THE CURSE OF CONFUCIUS
Chinas's Regime, May 4, 1919 and the Influence o Mandarin Capitalism on the UK University Sector
As part of my mission to put something of value on Substack, every weekend, no matter how busy I am with creative projects, I was going to talk today about the Labour landslide in the local elections but, more especially, Sadiq Khan’s historic third term triumph as Mayor of London and what it means beyond the Tories being very much past their sell-by date.
For one thing, it taught us that Keir Starmer’s lurch to the Right is not a vote winner nor is it the primary reason for the implosion of the Tory vote. Starmer himself undermined Sadiq Khan when he opposed ULEZ, thereby fuelling a single issue Tory campaign that was also framed by rank Islamophobia. Starmer has also forced Sadiq to back down on rent controls which is a disgrace. Nonetheless, Sadiq won and won comfortably.
In the North East, Starmer’s removal of the Labour whip to a Mayor who praised the work of film director Ken Loach no doubt helped the Tories get elected on Tyneside. Like Turkeys voting for Christmas their reward will be a “freedom port” that loots public services and destroys workers rights. This idea of “enterprise zones” could also be the future for many metropolitan regions, particularly including Birmingham and the West Midlands, where Tory policies and cuts have bankrupted the largest metropolitan authority in Europe (rendering it ripe for “enterprise zone” exploitation) and where Andy Street got his marching orders accordingly.
Depending on whether an incoming counterfeit Labour government under Starmer will implement enterprise zones and freedom ports, the way that Starmer has embraced every other Tory policy (along with Thatcherism itself) the local councils could yet become once again a key battlefield in the struggle for authentic socialism against Tories, fascists and faux Labour alike. This needs to start with Saddiq defying Starmer in demanding rent controls and councillors and unions resisting the enterprise zones and freedom ports whichever Tory ends up in Number 10.
So here I was, poised to do a detailed piece on the importance of local government when I read Adam Tooze’s substack and a fascinating piece on the May 4 political movement in China in 1919. Now, mark my words, I am most certainly not an expert on Chinese history, politics or culture and couldn’t talk with the same degree of authority on China as I could on (say) Africa or the Middle East. That said, as a former Trotskyist who still cites Lenin and Trotsky as major theoretical influences I have of course read Harry Isaacs on The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution as well as Leon Trotsky On China. In addition I have also read the valuable contribution of my good friend Charlie Pottins to Revolutionary History on “The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution” (Socialist Platform). Finally, I’ve read the deeply flawed but nonetheless useful Road to Tiananmen Square by the deeply flawed but sometimes useful Chris Harman of the SWP (just a little sectarian joke there!)
However, in all of these works I must have missed or forgotten any reference to the May 4 political movement in China in 1919 that Adam Tooze referenced in his substack blog yesterday morning That I may have once seen this reference in passing, especially at the time of the Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, and not grasped its significance, may allude to how I have (hopefully) evolved into a more sophisticated Hegelian Marxist, with a deeper understanding of the value and significance of philosophy due to my later and wider reading e.g. of Lukacs and especially De Bord.
In 1989 I grasped that the brutal crushing of democratic protests in Tiananmen Square was a conscious precondition, on the part of the triumphant wing of the Stalinist bureaucracy in China, to restore capitalism and transform itself into a state-ised bourgeoisie after the fashion described by Hillel Ticktin and applied by him (less accurately) to Russia (Critique, various). This involved the crushing of any nascent labour movement or democratic rights and explains why Henry Kissinger (who later supported Putin in Ukraine) supported the brutal crackdown in the mass movement in China with almost as much zeal as he had for Pinochet's coup in 1973 (1).
What I didn't grasp while arguing furiously with the apologists for the Tiananmen Square massacre (such as Bill Tupman at University of Exeter where I was a student at the time) was why the protesters had chosen Tiananmen Square as their venue (2). As well as being the focus of political power in China, it seems that the protests focused on Tiananmen Square at least in part because of its historic significance related to the May 4 movement of 1919 from which the original Chinese Communist Party under Chen was derived, via the Naval Shipyard strike in Shanghai later that year (3).
