Antimatter
"It's anarchy, but it's organized anarchy."
- Dan Rather, reporting from Tiananmen Square in late May/early June 1989
- Dan Rather, reporting from Tiananmen Square in late May/early June 1989
No one can be
deceived that the government of the People's Republic of China does not
take the anniversaries of its massacres seriously. Already, more than
six weeks before the fifteenth anniversary of the People's Liberation
Army's bloody clearing of Tiananmen Square - and the wholesale
slaughter of those resisting in Beijing's working-class suburbs - three
mothers of victims killed at that time had been pre-emptorily arrested,
and then released. Shortly afterward, Dr. Jiang Yan Yong,
internationally renowned for having exposed the government's grotesque
mismanagement and cover up of the SARS crisis, was detained for
publicly recalling the regrets of Yang Shangkun (one of the pillars of
the post- Tiananmen central government in 1989) regarding the "6-4
Incident," along with his own plea for a reassessment of what had
happened. He has reemerged into the light only after two months of
'reeducation' and pressure to recant his position. Liu Xiaobo, China's
preeminent social critic, was also taken into custody and has yet to be
released. The authorities are certainly nervous, but they're not the
only ones who should be.
Around the world, the events in Beijing on June 3-4, 1989, have been commemorated with solemn speeches and ceremonies, each crafted to reflect the glory of Beijing's courageous citizenry onto the current projects of the official world in a light filtered by its present interests. Those governments that owe their present existence to the consequences of the June events in Eastern Europe have the opportunity once again to express their gratitude that the wind blew west that year. Refugee members of the Chinese expatriate elite who were at the Square and who have since used the backs of dead heroes as the stepping stones to their own contemptible business successes may, like Chai Ling, speak dismissively of the former movement, others, less adaptable, like Liu Binyan, of missed career opportunities and portfolios denied them by the "adventurism" of the students and the government's reaction. Fundamentalist Maoists and other Marxist-Leninist types seek to identify themselves with the 1989 Protest Movement, despite the fact that the movement constituted itself as an organic opposition against precisely the kind of society Marxism-Leninism has always created. The official leaders of the West attempt to distract the world from their increasing economic dependence on, and support of, China's elite by putting the slogans of their market dictatorship and its decrepit parliamentary facade into the mouths of Chinese corpses, making them appear to have died for Niketown instead of Autonomous Beijing. Human Rights activists, trade-unionists and spokespersons for the Chinese democracy movement deplore the massacre of non-violent protesters and the continued repression of political, labor and religious oppositionists, without calling for the liquidation of the bureaucratic class in whose interest this ongoing reaction is structurally embedded. When the citizens of Beijing are mentioned, it is largely as victims, not as actors. Those whose voices should be loudest of all are still stifled.
Around the world, the events in Beijing on June 3-4, 1989, have been commemorated with solemn speeches and ceremonies, each crafted to reflect the glory of Beijing's courageous citizenry onto the current projects of the official world in a light filtered by its present interests. Those governments that owe their present existence to the consequences of the June events in Eastern Europe have the opportunity once again to express their gratitude that the wind blew west that year. Refugee members of the Chinese expatriate elite who were at the Square and who have since used the backs of dead heroes as the stepping stones to their own contemptible business successes may, like Chai Ling, speak dismissively of the former movement, others, less adaptable, like Liu Binyan, of missed career opportunities and portfolios denied them by the "adventurism" of the students and the government's reaction. Fundamentalist Maoists and other Marxist-Leninist types seek to identify themselves with the 1989 Protest Movement, despite the fact that the movement constituted itself as an organic opposition against precisely the kind of society Marxism-Leninism has always created. The official leaders of the West attempt to distract the world from their increasing economic dependence on, and support of, China's elite by putting the slogans of their market dictatorship and its decrepit parliamentary facade into the mouths of Chinese corpses, making them appear to have died for Niketown instead of Autonomous Beijing. Human Rights activists, trade-unionists and spokespersons for the Chinese democracy movement deplore the massacre of non-violent protesters and the continued repression of political, labor and religious oppositionists, without calling for the liquidation of the bureaucratic class in whose interest this ongoing reaction is structurally embedded. When the citizens of Beijing are mentioned, it is largely as victims, not as actors. Those whose voices should be loudest of all are still stifled.
g1 Beijingers in aspic
What, it should
instead be asked, were the achievements of the 'Hundred Million Heroes'
who took to the streets and in so doing, took possession of their city,
of those who joined them from all over the country, and of those who
emulated them elsewhere in metropolitan China?
