China

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A round up of news from WL41 Download PDF Articles: Letter from Hong Kong: Nothing to celerate (Chen Ying) Showdown on private railways Blairs plan to gut party democracy runs into trouble The adventures of Tom Sawyer A victory for socialism? (Martin Thomas)

The moderniser as executioner

Chan Ying on the politics of Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping (1904-1997). First published in 1997 in Workers' Liberty magazine. Deng Xiaoping, the second paramount leader of the People’s Republic of China, died on 19 February [1997] at the age of 92. He had reached an advanced stage of Parkinson’s Disease and eventually suffered respiratory and circulation failure. His last published photograph, in a wheelchair, was in October 1994. For at least the past two years he has been too ill to assert his political power as the regime’s final arbiter. All the various political factions and tendencies...

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Download PDF Articles: Are the police bugging you? (Helen Rate) Towards a Scottish Assembly (Stan Crooke) From boom to gloom (Cheung Siu Ming) A workers' party in Korea? A new Eastern Europe: Smiles for the IMF, scowls for the workers (Martin Thomas) Hillingdon Strikers fight on (Andre D'Souza) After the international dockers strike (Alan McArthur) Tube face sell-off

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Download PDF Articles: Scotrail workers take on union bosses Glenroy Watson, rank and file challenge The GMB's friends in the north Chinese dissident jailed London Hospital crisis Postal workers: don't throw the vote away! German trade unionists say 'we are not alone' Class struggle in Germany Racist backlash in Australia US labor builds

Mass strike in China

Up to 40,000 workers are participating in a strike in Dongguan, southern China, in a dispute over unpaid social insurance benefit. The strike began on 14 April and has steadily increased in size since. The workers, who are employed by Yue Yuen Industrial Holdings, make trainers for companies like Nike, Adidas, New Balance, and Puma, at a huge factory in the central Guangdong province. Yue Yuen Industrial had sales of more than $7.58 billion in 2013. The strike is one of the biggest in China's history. One striker, who spoke to the New York Times , said she takes in about 1,300 renminbi, or...

Welcome China's unions back into the family?

At the end of March, the International Labour Organisation’s Bureau for Workers Activities (known as ILO-ACTRAV) and the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) signed a Memorandum of Understanding “to promote Trade unions South-South Cooperation in the Asia- Pacific region”. The Director-General of the ILO, Guy Ryder, said “we need to find a way which so that the ACFTU can work more closely with other parts of the international trade union movement, sharing common objectives.” Ryder is a former General Secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation, which has decided to invite...

China: new realities and old dogmas

This book contains many good things — an assessment of the nature of capitalism that has developed in China over the last two decades; analysis of the burgeoning Chinese working class; and avid descriptions of recent workers’ struggles. However these fine efforts are spoiled by its treatment of the Maoist period which is falsely characterised as some kind of workers’ state. Au Loong Yu’s political economy of the current Chinese social formation is broadly correct. He defines China as “bureaucratic capitalism”, a term first used ironically by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) during the 1940s...

“Opening and reform” in China

Camila Bassi concludes a series of articles looking at the recent history of China. The post-1979 era of ”opening and reform” opened China’s economy to global capital. Since then the state has been managing this process to ensure its own political legitimacy and stability. It fuels a populist nationalism, embedded with anti-American and anti-Japanese feeling, and a neoconservative nostalgia for the past. Moreover, although Confucianism was rejected under Mao, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has since pursued a spiritual moralisation and harmonisation programme known as “new Confucianism”, in...

After Mao and the Tiananmen Uprising

“It doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.” (Deng Xiaoping) In the second of three articles overviewing a recent history of China, I review the era of Deng Xiaoping. That the successor to Mao Zedong as head of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was to be both a pragmatist and a loyal Party official, who had been there right from the start of the CCP’s rule, is telling in terms of China’s modern political economy. Deng Xiaoping launched the era known as ‘opening and reform’, which in the 1980s laid the foundations for what was to become a phenomenal pace and...

The legacy of Mao Zedong

Knowledge of China’s past is crucial for understanding the country’s present. To illustrate this interrelationship, let’s remind ourselves of the case of British citizen Akmal Shaikh. In 2007, Akmal was arrested by the Chinese authorities for drug smuggling (specifically, heroin), and was sentenced to death despite the fact he was mentally ill. The representation of the case in China by the Party-controlled media recalled the nineteenth century Opium Wars between the British Empire and China’s Qing Dynasty, which involved the British trading of opium, from India, within China. The story...

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