China: Heading for Middle East Style Uprisings?

This is the editorial from the latest issue of Socialist《社會主義者》magazine (number 9, Spring 2011), published in Hong Kong by Chinese and Hong Kong supporters of the CWI.


As Socialist magazine goes to print, the revolt against despotism in the Middle East and North Africa enters its tenth week and the “dominos” continue to fall. Gaddafi, the dictator of Libya, has lost control of most of the country, but clings to power at least for the time being with the help of mostly mercenary forces. At least 1,000 have been killed. The revolutionary wave shows no signs of subsiding, far from it. We are witnessing history – a massive demonstration of the power of mass struggle and the speed with which such movements can travel.

Even in oil-rich Saudi Arabia, a bastion of reaction across the region, young people are calling for a similar rebellion against the absolutist monarchy. Formerly “calm” Oman, ruled by Sultan Qaboos bin Said, has been drawn into the tumult. Reports are emerging of tear gas, rubber bullets and supermarkets ablaze, as youth on the streets demand higher pay, jobs and political change. These movements are payment for the imposition of brutal neo-liberal programmes over more than 30 years at the behest of the capitalists.

Inevitably the question is raised: Can this revolutionary mood spread from predominantly Arabic-speaking countries to Asia and even China?

“Jasmine Revolution?”

Despite massive online censorship and a block on keywords like “Egypt” and “Jasmine Revolution”, millions of internet-savvy Chinese are scaling the regime’s “Great Firewall” controls and eagerly following the mighty revolutionary tide in the Middle East. The sympathy and excitement about these revolutions does not of course automatically translate into a movement on the streets, even inside the world’s biggest dictatorship, with its own stark inequality not so different to that which is fuelling revolt in Cairo, Tunis, Manama and Algiers.

China is different in one crucial respect: the degree and sophistication of internet and telecommunications controls exceeds anything seen elsewhere. Mobile SMS messages and not just the internet can be filtered by authorities to block sensitive words and monitor those calling for mobilisations. The calls online for regular Sunday protests and a “Jasmine Revolution” have yet to trigger any significant response inside China. But only fools will take this as a sign of “stability” or conclude that Chinese workers and youth are more satisfied than their peers in the Middle East.

Instead, the calls for gatherings in almost 30 cities, while so far largely unheeded, have shown the extreme nervousness of the China’s rulers. “The party is very, very nervous, way beyond their normal level of anxiety,” explained Li Datong, a retired editor of the party-run China Youth Daily.

Tens of thousands of police have been mobilised to cordon off suspected protest sites, often to the bemusement of local shoppers and residents. Dozens of lawyers, activists and dissidents have been arrested. The current crackdown is the biggest since October when dissident Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Increased repression

The fall of Arab dictators who only weeks ago seemed as firmly ensconced in power as China’s ruling party, has sent the government into a spin. Since Mubrarak was deposed in Egypt, two high-level meetings have been held in Beijing to put provincial and military leaders on the highest alert.

At the most recent meeting, China’s top security official Zhou Yongkang urged party chiefs to improve “social management” and “strive to defuse conflicts and disputes while they are still embryonic”. Zhou called for the establishment of a national database to store basic information on all citizens. Since 2008 the Beijing regime’s spending on internal security has risen dramatically and is now almost on a par with defence spending. It is more than the total health budget.

A favourite theme of the regime-controlled media is to dwell on the “instability” and “violence” of the mass movements in the Middle East, and the negative effects on business in particular. One would think China had never had a revolution. Yet this October sees the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the Xinhai revolution, which ended China’s imperial dynasty and established Asia’s first republic. This was overshadowed by the even more powerful revolutionary movement of workers and peasants in 1925-27, and the revolution of 1949 that overthrew feudalism and for a period also capitalism. The Chinese regime’s stress on “harmonious development” echoes the propaganda of Arab dictators Mubarak and Gaddafi, that they are all that stands between “civilisation” and “anarchy”.

Colour revolutions?

Beijing’s propagandists also warn against “colour revolutions” and imply that the movements in the Middle East have been fomented or manipulated by US imperialism to install pro-US regimes. Calls for democratic rights are thus equated with support for an “anti-China” and “pro-Western” approach. Nothing could be further from the truth. The reality is that almost all the regimes now feeling the heat of revolution are close strategic allies of Western imperialism. Those Chinese dissidents who still believe in the “universal democratic values” of the US capitalist system should open their eyes. The wholesale rejection of pro-US regimes by the mass of the people, despite their lack at this early stage of any clear programme to defeat imperialism, is a nightmarish challenge for the US.

