History Archives - Friends of Socialist China

Liverpool meeting on Chinese seafarers’ long fight for justice – Saturday November 14

The North West Trade Union International Committee is organising an important public meeting in Liverpool on Saturday November 14 on the theme: ‘The Liverpool Chinese Seafarers – over 80 years of fighting for Justice’.

The publicity for the meeting states that the 20,000+ strong Chinese merchant seamen’s pool in Liverpool during WW2 served an invaluable role during the entire Battle of the Atlantic at great risk to life. Once the war ended, many were secretly deported, and their families left behind in Liverpool have long campaigned for the release of details on what happened to their fathers and to demand an apology from the government.

The repatriation episode after the war cannot be detached from the seamen’s unequal treatment throughout the war. To organise against the discrimination in pay and conditions, sometime around October 1941 a branch of the Chinese Seamen’s Union was organised in the city, and from February to April the following year there were a series of strikes with some violent confrontations with police which saw Chinese sailors jailed. The seafarers eventually won an equal war risk bonus but not equal pay.

This event marks the donation of papers about the Liverpool Chinese Seamen’s Union collected at the time by Arthur Clegg, who was the national organiser of the China Campaign Committee, to the Maritime Museum Archives in Liverpool, by his daughter, the author and activist, Dr Jenny Clegg.

These documents, including information about the union, its constitution and elected committee, as well as correspondence and details pertaining to the seamen’s claims, are of considerable significance. In the first place they show that the Chinese did not take discrimination lying down but stood up for their equal rights against colonial-style practices; they also show there were people in Britain who supported them – through the China Campaign Committee, which had been set up in 1937 in solidarity with China’s resistance against Japanese aggression, they also received assistance from the then National Union of Seamen and the National Council of Civil Liberties.

Speakers at the event will include:

Dr Jenny Clegg – China author and campaigner
Eddie Dempsey – RMT (The National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers) General Secretary
Kim Johnson – Labour MP for Liverpool Riverside
Judy Kinnin – Long term family campaigner for justice

The meeting will be held 2–4.30pm at The Casa Bar, 29 Hope St, Liverpool L1 9BQ, a popular venue for progressive activities in the city, founded by former Liverpool dockworkers.

You can register to attend the event here. And for further background, see here.

Kim Jong Un visits Chinese border city of Dandong to honour Chinese People’s Volunteers

Kim Jong Un, general secretary of the Workers’ Party of Korea and president of the State Affairs of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), paid a visit to Dandong, a border city in northeast China’s Liaoning Province facing the DPRK across the Yalu (Amnok) River, on October 24, the eve of the 76th anniversary of the entry of the Chinese People’s Volunteer (CPV) Army into the war known in the DPRK as the Fatherland Liberation War and in China as the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea.

Kim and his party made the journey by crossing the new bridge connecting the two countries that opened on October 15.

Kim was greeted and accompanied throughout his day-long visit by Wang Huning, China’s top political adviser, who is a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) and who conveyed General Secretary of the CPC Central Committee and Chinese President Xi Jinping’s cordial greetings and best wishes to the DPRK leader.

The Xinhua News Agency reported that Wang greeted Kim at the square of the Memorial Hall of the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea and accompanied him to present a flower basket to the memorial tower.

During their meeting, Wang said that on the occasion of the 76th anniversary of the CPV’s entry into the DPRK to fight in the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea, General Secretary Kim Jong Un’s special trip to Dandong fully demonstrates how much the party and government of the DPRK value the China-DPRK friendship forged with blood. He added that the visit is highly significant, as it not only carries forward the traditional friendship between China and the DPRK and consolidates the popular support for friendship, but also deepens political mutual trust and advances cooperation and development. China stands ready to work with the DPRK to unswervingly implement the important consensus reached between the top leaders of the two parties and two countries and take their common socialist cause as a bond to further develop China-DPRK relations.

Kim asked Wang to convey his cordial greetings and best wishes to General Secretary Xi Jinping and wished the upcoming fifth plenary session of the 20th Central Committee of the CPC success. He said that he has come to Dandong on this special trip to pay tribute to the martyrs of the CPV, who sacrificed their lives to support the DPRK at a critical historical juncture, and to express the DPRK’s heartfelt gratitude and eternal respect for these heroes.

General Secretary Xi Jinping’s historic visit to the DPRK in June this year demonstrates the high importance attached to DPRK-China relations and marks a milestone in the development of bilateral ties, Kim added. Noting that this year marks the 65th anniversary of the signing of the DPRK-China Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance, he thanked China for its long-term support and assistance to the DPRK’s socialist cause and said the prospects for cooperation between the two sides are very broad. The DPRK admires the remarkable development achievements scored by the Chinese people and their rightful important international standing under the leadership of General Secretary Xi Jinping and the DPRK stands ready to work with China to carry forward historical friendship, expand practical cooperation, and bring tangible benefits to the people of both countries.

The Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) noted that the memorial hall visited by Kim is a “monument to great friendship that tells forever the sacred and excellent history and invincible unity of the DPRK-China friendship and always brings closer the peoples of the two countries, who forged their genuine comradely relations and militant friendship through the realisation of the common ideal for socialism and the bloody struggle against the imperialist aggression and have creditably carried forward and developed them century after century and generation after generation.”

It reported Kim Jong Un as saying that it is a natural duty and obligation to remember the great years and history in reverence at the place where the CPV martyrs were dispatched, adding that it was a moment to recollect the preciousness of the DPRK-China friendship forged at the cost of blood. We will always remember the history when the excellent sons and daughters of the Chinese people helped our revolution at the cost of their blood and steadily and firmly carry forward the history of the DPRK-China friendship, he noted. And he extended thanks to esteemed Comrade General Secretary Xi Jinping for paying special and meticulous attention to his visit, asked to convey his warm greetings and best wishes to Comrade Xi Jinping and expressed deep thanks for the warm hospitality accorded by Dandong City and Liaoning Province.

Kim Jong Un also visited the Dandong City Bus Factory and said farewell to his Chinese comrades on the new bridge linking the two socialist neighbours. Kim Jong Un sincerely hoped that the Chinese party and government would carry on the course of the rapid development of the PRC with better and plentiful successes under the experienced and seasoned leadership of Comrade Xi Jinping.

On the same day, China and the DPRK jointly held a completion ceremony for the renovation project for the Chinese People’s Volunteers (CPV) martyrs’ cemeteries in Sinphyong County, North Hwanghae Province of the DPRK.

