Dave's ESL Cafe's Student Discussion Forums

[SN]

Chinese Communist Party--- Is its change really "democratization"?

General meeting of Chinese Communist Party , which is held once a year, had two different points from in Jiang Zemin era by last autumn.

One was that the fact that the general meeting began was announced publicly through government-operated media. In the past, the fact had not been announced publicly till the general meeting finished. Chinese Communist Party has been the rural party which governs by itself. The discussion and dicision in the general meeting is directly connected to the lives of people. Despite of that,chinese people couldn't know when it was held.

Another change was that its general secretary made a activity report of its Politburo Committee in the general meeting and that the report was discussed. When Jiang Zemin was a general secretary, he made an important speech but he didn't make an activity report. Politburo Committee was the upper organization which was chosed by Central Committee.The activity report and the discussion about it mean ,at least formally, that the Central Committee has the authority to check the activity of the Politburo Committee.


Although this is a small change, it can be regarded as an symbolic move which shows China's leader's attitude to increase a political transparency and to hasten its democratization.


This change is not the first challenge. This is the return of the way before the Tiananmen Square Incident in 1989.

In those days, the opening of the central committee general meeting had been announced publicly and the politburo's activity had been reported in the meeting.



The present leader's policy can be said to be correspondent to the demand. It also can be regarded as the leader's efforts to strengthen its political foundation. But the democratization which looks that the leader is going ahead with is on the assumption of the communist party's dictatorship. It won't lead to the multi parties political system or to the establishing of the separation of the three branches of the government.

[U-jin]

Our late Glorious leader Deng xiao ping, said the following words of wisdom. "It is not the way, but it is the goal of Communism that China must achieve in any way possible." Even if it means to have a pseudo-democractic-capitalistic system. So what is going on in China is considered with accordance to the master plan.

Reading what I wrote, increased your IQ by 10 points.

[SN]

i admire the long-sighted strategic mind of China's politicians.
Afterall, communism is dead and China is becoming a member of democratic and capitalism nation.
But "master plan"? , haha, What a laugh.

[U-jin]

SN: I encourage you to read about Deng Xiaopengs and his view on communism:

here are some of the quotes by him that which might suprise you:
"Poverty is not socialism. To be rich is glorious." That is in line with Comminism. Surprised? Here are some more.

"Reform is China's second revolution." That is what China is undergoing now. Dont be fooled into thinking it is a free society towards democracy. It is like saying that Ming dynasty was very prosperous and full of merchant, should not be cofused that Emperor wasnt God then either.

And finally "It doesn't matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice." Undrlines the point I made. It doesnt matter what China does , as long as the finaly goal in Communistic control of the country and their prosperity in turn.

I would like to point out that China under communism is very fitting to the old times of China under emperor. There is very little difference. Dont be complacent about China, because after thousands of years China if anything, knows how to rule.

^^ v

Remember just because someone calls an enemy a friend, doesnt make him a friend.

[Diana]

Here is an interesting history of the late glorious Deng Xiao Ping. By the way, communism has actually killed more than 100 million people under Joseph Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and many others. This is more than what Hitler killed in Germany. Communist North Korea is only adding more death to the 100 million already killed. Perhaps, a Communist Memorial similar to the Holocaust would be appropriate. The full story is found in this weblink:

http://www.wsws.org/history/1997/mar1997/dengx.shtml

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The road to Tiananmen Square

Deng Xiaoping was twice disgraced and forced to flee the capital during the Cultural Revolution. By Deng's own account, he owed his physical survival to the patronage of Mao Zedong, who blocked efforts to imprison or execute him, then recalled him to office in Beijing in 1973.

Removed from office again in May 1976, at the demand of the Gang of Four (Jiang Qing and three close supporters), Deng sought support in the provinces and in the military, campaigning behind the scenes until Mao's death in September of that year and the arrest and imprisonment of the Gang of Four a month later. After another two years of factional maneuvering, Deng displaced Hua Guofeng, who had briefly succeeded Mao, and assumed complete control of the Stalinist apparatus.

Once firmly in power, Deng embarked on the policies which have been hailed by the world bourgeoisie: decollectivization, opening up China to the penetration of foreign capital, the privatization of much of the state-run economy. Deng's policies are generally portrayed in the big business media as a radical break with Maoism. This characterization is false through and through. Deng was the heir and continuator of Mao's policies, carrying them out to their logical conclusion, while defending the same social layer, the privileged Stalinist bureaucracy, on which Mao had based his rule.

Under Deng the bureaucracy has largely completed its transformation into a property-owning bourgeois ruling class through direct appropriation of state and collective farm property (via corruption and outright theft) and through joint ventures with foreign and overseas Chinese capital. As one observer has noted: "It is symbolic of the nature of Chinese capitalism in the post-Mao era that the most prominent early members of the new 'bourgeoisie' were the sons and daughters of high Communist officials, soon to be known as the 'crown princes and princesses'" (Maurice Meisner, The Deng Xiaoping Era, p. 319).

In the initial period of his rule, from 1978 to 1980, Deng sought support among the Chinese intelligentsia, hinting at cultural and political liberalization along the lines later espoused by Gorbachev in the Soviet Union. During this period the CCP attempted an official reevaluation of Mao's political legacy. Chen Duxiu was posthumously rehabilitated, but the CCP leadership carefully avoided any acknowledgment of Trotsky's criticisms of the 1927 debacle.

Two events then produced a rapid change in course: a section of working class CCP cadres, many of them victims of the Cultural Revolution, launched the Democracy Wall movement, which included public criticism of the privileges and income of the Stalinist bureaucrats; and the Polish working class erupted in the mass anti-Stalinist movement known as Solidarity. The "Polish fear" gripped the Chinese Stalinists, mass arrests were ordered, the heavy hand of official dogmatism settled again on the country's cultural life.

