***** This essay is from Confronting Capitalism, a new collection from Softskull edited by Eddie Yuen, George Katsiafikas and Daniel Burton Rose and to be published in the coming months.
"Insurgent Chinese Workers and Peasants: The 'Weak Link' in Capitalist Globalization and U.S. Imperialism" (1) John Gulick
. . . When the worldwide mobilization against capitalist globalization hit its pre-September 11 stride, some of its partisans characterized it "a movement of movements," arguing quite cogently that one of its virtues and trademarks is its decentralized, networked, and pluralistic character.8 According to this formulation, the movement as a whole consists of parallel initiatives and struggles within and across the Global South and Global North. While these parallel campaigns are animated by the same, or at least similar, principles (i.e., against the depredations of global neo-liberalism), they are also unshackled by a concentrated, top-down structure of command and control. Curiously, however, one of the most pivotal movements in objective opposition to the imperatives of capitalist globalization was not and is still not conventionally regarded as part of the broader movement: the movement (informal, localized, and episodic though it may be at present) of insurgent Chinese workers and peasants resisting the assorted hardships imposed on them by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)'s accelerated implementation of its "economic reform" and "opening up" policies, epitomized by China's November 2001 accession to the World Trade Organization.
Scattered outbursts of worker and peasant protest have been on the dramatic upswing in China since 1998.9 Demonstrating workers are aggrieved by the downsizing, closure, and privatization of SOE's and by brutal exploitation in subcontractor sweatshops while demonstrating peasants are aggrieved by plunging crop prices. Both workers and peasants are absolutely exasperated by and fed up with the venality of local party-state officials. Consequently the number of reported worker and peasant protests has metastasized at a dizzying pace. According to the Chinese Ministry of Public Security (a state entity usually inclined to downplaying the extent of social unrest), the year 2002 constituted a high-water mark for worker and peasant demonstrations.10 Whereas an average of 80 daily "incidents" occurred in 2001, by December 2002 this figure had swelled to 700.11 The CCP's experiment with "socialist market economy with Chinese characteristics" has entered some kind of watershed crisis, one that its newly installed "Fourth Generation" leadership is trying to address with short-term palliative measures.12
This momentous development of the past five years seems to have eluded the attention of many activist-theoreticians close to the movement against capitalist globalization. Whatever their tactical and programmatic differences concerning the how and the where of the movement, French socialist intellectuals and Italian anarcho-communist militants, U.S. environmental radicals and Chiapan Zapatistas, Brazilian landless laborers and South African municipal activists alike share at least one thing in common: theorizers of and spokespeople for the movement against capitalist globalization recognize each and every one of them as participants in this amorphous but definable movement. Generally speaking, the same recognition has not been extended to Chinese workers and peasants courageously fighting the multiple and intertwined evils associated with CCP-engineered neo-liberalism and global capitalist integration. This failure to characterize current-day Chinese worker and peasant protest (and, in some cases, outright insurrection) as part of the worldwide refusal against capitalist globalization stems partially from the reality that neither rebellious Chinese workers and peasants, nor representatives democratically elected by them, have actively taken part in those events customarily associated with the broader global movement - the successive street demonstrations staged alongside the summit meetings of the WTO/IMF/World Bank/G7, or the respective World Social Forums in Porto Alegre and Florence, and so on. A salient cause of this absence is that the CCP remains dead-set against the licensing of independent popular organizations that could potentially contest the prerogatives of the party-state, and coercively suppresses their very existence.
One irony of overlooking the historic Daqing and Liaoyang protests, and thousands of comparable protests, is that the trajectory of capitalist globalization and of the U.S. imperialist quest for planetary dominance rests largely upon the disposition and the action of ordinary Chinese workers, peasants and rural-to-urban migrants. Although the claims they make upon party-state officials may deal mostly with hand-to-mouth issues, the Chinese demonstrators unwittingly endanger the smooth functioning of a Pacific Rim accumulation regime critical to the prolongation of U.S. imperial power.
Despite a host of imagined and genuine geopolitical frictions between nominally "communist" China and the U.S., the mutual destinies of the CCP elite and U.S. ruling groups are becoming inextricably wedded to one another. U.S. big business direly needs China as an outlet for exports, as a theater for financial speculation, and as a supply platform for the production of cheap parts and components. As long as China continues to hold the lion's share of its voluminous currency reserves in dollars, stabilizing the privileged status of the U.S. currency as "world money," the hawks and neo-cons in Washington can live with China's emergence as the "workshop of the world."13 The CCP's acquiescence to this arrangement is virtually guaranteed by the staking of its legitimacy and sheer survival on an economic model dependent upon huge flows of U.S.- led foreign direct investment and parity access to U.S. markets.14 And by decisively tying its political future to an emergent mainland Chinese capitalist class whose fortunes are entwined in the trans-Pacific commodity chain, the CCP all but confirmed this dependence at its 16th National Congress held in November 2002.15 To the extent that the CCP tries to waver from the implied terms of this marriage, the U.S. Departments of War and State have various tools at their disposal - arms transfers to Taiwan, leverage over the oceanic conduits of oil transport, coy complaints about human rights abuses, all buttressed by post-911 encirclement - to force China back into line, overblown proclamations about its high-tech military buildup notwithstanding.16
At the risk of oversimplifying, U.S. ruling groups need a "socially stable" China as much as the CCP does. The structural between a deepening of neo-liberal reform in China and the putative reinvigoration of U.S. hegemony thus frames the backdrop in which the gathering storm of Chinese worker and peasant resistance is taking place. Besides the fact that the segment of the Chinese populace suffering from the CCP's latest concessions to capitalist globalization makes up roughly one-eighth of humanity, this equation is precisely why partisans of a recomposed "global justice" movement should train their sights on increasingly agitated and unruly Chinese workers and peasants. Bearing this in mind, myriad aspects of the recent worker and peasant mobilizations warrant closer inspection. . . .
<http://info.interactivist.net/print.pl?sid=04/02/27/1522245> ***** -- Yoshie
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>