Qi Han, charge d’affaires ad interim of the Chinese Embassy in the DPRK, said that 76 years ago, the CPV fought shoulder to shoulder with the DPRK army and people, shared weal and woe, and the traditional China-DPRK friendship forged in blood will never fade. China stands ready to continue to work with the DPRK to implement the important consensus reached by the top leaders of the two parties and the two countries, do well in honouring and commemorating the CPV martyrs in the DPRK, consolidate traditional bonds, enhance strategic coordination, maintain regional peace, honour the martyrs who sacrificed their lives and benefit the two peoples through peace and development.

DPRK Vice-Minister of Urban Management Kang Chol Ho said that the brilliant feats, noble soul and self-sacrificing spirit of the CPV who fought bravely against the common enemy under the uplifted banner of resisting America and aiding Korea, safeguarding the home and defending the motherland will be conveyed forever along with the DPRK-China friendship.

Hong Zongming, vice minister of China’s Ministry of Veterans Affairs, leading a delegation of his ministry, said the memorial facilities for the CPV martyrs in the DPRK are “an important platform” for carrying forward the spirit of the fallen heroes and the China-DPRK friendship.

The delegation of China’s Ministry of Veterans Affairs arrived in Pyongyang by train on October 22. It met with Kim Son Il, minister of Urban Management of the DPRK, on October 25 and on the same day participated in a wreath laying ceremony at central Pyongyang’s Friendship Tower, which honours the Chinese People’s Volunteers.

They were joined by Kim Hyong Sik, vice-chairman of the Standing Committee of the Supreme People’s Assembly of the DPRK, Mun Song Hyok, vice department director of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea, Kim Myong Su, vice-minister of Foreign Affairs, along with Qi Han, charge d’affaires ad interim, and other officials of the Chinese embassy and other Chinese guests and residents in the DPRK.

KCNA reported that “before looking round the tower, the participants paid a silent tribute to the memory of the fallen fighters of the Chinese People’s Volunteers who bravely fought, displaying a matchless self-sacrificing spirit, in the sacred war for repelling the imperialist armed invasion, out of their noble internationalist obligation”.

The Ministry of Veterans Affairs delegation also visited Pyongyang’s Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum, as well as the cemeteries of fallen soldiers of the Chinese People’s Volunteers in Pyongyang Municipality and South Phyongan Province, and left for home by air on October 26.

Joint commemorations were also held in Shenyang, the capital of China’s Liaoning province.

A commentary carried by KCNA lauded the contributions and heroic feats of the CPV. Setting the historical context, it wrote:

“Today marks the 76th anniversary of the entry of the Chinese People’s Volunteers into the Korean front.

“The DPRK-China friendship is an invincible one firmly united with comradely friendship and bloody ties in the struggle against foreign aggressors. In the days of the great anti-Japanese war, the revolutionaries and other peoples of Korea and China provided the precious cornerstone of friendship and excellent tradition while waging an armed struggle against the Japanese imperialists, the common enemy. The Korean communists rendered selfless assistance to China’s revolutionary civil war, thus making an active contribution to the birth of new China.

“The CPV’s entry into the Korean front was a clear demonstration of the revolutionary unity of the peoples of the two countries formed and deepened at the cost of blood in the anti-Japanese war and the struggle for nation building.”

Among various historical events it highlighted: “In October 1952 the US imperialists launched a desperate attack on Sanggam Pass by mobilising four divisions, over 100 planes, many artillery pieces and tanks, but the CPV soldiers fought bravely to the last. In this battle, Huang Jiguang, who had received severe injuries to his arms and a shoulder, blocked the enemy’s pillbox with his chest to open the way for the advance of the unit… The heroic feats performed by excellent sons and daughters of the Chinese people in the arduous war are recorded on the shores of Lake Jangjin and the Chongchon River and Height 391. In those days, a number of heroic soldiers including Mao Anying [son of Comrade Mao Zedong], Yang Liandi, Qiu Shaoyun and Sun Zhanyuan were produced.

“The CPV soldiers regarded the Korean people as their own parents and brothers in their native places and sacrificed their lives for them without hesitation. The self-sacrificing spirit displayed by Luo Shengjiao, martyr who saved a child at the cost of his life, and the heart-touching stories that a CPV army surgeon gave a transfusion of [his own] blood to a wounded scout of the People’s Army are still deeply engraved in the hearts of the Korean people.”

Earlier, on October 22, KCNA reported that Kim Jong Un had received a reply message from Xi Jinping on October 20, in response to the message sent by Kim greeting the 77th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China.

Xi Jinping wrote: “For 77 years since the founding of new China, the Chinese people worked two miracles – the rapid development of the economy and the long-term stability of society – through an uninterrupted effort in single-hearted unity under the firm leadership of the Communist Party of China. They have achieved the goal of building a comprehensively well-off society in an all-round way as scheduled and are making a dynamic advance towards the goal of comprehensively building a modern and powerful socialist country.

“The two countries, China and the DPRK, are linked by the same mountain and rivers. They are friendly generation after generation and [have been] defending and helping each other while sharing their destiny…

“We are pleased to see the DPRK opening up a new era of overall development of socialism. I believe that the socialist cause of the DPRK will surely and continuously open up a new phase under the firm leadership of the Workers’ Party of Korea headed by you, Comrade General Secretary.”

Meanwhile, on October 28, Xinhua reported that China has confirmed the identities of eight more Chinese People’s Volunteers (CPV) martyrs who lost their lives during the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea. The Ministry of Veterans Affairs noted that this marks further progress in efforts to identify the remains of CPV martyrs repatriated from the Republic of Korea (ROK).

According to an agreement between China and the ROK signed in late 2013, the two sides consult every year on the handover of remains of Chinese soldiers found in the ROK. And since 2014, China and the ROK have completed 13 consecutive handovers involving the remains of 1,023 CPV martyrs.

Xinhua added that in recent years China has intensified efforts to identify the remains of CPV martyrs, including the creation of a DNA database for martyrs and their relatives, offering solid technical and data support to help more families find their missing loved ones.

Oliver Vargas: The Long March – lessons in overcoming the impossible

In the following article, Bolivian journalist and CGTN commentator Oliver Vargas reflects on a recent journey following in the footsteps of the Red Army through Sichuan province, the scene of some of the most decisive and gruelling episodes of the Long March, which concluded 90 years ago this month.

Oliver describes how the Red Army won over the Yi people of Liangshan by respecting their culture and treating them as equals – an example, he suggests, of the kind of cooperation the world needs today as against the bullying of unipolar hegemony. He recounts the seizure of the Luding Bridge over the Dadu River, where the revolutionaries calmly analysed an apparently hopeless situation and found a way through; and the crossing of the snow-capped Jiajin Mountain and the swamplands of the high grasslands, where many lost their lives.

