Month: May 2021

The ‘lab leak’ theory is a racist trope

  • The ‘Wuhan lab leak’ theory was devised by the Trump regime to deflect from its failure containing the pandemic and to build hostility towards China.
  • A World Health Organisation team of 17 international experts concluded it was “extremely unlikely” that Covid emerged from a lab leak.
  • The WHO team confirmed that Chinese officials and scientists were open and cooperative and gave access to all relevant data.
  • The countries raising “concerns” about the WHO report are the same countries pushing the New Cold War: US, Britain, Australia, Canada, Japan.
  • Biden’s proposal for a new US-led investigation is just a variation of Trump’s “kung flu” racism, and serves to deepen anti-Asian hate.
  • US and British intelligence services have a notorious record of faking
  • material in order to serve their governments’ imperial interests.

Pivot to Peace event: Myths & Facts about genocide – what’s happening in Xinjiang

Pivot to Peace are organising this important event on Saturday 12 June 2021, 3pm US Eastern, 12pm US Pacific, 8pm Britain.

The Biden Administration has chosen to echo the same propaganda claims against China that were made by Trump’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Both the Trump & Biden administration are charging the Chinese government with the crime of genocide against a minority people, the Uighurs, in Xinjiang Autonomous Region in western China. This campaign coincides with an economic war with China, which includes tariffs and sanctions. It also comes as the Pentagon has announced a new military doctrine which prioritizes and prepares the United States with a war on China.

What are the facts? Is China actually carrying out a genocide against this minority Muslim population? Or, is this one more demonization campaign waged by the US government against a targeted country in preparation for confrontation? After-all, the US insisted that Saddam Hussein was a threat to world peace because Iraq possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction, and used that rationale to justify a war against Iraq. There were no Weapons of Mass Destruction. That war that took more than one million lives, was based on lies.

The webinar will feature a Canadian journalist who has been covering the events in Xinjiang, there will also be a historical review of the US government’s involvement in genocide against indigenous people in what is now the United States. And there will be eyewitness reports from legal experts and scholars who have visited Xinjiang.

Speakers include:

  • Canadian Youtuber Daniel Dumbrill
  • Professor of History, Gerald Horne
  • Professor of East Asian and Global History, Kenneth Hammond
  • Superior Court Judge, Julie Tang, Retired
  • Pivot to Peace co-founder, Sheila Xiao

Register for the event here: http://bit.ly/p2p-mythsfacts-rsvp

The event can also be watched here: https://fb.me/e/49mjrnE0a

Nelson Mandela on the Chinese Revolution

The Chinese Revolution has been an inspiration to freedom fighters globally, Nelson Mandela among them. He said:

The revolution in China was a masterpiece, a real masterpiece. If you read how they fought that revolution, you believe in the impossible. It’s just miraculous.

And in his famous autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, he wrote:

I read works by and about Che Guevara, Mao Tse-tung, Fidel Castro. In Edgar Snow’s brilliant Red Star Over China I saw that it was Mao’s determination and non-traditional thinking that had led him to victory.

China gave important support to the South Africans freedom struggle, including providing military training to the earliest armed units of the ANC. In 1999, Mandela became the first South African president to visit China.

No Great Wall: on the continuities of the Chinese Revolution

This essay by Friends of Socialist China co-editor Carlos Martinez argues that there is a common thread running through the hundred-year history of the Communist Party of China. While there have been numerous twists and turns, and several contrasting strategies, the constant factor is the creativity and dedication in forging a path to socialism, improving the lot of the Chinese people, and contributing to a peaceful and prosperous future for humanity.

It was first published on Invent the Future.

The Communist Party of China (CPC) was formed in July 1921. From that time up to the present day, it has led the Chinese Revolution – a revolution to eliminate feudalism, to regain China’s national sovereignty, to end foreign domination of China, to build socialism, to create a better life for the Chinese people, and to contribute to a peaceful and prosperous future for humanity.

Some of these goals have already been achieved; others are ongoing. Thus the Chinese Revolution is a continuing process, and its basic political orientation remains the same.

Feudalism was dismantled in CPC-controlled territories from the early 1930s onwards, and throughout the country in the period immediately following the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949. Similarly, warlord rule was ended and a unified China essentially established in 1949; Hong Kong was returned to Chinese rule in 1997 and Macao in 1999. Only Taiwan continues to be governed separately and to serve foreign interests. And yet in a world system still principally defined by US hegemony, the imperialist threat remains – and is intensifying with the development of a US-led hybrid war against China. Therefore the project of protecting China’s sovereignty and resisting imperialism continues. Similarly, the path to socialism is constantly evolving.

In the course of trying to build socialism in a vast semi-colonial, semi-feudal country, mistakes have certainly been made. The collected works of Marx and Lenin bubble over with profound ideas, but they contain no templates or formulae. Chinese Marxists have had to continuously engage in “concrete analysis of concrete conditions”,1 applying and developing socialist theory, creatively adapting it to an ever-changing material reality. In their foreword to Agnes Smedley’s biography of Zhu De, The Great Road, Leo Huberman and Paul Sweezy wrote that the Chinese communists, “in the midst of their struggle for survival … have proceeded to evolve a more flexible and sophisticated theory which enriched Marxism by reflecting and absorbing the stubborn realities of the Chinese scene.”2

As Liu Shaoqi, a prominent CPC leader until his denunciation during the Cultural Revolution, explained: “because of the distinctive peculiarities in China’s social and historical development and her backwardness in science, it is a unique and difficult task to apply Marxism systematically to China and to transform it from its European form into a Chinese form… Many of these problems have never been solved or raised by the world’s Marxists, for here in China the main section of the masses are not workers but peasants, and the fight is directed against foreign imperialist oppression and medieval survivals, and not against domestic capitalism.”3

This article argues that, while the Chinese Revolution has taken numerous twists and turns, and while the CPC leadership has adopted different strategies at different times, there is a common thread running through modern Chinese history: of the CPC dedicating itself to navigating a path to socialism, development and independence, improving the lot of the Chinese people, and contributing to a peaceful and prosperous future for humanity.

Continue reading No Great Wall: on the continuities of the Chinese Revolution

Yuan Longping, 7 September 1930 – 22 May 2021

We are mourning the death and celebrating the life of the world-famous agronomist Yuan Longping. Known as the ‘father of hybrid rice’, Yuan Longping worked tirelessly and selflessly his entire life in the battle against food poverty. His innovations helped to end malnutrition in China, and are currently in use throughout the world.

A biography and tribute can be found on CGTN.

Congratulations on the successful Mars landing

Infographic highlighting the China’s success in the realms of science and space exploration. In the space of just 72 years, China has transitioned from being one of the poorest and most backward countries in the world, ground down by imperialism, to being a global leader in science and technology. This has been made possible by China’s socialist system.