A wave of strikes and demonstrations has rocked China since the beginning of the year. In July, in the province of Sichuan, the struggle reached a new peak. According to reports monitored in Hong Kong, over 100,000 workers were involved in the protests, which began in late June in response to the closure of three state-owned textile plants in the city of Mianyang.
The workers, who occupied buildings and erected barricades, were finally dispersed by the brutal intervention of the paramilitary “People’s Armed Police”. Over 100 strikers were seriously injured and key organisers were arrested.
The immediate cause of this explosion was the failure of city officials to turn up to a meeting to explain what measures were to be taken to support workers made redundant by factory closures. But it is the closures themselves that underline what is happening in China.
Strikes and workers’ demonstrations are no longer a rarity in China, but until this year the majority were in privately owned or “Foreign Invested” enterprises. In most cases, conflicts arose over the sweatshop conditions.
This year, however, there has been a major change. In April, the Prime Minister, Li Peng, reported to the Central Committee of the Communist Party that there had been rallies, demonstrations and disturbances as a result of sackings and threatened redundancies in 230 cities in the previous three months. He said that an estimated 2.4 million people were involved, and that there had been hundreds of serious injuries and 42 deaths.
This vast tide of strikes and protests is obviously more than a spontaneous protest at harsh conditions. Redundancies and sackings on this scale show a fundamental change of strategy by the government because, as in Mianyang, the factories being closed are state owned.
As early as 1984 the most radical supporters of market reforms in China were arguing that the state owned industries needed to lose some 20-30% of their employees to become financially viable. However, as long as the centrally-planned state economy accounted for virtually all of the industrial sector it was impossible for these champions of capitalist restoration to get their way.
The last decade has dramatically changed the balance of forces. The market reforms, which began in the countryside but were then extended into light industry, have created an increasingly important class of capitalist entrepreneurs. At the same time, managers within state industry have been encouraged to mimic their capitalist counterparts by a combination of greater enterprise autonomy and lucrative personal bonuses.
Until 1989, the greed and ambitions of these would-be capitalists were kept in check by their fear of the Communist Party’s bureaucratic leadership, whose power rested on state ownership of the core of the economy, and their fear of the huge industrial working class whose efforts kept that heart beating.
In Tiananmen Square, in June 1989, the bureaucrats rightly recognised that their grip on China was being challenged, even by the innocuous petitions of the students, because the workers of the capital’s industrial plants were beginning to make common cause with the opponents of bureaucratic dictatorship. In the aftermath of the Tiananmen massacre, workers throughout China rose in spontaneous protest and were suppressed as bloodily as the students of Beijing. In the short term, this strengthened the most conservative wing of the bureaucracy but ultimately their new power was to prove ephemeral.
Having struck out against the working class, the inevitable result of the two years of oppression which followed Tiananmen was to strengthen the social forces of capitalist restoration both within the regime itself and within China as a whole.This in turn further eroded the social base of the bureaucracy which had its origins and expansion in the state sector.
Since then, the principal concern of the Beijing leadership has been to find a way of reconciling its own privileged social position with the dismantling of the state owned economy upon which that position was previously based. Their solution is to transform the core enterprises of the state sector into autonomous, but state owned, capitalist trusts, modelled on the giant industrial conglomerates such as Mitsubishi in Japan.
These new corporations will own all the assets of their industries and the bureaucrats who manage them will have a legal obligation to, “maximise their assets” in the state’s interest. Needless to say they will also be entitled to a serious slice of those assets in recognition of their service to the state.
The other side of this coin is that smaller enterprises and industries that cannot compete internationally are to be taken over, sold off as private enterprises or co-operatives or simply closed down as unviable.
That is the logic that led to the closure of the textile mills of Mianyang.
But the mills of Mianyang didn’t simply stop working, they were closed in the face of mass working class opposition. Like millions of others, the workers of Mianyang refused to accept the logic of the market and fought to defend their livelihoods and their families.
In the coming period it will be struggles like theirs which will forge a new working class movement able to unite both the new workers of the private sector and those of the state sector. It is within that movement that a new revolutionary leadership must be created, committed to the overthrow of capitalist and bureaucrat alike.