Above, 15 February 2020: COVID-19 infected patients dance at a makeshift hospital in Wuhan used to treat and quarantine less critical cases.
CHINA’S SOCIALISTIC SYSTEM ENABLES HER PEOPLE TO ACHIEVE VICTORY OVER VIRUS THREAT
6 October 2020: It has now been a whole six months since the city in China worst affected by the COVID-19 outbreak, Wuhan removed the last restrictions on outbound travel. Those restrictions had been crucial to containing the spread of the virus, which was first detected in Wuhan. For the last several months China has been buzzing again. Not only are nearly all workplaces and schools re-opened but railways stations, airports, bars, restaurants, cafes, museums, theatres, galleries, gyms, sports stadiums, tourist venues and entertainment venues have been bustling with activity. Five days ago, people in China made 97 million domestic tourist trips on just the first day of the eight day (!) public holiday that Chinese people get for their combined National Day (i.e. anniversary of the 1949 anti-capitalist revolution) and Mid-Autumn Festival holidays. Chinese people are expected to make a further 500 million domestic tourist trips during the remaining seven days of the public holiday. Other than for the countries like Sweden where governments have callously downplayed the coronavirus threat leading to huge numbers of deaths, China and her socialistic neighbour Vietnam have more than any other populous country been able to re-open their societies.
Crucially, the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) and Vietnam have been able to almost completely contain the virus even while carrying out this reopening. Over the last more than one month, China, despite her huge population, has not had one single locally transmitted COVID-19 case. The only new cases have been from returning Chinese citizens and visitors arriving from overseas who have been in quarantine. By contrast other countries that have tried to significantly re-open, like Singapore, South Korea, Japan, Britain, France and Spain – not to mention the catastrophic situation in the United States – have been hit with major second waves of virus spread.
China’ success in containing the virus while re-opening is due to some very careful and often expensive efforts. For example, while most schools in Australia do not monitor the temperature of their students, China’s schools check the temperature of all students as they enter school. Some schools in Beijing have even provided students with smart thermometers that can automatically alert teachers if the student has a fever. Meanwhile, a survey found that even after the pandemic has been largely suppressed, 60% of Chinese employees are still being temperature tested when they enter work each day, including all employees at larger workplaces. Around the same percentage of workers are provided with face masks by their employers. How many of us here in Australia lucky to still have a job have the security of knowing that we and all our coworkers are being temperature tested when we enter work? How many of us are being provided with face masks by our employers? Very few would be the answer to both questions! Moreover, while universal COVID-19 testing of all people working at a nursing home only occurs in Australia after there is pandemic spread disaster like the deadly one at the Anglicare-run Newmarch House in Western Sydney, in China, all workers at nursing homes, fever clinics, medical institutes, ports, borders and prisons are given mandatory tests. Furthermore, to ensure the safety of what had been the worst-hit part of China, the PRC incredibly tested nearly 10 million people in Wuhan for the virus between May 14 and June 1. This meant that alongside the one million city residents previously tested, every single person in Wuhan has been coronavirus tested at least once, except for children under six who it is not considered advisable to have tested.
However the PRC would never have even got to the stage of being able to safely re-open if she had not succeeded in suppressing the virus in the first place. Let’s remember that China achieved this feat while facing a unique problem. You see when the virus first started spreading quickly it was on the eve of the country’s seven-day Chinese New Year public holiday. This normally sees the biggest human migrations in the world, when hundreds of millions of Chinese people travel to visit family or for vacation. Such large movements of people in crowded aircraft, trains and buses would rapidly spread any infectious disease. Moreover China was facing the rampant spread of a brand new virus that no one knew of previously and no one knew how to treat. Other countries where the virus spread later – or at least where the virus was detected later (there is some strong, though at this stage not conclusive, evidence that the coronavirus was actually in Spain and the U.S. and possibly France before it was in Wuhan) – had the advantage of knowing that the deadly coronavirus was coming and how it could be detected. When the PRC took the unprecedented step in the morning of January 23 of suspending all outbound travel from Wuhan, there was not a single recorded case of the virus in Australia. It would be another eight days until Britain recorded a case. Yet, the PRC’s response was so effective, that the proportion of China’s population that has died from COVID-19 is eleven times lower than in Australia. Meanwhile, more than nine times fewer people in China have died from the pandemic than have died in Britain, despite China having a 21 times greater population!
So why has the PRC’s response been so successful. Undoubtedly, much credit must go to the dedication and courage of her nurses, doctors, sanitation workers and community workers. This includes the 42,600 nurses and doctors from other provinces of China that heroically volunteered to go to Wuhan to help treat COVID-19 patients. In late March in Wuhan, there were emotional scenes as these medical workers about to return to their home provinces after their successful efforts broke down in tears of joy as they received warm thanks from Wuhan residents. The medics were given honorary police escorts as their brigades went in buses to Wuhan airport to fly them back to their homes as huge crowds wearing face masks lined the streets of Wuhan to cheer and honor them (see for example: https://twitter.com/OcastJournal…/status/1243791022489882624).
Yet, medical workers in other countries have also shown great resolve and determination to treat COVID-19 patients. This includes staff in the likes of the U.S., Britain and Australia, where many medical workers are of Asian, African and Middle Eastern backgrounds and have had to put up with racist abuse and harassment alongside the stress of their life-saving work. So what made the PRC’s response so decisively more effective than in these other countries? An editorial in the April 18 issue of the prestigious British medical journal, The Lancet, explained China’s success as follows (see: Sustaining containment of COVID-19 in China – The Lancet ):
The quick containment of COVID-19 in China is impressive and sets an encouraging example for other countries. What can be learnt from China? Aggressive public health interventions, such as early detection of cases, contact tracing, and population behavioural change, have contributed enormously to containing the epidemic.
However, what enabled China to make those crucial “public health interventions” so effectively? When the coronavirus was ravaging China in late January and early February, before it devastated the rest of the world, the Western mainstream media claimed that the virus spread in China was evidence of the serious flaws in her political system. Now that it has been proven that the PRC responded to the virus threat far more effectively than the Western countries, in order to be consistent with the initial methodology of the mainstream Western media we must ascribe that success entirely to the superiority of her political system. China has a socialistic political and economic system based on working class rule and the dominance of public ownership of her economy – despite the fact that the wavering Beijing government has allowed too much of a capitalistic private sector. And when one compares the results of the PRC’s pandemic response to that of capitalist countries, her socialistic system comes through with flying colours.
Tragically, at this time 4634 people have died from COVID-19 in China as part of the more than one million people who have been killed by the disease worldwide. Our solidarity and heartfelt condolences go out to the friends, loved ones and families of all the victims of the virus in Australia, China and the entire world. When one compares the effectiveness of socialistic China’s response to this health emergency with that of the capitalist countries with similarly large populations, we find that her response has been far more effective regardless of which type of capitalist state that you compare with the PRC. Thus the proportion of people killed by COVID-19 in socialistic China is currently 214 times lower than in Brazil, which has a hard right government, 154 times lower than in France, which has a more mainstream liberal centre-right government and 214 times lower than in social democrat-administered Spain. Notably, the percentage of China’s people killed by the coronavirus is also 202 times lower than in the world’s capitalist superpower the U.S. – where the virus is still spreading alarmingly – and 46 times lower than in the U.S.’s only powerful capitalist rival, Russia. Meanwhile, the proportion of people killed by COVID-19 in China is 60 times lower than in one of the U.S.’s strongest allies Israel, while being 101 times lower than in one of the U.S. biggest arch enemies in the capitalist world, Iran. Moreover, the percentage of Red China’s population killed by the coronavirus is 194 times lower than in Britain, which never misses a chance to proclaim its supposed “democracy,” 31 times lower than in Turkey which has an authoritarian, defacto one-party, capitalist state and 44 times lower than in Saudi Arabia which has an absolutist, monarchist dictatorship. Nominal parliamentary “democracies”, authoritarian regimes, absolutist monarchies, hard right governments, centre-right governments, social democrat-administered “welfare states,” allies of the U.S., adversaries of the U.S., it doesn’t fundamentally matter, capitalist rule in all its forms has in general failed miserably in responding to the COVID-19 threat in comparison with socialistic China.
We should add too that the other socialistic countries have also responded in a very effective way to the pandemic. Three of these countries share borders with China – Laos, North Korea and Vietnam – and thus were other than China itself the most vulnerable to the virus spread out of Wuhan (if one discounts the slower undetected spread of the virus that may well have already taken place earlier in the U.S. or Europe). Yet, the response of these socialistic societies has been so successful that to date not a single person has died from COVID-19 in Laos and North Korea. In Vietnam, 26 times fewer people have died from the virus than in Australia, despite Vietnam having nearly four times Australia’s population. The effort of socialistic Vietnam should in particular be singled out for praise as she has not only a large population of 97 million people but a very high population density, making her at higher risk to the pandemic. Yet, through an effective program of quarantine for suspected cases, a resonant government information campaign and a collectivist spirit amongst her population that ensured that they mobilised in support of public health measures, Vietnam has been to date stunningly successful in suppressing the pandemic threat (see: How has Vietnam, a developing nation in South-East Asia, done so well to combat coronavirus? – ABC News ). Other than for the four socialistic states in Asia, the only other workers state in the world right now is Cuba. The response of Cuba, which is still burdened by a U.S. economic blockade (the DPRK is weighed down even more by draconian UN economic sanctions), to the virus threat has been less successful than the other workers states. The proportion of her people who have died from COVID-19 is more than three times that of China’s. However, this is still far, far better than most capitalist countries in her region.
PUBLIC OWNERSHIP AND THE RESULTING COLLECTIVIST SPIRIT
A volunteer takes the temperature of a scooter driver in Hangzhou in early February 2020 while another volunteer records results. A massive grassroots mobilisation involving volunteers, community workers, neighbourhood collectives and Communist Party of China local activists was key to China’s success in responding to the COVID-19 threat. Photo credit: Chinatopix
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So how did China’s socialistic system enable her to effectively respond to the coronavirus threat? One striking example is the way that the PRC’s socialistic state-owned developers, equipment manufacturers, and communication and power firms collaborated to build two urgently needed new hospitals in Wuhan in less than two weeks. This building of additional, large infectious disease hospitals enabled Wuhan to have the capacity to treat infected patients both effectively and in a way that ensured that infections would not be passed onto others. Just as importantly, state-owned firms acted to convert in rapid time large numbers of public facilities like gymnasiums and cultural halls into makeshift hospitals. This meant that although Wuhan’s hospitals were at the start overwhelmed, before long all COVID-19 patients in China could actually be treated in hospitals rather than be made to self-quarantine at home or in nursing homes, as is the case with most coronavirus infected people in Australia, Britain and the U.S. deemed to be “non-serious cases.” In this way the PRC guaranteed not only the proper treatment of infected people but, through ensuring that all infected people were both isolated and guaranteed food and essentials without having to go shopping for such goods, they ensured that the quarantine of these people was water-tight. In contrast, the shortage of available hospital places in the likes of the U.S., Britain, Italy and Australia meant that infected people ended up passing on the virus to family members, house mates and most fatally, fellow nursing home residents.
Meanwhile, China’s state-owned manufacturers – even aircraft manufacturers, car factories, oil giants and of all industries underwear manufacturers – were quickly turned into factories making masks, ventilators, personal protective gear for medics, disinfectants, non-contact thermometers and testing kits. Such a mobilisation on this scale is not possible in capitalist countries like Australia because the private manufacturers here are totally driven by profit and will only agree to switch production if they can make a quick buck out of it. There have just been a handful of manufacturers here that have switched over their production to assist the pandemic relief effort and they have mostly done so at a slow pace and with low levels of output. Similarly, if private developers in Australia had been asked to build massive brand new hospitals in ten days or to rapidly convert large public facilities into makeshift hospitals they would have demanded a massive premium for such an urgent construction and would have wasted days if not weeks haggling for a bloated price before even thinking about starting construction. In contrast, in the PRC, not only does the socialistic public sector put social needs above profit but because the smaller private enterprises are beholden to the large public sector that dominates the markets and supply chains and because private firms have a tenuous existence under a workers state, even some private companies felt compelled to join the anti-pandemic mobilisation.
As a result of this public sector-led mobilisation, China’s daily output of medical grade N95 masks increased from 130,000 in early February to over 5 million by the end of April. Even more impressively, she increased her production of medical protective suits 90 fold from the early days of the epidemic. By late April, China was producing nearly 2 million protective suits per day! This made a huge difference to her response. Although in the early days of the pandemic, many Chinese medical workers became infected and some tragically later died, once it was realised how infectious the disease was and production of personal protective equipment was ramped up rapidly within days, all of China’s nurses, doctors and sanitation workers working in infection prone settings were able to wear space suit–style head to toe protective suits. This greatly contributed to slowing the spread of the disease within hospitals and protected the lives of medics and sanitation workers alike.
