The following is the text of the speech delivered by Alex Gordon to the opening session of our conference held on September 28 to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, “a moment of pride and achievement for the people of China, but also a moment of hope and inspiration for peoples around the world.”
Alex refers to President Xi Jinping’s May Day message this year to the Chinese working class as well as his letter to Serbian steel workers and contrasts this to the looming job cuts at the at the Port Talbot steel plant in South Wales.
He goes on to compare the fiasco of Britain’s HS2 high-speed rail project with the relevant experience in China:
“In the decade it took to turn HS2 from a rail infrastructure project into luxury homes opportunities for billionaires, China developed a 40,000 km publicly owned, high-speed rail network, the largest in world history.”
He also outlines the work of the Chinese trade union movement, noting that Xi Jinping had emphasised that the unions should earnestly safeguard the rights of workers and strive to solve practical problems concerning their vital interests, in particular for workers in new forms of employment.
Alex Gordon is the President of the rail workers and seafarers’ trade union RMT, the Chair of the Marx Memorial Library and Workers’ School and a member of the Political and Executive Committees of the Communist Party of Britain (CPB).
Chair, Minister, Your Excellencies, Comrades and Friends,
On behalf of the Executive Committee of the Communist Party of Britain (CPB), please allow me first to pay tribute to the great work and militant life of our late comrade Sitaram Yechury, General Secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI[M]). CPB General Secretary, Robert Griffiths has paid tribute to Comrade Sitaram in a eulogy published in the Morning Star. Comrade Sitaram was a friend of China, but also a friend of the CPB and did so much to strengthen and deepen the links between our two parties. We mourn his loss and send our condolences to all his comrades. Vale comrade.
The 75th anniversary of the founding of People’s China is a moment of pride and achievement for the people of China, but also a moment of hope and inspiration for peoples around the world.
On behalf of the CPB, I want to recognise also the significance of this achievement for the working class in our country. But my remarks apply to workers more widely across the developed G7 economies and beyond.
In his May Day greeting to China’s working people this year, President Xi Jinping called on them to “actively participate in advancing Chinese modernisation with high-quality development and work tirelessly to promote the building of a strong country and the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation on all fronts.” He asked party committees and government bodies at all levels to “realise, safeguard and develop the legitimate rights and interests of workers.”
President Xi also replied to a letter from Serbian workers at the HBIS Smederevo Steel Plant who he met on a state visit to Serbia in 2016.
Xi told the Serbian steelworkers: “It is a great pleasure to learn that the steel plant has turned losses into gains quickly after the investment of a Chinese-funded enterprise, with the jobs of more than 5,000 employees guaranteed and thousands of families enjoying a peaceful and happy life. The development of the plant cannot be achieved without the dedication and hard work of the workers, who have been working diligently for the quick growth of the steel plant and have written a new chapter for the iron-clad friendship between China and Serbia. I give you ‘the thumbs up.’”
Xi visited Serbia in May 2024 coinciding with the 25th anniversary of US-led NATO’s bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999, which claimed the lives of three Chinese citizens and wounded others. I vividly recall being shown the shell-damaged building by Serbian comrades when I visited Belgrade in 2010.
Of course, it is natural and to be expected that the continuing strong growth of China’s economy, its accelerating developments in new technological and scientific fields as well as great achievements by Chinese sportsmen and women and cultural initiatives are all observed with great interest by workers in capitalist societies. This is a thriving society that cares for its people.
The British steel industry meanwhile is preparing for 2,500 job cuts this year at Port Talbot in South Wales in a state-funded ‘rescue plan’ for the Tata-owned plant. The imminent closure of blast furnaces at Port Talbot and Scunthorpe will end primary steel production – making steel from coal and iron ore – in Britain, marking a definitive moment in the deindustrialisation of this country, which has been a policy of the British ruling class for over forty years.