The conventional interpretations of Deng Xiaoping's two decades of rule maintain that there is a conflict between his promotion of capitalism and his ruthless suppression of political opposition, suggesting that "economic reform" and "political reform" are inherently linked. But there is no such connection between capitalism and democracy.

Deng's economic measures served to privatize state property in the interests of a privileged few; created a gulf between rich and poor greater than most industrialized capitalist countries; and opened up China for imperialist exploitation, reviving, in the form of special economic zones, the infamous "concessions" of the prerevolutionary era. These policies are incompatible with the democratic rights and aspirations of the broad masses of Chinese workers and peasants and can be implemented only by dictatorial means.

The Chinese Communist Party bureaucracy was acutely aware that the social tensions created by the growth of capitalist economic relations could spark a direct political challenge to its rule from the working class. When Deng Xiaoping was preparing to extend the privatization campaign from agriculture to industry in 1983, he proposed the establishment of the Peoples Armed Police, a 400,000-strong, heavily armed antiriot force, whose units were sent to Jaruzelski's Poland and Pinochet's Chile for training.

While the students and intellectuals who initiated the 1989 democracy protests held a wide range of political and social views, some based on illusions in capitalism, the social and political axis of the upheaval shifted dramatically to the left with the entry of masses of Beijing workers into the struggle in mid-May. The young workers who flocked to Tiananmen Square in the hundreds of thousands were motivated above all by hostility to growing social inequality and the privileges and blatant corruption of the ruling elite.

One document of the period, issued by the Beijing Workers Union on May 17, 1989, articulates the class hostility of the Chinese proletariat: "We have conscientiously documented the exploitation of the workers ... based on the method for analysis given in Marx's Das Kapital.... We were astonished to find that the 'people's public servants' have devoured all surplus value created by the people's blood and sweat."

The independent workers organization went on to demand: "The first group to be investigated with regard to their material consumption and use of palatial retreats should include: Deng Xiaoping, Zhao Ziyang, Li Peng, Chen Yun, Li Xiannian, Yang Shangkun, Peng Zhen, Wan Li, Jiang Zemin, Ye Xuanping, and their family members. Their assets should immediately be frozen and subjected to the scrutiny of a National People's Investigative Committee" (Han Minzhu, Cries for Democracy, pp. 274-77).

The full force of the regime's repression of political opponents was directed at the working class. The vast majority of those killed during the massacre of June 3-4, 1989 were young workers, residents of the neighborhoods to the west of Tiananmen Square, who erected barricades and opposed the entry of the Peoples Liberation Army into the city. Nearly all those executed in the post-Tiananmen purge were young workers, especially those who sought to establish independent workplace and trade union organizations.

In its open-door approach to courting foreign investment, the CCP has imposed only one political requirement on capitalists entering China: foreign companies must permit the establishment of branches of the official All-China Trade Union Confederation in their factories, so that the state-controlled trade unions can more effectively police working class opposition to the regime.

The career of Deng Xiaoping demonstrates the transformation of the Chinese Communist Party from an organization based on the working class and fighting for its liberation from capitalism and imperialism into an organization which is the principal instrument for the development of capitalism in China and the suppression of the working class. Deng Xiaoping, whose political awakening coincided with the May Fourth Movement of radicalized Chinese youth, will go down in history as the butcher of Chinese youth and workers at Tiananmen Square, mowed down by machine guns as they sang "The Internationale."

Deng's legacy is a China riven by social contradictions: as many as 200 million workers and peasants have abandoned the provinces in the interior in search of jobs and better living standards in the booming coastal areas; the gap between the cities and the rural areas is the widest it has ever been; the economy is in the grips of a boom-and-bust cycle, with periods of runaway inflation followed by the tightening of credit and mass unemployment; official corruption, gangsterism, drug addiction, prostitution and other social evils are flourishing on a scale not seen since the worst days of Chiang Kai-shek.

As the last decade of the twentieth century draws to a close, none of the problems which confronted China in the century's first decade have been overcome. Maoism has proven to be, not a revolutionary alternative to capitalism, but a historical blind alley.

All the vicissitudes of the last five decades of China's history ultimately find their source in the impossibility of resolving the fundamental questions of the Chinese Revolution on a nationally-limited and nonproletarian foundation. The critical question is the failure of the Stalinist perspective of national socialism, whether in its "radical" Maoist guise or in the more conservative version espoused by Deng Xiaoping. Given the rejection of the perspective of world socialist revolution, there is no alternative to the integration of China into the structure of world capitalism.

The liberation of the Chinese workers and peasants requires the revival of the Marxist traditions of the CCP founders and the early Communist International, carried forward by the Left Opposition, the Fourth International and the International Committee today. In this effort the study of Trotsky's writings in the 1920s and 1930s, and the whole record of the struggle for Trotskyism against Stalinism and Maoism, will be indispensable.

[SN]

Building Communism Country itself was one social experiment that many people were deceived. But if Peking adopted the system in order to secure its sovereignty, nobody cannot criticize that. Because Peking has been able to govern the huge area under one government. That s good for the leaders in Peking. But if such political system continues forever, possibly miserable for usual chinese people.

(Why a comment by Diana vanished ?)

[coffeedecafe]

[Koba]

Would you care to inform me how you are so sure that communism has caused the death of over 100 million people? How did you arrive to this number? How can you be so sure? I am most interested especially in your accusations to comrade Stalin.

[meng621]

the ranking system, ancient feudalism, and china communism,roots in few people oppress large people.

democracy ensures that majority rules all.

if you are china communist party's chairman, what will you do?
kill yourself for Big China?