The first of these must be the triumph of having developed an enduring culture of resistance to the totalitarian state-capitalist dictatorship of the Communist Party of China. That the citizens of Beijing were able to coordinate their actions swiftly enough to take advantage of the opportunity provided for a manifestation of public opinion by the death of the liberal former Party Secretary Hu Yaobang is only one example of the formidable organizational capacity with which this culture has been endowed. This oppositional culture had its beginnings in 1968 when groups of workers, ex-soldiers, students and peasants who had been mobilized against reformist Party bureaucrats (among them Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping) by the circle of extremist ideologues around Mao Zedong during the phony "Cultural Revolution," began to turn it instead into an authentic grassroots movement for a self-organized "People's Commune of China" against the state. They also established linkages and routes for information, underground libraries, and escape routes for fugitives. Continuity in the development of this current to the present may be seen in the contemporaneous Beijing group "North Star," which included Chen Zeming, one of the "black hands (i.e. hidden organizers)" later alleged to be behind the Beijing events of 1989. On a citywide scale, the self-organizational capabilities of the Beijing populace were first to become famously evident in the open defiance of the more than 200,000 people who demonstrated against the Maoist regime of austerity, overwork and faith-based terror in Tiananmen Square on April 5th, 1976.
Secondly, the material existence of Autonomous Beijing as both a real occupation of physical and social space and the assertion of a living alternative to the dominant organization of society overseen by the Communist Party, was already the repudiation of the Party's thirty years of rule. The self-organization of the Beijing citizens, the establishment of committees that organized incoming supplies and saw to the housing of thousands of students and others from out of town, removed garbage, wrote, printed and distributed publications, not only exploded the fashionable western myth that improvements in the Chinese standard of living had suddenly depoliticized the population, but also proved, to the permanent discomfiture of our masters everywhere, that the population of one of the largest cities on the planet can organize its affairs without the interference of government, the state, and any of its institutions.
The first of these must be the triumph of having developed an enduring culture of resistance to the totalitarian state-capitalist dictatorship of the Communist Party of China. That the citizens of Beijing were able to coordinate their actions swiftly enough to take advantage of the opportunity provided for a manifestation of public opinion by the death of the liberal former Party Secretary Hu Yaobang is only one example of the formidable organizational capacity with which this culture has been endowed. This oppositional culture had its beginnings in 1968 when groups of workers, ex-soldiers, students and peasants who had been mobilized against reformist Party bureaucrats (among them Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping) by the circle of extremist ideologues around Mao Zedong during the phony "Cultural Revolution," began to turn it instead into an authentic grassroots movement for a self-organized "People's Commune of China" against the state. They also established linkages and routes for information, underground libraries, and escape routes for fugitives. Continuity in the development of this current to the present may be seen in the contemporaneous Beijing group "North Star," which included Chen Zeming, one of the "black hands (i.e. hidden organizers)" later alleged to be behind the Beijing events of 1989. On a citywide scale, the self-organizational capabilities of the Beijing populace were first to become famously evident in the open defiance of the more than 200,000 people who demonstrated against the Maoist regime of austerity, overwork and faith-based terror in Tiananmen Square on April 5th, 1976.
Secondly, the material existence of Autonomous Beijing as both a real occupation of physical and social space and the assertion of a living alternative to the dominant organization of society overseen by the Communist Party, was already the repudiation of the Party's thirty years of rule. The self-organization of the Beijing citizens, the establishment of committees that organized incoming supplies and saw to the housing of thousands of students and others from out of town, removed garbage, wrote, printed and distributed publications, not only exploded the fashionable western myth that improvements in the Chinese standard of living had suddenly depoliticized the population, but also proved, to the permanent discomfiture of our masters everywhere, that the population of one of the largest cities on the planet can organize its affairs without the interference of government, the state, and any of its institutions.
g2 Meal truck delivering food to protesters in the Square
Thirdly, the
profundity of the transformation that affected the people of Beijing
moved the world. The public declaration by the thieves of Beijing that
they would not rob citizens during the crisis cannot help but remind
one of the similar declaration made by the thieves of the Paris during
the Commune of 1871. The free delivery of food and other goods by the
small entrepreneurs, the getihu, to the occupants of the
square, the desertion, refusal to fire on demonstrators, and the
spontaneous distribution of weapons to the crowds by elements of the
PLA, as well as incidents in which public security officials warned
demonstrators of the arrival of the police and army, were occasions on
which people asserted their freedom precisely to the extent that they
broke the laws of the economy and hierarchical power and refused the
social roles to which they had been assigned. The stubborn solidarity
that was extended to the movement's activists by their fellow workers
when they refused to identify "troublemakers," and by neighborhoods to
snipers firing on the military occupiers, also shows that these
sentiments did not wash off in warm water.
g3 Beijing citizens swarm around military vehicles, June 1989
Fourthly, the events
of May-June 1989 in Beijing appear as the reassertion of a critical
Chinese historical consciousness over the official lies presented by
totalitarian bureaucratic capitalism.
