Workers World, Vol. 21, No. 13
March 27 – Even if the fighting in Viet Nam should escalate and the possibility of negotiations between Viet Nam and China on the complete withdrawal of the latter’s troops from Vietnamese territory becomes nil, it is both timely and appropriate to utilize the present lull in the struggle to take a fresh look at is overall world implications for the fate of socialism.
It is impossible to view the aggression against Viet Nam except in the larger context of the Sino-Soviet conflict and against the background of the predatory struggle of imperialism against all the socialist countries. Viewing the struggle merely in the light of the reciprocal relations among Viet Nam, Kampuchea, and China can at best only yield a one-sided and inadequate view of the situation.
It is necessary to see the struggle in the historic sequence of the decline of the imperialist world order and the slow but sure ascendancy of a new social order. It is a struggle very much like the one which marked the transition period between the old feudal system and the rising capitalist system, a period which lasted for centuries.
The final triumph of capitalism over the feudal order was not only marked by defeats endured by the early bourgeois order but also by compromises which the new rising capitalist class made with the feudal lords, especially under the auspices of bourgeois monarchies.
In the French Revolution, feudalism was cut down root and branch. In Britain, however, the bourgeoisie took power through a series of compromises, but only after having resorted to revolutionary measures and violent struggle, as witness the Cromwellian revolution.
What made it possible for the bourgeoisie to conciliate and compromise with the feudal lords was that they had this much in common: they were both propertied, possessing, and exploiting classes. Their common hostility was to the exploited masses, the peasants, and the new, not yet numerous proletariat, as well as to the independent artisans and townspeople in the urban centers.
The bourgeois system develops automatically. It grows spontaneously. It is not so with the socialist system.
A workers’ government needs a planned allocation of resources, a centralized plan for managing the affairs of the workers’ state, for producing the necessities of life for the mass of the population while anticipating the future. It needs a peaceful social environment. It needs above all the widest arena for the expression of the creative initiative of the masses and it needs socialist democracy.
This entails the right of any socialist country to criticize the political direction of any other socialist country, and not merely because it has been wronged by the latter’s conduct. It should be able to do so without fear of punishment or ostracism, provided it is done in the spirit of comradely, constructive socialist criticism. This approach has nothing to do with any assertion of false independence, which has frequently served as a cover for collaboration with imperialism and hostility to other socialist countries.
At the present time the leadership of the People’s Republic of China is in the hands of a tendency which is politically highly regressive, and which has pushed China in an increasingly rightward direction both at home and abroad. The problem is how to deal with it.
It is now almost three months since the Deng-Hua ruling group launched the so-called modernization effort, which is supposed to be a plan to industrialize China by the end of the century. To do this, the new Beijing leaders have opened wide the gates to all the imperialist monopolies and the multinational corporations in Japan, Western Europe, and the United States. Plans have been made to bring in new technology and equipment for purposes of industrial construction that would cost hundreds of billions of dollars.
For weeks on end, executives from most of the biggest corporations have descended upon Shanghai, Canton, and practically all the industrial centers of China. There has been no end to the trade and commerce delegations from almost all the Western capitalist countries. Some of the contracts that have been signed, sealed, and delivered run into the billions of dollars.
Even though performance on these contracts has been negligible as of now, until just very recently there was a virtual stampede by the capitalist monopolies to get into the “China market,” as they call it, and “get a piece of the action.”
Suddenly, in the midst of the Viet Nam invasion, the Chinese leadership pulled back and began to cut down on some of the orders and some of the very big industrial projects which it had previously contracted for. The capitalist press have of course expressed disappointment and are somewhat at a loss on how to explain it.
Some say that it is due in part to the effects of the Viet Nam war. Others, such as an official from the Mitsubishi conglomerate of Japan, say, “The truth is that the Chinese have no money, their foreign reserves are down to about $2 billion so far as we can determine. How can they pay for our goods? The China market is not an easy one, though we will quietly persist with our efforts there.” (New York Times, March 25, Week in Review section.)
It is true, of course, that the Viet Nam war has somewhat affected the planning aspects of the modernization scheme. And it is, of course, also true that from the point of view of whatever foreign currency reserves China may have, they are probably inadequate to cover the vastly ambitious economic and industrial plans.
But such development projects as the Chinese leadership has embarked upon cannot be paid for in cash, anyway, nor have they ever been undertaken anywhere else in the socialist world on a cash basis.
When, for example, a socialist country contracts to have its ore mines developed, payment usually is stipulated to be in kind, that is, the payment is in the form of ore mined and shipped. In China’s case, Japan has contracted to do this. So that the problem of cash reserves, while a problem, is not the basic problem.
In any case, resort to loans, which China has tried to avoid in the past, is possible under extended credit schemes, which other socialist countries have embarked upon.
What should be the revolutionary, Marxist-Leninist attitude towards the modernization plan or attempts to revise it?
Those who can’t distinguish China’s socialist foundations from its current reactionary leadership and who really regard China as a bourgeois social formation cannot but present a false and distorted view of the real situation there. Their perspective on China is wholly erroneous.
Some explain the Chinese modernization plan exclusively as an attempt at “hegemony” and as an effort to prop up its military position for purposes of aggression. So far as the current leadership is concerned, there is a big element of truth in this, especially in light of the Viet Nam invasion. But this is not the whole truth. Seeing China in that light presents a picture of hopelessness. It also assumes, whether one admits it or not, that the current leadership is in to stay and that even if a new leadership succeeds the present one, it will pursue the same aggressive and reactionary policy.
