Red Alert: The People's Republic of China: an opportunity for relative delinking from imperialism? Reflections from Beijing
Each time one visits China one either discovers new things or come back with new reflections. Hundreds of SACP cadres have visited China especially over the last 25 years. I visited the People’s Republic of China (PRC) for the first time in 1991 in an SACP delegation led then by the now late Raymond Mhlaba, Oom Ray, former National Chairperson of our party. Similarly the ANC has sent many delegations to the PRC over the same period.
This past week I was part of a government delegation to the PRC led by Deputy President, Cde Cyril Ramaphosa. It was by all accounts a very successful mission, especially the Beijing leg of the visit, of which I was part. This visit focused on building upon areas of agreement on co-operation reached between Presidents Zuma and Xi Jinpin during the former's last state visit to China last year.
Amongst the areas of focus and exchange were the training of public servants, with a possible co-operation between the Chinese Academy of Governance and our National School of Government. In addition, our delegation held a very informative joint seminar with the Chinese on the role of State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) in the Chinese economy.
The main meeting between Vice-President Li and Cde Ramaphosa covered a number of very important areas of co-operation, with a particular focus on implementation on those areas beyond just what is contained in the comprehensive strategic relationship between our two countries. Cde Li pointed out concrete ways of co-operation in supporting South Africa's industrialisation strategy, including in the areas of infrastructure development, energy, as well as human resources development.
As I was participating in these meetings I was quietly thinking that, against the backdrop of the launch of the New Development Bank (Brics Bank) established under the Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (Brics) global co-operation, and the potential mutual benefits from this Sino-South Africa relations, this is one of the major reasons why President Zuma is such an object of hate by local media and some of its business and imperialist backers.
Dominant sections of our media in particular, if not by design, but certainly in their discourse and ideological outlook, still sees South Africa as a 'neo-colonial outpost' of Western capitalist countries. It is because of the potential of both the Brics and our relations with China that we can possibly achieve what our discussion document, 'Going to the Root', refers to as partial delinking from the Western imperialist economic centres, thus creating real possibilities for radical economic transformation in our country.
However, I could also not help reflecting on the fact that we, as the SACP, have perhaps not fully utilised our relations with China to build the capacity of the Party in particular. At the very least, we have not adequately reflected on this relationship and some practical gains we can make out of it. Maybe our starting point in this regard could be a convening of a few days' Conference for us to reflect on, amongst others, China and its economic development trajectory, the role of the Communist Party of China, and on relations between our two parties and two countries.
Such a conference would also involve our allies and other progressive forces of our country interested in China, especially in the political and economic relationship between the PRC and South Africa. Hopefully, out of these discussions we could come out with concrete actions to enrich and better benefit mutually from our relations.
Many of the SACP cadres who have visited the PRC over the past two decades have come back both impressed and concerned about China. They are very impressed about the level of rapid development of the Chinese economy and the improvements this has brought about to the millions of Chinese. Of course the Chinese themselves have warned that we need to temper this optimism with the reality that there is still significant amounts of poverty in the PRC, especially in rural areas, and therefore there is still a long way to go.
Concerns have been raised by our cadres especially about the growth of a domestic Chinese capitalist class and the counter-revolutionary danger this may pose to consolidating a socialist China. This is because wherever the bourgeoisie has emerged and consolidated its place in the economy, it has always sought to capture political power for itself in order to guarantee its own reproduction as the ruling class. Of course we have over the years had very frank, honest, but comradely debates on these matters with our Communist Party of China (CPC) comrades. They have strongly argued that much as the path they are traversing since 1978 (when the CPC decided to open its economy to the outside world), is uniquely Chinese ('Building Socialism with Chinese Characteristics'), there are important lessons for the communist movement as a whole in this experience.
Our CPC comrades have argued that perhaps the single most important weakness of 20th century socialism (including the then actually existing socialism and its communist theory and strategy), was its primary focus on the transformation of relations of production (in this case the overthrow of capitalism and its exploitative relations), often at the expense of adequate and simultaneous focus on how to grow the productive forces.
This weakness was exaggerated by the fact that socialist revolutions only occurred in underdeveloped or less developed parts of the world and none in the advanced capitalist countries, contrary to what Marx and Engels had expected and predicted. Therefore, the Chinese path is a particular model of building productive forces for socialism in an underdeveloped country and in the context of a unipolar world, dominated by neo-liberal capitalism.
Indeed this is an important debate for communists to embark upon, especially on the question of what constitutes an appropriate socialist strategy after the collapse of the Soviet Union and in a world where neo-liberalism is in many respects still dominant, albeit in a crisis as well. It is a debate that must not be judgmental of the Chinese path, but must seek to learn appropriate lessons from this 'experiment' for the whole of the communist movement and other left forces.
There is perhaps another more important lesson from the PRC path of development. The SOEs made what is perhaps the singularly most important contribution in the impressive development of the Chinese economy. Some twelve years after China embarked on this new path of development, we saw the collapse of the Soviet Union and actually existing socialism in Eastern Europe, inaugurating an era of neo-liberal triumphalism. Part of this triumphalism was that there was no alternative other than to allow the capitalist market to rule and to, amongst things, privatise state owned enterprises.
The PRC did not follow the neo-liberal prescription of surrendering the SOEs to private companies. In other words the CPC rejected this aspect of neo-liberal orthodoxy. Instead it reformed and repositioned SOEs and mandated them to invest in a particular way that was to see the economy grow and develop to unprecedented levels.
Those countries that privatised their SOEs never saw any such meaningful socio-economic developments. In many instances their development was held at ransom by some of the very same privatised former SOEs.
Between the current crisis of neo-liberalism and the emergence of a power like China, as well as the potential of Brics, lies an area of huge opportunities for a country like ours, including our region and continent. It is for all this that we need to engage with these new realities from a consistently Marxist-Leninist perspective in order to drive a second, more radical phase of our transition.
An important part of this struggle is to defend and protect our national sovereignty as a crucial requirement for driving this democratic transformation. The SACP, as mandated by its 3rd Special National Congress, needs to campaign strongly around these themes, including heightened engagement in the battle of ideas.
Asikhulume!
This article by SACP General Secretary and Minister of Higher Education and Training Cde Blade Nzimande first appeared in Umsebenzi Online, the online journal of the SACP.
