Workers World, Vol. 20, No. 25
June 20 – A central theoretical and political problem confronts the international working class and oppressed people as a result of the truly incredible developments stemming from Chinese foreign policy.
How is one to explain how a great socialist country would go so far as to actually send a naval task force to defend the Mobutu regime, a regime that even the bourgeois press admits is a corrupt tool of the imperialists, particularly France, Belgium, West Germany, and the U.S.? Certainly China’s vessels could not possibly reach the waters off Zaire unless the imperialists had agreed to it in the first place, and allowed the People’s Republic of China to defend Mobutu on their behalf. And what is there in it for China or even for the narrow interests of its current leaders?
How is it possible for the Chinese leaders to embark on such a violent campaign of vilification against a small socialist neighbor, one which fought imperialism under circumstances which made it a shining light in the struggle against imperialism? How is it possible for China to unilaterally decide to send its ships to Vietnamese ports to pick up Chinese nationals (called in Vietnam the Hoa people)?
How can China, which has long crusaded against “hegemonism,” so belligerently intensify its hostile campaign against Vietnamese consulates and [order] the departure of their staffs “in the shortest time”?
Isn’t this in the worst tradition of the old colonialist gun-boat diplomacy? Has China not itself been subjected to just such types of practices by the foreign imperialists?
Why the sudden concern for corrupt comprador elements of Chinese descent on Vietnam when China herself has carried on a valiant struggle against such bourgeois elements in its own socialist revolution?
Why is Foreign Minister Huang Hua roaming all over the globe passing on Washington’s message, “The Russians are coming, the Cubans are coming,” in such hysterical terms as to make his frantic approach utterly incomprehensible to progressives all over the world, the advanced workers and oppressed peoples in particular?
Why are so many rabid militarists from the West finding such a warm welcome in Peking? And why – but what is the use, the list is already too long.
It has become more and more obvious since the Brzezinski visit to Peking and the U.S.-NATO intervention in Zaire that the Chinese leaders have taken a headlong gallop into the embrace of Pentagon-NATO imperialism. Unquestionably an alliance between Western imperialism and the People’s Republic of China leaders is rapidly taking shape. The great question confronting the international working class movement and the oppressed people is whether it is too late to be reversed or whether there are sufficient grounds for believing that new progressive social forces on a wide scale can assert themselves from among the workers and peasants to reverse the tragic course pursued by the current People’s Republic of China leaders.
In analyzing the situation in China, it is tempting to go way back into the historical antecedents of Chinese development, to go over the long and tortuous road the Chinese Revolution had to take in order to achieve the monumental victory that occurred almost thirty years ago. It is best, however, to first examine the contemporary reality that is China today.
A great mistake was made in the communist movement and in some of the socialist countries in assessing the significance of the ouster of Chiang Ching, Chang Chun-chiao, Wang Hung-wen, and Yao Wen-yuan. In general it was viewed as a “positive” development; the character of the new leadership was completely underestimated. Sad to say, the imperialist bourgeoisie more quickly and more accurately sensed the significance of the events which overturned the so-called “gang of four” and brought Teng Hsiao-ping back to positions of great authority.
The view in the international communist movement was that a small group of ultra-left Maoists was turned out and that a new, more reasonable grouping, one which conceivably might be anti-Maoist, was taking over; that this increased the possibility for collaboration between the Soviet Union and China and that it would even be possible to restore party-to-party relations and of course to solve the Sino-Soviet border dispute.
But this was a mistaken view. The mistake was not so much in analyzing the Chiang grouping as ultra-left – yes, there were excesses in the Cultural Revolution and ultra-left errors. But that’s not the basic element in the analysis of what had happened. The basic error was in not realizing the depth of the right-wing swing of the historical pendulum which had taken place on the social landscape of this great socialist country.