A society dominated by a collectivist economy breeds a collectivist, community spirit amongst its people. So in China, during a crisis, people, by and large, have a sense of civic duty and community responsibility. That meant that during this public health crisis, the population overwhelmingly followed hygiene and social distancing measures voluntarily. Moreover there were few cases of people fighting with each other over items like toilet paper such has occurred in Australia. To be sure, given that there is also a sizeable private sector in China that operates alongside the socialistic state sector and which operates more on the capitalist mode, the dog-eat-dog mentality dominant in capitalist countries has infected Chinese society to some degree and there were a small number of cases of selfish behaviour by individuals during the outbreak. Moreover, in a country with a population 57 times that of Australia’s, one could find a few cases too of over-zealousness by local officials. And the Western media did their best to try and find such isolated cases and deviously portray them as the norm in China. So too did Australian prime minister Scott Morrison when he deceptively claimed, at a news conference, that China’s response to COVID-19 was typified by welding doors shut to quarantine people (how many actual cases of that happening in China were there – like five cases in a country with a population of 1439 million!). But for all the cases of self-centred behaviour by a small number of individuals and the very small number of cases of bureaucratic heavy-handedness by a few Chinese local government officials, the big picture reality is that China’s current victory over the virus threat is in good part due to the overall community, collectivist spirit of her people – a spirit that has been created by the dominance in the PRC of the socialist economic mode. It was this spirit that led to a massive grassroots mobilisation in China to respond to the COVID-19 threat. The amount of people that participated in the PRC’s grassroots campaign is staggering. Four million community workers were involved in the pandemic response along with nearly 9 million volunteers, 13 million Communist Party of China (CPC) volunteers and tens upon tens of millions of local residents. Their efforts made a decisive difference. For one they ensured that at a very local level, everyone was informed about the required social distancing and hygiene measures and just as importantly were motivated as to their importance through direct discussions. They also ensured that in addition to the daily and sometimes three times daily temperature testing of all workers that was taking places in all Chinese workplaces during the height of the epidemic, people were being temperature tested in their homes at least once a day. As a result those thought to possibly have COVID-19 were quickly identified, tested for the virus and quarantined.
PRC AIDS PEOPLES OF THE WORLD
6 April, Ghana: Airport workers at the Kotota International Airport in Accra, capital of Ghana, unload a plane load of pandemic response items sent by China.
Even while still battling to get on the top of the coronavirus, the PRC began sending out medical teams and pandemic response goods to other parts of the world. Already by the end of May, the PRC had sent 29 medical expert teams to 27 countries and had directed its medical teams already stationed in 56 countries to support local pandemic response efforts. Moreover, the PRC donated large amounts of surgical masks, protective suits, disinfectants, thermometers, testing kits and ventilators to more than 150 countries. This assistance was concentrated on countries in Africa, the South Pacific, Asia and the Middle East.
This approach is radically different to that of the U.S. leadership. The Trump regime’s “America First” ethos led U.S. authorities, on several occasions, to literally seize masks in foreign countries that had already been set for export to third countries. Several countries, including France, Germany and Canada, were in this way deprived of promised supplies. Here, Australian politicians and media imbibed the same nationalist outlook as Trump. They made a big retrospective song and dance about a small amount of masks and sanitiser being exported to China – or bought and sent on to China by Chinese Australians – during the height of the virus spread there and before COVID-19 had even spread widely here. This was claimed to be harming Australia’s national interests. This did not stop Australian authorities from, for their part, importing a far, far larger number of masks, protective suits and testing kits from China.
Meanwhile, even as Australia imposed a total travel ban on non-Australian citizens from China entering here from January 31 and then a general ban on all foreign nationals or non-permanent residents from entering Australia from March 20, the PRC has never imposed a general travel ban on non-citizens arriving from any country. On March 26, China did suspend the entry of tourists and business travellers. However, international students, workers and those conducting scientific and technical research and co-operation could still enter China. Thus, the contrast between the way that international students are being treated in China with the what they are copping in Australia is striking. Notable too is the fact that while international students here who have lost their jobs as a result of the pandemic, as many indeed have, are not eligible for any welfare payments, PRC authorities have been providing meals and other essentials to international students from Africa, the South Pacific and the Middle East studying in China. Moreover, throughout this entire pandemic there has not been one single case of an international student suffering a violent racist attack in China. This is a welcome contrast to the reality faced by many international students in Australia who have had to combine enduring economic insecurity and pauperisation with being hit with terrifying physical violence.
AUSTRALIAN RULERS TRY TO MASK THE PRC’S PANDEMIC RESPONSE SUCCESS FROM AUSTRALIA’S PEOPLE
When the coronavirus was ravaging Wuhan before the PRC managed to suppress the threat, the capitalist Australian media could not report on the epidemic sweeping China enough. They wanted to present Red China as vulnerable, backward and deeply flawed. Yet when it became clear just how effectively the PRC was responding to the pandemic and in particular just how successful her response had been in comparison with the capitalist countries, reports about the current state of the pandemic in China … suddenly disappeared from our TV screens! Instead, when the media did start talking about COVID-19 in China again they only spoke about the origins of the virus which they attributed to China, something that is as yet unproven and moreover is actually not central to examining an overall response to an infectious disease, since viral outbreaks are a natural disaster that have always been impossible to contain at their immediate source. The motivation of Australia’s mainstream media is clear. They want to mask the truth about China’s pandemic response success from Australia’s population in order to ensure that this country’s masses do not acquire a positive attitude to the PRC and her socialistic system. They understand just how many grievances that the working class masses here have and they sure don’t want people here getting any ideas about supporting socialism.
One way that the big business and government-owned Australian media have sought to mask China’s virus suppression success is to find some other, capitalist, country that they can point to as a model of success. This so that people don’t focus on the elephant in the room when it comes to successful response – Red China. One country that the Western media had held up was capitalist Singapore. Yet this blew up in their faces as Singapore had a massive second-wave virus spread that was concentrated in the terribly overcrowded dormitories of that country’s brutally exploited South Asian and South-east Asian foreign guest workers. As a result, Singapore now has an infection rate even greater than that of Britain and Italy (although thankfully a lower death rate due to the relative youth of the guest worker population). The main positive model that the mainstream media focussed on was South Korea. Yet South Korea’s number of deaths per million people is already two and a half times higher than China’s and continues to climb, whereas all of China has not had a single COVID-19 death for the last nearly five months. Japan, and quite ridiculously Germany, were also pointed to as capitalist “democratic” models of success. Yet the proportion of Japan’s population that has died from COVID-19 is already four times higher than in China, while in Germany the proportion is 36 times higher than in China. So in the end, the mainstream media had to tout Australia as the model of pandemic response success. But despite this land’s great geographic advantages of being both an island and a country with a very low population density, this country was hit by a deadly second wave centred in Victoria. So the capitalist media and government have had to sheepishly pull back on that claim as well.
When the Western media have had to grudgingly acknowledge China’s pandemic response success they have tried to tarnish this by claiming that this was the result of “authoritarian” methods and “brutal lockdowns.” The reality is however very different. The centre of virus spread in China, Wuhan was to be sure put in a water-tight quarantine to reduce the virus spread to other parts of China. People in Wuhan and some other parts of Hubei Province were required to remain in their homes. However, this was achieved largely because of the voluntary co-operation of the people, their sense of civic duty and the effectiveness of grassroots information campaigns. Moreover what made the lock down effective is that neighbourhood collectives, community workers, CPC local committees and volunteers organised to ensure deliveries of food and other essentials to every single person in lock down or quarantine as well as more broadly for vulnerable people like the elderly and disabled.
Before the pandemic hit Australia, the mainstream media here tried to play up reports and videos shared on China’s social media of isolated cases of people breaking quarantine and then loudly protesting as they are being dragged back into their homes. Yet this was the experience for just a tiny percentage of people in China. The Western media however seized on this to describe China’s methods as “brutal” and evidence of an “authoritarian communist dictatorship.” They sold that line until the virus became rampant in Europe, America and Australia. Then these countries themselves naturally needed to enforce quarantining measures too. Soon quarantining measures here in Australia were enforced through repressive means involving not only the police, but quite unnecessarily, even the army. People were hit with hefty fines if they could not show cause for why they were outdoors – some for merely jogging. Six months ago, Victorian cops fined 26 people a total of $43,000 for holding a refugee rights protest allegedly because they were outdoors other than for the allowed reasons. This despite protesters being in a car cavalcade and thus posing little risk of virus spread. Meanwhile large numbers of other people have received $1,652 on-the-spot fines for breaching social distancing restrictions, fines which necessarily affect lower-income people the most. Meanwhile, several other people have actually been arrested and hit with criminal charges. In contrast the proportion of people fined or charged for breaching quarantine in China has been tiny compared to her huge population. In most cases, those few people found to be breaching quarantine and refusing to return to their homes were instead of being fined were literally escorted or – in rare cases – dragged back into their homes. Moreover, most of this enforcement was actually performed by volunteers, neighbourhood committees and grassroots activists. If in those tiny few cases where people who breached quarantine shouted and resisted as they were being pulled back into their homes, the reason that they resisted and complained so loudly is because they could: it was not the police grabbing them back into quarantine but often literally their own neighbours, community workers or grassroots activists. Where PRC authorities actually did have harsh crackdowns was against private shopkeepers and other capitalists who tried to profiteer from the crises by raising prices. Many of these people were arrested. However, from the standpoint of the masses these are completely supportable and very necessary measures.
It is important to note that Wuhan and the other cities in Hubei that had stringent lockdowns only amounted to 4% of China’s population. In the rest of China, compulsory social distancing restrictions were actually not as stringent as the ones at the height of lockdowns in Britain, Italy, Spain and other countries. Other than for the cities in Hubei, in a further 12% of China, at the height of the pandemic, people could only go outside for work or medical reasons and one person from each household could go out to get provisions every two days. However, in the remaining 84% of China – including in China’s most well-known cities Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Chengdu, Chongqing, Nanjing and most of Xian and Tianjin too – compulsory restrictions were actually less stringent than they were in Australia at the height of the virus spread here. To be sure schools were suspended, mass gatherings banned, entertainment venues closed and the Chinese New Year holidays greatly extended to keep non-essential workplaces shut. Certain housing communities restricted outsiders entering their compounds, while others required people entering to have their temperature taken and be registered for tracing purposes. However, people were still allowed to move outside freely as long as they wore a mask. Nevertheless, following urgings from the government, most people chose voluntarily to stay at home out of both civic duty and for their own protection.
The fact is that China’s stunningly successful response to the coronavirus came not from “authoritarian methods.” Rather, it came from the ability of her socialistic, public sector-dominated economy to rapidly build emergency hospitals and provide urgently needed pandemic relief goods, from the sense of collective responsibility in her population created by her collectivist economic system, from the enthusiastic grassroots mobilisation by the Chinese masses and from the fact that, constrained by working class state power, the PRC leadership put people’s needs first ahead of the interests of corporate profits.
That so much could be achieved by a socialistic country so squeezed by the relentless pressure of richer imperialist powers – and one which is undermined by the intrusion of capitalistic enterprises and weakened by the lack of genuine workers democracy – shows what we could achieve in a fully socialist world. At this time of public health emergency and with millions of working class people in Australia and the rest of the capitalist world having been thrown out of their livelihoods, we need to fight all the more energetically here and across the capitalist world for a society based on public ownership and working class state power.
Above: Chan Han Choi at his residence of house arrest shortly after his release from prison on bail on the evening of 12 November 2020. Choi is here reading a copy of the main Korean language community newspaper in Sydney, Hanho Daily. The then current issue of Hanho Daily contained an article on the campaign to free this socialist political prisoner. Photo Credit: Trotskyist Platform
Free Chan Han Choi – Drop All Charges Now!
Australian Regime Releases Socialist Political Prisoner into House
Arrest
13 November 2020 –
After nearly three years in prison without being convicted of any charge, Chan
Han Choi was yesterday finally released on bail. However, the bail conditions
imposed on him are so strict that they amount to house arrest. Choi is not
allowed to leave his bail residence except for his twice daily reporting to a
nearby police station or for essential medical care. Apart from being subjected
to a strict curfew, his use of the internet is greatly restricted. Moreover,
Choi “must, on request, disclose to the officer in charge any caller or phone
number appearing on his accounts.” This is a blatant attempt to assist the police
to carry out intimidation and surveillance of Choi’s many friends and
supporters.
Despite the harsh bail conditions imposed on him, Choi is certainly happy to be out of prison. He spent most of his nearly three years in prison in one of the Australian regime’s most notorious prison camps. Moreover, the capitalist regime imposed extra severe conditions on this socialist political prisoner. They obstructed visits to Choi by lawyers, translators and friends. They banned him from making any telephone calls to his friends whatsoever – a right accorded to other prisoners. More recently, they failed to monitor his diabetes and repeatedly knocked back his requests to see a prison doctor over an eight and a half month period as his diabetes significantly worsened. Choi was finally allowed medical care again only after sending off a strong August 15 letter to prison health authorities stating “that they are trying indirectly to murder me” by rebuffing his repeated written requests to be seen by a prison doctor. By the time that Choi was seen by prison medical staff on August 27, his blood sugar levels had reached alarmingly dangerous levels. He required emergency doses of insulin. Later he was put on a program of daily insulin injections and thrice daily sugar level monitoring. It turned out that, unbeknownst to Choi at the time, most of the symptoms that he was desperately seeking medical attention for – severe unintended weight loss, rashes all over his body, very itchy fungal infections etc – were the result of his diabetes going out of control. The fact is that Choi should have been receiving daily insulin up to eight months before he was finally treated in this way. The regime’s delay in treating his diabetes not only caused the symptoms that he suffered from but put Choi at greatly increased risk of suffering a heart attack or stroke. Apart from being potentially deadly, the Australian regime’s refusal of medical care to this left-wing political prisoner caused him extreme stress that for a period affected his mental health.
Even on his very last day in jail prior to being released on bail, the callous neglect of Choi’s health needs continued. Yesterday, Choi asked to see the nurse on duty so that he could get a certificate about the medication that he is taking in order to give it to a doctor once he is released. However, senior guards blocked him from accessing a nurse. Thus prevented from having any official record of the medication that he has been prescribed, today Choi and his supporters spent the afternoon in a panic as they feverishly attempted to deduce – with the help of his new GP and pharmacist – what daily insulin dose he was being prescribed and what other diabetes and high cholesterol medication he requires.
