Three weeks in Hong Kong
Posted on Monday 18 January, 2010
Filed Under International
I’M OVER the jet lag, I’ve done my first day in the office, and now it’s now evening in Hong Kong. But instead of maxing out the company credit card down in Wan Chai, I am sitting in my rented apartment at Causeway Bay, making sure that the Wi-Fi works so that I can carry on blogging.
For the next three weeks, I will be based in this undeniably impressive high-rise city, and will probably be taking some trips to other countries in the region. At the very least, there’s a conference in Singapore next week, and I plan to make an excursion over the border to Shenzhen special economic zone one weekend.
On the political side of things, I have the contact numbers for some local labour movement activists, and a stack of the latest radical books on China. One of the things I’ll be trying to work out is how come a notable wave of soft Sinophilia has overtaken certain sections of the British left.
This is, on the face of it, very odd. Beijing’s human rights record and its continued repression in Tibet and Xinjiang speak for themselves. From a democratic socialist perspective, they don’t say good things, either.
Some far left groups are beyond help, of course. The Morning Star can at least point to a long tradition of preparedness to overlook certain flaws in one party states, so long as that party proclaims itself communist.
Meanwhile, the Sparts, Workers’ Power and the normally more sensible Socialist Party all maintain that China is still in some distorted sense a ‘workers’ state’, and thus in need of defence against what they insist on calling ‘capitalist restoration’. That position does not sit too well with the very obvious real world turbocapitalism I have already witnessed over here, and expect to see more of in China proper.
There’s also blogger Andy Newman, who has written many pro-Beijing posts in the last couple of years. One recent example is his positive write-up of CPBer Jenny Clegg’s ‘China’s Global Strategy’. Comrade Newman argues that China’s turn to the market is ‘misunderstood’, and praises the Communist Party for ‘seeking to leverage its control of the state to promote economic and social development’. This, of course, entails making a new capitalist class extremely rich. But hey, let’s not nitpick.
Also unintentionally hilarious is his reflection that the urban intellectuals experienced the cultural revolution ‘most negatively’. I suppose that’s one way of describing a few years of forced labour in the countryside. Still, at least it knocked the book learnin’ out of most of ‘em.
The Clegg book is sitting on my bedside table, alongside Martin Jacques’ ‘When China Rules the World’ and a compilation of Marx’s journalism on China. I’ll be doing some reviews once I have ploughed through them.
In the meantime, many of the posts on this blog from now until early February will presumably reflect the environment. I don’t proclaim myself an expert on all things Chinese, but I do hope that this trip is going to teach me a lot.
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Comments
54 Responses to “Three weeks in Hong Kong”
Simon you wrote:
“Are you suggesting one elite is not preferable to another? “
I am suggesting that because it is run by an elite it is not run by the workers.
It is simple reasoning, an elite looks after an elite, not the workers., etc etc
Let me give you an example.
Suppose, hypothetically, there was a company and it called itself “The Workers Company” and it produces widgets, but it was run by a small, self-selecting elite, largely for their benefit, without any worker having any significant say in it is running.
What would socialists think of that example?
Well, Simon, in such a case, any conscious socialist would probably argue that without workers having a significant say or influence in that enterprise and you can’t really call it a “Workers Company”.
That is irrespective of how benevolent it was to its employees, or irrespective of how the elite who run the company think pleasant thoughts about the workers.
The same applies to China.
The key elements are:
1) who has the power?
2) who has the control?
3) who really benefits?
You could apply that approach to any capitalist company, any capitalist state and it would help to cut thru the BS and false consciousness which exists.
Equally, if you apply them to China, you find the workers have very little power, the elite has the power.
Thus, to call it a “worker’s state” is to deprive the very words of their own meaning.
PS: Do you think Romania under Ceausescu was a Worker’s state?
This is a very good article by Perry Anderson in the shape of a book review(s), on the new debate about China:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n02/perry-anderson/sinomania
Seriously, who thinks that Romania under Ceausescu was a Worker’s state?
Why is it that so many socialists don’t realise that worker’s conditions are better in liberal democracies than in illiberal autocracies? And I’m not arguing for the status quo, I’m not saying even the most enlightened of liberal democracies go far enough or truly respect the rights of the workers, and of course the apparatus of the market must be wholly dismantled . But when the day of international revolution comes I for one hope the result looks more like Sweden than China