Because of the enthusiastic response of fighters for women's rights to this event, the capitalist rulers cannot brush it aside. The Clinton administration is jumping in, purporting to carry the banner of defending women's interests.
Washington's record shows otherwise. A message to the U.S. delegation at the Nairobi conference in 1985 from then- president Ronald Reagan read, "The business of this conference is women, not propaganda." By "propaganda" the U.S. president meant: keep out of the discussion such central political questions as the imperialist-imposed debt crisis facing the semicolonial countries, the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, condemnation of Washington's counterrevolutionary war in Central America, and the struggle of the Palestinian people for self- determination. All of these questions - which were, and many still are, linked to the international struggle for women's liberation - were discussed and debated at the conference to the dismay of the imperialist powers.
The Democratic administration this time around will likewise attempt to steer the discussion clear of such questions, putting forward a "pro-family," pro-capitalist line. At the same time right-wing politicians in the United States, who would rather not see this conference happen at all, are on a hypocritical campaign against China, supposedly concerned over human rights abuses.
The fact is that the capitalists, and especially U.S. imperialism, are the biggest violators of human rights and perpetuators of women's oppression in the world. It's their system that breeds the depression conditions and brutal wars - from Iraq to Bosnia - that working-class women and men bear the brunt of. It's their system that depends on the exploitation of women as one of the central pillars upholding class society.
The anti-China campaign, which most bourgeois forces in the United States have joined, is being waged because they can't forgive the workers and peasants of China for seizing their country for themselves in the 1949 revolution. In doing so they removed close to one quarter of the world's population from the dictates of capital.
Today the Chinese government is taking on a greater political, economic, and military role in Asia and the Pacific, out of the control of Washington, London, Tokyo, and other imperialist powers. And, for all their investment, the imperialists are finding they can't reimpose capitalism in China just by opening a stock market in Shanghai.
Fighters for women's rights from around the world will be looking for each other at this conference, trying to find ways forward. Neither Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright, leading the official U.S. delegation, nor the right-wing forces campaigning against the conference speak for the vast majority of women. Our future will be forged in uncompromising fights for women's equality, and is intertwined with the worldwide struggle for socialism.