16 November 2020: Chan Han Choi with some of his supporters at his own COVID-safe birthday party held at his residence of house arrest. Choi was coincidentally released from bail just four days before his 62nd birthday. Photo Credit: Trotskyist Platform
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Chan Han Choi is accused of trying to help North Korea’s people conduct trade with entities abroad in violation of UN economic sanctions. He is scheduled to face trial next February. All the eight charges against Choi relate to alleged brokering of the export of produce from North Korea to entities in third countries, except for one of the charges. That latter charge alleges that Choi attempted to broker the import of petroleum products from Iran to the DPRK. Choi has pleaded not guilty to all the eight charges. However, as asserted by the chair of a united front rally held in Choi’s defence on the Saturday prior to his November 10 bail hearing:
“We say that whether the charges are true or not, Choi should be freed and all the charges dropped. Because even if they are true, he has committed no crime from the standpoint of working class people. On the contrary he would have carried out a great act of humanitarianism. Because these sanctions are cruel and brutal. Similar sanctions imposed on the people of Iraq, in just their first eight years of implementation, from 1990 to 1998, killed half a million Iraqi babies. They caused a half a million babies to die prematurely through a lack of food and medicine – this is according to the United Nations, the body that imposed the sanctions. In the end about 1.7 million people in Iraq died as a result of those sanctions. Now, North Korea has a socialistic system so they’re better able to protect their people from these sanctions. But still it causes enormous suffering. Choi has been to rural areas of North Korea and he has seen that suffering caused by the sanctions. And that is why he is opposed to these sanctions and wants to help the people of North Korea.
“But Chan Han Choi is also a socialist. He likes North Korea’s egalitarianism. He likes the society’s community spirit. Now people can have different ideas about North Korea’s leadership. But the fact is that the people of North Korea have built a socialistic system based on public ownership of the banks, the mines, the factories and the agricultural land. Now that system is a system that favours working class people. So by standing by such a system, Chan Han Choi has stood by all the people in Australia and around the world hurt by the capitalist system. He has stood by the millions of workers, many young and women workers, who’ve been forced into insecure casual labour. He has stood by the hundreds of thousands of workers who have been thrown out of their jobs over the last few months after their toil made their bosses huge profits… He has stood by the people who are struggling with rent or mortgage repayments because there is so little public housing. He has stood by the people hurt by privatisation. So by standing by a system of public ownership, he has stood by 90% of Australia’s population. We must now stand by him!”
An Australian SAS soldier murders an unarmed Afghan person in cold blood. A report by the Australian regime itself – only partly made public – reveals that the Australian military killed at least 39 civilians or unarmed prisoners. Among those that they murdered were children. The racist troops also tortured a large number of prisoners, often just for sport. Yet despite some of these crimes having occurred eight or more years ago and being exposed by courageous whistleblowers years ago, not a single soldier committing a war crime has thus far been charged with any crime. By contrast, Chan Han Choi who is not charged with killing anyone, assaulting anyone, sexually assaulting anyone, stealing from anyone or even with espionage was imprisoned for nearly three years without facing trial.
Resist the Rise of Cold War McCarthysim!
Although Choi was initially charged for allegedly trying to break the sanctions on the people of North Korea, the reason he was imprisoned and denied bail until now was largely because of his sympathy for socialistic North Korea. In their submissions opposing each of Choi’s bail applications, the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions (CDPP) insisted on each occasion that Choi’s stated sympathy for the DPRK was a strong reason to reject bail. Meanwhile, the Australian Federal Police (AFP) claimed that Choi’s statements from prison that he is a political prisoner and attacking the economic sanctions on the DPRK as unfair and unjust are also reasons to deny bail. In other words, because of Choi’s sympathy for a socialistic country and his avowed opposition to the cruel sanctions on the people of that country, the Australian regime is insisting that Choi should have less rights than others. This is blatant political discrimination! It is what Cold War McCarthyism is all about – where people’s sympathy for a socialistic country or advocacy of communism is equated with criminal acts. It makes a mockery of the Australian regime’s claims to run a “democratic system” where “everyone has the same rights regardless of their political stance.” Such discrimination against sympathisers of socialistic states is all the more disgusting because those standing by such systems based on public ownership and working class rule – in however a bureaucratically deformed manner that it may currently exist in North Korea and the Peoples Republic China – are standing by the interests of the entire working class of Australia and the world; and most of the middle class as well.
Meanwhile, the CDPP and AFP also opposed Choi’s bail on the grounds that his supporters providing bail surety and bail residence to him are associated with groups like Trotskyist Platform, “that make statements undermining the Australian legal system and showing a lack of respect for the processes associated with adjudicating criminal guilt.” Thus, people expressing distrust in Australia’s capitalist legal system – a system that is both racist and biased towards the rich business owning class – are branded as being necessarily more likely to commit criminal acts than others. Indeed, the regime went even further. They made a big deal about the people offering bail surety having, on certain days, worn t-shirts containing the flag of the DPRK! Shock horror! Their Cold War anti-communism is so intense that they even deem people wearing t-shirts with the flag of a socialistic country as would-be criminals.
Alongside such fanatical anti-communist arguments, the CDPP and AFP also resorted to other spurious “grounds” for opposing bail. For one they constructed a completelybonkers conspiracy theory that Chinese, North Korean or even Russian agents would assist Choi to flee Australia – despite the COVID ban on travel out of this country – should Choi be granted bail. Then, they made a huge song and dance about Choi’s family’s supposed minimal contact with him since his arrest. However, as Choi’s legal team noted, his family members were themselves raided at the time that Choi was arrested and there “is an irresistible inference that the lack of contact between the Applicant [Choi] and his family, and vice versa, may be prompted out of fear for the safety” of family members “as opposed to a permanent state of degradation in their familial relationship, and hence the diminishment of the Applicant’s community ties.” Moreover, until well into 2019, Choi had regularly been speaking to his wife on the phone. This communication only ceased after two members of the Corrections Intelligence Group visited Choi in prison and made the chilling threat that should he ever speak on the phone in Korean again, he would be sent to Goulburn Supermax prison. Soon, Choi found that he could not adequately communicate with his wife since both are far from fluent in English. Moreover, there was a danger that either one of them could unthinkingly break into Korean during a phone conversation which could cause Choi to be sent to Goulburn Supermax and out of easy reach of the friends who have been visiting him in custody. As a result he stopped calling his wife. However, making a mockery of the prosecution’s emphasis on his supposed “minimal contact with family members,” the first thing that Choi did this morning – after having been given an approved phone late last night – was to make phone contact with his family… and a lengthy conversation followed!
Upon his release from prison into house arrest, Choi expressed his deepest appreciation to all the people who have supported him. He said that without their support and actions there is no way that he would have been released on bail. When Choi was arrested in December 2017, then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, Australian Federal Police leaders and the mainstream media launched vicious verbal attacks on him. They sought to use the case to create a hysterical fear of North Korea. Choi was a bogeyman for the Australian capitalist regime to justify increased McCarthyist repression at home and a greatly intensified military build up against the DPRK and her socialistic PRC neighbour and ally. However, soon, the regime and the capitalist class that it serves found that many people did not buy their propaganda. Many sympathized with Choi and a vibrant movement mobilising street protests in defence of this socialist political prisoner emerged. The regime realised that the Choi case, rather than being a propaganda bonanza, has turned into a headache for them. In particular, the efforts of Choi’s supporters to expose the regime’s cruel treatment of this political prisoner and the resulting sympathy for Choi emerging from within a sizeable section of Australia’s Korean community (see: http://www.hanhodaily.com/news/articleView.html?idxno=64867) – and part of the Chinese community too – was threatening to lay bare to many the fraudulent nature of the ruling class’ claims to stand for “rule of law” and “human rights.” Thus, the exposure of the Australian regime’s profoundly unjust persecution of Choi is also undermining its attempts to attack the PRC, DPRK and other socialistic countries over supposed “human rights abuses.” It seems that decisive sections of the Australian ruling class have hence calculated that its interests would be better served by releasing Choi into house arrest until his trial.
7 November 2020: Supporters of Chan Han Choi rally in Sydney’s Chinatown to demand his freedom and to assert their opposition to the return of Cold War McCarthyism. The protesters then marched to Sydney Town Hall.
Congratulations to all those who have joined the street protests in defense of Chan Han Choi and supported him in other ways. You made a real difference! Alongside Trotskyist Platform, many other groups joined this united front campaign. Among the organisations that have either participated in or supported the various rallies supporting Choi are Trotskyist Platform, Anti-War West Sydney, Social Justice Network, Australia-DPRK Friendship Society, Communist Party of Australia – Wollongong branch, Communist Party of Australia –Western Sydney branch, Aust-DPRK Solidarity, Lebanese Communist Party and the Irish Republican socialist group James Connolly Association.
However, we supporters of Choi cannot rest on our laurels. His trial is approaching fast. Moreover, there is a lot at stake. For, although Choi is the biggest victim of Cold War McCarthyism in this country he is far from the only target. Just a week before Choi was released from prison, a Chinese Australian man, Sunny Duong, became the first person charged under Australia’s draconian so-called “foreign interference” laws – laws that are aimed at quashing the voice of those sympathetic to socialistic China and the other workers states. Sunny is a highly respected member of Melbourne’s South-East Asian Chinese community. The Australian regime have given scant details about the charges. But you can bet that this is another beat up! They say that he was conspiring to interfere in Australia’s political affairs. What do they mean by that: was he was planning to merely issue some social media posts sympathetic to China?
Five months ago, a NSW Labor MP Shaoquett Moselmane was forced out of his elected senate seat for several months after the Australian Federal Police made a heavy-handed and intimidating raid on his home. It turns out that he never had any case to answer. Their excuse for the raid was that he belonged to a social media chat group where other people made pro-China comments. Can you believe that? And the regime here calls itself a democracy! Two months before being raided, Moselmane was witch-hunted out of his position as deputy president of the NSW upper house just because he told the truth and said that China responded very well to the pandemic. So much for free speech!
Meanwhile, last year, Chinese international students were subjected to an intimidating interrogation by Australia’s ASIO secret police. The students were targeted because they organised a large march in Sydney opposing the pro-colonial, anti-China rioters in Hong Kong. Then this year, ASIO and the Federal police staged a Gestapo-style raid on Chinese journalists working in Australia, seizing their computers and phones and terrifying their children.
Like all bullies, those leading the Cold War McCarthyist drive in Australia depend on their potential victims being intimidated. That is after all how witch-hunts work. First the witch-hunters target one person and hope that others who would support that target are intimidated and stay silent to avoid being targeted themselves. Then the persecutors move on to the next victim who often could be one of the people who decided to stay silent. That is why we must not stay silent when anyone is being persecuted for their sympathy for socialistic states; or in Moselmane’s case for having merely said a few words in praise of China. Now is the time to put our heads up – not duck for cover! The way to defeat witch-hunts is through courage! We must say an injury to one is an injury to all! By working harder to defend the biggest victim of McCarthyist persecution in Australia, Chan Han Choi, we are pushing back against this Cold War witch-hunt on all fronts.
The struggle to win freedom for Choi and to oppose the broader McCarthyist witch-hunt will need to be waged through mass street actions and political exposure. We can have no illusions in justice originating from the Australian regime’s legal system. As Trotskyist Platform spokesman, Samuel Kim, concluded in a speech made at the 7 November “Free Chan Han Choi” protest:
“The prisons, the courts, the police and the state bureaucracy in this capitalist country exist to enforce the interests of the corporate owners against those of the working class masses and their supporters. This is the case whether it is the Liberals, the ALP or the Greens who are in office as the capitalists also heavily influence these political parties. That is why greedy construction industry bosses get away with industrial manslaughter and murder – where on average 30 construction industry workers are killed on the job every year. Yet representatives from the construction workers unions get hit with criminal convictions for inspecting unsafe work sites.
“This system is geared towards the rich and powerful – and Choi, a hospital cleaner and someone charged with standing up for a workers state will receive discrimination from this system. So that is why we have mobilised on the streets with our physical bodies and we are loudly voicing these injustices. The only way we can bring true justice for Choi or any working class struggle – like for higher wages, struggles against police brutality or for affordable housing – is through street actions and protest actions of the good people. We need future mass actions of politically aware working class people and our allies. This, comrades and friends, is the most powerful way to oppose the decaying capitalist system of increasing inequality. We demand:
“Freedom for Chan Han Choi!
“Down with the barbaric sanctions, military threats, and trade war on the people of North Korea!
“Down with the Cold War witch-hunt against supporters of socialistic states!
The Last Cold War Against the Soviet Union and the New One Against Socialistic China
28 May 2020: What a last few months it has been in terms of Australia’s “relations” with its biggest trade partner, the Peoples Republic of China (PRC)! Firstly, even after the PRC had effectively squashed the coronavirus spread by late February, Canberra continued to maintain a discriminatory travel ban almost exclusively on PRC citizens, while for weeks allowing large numbers of infected people to enter from the U.S.A and Europe without any screening and quarantine. Then two months ago, the mainstream media, right wing politicians and members of his own Labor Party launched a hysterical witch-hunt against senior NSW upper house MP, Shaoquett Moselmane, for simply having the temerity to state what many infectious disease specialists had already explained: that China had taken effective measures that had fought and contained the coronavirus threat. All the while, the mainstream media could not let a week pass without “finding” – or rather manufacturing – a story on which to attack the PRC. It was just like in the days of the last Cold War against the then Soviet Union. Then last month, senior government politicians, like home affairs minister Peter Dutton, stepped up their campaign to despicably blame China for the virus outbreak. Associated with this propaganda campaign, the Australian regime spearheaded the push for a witch-hunting anti-PRC “inquiry” into the virus’ origins which the foreign minister said would involve “investigators” acting like weapons inspectors, thus evoking the notorious “weapons inspections” that were the prelude to the 2003 U.S./British/Australian invasion of Iraq.