This is the crux of the error. The bourgeois press also saw the Chiang grouping as “extremists,” but was quick to realize that the “moderates,” the “pragmatists” would be far more amenable and far more accommodating towards imperialism than were their predecessors. Communists, however, tended to view the significance of the “pragmatic” trend as merely a relief from ultra-leftism and the opening of a more reasonable approach towards relationships with other socialist countries which could lead to an abandonment of hostility to the USSR and a renewal of the Sino-Soviet Treaty.
Certainly this possibility was always there and still is there as long as the socialist foundations and the class character of the Chinese regime remains. But the depth of the political reaction that has ensued on the heels of the ouster of the Chiang grouping is so deep and pervasive that it will take much more than even the best diplomatic and political tactics and strategy at the disposal of the leadership in the other socialist countries to reverse the situation. But it does not depend on them alone.
Under Mao there was a deep contradiction between his struggle to continue the process of reforming China’s social and political institutions on a revolutionary basis, and his reactionary foreign policy in relation to the USSR and other socialist countries which was expressed as a false thesis on the class character of the USSR. What is not fully understood about present day China is that the current leaders are bent on “harmonizing” the domestic situation with their foreign policy, but their resolution of this truly fundamental contradiction is a reactionary one; that is, they are attacking the revolutionary domestic achievements of the Mao era.
The new leadership, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say the Teng leadership, is bent on dismantling the progressive and revolutionary achievements of not only the Cultural Revolution but of previous revolutionary gains made during the Chinese Revolution after the country was liberated.
The new leaders could be divided into two groupings. There are, in our view, the so-called “old capitalist roaders,” many of whom merely had a deep affinity to the Soviet Union and were reluctant to take up the cudgels in the struggle against the Khrushchev regime. By and large they were sympathetic to the trend that Khrushchev brought about in the USSR during the period of his ascendancy. But generally these were really the smaller and less significant elements in the internal struggle in China. They in turn, however, stimulated and brought to life far more powerful and more abiding regressive and anti-revolutionary social elements, many of whom could scarcely be distinguished from the bourgeois dissidents in the USSR about whom the West writes so much.
The coming to power of Teng and Hua represented the victory of the New Right. And this is what the imperialist bourgeoisie quickly realized. These are the people who are not only eager to dismantle the remains of the Cultural Revolution, but view the Maoist foreign policy quite differently than did Mao himself.
Mao saw in the Nixon visit to Peking and in the Shanghai Communique a tremendous victory that would end the isolation of China, soon win the restoration of Taiwan as a province of China, and bring about the normalization of relations with the U.S. – but without an alliance with U.S.-NATO imperialism. Rather, the view in Peking at that time was that there was a diplomatic and political struggle against the two “super-powers,” even though the USSR was the “most dangerous one.” All of this, however, still remained in the stratosphere of diplomatic maneuvering and within the context of China relying principally upon itself, with peripheral economic and diplomatic contacts with the West. The watchword was “self-reliance.”
The New Right has gone much further. It has moved from diplomatic maneuvering to action; since the imperialist intervention in Zaire, it has moved headlong towards a Sino-U.S. alliance.
The New Right is propelled to do so by its assault on the progressive social achievements of the Chinese Revolution and in its haste to achieve military standing in the world arena.
Along with that has come a degeneration into chauvinism. When a great socialist country with more than 900 million people has to open a campaign to win the allegiance of the overseas Chinese on a reactionary basis – this is the real meaning of the struggle with the Hoa people – then it must be admitted that the revolutionary fortunes of the Chinese have sunk to a very, very low point. It would have been inconceivable for Lenin and the Bolshevik Party, during the struggle to defend the USSR against a host of imperialist countries and their stooges, to have first and foremost called upon ethnic Russians as a primary point of support for the October Revolution. On the contrary, it was the deep feeling of the world proletariat and oppressed people that served as the main point of support, after the Russian workers and peasants themselves.
China, like the USSR and other socialist countries, is called socialist not because it has achieved a fully developed socialist mode of production where classes have been abolished and where inequality has been substantially reduced between the various strata of the population, but because of the aspirations of the workers and peasants, the perspective of the leaders of the Revolution, and because of the collective ownership of the basic means of production which entails the abolition of private ownership of large means of production and the expropriation of the former property owners and landlords.