The long overdue passing of historical judgment on the more than three decades of ferocious pre-capitalist accumulation, mass-murder and starvation, the attempted erasure of Chinese history, culture and intellect, and its replacement by the simplistic idiocy of Maoism, took place on May 23rd, with the paint-filled egg attack on the massive picture of Mao Zedong, greatest oppressor in human history, by three young men from his home province of Hunan, Yu Zhijian, Yu Dongyue and Lu Decheng. The degree to which this act of signal bravery was understood and supported also marked the limit of the movement's consciousness of the meaning of its own existence in acts.
The long overdue passing of historical judgment on the more than three decades of ferocious pre-capitalist accumulation, mass-murder and starvation, the attempted erasure of Chinese history, culture and intellect, and its replacement by the simplistic idiocy of Maoism, took place on May 23rd, with the paint-filled egg attack on the massive picture of Mao Zedong, greatest oppressor in human history, by three young men from his home province of Hunan, Yu Zhijian, Yu Dongyue and Lu Decheng. The degree to which this act of signal bravery was understood and supported also marked the limit of the movement's consciousness of the meaning of its own existence in acts.
g4 Gone forever is the feudal kingdom of Qin Shi Huangdi
These accomplishments
do not however, obscure the importance of noting the mistakes made by
this unprecedented social movement as it attempted to find its way
through the unknown.
Many of the shortcomings of the movement lay in its origins in a student milieu still burdened with the habits of the old Chinese scholar-gentry and its neo-Confucian role as moral repository and advisor to the imperial court. To preserve the purity of ''their'' movement, students sought initially, as they had during the1986-1987 movement, to limit contacts with and participation by the workers and other outsiders. In fact their movement only really began to resonate throughout Chinese society and raise the actual question of power when the massed citizenry of Beijing, pointedly among them the workers of Capital Steel, joined them first in support of their hunger strike and then in defiance of martial law. Even so, when the organizers of the Workers' Autonomous Federation wanted to set up a tent in Tiananmen Square, they were confined to the outer perimeter. The authorities who suppressed the occupation of the square were not so blinkered as to their importance; the WAF tent was one of the first at which they directed their assault. The students' misdirected desire to appear as a loyal opposition to the regime (and their equally absurd thinking that this attitude would protect them) appears repeatedly as the greatest limitation of a movement which had already broken the bonds of loyalty in the eyes of China's masters, and was going to be made to pay for it. The student's nearly complete misunderstanding of the nature of legitimacy under bureaucratic power and the illusion that the Party could be negotiated with, left them defenseless both in terms of the theoretical means of describing their undertaking and in regards to the narrow practice of civil disobedience it led them to adopt. There were fewer who shared this view in the working-class suburbs, where large numbers were arrested for possession of weapons and ammunition: proof that there, the requisite conditions for the negation of bureaucratic capitalism were better understood.
Many of the shortcomings of the movement lay in its origins in a student milieu still burdened with the habits of the old Chinese scholar-gentry and its neo-Confucian role as moral repository and advisor to the imperial court. To preserve the purity of ''their'' movement, students sought initially, as they had during the1986-1987 movement, to limit contacts with and participation by the workers and other outsiders. In fact their movement only really began to resonate throughout Chinese society and raise the actual question of power when the massed citizenry of Beijing, pointedly among them the workers of Capital Steel, joined them first in support of their hunger strike and then in defiance of martial law. Even so, when the organizers of the Workers' Autonomous Federation wanted to set up a tent in Tiananmen Square, they were confined to the outer perimeter. The authorities who suppressed the occupation of the square were not so blinkered as to their importance; the WAF tent was one of the first at which they directed their assault. The students' misdirected desire to appear as a loyal opposition to the regime (and their equally absurd thinking that this attitude would protect them) appears repeatedly as the greatest limitation of a movement which had already broken the bonds of loyalty in the eyes of China's masters, and was going to be made to pay for it. The student's nearly complete misunderstanding of the nature of legitimacy under bureaucratic power and the illusion that the Party could be negotiated with, left them defenseless both in terms of the theoretical means of describing their undertaking and in regards to the narrow practice of civil disobedience it led them to adopt. There were fewer who shared this view in the working-class suburbs, where large numbers were arrested for possession of weapons and ammunition: proof that there, the requisite conditions for the negation of bureaucratic capitalism were better understood.
In the three weeks
during which the movement grew and developed, it was not always
possible for institutions of self-rule to realize directly democratic
forms, the more so as China was not a society in which the ideas of
directly democratic, anti-statist, anti-capitalist social organization
could be freely or legally disseminated. Partly as a consequence, there
was a lack of clarity regarding the nature of organizational forms and
a fear by what was already becoming the elite of the student movement,
of the consequences to their power arising from the adoption of
democratic procedures. When Liu Xiaobo, "the liumang
('hooligan') intellectual", proposed elections to the student leaders,
the response of one of them, Wuer Kaixi, was ''what if we don't win?"
