The article in question reported that the Tibetan Rights Campaign is "demanding that China not be allowed to join the WTO," and commented that this "position dovetails with Washington's drive to weaken and militarily surround the Chinese workers state."

The U.S. rulers are increasingly assuming a bellicose stance toward China. U.S. president William Clinton has given the green light to the development, and possible deployment before he is out of office, of a missile system that in theory can shoot enemy rockets out of the sky, giving Washington a nuclear first-strike capacity.

The campaign to deploy such a Theater Missile Defense system on the soil of U.S. allies surrounding China shows that this drive for nuclear superiority is very much aimed at Beijing. The discussion on the U.S.-China trade deal signed in Beijing November 15 provides a glimpse of the imperialists' drive to force a "transition to an open, market economy" in China, as the November 16 New York Times put it. (See front-page article and editorial on this page)

Washington's "China policy" has been framed by hostility to the Chinese revolution since the triumph of the Peoples Liberation Army over the imperialist-backed forces of Chiang Kai-shek in 1949. In the 1950s the revolution made deeper and deeper inroads into capitalist property relations and domination by the "great powers" of western Europe and North America.

By the mid-1950s the main means of production had been nationalized and a state monopoly on foreign trade and planned economy had been established — the foundations of a workers state. Humanity had taken an enormous step forward.

Millions of peasants and workers in the world's most populous country had seized the prize that Washington thought it had won when it crushed Japanese imperialism. In the years that followed, the U.S. rulers debated "Who lost China?," as Socialist Workers Party national secretary Jack Barnes put it in one of the speeches in Capitalism's World Disorder (see front-page ad). "But it was the wrong question. No one lost China. The Chinese took it — that was the real answer."

Washington has used the "Free Tibet" campaign as a tool against that revolution for the last 50 years. In 1949, the victorious revolutionary troops occupied Tibet — historically a separate nation but ruled by Chinese emperors for several centuries — and confronted a backward, feudal regime.

The aristocracy in Tibet was organized around Buddhist monasteries. Monks formed the armies that fought out internecine wars over hundreds of years. The system was not wanting in feudal brutality towards the impoverished and rightless peasantry. One monastery near the capital Lhasa owned estates with some 25,000 serfs.

From at least 1953, the CIA organized a covert program backing Tibetan troops against the Peoples Liberation Army. The defeat of these rebellions in Tibet represented a setback for imperialism and the backward forces in Tibet and a victory for the Chinese revolution.

These progressive steps were distorted, and their moral authority marred, by the Stalinist character and anti-working-class course of the Chinese Communist Party. The brutal methods employed by Beijing in Tibet and across China have given the imperialists a handle for their propaganda campaigns against the revolution, and their completely fraudulent concern for "human rights" and the rights of national groupings.

Capitalist politicians in Europe, Japan, and North America lionize the Dalai Lama, the head of the best-known Tibetan Buddhist sect, when it suits their propaganda thrusts against Beijing. The remnants of the feudal aristocracy who the Dalai Lama personifies have allied themselves with the imperialist powers in their propaganda, economic, and military campaigns against China.

Washington and the other imperialist powers do not seek to "bring back feudalism," however. The Militant article I wrote gave the wrong impression on that score, stating that the "'free Tibet' advocated by liberal forces will be a return to that oppressed [feudal] condition."

The U.S. rulers and their counterparts aim to restore, not feudalism, but capitalist social relations and imperialist domination throughout China, Tibet included. That would mean overturning the gains of the revolution and subjugating China to the interests of foreign capital. Their vision is not a "Free Tibet," but a "free" —that is, capitalist — market, and a political system that allows free imperialist super-exploitation.  
 

'Free Tibet' actions serve as bludgeon for U.S. imperialism

What of the campaign that Jan Lyden and others like her are involved in? Many are drawn into an essentially reactionary enterprise in spite of whatever progressive intentions they may have. The material produced by Students for a Free Tibet is typical. In one article they criticize "foreign governments, under pressure from corporations" for placing "decreased value on the treatment of human life in China, Tibet, as well as the other countries that China illegally occupies."

The article goes on: "The question becomes, do you want to support a regime that imports AK-47s to US gangs, forcibly sterilizes Tibetan women, tortures monks and nuns, sells nuclear weapons technologies to terrorist countries, massacres student activists, allows no freedom of press and engages in the systematic genocide of Tibetans and Tibetan culture?" Mixed in with references to real crimes of the Stalinist regime are charges that even some capitalist opponents of the Chinese revolution might find a little too implausible to express.

The Dalai Lama also accuses Beijing of "cultural genocide," a typically emotional claim that in fact refers to the settlement of areas in Tibet with many people from the rest of China.

As the Militant has explained, trade union officials and groups on the petty-bourgeois left organizing the anti-WTO protests, including the "Tibetan Rights Campaign," provide ammunition to the trade and foreign policy of U.S. imperialism and make working people more susceptible to the demagogy of incipient fascist forces. The Tibet protests take aim at a workers state under deepening economic and military pressure from Washington.

Calling for China to be excluded from the WTO, for example, simply echoes the policy of the U.S. rulers, which held off giving Beijing's application initial approval until it had extracted the maximum concessions it thought possible. Now conservative and rightist forces are sharpening their tone in a chorus of opposition to the trade deal with Beijing, pledging to fight China's admission to the WTO, alongside many union bureaucrats. Meanwhile, Washington cranks up the military pressure on China.

For young people who want to fight capitalist injustice and stand alongside those defending national rights, there are plenty of struggles to join today that clearly target the bosses in this country and the brutal government in Washington that defends the prerogatives of the employers. The strike for union recognition by workers at Overnite is one case. The struggle by the people of Puerto Rico to end U.S. colonial rule of their nation, including the bombing practice by the U.S. Navy in Vieques, is another.

Workers and peasants in China are already starting to find ways to resist the impact of market "reforms" and the abuses of the Stalinist bureaucracy. As these struggles grow in Tibet and elsewhere in China, they will lay the basis for a fight to build on the gains of the revolution, overthrow the stranglehold of bureaucratic rule, and replace it with the political rule of a government that represents the historic interests of the working class and its allies.

They will confront U.S. imperialism as their main enemy, and will reach out to working people across the world for solidarity. Along this road, the duty of class-conscious workers, youth, and all democratic-minded people in the United States and beyond is to oppose all imperialist attacks and pressures on China and reject the "Free Tibet" campaign as reactionary.  
 
 
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