We are pleased to publish below the speech given by Dr. Jenny Clegg to our meeting to launch People’s China at 75: The Flag Stays Red, held on Thursday March 20, at the Marx Memorial Library in central London.
Jenny makes a number of important points in her speech, noting how the process of socialist revolution and transformation in China had its antecedents in the country’s experience of World War 2. With this year being the 80th anniversary of victory in the Chinese people’s war of resistance against Japanese aggression and the global anti-fascist war, she argues strongly for seeing the conflict as a people’s war and as one with important lessons for today’s international situation, itself displaying ever greater dangers of another global conflagration. Jenny further argues that the left needs to take a realistic view of China and to build that into our own political perspectives and practice.
Jenny is an independent writer and researcher, specialising in China’s development and international role; and a former Senior Lecturer in Asia Pacific Studies at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLAN). She is the author of China’s Global Strategy: towards a multipolar world (Pluto Press, 2009) and Storming the Heavens – Peasants and Revolution in China, 1925-1949 – from a Marxist perspective (Manifesto Press, forthcoming).
People’s China at 75 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.
This book looks at China’s experience of, and contributions, to socialism. But how did socialism in China come about? My chapter covers those first few years from 1949 to 1956 when the nationalist, peasant and worker movements converged to establish the system of public ownership in industry and agriculture.
But there is more to be said to explain where socialism in China came from – the extreme privation, the near national extinction through war and the need to resist, a history I want to suggest which is very relevant to the question today: why study China?
Today the world is in turmoil – Trump kicking off; the spectacular failure of Biden’s leadership with 70 years of the international political liberal order down the drain. When Biden and Starmer supplied Zelensky with long-range missiles to strike deep inside Russia, we came perilously close to World War 3.
How on earth did things come to this? From history we may gain perspective. As we stand at the brink of WW3 let’s recall WW2 and how it sparked China’s trajectory to socialism through mass mobilisation.
China was the country most changed by WW2: 35 million causalities, the majority civilians; some 100 million, nearly one fifth of the population, uprooted from their homes, wandering aimlessly. Out of the terrible suffering came the revolutionary will to fight for a new, an independent China.
The fact that the Chinese united front armies contained around a million and a half Japanese troops, over 60 percent of their forces, prevented the opening of a second front against the USSR, and blocked attempts to establish German-Japanese control across Eurasia. Had this happened the war would have been lost. But China’s contribution today is barely acknowledged in the West. People should ask why?
WW2 was a people’s war – made up of infinite acts of international solidarity: Chinese armies that came to the relief of British and Americans troops surrounded by the Japanese in the jungles of Burma; the guerrillas that aided POWs escaping Japanese camps in Hong Kong; the fishermen who saved British soldiers from being drowned by the Japanese in the East China Sea when their PoW ship was torpedoed; the Chinese seamen in Liverpool who served on the dangerous Transatlantic run, but who didn’t even get the same pay as British merchant seamen.
On our side, there were all the ordinary men and women back in Britain who donated through their unions and cooperative societies to send medical aid to China because they understood the war in Europe and Asia was a shared cause against fascism, the most aggressive form of imperialism.
This has all been forgotten and suppressed. But it is apposite to recall right now, as the UN is pushed towards extinction, that victory of international solidarity which was expressed in those opening words of the UN Charter “We the peoples of the United Nations…determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war….”
The Cold War was to extinguish the spirit of the people’s war in Europe, but its momentum surged elsewhere. As Mao recognised, the war in Asia was a war of liberation.
The defeat of worldwide fascism was to unleash progressive and national liberation movements across not only Asia but also Africa. In China in 1949, the people’s war brought the CPC to victory over the Nationalist forces, forces which represented the landlords and big bourgeoisie backed by the US. Freed from the bonds of feudalism and imperialism, the Chinese people embarked on a fundamental social and economic transformation through mass-based land redistribution, impacting on each and every household, together with a marriage law reform which espoused equality for women, shaking the hold of traditional Confucian family ideology.
The mass movements, the peasants especially enthusiastic for cooperation, then brought their pressure to bear on the national bourgeoisie which was to surrender in 1956.
The world was changing fundamentally, but the Cold War imposed a fake consciousness in the West of international order: not an order of equal nations brought about by the people’s desire for peace but a repackaged imperialism overlayed by political and economic liberalism and centred on the Atlantic, one that leaves us disarmed as a new phase of great change breaks today.
The Cold War still lives on in our minds, obliterating China, distorting our view of history and our understanding of how today’s world came about. Now China has become a major power influencing global trends – but where it has sprung from? People in the West have no idea and cannot understand what is happening.
The facade of liberal internationalism has been exploded by its hypocrisy over Gaza and lost on the battlefields of Ukraine. Now Trump is taking a wrecking ball to the UN order, and we are heading back to the pre-war law of the jungle where might calls the shots and everyone else bows down. Or are we?
China, following the objective historical trajectory, seeks to rebuild the UN system to return it to the centre of world peace and stability. Working quietly behind the scenes it inches countries around the world towards unity around UN principles: the China-Brazil peace plan; the Beijing Declaration agreed by the 14 Palestinian organisations, which has helped in the formulation of the Arab proposals for Gaza and so on.
To me these efforts answer the question: why China? Without understanding China. we can’t get our bearings amidst all this confusion; and without the history, we cannot understand what China is doing.
The political elites of the Western world don’t have a clue: with their distorted view of history and their place in the world, they’re heading us off up a blind alley of excessive militarisation, decoupling from the rising Global South even as they do so.
For its part, the Global South is starting to turn in a different direction, at least derisking from the West’s agendas. China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi recently predicted greater numbers joining the BRICS.
People in the West maybe sense a sea change, with a stagnating Europe dissolving in confusion and Trump seemingly set on committing hara kiri. The Global South, if not immediately, seems key to the future.
But on the left, there are two mistakes: there are those who, albeit opposing militarism, are so wrapped up in short term considerations, they avoid the bigger picture to share the same tunnel vision as the Western political elites. This in effect perpetuates the Cold War mentality. Why is it so hard to support the China Brazil peace plan for Ukraine? 110 countries do. Should we not at least consider the Arab plan for Gaza which China supports?
But nor should we look at China through starry eyes. Being socialist does not make everything perfect. China has its own structural problems to sort out, so let’s not raise expectations. China can be a stabiliser in a world in tumult, but it cannot be its saviour: when Arab leaders asked Wang Yi recently how could China help out in the Middle East, he replied in so many words: I have every confidence in your countries’ abilities to sort out the problems of your region among yourselves.
Here in the West, we socialists have to identify the priorities; to do so, we need to find our bearings in history. This means bringing China back in to our view of the world so as to make a sober analysis of the current situation; we need to clear our vision of Cold War distortion so we can see how the world is unfolding all the better. We need to be much more conscious of China’s agendas, how it works to reshape world agendas, and we need, each one of us, to build China into our own political perspectives and practice. Doing so may help to bring us closer to socialism in our own countries.
