On May 30, a panel of three judges at the West Kowloon Judicial Court in the city of Hong Kong convicted 14 activists of conspiracy and subversion under the National Security Law imposed by the Chinese regime on the territory of Hong Kong in June, 2020 (1).
By Fabio Bosco
Another 31 activists will be tried by the end of the year. There has also been an appeal by the prosecution against the acquittal of two activists. There are 47 activists in total, the largest legal case related to the National Security Law. Most of them have been in prison since February 28, 2021 (2).
Among the 14 activists convicted is the left-wing activist Leung Kwok-hung, better known as “Long Hair.” His nickname is due to his promise to cut his hair only after the return of democratic liberties in China. The nurses’ union leader Winnie Yu, president of the Hospital Authority Employees Alliance, was also convicted.
Appeals and penalties will be defined from June 25 onwards and can reach life imprisonment under the new authritarian Hong Kong legislation imposed in March this year.
“Illegal” election primaries
The 47 political prisoners are accused of conspiring against the political order for organizing and participating in the primary elections that the pan-democratic opposition held on July 11 and 12, 2020 with the participation of 610,000 voters to form a unitary electoral list for the election to the Hong Kong Legislative Council (Legco) that was to be held in September 2020 but was postponed due to the alleged risks to public health because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Allegedly, this unified opposition list, if elected, would have used parliamentary rules of repeated budget rejection to bring about the downfall of the pro-Beijing government led by Carrie Lam. This is the “conspiracy” to “undermine, destroy or overthrow the government” by which the 47 activists are being prosecuted.
This accusation is false because Hong Kong’s Basic Law does not provide the Legislative Council (LegCo) with any power to overthrow or initiate impeachment proceedings against the government. On the contrary, the Basic Law gives the government the right to dissolve the LegCo.
Sarah Brooks of Amnesty International said the verdict “represents the quasi-total elimination of political opposition and illustrates the rapid disintegration of human rights in Hong Kong.”
Repression of protest
On the day of the trial, five members of the left-wing opposition League of Social Democrats organized a protest in front of the Court to demand the release of all political prisoners. The five protesters were arrested for “causing disorder in a public space.” Among them is the current president of the League, Chan Po-Ying, who is also married to “Long Hair.”
The League was founded in 2006 uniting oppositionists such as Wong Yuk-man and the left-wing April 5 Action Group led by “Long Hair” to give voice to the local working class and their demands for universal suffrage, a universal retirement system, against real estate profiting and privatizations (3).
The League was opposed to the conciliatory and moderate policies of other pan-democratic opposition parties such as the Democratic Party and the Civic Party.
“Long Hair” understood that the struggle for democratic freedoms in Hong Kong is inextricably linked to the struggle for democratic freedoms in China. That is why he opposed the authoritarian one-party regime in China and put the memory of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 at the center of his activities.
Today the League is one of the few democratic opposition parties that have not dissolved, despite living under semi-legality, being persecuted, and under intense surveillance (4).
The long march back to capitalism in China
The National Security Law imposed by the Chinese regime on Hong Kong aims to crush democratic freedoms in HK and prevent any extension of these freedoms to China that would open space for the working class to call into question single-party rule and capitalist exploitation altogether.
The 1949 Chinese revolution, also called the third Chinese revolution (after the revolutions of 1911 and 1925-27), achieved the national reunification of all Chinese territories and the improvement of the living conditions of the peasantry through agrarian reform and the nationalization of the economy.
However, this victorious revolution did not achieve a regime based on workers’ democracy. Instead, a single-party regime was imposed that followed the authoritarian political regime of the guerrilla party represented by the Chinese Communist Party.
Later, this same one-party regime led the return of capitalism to China.
The first step was the rapprochement with U.S. imperialism and the recognition of the People’s Republic of China as the representative of the Chinese people at the U.N. in 1971.
The death of Mao Tse-Tung and the subsequent arrest of the Gang of Four in 1976 ended the so-called “Cultural Revolution.”
In December 1978, Deng Xiao-Ping, already in the position as the Chinese main leader, stood for, at a meeting of the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee, a political reform called Boluan Fanzheng (“Eliminate chaos and return to normal” in Mandarin) to “correct the errors” of the Cultural Revolution.
Simultaneously he implemented a new policy of capitalist reforms called “Reform and Opening-up” to implement what was called “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” or “Socialist Market Economy,” but which, despite the name, took the first steps towards return to capitalism: the de-collectivization of land, the creation of a market for the surplus production of state companies and the “open doors policy” to attract foreign capital.
Land de-collectivization was implemented a priori in the poorest regions through the “Household Responsibility System” in which communal land is divided into publicly owned rural plots under family’s private administration with production contracts with local governments. This system allowed the sale of surplus production at market price. In 1982-1983 this agricultural production system was regulated and implemented throughout China. Gradually, the capitalist market laws ruled all agricultural production.
The first reform of state-owned companies occurred through the establishment of a market for surplus production (above planned economy quotas) in which goods were sold at market prices. This system was called “dual-price” (one price for the goods produced for the planned economy, and another price freely established by the capitalist market). The formation of local companies, state or private, that “competed” with national state monopolies was also encouraged. Subsequently, the production financing system, through state banks, gradually stopped financing companies based on national planned economy goals and started financing based on companies’ economic results, fueling the super-exploitation of the workforce and the capitalist market economy.
