China

The truth about China

A top Chinese government official has blamed Europe’s economic problems on welfare provision and labour laws. Jin Liqun, chair of China’s sovereign wealth fund (the body which manages the Chinese government’s overseas investment of its spare loot) told Al Jazeera: “If you look at the troubles which happened in European countries, this is purely because of the accumulated troubles of the worn-out welfare society. I think the labour laws are outdated. The labour laws induce sloth, indolence, rather than hard work. The incentive system is totally out of whack. “Why should, for instance, within...

Resisting bosses' greed in China and South Korea

China’s people and its media have defied state censorship to condemn the government’s development drive, which is coming with a terrible cost. After a high-speed rail crash on 24 July which killed 39 people, questions are being asked about the real motivations behind projects such as the high-speed railway and the Jiaozhou Bay sea-bridge, which opened in late June 2011 despite fears that it was not safe. In the immediate aftermath of the rail crash, the Chinese government appeared unwilling to respond to questions about the incident and attempted to prevent the national media from probing too...

How China's Stalinists deal with strikes

In a report on the Shanghai truck drivers' dispute, in the Financial Times of 27 April, Jamil Anderlini summarised the Chinese authorities' standard procedure for strikes. As he describes it, it is exactly the same as the standard procedure of the USSR's rulers in the Brezhnev period. "The... authorities first [send] in riot police to confront the strikers and introduce the threat of official violence, but arrest only a handful... Then identif[y] ringleaders [they can] negotiate with and quickly [come] to a negotiated settlement... [Then]... wait until most strikers or protesters have gone...

Reviews: John Palmer; SWP; Foley; Wates and Knevvit; Pauline Kael; Davis and Huttenback; Liebman; Marquand

Martin Thomas reviews "Europe without America", by John Palmer. Clive Bradley reviews "Revolutionary Rehearsals", published by the SWP's Bookmarks. Stan Crooke reviews "Ireland, the case for British disengagement", by Conor Foley. Neil Stonelake reviews "Community Architecture", by Nick Wates and Charles Knevvit. Belinda Weaver reviews "State of the Art", by Pauline Kael. Rhodri Evans reviews "Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire: the Political Economy of British Imperialism, 1860-1912", by Lance Davis, Robert Huttenback, and Susan Gray Davis. Gerry Bates reviews "Leninism Under Lenin", by Marcel...

New website maps strikes in China

Manfred Elfstrom, a PhD student at Cornell University in the United States, has produced an extraordinary resource for the trade union movement. It’s a website called China Strikes and is essentially a map of China with red dots representing strikes. Elfstrom is taking this quite seriously and is producing some interesting results. For example, he’s categorised the strikes not only by region, but also by sector. Some of this will not be surprising — for example, he finds 15 strikes at electronics factories, such as the infamous Foxconn. There are another dozen strikes reported in auto...

A Chinese Marxist in the 1920s

Click here to download pdf A veteran Chinese Trotskyist describes his time in the Chinese Communist Party, between joining in 1925 and being expelled in 1929.

A collection of short articles from Workers' Liberty 12-13, August 1989

Click here to download the pdf including all these short articles from Workers' Liberty 12-13, August 1989. Strikes in Stalinist and ex-Stalinist states; Rushdie; EU; Dock Labour scheme scrapped; more on USSR strikes; strikes in UK; abortion rights in USA; world economy; British economy; Scottish left and Assembly; independent union in China. The heirs of Stalin face the workers: In China, in Yugoslavia, in Poland, in the USSR, the working class is becoming an independent force for the first time in many decades. Rushdie and the labour movement: The Labour movement, Muslim zealots and Salman...

The working class in the second Chinese revolution

Click here to download the pdf Before 1989 the Chinese workers' movement had been crushed for 60 years. But in the 1920's it fought heroic battles, rich in lessons for today. Elizabeth Millward describes how a working class developed in China, how its struggles interlaced with those of the nationalist bourgeoisie, and why it was defeated.

The road to Tiananmen Square: workers and students

Jack Cleary explains why the workers and students are in bloody conflict with China's 'socialist' rulers For three weeks in May and June, the Chinese government lost control of a large part of Beijing.It lost control of its capital city to the people who live there, spearheaded by the students and workers demanding radical democratic reform. They paraded with a home-made replica of the Statue of Liberty, but their anthem was the Internationale, the song of revolutionary socialism all over the world ever since the French workers took another capital city, Paris, out of the hands of the French...

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