On the other hand, however prominent the movement's informal leadership
became, it always remained subject to the sovereign base. Again, in
Wuer Kaixi's words: "Anyone in charge had to support the Tiananmen
occupation. Were you to ask the students to leave, they would get rid
of you." The disproportional importance of personalities, a
corresponding underdevelopment of ideas of self-organization and the
lack of a general critique of bureaucratic capitalism (as of world
capitalism in general) were signs of the movement's relative
immaturity. How really insignificant these "leading personalities"
turned out to be, once detached from the movement of which they had
been a part, became only too clear later in exile. Today, the
continuing preoccupation with personalities by the Chinese opposition
in exile is the sign of a milieu still without a substantive
oppositional politics. The feeble philosophical and psychological
resistance to religion afforded by many of these same refugees serves
as well as another unedifying display of their soft critical cores. The
greatness of the 1989 Protest Movement was not in its leaders, but in
its rank-and-file, ordinary citizens, workers and students.
"...After June 4, under the guidance of the district and municipal governments, neighborhood committees organized 649 work teams with 156,000 members to participate in the task of restoring order to traffic and society. Neighborhood committee cadres and activistsjoined forces with Martial Law Enforcement Troops and the People's Police to clear away roadblocks, remove posters and slogans, and clean up the city. Altogether they cleared away roadblocks in more than 570 places, washed or painted over more than 30,000 slogans, and picked up more than 80 tons of bricks and stones, making a great contribution toward the early restoration of normal traffic and a stable situation in the capital."
Peking Evening News, August 3,1989
The period
immediately following June 4th consisted of two moments: first the
repression itself, and then a frenzied renewal of economic activity
with the object of purchasing, through increases in the Chinese
standard of living, the loyalty of the urban population. Progress in
the application of this strategy which has continued to the present,
has been uneven. The large number of unproductive state-owned
enterprises has presented a serious obstacle to structural "reform",
particularly in the ''rust belt" of the Northeast. Sell-offs of
factories to entrepreneurs or cronies of local officials have been
accompanied by large-scale lay-offs of employees without pension,
compensation, medical insurance or much prospect of employment.
Protests have been met with repression even as they have become more
widespread and well organized. Privatization, corruption, and
dispossession and poverty are, just as in the West, inextricably
linked. The rapid growth of demand for office space and luxury -- or
less than luxury -- homes has resulted as well in the same destruction
of older communities we have seen in the West, only with fewer
constraints on developers and fewer protections for neighborhoods.
In the countryside, the initial takeoff of the rural economy fueled by the breakup of the state-imposed "People's Communes" and permission given peasants to rent and farm their own plots, has begun to slow as an ever-growing army of parasitic officials have discovered ways to tap into the peasants' income stream. By the mid-nineties, peasant protests were becoming increasingly common, sometimes closing roads or attacking local Party headquarters. The geologically dubious Three Gorges Darn, the centerpiece monument of Chinese hydroelectric civilization to the outgoing generation of post-Maoist bureaucrats (of whom Li Peng is the most obvious example) and possibly the world's largest outdoor cesspool when fully backed-up, has also exacerbated the situation of the more than one million peasants in its way. It continues to be a sensitive issue. There is presently a moratorium on reporting the alluvial buildup of sediment behind the dam, the more that 100 cracks that have appeared in it, the pollution and environmental damage than has resulted from its construction, and the situation of those displaced. Many other rural Chinese are leaving the farm and heading for the cities to join the immense "floating population," presently of 114 million, there looking for work in an economy increasingly shifting to skilled labor and already oversupplied with unskilled workers. The health care system in the countryside has collapsed as hospitals have become profit-making enterprises and those who cannot pay are abandoned. The plight of those remaining in the countryside is deteriorating. Women in rural China now have the highest rate of suicide in the world.
The Chinese government's recent suppression of the already widely sold expose of peasant life by Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao, titled "An Investigation of China's Peasantry," is but one recent demonstration of its anxiety about the state of affairs in the countryside. Although praising current efforts to ease farmer's tax burdens, the main thrust of the piece was to show how corrupt local officials undermine the well-intentioned policies of the central government. Three years earlier, the government itself had issued a 308-page report which described farmers increasingly squeezed by local officials who levy excess fees, by a slowing rural economy and by declining crop yields from increasingly degraded land. It noted as well an increasingly confrontational tide of protest in which protesters "frequently seal-off bridges and blockade roads, storm party and government offices, coercing party committees and government, and there are even criminal acts such as attacking, trashing, looting and arson." Concern over the continuing volatility of the countryside and the potential of protests to spread during this June may be also measured in the swiftness with which the recent protests by Shenzhen farmers against the demolition of their homes and eviction from their land were quelled.