Writing from the perspective of a Latin American facing the “Donroe Doctrine”, Oliver concludes that the Long March offers a powerful lesson for the Global South: “When organised and united, the people can win against all the odds.”

See also Xi Jinping’s speech marking the anniversary and our co-editor Carlos Martinez’s article on the Long March at 90.

A manifesto, a propaganda force, a seeding-machine: the Long March at 90

In the following article, Friends of Socialist China co-editor Carlos Martinez marks the 90th anniversary of the conclusion of the Red Army’s Long March, taking as his starting point Mao Zedong’s description of the march as “a manifesto… a propaganda force… a seeding-machine”.

Carlos traces the road to the Long March – from the Kuomintang’s betrayal of the First United Front and the 1927 Shanghai massacre to the reorientation towards the countryside and the five encirclement campaigns against the Jiangxi Soviet – and recounts the march itself, including the crossings of the Jinsha and Dadu rivers and the seizure of the Luding Bridge. He emphasises that the Long March was also a landmark in the development of Chinese Marxism: the Zunyi Conference brought Mao to the core of decision-making, and the march created a political distance from the Comintern representatives’ dogmatic interpretation of Marxism, laying the deepest roots of socialism with Chinese characteristics.

The article concludes that each generation has its own Long March – today walked in the victory over extreme poverty, the drive for scientific and technological self-reliance, and the building of an ecological civilisation – and that, for the Global South, the march remains the great demonstration that a people organised around a clear political project can defeat apparently overwhelming force.

Xi Jinping made a similar point in his speech marking the anniversary on October 22, stressing that “the road of the Long March continues to extend”.

Xi Jinping: the road of the Long March continues to extend

On October 22, a gathering was held at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the victory of the Red Army’s Long March – the epic 1934–36 operation that saved and set the course of the Chinese Revolution.

Addressing the gathering, Chinese President Xi Jinping stressed that “the Party’s right leadership and the establishment of Mao Zedong’s core position were decisive for the victory”, along with firm conviction, the integration of Marxism with China’s specific realities, and reliance on the people. Describing the great spirit of the Long March as “a precious treasure and a powerful driving force”, he noted that “the road of the Long March continues to extend”, calling for new achievements on the new Long March towards building China into a great modern socialist country in all respects. For more on the history and contemporary significance of the Long March, see our co-editor Carlos Martinez’s article marking its 90th anniversary.

In memory of Ambassador Kojo Owusu Gyamadua Amoo-Gottfried, 19 February 1934 – 24 July 2026

Our co-editor Keith Bennett remembers his friend and comrade Kojo Amoo-Gottfried, who passed away peacefully in Ghana on July 24, 2026, at the age of 92.

His Excellency Ambassador Kojo Owusu Gyamadua Amoo-Gottfried, known to one and all simply as Kojo, was a Ghanaian patriot and public servant, a revolutionary Pan-Africanist, a Marxist, a member of the Ashanti royal family, a scientist, an Ambassador to Cuba, China, Switzerland and the United Nations in Geneva, a member of the Friends of Socialist China advisory group, a husband, father, grandfather and to me personally a much-loved friend and comrade.

Although I was aware of the fact that he had been ailing for some time, it still came as a considerable shock when I somewhat belatedly learned of his passing.

On the introduction of a mutual friend, we first met in the 1990s in Beijing, where he was serving as his country’s ambassador. We found ourselves wondering how we had not met before, considering the number of friends we had in common. But we soon made up for lost time, with the years that followed filled with numerous meetings and activities in Beijing during his period of office, in London where he had a family home and still visited regularly until his very last years, and on visits together to Durban and Hanoi.

Ambassador to China, and concurrently non-resident ambassador to Vietnam, Cambodia and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, in the late 1990s, was his last job before retiring. But his close relationship with the Chinese revolution long predated this. He would often recall being at boarding school and sharing the excitement with his lifelong best friend Captain Kojo Tsikata at the news of the founding of the People’s Republic of China and their discussing what this meant for the anti-colonial struggle in Africa.

Brits in revolution: Weaving the struggles of British and Chinese people into a community of shared future

The following is the text of a talk given by our co-editor Keith Bennett on September 23rd to a meeting organised by the Birmingham People’s History Archive and held at its offices housed in the Birmingham and Midland Institute.

With the title of Brits in Revolution, Keith introduces various British people whose lives became entwined with the Chinese revolution in various ways and in its different phases and stages and travels back and forth between Britain and China, between the Chinese revolution and progressive and working class movements in Britain, and between individuals in both countries, illustrating in this way how each influenced and reinforced the other, creating history in the process.

Starting with the first opium war waged by British imperialism against China and the Chartist movement in Britain, the first mass political expression of the modern proletariat, in the early 1840s, Keith takes us through the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, the early collaboration between British and Chinese communists in the 1920s, the war of resistance against Japanese aggression, the early days of building New China and the more complicated period of the 1960s.

Inevitably these snapshots omit many great events and many individuals who richly deserve to be remembered, but Keith concludes:

“In this spirit, in going back and forth, I have tried to draw out how the role of British people in supporting and even participating in the Chinese revolution is not simply a matter of something that happened ‘over there’. Rather it represented two mutually reinforcing fronts of ultimately the same fight, a struggle whose commonality was forged through the interweaving of numerous threads in such a way that they could not actually be dissevered. And further that here we can perceive part of the makings of what Xi Jinping now calls a community of shared future for humanity.”

From Norman Bethune and Dwarakanath Kotnis to Hussam Abu Safiya – medicine in the fight for national liberation

October 7, 2026 marked the third anniversary of the Al Aqsa Flood, when fighters of the Islamic Resistance Movement Hamas and other militant Palestinian resistance organisations broke out of Gaza, aptly described as the greatest concentration camp in the contemporary world, by air, land and sea, taking the war to the zionist enemy.

It also marks the third anniversary of an ongoing, relentless and pitiless genocide against the Palestinian people, distinguished from nazi barbarism only by its brazenness and boastfulness.

Amongst the myriad of statistics it could have chosen to cite on this occasion, Palestine Chronicle notes a report from Palestine’s education ministry that a total of 20,748 Palestinian students and 1,058 educational and administrative staff were killed in Gaza and the occupied West Bank during the last three years of genocide.

“The overwhelming majority of the deaths occurred in Gaza, where Israeli attacks killed 19,189 school students and 1,386 university students. Another 28,586 school students and 3,082 university students were injured.”

Another report from Gaza’s Ministry of Social Development highlights that 71,846 children have lost one or both parents during three years of Israeli genocide, while the number of widows has reached 64,413.

Hospitals, their patients and their heroic staff have been particular targets of the genocidal onslaught. In his Substack, Journal of International Solidarity, A. Shantha notes that Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya was first illegally captured and interned by the Israeli military on December 27, 2024.

