The meeting room of London’s Marx Memorial Library was packed on the evening of Thursday March 20, with others joining online, for the launch of People’s China at 75 – The Flag Stays Red, edited by Keith Bennett and Carlos Martinez, the editors of this website.
The meeting was chaired by Carlos Martinez, with speakers, Keith Bennett, Professor Radhika Desai and Dr. Jenny Clegg. They were followed by a lively round of discussion and questions and answers. Andrew Murray was also due to speak but unfortunately was not able to make it.
We publish below the text of Keith’s opening speech. The meeting can be viewed on YouTube (and the video is also embedded below).
The book is available from the publishers in paperback and digital formats. Note that, for the month of March 2025, to celebrate the launch meeting, Praxis Press are running a 25 percent discount on their full catalogue – the discount code is 25FOR25.
Thank you for coming this evening and thank you also to those who have joined us online and those who will watch online in the days to come.
We’re fortunate to have a number of the authors who contributed chapters to this book with us this evening and doubtless they’ll introduce their work and the themes they sought to address.
As co-editor, along with Carlos, I want to say a bit about why and how we came to produce it.
There are two well-known sayings in English that I’d like to mention here.
The first is: Never judge a book by its cover.
And the second is: There’s an exception to every rule.
So, please take a look at the beautiful cover of our book.
I’m sure many of you have already seen it. I submit that it represents one of the exceptions to the rule. In words, as well as graphically, it sets out what we want to say and where we stand.
As Friends of Socialist China, we conceived of this book as part of our celebration of the 75th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, which fell on October 1st last year. And thanks to the stupendous efforts of our publisher, comrade and friend, Kenny Coyle, who also contributed a highly thoughtful and enlightening chapter on the antecedents of socialism with Chinese characteristics in Lenin’s explorations on the ways of building socialism, we got it out in time for our celebration and conference, held in London’s historic Bolivar Hall on the last Saturday of September.
With a day-long conference attended by well over 100 people, a book, and a special supplement in the Morning Star, it was a landmark in the development of our work.
Some comrades have kindly said that we must have worked very hard to produce the book. I’ll let others be the judge of that. But I’ll just say that we did so in about three months – if I recall correctly – from start to finish; from conceiving the idea to the published product.
We could do so thanks to the amazing cooperation we had from all our authors and, as I’ve just mentioned, the sterling efforts of our publisher.
We didn’t have a particular idea for the book title when we started. But one of the first submissions we received was from our comrade Ken Hammond in the United States. Giving a broad overview of China’s long march towards socialism, Ken concluded:
“The flag stays red, and the struggle continues.”
It was Carlos who said: “I think Ken’s just given us our title.”
It resonated with us on at least three, inter-related levels:
First: It summed up the essential message we sought to get across to the working-class movement and progressive people generally. As Xi Jinping put it in 2013: “Socialism with Chinese characteristics is socialism and nothing else.”
Second: It also brought to mind one of the most famous books by a working-class leader of this country. Phil Piratin’s ‘Our Flag Stays Red’ has educated generations of socialists in the class struggle and has seldom, if ever, been out of print, since its first publication in 1948. Piratin, incidentally, had been a leader of the anti-fascist struggle at the Battle of Cable Street in 1936, alongside other Jewish East Enders, later better known for their friendship with China, like Jack Perry, Michael Shapiro and Jack Shapiro. When Phil was elected as the Communist MP for Mile End in the 1945 general election, he was joined by 11 communists elected to Stepney Borough Council. Their leader was Michael Shapiro, who in 1949 was one of four comrades sent by the Communist Party of Great Britain to help the newly founded People’s Republic, and who stayed in China until his death in 1986, when Deng Xiaoping acclaimed him as “a staunch international soldier and sincere friend of the Chinese people.”
And third: It serves to mark out our modest volume as a work of committed scholarship. Authors like Jenny Clegg, Andrew Murray, Roland Boer, Mick Dunford, Efe Can Gurcan and Radhika Desai are second to none in their understanding of China and the Chinese revolution or of Marxist theory. Or, as the saying goes, in any combination of one and two above.