The nature of the Communist Party has itself been affected by the changes it has wrought in society and the economy as it has moved away from the former centralized, "planned" Marxist-Leninist models of economic management and given increasing institutional prominence to the business class whose rising power the Party wishes for its own. The price of this open accommodation of private capitalists has been the endangerment of the Party's legitimacy as the 'party of the proletariat' at a time when the Party's room to maneuver in containing working-class and peasant protests is shrinking. The occasional populist gestures of the present generation of Chinese leaders reveal what they have learned from the social-imaginary manipulations of their American competitors; whether this proves sufficient to compensate for the Party's declining identification with 'labor' is not certain.
In the countryside, the initial takeoff of the rural economy fueled by the breakup of the state-imposed "People's Communes" and permission given peasants to rent and farm their own plots, has begun to slow as an ever-growing army of parasitic officials have discovered ways to tap into the peasants' income stream. By the mid-nineties, peasant protests were becoming increasingly common, sometimes closing roads or attacking local Party headquarters. The geologically dubious Three Gorges Darn, the centerpiece monument of Chinese hydroelectric civilization to the outgoing generation of post-Maoist bureaucrats (of whom Li Peng is the most obvious example) and possibly the world's largest outdoor cesspool when fully backed-up, has also exacerbated the situation of the more than one million peasants in its way. It continues to be a sensitive issue. There is presently a moratorium on reporting the alluvial buildup of sediment behind the dam, the more that 100 cracks that have appeared in it, the pollution and environmental damage than has resulted from its construction, and the situation of those displaced. Many other rural Chinese are leaving the farm and heading for the cities to join the immense "floating population," presently of 114 million, there looking for work in an economy increasingly shifting to skilled labor and already oversupplied with unskilled workers. The health care system in the countryside has collapsed as hospitals have become profit-making enterprises and those who cannot pay are abandoned. The plight of those remaining in the countryside is deteriorating. Women in rural China now have the highest rate of suicide in the world.
The Chinese government's recent suppression of the already widely sold expose of peasant life by Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao, titled "An Investigation of China's Peasantry," is but one recent demonstration of its anxiety about the state of affairs in the countryside. Although praising current efforts to ease farmer's tax burdens, the main thrust of the piece was to show how corrupt local officials undermine the well-intentioned policies of the central government. Three years earlier, the government itself had issued a 308-page report which described farmers increasingly squeezed by local officials who levy excess fees, by a slowing rural economy and by declining crop yields from increasingly degraded land. It noted as well an increasingly confrontational tide of protest in which protesters "frequently seal-off bridges and blockade roads, storm party and government offices, coercing party committees and government, and there are even criminal acts such as attacking, trashing, looting and arson." Concern over the continuing volatility of the countryside and the potential of protests to spread during this June may be also measured in the swiftness with which the recent protests by Shenzhen farmers against the demolition of their homes and eviction from their land were quelled.
The nature of the Communist Party has itself been affected by the changes it has wrought in society and the economy as it has moved away from the former centralized, "planned" Marxist-Leninist models of economic management and given increasing institutional prominence to the business class whose rising power the Party wishes for its own. The price of this open accommodation of private capitalists has been the endangerment of the Party's legitimacy as the 'party of the proletariat' at a time when the Party's room to maneuver in containing working-class and peasant protests is shrinking. The occasional populist gestures of the present generation of Chinese leaders reveal what they have learned from the social-imaginary manipulations of their American competitors; whether this proves sufficient to compensate for the Party's declining identification with 'labor' is not certain.
g6 Wang Guangyi, Great Castigation Series: Coca-Cola
Present conditions in
China are a consequence of the passage from the murderous, accelerated
accumulation of capital during the late fifties and early sixties,
through the intra-bureaucratic warfare of the sixties and seventies, to
the state-supervised laissez-faire of the present. This
trajectory has seen -- especially after restrictions on private
economic activity outside state control were breached by massive
popular pressure and the remarkable productive capacity of the Chinese
people enlisted under the slogan "to get rich is glorious" -- one of
the world's most rapid rises in living standards; an event which
occurred not because of what the party had done, but because of what it
no longer stood in the way of. To a considerable extent the
export-driven economic growth of the last decade and a half has
accomplished the political objectives the Party had set for it: the
creation of modem corporate engines of growth which have powerfully
extended Chinese markets overseas (made possible in great part by the
continued suppression of workers' struggles for increased wages and
safety measures -- of the latter, an article by Columbia law professor
John Fabian Witt cited in the May 8, 2004 Asian Labour News
reported the official figure that 14,675 Chinese workers had died on
the job last year, but went on to note that "some observers suggest the
number may be closer to 120,000."), the growth of a class of more than
one million million-yuan entrepreneurs, the development of a
middle-class consumer sector replete with all the cars and culture,
fashion and fleeting fame found in the West, the ability through its
export-generated surplus to obtain goods and technology hitherto
unavailable for the modernization and expansion of both the economic
and military spheres, and the quiescence of much of the intelligensia
which, having thrown itself "into the sea" of commerce, is now
acquiring a stake in the current arrangements of power. This will tend
to further fragment the intelligensia at the same time that the
education of a new generation in business values, as was pointed out
this spring by Fang Lizhi, will undermine its solidarity with the urban
working class and peasantry and its commitment to social change.