He notes that the health of Dr. Abu Safiya, whose dignity, courage and heroism has moved and inspired the world, has severely declined since his internment. “His weight dropped by one-third of what it previously was as he continues to be underfed and is forced to sustain brutal and barbaric physical abuse and medical negligence [at the hands of] his Israeli captors. Dr. Abu Safiya remains in Israeli captivity alongside at least 160 other medical professionals, including 20 doctors.”

In solidarity with Dr. Abu Safiya, Shantha republished on August 19, an article he originally posted on February 12, 2025, just over a month after Dr. Abu Safiya was first illegally captured and interned by the Israeli military on December 27, 2024.

He writes: “I am republishing this article as a modest attempt to join this broader chorus drawing attention to the situation of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya. In particular, this article attempts to situate the events of Dr. Abu Safiya’s abduction and internment within the broader context of a protracted anti-colonial national liberation struggle and seeks to address the role played by healthcare workers in resisting the colonial drive to de-develop and genocidally lay waste to indigenous societies. This article looks at the case of Palestine alongside the historical context of China’s national liberation struggle and two doctors – Dr. Norman Bethune (Canada) and Dr. Dwarakanath Kotnis (India) – who were internationalists and sought to contribute to China’s struggle for sovereignty and, ultimately, the Chinese people’s collective right to life.”

This year also marks the 90th anniversary of the victorious conclusion of the Long March and Shantha writes:

“The 1930s were a tumultuous decade in recent Chinese history. The Communist Party of China (CPC) and the movement it led suffered a major strategic setback in the civil war against the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang – KMT), resulting in the need for the Communists to retreat from a base area in the south to another base area up in the north. This retreat became known as the Long March. Freedom fighters literally walked approximately 10,000 km from Jiangxi to Shaanxi while continuing to fend off attacks from the KMT. This year-long… journey started with 100,000 people while only around 8,000 reached Shaanxi – many perished as a result of war, exhaustion, and hunger, while many others discontinued and stayed in villages along the route. The sacrifices made during this year-long ordeal for national liberation are unimaginable.”

He further notes: “One could argue that both Dr. Bethune and Dr. Kotnis would be much less known (if at all) in Canada and India respectively, if it were not for China’s commitment to keeping their memory alive domestically as well as diplomatically. This commitment on the part of the Chinese people indicates an understanding of the immense hardship and sacrifice required to achieve national liberation. There is an understanding that these two individuals – by virtue of their medical expertise – contributed significantly to the Chinese people’s collective struggle for the right to life, in opposition to imperial Japan’s desire to deprive them of that right.

“One would wish that the unfathomable sacrifices made in the Chinese national liberation struggle, and those of the South Asian, West Asian, African, and Caribbean liberation struggles of the mid-20th century remained relegated to that era. Unfortunately, that is not the case. The imperialist force from which these liberation struggles attempted to break has – though weakened – transformed its mechanisms of domination in order to continue its hegemony. [These] kinds of unfathomable sacrifices… continue to be made at the hands of imperialism, most acutely in Palestine today.”

And despite three years of genocide, supported by the most powerful imperialist states, the heroic Palestinian people, of whom Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya is an outstanding symbol and representative, remain unbroken, undefeated and unbowed. The zionist entity is unable to secure control over Gaza. And the Israeli regime and its backers have never been more isolated and more hated across an entire world whose peoples stand with Palestine. As the Irish hunger strike martyr Bobby Sands, himself much loved in Palestine, wrote in his Prison Diary:

“If they aren’t able to destroy the desire for freedom, they won’t break you. They won’t break me because the desire for freedom, and the freedom of the Irish people, is in my heart.”

Ma Haide – a bridge of friendship between China and Lebanon

Marking the 90th anniversary of the successful conclusion of the Long March, we recently republished an article from China Today introducing the contributions made at that time by two young Americans, Edgar Snow and George Hatem (Ma Haide).

The below article, which was originally published in The Beiruter, introduces Hatem’s connection to his ancestral home country of Lebanon, with the help of exclusive interviews with his family, unpublished letters, rare photographs and original reporting, and outlines how this connection still helps to form a bridge of friendship between the Chinese and Lebanese peoples.

It recounts how, in an October 1983 letter to family members, Hatem thanks his relatives for the olives they had sent from Lebanon. He asks about Hammana, his family’s hometown. He worries about the civil war then consuming his ancestral homeland. And he sends warm wishes to every member of the family.

“Thousands of kilometers away, the physician revered across China as Ma Haide, the man who helped transform the country’s fight against leprosy and sexually transmitted diseases, and [one of] the first foreigner[s] to become a citizen of the People’s Republic of China, was writing not as a revolutionary or a national hero, but as George, a relative who had never stopped thinking about home.”

Like thousands of Lebanese emigrants at the turn of the twentieth century, Ma Haide’s father, Nahoum Salameh Hatem, left Mount Lebanon in search of opportunity in the United States. Although raised in America, George spent summers in Hammana with relatives, forging a connection to Lebanon that distance would never erase.

After studying at the University of North Carolina, the American University of Beirut (AUB) and the University of Geneva, the newly graduated physician boarded a ship to Shanghai in 1933 with two fellow American doctors. The plan was simple: gain experience, practice medicine and eventually return to the United States.

He never did. Arriving in Shanghai, he opened a dermatology and venereal disease practice. Beyond the city’s modern façade, he soon discovered a different China. Patients suffered from illnesses driven as much by poverty, overcrowding and exploitation as by disease itself, leading him to question not only how to treat illness, but the conditions that created it.

He also met people who would shape his future. Through American journalist Agnes Smedley, he was introduced to Soong Ching-ling, widow of Sun Yat-sen, the founder of modern China, and later to Zhou Enlai, who would become the first premier of the People’s Republic of China.

In 1936, Hatem left Shanghai for the communist base area of Yan’an together with American journalist Edgar Snow, convinced he was going not where life would be easiest, but where a doctor was needed most.

Unlike the many foreigners who passed briefly through Yan’an, Hatem chose to stay. In 1937 he became a member of the Communist Party of China. According to family accounts, Mao Zedong waived the usual probationary period, telling colleagues that Ma Haide had already proven his commitment through his work rather than words. And in 1950, he was one of the first foreigners to become a citizen of the newly-founded People’s Republic of China.

He would serve as Chairman Mao’s personal physician while helping establish medical services for the Red Army, training healthcare workers and building the foundations of a modern military health system and then leading the country’s post-liberation fight to eliminate leprosy. He later described his time in Yan’an as “the happiest, most meaningful and most extraordinary years” of his life.