All of the chapters, I believe, can stand up to peer review and critical commentary. But they are not abstract musings from an ivory tower. As I have expressed it elsewhere, this is above all a work of scholar activists.
Again, perhaps no one better epitomises this than Ken Hammond. Professor of East Asian and Global History at New Mexico State University, author of numerous books and scholarly articles on China, and a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Ken was one of the student organisers at Ohio’s Kent State University at the time of the 1970 May 4th massacre, when four unarmed students were killed and nine wounded when the National Guard fired on a peaceful protest against Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia, following the overthrow of the progressive and non-aligned government of Prince Norodom Sihanouk. Some events become seared in one’s mind with a song. For me, as a 12-year-old, as I was at the time, it was the words from Neil Young’s song ‘Ohio’, first recorded a month after the massacre:
What if you knew her and found her dead on the ground
How can you run when you know
I first heard the song on Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s live double album, ‘Four Way Street’.
Ken is an example of someone who has never run because he knows. And it is that commitment to impassioned scholarship, to scholarship that serves the class struggle, the struggle against imperialism, for peace and socialism, that we hope animates our book. At a time when a new generation is being brought into struggle in response to the genocidal war against the Palestinian people and in support of their heroic resistance, just as Ken’s generation was by the war in Vietnam. At a time when the new Cold War against China is becoming dangerously heated and when the nuclear clock has never been closer to striking midnight. When the death rattle of social democracy, at least as any kind of expression of working class interests in however partial or degraded a form, is expressed in a Labour government waging war on some of the poorest and most vulnerable members of our society. And when the looming climate catastrophe threatens the very existence of life on earth.
In other words, as with all the work of Friends of Socialist China, of course we do it to support and defend the People’s Republic of China.
But that is not the only, or even necessarily the main, reason. At least not as defined in any narrowly national or parochial sense.
In 1956, Mao Zedong, paying tribute to Dr. Sun Yat Sen, said: “Things are always progressing. It is only forty-five years since the Revolution of 1911, but the face of China has entirely changed. In another forty-five years, that is, by the year 2001, at the beginning of the 21st century, China will have undergone an even greater change. It will have become a powerful industrial socialist country. And that is as it should be. China is a land with an area of 9,600,000 square kilometres and a population of 600 million, and it ought to make a greater contribution to humanity. But for a long time in the past its contribution was far too small. For this we are regretful.”
In 1989, faced with the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe, and what proved to be the terminal crisis of the Soviet Union, Deng Xiaoping told Tanzania’s first president Julius Nyerere: “So long as socialism does not collapse in China, it will always hold its ground in the world.”
And in 2018, Xi Jinping was able to say: “China’s success proves that socialism is not dead. It is thriving. Just imagine this: had socialism failed in China, had our communist party collapsed like the party in the Soviet Union, then global socialism would lapse into a long dark age. And communism, like Karl Marx once said, would be a haunting spectre lingering in limbo.”
We may all have an image in our heads of the perfect Socialist China we would like to see. China’s socialism is far from perfect. It is clearly a work in progress.
But, especially considering our own situation, and the state of our own movement, perhaps we should focus less on China’s mistakes and shortcomings – real as they undoubtedly are – and more on what sort of world it would be if by some terrible historical tragedy People’s China was to cease to exist.
Hundreds of millions of Chinese people would likely be plunged back into poverty. Global poverty alleviation would be effectively nullified.
As with the former Soviet Union, and as the awful Ukraine conflict so starkly illustrates, the prospect of fratricidal war would loom large.
Whilst China, quite correctly, does not seek to export revolution, it is increasingly proving the indispensable friend, partner and comrade of every country whose people seek to embark on the socialist road or even just the road of independent national development. As Xi Jinping has expressed it, socialism with Chinese characteristics represents a new option and a point of reference for those countries who wish to develop their economies while maintaining their independence.
