China

Self-determination for the people of Taiwan!

Before Nancy Pelosi’s visit, Biden had quietly continued with Trump’s approach of upgrading its relationship with Taiwan as a strategic move against mainland China (PRC). Her visit was however a high profile event, and predictably provoked a reaction from Beijing which was unprecedented in scale and ferocity. Never before had People’s Liberation Army (PLA) forces surrounded the whole island, sent fighter jets across the informal border between Taiwan and the mainland, and fired missiles flying over the island. The military exercises continued longer than most people expected. Foreign countries...

China is not the monolith it seems

The image of China as a single homogeneous nation is false. The republican movement which rebelled against the Qing dynasty in the early 20th century saw themselves as standing up for a Greater China against the Manchu rulers. They had a five-coloured flag, proclaiming unity of five major ethnic groups — the Han (red); the Manchus (yellow); the Mongols (blue); the Hui (white); and the Tibetans (black). GMD leaders like Sun Yat Sen and Chiang Kai Shek saw themselves as creating a Chinese people through a melting pot of different ethnic groups, and replaced the early republican flag with the...

China and Covid: silence from the Morning Star

In the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Morning Star gave extensive and enthusiastic coverage to China’s response, which did indeed appear to be impressive. A piece entitled “The Planned economy vs the coronavirus” (republished on 30 January 2020 from the US Stalinist paper People’s World ) noted: “The World Health Organisation is praising the Chinese government’s quick response to the crisis… The scale of that commitment is now ramping up in a massive way - showcasing the ability of the country’s socialist state to marshal resources rapidly and efficiently in the service of public...

Bird flu: a warning for the next pandemic

Avian flu has been affecting many countries this year, leading to widespread culling of poultry in UK, France, US, and other countries. In America this has led to direct-action protests at the methods used. Glen Taylor, a billionaire who also owns Rembrandt Enterprises, culled 5.3 million hens by “ventilatory shutdown plus” ( VSD+ ). Protesters glued themselves to goals to disrupt the games in April of the Minnesota Timberwolves basketball team, where Taylor is majority shareholder. US authorities (but not UK) advise that VSD+ is a legitimate method of cullting. The birds die slowly over...

Karl Radek on China

The Chinese revolution of 1925-27 was one of the high points of working-class militancy in the twentieth century. By the mid-1920s a wave of strikes swept the country, with workers’ organisations becoming major powers in the main cities, with ever-greater numbers of workers coming out, joining unions and taking control of the streets.

War, peace... and trade?

The Morning Star keeps telling us that it opposes Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and up to a point that’s true. The paper and its political masters at the Communist Party of Britain (or, at least, the majority of them) do oppose the invasion — but only because it’s been a tactically “maladroit” move that has resulted in “temporarily uniting Nato” (editorial, 4 March). This “opposition” should not be mistaken for support for Ukraine’s right to national self determination, still less any support for its right to fight the invader. Time and again, the paper has counselled against arming Ukraine...

China, Covid and ultra-lockdowns

Over 25 million people in Shanghai are in ultra-lockdown over Omicron. Having seen the loss of life in Hong Kong, where after two years of “Zero Covid” policies, in one month over 7,700 people out of 7 million have died from Omicron, Shanghai has made a dramatic U-turn. As recently as 26 March, as the city recorded 2,269 new coronavirus cases, Shanghai city leaders still declared that it would not lock down the city. According to Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post , Wu Fan, an expert member of Shanghai’s Covid-19 response task force stated: “No, we can’t, because Shanghai is not only home to...

Covid: a comma, not a full stop

Solidarity 626 and 627 were the first issues since early 2020 to have no articles on Covid. That was mostly was to do with the pressure on space from coverage on Ukraine, and only partly to do with a slight pause in Covid developments in Britain. It's only a slight pause, not an end. Case counts and hospitalisation have been rising again, since late February, and by now substantially. Numbers in mechanical ventilation beds have levelled after falling steadily since early November (they didn't rise with Omicron). This may be no drama. Across the European Union, as Covid curbs have been...

Socialist Action: more genocide-denying lies

Socialist Action, a small but occasionally influential British group, has Trotskyist origins – but its politics are now flatly Stalinist. It specialises in long-winded and theoretically pretentious praise for China’s economic system and policies. Periodically SA spews out something denying and / or justifying the Chinese state’s genocidal oppression of the Uyghur people. In August 2020, after they enthusiastically cited and republished the Stalinist-cum-conspiracy-theorist Max Blumenthal, we published this exposing their incoherence and dishonesty on the Uyghurs. I recommend reading it...

Putin and Xi's unpaid propagandists

Until recently the Morning Star would occasionally criticise Vladimir Putin. The Russian Communist Party is the largest opposition group in the Duma and makes criticisms of Putin’s domestic policy. But when it comes to Ukraine, the Russian CP is a very loyal opposition and differs with Putin only by being more belligerent — for instance calling for formal recognition of the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Luhansk. The Morning Star ’s coverage of China (which the paper unhesitatingly describes as “socialist”) has long been no more than Chinese Communist Party (i.e. regime) propaganda...

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