It
is pretty evident that we are now no longer merely facing the threat of a new
Cold War. We are actually now in a
new Cold War – a Cold War directed mainly against socialistic China and those living
in the West with even the slightest sympathy for her. Thus, it is worth looking
back at the last Cold War. That Cold War was also focussed against the most
powerful socialistic country of the time, which was then the Soviet Union. It
is a myth that the capitalist powers’ hostility to the Soviet Union only began
around 1947. In fact, it actually started in late 1917 from the very moment
that the working class and other toilers of Russia overthrew their exploiters
and took state power into their own hands. Soon after this October 1917
Socialist Revolution, over a dozen foreign states including Britain, Australia,
Japan, the U.S. and France sent troops to assist Russian
counter-revolutionaries seeking to restore capitalist rule there through bloody
civil war. The capitalist powers
understood that the 1917 triumph of the working class in Russia would inspire
revolutionary struggles of workers around the world. So they resolved to crush
socialism before it could establish itself and spread. However, after the invading
capitalist armies and their Russian counter-revolutionary allies were defeated
in the Civil War, the capitalist powers became partially engrossed in their own
inter-imperialist rivalries. Later they were also focussed on trying to crawl
out of the 1930s Great Depression that had wreaked havoc across the capitalist
world. All the imperialists still wanted to crush the Soviet workers state.
However, with the Soviet Union then much weaker, the British and French
capitalists were equally concerned about the resurgence of their German
imperialist rival. But the outcome of World War II and its aftermath changed
all that. The strength of the Soviet Union and of pro-communist movements became
greatly enhanced. The heroic victory of the Soviet Red Army and her communist
partisan allies over the Nazis had led to the foundation of new socialistic
states allied to the Soviet Union in Poland, Hungary, East Germany and other
parts of Eastern Europe. Furthermore, local communist partisans with the
assistance of the Soviet Army had overturned capitalist rule in North Korea and
Yugoslavia. Moreover, although 75 years later, Western propaganda has managed
to obscure this truth from many people, everyone at the time knew that it was
the Red Army and her allies who had largely defeated fascist Germany. The
overwhelming majority of the fighting against the Nazis was in the Eastern
Front where the Red Army and her allies stood up to the Nazis and their allies.
Of all the casualties in the European and North African theatres of the war,
more than 90% were in the Eastern Front. The U.S., Britain and their allies did
not make a serious attempt to defeat the Nazis until they saw the Soviets
winning in the Eastern Front. Although they partly sold their war as a “war
against fascism”, the Allies’ opposition to Hitler, in as much as it existed,
was driven by imperialist competition. And their main reason for finally
opening up a second front against Hitler was to get to Germany before the
Soviet Union did. Many people at the time could see through all this. They were
only too aware of how the bulk of the French capitalist class and that of many
other Western capitalist classes had collaborated with the German and Italian
fascists. As a result, many of the capitalist classes in Europe and around the
world were discredited, tainted with fascism and threatened with working class
revolts at home. In contrast, the Soviet Union’s predominant role in crushing
the hated Nazis greatly increased her authority. Around the world, Communist
parties grew in numbers and anti-colonial movements influenced by Marxist ideas
emerged. Alarmed by all this, the capitalist regimes moderated their rivalries
in order to unite against their common threats: communist movements, the Soviet
Union and the other socialistic states. In 1947, the U.S. imperialists backed
up by the weakened West European and Japanese capitalist rulers and capitalist
regimes in Australia and elsewhere unleashed a Cold War to contain and crush
communism and the socialistic states.
The Cold War became more intense in 1949 after the toiling masses of China led by Mao Ze Dong’s Communist Party of China (CPC) overthrew the landlords, imperialist-puppets and capitalists of China and set about on a socialistic path. Then after socialistic North Korea and her Red Chinese allies humiliated the U.S., Australian and other imperialists by holding them to a stalemate in the 1950-53 Korean War, Cold War fears reached fever pitch. In many countries a McCarthyist anti-communist witch-hunt – named after U.S. senator Joseph McCarthy who played a key role in inciting it – was unleashed. In the U.S. in the late 1940-1950s, thousands upon thousands of teachers, wharfies, seamen, university academics and government employees were driven out of their jobs on the basis of the slightest alleged sign of communist association or lack of adequate hostility to the Soviet Union. Large number of Hollywood actors, writers and directors were also forced out of their jobs and blacklisted. Hundreds of communists and alleged communists were jailed. Meanwhile, in Australia, several Communist Party of Australia (CPA) leaders were imprisoned alongside communist trade unionists. The government even raided CPA offices in the midst of a witch-hunting atmosphere that almost saw the CPA banned in 1951.
2 October 1949: Over one million people march through the streets of Shanghai to celebrate the triumph of China’s 1949 Anti-Capitalist Revolution.
Internationally,
in the 1950s and 60s, the main target of the Cold War was the Soviet Union
followed by the other socialistic countries: China, North Korea, North Vietnam,
Cuba and the East European countries. However, in the early 1970s, PRC leader
Mao betrayed the socialist cause and his own laudable role in leading China’s
1949 anti-capitalist revolution by entering into an alliance with U.S. and
Western imperialism against the Soviet Union. Treacherously enlisting in the
Cold War against the Soviet Union was the price that the national-centred CPC
leadership paid for dubious “guarantees” of peace and reduced hostility from
the capitalist powers. However, after capitalist counterrevolution drowned the
Soviet and East European workers states in the 1989-1992 period, the PRC itself
became the main target of imperialist hostility.
Why Capitalist Hostility to Red China Has Grown So Much Over the Last Three Decades
In
the early 1990s, the level of imperialist opposition to the PRC was somewhat
muted in comparison to today. At that time, it had only been just over 40 years
since the Chinese Revolution. Thus, China then still had a very long way to
catch up from the horrific poverty and backwardness of its pre-1949 days when
it was a brutally subjugated neo-colony of the imperial powers. The capitalist
powers did not see the Red China of the early 1990s, now without the presence
of the Soviet Union, as much of a serious force to be reckoned with as they do,
indeed, today. Moreover, drunk with triumphalism following their defeat of the
Soviet Union and encouraged by the right-wing market reforms in China renewed
by then PRC leader Deng Xiaoping in 1992, many capitalist strategists expected
that it was only a matter of time before the emergence of a sizable private
sector in China would open the way to capitalist counterrevolution there the
way that Gorbachev’s perestroika had
opened the road to the same in the Soviet Union. However, nearly three decades
on, imperialist perspectives about China have changed considerably.
There
was no one single event, equivalent to the outcome of World War II in terms of
the previous Cold War against the Soviet Union, that hardened the attitude of
the capitalist powers against the PRC. Rather there has been a series of events
and processes. One was the way that the PRC sailed through the 1997 Asian
financial crisis. That economic implosion seriously buffeted the capitalist
economies in East and Southeast Asia, including the so-called “tiger”
economies. By contrast, the PRC dealt with the crisis with ease. This alarmed Western
ruling class analysts. Meanwhile, they grew steadily concerned at the rapid
rate of economic development in the PRC, which was – and is – still based on a
dominant socialistic public sector. In the late 1990s – early 2000s, China’s
GDP was growing at around 10% per year. This was much faster than that of any
of the capitalist countries. Then Beijing’s successful – and indeed spectacular
– hosting of the 2008 Olympic Games heralded socialistic China’s emergence as a
world power. Soon after, the then worst economic crisis since the Great
Depression hit the world. The late noughties Great Recession caused massive job
losses and economic contraction in the capitalist world. Many countries,
especially in Europe, not only took a very long time to recover but in some
sense have never fully recovered from this economic shock. In contrast, the PRC
stormed through the crisis by bringing the advantages of her socialistic system
to bear. Her GDP growth rate never even dropped below 6% per year.
There
was another development that equally worried capitalist ruling classes. Far
from their predictions that market reforms would gradually see China move
towards capitalist restoration, by the mid-2000s China started to move in the
opposite direction. Pushed by mass working class protests and struggles and demands
by people on the left-wing of the CPC, the PRC’s leaders’ curbed privatisations
and helped fortify her socialistic state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Far from
becoming obsolete, these SOEs were becoming increasingly successful and
powerful. Moreover, the period from about 2005-2012 saw a wave of crackdowns on
capitalist tycoons within China and nationalisations and re-nationalisations of
privately owned companies. Indeed, the period from 2008 to 2011, in particular,
was in many ways China’s most left-wing period in four decades. So when Xi
first took office in 2012, pro-capitalist strategists and academics hoped that
he would renew rightist reforms. However, some three to four years later those
hopes became dashed too.
Meanwhile,
the rise of Red China was having an effect on the world that infuriated the
imperialists. These imperialists have always plundered the so-called “Third
World.” When “engaging” with these semi-colonial and neo-colonial countries,
the imperialists demand as a condition for granting access to capital,
technology and markets, their “right” to exploit labour, plunder natural
resources, set a low price for purchased produce and leach huge profits through
debt service payments. However, over the last decade and a half, China started
engaging in large-scale, mutually beneficial and respectful cooperation with
these ex-colonial countries. Her socialistic SOEs would hand over capital and
technology to these countries as well as access to the huge Chinese market
without robbing these countries blind or demanding that they privatise their
public sectors or introduce grinding austerity. The Australian imperialists, in
particular, were enraged at this as governments in the South Pacific,
buttressed by these new found relations with the world’s only non-imperialist
power, now felt more confident to sometimes resist Australian imperialist
bullying. Famously, Fijian prime minister, Frank Bainimarama pushed back
against the arrogant bullying of Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, at
the August 2019 Pacific Islands Forum. Asked if Morrison’s approach might cause
some Pacific leaders to look to China, Bainimarama responded [1]:
“After what we went through with Morrison, nothing can be worse than him.
“China never insults the Pacific. You say it as if there’s a competition between Australia and China. There’s no competition, except to say the Chinese don’t insult us. They don’t go down and tell the world that we’ve given this much money to the Pacific islands. They don’t do that. They’re good people, definitely better than Morrison, I can tell you that.
“The prime minister was very insulting, very condescending, not good for the relationship.”
That
is why despite making huge profits from exports to China, which is by far
Australia’s largest export market, the Australian imperialists are bristling at
how Red China’s “interference” in Australia’s “neighbourhood” is interfering
with what they see as their “right” to trample over, patronise and squeeze
every last bit of natural wealth out of the former colonies of the South
Pacific and beyond.
Above (Photo credit: Fumi Matsumoto) : People wearing China t-shirts and carrying both the red flag of the Peoples Republic of China and PNG flags line the streets of the PNG capital Port Moresby to welcome Chinese president Xi Jinping to the November 2018 APEC Conference. Below, December 2013, East Timor: People protest in the East Timorese capital Dili against the Australian regime’s plunder of East Timor’s oil and gas. The protest followed exposure that Australia had used the cover of an “aid” project to install listening devices in East Timorese government buildings in order to deceitfully ascertain East Timor’s diplomatic strategy in negotiations with Australia over access to energy resources in Timorese waters. Red China’s mutually beneficial relations with South Pacific countries has helped the people of these countries to achieve slightly greater economic independence and enabled them to start to push back against Australian imperialist bullying in the region, infuriating Australia’s capitalist rulers.
Yet
the emerging outcome of the COVID-19 crisis is likely to turn out to be by far
the biggest single factor that leads to the ratcheting up of imperialist
hostility to the PRC. In particular, there is the fact that while the
capitalist countries have met the pandemic with at best a flawed, and more
often a disastrous, response, socialistic China has implemented a strikingly
effective response. The rulers of the capitalist powers are furious that the
pandemic is ending up doing more damage to their own economies than it is to
the PRC. Moreover, they are fearful that their own populations have seen
China’s more successful response and are worried that they will draw
pro-socialist conclusions from this.
Despite
the obvious similarities between the last Cold War and this one there are also
some notable differences. Pre-1949 China had been kept so backward – her per
capita GDP was barely more than half of India’s at the time – that even after
seven decades of catching up, China’s per capita economic strength is still weaker
relative to that of the imperialist powers than the 1970s-1980s Soviet economy
was relative to these same powers. Moreover, while the Soviet Union had
basically achieved military parity with the strongest capitalist power, the
U.S., by the end of the last Cold War, the PRC’s military remains much weaker
than that of the U.S. Thus, while today the U.S. has well over 6,000 nuclear
weapons, China has under 300 such warheads [2]. More crucially, communist and
left-wing movements are much weaker today in the capitalist world than they
were during the last Cold War. All this makes socialistic rule in the PRC all
the more precarious; and by extension that makes the position of the working
class in the capitalist world more vulnerable, because for all the bureaucratic
deformations and excessive concessions to capitalism within China, the PRC
remains a workers state whose success will mean great advancement for the
masses of China and inspiration for the toilers of the world but whose demise
would be a catastrophe for the working people of both China and the rest of the
world.
On
the other hand, one factor that makes the socialist and working class side in
this Cold War stronger than the last one is China’s sheer population size.
Today, the world’s biggest socialistic country encompasses one in five of the
world’s people. Secondly, the capitalist economies are far more fragile than
they were during the last Cold War. Moreover, the late noughties Global
Recession has left a lasting crisis of self-confidence amongst the capitalist
ruling classes around the world – something that has only been amplified by
their failed and callous response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This is what has
made them so panicked about Red China’s rise and made them so hysterical about
Chinese “interference” undermining their ability to “freely” rape the peoples of
the South Pacific, Africa, the Middle East, South America and key chunks of
Asia. As a result, the imperialist powers have become ever more provocative in
their efforts to exert military pressure on China – such as through ever more
aggressive U.S., British and Australian incursions through contested waters in
the South China Sea and bigger arms sales to Taiwan – more brazen in their
backing of anti-communist forces within China and ever shriller in their witch-hunting
of anyone at home “guilty” of being soft on Red China.
