Louis Proyect wrote:
> In spring the daily CP newspaper published letters from students at the
> University of Peking denouncing their professors, whom they considered to
> be too liberal. Anti-globalization nationalists, part of the new left, are
> very critical towards social inequalities, which they blame on twenty years
> of 'reforms'.
The importance of this development is that the youths of China have finally
rediscover the right path, unlike the misguided students in Tiananmen
Square in
1989. In 1989, the students, who were already a privileged elite enjoying the
unequally distributed fruits of China's new experiment with market economy,
were agitating for a still better deal for themselves and for the right to
indulge in bourgeois liberalism, and US style "democracy and individual
"freedom", much of the poison fed to them blind by US journalists. The
Tiananmen protestors, in their ignorance of the West, mistook US prosperity as
proof of the correctness of the capitalist/democratic system, not realizing
that that very prosperity had been achieved through oppression both internally
and globally. The New Left are students who have lived in the West for a
decade and have first-hand knowledge of the reality of capitalism.
The New Left among Chinese youths is significant because it can play a timely
role in the ideological and policy struggle within the CPC that is expected to
come to a climax within the next two years. The CPC is committed to a
jeunvenization program and is seeking a balance between the development of a
modern economy without total surender to US globalization. The left has two
favorable conditions at its disposal against overwhelming odds. The odds are
that to fight globalized finance capitalism is easier said than done. The
odds
are made more high because many leftists reject serious studies of finance out
of ideological distaste. Sunzi, the ancient Chinese militarist said: "To
win a
battle, one must first know one's enemy." The favorable conditions are: 1)
communist parties as political institutions fundamentally understand that in
building capitalist economies, they are also digging their own institutional
graves, and 2) capitalist systems do not tolerate new late comers as
equals; thus it is
not the best game for Third World economies to play. These conditions will
give socialism in the Third World an adventage.
Socialist economic structure has to be made evident that it can deliver
prosperity with equality. Though all leftists subscribe to that proposition,
that is a challenge the difficulty of which should not be minimized.
The road is long and hard, but the destination is within sight.
Henry C.K. Liu
Louis Proyect
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