At the same time as history is being made in Hong Kong by the movement challenging the Chinese ruling classs political dictatorship, in Xinjiang/East Turkestan with less media attention the riot police in two days killed 40+ Uighur people in Luntai County. These two places where the state power is resorting to naked violence are simultaneously weak links and strong links of capitalism in China. In Hong Kong the Partys rule is vulnerable because it concedes more democratic rights, and its influence in the Special Region is mediated through an alliance with a Hong Kong capitalist elite which isnt as politically powerful as it used to be. But Hong Kong is also a strong point in Chinese capitalism because of its higher standards of living and separate administrative system which gives the regions politics a narrower focus confined to really just one city. China rules East Turkestan and other non-Chinese-nationality regions as colonies. This means that the flip-side of the systematic oppression of the Uyghurs and Kazakhs, who can only be ruled through naked state terror, are ethnic Han settler populations that more loyal to the Party and its police state than in any other part of China. In East Turkestan a third of the Han populations lives on settlements of the armys Production and Construction Corps -- open only to ethnic Chinese -- which controls much of the land and 80% of industry in the province. Even outside the military-colonial establishment, Han from the mainland are drawn to the province by promises of super-cheap higher education, guarantees of employment at good jobs, and special privileges like the right to own guns; whereas the native people of Turkestan are systematically excluded from universities and labor market, and subject to random police sweeps and constant harassment of their language and the Muslim religion. The democracy movement in Hong Kong can only be successful in the long run if it acts to spark a massive struggle for democratic rights on the mainland. Accomplishing this will take a big political leap for the movement in Hong Kong: consciously jeopardizing its special treatment and risking a much-worse crackdown to help mobilize the class struggle of the billion+ oppressed Chinese. Any mass movement contending with the Party for authority in China will also need to confront Chinese nationalism directly. All layers of the Han-Chinese working class with even relative privileges can only break from the ruling classs political control if it consistently opposes the colonial regimes in Xinjiang and other frontier provinces and the forcible retention of those regions in China -- and also opposes all other divide-and-conquer and discriminatory policies, especially those against the 900 million people classified as rural residents.
Posted on: Sun, 28 Sep 2014 17:45:14 +0000
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