Ironically, there is one aspect of Cold War fears of socialistic powers that actually brings some benefits to the working class masses in the capitalist world. During the last Cold War, in order to make the Soviet Union less attractive to their own masses relative to their own capitalist system, the capitalist rulers in the West conceded certain welfare state provisions and rights to their own workers in excess of what they actually wanted to. Once they managed to destroy the Soviet Union they, of course, began rolling back these concessions. However, today as they grow more concerned about the potentially attractive power of a giant rising socialistic power, they are posed with the need to make new concessions to their own working people. This was seen most clearly with the response of some capitalist countries to the COVID-19 pandemic. The impulse of most of the capitalist powers was to avoid excessive economic shutdowns and social distancing measures that could hurt corporate profits. Their initial inclination was to adopt a “herd immunity” strategy of basically letting most people get infected – on the grounds that the society would then get immunised – so that economic damage could be minimised. This “herd immunity” strategy was in effect a callous program to cull the herd of millions of old, ill and poor people, the people most likely to die if infected. However, with socialistic China having already responded to the pandemic with measures that put her peoples’ lives above that of her economy, some capitalist rulers felt compelled to partially retreat from the “herd immunity” strategy in order to not seem so heartless and ineffective relative to Red China. This only infuriated the Western capitalist rulers even more as they feel that the PRC has, in effect, “cornered” them into taking measures harmful to their own beloved stock markets.
Socialists in the Capitalist World Must Mobilise against Cold War Attacks on the PRC
Participants listen to a speech by Trotskyist Platform chairwoman, Sarah Fitzenmeyer, during the 7 October 2019 demonstration calling on “Working Class People in Australia & the World” to “Stand With Socialistic China.” The action which was built primarily by Trotskyist Platform and the Australian Chinese Workers Association was covered by Chinese language newspapers and radio in Australia. When word got back to communists inside China of the march, they were delighted to hear about it. Actions supporting the socialistic PRC held in Australia and other imperialist countries will boost the morale of genuine communists within China and encourage them to fight hard to defend the PRC workers state in the face of incessant capitalist military, political and economic pressure.
If
some of the capitalist regimes have felt the need to not appear so inhumane in
comparison with the PRC’s people’s first approach to COVID-19 by reluctantly
replicating, in part, some of her economic shutdown measures, we had better
consider what would have happened if there had been no socialistic giant on the
planet like the PRC. What if the capitalist powers knew that people would not
have any sizable non-capitalist country to compare these rulers’ response to
COVID-19 with? If they could administer a “herd immunity” “strategy” and then tell
people that this is all that can be done and that is what everyone is doing
anyway? What if most governments thought that they could get away with replicating
the worst of Trump’s so-called responses to the pandemic, with unleashing the
callous “herd immunity” “strategy” that Britain’s Boris Johnson implemented at
the start and which social democratic-administered Sweden and the fascistic
Brazilian regime of Jair Bolsonaro alike are catastrophically still set on
today? As disastrous as the response of most capitalist countries has been
today, how many tens of millions of people would already be dead if that
scenario played out? And consider how events would have played out in China
itself had socialistic rule already been overturned there. Would China even
have been the first country to detect the virus? Would the health system have
been so devastated in China, as it has been in Russia since the 1991-92
capitalist counterrevolution, that tens of thousands of people would have died
in Wuhan before anyone even noticed? Would a capitalist China have replicated
the disastrous “response” of capitalist Brazil which is, after all, a country
with a similar per capita GDP to China? How many millions of people would then
have died in China from the virus?
If one ponders these questions then it becomes crystal clear just how much is at stake in the outcome of this new Cold War. And most importantly it shows just how crucial it is thatthose concerned with the interests of the working class masses and the fate of humanity stand by socialistic rule in China today. That means that we must oppose all the military pressure that the imperialists are unleashing against the PRC. We must demand that the U.S. and Australian navies stop their provocative naval runs through the South China Sea, that the U.S. troops stationed in Darwin, which are aimed against the PRC and her socialistic North Korean neighbour, get out and that the joint U.S.-Australia spy bases at Pine Gap and Geraldton are closed. The Left and workers movement must also oppose the massive political, financial and media support that the U.S., British and Australian governments are giving to forces within China seeking to undermine socialistic rule there – whether they be the violent pro-colonial, rich people’s opposition in Hong Kong, pro-capitalist “dissidents” on the mainland or the rabidly right-wing, anti-secular forces based on a minority of the Uygur community in China’s north-west. We need to energetically resist the propaganda war against the PRC.
We should understand that just as the 1991-92 capitalist counterrevolution in Russia strengthened capitalist exploiting classes everywhere, the defeat of socialistic rule in China would embolden the capitalist rulers in this country and around the world to further attack workers’ rights, push through still more privatisations and further slash public housing and other services most needed by working class people. However, if the Left is not to lose this new Cold War like we lost the last one we must learn the bitter lessons of that previous defeat. Socialistic rule in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was crushed by the combined weight of imperialist military, economic and political pressure. Serious defects in the structure of those workers states – including the lack of workers democracy and the existence of material privileges for the administering bureaucracy both of which depoliticised the masses and undermined their commitment to defend socialism – made these workers states more vulnerable to the immense capitalist pressure bearing down upon them. However, from the point of view of leftists living in the capitalist world, the most important lesson from the last Cold War to grasp is that a key reason why socialistic rule in Russia and Eastern Europe was destroyed is because the workers movement in the West failed to come to the defence of these workers states. Indeed, the mass social democratic parties within the capitalist world – including the ALP in Australia – actually supported the anti-communist Cold War drive against the Soviet Union. Treacherously, so did much of the Far Left. In Australia, the group inspired by the theories of late British leftist Tony Cliff, the International Socialist Organisation (ISO) – the parent group of today’s Cliffite groups Solidarity and Socialist Alternative – enthusiastically supported every major anti-communist movement that worked to destroy the Soviet Union. Their excuse for taking this stance was to ridiculously claim that the Soviet Union was merely just another form of capitalist state – even as the real capitalists did everything in their power to crush the Soviet Union precisely because it was not capitalist! Unlike the Cliffite ISO, the Democratic Socialist Party, the forerunner of today’s Socialist Alliance, accepted that the Soviet Union and her East European allies were workers states of some form. Yet, bending to Cold War pressures, they too supported the key imperialist-backed counter-revolutionary movements that destroyed these workers states. Thus, they joined the ISO in hailing Poland’s anti-communist Solidarnosc movement and then supporting arch-counterrevolutionary Boris Yeltsin’s August 1991 counter-coup, the decisive event in the defeat of the Soviet Union.
19 February 2020, Sydney: Trotskyist platform sign at protest against the Morrison government’s travel ban targeting arrivals from China and its forced quarantining of people from Wuhan at the remote Christmas Island immigration prison. The contrast between China’s successful response to the pandemic and the deeply flawed response of the likes of the U.S., Britain, Australia and India has left capitalist ruling classes the world over worried that their own populations will draw prosocialist conclusions from this comparison Photo Credit: Richard Milnes/Alamy Live News
There
were some in the left in Australia, like the old SPA (Socialist Party of
Australia) – the fore-runner of today’s Communist Party of Australia (the SPA
changed its name to the Communist Party of Australia in 1996) – that did at
least have enough political courage and understanding to stand by the Soviet
Union. However, intimidated by the intense anti-Soviet “public opinion” at the
time, they did not promote their pro-Soviet politics too aggressively within
left milieus. Most notably, they largely refrained from building actual actions
on the streets in defence of the Soviet Union. Instead, the pro-Soviet
component of Australia’s Left tried to make common cause with left-liberal
peaceniks who, while opposed to the war-mongering of their own rulers, were at
best neutral on the Cold War and were opposed to any overt displays of sympathy
for the Soviet Union. Thus shackled by this alliance – or at least this quest
for an alliance – with pacifist members of the upper middle class, middle class
and even tiny clots of the capitalist class, the pro-Soviet elements were
unable to connect the need to defend the Soviet Union with the class struggle
interests of the Australian working class and were reluctant to mobilise any
defiant street actions in solidarity with the Soviet Union. A similar dynamic
took place within most of the imperialist countries. And so the Soviet masses
looking abroad at the capitalist powers saw only hostility – from governments,
the mass social democratic parties and much of the Far Left – or at best
neutrality (from the left-liberal pacifists and class-collaborationist
pro-Soviet elements following in their tails). This, on the one hand
demoralised the pro-socialist workers within the Soviet Union and, on the
other, emboldened those seeking capitalist counterrevolution. We cannot let the
same thing happen to the Peoples Republic of China! It is the duty of those within the Australian Left who understand the
need to defend the PRC workers state to build actions here in solidarity with
socialistic rule in China. We must show staunchly pro-communist elements within
China, seeking to defend socialistic rule there, that they are not alone, that they
have support even within the imperialist centres.
We
in Trotskyist Platform (TP) are proud to be the left group in Australia that is
most actively building actions on the streets in solidarity with the PRC
workers state. Unfortunately, the proportion of the Far Left in Australia that
has any sympathy for the PRC is even less than the proportion that was
pro-Soviet during the last Cold War. The Cliffites – this time in the form of
Solidarity and Socialist Alternative – are at it again in effectively lining up
on the side of imperialism in the Cold War. Just look at what they say about
Covid-19 whenever they mention China! Although they have criticised some of the
more bonkers anti-China conspiracy theories of the Far Right, they are repeating
most of the talking points attacking the PRC pushed by the mainstream
capitalists and their media. They claim that China tried to cover up the
outbreak, had a “botched response,” failed to act decisively in the early days
of the outbreak and even when they are forced to acknowledge China’s success in
curbing the pandemic put it down to “brutal lockdowns” and “authoritarianism.”
Why bother looking at a nominally socialist website to find such rubbish when
you can read it all the time in the Murdoch and Fairfax (now owned by Peter
Costello-headed Nine Entertainment) papers, hear it on 2GB or watch it incessantly on Channel Nine or the ABC?
Somewhat differently, Socialist Alliance has simply avoided commenting on the
attacks on the PRC over Covid-19. One could say that this is not as harmful as
the actions of the Cliffite-based groups. However, putting one’s head in the
sand when one’s “own” ruling class and its U.S. superpower ally is waging an
intense campaign against the world’s biggest socialistic state is hardly what
socialists should be doing. Moreover, like Solidarity and Socialist
Alternative, Socialist Alliance continue to fervently back the
Washington-backed, anti-communist opposition in Hong Kong.
Other
than for TP, the only other active, bona-fide left group in Australia to defend
the PRC is the Communist Party of Australia (CPA). We must note with
encouragement that in the last period, the CPA – and, in particular, the
Editorial section of its newspaper The
Guardian – has taken a stronger position in defence of the PRC than their
more perfunctory stance previously. In part this may be because a section of
their party, including their former general secretary, who had anti-PRC views
left the CPA a year ago. Those who left founded a new party called the
Australian Communist Party which seems to have near identical positions as the
CPA except on one gigantic issue: on the issue of China the new group shares
the same pro-imperialist hostility to the PRC as do the Cliffite groups. For
the CPA, it seems that with some anti-PRC elements having left their ranks and
leadership and faced with the unmistakable need to take a stand in the face of
an escalating new Cold War, they are strengthening their pro-PRC stance.
Nevertheless, the CPA has still not adequately turned their pro-PRC written
position into action on the streets. They would still rather talk about the
more popular socialistic state in far-away Cuba and the more amenable to the
social democratic-left, leftist government in Venezuela than about the need to
defend the workers states most intensely targeted by Australian imperialism:
the PRC and the DPRK. From the outside it seems that on the positive side there
is the CPA’s Brisbane Branch and chunks of their Sydney membership who strongly
want to defend the PRC. On the other hand, it seems that there are still individuals
within the CPA who hold at best a neutral attitude to the PRC and others who
believe that the issue should be downplayed so as not to interfere with a quest
to build a “people’s front” alliance with the Greens and other anti-PRC
progressive-liberals. To this we would say that the defence of socialistic rule
in the world’s most populous country – especially when Cold War hostility to
that state so dominates this country’s political life – cannot be made an
optional extra for anyone calling themselves a Marxist-Leninist or a communist.
This is not a question one can simply “agree to disagree on” while amicably
existing in the same party. It should be
absolutely mandatory for communists to actively stand in defence of the
PRC and the other remaining workers states against imperialist attacks and
internal counterrevolutionaries.
We
look forward to in the future joining with the CPA and the many pro-PRC
leftists who are not part of any political group in united front actions in
solidarity with the PRC and in opposition to military, political and propaganda
attacks on her. By pointing to the policies facilitated by the existence of a
workers state in China that would be attractive to working class activists in
Australia – like the widespread availability of public housing, the crackdown
on housing speculation, the nationalisation of China’s banks, the dominance of
public ownership over China’s finance sector, ports, airlines, car plants,
infrastructure construction, steel industry, mining, energy, shipping etc, the
jailing of bosses for deadly workplace accidents and the frequent crackdowns on
greedy capitalists – we can connect the need to defend the socialistic PRC with
the class struggle against capitalism here. One thing that we must realise is that
because the interactions between Australia and China are far greater than those
that existed between Australia and the Soviet Union – i.e. there is far more
travel and tourism between China and Australia, there are far more
international students from both China and Australia studying in the other
country, far more people from each country working in the other country and, additionally,
there are a large number of PRC immigrants living in Australia – what happens
here with respect to China will have much political influence on events within
China. The stakes are thus higher in terms of the stance that leftists take in
Australia with respect to the new Cold War. On the negative side, word about
any demonstrations supporting the anti-PRC, pro-colonial rioters in Hong Kong,
in which the likes of Solidarity, Socialist Alternative and Socialist Alliance
have been participating, will get back to China. On the positive side, word
about any mobilisations supporting the socialistic PRC will also quickly get
back to the Chinese masses. An example of the latter was seen on the Labour Day
public holiday in NSW last October, when in an action built largely by the
Australian Chinese Workers Association and Trotskyist Platform, around 60
socialists from a range of political backgrounds marched through the streets of
Sydney behind a banner saying, “WORKING CLASS PEOPLE IN AUSTRALIA & THE
WORLD: STAND WITH SOCIALISTIC CHINA!” and “DEFEAT HONG KONG’S PRO-COLONIAL,
ANTI-COMMUNIST MOVEMENT!”