After decades apart, he finally met his father again in 1962, in the Syrian capital, Damascus, it not being possible for him to visit Lebanon as a Chinese citizen at that time. He was finally able to visit the country in 1974.

The article adds: “His connection to Lebanon did not end with those visits. Decades after his death, it continues to bring China back to the mountain village where his family’s story began.

“‘I was working when two young women approached me speaking English,’ [his cousin Joseph] Rached said. ‘“Is your mother Mary Hatem? Is this Dr. Hatem’s family home?” I said yes. Then they told me, “The Chinese ambassador wants to meet you.”’

“According to Rached, that visit marked the beginning of a tradition that continues today. Every Chinese ambassador appointed to Lebanon has visited the Hatem family in Hammana to pay tribute to Ma Haide… The Chinese Embassy later erected a bronze statue honoring Hatem in the village where his family’s story began, a lasting symbol of the bond between China and Hammana.”

Japan is further down the road of remilitarisation than at any point since 1945

18 September marked the 95th anniversary of the September 18th Incident, the staged explosion in Northeast China that Japanese forces used as the pretext for the invasion and occupation of Manchuria – and the opening act of the Second World War in Asia. China Daily marked the anniversary by speaking to commentators and peace campaigners in China and Europe, among them our co-editor Carlos Martinez.

Carlos told the paper that the anniversary finds Japan further down the road of remilitarisation than at any point since 1945, pointing to a record military budget, deepening military integration with the United States, and Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s provocative statements on Taiwan. The danger, he argued, is that Japan is being turned into a forward military platform in Washington’s strategic competition with Beijing – a country that already hosts around 50,000 US military personnel and occupies the central position in the US alliance system in East Asia.

He described the nuclear question as particularly serious, citing the warning from Tomoko Tamura, chair of the Japanese Communist Party, that the introduction of US nuclear weapons would make Japan a frontline base in a possible nuclear conflict. “In the only country ever subjected to atomic attack, that is the measure of how far the US alliance has hollowed out Japan’s postwar pacifism. The peoples of East Asia have every interest in refusing it.”

The other contributors make a related point: that remembering this history is not a matter of stoking hatred but of understanding how aggression escalates when the international community fails to respond – as the League of Nations failed to respond in 1931 – and that a broad rightward shift in Japanese society is drowning out the ordinary Japanese people who want peace.

Tings Chak: Fifty years after Mao – a legacy for changing the current of history

The following article by Tings Chak, Asia co-coordinator of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and an editor of Wenhua Zongheng: A Journal of Contemporary Chinese Thought, marks fifty years since the death of Mao Zedong by asking why young Chinese people are returning to him.

She begins with a television drama made for the 130th anniversary of Mao’s birth, which set out to show not a bronze statue but “a young man their own age trying to figure things out” – and with the fact that Mao’s Selected Works have repeatedly topped the borrowing list at Tsinghua University library. What draws these readers, she argues, is not nostalgia but political method: how to identify the contradictions within a situation, distinguish its surface appearance from its underlying movement, and locate individual experience within wider social forces.

Tings traces that method from “no investigation, no right to speak” through the Communist Party’s 2023 investigation and research campaign to the targeted poverty alleviation drive, in which 800,000 cadres were dispatched to 128,000 villages. She then turns to On Protracted War, written when defeat at Japan’s hands seemed to many the only sober conclusion, and to its relevance for a global left that moves too easily between the conviction that US imperialism is immovable and the declaration that an anti-imperialist multipolarity has already arrived.

Tings developed several of these themes in her contribution to our recent webinar marking the 50th anniversary, organised jointly with the International Manifesto Group, a report of which can be read here. The full text of our co-editor Keith Bennett’s closing remarks to the same webinar is available here.

When socialist countries went to war: Keith Bennett in conversation with Radhika Desai

In the late 1970s, wars involving three self-declared socialist countries, China, Vietnam and Cambodia were gleefully reported in the Western press along with lurid allegations of ‘killing fields’ in Cambodia. Many considered that this had sounded the death knell of socialist internationalism.

In this episode of her Geopolitical Economy Hour, Radhika Desai is joined by our co-editor Keith Bennett, who is also co-editor of a new book on China’s foreign policy, to help disinter facts that lie buried under decades of misinterpretation and misunderstanding of these complex events. The purpose was twofold: to help understand these conflicts in a broadly historical materialist manner, one that makes socialist sense, and on that basis to dig deeper into the complex interrelationship between class and nation in the advance towards socialism. Some of the questions discussed are: Why did Vietnam attack Cambodia and China attack Vietnam? What drove these countries, which had stood shoulder to shoulder against US aggression, apart? Who were the ‘Khmer Rouge’ and what motivated them? Where did it all go wrong?

Kim Jong Un: we will always join hands with the Chinese comrades

Leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) Kim Jong Un sent a reply letter on September 12 to his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping in response to his letter sent on the occasion of the 78th founding anniversary of the DPRK on September 9.

Kim Jong Un wrote: “Your warm congratulations and best wishes serve as great strength and encouragement to all the members of the Workers’ Party of Korea and the DPRK people who are making all-out efforts to usher in a new era of comprehensive national rejuvenation, regarding socialism as their faith.

“We will always join hands with the Chinese comrades in the course of firmly defending and advancing the common cause of socialism and better cultivating, strengthening and developing the traditional DPRK-China relations of friendship and cooperation in conformity with the requirements of the new era and the aspirations and wishes of the peoples of the two countries.”

On September 8, the DPRK embassy in Beijing hosted a reception to mark their national day. It was attended by Peng Qinghua, vice-chairperson of the Standing Committee of the Chinese National People’s Congress (NPC), along with representatives of numerous Chinese departments and organisations.

In his speech Ambassador Ri Ryong Nam said that the 78 year-long history of the DPRK is the proud course of victory in which it has dynamically advanced for building a powerful socialist country despite all trials and difficulties under the outstanding leadership of President Kim Il Sung, Chairman Kim Jong Il and respected Comrade Kim Jong Un.

He said that the Workers’ Party of Korea and the DPRK government would as ever invariably and firmly support the Chinese people in their struggle for defending the cause of socialism with Chinese characteristics in the new era and the country’s national sovereignty, security, development and interests under the leadership of the Communist Party of China with Comrade General Secretary Xi Jinping as its core.

Peng Qinghua extended warm congratulations on behalf of the Chinese party, government and people to the Korean party, government and people, saying that after the founding of the DPRK the Korean people embarked on the road of independent development and have dynamically advanced the socialist cause and changed the appearance of the state by waging a ceaseless struggle for 78 years.

