BY MEGAN ARNEY

Several readers have argued against the Militant's stance in defense of the Chinese workers state and for the reunification of China with Taiwan. These questions were also debated at the Young Socialists convention held on April 6-7 in Minneapolis. It helps to review what the Chinese revolution was.

In 1949 the workers and peasants of China threw the landlord and capitalist classes out of political power and began the transformation of property and social relations in China. The Chinese revolution established a workers and peasants government, and later a workers state.

Before 1949, China's population was some 450 million people, with more than 85 percent living in rural areas. Since the 19th century China had been fought over and carved up by the rulers of Britain, Japan, the United States, and other imperialist powers. Capitalist relations became intertwined with the feudal forms of exploitation already in place.

Workers in the cities were brutally exploited and many peasants farmed as sharecroppers. The mass of peasants lived with starvation, illiteracy, and epidemics of cholera and other diseases. Women were doubly oppressed as the most exploited part of the working class and chained to feudal norms like prostitution and concubinage. An uprising by workers and peasants against these conditions in 1925-27 was crushed and the capitalist dictatorship of Chiang Kai-shek came to power.

In 1931 Tokyo's forces invaded China and set up a puppet regime in Manchuria. Chiang's regime put up an ineffective defense. The Chinese resistance to Japanese imperialism was spearheaded by peasants, workers, and students before and during World War II. The only political force that consistently opposed the occupation, and therefore won the leadership of the masses, was the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), whose central leader was Mao Tse-tung. The peasant armies organized by the CCP not only fought the Japanese, but also had to defend themselves from attacks by Chiang and his army.

By the time the Japanese were defeated in 1945, rebel forces had seized large areas of the Chinese countryside. Local governments in these areas, populated by some 150 million people, organized defense groups, coordinated policies, raised funds and supplies, and carried out other administrative duties. Land belonging to the big landholders began to be redistributed. From 1946 to 1949, 178 million peasants obtained land, beginning the abolition of the centuries-old system of landlordism.

In 1947 a full-scale war broke out between the revolutionary forces and those of Chiang. The CCP-led Red Army had forged deep ties to the peasantry, and in 1949 Chiang fled to the island of Formosa, now Taiwan, and set up a "government in exile." Those are the origins of the capitalist government in Taiwan today. A founding maxim for the revolution was for a united China, based on the history of struggle against partition by the imperialist powers, feudal warlords, and Chiang's dictatorship.

Mao at first did not outline a road to socialism. He maintained that there must first be a democratic revolution and then a socialist revolution. In this "two stages" policy, a Stalinist conception, Mao strove to collaborate with bourgeois forces, subordinating the interests of working people to preserving a capitalist regime.

In 1950 the Korean War broke out when Washington assaulted the revolutionary Korean forces. The U.S. Seventh Fleet was sent to the Taiwan Straits, and the U.S. Congress barred all trade with China, crippling China's economy. As U.S.-led forces marched toward the Chinese border, with the ultimate goal of not only conquering the Korean peninsula but taking back China for imperialist exploitation, Chinese troops mobilized by the millions to force the U.S. and its allies to retreat.

In this struggle against imperialist intervention the Mao bureaucracy was driven to break with capitalism. By October 1952 nationalization extended to about 80 percent of heavy industry, and 40 percent of the light industry. The state controlled 90 percent of all loans and deposits through the People's Bank, and state trading companies were responsible for about 90 percent of imports and exports. Peasant committees were reorganized beginning in 1950-51, participation rose and peasants played a more significant role.

The Chinese revolution brought a transformation of property and social relations to millions of people. Capitalism had lost the control and markets of one of the largest land masses and most populated countries. The nationalization of the major means of production, and imposition of a monopoly on foreign trade and economic planning constituted the concrete foundation of a workers state. The decisive gains made by workers and peasants continue to this day, especially in the nationalized property relations and the social consciousness of millions of working people.

The Chinese revolution represents a tremendous gain for the working class and fighters worldwide. To read more about this chapter in the history of revolutionary struggle I suggest some titles in the Education for Socialists series published by Pathfinder: The Workers and Farmers Government by Joseph Hansen, Workers and Farmers Governments Since the Second World War by Robert Chester, and The Chinese Revolution and Its Development. - MEGAN ARNEY  
 
 
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