinese Communist Party and among the Chinese people. The views on New Democracy set out by Comrade Mao Tse-tung in Chapter II were considerably developed in his “On New Democracy”, written in January 1940.]
China is one of the largest countries in the world, her territory being about the size of the whole of Europe. In this vast country of ours there are large areas of fertile land which provide us with food and clothing; mountain ranges across its length and breadth with extensive forests and rich mineral deposits; many rivers and lakes which provide us with water transport and irrigation; and a long coastline which facilitates communication with nations beyond the seas. From ancient times our forefathers have laboured, lived and multiplied on this vast territory.
China borders on the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in the northeast, the northwest and part of the west; the Mongolian People’s Republic in the north; Afghanistan, India, Bhutan and Nepal in the southwest and part of the west; Burma and Indo-China in the south; and Korea in the east, where she is also a close neighbor of Japan and the Philippines. China’s geographical setting has its advantages and disadvantages for the Chinese people’s revolution. It is an advantage to be adjacent to the Soviet Union and fairly distant from the major imperialist countries in Europe and America, and to have many colonial or semi-colonial countries around us. It is a disadvantage that Japanese imperialism, making use of its geographical proximity, is constantly threatening the very existence of all China’s nationalities and the Chinese people’s revolution.
THE third session of the Eleventh Central Committee of the CPC held in December 1978 was historic. This meeting took many important decisions to correct Left deviations and it embarked upon the task of putting the Party back on the correct path, both politically and organisationally.
The CPC decided that socialist construction in China would be according to ‘Chinese characteristics’, built on the initial advances made after the formation of the PRC. It pledged adherence to four cardinal principals: adherence to socialist road, people’s democratic dictatorship, leadership of the Communist Party, and Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought. The CPC assessed that China is still in the primary stage of socialist construction. It stated that there will be various stages in each phase and concluded that the primary stage of socialist construction might take many decades. To achieve this, they have to reform their economy by opening it to foreign investment. “On the basis of self-reliance, we should develop equal and mutually beneficial economic cooperation with other countries of the world, introduce advanced technologies and equipment from abroad and make great efforts to improve work in science and education which was needed for modernisation”.
On July 1st the Communist Party of China turns 100. Without doubt it’s formation was one of the greatest turning points in the history of mankind. It shaped the political course of China being a precedent to many a historic event, be it the Long March of 1935,the anti-Japanese War from 1937-45 , the civil war of 1946-1949, the New Democratic revolution of 1949, the Socialist Revolution from 1949-56 the Great Leap Forward, the Socialist Education Movement of 1962, and finally the Great Proletarian Cultural revolution of 1966-76 .All these events enriched the ideology of Marxism Leninism to a pinnacle with symmetry and continuity and unprecedented penetration of practice of massline and It is a great travesty that at the very time of celebration the CPC has completely betrayed the path it undertook from the 1930’s itself to morally make it an anti-thesis of Marxism-Leninism. With the very induction of the four modernisations by Deng Xiaoping the very backbone of Socialism was destroyed in China and seeds planted for capitalism to bloom.
Journal of People 