Hi Jim,
Good question. Actually, I sent this off to Li Minqi, a Marxist who has
published in Monthly Review who was originally involved in the Tiananmen
Square activities and later broke with the liberal ideology that student
leaders embraced during those protests. He spent time in jail because of a
call he made during a speech at Peking University a year later for workers
to demand their rights. Now he is finishing a PhD at Amherst's economics
dept (I can hear the anti-pomo warriers now, "ah hah, he's an amherst
pomo!!!"--not at all actually).
His response to my comments on leftist cadres in China was, "Are you
kidding? Leftist intellectuals may be more relevant here..." I can send
you the rest of his comments off list...I would agree with his response, I
haven't taken seriously enough the point you raise in response to my
comments.
BTW, There's a fine interview in last summer's New Left Review with him,
another left oriented Tiananmen
activist now studying at UCLA Wang Chaolin, and Wang Dan (Tiananmen's
neo-liberal icon) on the problems facing China 10 years after Tiananmen is
also well worth looking at to see what the perspective of China looks like
to Tiananmen activists who didn't embrace free markets as the solution to
China's problems faced during restructuring...
Steve
Steve
Stephen Philion
Lecturer/PhD Candidate
Department of Sociology
2424 Maile Way
Social Sciences Bldg. # 247
Honolulu, HI 96822
On Thu, 31 Aug 2000, Jim Devine wrote:
> At 07:08 PM 8/30/00 -1000, you wrote:
> >What is fascinating to me about the case of China is both the extent of
> >conflicts betweeen workers and managers/ministries over the terms of SOE
> >reorganization and the almost complete lack of any active reaction on the
> >part of the left faction of the CCP. There is missing any strategy
> >whatsoever to show support for workers in these conflicts. What makes this
> >so remarkable is how much space exists in China for making this possible
> >through legal means. Intellectuals/cadres in China possess enough
> >knowledge of labor and enterprise conversion laws that make it feasible
> >for them to set up the equivalent of legal aid organizations, institutes
> >studying systematically the different problems workers face in specific
> >segments of SOE industries, strategies for defending SOE workers' legal
> >rights (as they exist on the books) and the like.
>
> is it possible that even the members of the "left faction" of the CCP have
> some sort of vested interest that goes against putting pro-worker rhetoric
> into action?
>
> Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
>
>
