The Chinese student demonstrations

Monthly Review, Sept, 1987 by Richard Levy

For the Chinese democracy movement to make freedom of the press a reality, it must develop a framework which allows not only for the most politically active, most self-confident, and most resource-rich strata to challenge the ideas and orthodoxy of the leadership, but also for the most disenfranchised, the least literate and least self-confident, and those who are so busy with survival that they have little time for "politics' to express their views to the wider public.

The Reforms and Capitalism

An even greater concern is the way in which the reforms and their linkage--or nonlinkage --to capitalism seem to be viewed by many in the student movement. There seems to be a view held not only by the students, but also by much of the leadership, that by selectively adopting the economic and political practices of the West, China will be able to achieve rapid economic growth and perhaps even approach the level of material affluence of the economically advanced Western countries without altering its basic socioeconomic structure. And in fact, in the past few years, the Chinese economy has developed at an unprecedented rate, at least on a macro-scale. However, to me there are several problems with this model.

First and most significant seems to be the notion that the advanced Western model, which many hope to adapt to China, is a model of increasing wealth for the vast majority. However, because capitalism is not a national system but a worldwide system, the question of increasing or decreasing wealth can only be adequately answered when the question is posed on a global scale. Then it becomes apparent that the system of which the United States is one of the centers is one of increasing wealth for a majority of those in the advanced Western countries but only at the direct expense of far greater numbers of people living in the exploited countries of Asia, Africa, and Central and South America. The United States, with some 5 percent of the world's population, uses some 30 percent of the world's resources! This can only occur if there is in place a system of unequal exchange and exploitation. It is depressing to see that, some thirty years after the victory of a socialist revolution in China, there is so little understanding of the idea of imperialism. It is as if once the militaristic aspect of imperialism had moved away from China's shores (with the end of the Korean and Vietnam Wars), the entire notion of imperialism was discarded as if it had been just another ultra-left exaggeration of the Cultural Revolution. But it is not an exaggeration. The only way China could achieve the level of affluence of the Western countries would be, as Lenin said nearly a century ago, to struggle with them over the right to exploit other countries, to find new areas of exploitation or to develop some fantastic source capable of generating at least five times the current amount of wealth from presently existing resources-- assuming that this would not wipe out the ecological systems of the earth, as the Greens throughout Europe have, with good cause, asserted.