Without Socialist China, as the Belt and Road Initiative best illustrates, dozens of countries of the Global South, well over 100 of them, would have no viable alternative to the diktats of the IMF and the World Bank, not to mention the increasingly brazen and unhinged bullying by the orange thug in the White House.
Without Socialist China, no major power would be truly committed to preventing climate catastrophe. Truly committed to the survival of humanity and to a human community of shared future. The latter increasingly a perquisite for the former. If first Engels and later Rosa Luxemburg presciently spoke about the choice for humanity being between socialism or barbarism, today it becomes ever more apposite and necessary to speak of the choice being that between socialism or extinction.
This is why it is so necessary to understand the line of march of the contemporary world’s bastion of socialism.
I’ll sum this up in a relatively long quote from Xi Jinping, speaking in 2013[1]:
“The Chinese model represents the path of Chinese socialism created by the Chinese people through their own endeavours. We are confident that as Chinese socialism progresses, our institutions will undoubtedly mature, the strengths of our system will become self-evident, and our development path will assuredly become wider and have greater impact on the world. We must have confidence in our path, our theory and our system….
“Second, the process by which the people build socialism under the leadership of the Party can be divided into two phases – one that preceded the launch of reform and opening up in 1978, and a second thereafter. The two phases – at once related to and distinct from each other – both mark endeavours of the Chinese people to build socialism under the Party’s leadership. Chinese socialism was initiated after the launch of reform and opening up and based on more than 20 years of experience after the socialist system was established in the 1950s. There are three aspects to this issue.
“One, if our Party had not taken a resolute decision to launch the policy of reform and opening up in 1978, or had failed to implement it in full, or had failed to steer it in the correct direction, socialist China would not have made the progress we can see today and would have experienced serious crises like those that afflicted the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries. It would also have been difficult to advance reform and opening up if we had not founded the PRC in 1949 and then launched socialist revolution and construction, which created favourable theoretical, material and institutional conditions and left us with both positive and negative experiences to draw on.
“Two, although the two phases are very different in their guiding thoughts, principles, policies, and practical work, they are by no means separated from or opposed to each other. During socialist construction our Party put forward many sound proposals, which were not implemented at that time but have been carried out since the launch of reform and opening up. We must follow and develop them in the future. Karl Marx said a long time ago, ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.’
“Three, we should conduct a proper assessment of the phase preceding the launch of reform and opening up. We should neither negate the pre-1978 phase in comparison with the post-1978 phase, nor the converse. In the pre-1978 phase we accumulated the experience and know-how that created the conditions necessary for the post-1978 phrase, and our experience since then is a continuation, adjustment and development of the former. In our assessment of the period leading up to 1978 we should adhere to the principles of seeking truth from facts and distinguishing the trunk from the branches. We should uphold truth, rectify our errors, and draw on our successes and failures. These are the foundations that will allow us to advance the cause of the Party and the people.
“The reason I have highlighted this major political issue is that if not properly addressed, it will have serious consequences. A Qing Dynasty scholar said, ‘To destroy a country, you must first obliterate its history.’ Hostile forces inside and outside our country often cast aspersions on the history of our revolution and the PRC, trying every means to attack, denigrate and vilify us. Their ultimate aim is to confuse our people and encourage their followers to overthrow CPC leadership and our socialist system. One important reason for the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the downfall of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) was that the ferocity of their ideological struggle resulted in total negation of the history of the Soviet Union and the CPSU, repudiation of Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, and the embracing of historical nihilism. Due to the resulting ideological confusion, CPSU organisations, at all levels, no longer played their role, and the troops no longer followed CPSU leadership.
Ultimately the CPSU fell apart, and the socialist Soviet Union disintegrated. Their failure must serve as a lesson to us.”
In a word, the flag must stay red, which happens to be the title of our book.
Thank you for listening.
[1] Issues concerning socialism with Chinese characteristics, January 5, 2013