The May 4th movement derived both from the 1917 Russian Revolution and the Imperialist response, in the form of the Versailles Treaty, whereby the various powers carved up the world among themselves. While most historians of Versailles, and the later conference at San Remo, focus on Europe or (at best) the Middle East it also found Japan being afforded a "sphere of influence" in China that would culminate in the brutal and apocalyptic invasion of 1937 with which, in reality, and alongside the Civil War in Spain, World War II actually began (4).
The May 4 movement was a democratic revolt against this nefarious and ultimately murderous Japanese interference but also against the domestic ruling elite and its use of Confucian ideology to justify subservience to Asiatic despotism on behalf of the population (5). May 4, 1919 was an authentic democratic movement that championed both social justice and individual democratic rights and led among other things to the proliferation of a significant women’s movement (6).
Marxists and what later became the Chinese Communist Party (under Chen Duxiu not, Mao) was in many ways the driving force of this democratic movement, leading to the creation of the Party during the Naval Shipyard strike of 1919 (7). It was partly inspired by the Bolshevik revolution and by Lenin's explicit denunciation of Tsarist territorial claims on China by way of his writings on The Right of Nations to Self Determination, since explicitly denounced by Putin during his murderous romp in Ukraine (8).
This reminds us of a number of things namely that:
1. Marxism is a mandate for human emancipation that uses class struggle as its method but which has democratic values and concerns for the tension between authority and liberty at its core.
2. The Chinese Communist Party had its origins as an urban, secular, democratic party of cosmopolitan intellectuals and class conscious workers and not a peasant based movement led by Mao and his Stalinist entourage to purely nationalist and authoritarian ends.
3. That peasants in backward or developing countries, even if they are the majority of the population, have to accept the leadership of the urban working class in order to overthrow both conditions of feudal or pre-capitalist oppression and of combined and uneven development given that classic bourgeois democratic revolutions are no longer possible in the epoch of Imperialism (as a stage of capitalist production). In order to carry through a democratic program in short, a worker's state must fully seize power and begin the task of building socialism right away (9). This in turn requires carrying the revolution into the Imperialist heartlands which, of course, now includes China itself.
Marx called this theory whereby the working class first leads a bourgeois democratic revolution then immediately begins the task of building and exporting revolution the theory of Permanent Revolution which is not to be confused with Mao's drivel about Perpetual Revolution that we will come to in a moment (10). First cited in relation to the German Revolution of 1848 and, more especially, the Paris Commune of 1871 it particularly became identified with Leon Trotsky and Russia after the failed revolution of 1905 and was eventually endorsed by Lenin in the April Thesis of 1917 (Lenin, 1971).
At this point, however, both Lenin and Trotsky saw Permanent Revolution as something unique to Russia rather than a general formula for all developing countries as evident e.g. in Palestine, Africa and the Middle East today (Lenin, 1971; Trotsky, 2007). What changed that, where Trotsky was concerned, were the events in China to 1927 where the Communist Party under Chen Duxiu, was forced by Stalin and a bureaucratised Commintern to enter into a Popular Front with Chek's Goumintang in the name of a bourgeois democratic revolution not of permanent revolution (Isaacs, 2010; Trotsky, 1976)
The result was that Chek's Goumintang massacred the communists and destroyed the original Communist Party altogether thereby setting China on the path to catastrophe (Isaacs, 2010; Trotsky, 1976). Mao's Stalinised Communist Party, based on a rural peasant army, may have subsequently played the decisive role by way of the Long March, in the defeat of a murderous and genocidal Japanese Imperialism but this was a nationalist struggle that had nothing to do with Marxism, had no mandate for human emancipation or democratic rights and, indeed, was already using Confucian rhetoric to authoritarian ends (Lei Sun, April 27, 2022). That this was the very Confucian ideology denounced by the May 4 movement in 1919 is significant. The overthrow of capitalism when it came, by way of a problematic strategic alliance with the USSR, was as bureaucratic as in Eastern Europe and China was a Deformed Workers’ State in the sense that it was deformed at birth (Trotsky, 2013).