For lack of a more accurate terminology, Lenin defined the Soviet state as one based upon the workers and peasants and he called it a “workers’ state with bureaucratic deformations.” Although 60 years have gone by and the Soviet state has become enormously strengthened from the point of view of the growth of the productive forces, the well-being of the people, and its tremendous military, industrial, and technological prowess, there is no question that the USSR has still not gone beyond the stage of a workers’ state with bureaucratic deformations.
There are concrete historical circumstances both of an internal and especially of an external character which have enforced this sociological definition on the USSR and for others reasons on other socialist states.
China without the Cultural Revolution, China with the New Right as its ruling group, is a workers’ state in the sense that Lenin used the term. It’s a workers’ state not merely with bureaucratic deformations but with a weakened social system and more in danger of a relapse than at the height of the struggle between the Right and Left during the critical days of the Cultural Revolution.
There are those who see the Teng leadership as a continuation of Maoism. But the truth of the matter is that the new leaders, the New Right, that is, who it must be remembered are hampered by centrist and leftist elements within the coalition, regard Maoism as an albatross around their neck and are only precluded from chucking it all overboard for fear of the many millions who still adhere to Maoism, even as it is proclaimed by the current leaders.
The broad historical context in which these events in China must be understood is that of the great world transition period between the capitalist and socialist systems. This is much more profound and decisive for the future of humanity than was the transition from feudalism to capitalism.
Furthermore, the parameters in understanding the crisis in Chinese politics should be viewed in the light that no new progressive social system arises from the old without bearing birthmarks – that is, some of the characteristics of the old system from which it issued. Nor will the new social system yield to destructive, reactionary forces unless its potentialities have become exhausted or incapable of taking up the torch of progress, the torch of the working class and the peasantry.
This cannot be viewed as a uniquely Chinese phenomenon, but rather as a general one affecting all the countries of the socialist camp which, in spite of everything, are all bound by common ties of a class character.
There are those who are so justifiably enraged by the reactionary alignment with imperialism to which the PRC leaders are gravitating so rapidly that, seeing the current leaders as a mere continuation of Maoist doctrinarism, they would chuck overboard all of Maoist ideology and the entire course Mao pursued, which for almost all purposes covers virtually the entire Chinese Revolution. That would be throwing the baby out with the bath water. It would lay the foundation for compounding Mao’s error on the false sociological characterization of the USSR as a capitalist or imperialist state by repeating it in regard to China.
If the revolutionary working class and oppressed people are to find a way out of the abyss toward which the contemporary leaders of China are pushing, it is necessary to have an objective evaluation of the current state of affairs in China. Above all it is necessary not to read China out of the socialist camp, not to disqualify it as a socialist state in the sense that it is popularly understood and currently used throughout the world, and to remember that although the socialist foundations and the progressive social structure of China have been weakened, basically what prevails in China is a new mode of production that is progressive as against the old bourgeois system.
All preceding history in the imperialist era attests to the speed with which political reaction can be superseded and swept away by the revolutionary action of the masses. This applies to the socialist countries as well as to the imperialist system. The Soviet Union itself has to a large degree overcome periods of political reaction, especially in its foreign policy with relation to the national liberation movements, although the struggle in the USSR against political reaction is by no means over.
Political reaction is now having its day in China. But the creative initiative, the revolutionary energy of the masses is sure to assert itself in one form or another and rescue the socialist revolution in China from the hands of reaction.
Nevertheless, it is incumbent upon all progressives, all workers, all oppressed people, to unmask the reactionary character of the present Teng-Hua leadership and point out that their alliance with the most unbridled militarist and reactionary imperialist forces in the world poses the greatest danger to the whole working class. Its role as a tool of U.S.-NATO imperialism must be fought with uncompromising vigor to the end.
Last updated: 11 May 2026