The strategy of
privatizing the old state enterprises will do more than just empower a
new stratum of entrepreneurs dependent on the Party for its position
and continued well-being. Hit on the one hand by the movement of
privatization and on the other by the surge in the floating population
as more and more peasants are driven off the land, the old industrial
working class will be increasingly marginalized precisely as its
material position worsens and its militancy becomes more marked. As
reported by the Hong Kong Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy, the number of large-scale protests in China had nearly
tripled to 170,000 in the year 2000 from 1998. Many of these
demonstrations were in cities where unemployed workers from state owned
enterprises and migrant workers made for a potentially explosive
combination. It follows that organizing links between the floating
population and the urban working class will be crucial for success in
future struggles.
g7 Members of the floating population waiting at a railway station
During the course of
this process, structural problems, such as lack of transportation
infrastructure or sufficient available energy resources, have created
temporary bottlenecks that are for the most part being rapidly being
overcome. Barriers to Chinese economic expansion overseas have been
reduced, notably by China's entry into international trade bodies such
as the WID. More serious and intractable difficulties reside in the
continuing disparities of wealth between cities and the countryside,
between coastal and riparian areas of economic growth and inland areas
of stagnation, and in the growing environmental crisis created by
decades of unchecked, badly planned industrial development. One
estimate predicts a 25 percent loss in arable land, a 40 percent
increase in water needs, a 230 to 290 percent increase in wastewater, a
40 percent increase in particulate emissions, and a 150 percent
increase in sulfur dioxide emissions by 2020. The declining quality of
water and air, along with the exhaustion of aquifers and soil, will
increase pressures on the Chinese state to both save and protect what
is left, and to obtain these resources elsewhere.
"In 1996, the residents of Tangshan City took to the streets to protest the pollution emanating from Tongda Rubber, a tire-recycling plant. The air pollution from the factory was causing headaches, dizziness, nausea, rashes, and insomnia. In the face of their complaints, local officials threatened protesters with loss of their jobs and pensions. In a showdown, 700 residents blockaded the factory, while factory workers rallied against the plant closure. The local Tangshan government eventually ordered the plant shut down."
- from The River Runs Black by E. Economy (2004), page85
With new conditions
of development, new forms of resistance to exploitation and the Party's
control of society have also arisen. Individual freedoms have widened
where, as temporary expedients, they serve an expanding consumer
economy whose. growth is inextricably linked to the survival of the
Communist Party of China. The creation of a middle class to world
standards has caused this class to demand what it imagines to be a
world-class standard (of middle-class living), too. As the non-resident
'floating population' becomes more and more skilled, it has begun to
demand guarantees previously withheld from it as well. The death of
graphic artist Jun Zhigang at a detention center for non-residents led
to a popular outcry that may result in lasting reform to the system of
detentions. The arrest of those few souls brave enough, like Liu Di,
the 'Stainless Steel Mouse', to publish statements of solidarity with
critics of the regime on the Internet has led to campaigns to see them
and enlarge the zone of free expression
in the electronic media. Despite the Great Firewall created by the
Party's Public Security Bureau and manned by 30,000 operatives, the
censorship of information coming into China is proving a difficult
task. In an effort to contain the incoming tide, the government has now
begun to move against text messaging. These
forms of sometimes tolerated resistance, so long as they remain
isolated, offer by themselves no serious danger to the enormous
apparatus of violent repression which remains the chief protection of
Chinese bureaucratic capitalism. The figure given this March (and later
retracted) by Chinese lawmaker Chen Zhonglin indicate that nearly
10,000 people are officially murdered by the state every year, a
considerable surprise to Amnesty International which had estimated the
number at no more than 2,000. Despite the seasonal anti-Taiwanese
independence rhetoric, much, if not most, of the Chinese effort to
modernize its armed forces has consisted of establishing rapid-reaction
units that can be airlifted within China to suppress demonstrations,
strikes and occupations.
g8 Gunboat diplomacy in one's own bathtub: one of eight PLA warships visiting Hong Kong, April 2004
In sum, none of the developments of the last decade and a half indicate any qualitative
change in the nature of bureaucratic rule. Nor has there been any real
resolution of the problems that gave rise to the Protest Movement of
1989. The Communist Party's solution - rapid
marketization/privatization, generation of a middle class consumer
economy, plus a strong infusion of nationalism, has delayed the moment
of crisis while increasing the scale of displacement and alienation in
many quarters, and the scale of expectations in others. Corruption
continues on a colossal scale. PRC Auditor General Li Jinhua recently
declared that 41 out of 55 government departments had instances of
"malpractice." Cited as an example was the fate of poverty relief funds
in Chongqing, of which only 0.3% found their way into the hands of
those intended to receive them. Strikes and protests in general have
increased and there has been the (re)emergence, both in many parts of
China, and as far overseas as
Algeria, of a robust Chinese workers' culture of protest. Either the
coming death of Zhao Ziyang or the developing crisis of sovereignty in
Hong Kong may provide the catalyst for a restatement of the unresolved
grievances festering throughout China, forming a clear opening for yet
another "return of the repressed" in which everything may once again be
questioned. The specter of Autonomous Beijing continues to haunt the
rulers of Zhongnanhai.
