The B u l l e t
Socialist Project • E-Bulletin No. 94 March 30, 2008

It is now thirty years since the People’s Republic of China announced its market reform policy at the Third Plenum of the 11th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in December 1978, under the then new leadership of Deng Xiaoping. The policy followed the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 and the purging of ‘leftists’ in the Party and the state, symbolically represented by the trial of the ‘Gang of Four.’ The policy was the declaration of the end of ‘Maoism’ as the economic and political framework for the Chinese revolution, although Maoism has continued to endure as a source of ideological legitimacy for the CCP. (Keep reading…)

The Economist Updated: March 17

There is no exaggerating China’s hunger for commodities. The country accounts for about a fifth of the world’s population, yet it gobbles up more than half of the world’s pork, half of its cement, a third of its steel and over a quarter of its aluminum. It is spending 35 times as much on imports of soybeans and crude oil as it did in 1999, and 23 times as much importing copper — indeed, China has swallowed over four-fifths of the increase in the world’s copper supply since 2000. (Keep reading…)

http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticleNew.asp?xfile=data/opinion/2008/Ma rch/opinion_March35.xml&section=opinion&col Khaljee Times
9 March 2008 (Keep reading…)

Daily Telegraph 04/07/2007

Pollution kills three quarters of a million people in China every year, according to previously unreleased World Bank statistics. (Keep reading…)

Monthly Review June 2007

Regrettably, there are all too many candidates that qualify as imminent and very serious crises. Several should be high on everyone’s agenda of concern, because they pose literal threats to human survival: the increasing likelihood of a terminal nuclear war, and environmental disaster, which may not be too far removed. However, I would like to focus on narrower issues, those that are of greatest concern in the West right now. I will be speaking primarily of the United States, which I know best, and it is the most important case because of its enormous power. But as far as I can ascertain, Europe is not very different. (Keep reading…)

Special to Canadian Dimension May 2007

China’s Billionaires China’s billionaires, twenty in number, unlike India’s, are on average younger, have less advanced educational degrees, were almost all educated in China and only 10% (2) inherited wealth. Sixty-five percent are fifty years or younger. Their total wealth is $29.8 billion dollars. (Keep reading…)

Washington Post Sun Apr 8 2007

WASHINGTON — Listen to the apostles of free trade, and you’ll learn that once consumer choice comes to authoritarian regimes, democracy is sure to follow. Call it the Starbucks rule: Situate enough Starbucks around Shanghai, and the Communist Party’s control will crumble like dunked biscotti. As a theory of revolution, the Starbucks rule leaves a lot to be desired. (Keep reading…)

From: “PINR Dispatch” dispatch@pinr.com Date: September 28, 2006
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Volume 58, Number 2 Monthly Review June 2006

Introduction

This article is based primarily on a series of meetings with workers, peasants, organizers, and leftist activists that I participated in during the summer of 2004, together with Alex Day and another student of Chinese affairs. It is part of a longer paper that is being published as a special report by the Oakland Institute. The meetings took place mainly in and around Beijing, as well as in Jilin province in the northeast, and in the cities of Zhengzhou and Kaifeng in the central province of Henan. What we heard reveals in stark fashion the effects of the massive transformations that have occurred in the three decades following the death of Mao Zedong, with the dismantling of the revolutionary socialist policies carried out under his leadership, and a return to the “capitalist road,” leaving the working classes in an increasingly precarious position. A rapidly widening polarization—in a society that was among the most egalitarian—is occurring between extremes of wealth at the top and growing ranks of workers and peasants at the bottom whose conditions of life are daily worsening. Exemplifying this, the 2006 Fortune list of global billionaires includes seven in mainland China and one in Hong Kong. Though their holdings are small compared to those in the United States and elsewhere, they represent the emergence of a full-blown Chinese capitalism. Rampant corruption unites party and state authorities and enterprise managers with the new private entrepreneurs in a web of alliances that are enriching a burgeoning capitalist class, while the working classes are exploited in ways that have not been seen for over half a century. (Keep reading…)

New Left Review

In the current debate on Tibet the two opposing sides see almost everything in black and white—differing only as to which is which. But there is one issue that both Chinese authorities and Tibetan nationalists consistently strive to blur or, better still, avoid altogether. At the height of the Cultural Revolution hundreds of thousands of Tibetans turned upon the temples they had treasured for centuries and tore them to pieces, rejected their religion and became zealous followers of the Great Han occupier, Mao Zedong. To the Chinese Communist Party, the episode is part of a social catastrophe—one that it initiated but has long since disowned and which, it hopes, the rest of the world will soon forget. For the Tibetan participants, the memory of that onslaught is a bitter humiliation, one they would rather not talk about, or which they try to exorcise with the excuse that they only did it ‘under pressure from the Han’. Foreign critics simply refuse to accept that the episode ever took place, unable to imagine that the Tibetans could willingly and consciously have done such a thing. But careful analysis and a deeper reflection on what was involved in that trauma may shed light on some of the cultural questions at stake on the troubled High Plateau. (Keep reading…)