Chen, significantly, became leader of the Trotskyist movement in China, which was strongest in Hong Kong and Shanghai, but these were deeply divided even before the triumph of Mao's Stalinists and the breakup of the Fourth International ended everything in tears (11). The Sino-Soviet split, when it came in 1962, was for nationalistic and geo-strategic rather than ideological reasons because Mao's Stalinists had seized Tibet, had their eyes on Nepal and this threatened Kruschev's coveted relationship with India. Indeed, during the Sino-Indian War Kruschev supported India (12). Hence the split had nothing whatsoever to do with any authentic resurrection of Marxism or the spirit of May 4, 1919. .
The Sino-Soviet split that was chronicled, but never fully understood, by Deutscher (and later by Chris Harman) had nothing to do with Marxism but brought to a head a division in the bureaucracy that had grown since the failure of The Great Leap Forward led to millions of Chinese dying of famine in the 1950s (13). In many ways this replicated the division and crises of Stalinism's Third Period (which Maoists have fully embraced) only in grotesque caricature (14). One wing of the bureaucracy, under Mao, defended socialised property relations by bureaucratic means that negated democratic planning and preserved their privileges intact. Their opponents simply wanted to transform themselves into a bourgeoisie and restore capitalism and courted the support of the military elite accordingly (Domes, 1968; Gittings, 1966/67).
Both factions drew more inspiration from Confucius than Marx as evident in the drivel that is Mao's Little Red Book (Mao-Tse-Tung, 1967). What Mao's faction did, and what worked for a time, was to mobilise students and workers in opposition both to the counter-revolutionaries and democratic rights, through a reign of terror that was the Cultural Revolution (15). Mainly identified with the period 1962-68 this only really ended with Mao's death and the purge of the gang of 4 that saw Mao's widow among those put to death (Moody, 1977).
Democracy Wall, however, was short lived because the triumphant wing of the bureaucracy had to destroy all democratic movements and the organised working class in order to restore capitalism (16). Again, Confucius provided the ideological framework for the crackdown that culminated in the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 (Hore, 1991).
In the former Soviet Union and Russia the Glasnost and Perestroika movements (sadly) came to an end when the executive Presidency created by Gorbachev (for the best of intentions) was hijacked by scum like Yeltsin and Putin (17). For all that, in my view, China ceased to be a deformed workers’ state in the sense understood by Trotsky, more or less immediately after Tiananmen Square, the collapse of the USSR presented a conundrum for the counter-revolutionary bourgeois-restorationists and their allies, both in the corrupt bureaucracy and in the military. In short, and for all that Gorbachev wasn’t a pro-capitalist counter-revolutionary they resolved that what happened to Gorbachev was not going to happen to them (18).
In 1981, just before the Solidarity Protests in Poland led to Jaruljelski’s coup, I attended a brilliant talk by Hillel Ticktin at the University of London, where he presented a realistic prospect for a political revolution against Stalinism and also predicted the collapse of the USSR. Of course, Tiktin thought that a form of capitalism had already been restored to the USSR and while his theory of “state-ised” capitalism was much more sophisticated than that of Tony Cliff it was still ultimately wrong. For one thing, had capitalism already been restored the collapse of the USSR would not have been the catastrophe that this economic holocaust proved to be both for Russia and the world. That said, Ticktin at least recognised that Glasnost and Perestroika, while to be welcomed, were not the political revolution against Stalinism that Ernest Mandel and other Pabloites believed (Mandel, 1989). At the end of the day, the real tragedy of the Soviet Union’s collapse, following Kryushkov’s coup that was deliberately set up to fail, was that it followed the catastrophic defeat of the working class in the west particularly represented in the miners’ strike in the UK. However, the crisis of consciousness and leadership on the left was also typified by a myriad of sects siding with one or other Stalinist faction rather than following the method of Trotsky in The Revolution Betrayed (19).
Between 1989 and 1991 capitalism was restored both to China and Russia with devastating consequences for both countries. However, the dynamic of counter-revolution was quite different in each case. In the Soviet Union Kryuchkov and his cabal of corrupt KGB, who included Vladimir Putin and his gangster connections, had already been looting the USSR of its revenues to fuel the rise of the future Oligarchs once Yeltsin’s fire sale privatisations left millions of Russian workers dead (20). The result has been a gangster-capitalist regime that is many ways close to fascism but where most of the wealth is evacuated out of the country (Bullough, 2022).