But any new
manifestation of autonomous organization must realize that its simple
existence already constitutes an act of war and will mean a resumption
of hostilities. To succeed, it must not only have resolved fundamental
questions of organizational form and coordination between sectors, and
ensure that power always resides in the general assemblies that
directly and democratically determine its policies and measures. It
must also thoroughly discard any illusions about the democratic nature
of the marketplace, the protection of liberties afforded by the rule of
law unsecured and unlegitimated by the sovereign base, or about the
desirability of making allies of reformist bureaucrats. The federation
of free cities and countryside where this new power has established
itself must be understood as the supersession of all states
past, present, and future. This time too, the movement cannot have any
illusions about the fate awaiting it if it is unable to sustain its
momentum; there will be no alternative to armed conflict except total
defeat. Desertions and refusals to follow orders have been shown to be
by themselves sadly insufficient. If, in the words of Lu Xun, written
in blood on the side of a burnt-out Beijing bus, "Blood debts must be
repaid in blood", then it is best that new ones not be lightly
incurred, and that the initiative, once seized, never be yielded.
g9 Most tanks didn't stop
It is the hidden dragon of this other kind of sovereignty
that makes this world quake and dissemble about what happened in
Beijing during those three weeks in May/June 1989 when students and
intellectuals were first emboldened to take to the streets in defiance
of the authorities and drove their singing, chanting, marching
spearhead into the vampire heart of the legitimacy of China's
late-Maoist regime. And it is something that could happen anywhere,
anytime that people decide to organize themselves directly for their
own interests and take control of their lives. No government looks
forward to events like these for the simple reason that acts of this
sort are the living repudiation of the false principles of
representation and authority that .lie at the foundation of every
government and every state that makes up this rotting civilization.
Were the populations of Washington D.C. or London to take over their
urban social space, administer it directly and democratically
themselves and begin to transform it in their interests, they would
find themselves no better protected by "democracy" against the violence
of "their" governments than the citizens of Beijing were protected by
"communism" against theirs. This is a lesson already well-known in
Paris, Barcelona, Budapest and Kwangju.
g10 "After decades of bitterness, things are what they were before Liberation" - common saying among workers in foreign ventures
In the process of
expanding social reproduction and submitting to the dictates of the
marketplace directly instead of through the mediation of state
planning, China has become the factory of the world. Conditions in this
factory are appalling, as much from the activities of foreign
capitalists as from indigenous ones. These foreign investors, in
addition to enriching themselves through their Chinese operations, are
able to derive a competitive pricing advantage through the
state-assisted depression of Chinese workers' wages at the same time
they drive down the cost of labor
generally and globally, including of course, (both as a result of
reductions of wages, benefits, etc., but also through attacks on
government-sponsored social programs and services -- neoliberalism
abroad and neoconservativism at home, as it were) the cost of labor in
the developed countries where they
are headquartered. Even elements of Chinese-style superexploitative
social control have appeared, as when Walmart, one of the great
beneficiaries of the disempowerment of (subcontracted) Chinese workers,
was reported to have instituted a policy of locking their US night shift
workers into their plants. Later it has been reported that a number of
other US companies now do likewise. Developments in the march of
exploitation abroad are rarely without reciprocal effects at home, as
are developments against it.
g11 A Study in Perspective: 1995, 1996, 1997 - by Ai Weiwei (1997)
Ordinary people in
China and in the United States have the same interests and the same
enemies. Just as plutocrats east and west can collaborate in the
dispossession, exploitation and impoverishment of each others' workers,
so can these workers and all those who are fighting against the
dictatorship of the marketplace, the security state, nationalism,
religion and ideology in general, collaborate against the global elite.
In the publicizing of exemplary actions, such as the demonstrations and
rail blockages by textile workers at the Tieshu textile factory in
Suizhou, Hubei Province, or the plight of those who stand in desperate
need of support, like the imprisoned organizers of the labor actions at
the Liaoyang Ferro-Alloy plant in Liaoning province during March of
last year, there is an opportunity for an expression of the admiration
and solidarity needed to build an international movement against
capital and domination. There is also possible the realization that
when American workers fight their enemies, they do not fight alone.