The opening-up of the national economy occurred with the creation of Special Economic Zones, areas in which foreign capital got incentives to establish themselves. The most important of these was the Shekou Industrial Zone in January 1979 in the city of Shenzen, close to Guangzhou and Hong Kong. Another important measure was the legalization and regulation of joint-venture companies uniting national and foreign capitals in July 1979. Later, on May 1984, 14 coastal cities were opened to foreign capitals.
In the 1982 constitution, the return to capitalism materialized itself in the exclusion of the reference to the “Continuous Revolution under the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.” The single-party regime, which is not incompatible with the return of capitalism and which preserves the interests of the communist party bureaucracy, was maintained.
In 1986, a debate began on price liberalization guided by the World Bank. The position of gradual price flexibility prevailed. In 1988, there was a shift in favor of radical price liberalization, which generated high inflation, local protests, and a run on banks and supermarkets. In the same year, the price release was reversed. Even so, its effects influenced the student and popular uprising in Tiananmen Square.
The Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, in which Deng Xiao-Ping murdered around 3,000 young students and workers who were protesting for democratic freedoms and better living conditions, consolidated the Chinese path for capitalist restoration with the maintenance of the single-party regime without any democratic freedoms, formal or real ones (5).
On the other hand, capitalist reforms were slowed down, and officials opposed to the Tiananmen massacre were removed and arrested. In 1992, Deng Xiao-Ping made the famous visit to Shenzen and other coastal cities during which he advocated the accelerated resumption of capitalist reforms, including flexible prices.
That same year, the Chinese State began privatizations that peaked in 1997-1998 and continued in the following decade. Some strategic sectors, under the 1994 Corporate Law, such as oil and banking, were preserved. In 2005, the national private sector became responsible for more than 50% of Chinese GDP.
At the beginning of the “back to capitalism” march, industrial production was concentrated on low value-added goods such as textiles and simpler electronic products. Forty years later, industrial production has diversified into high value-added goods such as 5G networks, ships, planes, electric cars, space rockets and AI (6).
The implementation of capitalist reforms was slow and gradual due to internal bureaucratic disputes. All wings defended capitalist reforms but in different forms and rhythms. All wings also defended the one-party regime but with differences over the degree of state repression.
One wing was led by economist Chen Yun. He advocated gradual, controlled and limited capitalist reforms (known as the Birdcage Economy) and advocated repression against student protests. The other wing, led by Deng Xiao-Ping, advocated comprehensive and accelerated capitalist reforms and the opening of the economy to international capital, maintaining state control over some companies and, above all, maintaining the one-party regime at any cost. Finally there was the wing of liberals Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, who defended capitalist reforms like Deng Xiao-Ping, but opposed the suppression of student protests in 1976 and 1979 respectively and were therefore removed from central power, and even, in case of Zhao Ziyang, arrested.
The emergence of imperialist China
Joining the World Trade Organization in 2001 expanded access of foreign capital to the Chinese market and, at the same time, paved the way for Chinese corporations, both private and state-owned, to the world market. Today Chinese companies are present in around 190 countries and regions worldwide (7).
Finally, in 2013 the Chinese regime, already the second largest economy in the world, launched the “Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) dubbed the New Silk Road. Based on six land and sea routes whose objective it is to integrate the economies of different countries with the Chinese economy through port and road infrastructure works that induce national production of each country to serve the Chinese economy.
This imperialist orientation puts China in dispute with the old imperialist powers – the United States, E.U., and Japan, which oppose the emergence of new imperialist nations but face difficulties to stop them due to their overall current decline.
Combining market policies with state intervention, and under the discourse of a multi-polar world, Chinese imperialism under the one-party regime seeks its place in the capitalist world order.
The fight for democratic freedoms
The struggle for democratic freedoms in China can acquire a central role in the future Chinese workers’ and peoples’ revolution.
The inter-imperialist dispute, the reduction in economic growth, the possibility of the real estate bubble bursting, the growing social inequality, and the destruction of the environment are factors that point to the lack of perspectives for the working class and youth who, when entering into movement as an exploited and oppressed class, will invariably take on the single-party regime and the lack of democratic liberties.
From this perspective, it is very important for the global working class to support the struggles for democratic freedoms in China, whether by opposing the National Security Law in Hong Kong and demanding the freedom of political prisoners, whether by supporting workers and popular protests, or by remembering the massacre of Tiananmen Square every year on June 4 (8).
Backed by international solidarity, and having a revolutionary workers’ party at its head, the Chinese working class will find the support to carry out the fourth Chinese revolution towards a socialist China under workers’ democracy, integrating a federation of Asian socialist republics.
Notes:
(1) https://hongkongfp.com/2024/06/01/hong-kong-judges-reasons-for-convicting-14-democrats-of-subversion-conspiracy-under-national-security-law/
(2) https://litci.org/en/hk-opposition-guilty/
(3) Wong Yuk-man was politically connected to the bourgeois nationalist party KMT. After leaving the League in 2011, he linked himself to the right-wing localist groups that stood for Hong Kong independence.
(4) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLqvS9cJ5SI&t=2s
(5) https://litci.org/pt/2019/06/04/o-massacre-em-tiananmen/
(6) https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3gg32nn9p4o
(7) https://www.china-briefing.com/news/chinas-outbound-investment-odi-recent-developments-opportunities-and-challenges/#:~:text=By%20the%20end%20of%202022%2C%20Chinese%20domestic%20investors%20had%20established,and%2010.2%20percent%20in%20Europe
(8) https://litci.org/en/workers-and-popular-protests-challenge-dictatorship-in-china/
