A very brief history
The Communist Party of China (CPC) is 90 years old. Founded in 1921, under the impact of the revolutionary wave caused by the Russian Revolution of 1917, it soon bureaucratized due to the dominance of the Kremlin bureaucracy headed by Stalin on the Comintern.
From 1925 to 1927, after experiencing an incredible growth in its early years, the young party faced enormous revolutionary processes, which were turned into strategic defeats carried on by the Stalinist policy of submitting the CPC to the Chinese national bourgeoisie.
The four classes alliance policy (proletariat, peasantry, petty bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie) and the characterization of the Chinese revolution as a bourgeois revolution that would be limited to deploy an autonomous capitalism whose direction should belong to the bourgeoisie, led the CPC to be submissive to the policy and discipline of the Kuomintang (a nationalist bourgeois party) and its leader Chiang Kai-chek. This caused the near-destruction of the CPC because of several massacres carried out by the Kuomintang against their Communist allies. This defeat caused a huge setback to the labor and popular movements in the Chinese cities and forced the Communists to escape to the mountains of northern China.
Isolated from the working class, the CPC builds a peasant “party-army” without any internal democracy. After the fight in 1927 and a congress in 1928 (which consolidated Mao Zedong’s power in the party), the following congress would be convened only in 1945. The victory of the revolution in 1949 meets a fully bureaucratized CPC as well as a consolidated policy of class alliance, typical of the Stalinism in the post-second world war.
Once in power, the CPC applies the Stalinist “theory” of socialism in one country and begins to compete for leadership in the “communist world” with the Soviet Union.
It tries to build up its own sphere of influence by supporting anti-colonial revolutionary processes, but always using the policy of alliance with the national bourgeoisie in each country, repeating the same mistakes made from 1925 to 1927. And, again, they were victims of their own policy. Sukarno, Indonesia’s president backed by Mao, would repeat the feat of Chiang Kai-shek 38 years later, killing at least 500,000 activists of the Communist Party of Indonesia, the third largest in the world at the time.
In 1978 the CPC leads the capitalist restoration in China with its policy of the four modernizations (with Deng Xiaoping succeeding Mao as head of the CPC, after the defeat of the Maoist faction known as the Gang of Four) and it currentlydirects the most important of the “emerging” countries, known as the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, China and India), to which South Africa was recently added.
This feature – a Communist Party ahead of a major capitalist country–drives many activists to wonder how the CPC could be defined today. Is it a genuine communist party, driving the country into a stage of transition to socialism (the so-called socialism with Chinese characteristics), as the CPC calls itself, or, conversely, did it suffer a “restoration” in the same way that capitalist restoration happened in China?
A Bolshevik Party?
We believe that nothing better than the words of the CPC (obtained on its website www.english.peopledaily.com.cn) to get an answer. The first question, and most importantly, it’s about the nature of the CPC. In an article dedicated to “refute five myths about the CPC” (curiously based on the book by a critic of the regime, Richard McGregor, a journalist at the Financial Times), the website’s publisher says it is untrue that the CPC is communist in name only: “If Vladimir Lenin were reincarnated in 21st-century Beijing, he would instantly recognize in the ruling CPC a replica of the system he designed nearly a century ago for the victors of the Bolshevik Revolution. One needs only to look at the party’s structure to see how communist – and Leninist – China’s political system remains.”
Regardless of the identity between party and state, a proper attitude of a bureaucracy, the quote equates Bolshevism to a “structure”. It is true that the CPCis apparently Bolshevik structured: a Central Committee, a Stand Bureau, congresses held (currently) each five years, etc. But is this enough to characterize it as a Bolshevik Party? Where are the internal democracy and revolutionary politics, to say the least? So, the CPC turns Bolshevism into an eggshell, fragile on the outside and empty inside. Parties with such characteristics, or religious structures (frameworks, organizations) strongly centralized, have existed in various societies and have nothing to do with Leninism.
That’s why soon after the editor is forced (obliged, taken) to state that “Sure, China long ago dumped the core of the communist economic system, replacing rigid central planning with commercially minded state enterprises that coexist with a vigorous private sector”. Recall that, for Lenin, the centralized state economic planning, the end of private ownership and state control of foreign trade are the three pillars of a workers’ state (or socialist). As we can see, from the Bolshevik Party of Lenin nothing is left, not even its shell. Moreover, Lenin advocated democratic centralism. The CPC, in contrast, is a centralized and totalitarian party, at the service of capitalist expansion and the integration of China to the imperialist world economy.
The CPC and the army
Still, could it be said that a party with historical roots in the people and with more than 80 million members (data from the PCC) that “regularly pay contributions” has something of communism? After all, only with an immense popular support could a party grasp power for so long.
Again, the CPC itself denies this possibility. China’s President Hu Jintao said on July 1stthat “we need to adhere to the fundamental principle of the Party exercising absolute leadership over the army” during a meeting commemorating the 90th anniversary of the party. This means that the army is controlled byCPC, not the Chinese state.
LiJInai, a senior official of the People’s Liberation Army, explains ten reasons for which the CPCwould exercise its “absolute leadership”. Not to weary the reader with tiresome repetitions, I quote the most significant: “CPC’s absolute leadership over the army is our country’s basic military system and important part of political system with Chinese characteristics.”
Any more clearer is impossible. The CPC is still organized as a “party-army”, at least its most important part, which has a decisive influence on the Chinese “political system”.
Latin America experienced a period in which parties, supported by armies, or their own armies, have ruled over several countries, and these regimes were given a name so simple to understand: a military dictatorship. As they are capitalist countries, we can complement – bourgeois military dictatorship. We ask: what is the difference with China today?
From this point of view, there is no difference. There are other similarities, although not so clear, as the economy. Despite the substantial figures of the Chinese economy presented by the media, putting the country as a threat to American hegemony, China is a country dependent on imperialism and in a process of semi-colonization. Dependent on exports to imperialist countries and on the share of foreign capital in domestic investment. Bai Ming, a member of the Ministry of Commerce, stated that”according to the 12th Five-Year Plan, with huge market potential, China will make further efforts to improve its investment climate and offer more investment opportunities to foreign companies.”
Where is worker internationalism?
Therefore, China’s foreign policy is diametrically opposed to Lenin’s, soon after taking power. Far from attracting foreign investment, Lenin sought to establish political relations with the revolutionary wing of the reformist parties of Europe and new parties that emerged, often with an ultra-left politics, to build the Third International.
One would expect that a party calling itself communist, at the head of a powerful country like China, which claims to follow in the footsteps of Lenin, could build a new International to put a definitive end to capitalism.
However, Ai Ping, a member of the International Department of CPC Central Committee, refutes this hypothesis. Ping said that the party doesn’t seek relationship with ultra-left and illegal parties and that “The most typical example is CPC never contact with the so-called Indian Communist Party (of Maoist orientation!), an ultra-left party.” And to leave no doubt, another member of the CC, Huang Huaguang, adds: “Since last year, CPC even started the high level dialogue with the Democratic Party and Republican Party of America”.There is no greater demonstration of submission to imperialism than this.
What is CPC nowadays
All these self-statements on CPC’s nature take us to an ultimate characterization of the CPC: a party-army ahead of a bourgeois capitalist state, subordinated to the imperialist economy that keepsChinese people subjugated by a military dictatorship. Definitively, there’s nothing to celebrate.