The need for a
critique of the failure of the unions during such events as the recent
west coast Safeway strike, and for an analysis of such actions as the
successful wildcat highway blockages by independent truckers in Los
Angels, obliges local opponents of class-society in any case to address
the limitations of present labor struggles and possible means for
overcoming them. Our fights do not exist in a vacuum. The methods of
contestation being developed in the factories of China should be
considered in this light as well. Good examples are contagious and
reinforce each other. Just as the greatest assistance the Chinese
workers' movement could give us in our war against capital is in the
example of their acts, so the greatest aid we might give in return
would be the generalization of our struggles against all aspects of
this society of domination, across union jurisdictions and sectoral
lines between businesses and institutions, and ultimately across
national borders, to the point where, society-wide and planet-wide,
people begin to discover the power to take control of their lives
altogether, beginning the greatest adventure of them all.
Chinese 'anarchists' sent homeAlgiers -- Algeria has sent home at least nine Chinese building workers for committing "acts of anarchy" in a pay dispute, press reports and Chinese diplomats in the north African country said on Monday.
The construction labourers several times put up roadblocks near Tiaret, a town 340km southwest of the coastal capital, at the end of January to demonstrate over three months of wage arrears.
During the protest, which also concerned money not sent to their families in China, the workers trashed a police car and an ambulance, le Quotidien d'Oran reported.
Thousands of Chinese expatriates are employed in Algeria's construction industry, working on sites for new housing.
In Algiers, security forces stopped them marching on their embassy and 10 protesters, considered to be the ringleaders by police, were arrested, the Oran Daily and Le Jeune Independant reported.
A Chinese embassy official confirmed that the incidents had taken place and said that nine people, accused of "acts on anarchy" and breaking the law, were flown home at the end of March.
News24.com, edited by Anthea Jonathan, April 26th 2004
Fifteen years of
repression have succeeded neither in completely halting the
subterranean progress of the movement of opposition, nor in limiting
its extent. Indeed, as events this August in Chongqing attest, the
class struggle in China may be entering a new phase, wherein the very
natures of the ownership of the
means of production and of the relations of production themselves can
be called directly into question. There, at the Chongqing Shanhua
Special Vehicle Factory (former PLA Factory 3403), located in Huaxi
town in the Ba'an district of Chongqing municipality, workers, already
owed substantial unpaid wages and
denied promised medical insurance, responded to the privatization and
restructuration of their factory with a remarkable counteroffensive of
their own:
"The workers launched their protest action to signal their determined opposition to the local government's recent selling off the factory, which was worth 200 million Yuan, to a private company for a price of only 22 million Yuan. They are angry that the sale was not put out to public tender, and they have made a counterproposal to the government whereby the workers themselves would purchase the factory at a higher price than the one already agreed to and would then operate the factory on a collective and democratic management basis."
China Labour Bulletin, Issue No. 19 (22 September 2004)
The workers went on
strike and occupied their plant on August 18th. After they had rebuffed
an attempt by the district government and the Public Security Bureau to
arrest their leaders under the pretext of conducting an investigation,
and a subterfuge begun by the Chongqing Municipal Committee to
negotiate the removal of confidential documents and weapons (but which
might well have jeopardized evidence the workers held of financial
impropriety by the factory manager), the authorities resorted,
predictably, to force. In the early morning hours of August 30th, more
than 1,000 police and paramilitary People's Armed Police forced their
way onto the factory and dormitory grounds. During the course of their
occupation there were instances of brutality and the disappearance of a
young worker. The same day personnel from the new owner, Endurance
Industrial Stock Co. Ltd., entered to take over the factory and general
area.
Here then is an
example of the level to which the struggle between workers and the
alliance of bureaucrats and private capitalists that presently manages
China has now risen. If the end of bureaucratic capitalism in China has
been postponed, its future remains far from secure.
Burt Green (September 26th, 2004)
g12 Escaping Square, Escaping Circle, No.2 (1997), by Fang Tu
g1 Geremie Barme and Linda Jaivin; New Ghosts, Old Dreams; (1992); page 59.
g2 "Tiananmen Square, April-June 1989".
g3 ibid.
g4 Barme; ibid.; cover, slightly cleared-up electronically
g5 "Tiananmen Square, April-June 1989".
g6 New Chinese Art; catalogue of the 1999 show at SFMOMA; plate 35.
g7 Anita Chan; China's Workers Under Assault; (2001); 2nd interior plate after page 136.
g8 recent newspaper website
g9 "Tiananmen Square, April-June 1989".
g10 Chan; ibid.; 3rd interior plate after page136.
g11 Geremie Barme; In the Red; (1999); page 200.
g12 New Chinese Art; ibid.; plate 11.
Revision History
| Release |
Date |
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| v1.0 |
Sep 26, 2004 |
Antimatter |
Original text published by Burt Green.
|
| v2.0 |
Sep 23, 2006 |
Lust for Life |
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