Given this attitude, one can scarcely find a way out of the dilemma in which the socialist countries find themselves without an up and down military struggle which would, merely by virtue of its destructive force, consume the efforts of socialist construction in both Viet Nam and China as well as other countries should they fall into this entrapment.
The basic issue confronting the Chinese leadership is, and has been for some years, whether to pursue a neo-colonialist road to industrialization, an industrialization in which it becomes an appendage to imperialism, or to pursue the socialist road. That is the core issue.
For instance, Chang Chun-chiao, one of the so-called “Gang of Four” and the author of “On Exercising All-Round Dictatorship Over the Bourgeoisie,” believed that the grouping now in the leadership, before they took over, were bent on going the colonialist road. He is alleged to have said, “China is going for a colonial economy.” He went as far as accusing one of the Politburo members of being a “comprador bourgeois right in the Politburo.”
The fact of the matter is that the modernization scheme in and of itself could be perfectly valid and correct. The tempo of development is something about which even the best of revolutionaries could be mistaken. In reality, there is scarcely a way of knowing, except through practical experience and the experience of other socialist countries.
The problem with the present modernization scheme is that the plans are geared toward leaning on and depending on the imperialist powers, primarily the U.S. and to a lesser extent Japan and Western Europe. That leads the way to a neo-colonial solution of the industrialization problem for China.
It is on this basis that monstrous and unwarranted economic and political concessions have been made by the Chinese leadership, not the least of which is the anti-Soviet alliance that China has effectuated with Japan as well as the U.S. (the new Beijing-Tokyo-Washington-NATO axis). On the economic side, the Chinese leadership has offered so many trade concessions that they border on infringing on the constitutional provisions of the PRC – which prohibit the ownership of the means of production by private entrepreneurs, that is, the foreign monopolies!
The lengths to which the Deng-Hua leadership have gone can be seen in the brazenness with which the U.S. has virtually annexed Taiwan. It is embodying all this in pending legislation which the Chinese Foreign Ministry found so offensive that it had to protest to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, to which Washington has turned a deaf ear.
This headlong rush into the arms of the multinational corporations cannot but bring back memories in China of the colonial era. It cannot be viewed except in the light of the “opening up” of China following the defeat of China in the Opium Wars by the then-corporate pirates of British, French, Japanese and U.S. interests.
An article in the Daily World of March 27 entitled “China’s economic woes worry West” misses the whole point and addresses itself to the wrong people. Even the headline is wrong. China’s economic situation doesn’t worry the West. On the contrary, they are delighted with it. The worry is whether China can pay extortionate prices for the sale of Western technology and equipment, which is an altogether different matter.
The imperialists worry whether any of their clientele can afford to pay, which included Sadat, Mobutu, and others. But they also worry whether Poland, which has contracted an enormous debt, and which has permitted itself to be monitored by Western imperialist banks, can make timely payment as well.
The imperialists want and need to see China’s socialist economy in shambles, being dismantled, and turning towards the imperialist West as a neo-colonialist solution to the task of modernization. Therein lies the problem.
From this it follows politically that an effort must be made to direct revolutionary socialist propaganda to encourage China back toward modernization on the basis of socialist construction and cooperation with other socialist countries. It is wrong to appeal to the “wise imperialists,” as does this article in the Daily World, “in their own interests to promote détente in China rather than militaristic ambitions.” On the contrary, one must appeal to the Chinese communists against both the “wise” and the reckless imperialists. Neither has any other interest except to promote militarist ambitions on the part of the current Chinese leadership against other socialist countries; promoting détente is not at all what they have in mind.
It is also erroneous to believe that the potentialities for progressive change in China have been exhausted.
The problem is how to influence revolutionary Chinese thinking to combat the neo-colonialist road propounded by Deng and Hua and to go back to the socialist road. Thus if the Chinese leadership has been compelled, at least for a moment, to cancel some of the orders with the imperialist monopolies because the prices the imperialists are exacting are extortionate and because they are infringing on the political sovereignty of China as a socialist state, then all this is to the good. Rather than berate them for it, it should be viewed as a favorable omen that all is not lost in China even at the summits of the current leadership, which at the present time is divided into a right-wing and a centrist grouping at odds with each other.
One swallow, of course, does not make a summer. Yet it is important to watch for every sign objectively, dispassionately, and with a view towards reversing the tragic course of the Chinese leadership both at home and abroad. Even taking just one step backward from the headlong rush to embrace the imperialists (who in any case hope to choke China in their embrace) may be a good sign. And if that proves correct, such a step is at variance with a hostile, militaristic, and hegemonistic relation with its socialist neighbors, such as Viet Nam and the USSR.
The imperialists for decades have watched for every sign of strain in the community of socialist states in order to exacerbate the relations with the objective of splitting them apart. All the more is it necessary to employ proletarian statesmanship in efforts to rectify that which is detrimental and destructive to the socialist cause.
The more the Chinese leadership is obliged to retreat, whether economically or politically, from the embrace of imperialism, the greater are the chances to reforge the fraternal ties that bind the community of socialist countries.
Last updated: 11 May 2026