It is not just in Britain where decline follows deindustrialisation. In Germany, France and Italy, the economic policies of the European Union tied to the priorities of US foreign policy have atrophied growth and vetoed public investment in new, green technologies that we need to achieve the zero carbon emission targets that Britain has committed to as a result of the Paris Climate Change Accords.
Almost one year ago, Britain’s then Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak chose to announce he was scrapping the HS2 high-speed rail connection to Manchester, while he was addressing his own Party Conference at Manchester Central Convention Centre (formerly Manchester Central station). What is the Chinese word for ‘Chutzpah’?
For fifteen years UK banks and monopolies have pocketed billions in fees for consultants, lawyers, contractors, and inflated property prices from HS2.
Originally planned to link Glasgow, Edinburgh, Leeds, Manchester and London within 90 minutes, in 2010 the DfT High Speed Rail – Command Paper called for a “new British high speed rail network connected to the wider European high speed rail network via High Speed One and the Channel Tunnel.“
In 2012, HS2 Ltd estimated that its direct trains from Leeds and Manchester to Paris would take 3 hours and 38 minutes. Birmingham to Paris, would take a mere 3 hours, 7 minutes.
Then, in 201 the government cut the link with Europe from the High-Speed Rail Bill. Lord Adonis told parliament “… it seems absurd there is not a connection, but I very much doubt it would be taken up in any big way. While we have cheap airlines that offer very frequent services to Manchester and Birmingham it is unlikely such a line would be viable.”
The vultures today picking over HS2’s carcass, are a perfect symbol for such short-term capitalist opportunism.
In the decade it took to turn HS2 from a rail infrastructure project into luxury homes opportunities for billionaires, China developed a 40,000 km publicly owned, high-speed rail network, the largest in world history.
Using breakthrough technologies, such as super-thin, large hollow aluminium to build aerodynamic nose cones, China’s latest Fuxing bullet train reaches speeds of 350 km/hour to slash travel times on the 818.9-mile Beijing-Shanghai route from 37 hours to just four hours.
In his article on 1 May 2024 in Qiushi, the main theoretical journal of the Communist Party of China (CPC), Xi Jinping called on the CPC to mobilise China’s hundreds of millions of workers to vigorously take part in the great cause of building a strong country and national rejuvenation.
According to Xi, since the 18th CPC National Congress, the working class has been playing a backbone role in the development of the cause of the Party and the country under the leadership of the CPC Central Committee. The Chinese workers’ movement has made historic achievements, and the work of trade unions has made comprehensive progress.
Xi says that Chinese workers have taken on significant challenges and shouldered responsibilities in such major areas as economic development, scientific and technological innovation, poverty alleviation, rural revitalisation, epidemic prevention and control, and disaster relief.
Trade unions should earnestly safeguard the rights of workers and strive to solve practical problems concerning their vital interests, in particular for workers in new forms of employment. Xi called on Party committees at all levels to strengthen leadership over trade unions and their work, and government bodies at all levels should help trade unions solve workers’ difficulties and problems.
In May this year the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) initiated the first collective contract for road freight drivers nationwide with a company called Logory Logistics
The contract is expected to benefit the 3.8 million drivers across Logory Logistics’ digital freight-transport network. This marks the first attempt by China’s domestic freight transport industry to cover truckers’ rights on a nationwide scale.
Workers in Britain are lied to repeatedly by UK state and corporate media that China’s continued growth and success is a threat to their jobs and their futures. The truth is the opposite. China’s example 75 years on from the Chinese revolution is an example and an inspiration to workers world-wide, but particularly in Britain where our own economy has been sabotaged for the last forty years by policies aimed at privileging the financial sector over the interests of the mass of the people.
The Communist Party calls on workers to resist the lies and propaganda of imperialism, which aim to make us all blind to the real causes of poverty and stagnation in our own societies.
Let’s celebrate the great achievements of the PRC over 75 years.
Let’s emulate the victories of the Chinese people under the leadership of the CPC.