This is the case in Yemen, Djibouti, Egypt and Bahrain, the base of the US Fifth fleet, where the Khalifah monarchy, closely supported by the Saudi ruling family, has also recently attempted – without success – to crush the revolution by force. Unlike Gaddafi in Libya, Bahrain’s tyrant has escaped condemnation by the capitalist United Nations.

“Mubarak is immensely courageous and a force for good,” Britain’s former Labour prime minister Tony Blair told CNN, just one week before the Egyptian dictator was toppled. This shows the real attitude of capitalist leaders (Blair was a key partner of president Bush’s plan to invade Iraq in 2003). Mubarak’s regime has historically been the second largest recipient of US aid worldwide, with four-fifths of this aid going to the military, the power-base of Mubarak’s dictatorship.

This shows the hypocrisy of the Western “democracies” whose actions in the Middle East – i.e. propping up repulsive dictatorships – are decided by naked economic interests. In this power game there is no fundamental difference between the “democracies” and the Beijing regime. While Western capitalist leaders talk of “human rights” and “democracy” to hide their real intentions, Beijing talks of “harmonious development” and the need for “stability”.

Libya – What next?

The level of governmental hypocrisy has reached new heights over Libya. With the largest reserves of oil in Africa, this is a key country for world capitalism. Western governments are rushing to reposition themselves in the eyes of world public opinion, condemning the Libyan regime’s savagery, when in fact for over a decade they have embraced Gaddafi (literally in Blair’s case) as an ally in the fight against “radical islam” and a pillar of regional “stability”. The European Union (EU) has used Gaddafi and his strong-arm methods to police its southern Mediterranean borders against refugees.

Imperialist governments from Paris to Washington are hinting at possible military action against Gaddafi, under a “humanitarian” pretext, but in reality as a means to exercise leverage over a post-Gaddafi regime, protect their business interests in the region and hedge against the deepening revolutionary mood in the region. They fear the fallout from yet another successful mass revolt, and especially that this may spread to the linchpin state of Saudi Arabia.

Although the Chinese regime does not welcome the prospect of Western military involvement in Libya, which sets a dangerous precedent in their eyes, they too want to see the Arab revolt “contained”, fearing further radicalisation that can pose a threat to capitalism in the region. This explains why China did not block a decision in the UN Security Council to impose sanctions on Libya, including an arms embargo, although China and Russia are unlikely to support tougher action such as a proposed no-fly zone. In all cases, the powers represented in the UN are deeply hostile to the revolutionary upsurge in the region while also vying for their own interests, which are not identical.

Socialists, the supporters of the CWI internationally and Socialist Action in Hong Kong, oppose any imperialist intervention in the Middle East, which would be an attempt to hijack a revolutionary movement in order to prop up new compliant rulers, rather than support the masses’ demands for democracy and economic justice.

As the articles in this issue of Socialist show, the CWI actively supports the mass revolutionary movements in the Middle East and urges no compromise with the monarchs and dictators – for the removal of these regimes and their capitalist cronies, and their replacement by governments of workers and poor farmers, based on freely elected revolutionary constituent assemblies and mass revolutionary committees. We call for a socialist federation of Middle Eastern and North African states as a step towards defeating capitalism internationally.

China’s turn?
The Chinese leaders are sitting on a social time bomb, no different fundamentally from that faced by Mubarak, Gaddafi and other Arab dictators. There is huge accumulated anger everywhere after decades of privatisations, neo-liberal attacks, an unprecedented wealth gap and rampant corruption.

In China there have been more than 90,000 “mass incidents” in each of the last four years according to official data. Peasant protests against corrupt officials in league with property tycoons have skyrocketed in tandem with soaring land prices – last year struck a new record with over 50,000 illegal land grabs. At the same time the gap between rich and poor is more extreme in China even than in Egypt, Yemen and Tunisia.

Government figures released on January 20 show that rural per capita net income rose 10.9 percent to an average of 5,919 yuan last year. This is hailed as great progress. But it still means that 750 million rural Chinese must eke out a living on 898 US dollars per year – or 2.4 dollars a day! This is the average income level and most therefore receive less than this, with a minority receiving a great deal more. A survey published by the puppet official trade union shows that average salaries for “second generation” migrant workers, the backbone of last year’s historic strike wave, are ten percent lower than the “first generation” of migrants earned in the 1980s and early ‘90s, in real terms.

The Chinese regime is frantically stocking its state armouries and expanding the technical capacities of its more than 40,000 internet cops. But they should heed the example of Gaddafi, who threatened to act “like the Chinese in Tiananmen Square” in order to defeat the revolutionary uprising. Perhaps the greatest lesson of the revolutionary wave we are witnessing is that once the people lose their fear, no amount of repression can succeed against them.