Xi Jinping’s capitalist government recently “celebrated” the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. The Chinese bosses displayed the new Dong Feng 41 hypersonic ballistic missile, which can reach any target within the U.S. These traitors to the Chinese Communist Revolution were sending a clear message to their main imperialist rival: They are ready to claim the position as the capitalist world’s top dog. The Chinese bosses are ready to go to war to claim that position, even if it means spilling the blood of millions of workers.
The workers of the world celebrate October 1, 1949, as the day when our class, led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), hailed the Party’s triumph over the bourgeois nationalists, who were backed by the U.S. Although the Chinese communists made many mistakes, they correctly placed their confidence in workers’ ability to seize state power and build a communist society. They advanced the international struggle for communism, most significantly during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR), which strengthened the theory and practice of collective organization of society and the economy.
Cultural Revolution: transforming society
During the GPCR, the young Red Guards launched a fierce struggle against capitalist ideology and practice inside the Party and within the working class. Championing political over economic incentives, the Cultural Revolution represented “a social transformation that was—in its origins—an attempt to prevent revisionism from taking hold in China’s Communist Revolution….[I]t was an attack on the class privilege that arose from socialist China’s bureaucratic system, and … an argument that class behavior should matter more than class background” (Origins, Ohio State University, August 2016). Nonetheless, the cult of the personality of Mao and the right-wing opportunism of the Party’s leadership smashed the GPCR and the Red Guards.
It is important to remember the extraordinary achievements of the Revolution. What was once considered impossible, the Communists transformed into living reality. The barefoot doctors extended healthcare to all and eradicated many diseases like syphilis and schistosomiasis. Decades later, their achievement was recognized by the World Health Organization as “a successful example of how to solve the shortage of medical services in rural areas” (BBC World, March 2018). Life expectancy was doubled, the “most rapid increase of any population in documented global history.” Infant and child mortality was reduced by 50-70 percent (Population Studies, 2015 vol. 69, no.1). Communists also eliminated sexist practices like prostitution, foot-binding, and forced marriages. Illiteracy was nearly eliminated: “the literacy programs mounted in China after 1949 constitute what is perhaps the single greatest educational effort in human history” (University of British Columbia Press, 1997).
Additionally, Communist China served as a beacon of hope for workers’ fightback everywhere, from Africa to Latin America to a fledgling Progressive Labor Party in the United States.  
But most of these advances could not be sustained, because Mao and the Party leadership ultimately lost confidence in the working class. They allied themselves with “lesser-evil” capitalists. China today is the antithesis of workers’ power, a complete betrayal of the communist society that the CCP originally fought for.
Lies and concentration camps
The 70th anniversary of this great event in working-class history was cynically used by China’s bosses to exploit nostalgia for Mao and the Revolution among workers in China. Xi invoked national unity and sentimentalist patriotism in an attempt to falsely legitimize his economic policies as communist. Why would a fascist government seek to label it communist? It is because 70 years later, China’s workers still remember what once was. In the name of communism, students and workers today are fighting back and rebuilding the true essence of revolutionary Maoism.
In response, China unleashed its brutal state apparatus of surveillance and arrests (The Guardian, 11/12/2018). The bosses’ fascist call for national unity has led to the destruction of scores of mosques in Xinjiang, along with the imprisonment of millions of Muslims in concentration camps and the use of new technologies like facial recognition to monitor and control the entire region (ABC International, 5/7/2019).
Potentially a ruler for life, Xi Jinping presents his grip on the CCP as essential for modernization and a stronger economy. In reality, the Chinese bosses are using fascism to prepare for sharper competition and eventually war with competing imperialists. Meanwhile, they are extending their economic power by developing multilateral financial institutions like the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank, an alternative to the U.S.-controlled World Bank and the Japanese-controlled Asian Development Bank (Bloomberg 8/6/2018). Similarly, the Chinese bosses’ Belt and Road Initiative is designed to create a Eurasian economic corridor that will strengthen China’s industrial sector, its business vitality, and its control over the latest technology (National Bureau of Asian Research, 4/11), all while enhancing the Chinese bosses’ geopolitical and military position.
After receiving massive investments from the Chinese bosses, capitalist rulers in Greece and Hungary have defied the U.S. bosses. Even more troubling to the main wing of the U.S. ruling class is that Germany, the largest economy in the European Union, now has more trade with the Chinese capitalists than with the U.S. If the Chinese bosses continue to rise at the U.S. bosses’ expense, a global military conflict can be only a matter of time.
The red guards were right
The Progressive Labor Party recognizes the enormous historical advances of the revolutionary communists of China. We are their heirs. We fight directly for a communist society as workers’ only alternative to the horrors of capitalism, fascism, and imperialist war. Like the Red Guards of China, we have confidence that our class will again embrace communist ideas and revolt for a communist world.