The following is the full text of the remarks prepared by Keith Bennett for the 20 September online launch of China’s Foreign Policy and the Making of a Multipolar World: Changes Unseen in a Century, which he edited along with Carlos Martinez. (His speech as delivered was abbreviated due to time constraints.)
Taking up the concept of changes unseen in a century, advanced by Xi Jinping and incorporated into the book’s title, Keith notes that: “One key manifestation of this in our part of the world can be summed up in three words: Gaza changes everything.”
He adds that: “It is above all this new generation coming to anti-imperialist politics that we hope our book can reach.”
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In his testimonial for the book that we’ve been launching online today, George Galloway, as most if not all of you will know currently a parliamentary candidate for the constituency recently held by the prime minister of the United Kingdom, writes:
“Only the light-hearted care naught for where China goes next. The future of China will shape yours.”
One might disagree with George on many things, but on this at least reasonable people should surely not differ.
Yet, as China, to paraphrase Xi Jinping, steadily advances to the centre of the world stage, in our part of the world there is still a dearth of serious scholarship and a serious lack of understanding of what is actually happening, how the country and its leadership actually thinks and acts, and how that is changing the face not only of China but of the world as a whole.
There is not a shortage of copy per se. If you pick up a comic like the Telegraph, the Mail or the Murdoch Times, you can, on a daily basis, read entertaining fiction, suggesting for example that China is bugging tractors in order to harvest the kind of prosaic information readily available on a government website. Slightly more sophisticated versions of the same are offered by the chronically anachronistic voice of classical liberalism, The Economist, and even the venerable pink paper, the Financial Times.
There are a few, but still far too few, books offering excellent Marxist analysis of China, including from Carlos Martinez, Jenny Clegg, and the late and always much missed Jude Woodward. And from John Ross, Ken Hammond and Roland Boer. There are also the rightly popular work of Martin Jacques and the phenomenal scholarship of Peter Nolan.
Yet if you go into a branch of Waterstones, for example, with the possible exception of Martin Jacques’ key work, thanks in large part to its brilliantly provocative title, you’re highly unlikely to find any of these authors.
What you’re likely to find is the scribblings of the renegade Jung Chang, who serves up a diet of political pornography thinly disguised as biography; of the charlatan Gordon Chang, who informed us in 2001 that China was certain to collapse by 2011, yet is still, presumably as a kind of therapy, periodically paraded in public as some kind of China expert; or of Frank Dikötter, whose dubious scholarship would have us believe that the greatest revolution in human history is little more than one great, century-long criminal conspiracy.
What this all reflects is that the battle on the ideological front, and the battle for public opinion, are key parts of the cold war against socialism and human progress; and are key fronts in the class struggle.
Chairman Mao observed that to make a revolution it is always necessary first of all to create public opinion. And the same goes for counter-revolution.
It was precisely in order to take up that battle for public opinion, as a key front in the class struggle, the struggle for peace and against war, the struggle for socialism and against barbarism, that, in May 2021, Carlos, Danny Haiphong and myself, took the initiative to establish Friends of Socialist China. And why Carlos and myself embarked on this book project.
As they have demonstrated again in their contributions today, the authors represent some of the finest activist scholars working in the China field today. We are indebted to them for giving so generously of their time and their wisdom.
I use the designation activist scholars advisedly. This is exactly what we are aiming for. As Stalin well put it in his celebrated work, Foundations of Leninism:
“Of course, theory becomes purposeless if it is not connected with revolutionary practice, just as practice gropes in the dark if its path is not illumined by revolutionary theory. But theory can become a tremendous force in the working-class movement if it is built up in indissoluble connection with revolutionary practice.”
Continue reading This is a book above all for the new generation mobilised by Gaza