In China both the bourgeois restorationists and the military and party bureaucracy had faced a much more determined threat to their rule and plans in Tiananmen Square in 1989. It had also already dealt decisively with that faction of the bureaucracy that wanted to preserve post-capitalist social relations (by bureaucratic means) following the purge of the gang of four. In China, the restored bourgeoisie cut a deal with the corrupt military and party apparatus which did not completely abolish the tension between them, in which political power was completely surrendered to the party bureaucracy almost as under conditions of Asiatic despotism. As part of this deal, while the capitalists were allowed to accumulate capital, and the law of Value was restored, the capitalists had to keep their wealth in the country and render financial tribute to the party as to any Cesar or Mandarin. In other words, while Tiktin’s state-ised capitalism never really came into existence in Russia, something akin to it has emerged in China, which is also now an Imperialist country and a direct threat to workers’ rights and democracy particularly in Africa,
The covenant between capitalists and party also has grim implication for Chinese society as a whole. There is no Trade Union or democratic rights and farmers are routinely driven from their land by corrupt party officials to make way for big capital projects. Some are murdered (21). These big capital projects make the capitalists rich but also guarantee that the party gets its cut. What is perhaps also significant is that while that party has been Communist in name only since the 1930s, it no longer even pretends to legitimate its rule through the cod “Marxism” [sic] of Stalin or Mao.
When I was teaching global political economy I asked a cohort of my students (and it was a big class, being a compulsory module) how many of them supported neo-liberalism and an unrestricted free market. Three said they did, one of whom was a Tory activist and the other two Chinese. Much more important however, is the role of the pre-bourgeois doctrines of Confucius in legitimating both capitalist exploitation and the tyranny of party rule in China today. Closely aligned to Hun Chinese nationalism and also to racism, this has implications for the continued oppression of Tibet and genocide of the Muslim Uighers, a million of whom are detained in concentration camps (22).
One thing that is clear, after the sorry catalogue of failure of non violent protest from Tiananmen Square to the Arab Spring, is that only Marxism can liberate China from the yoke of both capitalism and Stalinism but that this Marxism, the Marxism of Chen Duxiu, has nothing to do with the cod ramblings of Mao or any of his successors. And much as Marxism has its roots in Rousseau’s Contract Social and the democratic values of the Enlightenment, so Chinese Marxism has to have its democratic roots in the spirit of the May 4 movement of 1919 where it all began. And just as this was a movement against the dogmas of Confucius then, so it has to be now.
Which brings me to my final passing shot in which a corrupt and market-facing University sector in the UK, that is fast descending into the neo-liberal sewer, has a “Confucius problem” when it comes to entitled and rich Chinese students buying their degrees and doctorates over the counter in exchange for vast sums of money in terms of student fees (and rent). Now, when most of us talk about the need to “decolonise” the academic curriculum what we are talking about is a refusal to defend the British Empire and its crimes and follow the line of Michael Gove and his successors regarding “what put the great in Britain (23).” What this has come to mean for many British Universities, however, is not hurting Confucian sensibilities over critical engagement and democratic values in case it jeopardises the cash cow (24).
Finally, let us not forget that this humbug and one sided “decolonisation of curriculum,” comes from the very same corrupt and market-facing Universities that are purging pro-Palestinian and anti-fascist students and academics, on the Left, on a scale unseen since the McCarthy witch-hunts (25). These are the same Universities that do business with companies like BP and British Aerospace that have a direct economic investment in the genocide in Gaza (making the British government complicit), who resist public demands to know where their money actually comes from and who do business with monstrous genocidal regimes such as those in China, Israel and Miramar (26). Above all they are the same Universities that would have the temerity to condemn criticism of Confucius as racist while accepting the existence of darkly funded fascist think tanks like Spiked and MCC Brussels, that are colonising our University sector and education system at a rate of knots (27).
In Britain as in China the time for student revolt in concert with the wider labour movement and other democratic forces is way overdue.