No matter how the international situation may change, the Chinese party and government remains unchanged in its firm stand of attaching great importance to the China-DPRK friendship and also in its steadfast determination to firmly support the socialist cause of the DPRK led by General Secretary Kim Jong Un, defend the common interests of the two countries and preserve the excellent strategic environment, he stressed.

Meanwhile the General Association of Koreans in China (GAKC) and other organisations of the Korean community held celebrations on September 8 and 9 to mark their national day. They included placing flower baskets at the statue of President Kim Il Sung at Yuwen Middle School in Jilin and study tours of anti-Japanese revolutionary battle sites, where Chinese and Korean comrades fought shoulder-to-shoulder, in the three northeastern provinces of China. Kim Il Sung, the founder of the DPRK, studied at the Yuwen Middle School in his teenage years and his time there formed an important part of his early revolutionary activities. The school is also associated with a number of key figures in the Chinese revolution, including Guo Moro, Chu Tunan, and Shang Yue, who taught there, and Peng Huanwu and Ma Zongjin, who studied there.

Was Chairman Mao the greatest person to have ever lived?

The following is the full text of the remarks prepared by our co-editor Keith Bennett, as the final speaker at our webinar, organised in conjunction with the International Manifesto Group (IMG), on Sunday September 6, marking the 50th anniversary of the death of Chinese revolutionary leader Mao Zedong.

Keith’s speech was delivered in slightly abbreviated and adapted form due to time constraints. A report on the webinar can be read here. The livestream of the event is also available on YouTube.

I’m not sure whether having to speak last after such a galaxy of brilliant speakers is a blessing or a curse. Perhaps it is both.

Let me try to draw together some threads that I believe constitute the theme of this webinar.

It will be 50 years since the death of Chairman Mao this coming Wednesday. I was one of those strange teenagers whose bedroom wall, much I’m sure to my parents’ bemusement, was not decorated with posters of footballers or rock stars but rather of Mao.

So, I remember so well when I heard the news that he’d died. I’d just turned 18. It was the summer between finishing school and starting university and, as part of my holiday job, I was on my hands and knees washing a kitchen floor when the lunchtime news on the radio led with this story.

Such are the kind of memories this anniversary evokes for me.

But the passage of half a century should allow for at least the beginnings of an objective assessment of a person’s life, work and legacy.

And in this spirit, let me express a perhaps controversial view that no single person in history has ever made a greater contribution to the liberation of humanity as that made by Mao Zedong. Further, if that is the case, then it is not unreasonable to suggest that he is the greatest person to have ever lived.

In the brief time available let me try to sketch a pathway to that bold assertion.

First, regarding his style of work, Mao insisted on careful study and social investigation.

The revolution that continues: marking 50 years since the death of Mao Zedong

Fifty years after his death, Mao Zedong remains among the most systematically vilified figures of the twentieth century in Western writing, but in China he is still revered as the architect of the revolution that ended imperialist domination and laid the foundations for the country’s socialist development.

On September 6, Friends of Socialist China, in conjunction with the International Manifesto Group convened a webinar to take the measure of Chairman Mao’s legacy. Introduced and moderated by Professor Radhika Desai, the panel featured Ding Xiaoqin (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences), Senator Mushahid Hussain (Chairman, Pakistan-China Institute), Ken Hammond (Professor of History, New Mexico State University), Tings Chak (Asia coordinator, Tricontinental Institute), Jenny Clegg (Author and peace campaigner), Fiona Sim (Co-founder, Black Liberation Alliance) and Keith Bennett (Co-editor, Friends of Socialist China).

The webinar stream is embedded below, followed by a brief report.

The vilification is not about Mao

Radhika Desai opened by framing the problem. The charge sheet is long and familiar – the accusations of totalitarianism, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution – but, she argued, the campaign is not fundamentally about Mao at all. It is about the history he made, so this part of the record of human liberation can be dismissed as a terrible mistake from which nobody should take inspiration or lessons.

Radhika highlighted the importance of understanding the global and historical context of China’s development from 1949, starting from a baseline of horrifying poverty and technological backwardness to which imperialism and the century of humiliation had reduced it, and proceeding in the teeth of relentless imperialist hostility. What’s more, China’s industrialisation had to be accomplished without any of the things that financed Western prosperity: no tribute extracted from subject peoples, no cheap forced inputs, no exporting of surplus population to supposedly empty lands.

Given this context, China’s achievements become even more impressive, and its errors more understandable.

Three resolutions, one method

Ding Xiaoqin of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences read Mao through the three historical resolutions that the Communist Party of China has adopted on its own past. The 1945 resolution, on the eve of victory over Japan, was the first major party document to state that the party had developed a system of thought, Mao Zedong Thought, which was Marxism-Leninism adapted to Chinese conditions.

The 1981 resolution navigated a path between those who insisted on rigid adherence to all of Mao’s policies and those who wanted to repudiate his legacy wholesale. The 2021 resolution reaffirms Mao Zedong Thought as marking “the first historic step” in adapting Marxism to the Chinese context.

Running through all three, Ding said, is the basic methodology of Chinese Marxism: historical materialism, seeking truth from facts, and opposition to historical nihilism. From this follows the principle emphasised throughout the webinar: the period of initial socialist construction cannot be used to negate the period of reform and opening up, and vice versa.

Edgar Snow and George Hatem – Friendship beyond borders

As part of its series of articles celebrating the 90^th anniversary of the successful conclusion of the Long March, China Today recently wrote about how two young Americans, Edgar Snow and George Hatem (Ma Haide) witnessed the Long March spirit up close and shared it with the world, demonstrating the enduring power of international friendship transcending borders.

After the Central Red Army had arrived in northern Shaanxi in October 1935, Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai wrote to Soong Ching-ling, the widow of Chinese revolutionary leader Dr. Sun Yat-sen and a prominent revolutionary fighter herself, seeking her recommendation for an impartial foreign journalist and a highly skilled foreign doctor to visit the liberated area, conduct on-the-ground investigations, and present the truth to the world. Soong immediately recommended Edgar Snow, an American journalist, and George Hatem, an American doctor of Lebanese descent.

In June 1936, arranged by underground Communist Party of China (CPC) agents, Snow and Hatem broke through the blockades of the Kuomintang military and police, arriving in Bao’an (today’s Zhidan County of Yan’an City, Shaanxi Province), the capital of the Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia revolutionary base, in mid-July. Mao Zedong received them, and Zhou Enlai drew up an itinerary of approximately three months for their investigation and interviews.

Snow thus became the first foreign journalist to provide a complete account of the Long March to the outside world, while Hatem became the first foreign doctor to join the Red Army and participate in the Chinese revolution.