For
socialists, a Cold War political climate can be intimidating and isolating. But
we must stand strong! And we must never forget that the same Australian
capitalist ruling class that has managed to, at this stage, deceive a
considerable section of the working class masses into backing their Cold War
drive are the very ones who now threaten these same workers with new cuts to
their pay and conditions under the cover of “rebuilding the economy,” who increasingly
drive working class youth into insecure casual jobs, who throw out of work at
will the very same workers who made them their fortunes whenever they can’t
make enough of a profit out of these workers and who have allowed rental
accommodation to become cruelly expensive for most working class people. After
all, it is precisely because they know that
their own masses have such grievances that the Australian ruling class is so
fearful of the existence of a socialistic giant in its Asian neighbourhood.
In
responding to the new Cold War we should never be put off by the fact that
socialistic rule is currently flawed in China. The Chinese workers state is
bureaucratically deformed and more seriously, the CPC leadership have allowed the
emergence of way too much of a private sector. Dangerously, the CPC tops have
allowed some of the new capitalists to gain too much influence. Thus, just like
in the case of the former Soviet Union, socialistic rule in the PRC is fragile
and her transition to complete socialism is far from assured. Yet that only
makes it more crucial that we stand
in defence of the PRC workers state. As we wrote in Issue 8 of our journal 13 years ago:
“The fact that the Chinese proletarian [i.e. workers] state is bureaucratically deformed actually makes that state more in need of global workers support and not less. When a structure is distorted it is able to carry less load. So too, the points of deformations of the PRC can cause that workers state to collapse when the heavy weight of imperialism is bearing down on it. But if the action of the international labour movement relieves that load, it gives a chance for workers to repair the deformed structure. When that happens, the Chinese working people will build a glowing, ‘peoples oriented’ society. A society that will be a huge landmark that will help map out all of humanity’s march towards socialism. When that global march becomes unstoppable and when the Chinese toilers are able to complete the work that they began in 1949, by finally chiselling out and throwing away the last remnants of exploitation of man by man, then we can truly speak of a harmonious socialist society. We will then be able to speak of ‘social harmony’ because the class struggle would have been completed to the extent that there are no longer any classes. And from such a harmonious socialist society, humanity, in all its beautiful diversity, can dance merrily towards a glorious communist future. However, for this not to be a mere dream, militant unionists and leftists in the West must act now. Act now to counteract the imperialist pressure bearing down upon the Chinese workers state. A state, that however divergent from the ‘ideal,’ is still today saving 20% of the world’s population from the tender mercies of capitalist rule.”
Australian Government Censors Its Own Infographic
After…
Australian Data Proves China’s Pandemic Response Success
20 June 2020: In a high-profile speech four days ago, Australia’s foreign minister, Marise Payne accused China of spreading “disinformation” around COVID-19. In particular, the right-wing senator asserted that Australia had been “very clear in rejecting as disinformation the Chinese government’s warnings that tourists and students should reconsider coming here because of the risk of racism.” The conservative Morrison government has clearly been stung by the warnings about travel to Australia that China had very understandably given to its tourists and students. The travel warnings resulted from a frightening surge in the already large number of racist attacks taking place in Australia against people of Chinese background and other people of East Asian appearance.
In a further attack aimed against China, Payne claimed that it was “troubling that some countries are using the pandemic to undermine liberal democracy and promote their own, more authoritarian models” and boasted that Australia would resist and counter efforts at disinformation “through facts and transparency.” So let us do some examination at who has been “transparent” and who has been “spreading disinformation” during the COVID-19 outbreak.
Those
Conspiracy Theories About China’s COVID-19 Numbers
The most contentious issue when it comes to “disinformation” around COVID-19 is the claim by the likes of that master of disinformation, Donald Trump that China’s infection numbers are grossly downplayed. Right wing shock jocks in Australia have peddled a similar line. In the course of the witch-hunt that they helped propel against NSW Labor upper house MP, Shaoquett Moselmane, for stating that the PRC had taken effective countermeasures that had contained the COVID-19 threat, 2GB radio’s Ray Hadley and Sky News presenter, Peta Credlin, put out claims that the real death toll in China is actually around 40,000 and that the number of infected people there is more than ten times higher than reported. More “centrist” media have also claimed that China has under-reported the virus impact without providing any estimate of what they think the real number of infections and deaths there are. None of those putting forward such conspiracy theories have actually provided any evidence to back their claims.
Construction workers being tested for COVID-19 at a testing site in Beijing. In order to quell a small outbreak, in the space of just 24 days Beijing carried out COVID-19 tests on 11 million people, half the city’s entire population!
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Now there has been under-reporting of deaths in some countries. The U.S. top infectious disease official, Dr. Anthony Fauci, admitted at a Senate hearing on May 12 that the U.S. death count is almost certainly higher than reported [4]. Not all of this is because of conscious under-reporting. Many people are not counted in official U.S. figures because they died before they were positively identified with the coronavirus. Especially when health systems are overwhelmed such under-reporting is possible. After China had largely suppressed the virus threat in mid-April, the authorities there did a detailed investigation of the death toll by comparing figures from hospitals, funeral sites and public health agencies. They increased the death toll figure by 38% after accounting for people who had died at home during the initial surge in the outbreak when the hospital system was stretched, deaths not recorded by overwhelmed medical staff during that period who were focused instead on saving patients and deaths missed because of some hospitals not having been linked to the central recording site.
In the U.S., as well as unintentional under-reporting there have also been cases of deliberate under-reporting. Some of this is in states like Florida, Georgia and Arizona that have been recklessly re-opening businesses even as the virus runs rampant. Governments have sought to downplay new virus cases in order to justify the re-opening. The authorities have even driven out public health officials who have refused orders to manipulate data [5], [6]. There have been credible estimates that the real U.S. death toll is up to 50% higher than officially reported – both due to innocent under-reporting and deliberate under-reporting – and in some local areas the actual death toll may be as much as twice what is officially reported. However, to suggest that any country, including China, could get way with reporting a pandemic death toll more than ten times lower than the actual numbers is plainly bonkers. This is especially the case once a country gets the upper hand on the virus spread, which is now the case in China. Social distancing measures are eased and people again re-connect with family, social networks and work colleagues. In that situation no modern country could get away with under-reporting a death toll by a factor of ten. This particularly applies to densely populated, urban societies where populations are more interlinked and what happens in one neighbourhood is quickly known in other adjacent neighbourhoods. Wuhan, where most of the deaths in China occurred, definitely is such a society. Moreover, this is true more so for China, with its collectivist, more community-connected society, than for the more individualistic U.S. and Australia. People in China tend to be closely linked to each other through neighbourhood collectives, community organisations and a social workplace culture. This includes the elderly, the section of society hardest hit by the pandemic, who in China are known for joining together in mass social activities like group tai-chi sessions and even late-night, street dance parties. Where people have strong social ties to each other, it is simply impossible for any government to cover up deaths from a disease outbreak to the degree suggested by the conspiracy theorists, even if a government wanted to.
Fortunately, we can actually evaluate those claims that China has massively downplayed the extent of its coronavirus outbreak by looking at the Australian government’s own figures. The first figure to consider is the number of people who were found to have the coronavirus out of the Australian citizens and permanent residents brought out of Wuhan into quarantine in Australia in those “evacuation” flights. The first two groups of 278 Australian residents (242 + 36) brought out of Wuhan in chartered flights organised by the Australian government were cruelly required to endure their quarantine at the Australian regime’s remote Christmas Island immigration prison from the start of February [7]. The other group of 266 Australian residents flown out of Wuhan were quarantined at a facility in Darwin from February 9 [8]. Given that these groups, numbering a total of 544 people, were brought out of the city that is universally acknowledged to have been the hardest hit part of China and given that they flew out of Wuhan when the virus spread was at its most rampant there, one would expect that a large number of these people would test positive for COVID-19 if the conspiracy “theories” about the scale of the virus impact in China are true. On his April 2 morning show on 2GB, radio shock jock, Ray Hadley, claimed that the real number of infected people in Wuhan is actually over 800,000 [9]. Given that Wuhan has a population of 11 million, Hadley’s claim is equivalent to saying that over 7.3% of Wuhan’s population became infected. If that were true, we would then expect on probability that at least 40 of the 544 people brought out of Wuhan by the Australian government would be found by Australian health authorities to have COVID-19. But guess how many of these people ended up being found to have COVID-19? None at all! That’s right: a big fat zero [10] [11] [12]. Now this should be contrasted with the infection rate of the much smaller group of 164 Australians evacuated from the Diamond Princess cruise ship moored off Japan and moved into quarantine in Darwin on February 20 [13]. Despite all the Australians aboard the cruise ship already found to have the virus being transferred into isolation wards in Japan [14] and those at the last minute found to be infected also stopped from boarding the evacuation flight [15], ten of the 164 Diamond Princess evacuees still tested positive for the virus while in quarantine [16].
Some of the 278 Australian citizens and permanent residents (overwhelmingly of Chinese descent) brought out of Wuhan and forced by the Australian government to endure quarantine at the remote Christmas Island detention centre. Of the 544 Australian residents repatriated from Wuhan into quarantine at Christmas Island and Darwin, none at all were found to have COVID-19. This severely undercuts right-wing conspiracy “theories” that the real rate of infection in Wuhan was as high as one in 14 people. Photo Credit: Nic Ellis/The West Australian
Determining Infection Rates Based on Screening Tens of Thousands of Arrivals from China
Now, a person rationally examining the fact that none of the 544 Australians removed from what was by far the worst hit part of China (Wuhan) at the very height of her coronavirus outbreak were found to have COVID-19, would say that this is indeed strong evidence that the virus outbreak in China is no worse than China reported but then say, show me some more numbers with a bigger sample size just to be sure. Indeed, we can do just this. On the second last day of February, Australia’s Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Professor Paul Kelly, provided the following information in a radio interview on ABC Radio National [17]:
“We’ve done a lot of testing as people have come from China into Australia. Over 40,000 people have arrived – Australians have arrived since the 1st February – not a single one of those have proved to be positive for the virus.”
Now this is very telling!Over 40,000 Australian citizens and permanent residentsentered Australia from China during basically the worst four weeks of China’s outbreak (i.e. in February) and not a single one of them tested positive for the coronavirus. Now to put that in perspective, in roughly the four worst weeks, thus far, of Australia’s outbreak the number of infections rose from just under 300 on March 16 [18] to 6313 on April 12 [19]. That’s more than 6,013 infection in four weeks out of a total Australian population of 25.4 million. So in that four week period, we would expect that for every 40,000 Australian residents, on average, ten would test positive for COVID-19. Yet out of the 40,000 people who arrived from China during the worst four weeks of her outbreak, none at all tested positive for COVID-19! In other words, the Australian government’s own figures confirm that the virus spread in China during the most severe period of her outbreak was significantly less than in Australia during the peak of the outbreak here.
Australia’s Acting Chief Medical Officer, Professor Paul Kelly. On the second last day of February, in his then capacity as Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Paul Kelly informed that “We’ve done a lot of testing as people have come from China into Australia. Over 40,000 people have arrived – Australians have arrived since the 1st February – not a single one of those have proved to be positive for the virus.” This proves how low the overall rate of infection is within China itself given that February was the peak month of the pandemic there.
Now 40,000 people is a very large sample size on which to base the above conclusion. But we can examine the infection rate among a still bigger number of people arriving from China. We can, in fact, look at the number of infections amongst all the people who have arrived into Australia from China in the first four months of this year. The Australian government’s Department of Health records the number of COVID-19 cases coming from various regions and the government’s Australian Bureau of Statistics records the number of residents and visitors arriving in Australia every month from each separate overseas country. By dividing the number of people infected with COVID-19 who have arrived in Australia from China by the number of arrivals from China we can get a sense of China’s infection rate. This number can then be compared with China’s official infection rate. We must say from the outset, however, that the infection rate that we obtain from Australian government figures may be somewhat of an over-estimate of the real infection rate in China. This is because a disproportionately high amount of the people entering Australia from China (that is Australian Chinese households returning from visits to family in China, Chinese international students studying in Australia, Australians returning from study and work in China and Australians who tour China) return from travel or residency in China’s cities rather than from her rural areas. Yet it is in China’s cities (in most parts of the world, including Australia, urban areas have been hardest hit by the virus) where the virus impacted far more greatly that in the less densely populated rural areas.
To get an estimate of the number of people infected with COVID-19 who entered Australia from China we need to look at the pie chart that the Australian government’s Department of Health had been publishing daily on its website titled, “Australian confirmed cases who acquired COVID-19 overseas, by region.” Mysteriously, after April 30, the Australian government not only stopped publishing this chart on its Department of Health website but then made the existing data basically impossible to find online (we will have more to say on this). Fortunately, we saved the practically impossible to find link that contains the data. Here is the link: https://www.health.gov.au/sites/default/files/images/publications/2020/04/covid-19-cases-acquired-overseas-by-region-or-country-acquired_29.png [20] (hopefully the link still works by the time that you read this article but we will re-print the screenshot of the chart as well just in case). Examine this chart using an angle measuring instrument (protractor) and you will see that this Australian government chart showsthat just a tiny 0.83% of all COVID-19 cases in Australia that were acquired overseas were infected with the virus in the North-East Asian region that includes China (as the chart shows the overwhelming majority of overseas acquired cases actually came from Europe, America and cruise ships). Now researching the Australian government’s “Coronavirus (COVID-19) at a glance infographic’, still published daily, for April 30 shows that up to that date, 63.6% of the total 6753 virus cases in Australia at the time were acquired overseas [21]. That means that up to 30 April, 4295 of Australia’s COVID-19 cases in total were acquired overseas. Given that the pie chart shows that 0.83% of these cases were acquired in the North East Asian region, this means that the Australian government’s own figures show that just 36 of the overseas acquired COVID-19 cases came from the region that includes China.