Footnotes
1. David Stadmore, “The 1989 Tiananmen Square Crackdown Was Not Inevitable,” The Diplomat, April 10, 2020
2. Jeffrey N. Wasserston, “May 4th, the Day That Changed China,” New York Times, May 3, 2019
3. Savatore Babones, “The Birth of Chinese Nationalism,” Foreign Policy, May 3, 2019
4. Wa, C. and Japes, W. (no date) “The Persistence of Conflict: China’s War With Imperialism and Impact on Theory and Legacy, 1931 to the Present,” University of Oxford Foundation of History
5. Lei Sun, “The Relationship between Confucius and Chinese Politics: History and Future,” Journal of Law and Religion. Cambridge University, April 27, 2020
6. Hector Lopez, “Daughters of the May 4, Orphans of the Revolution,” History in the Making, Volume 9, January 2016
7. David Morley, “Founding of the Chinese Communist Party: Heroism and Tragedy,” Socialist Appeal, July 1, 2021
8. Nathaniel Flakin, “Putin, Lenin and Ukrainian Self determination,” Left Voice, February 23, 2022
9. Kate Frey, “An Introduction to Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution,” Left Voices, September 22, 2020
10. Jane Carter, “The Problem With Mao’s Continuous Revolution,” The China Project, July 19, 2023
11. Although Isaac’s account ends in 1937 Charlie Pottins, and others, explain what subsequently happened in Revolutionary History: A Chinese Tragedy (Socialist Platform, London). By the 1940s the Trotskyist movement in China had split into three factions which more or less anticipated what happened to the Fourth International as a whole. One faction basically put its differences with Mao to one side to fight the Japanese. An ultra-left faction took up an infantile position of “revolutionary defeatism” which meant, in practice, supporting the Japanese invasion. A more principled faction sought a united front in the struggle with the Japanese while retaining political independence.
12. Isaac Deutscher on “The Chinese Cultural Revolution,” La Sinistra, Italian Communist Party, 1966
13. Ted Grant (August 12, 1964) “The Cultural Revolution and the Sino-Soviet Split,” reproduced on In Defence of Marxism website.
14. Alan Campbell and John McIlroy, “Stalinism and Ultraleftism: A Warning From History – The Leadership of the Communist Party of Great Britain, 1928-1933,” Society for the Study of Labour History, no date
15. Tom Phillips, “The Cultural Revolution: All You Need to Know About China’s Political Convulsions,” The Guardian, May 11, 2018
16. Peter Moody, “The Fall of the Gang of Four: Background Notes on the Chinese Cultural Revolution,” Asian Survey, Volume 17, Number 8, August 1977
17. Ronald Suny, “Mikhail Gorbachev’s Project was a Noble Gamble Thwarted by Forces Beyond his Control, Jacobin, 2022
18. Chris Miller, “Could Mikhail Gorbachev Have Saved the Soviet Union,” Foreign Policy, December 21, 2016
19. Hillel Tiktin (no date) “The Nature of an Epoch of Declining Capitalism,” Critique 26
20. Greg Rosalsky, “How Shock Therapy Created Russian Oligarchs and Paved the Way for Putin,” Planet Money, March 22, 2022
21. “Six Land Protesters Killed in China,” The Guardian, June 16, 2005
22. Khaled A. Baydoun, “China Holds One Million Uigar Muslims in Concentration Camps,” Al Jazeera, September 13, 2018
23. Patrick Wintour, “Michael Gove Wants British Values on School Curriculum,” The Guardian, June 9, 2014
24. Tommy Thu, “Soft Power Stranglehold: China’s Influence on Britain’s Universities,” The St Andrews Economist, January 28, 2024
25. David Renton, “British Universities are Repressing Free Speech on Palestine,” Jacobin, June 26, 2024
26. Jenny Corduray and Billy Stalwell, “Revealed: £28 Million of Secret Cash Provided to UK Universities, Open Democracy, December 13, 2022
27. Anita Muiethi, “Revealed: UK’s Most Secret Think Tanks Took £14.3 Million From Mystery Donors,” open Democracy, November 17, 2022
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