Sigrid Schmalzer
We should also look at what the PRC state is doing that is attractive to people on the left internationally, especially around ecological civilization. There’s a sense that because China’s standing up to the U.S. it represents hope for the left. But I think it’s not just that: it’s also specific things like ecological civilization. I think many of these things are problematic and we need to be critical of them, but we also need to recognize why they are so attractive, and why some on the left see China as the best hope moving forward.
And I think this relates to a more general divide in the left that often gets papered over, which is the question of how we view the state. We often talk as if leftists all agree on the role of the state when in fact we do not, and those differences shape how people view the actions of the PRC state.
Kevin Lin
I wonder if understanding where the pro-CCP left comes from may also help us to tackle this question. I’ve continually encountered a refusal to seriously discuss China, and this has been a real challenge in various left spaces. Whenever I’ve tried to initiate these discussions, there are people who try to shut it down because they would say they don’t want to criticize China for fear of giving ammunition to the right wing in the U.S., or that the Chinese people should be left alone to sort out their own problems. I don’t think this is a majority attitude, but it’s a pretty vocal minority and still pretty dominant within the US left. So that does make it difficult to advance the discussion on China and the U.S.-China rivalry within the U.S. left if the largest political group simply refuses to engage on this question.
I really agree with Sigrid about taking China seriously and the social conditions and class struggles there. Often these very superficial facts will come up in discussion, things like poverty reduction and alleviation, that people would point to and say, “well, even though China may or may not be a socialist country, just look at the wonderful result of poverty reduction, they must be doing something right.” In contrast to a lot of other countries, I think the knowledge about China is just really, really scant among the U.S. left, and this is compounded by an unwillingness to discuss and debate these questions openly.
So, we are in a difficult position of having to counter right-wing discourse about China at the same time where we’re confronting the campists or tankies. This does raise a question about how we frame our discussions. There’s a real challenge in speaking to multiple audiences, also including multiple diasporas such as the Tibetan diaspora, the Hong Kong diaspora, the Uyghur diaspora, all of which have their own political views that may differ from ours on the left. We need to think carefully about how we relate to them as well.
Charlie Post
I think there has been a massive shift on the part of the left in its attitude towards China in the last three to five years. Three to five years ago, Monthly Review was publishing all sorts of material that was highly critical of the Chinese state, which they viewed as restorationist. They even published material by Richard Smith and people who are openly anti-Stalinist and even unsympathetic to the Maoist regime, no less the post-Maoist regime.
There’s been a huge shift on this in the U.S. left, and the same is true for the Australian and many other English-speaking leftists as well. There are elements of the British left that had been previously trained in a politics that was exceedingly anti-campist that are beginning to adapt to this as well. Not so much around China, but around Syria, etc. And I think that there’s a point that Sigrid made about the state-centric focus of much of the left. Rather than social classes, rather than the oppressed, they focus on the state.
This is something that binds together the nationally oriented, openly reformist, classical social democratic left that sees an alliance with the U.S. state as the road to social reform and getting good things for working people. And the other side is a layer of tankies or campists. And they do have a long history of looking to other states, which are perceived to be socialist or anti-capitalist as the alternative to this.
I think it’s right that the Chinese working class or the Chinese oppressed do not yet constitute a fully organized political subject. But one of the points we have to keep arguing is that it is through their own struggles, whether at workplaces or against racialized oppression and national oppressions as in the case of the Uyghurs, that they will have the potential of becoming a political subject capable of posing an alternative both to the rulers in China and the rulers in the U.S.
I also think that we need to develop and deepen our analysis of the Democrats’ views on China, because in fact, I think that Biden’s strategy for dealing with the challenge of Chinese imperial rivalry is probably going to be much more effective than Trump. Not only does it reject the worst of the open anti-Asian racism, but it does so in a context of attempting to build a pro-U.S. imperial alliance to isolate the Chinese, which will require, of course, collaboration with Japanese and South Korean capital.
That combined with the fact that they are abandoning elements of neoliberalism and are looking to the state to restructure both recovery at home and a strengthening of the U.S. imperial position, both politically and economically abroad, is much more dangerous than the open racist rantings, and, from the point of view of capital, irrational policies of Trump.