Unfortunately, the Australian government has not published the break down in case numbers originating from the various countries in North-East Asia. However, examining media reports in the earlier period of the outbreak when China was hard hit, we find that 15 people entered Australia from China that were later found to be COVID-19 positive. So 15 is the minimum number of cases that entered from China. But what is the maximum possible number of people who entered from China who had acquired the virus while there? To obtain this upper limit, we need to deduct from the figure of 36 – that is, the total number of people who contracted COVID-19 in the entire North-East Asian region – those that are known to have contracted the virus in the North-East Asian places other than in mainland China: that is in Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Mongolia, Macao and Hong Kong. Looking at the individual media reports about new cases from the first period of the outbreak in Australia, we find that in total at least five people later found to have coronavirus entered Australia from North-East Asian places outside the mainland PRC: that includes a person who arrived from South Korea and a person who arrived from Japan who were both announced to have the virus on March 3 [22], a 58 year-old man who arrived in South Australia from Taiwan on March 3 [23] and a woman in her 40s returning from South Korea and a man in his 20s returning from Hong Kong who were announced to have COVID-19 on March 10 [24]. As the number of infected people in Australia rose, from after about March 10 media stopped reporting on the sources of individual cases originating from overseas. However, the NSW Government’s Health website details air flights where passengers later found to be carrying COVID-19 had travelled on (as part of attempts to trace those sitting close to the infected passengers). Examining this data for cases after March 10 we find that a further, at least, ten people infected with COVID-19 entered Australia from flights originating from North East Asian countries other than China and which flew non-stop into Australia [25] [26]: this includes five people arriving from Japan on flights arriving between 22 March and 13 April, four people arriving from Hong Kong between 12 March and 23 March and one person arriving from Taiwan on 17 March. That means in total at least 15 (5 + 10) of the 36 people with COVID-19 who entered Australia from the North-East Asian region travelled from countries outside the mainland PRC. Unfortunately, other state government health websites, unlike the one for NSW Health, no longer show data for earlier flights where passengers later found to be infected with COVID-19 had travelled on. However, if we assume that, other than for the 15 coronavirus-infected people confirmed to have come from Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea and Japan, all the remaining of the 36 cases who entered Australia from North-East Asia came from the mainland PRC, then at the very most just 21 people who entered Australia from mainland China had COVID-19. Put another way, based on Australian federal and state government data, one can ascertain that the number of people from the mainland PRC who entered Australia with COVID-19 in the first four months of this year is between 15 and 21.
To finally determine the infection rate of people entering Australia from China we now just need to ascertain the total number of people who entered Australia from China in the period from the time that the epidemic broke out at the start of this year until the end of April (which is the date up to which we have Australian data for the source countries of COVID-19 cases originating from overseas). We know that up to the end of January, both Chinese citizens (including international students, workers and tourists) as well as Australian citizens and permanent residents were able to enter Australia from China. After the Morrison government instituted its China travel ban, Australian permanent residents and citizens were still able to return here from China as well as a small number of Chinese citizens (and other foreign citizens arriving from China) arriving as special exemptions. Now Australian Bureau of Statistics figures show that up to the end of April, a total of 322,510 people – including both Australian and foreign residents – entered Australia this year from mainland China. This includes 205,930 visitors who entered Australia from mainland China (156,610 in January, 21,330 in February, 27,940 in March and 50 in April [27]) and 116,580 Australian residents who returned to Australia from mainland China (72,530 in January, 40,000 in February, 3,670 in March and 380 in April [28]).
If we now divide the number of people who entered Australia with COVID-19 from China, which as we have detailed is between 15 and 21, by this total number of arrivals from China of 322,510 we get an infection rate of people entering Australia from China, based on Australian government data, of between 0.0047% and 0.0065% or between 47 and 65 COVID-19 cases per million people. If we take the average of this range, we find that the infection rate of people entering Australia from mainland China, based on Australian government data, is approximately 56 cases per million people. This is actually slightly lower than China’s infection rate given by the Chinese government of 58 cases per million people. Moreover this calculated infection rate, based on Australian government data, of the arrivals into Australia from China, which is in turn an indication of the overall infection rate within China itself, is three and a half times lower than the number of actively infected people in Australia at the peak of its outbreak (which was 194 active cases per million people on April 4 – from 4935 active cases [29] divided by a 25.4 million population). This confirms just how effectively China has combated the virus threat. It also proves that contrary to the fears incited by Far Right racists, people entering Australia from China have been much less likely to be infected with COVID-19 than other people living here!
Now let us do exactly the same calculation based on Australian government data for people entering Australia from Europe and from America. The Department of Health’s pie chart [20] shows that up to 30 April a whopping 34% of the overseas acquired COVID-19 cases came from Europe and 22% came from the Americas. We find now that the infection rate of people entering Australia from Europe has been 2,966 COVID-19 cases per million people. The infection rate of people entering Australia from the Americas is 1,548 COVID-19 cases per million people (and if the Australian government provided data for infected people entering specifically from the U.S. the infection rate of people entering from just the U.S. would surely be found to be even higher than this). To put all this in perspective this means that, Australian government data shows that the infection rate of people who entered Australia from Europe in the first four months of this year was 53 times higher than the rate of infection of people entering from China in that period, while the infection rate of people entering Australia from the Americas in the first four months of this year was 28 times higher than the infection rate of people entering Australia from China in that period.
The above contrast between the infection rate of arrivals from, on the one hand, China and, on the other, Europe and America is actually understated because until well into March, people entering Australia from Europe and America were not screened for COVID-19 and were not even told to consult their doctor if they had symptoms – only those who arrived from China, South Korea and Iran were [22]. That meant that many infected people who entered from the U.S. and Europe were not detected as having the virus. Moreover, while new cases in China are now down to barely a trickle relative to her huge population, the pandemic has continued to spread rapidly in Europe and the Americas in the weeks following the end of April, especially in the U.S., Brazil, Britain, Sweden and Russia. Furthermore, due to travel restrictions and disruptions, the arrivals from overseas during the January to April period is weighted heavily towards the beginning of that period. For example, more than nine times as many people entered Australia from China in January and February as they did in March and April; and similarly nearly ten times as many people entered Australia from Europe in the first two months of this year as in the subsequent two months. Yet, the first two months of this year were precisely when the coronavirus was spreading rapidly in China and had not yet begun its rampant spread through Europe; whereas in March and April, the virus was largely contained in China but spreading like wildfire in Europe.
Fortunately, we can actually compare the rate of infections of those entering Australia from China in January and February when the pandemic was worst there with the infection rate of those entering from Europe (and the Americas) in just the March and April period when the pandemic was worse there. Statements from Australian health officers indicate that there were 15 people who turned out to be infected with COVID-19 who arrived from China in January, although some of these people did not develop symptoms and become detected until early February [30]. And as noted earlier in this article, Australia’s Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Professor Paul Kelly, has informed us that none of the people who entered Australia from China in February were found to have COVID-19 [17]. Thus in January and February combined there were only 15 people who entered Australia from China infected with the coronavirus. Now the Australian Bureau of Statistics figures show that a total of 290,470 people entered Australia from China in January and February [27] [28]. Therefore, the proportion of people entering Australia from China who were coronavirus-infected during the first two months of this year, the worst months of the pandemic there, was 0.0052% or 52 cases per million people. The Department of Health’s pie chart [20] showing that, up to 30 April, 34% of the overseas acquired COVID-19 cases came from Europe combined with the fact that there were (as shown earlier in this article) 4,295 cases from abroad by April 30, demonstrates that, up to the end of April, 1,460 virus-infected people entered Australia from Europe. Statements by Australia’s minister of health and health officials in early March indicated that up to then none of the COVID-19 cases detected in Australia came from arrivals from Europe [31]. To be sure, this does not mean that there were not any coronavirus-infected people who entered Australia from Europe in January and February. People who entered Australia from Europe in this period and became ill were neither tested nor asked to be tested. So even if they actually had COVID-19 they were not detected and thus not included in Australian government figures. Therefore, all the 1,460 COVID-19 cases listed by Australian government data as having arrived from Europe up to 30 April came to Australia in either March or April. Noting that there were in total 147,490 residents and visitors arriving into Australia from Europe in March and April [27] [28], then the proportion of arrivals into Australia from Europe who were infected with COVID-19 in March and April was 0.9899% or 9,899 cases per million people. That is a massive 190 times greater than the proportion of people arriving from China who were infected with COVID-19 during the worst two months of the pandemic in China! Note this is what Australian government data is saying.
Given that the rate of infection of
people entering from a country is a strong indicator of the extent of the virus
spread in that country itself, we can say in summary that the Australian
government’s own data confirms what the WHO and most serious infection disease
specialists – and indeed ostracised NSW Labor MP Shaoquett Moselmane – have
said: that the Peoples Republic of China has been incredibly successful in
containing the COVID-19 outbreak.
Australian
Regime Hides Embarrassing Data
As we pointed out earlier in this article, the Australian government’s Department of Health had been publishing daily on its website that pie chart titled, “Australian confirmed cases who acquired COVID-19 overseas, by region.” However from April 30, without explanation, the Australian government agency stopped publishing this data. For a few days after this, the pie chart could still be found, with considerable difficulty, through doing a search on the Department of Health’s website. We saved the exact link to this pie chart (which at the time of writing still works) and saved the screenshot. However, soon after, the pie chart stopped appearing even on a search on that Australian government department’s website. The chart has been simply obliterated from the department’s search database!Moreover, one cannot find the latest version of this infographic even through a Google search with the name of the infographic as the search term.
As we explained above, you can only find the latest (i.e. April 30) version of the chart if you type in its exact web address. But you will only know that address if you had saved the exact address of the infographic previously! In other words, nearly everyone now trying to find this pie chart,“Australian confirmed cases who acquired COVID-19 overseas, by region,” will not be successful in accessing this data online. Is this the kind of “transparency” that Marise Payne is talking about! Today, if one does a Google search with the name of the chart as the search term, one can only find a small number of earlier versions of the chart (i.e. before April 30) with old data. In these search results, older versions of the chart that had been previously screenshot by a media outlet are reproduced: like this earlier version of the chart that was shown on the 7 News website with data up to March 30: https://7news.com.au/lifestyle/health-wellbeing/coronavirus-australia-the-latest-cases-and-trends-c-770380 [32]. Australian regime officials have well and truly “disappeared” from cyberspace their own pie chart showing the breakdown in regions from where COVID-19 cases entered Australia from overseas.
The pie chart on the source regions of overseas acquired COVID-19 cases in Australia that the Australian government’s Department of Health had been publishing daily. This is the last published version of the chart containing data up to April 30. After that, the government department, without explanation, stopped publishing the chart. Then, a few days later, they completely censored all links to the chart from their website’s search archives. This has no doubt much to do with the fact that the chart shows just how tiny a percentage of the overseas acquired cases within Australia came from the North-East Asian region that includes China and just how overwhelming the percentage of overseas acquired cases that arrived from Europe, America and cruise ships are.
Now why would Australian officials want to hide their own infographic that for weeks they had been showing us daily? Well the date that they last showed the graph, April 30, is telling. This was when the U.S. and Australian government’s witch-hunt against socialistic China over the coronavirus outbreak was at its height. It was within two weeks of Australia’s home affairs minister Peter Dutton demanding “transparency from China” in the context of lending credence to the nutcase far-right conspiracy “theory” that the coronavirus was leaked out of a Chinese lab; followed by foreign minister, Marise Payne, calling for a witch-hunting “inquiry” into the origins of COVID-19 after having already blamed China for the outbreak and then ratcheting up her attack further by calling for the “inquiry” to have weapons inspectors-like powers (thus associating the proposed “inquiry” with the “inspections” that paved the way for the 2003 invasion of Iraq). However, the entire premise of this anti-PRC witch-hunt and the claim that the proposed “inquiry” is in Australia’s “national interest” (there is actually no such thing as “national interest” – there is only the interests of Australia’s capitalist exploiting class and the counterposed interests of Australia’s working class, the latter being synonymous with the interests of workers of the world), is blown apart by the reality that only a tiny proportion of the imported COVID-19 cases came into Australia from China. The overwhelming majority of cases that entered Australia from overseas came from Europe and America and from cruise ships. This truth then illustrates that the focus of investigating how the virus came into Australia should not be about the “origins” of the virus – and it has not even been definitely established that the virus “originated” in China – and its first known spread within China but rather on why governments in Europe and America failed so miserably to contain the virus; and on why the Australian government allowed large numbers of people to enter with the virus from Europe, America and cruise ships without proper screening even while they barred non-citizens from China (and later Iran and South Korea) from entry altogether. In other words the infographic, “Australian confirmed cases who acquired COVID-19 overseas, by region” that the Australian government’s Department of Health had once been publishing daily, both blew apart the Washington-Canberra attacks against China over the coronavirus outbreak and exposed the serious flaws in the Australian government’s own handling of the pandemic. That is almost certainly why the Australian regime has decided to not only stop publishing this infographic daily but, moreover, then totally obliterate their own infographic from their own website’s archival searches.Talk about “authoritarian”!
Regrettably, we will never know for sure the Australian
regime’s reasons for disappearing this embarrassing pie chart and just who
ordered it unless someone comes forward as a whistle blower. However, many Australian
public health officials who might be wanting to expose this blatant attack on
the professional integrity of their work would know that whistle blowers are
fiercely repressed by the Australian regime. They may well be aware of the
Australian regime’s severe prosecutions going on against whistle blowers
Bernard Collaery, “Witness K” and David McBride that could see these people
jailed for long periods. Moreover, any one thinking of being a whistle blower
or an exposer of Australian regime corruption must look on in trepidation as
they see the way that the Australian government has been complicit in the
American and British regime’s cruel persecution of Julian Assange.
