The 1949 Chinese Revolution was a monumental event in world history. It ended a century of imperialist subjugation and unified the most populous country in the world, which had been divided for decades. The revolution dealt a major blow to imperialism, overturned the domination of the landlord class and money lenders over the countryside and eliminated much that was socially and culturally backward and oppressive.
The Chinese Communist Party regime headed by Mao Tse-Tung implemented bourgeois nationalist measures, including the expropriation of the landlord class, but it was intensely hostile to the working class. It brutally suppressed the Chinese Trotskyists, who had remained active within the urban proletarian centers in the aftermath of the defeat of the 1927 revolution. After considerable equivocation, the regime took control of much of Chinese industry. The CCP established a bureaucratic police state along the Stalinist model, combining nationalization of industry and socialist rhetoric with an internal regime that ruthlessly suppressed opposition, particularly from the left.
Over the past 30 years, the Chinese Communist Party has presided over the transformation of Chuna into a massive cheap labour platform for world capitalism. Astonishing levels of economic growth over the past three decades have been accompanied by equally staggering levels of social inequality. To understand how and why this happened, it is necessary to examine the historic roots of contemporary China in the 1949 Revolution.
By Peter Symonds, October 2019
An independent revolutionary perspective for the working class in China and internationally must be rooted in a historic and scientific understanding of the Chinese Revolution.
The massacre in Tiananmen Square has exposed once and for all the hoax that Maoism represented some new road forward in the struggle for socialism and against imperialism.
Conspicuous by its absence in the principles of the Taiwan Alliance for a Free Palestine is any reference to US imperialism or an explanation of why Taiwan has suddenly “deviated” from its founding principles by lending support to Israel.
Xi has been thrust to the fore by a fragile CCP regime facing crises at home and abroad—a Bonapartist figure balancing between rival factions of the ruling elite amid sharpening social tensions.
“The real root ideas of socialism were not implemented in China from the bottom-up. I learnt that Trotskyism is internationalism, but Mao did not agree with that perspective.”
The following lecture was delivered by Peter Symonds at eight campuses in Australia and at meeting in Wellington, New Zealand.
This lecture was delivered at eight campuses in Australia and New Zealand to meetings organised by the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) between September 26 and October 17.
On the 70th anniversary of the Chinese Revolution, the World Socialist Web Site is republishing the resolution adopted in 1955 by the Socialist Workers Party, then the Trotskyist party in the United States, on the issues raised by the revolution and its aftermath.
The SWP resolution summed up the lengthy discussion within the Trotskyist movement of the significance of 1949 Chinese Revolution and its deformation under the Stalinist leadership of the Chinese Communist Party.
The final lectures will be held at Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand) later today, and at Western Sydney University on October 9, the University of New South Wales on October 16, and Macquarie University on October 17.
The collapse of the Kuomintang dictatorship of Chiang Kai-shek and the victory of the Chinese Communist Party posed a number of important questions that required careful examination and consideration.
Report on the Chinese Situation to the Third Congress of the Fourth International in 1951.
Beside repression, the regime’s only answer to the rising unrest over widening social inequality is to promote reactionary Chinese nationalism, hoping that appeals to “national unity” will contain irreconcilable class antagonisms.
The political heirs of Mao Zedong cannot explain how and why the aspirations of working people for a socialist future, for which so many sacrificed 70 years ago, have resulted in the dead end of capitalism today.
In this video, Peter Symonds, SEP national WSWS editor, explains the relevance of his upcoming lecture “70 years after the Chinese Revolution: How the struggle for socialism was betrayed” to contemporary events. Details of dates and venues in Australia and New Zealand are available here.
This lecture was delivered by Peter Symonds at the Socialist Equality Party (US) Summer School on July 25, 2019. Symonds is a member of the International Editorial Board of the World Socialist Web Site and national WSWS editor of the Socialist Equality Party (Australia).
While the revolution vastly transformed international relations and class relations within China, the Communist Party, based on the Stalinist program of “Socialism in One Country,” deformed the newly-created state from the outset.
What was lacking in the 1989 protests was not determination, audacity and courage, nor numbers, but revolutionary leadership—the essential problem facing the international working class in the 20th century.
The following editorial in the January-June 1989 edition of the Fourth International magazine on the Tiananmen Square massacre is an indictment of Stalinism and its opportunist apologists from the standpoint of orthodox Trotskyism.
The following statement was published on June 8, 1989, just four days after the Chinese government’s brutal military crackdown on students and workers in Tiananmen Square.
We are publishing here the text of the speech to the 2019 Online International May Day Rally delivered by Peter Symonds.
The tour became a key turning point in the process of capitalist restoration in China.