During his nearly four months in Bao’an, Snow lived in a cave dwelling and conducted dozens of long conversations with Mao Zedong. He returned to Beiping (present-day Beijing) in October 1936. One year later, Red Star Over China was published in London and immediately caused a sensation. As the US historian and Harvard professor John King (JK) Fairbank said, the book opened a new window for the West to understand China. Then US President Franklin D. Roosevelt was also moved by the book and invited Snow to the White House.

Hatem had originally intended only to conduct a medical survey. However, while reviewing medical records at the Red Army’s field hospital and conducting clinics for chronically ill soldiers and civilians, he saw many Long March survivors left permanently disabled due to the lack of medicine and medical care. Deeply moved, he told Snow, “They need doctors here so badly. I’m not leaving.”

In August 1936, Hatem accompanied Snow to Yuwangbu in Ningxia (today’s Tongxin County), where he guided rescue efforts at a frontline field hospital and treated local Muslim residents of the Hui ethnic group. He observed the equality between officers and soldiers, their shared hardships, and their close bonds with the people.

Entrusted by Mao Zedong, Hatem spent more than a month surveying the needs of the Red Army’s medical teams. On submitting his survey report to Mao Zedong, he applied to stay and join the Red Army. Mao praised the report, welcomed him into the Red Army, and appointed him as an advisor to the Health Department of the Central Military Commission.

Because of his Lebanese ancestry and his basic knowledge of Arabic, Hatem was deeply respected by the Hui people. Noticing that most local Hui people had the surname Ma, he adopted the Chinese name “Ma Haide” to better connect with the local people. In February 1937, he was admitted into membership of the CPC, becoming the first foreigner to join the party.

Ma Haide devoted the rest of his life to the Chinese revolution as a member of the Communist Party of China and a citizen of the People’s Republic of China. He died in Beijing on October 3, 1988, at the age of 78 and is buried at the Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery.

We reproduce the article below. Previous articles from the series can be read here and here.

From organising in the US to teaching in China: the Long March spirit lives on

In the following article, which was originally published by China Today, Mark Levine, a veteran US socialist living and working in China, reflects on the enduring legacy and relevance of the Long March spirit, both in China and universally.

He recalls that: “I first heard of the Long March in the 1960s, as a college student in the United States… By 1976, I had earned my Ph.D. in sociology. Yet instead of pursuing an academic career, I spent the next three decades as a full-time volunteer labour organiser in impoverished American communities. It was during that period that I read Snow’s vivid account of the Long March [‘Red Star over China’ by Edgar Snow], which left a lasting impression on me… Today, after more than two decades living in China, observing the country’s dramatic transformations, speaking with people from remote villages to modern cities, and visiting revolutionary sites such as Zunyi in Guizhou Province and Xibaipo in Hebei Province, I have developed a far richer and more personal understanding of that Long March spirit.”

Mark recalls: “The original Long March (1934-1936), undertaken by the Chinese Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army and led by the Communist Party of China (CPC), was a journey of survival and hope. Facing harsh natural environments, rugged terrain, and constant military suppression, China’s revolutionary leaders chose faith over despair, unity over division, and the common good over personal gain. As Chairman Mao Zedong wrote in his 1938 treatise On Protracted War, victory would not come quickly, but it would surely come.”

He invokes the contemporary Long March spirit by detailing how villages, “once isolated by treacherous terrain and entrenched poverty are being rejuvenated, not by dramatic interventions, but by the persistent, grinding work of local people. Village teachers crossing rivers to reach a handful of students. Engineers building roads through mountains one metre at a time. Healthcare workers carrying medicine to communities that have never seen a doctor. There are no grand battles or dramatic heroics here, but there is the same perseverance and selflessness that carried the Red Army across China 90 years ago.

“I have also seen this spirit in China’s response to difficult times: the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, the devastating winter storms of that same year, and the COVID-19 pandemic. I wrote songs about each of these events because I was watching a society respond to catastrophes not with panic, but with coordinated resolve.”

This spirit has relevance, too, to China’s ethnic policies: “For nearly two decades, I have taught at Minzu [Nationalities] University of China in Beijing, an institution dedicated to ethnic unity and educational equity. My students mainly come from the high plateau, deep mountains, and borderlands of western and southwestern China. Many are from ethnic minority communities in regions that were, not long ago, as isolated and underdeveloped as the terrain the Long March once crossed… They study not merely to escape their circumstances, but to return home as teachers, doctors, engineers, and cultural stewards. They talk about revitalising their villages, preserving their languages, and building bridges between their traditions and the modern world…

“My own work has been shaped by this same ethos. As a songwriter, author, and chief expert of the ‘Telling China Stories’ Workshop, I have worked to break Western stereotypes that often reduce China’s development to superficial headlines and biased political narratives.”

The Long March spirit, Mark concludes, “is not China’s alone. It belongs to anyone who has ever faced an impossible journey and kept moving forward.”

Webinar: Mao Zedong 50 years on – the revolution that continues to change the world (6 September)

📆 Sunday 6 September 2026, 3pm Britain, 10am US Eastern, 10pm China

Fifty years after his death, Mao Zedong’s portrait still looks out over Tiananmen Square, his face is on every Chinese banknote, and Mao Zedong Thought remains written into both the country’s constitution as well as that of the world’s largest communist party. Ordinary Chinese people travel in their millions every year to Shaoshan, the village in Hunan where he was born.

This webinar asks why Mao is still revered in China, and what were the achievements of China and the Communist Party of China (CPC) under his leadership.

In 1949 China was among the poorest countries on earth: life expectancy of around 35 years, adult literacy below 20 percent, a population stagnant at four to five hundred million for a century, and a hundred years of treaty ports, extraterritoriality and foreign concessions. By 1976 life expectancy had reached around 67 – a gain of more than three decades in less than three decades, the fastest improvement ever recorded by any country in human history. Illiteracy had fallen to a third. Land was redistributed, famine ended, women emancipated, the country unified, and a complete industrial base built from a near-zero baseline.

That is the China the reform era inherited – not the backwater of Western myth. As Samir Amin put it, the take-off after 1978 “would not have been possible without the economic, political and social foundations that had been built up in the preceding period”. It is also how the CPC understands its own history, in Xi Jinping’s formulation that the post-1978 reform era cannot be used to invalidate the Mao era, nor can the Mao era be used to invalidate the reform era.

Mao’s China changed the world beyond its borders too – inspiring millions and standing with Vietnam, with Korea, with the liberation movements of Africa and with Palestine.

Join us to discuss what Mao achieved, how China’s present successes rest on those foundations, why he is still revered in China, and how the socialist project has held its course after his death, through half a century of twists and turns.

This webinar is organised by Friends of Socialist China and the International Manifesto Group.

Confirmed speakers

Senator Mushahid Hussain (Chairman, Pakistan-China Institute)
Ken Hammond (Professor of History, New Mexico State University)
Keith Bennett (Co-editor, Friends of Socialist China)
Jenny Clegg (Author and peace campaigner)
Tings Chak (Asia coordinator, Tricontinental Institute)
Ding Xiaoqin (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences)
Moderator: Radhika Desai (Convenor, International Manifesto Group)

Xi Jinping’s speech at the gathering commemorating the 100th anniversary of the birth of Comrade Jiang Zemin

On the morning of August 17, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC), the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, the State Council, the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, and the Central Military Commission held a grand gathering at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the birth of the great Marxist, proletarian revolutionary, politician, military strategist, diplomat, and outstanding leader of the great cause of socialism with Chinese characteristics, Comrade Jiang Zemin. Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the CPC Central Committee, President of the country, and Chairman of the Central Military Commission, attended the conference and delivered an important speech.

The following is the full text of the speech. It was published in Chinese by the Xinhua News Agency and has been machine translated and then sub-edited by us.

Comrades and friends,

Today, we gather solemnly to commemorate the centenary of Comrade Jiang Zemin’s birth, deeply commemorate his great achievements, deeply study his noble character, and inspire the entire Party and people of all ethnic groups across the country to continuously advance the cause of socialism with Chinese characteristics.

Comrade Jiang Zemin is an outstanding leader recognised by the entire Party, the military, and people of all ethnic groups nationwide, enjoying high prestige and outstanding leadership, a great Marxist, a great proletarian revolutionary, politician, military strategist, diplomat, a long-tested communist fighter, an outstanding leader in the great cause of socialism with Chinese characteristics, the core of the Party’s third generation central leadership collective, and the main founder of the important thinking of the ‘Three Represents’.

A hundred years ago today, Comrade Jiang Zemin was born into a patriotic intellectual family in Yangzhou, Jiangsu Province. From his youth, he was determined to pursue truth and actively participated in patriotic and progressive student movements. In April 1946, he joined the Communist Party of China, dedicating his life to the cause of the Party and the people.

After the founding of New China, Comrade Jiang Zemin worked successively in enterprises, research institutes, and national ministries, fulfilling his duties and working diligently in every position, dedicating his passionate years to the cause of socialist revolution and construction. In the early days of reform and opening up, Comrade Jiang Zemin served as Deputy Director and Secretary-General of the State Administration of Import and Export and the State Foreign Investment Administration Commission, and later as First Vice Minister and Minister of the Ministry of Electronics Industry, making extensive pioneering work in reform and opening up. At the 12th National Congress of the Communist Party, he was elected as a member of the Central Committee.

In 1985, Comrade Jiang Zemin was appointed Deputy Secretary of the Shanghai Municipal Party Committee and Mayor. In 1987, at the First Plenary Session of the 13th Central Committee, he was elected as a member of the Central Political Bureau and served as Secretary of the Shanghai Municipal Party Committee. During this period, Comrade Jiang Zemin led the broad masses of cadres and people in Shanghai to boost morale and courageously explore, led the formulation of Shanghai’s economic development and urban construction plans, promoted Pudong’s development and opening up, and made outstanding contributions to advancing Shanghai’s reform, opening up, and socialist modernisation. At the turn of spring and summer in 1989, China experienced serious political turmoil. Comrade Jiang Zemin resolutely supported and implemented the correct decisions of the Party Central Committee, effectively maintaining stability in Shanghai.

In June 1989, at the Fourth Plenary Session of the 13th Central Committee, Jiang Zemin was elected as a member of the Politburo Standing Committee and General Secretary of the Central Committee. In November of the same year, the Fifth Plenary Session of the 13th Central Committee decided to make him Chairman of the Central Military Commission, forming the third generation of the Party’s central leadership with Jiang Zemin at its core.

Holding the line: Jiang Zemin at 100

Monday 17 August marks the centenary of the birth of Jiang Zemin, General Secretary of the Communist Party of China from 1989 to 2002 and President of the country from 1993 to 2003 – the leader of the People’s Republic whom much of the Western left finds it easiest to write off as a “capitalist roader”.

The following article argues that the charge rests on a false premise: that the realistic alternative available to China between 1989 and 2003 was some purer or more advanced form of socialism. It was not. Jiang took office six months before the people’s democracies of Eastern Europe fell, and two years before the Soviet Union ceased to exist, and the working assumption in most Western capitals was that China would be next.

The article weighs the real costs of the period – a Gini coefficient rising from around 0.32 to over 0.42, state enterprise employment falling from 77 million to 42 million, corruption and ideological decay – against what was achieved, and against what happened in Russia over the same decade, where economic output halved and male life expectancy collapsed to around 57. It also examines the admission of private entrepreneurs to the Party, the Theory of the Three Represents, and Jiang’s record of solidarity with Cuba, the DPRK, Vietnam and Laos.

The following original article is by Friends of Socialist China co-editor Carlos Martinez. It has been translated into Dutch by our friends at China Square.

Monday 17 August marks the centenary of the birth of Jiang Zemin, General Secretary of the Communist Party of China from 1989 to 2002 and President of the country from 1993 to 2003. Of all the leaders of the People’s Republic, he is perhaps the one that many on the Western left find it easiest, at least according to their own paradigm, to dismiss as a “capitalist roader” and revisionist.

Such labels are applied because Jiang presided over a period of extraordinarily rapid economic growth and integration into the global economy; the dismantling of the “iron rice bowl” of job security for life, steady income and public benefits; and because he allowed suitably qualified private entrepreneurs to join the Communist Party.

But the charge as usually made rests on the assumption that the realistic alternative available to China between 1989 and 2003 was some kind of pure or more advanced socialism. It was not. The alternatives on offer at that moment in history were rather more brutal, as we discuss below.

A revolutionary life

Jiang was born in Yangzhou, Jiangsu province, in 1926, into a country under warlord rule and, before he reached his teens, under Japanese occupation of much of China. His uncle and adoptive father, Jiang Shangqing, died fighting Japan in 1939. Jiang took part in the anti-Japanese student movement, and joined the CPC in 1946 while studying electrical engineering – three years before liberation, at a time when Party membership under Kuomintang rule was an extremely risky business; in many instances a death sentence.

He then spent three decades as an industrial cadre rather than a politician. He organised the production of canned food for the Chinese People’s Volunteers in Korea. He trained at the Stalin Automobile Works in Moscow in 1955, and also worked as an engineer in Romania for several years in the 1970s. He oversaw the design of China’s first domestically produced turbo-generator. He was Minister of the Electronics Industry, then mayor and Party secretary of Shanghai. He came to the leadership as an engineer who had spent his working life building things and making them work.