Nevertheless, despite all this repression going on, we call on anyone with a strong conscience working in Australia’s Department of Health to risk their careers and blow the whistle on why, how, on whose orders and over whose objections, the Department of Health stopped publishing and then “disappeared” from its search database its own, formerly daily, infographic on the sources of COVID-19 cases acquired overseas. We ask such people to be inspired by those in the U.S. who have blown the whistle on the manipulation of COVID-19 data by states seeking to justify re-opening: like Rebekah Jones of the Florida Department of Public Health who for the sake of Florida’s people – and humanity more generally – exposed how she had been ordered to “manually change data to drum up support for the plan to reopen” [5] [6]. If you follow in the footsteps of such courageous whistle blowers, history will not forget you and even if you face retribution for such brave deeds you can be sure in the knowledge that you are advancing humanity’s cause. You would be – in Marise Payne’s own words but in the exact opposite direction – countering efforts at disinformation “through facts and transparency.” Moreover, please remember that the Australian regime’s cover up of the fact that so few of the COVID-19 cases came from Asia is helping to fuel the horrific violence and abuse against Asian origin people in Australia under the guise of pandemic fears. By helping to expose this cover up you will be able to contribute to resisting rabid racist forces who are using the coronavirus outbreak to incite fear and hatred against Asians and other people of colour.
However, regardless of whether we do eventually find out for sure why the Australian government is now making it almost impossible to find its own infographic on the sources of overseas-acquired COVID-19 cases, the reality is that this data, alongside the fact that none of the 40,000 arrivals into Australia from China during the peak of the pandemic there in February were found to have COVID-19 and the fact that none of the 544 Australian residents brought out of Wuhan at the height of the outbreak there tested positive for COVID-19, all show how effectively the Peoples Republic of China has contained the virus threat. Moreover, thisexamination of the Australian government’s own data has completely demolished the whacko conspiracy “theory” that China has concealed the true extent of the COVID-19 impact there. All the insults thrown at NSW MP Shaoquett Moselmane for rightly praising China’s response to the pandemic can now be thrown back in the face of Ray Hadley and the other media personalities claiming that China has covered up the true toll of the outbreak there. It is Ray Hadley and his ilk who are the “imbeciles,” “jerks,” and “lunatics”! The false claim that “China has spread disinformation” by “greatly under-reporting its COVID-19 infection toll” turns out to be the only actual disinformation that is going on. It is the U.S. and Australian capitalist ruling classes and their media who are the ones guilty of spreading disinformation around COVID-19. As for “transparency”: try finding the Australian government’s latest data on sources of overseas-acquired COVID-19 cases that they had previously themselves published (without using the direct web address that we have given you)!
Three toilet janitors of the temporary hospital of Jianghan pose for a photo in front of the temporary hospital in China’s Wuhan on 9 March 2020. Photo Credit: Xinhua/Fei Maohua
Photo Above: Shaoquett Moselmane with students and teachers from a Riverwood language school
Condemn the Witch-Hunt of NSW Upper House MP Shaoquett Moselmane
Cold War Repression in Australia Gets Even More Vicious
26 June 2020: Today, Cold War repression in Australia dramatically escalated. Around a dozen officers of Australia’s ASIO secret police and the Australian Federal Police (AFP) made an hours-long raid on the home of NSW Labor Party upper house MP, Shaoquett Moselmane. The raid was made under the ridiculous claim that “Chinese government agents” had infiltrated his office and were using him as part of a “foreign interference” operation. Moselmane has not been charged and the claims against him are completely fabricated. Moselmane is being witch-hunted because he has had the temerity to praise China’s achievements in poverty alleviation and because he more recently dared to speak positively about China’s successful response to the COVID-19 pandemic and to rightly call out the Australian media for inciting racist attacks on people of Chinese background.
Sources say that today’s terrifying raid took place with Moselmane’s wife and son at home in the residence. The duration of the ASIO/AFP attack went over a period of some 12 to 16 hours. Today’s raids are a despicable attack on democratic rights and a further constriction of the right to progressive dissent in Australia. These raids, made with the assistance of draconian “foreign interference” laws imposed two years ago with bi-partisan support, are designed to intimidate anyone from speaking positively about socialistic China or to advocate socialist solutions to the grave problems faced by the working class masses and oppressed Aboriginal and other non-white communities in Australia.
All trade unionists, supporters of workers rights, defenders of civil liberties and opponents of racism and all genuine leftists must condemn these raids! We must cry: down with the witch-hunt of Shaoquett Moselmane!
Outrageously, NSW Labor leader Jodi McKay wasted no time in joining the attack on Moselmane. She has suspended him from the ALP.
The mainstream media and right-wing politicians, with the acquiescence of Moselmane’s Labor colleagues, had been building up towards today’s authoritarian attack. Several weeks ago there was a hysterical witch-hunt against Moselmane that saw him driven from his post as the deputy president of the NSW upper house. Below is the article that we wrote in response to that witch-hunt. Given today’s raid, all the conclusions made in this article are magnified many times over in their urgency.
6 June 2020: The ruling classes in the capitalist world are rather nervous at how much dissatisfaction there is within their own countries. Working class youth are frustrated that they are likely to only get insecure, casual jobs where they are often arrogantly bullied by their bosses. Lower income people are angry that affordable rental accommodation is so hard to find. After COVID-19 hit, huge numbers of workers are seething that they have lost their jobs after the very company owners who had made fortunes out of their workers’ labour did not hesitate to retrench these workers as soon as there was any drop in business revenue. Now, the brutal police murder of an unarmed black man in America, George Floyd, has ignited explosive anger amongst black people and other people of colour throughout the Western world at the all-sided racist oppression that they endure. In the U.S., there have been huge, sometimes militant, protests with elements of an uprising. Today in Australia, there were massive solidarity protests with America’s Black Lives Matter demonstrations. These marches focused on opposition to the horrific killings of Aboriginal people by racist police and prison guards.
At least until the recent Black Lives Matter protests, mass grievances have not led to a left-wing radicalisation within Western countries. Instead, in Australia for example, the capitalist rulers have to some degree succeeded in shifting mass frustrations into blaming immigration, guest workers, Aboriginal people, Asians, African youth, Muslims, refugees, unemployed people, climate change concerns and militant unions. Yet the capitalist exploiters remain worried that eventually sizable sections of the working class masses will again look to communism as an alternative to their current predicament. Compounding these fears is the reality that while their own economies have barely been treading water since the late noughties global recession, the world’s biggest socialistic country – the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) – relentlessly grows in economic strength, continues to lift her own people out of the poverty of China’s pre-1949 capitalist days and steadily gains greater prestige and diplomatic clout in the former colonial countries of Africa, South America, the Middle East, Asia and the South Pacific. The richer capitalist powers are not only worried that this is “interfering” with their “right” to “freely” super-exploit their former colonies. They are terrified that some of their “own” masses will start to look favourably upon socialistic China and thus conclude that capitalist rule in their own countries needs to be deposed. As a result, across the capitalist world the rulers and their media have been churning out an anti-communist, China-bashing propaganda campaign.
In the U.S. and Australia, this new Cold War campaign has also involved intimidation and even repression. In Australia, this often takes the form of the witch-hunting of any public figure, and increasingly anyone else, who has any contact with social organisations with even the vaguest links to the PRC; or who dares to make any comment praising the PRC. Such witch-hunting has intensified over the last few years and has reached new levels of hysteria since the COVID-19 pandemic struck. The latest victim is NSW Labor upper house MP, Shaoquett Moselmane. Now Moselmane is no communist. He is, after all, a member of the anticommunist, social democratic ALP. However, Moselmane was witch-hunted for pointing out what is demonstrably true: PRC authorities and her people had taken “timely and effective countermeasures” that had “fought and contained” the COVID-19 threat. For having the temerity to state these plain facts, Moselmane was subjected to a shrill campaign of denunciations and insults from the mainstream media, right-wing politicians and leaders of his own Labor Party. Media shock jocks branded Moselmane a “jerk”, “a train wreck”’, “a lunatic”, “a low filthy bludger” and more. They even made despicable slanders about his wife, lying that she has a material interest in him making positive comments about China. Encouraged by all these insults, rednecks and far right idiots made chilling threats against Moselmane on social media. To his credit, however, in the face of all this intimidation and demands that he resign from parliament, Moselmane has thus far refused to “apologise” for saying what he knows to be completely true. As a result, on April 6, he was forced to step down from his position as assistant president of the NSW Legislative Council. Moselmane had been elected to this position, signifying that he was the highest-ranked ALP upper house MP in NSW, less than a year earlier.
A team of Chinese medical experts and Bangladeshi officials take a group photo upon the team’s arrival in Bangladesh. Even as the Peoples Republic of China was still completing her own initial battle against the pandemic, she sent experts with experience in responding to COVID-19 to many other countries in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Southern and Eastern Europe to assist with their struggles against the pandemic.
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Pilloried
for Telling the Truth
So what did Shaoquett Moselmane exactly
say that so infuriated Australia’s ruling class establishment? The campaign
against him cranked into high gear after the 30 March issue of the Sydney Morning Herald attacked him for writing
on his personal website that China had made an “emphatic” and “decisive”
response to the COVID-19 threat. Moselmane pointed out that China needed
“tough, unswerving leadership, focused on the mammoth task ahead” in
order to contain the virus’ spread. The Labor MP explained that: “For the
Peoples Republic of China, President Xi stepped up and provided that
leadership. He mustered the resources of the nation and together with the great
people of China – fought it and contained it…. The combined phenomenal effort
of the state and the people in the fight to contain the virus was breath
taking.” Moselmane also contrasted China’s effective response to “the
slow, and at times baffling and confused messaging by the Morrison federal
government.”
What Moselmane said was simply fact. Despite being the first country in the world to detect the new virus and despite having a rapid spread of the deadly virus in Wuhan before their own scientists or any other country in the world understood the coronavirus or could ascertain just how deadly it was, the PRC so effectively responded to the threat that the proportion of China’s huge population that have died from the virus is significantly lower than Australia’s. Moreover, while Australia is just starting to open up again following stay-at-home measures and now faces the risk of a second-wave, the PRC so effectively suppressed the virus and reduced new cases to such tiny levels that for the last two months her tourist spots, cafes and restaurants have been gradually filling up with people and her streets and public transport networks are again buzzing with lively crowds.
Although Moselmane focuses a fair bit on Xi Jinping’s leadership, we understand that the main factor behind the PRC’s breath taking response to the virus was the country’s socialistic system. It was this system in which public ownership plays the backbone role and in which the economy is controlled by a state under workers rule that enabled the PRC to concentrate resources so effectively for the pandemic response. Thus, the PRC was able to, in a matter of days, both build brand new infectious disease hospitals and to convert other facilities into makeshift hospitals. It was also this people’s control of the economy that enabled the PRC to provide space suit style protective gear for her medical workers and janitors as well as large quantities of urgently needed ventilators, testing kits, infra-red thermometers and masks. Meanwhile, the PRC’s economic system – in which collective ownership and control plays the basic role – has created a more collectivist outlook in the Chinese masses that led them to, on the one hand, be overall more willing to comply with pandemic response restrictions than their counterparts in, say, the U.S. and Australia and, on the other hand, be more motivated to mobilise in grassroots campaigns to conduct pandemic response measures.
Nevertheless, leadership was also a factor in determining how countries responded to the COVID-19 threat. Just as the likes of Scott Morrison, Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Boris Johnson and Vladimir Putin are shaped by their role at the head of states designed to serve the capitalist big end of town, Xi Jinping’s actions are shaped and, indeed, constrained by his role at the head of a workers state that was created to ensure the interests of working class people. That meant that while the leaders of the capitalist countries put the fate of their stock markets and corporate profits first, China’s president Xi, for all his faults, did put the interests of people first in responding to the virus outbreak. So Moselmane is quite factually correct when he stated that “President Xi stepped up.” Within hours of Chinese scientists confirming that human to human transmission of the virus can occur, Xi made a high profile order on January 20 for Communist Party of China (CPC) committees and governments at all levels to put people’s safety and health as the top priority and take effective measures to curb the spread of the virus. Chinese state media reported on the same day that:
“Xi ordered all-out efforts to treat patients, identify the causes of the virus infection and spread at an earlier date, strengthen monitoring and standardize treatment procedures.
“Xi spoke of the need for the timely release of information and the deepening of international cooperation.”
The PRC acted early. At the time Xi made this announcement, just three people had died of the virus in a country with a population of nearly 1.5 billion people. Overseas countries then reported just a total of four cases, two in Thailand, one in South Korea and one in Japan. Just two days after Xi’s orders were broadcast, Wuhan took the unprecedented step of announcing that from the following morning all public transportation in the city of 11 million people would be suspended, all movement out of the city through airports and railway stations would be temporarily cut off, all large-scale activities were suspended and everyone was ordered to wear masks in public. These and additional decisive measures taken by the PRC in the ensuing days became a template for the social distancing measures that many other countries, albeit often very belatedly, took.
Medical staff in China’s Wuhan celebrate on March 9 after all COVID-19 patients at the temporary hospital that they worked at were cured and discharged from hospital.
At the time that the PRC shut down Wuhan, Australia had not confirmed one single case of the new virus. Yet, by contrast to the PRC’s quick response, it took the Australian government a whole 50 days from the time that the first coronavirus case in this country was detected on January 25 until the first – and rather limited – social distancing measures were implemented on March 15. This despite having already seen how deadly the virus had been in other countries. The only early “measure” that the Morrison government took was to enact a travel ban on non-residents entering from China – which had more to do with encouraging fears of Red China than being a genuine health measure – and then enacting later bans on arrivals from Iran and then South Korea. Yet, even after China had effectively suppressed the virus, the Morrison regime maintained its politically-motivated, China-specific travel ban while for several weeks enabling people from the U.S., Italy, Spain, France, Germany and cruise ships to enter without proper testing and quarantining even after the pandemic had spread like wildfire in those places. As a result, not only was the virus allowed to spread within Australia through infections brought in overwhelmingly from the U.S., Europe and cruise ships but those infected people from these regions were not given the timely diagnosis and treatment that they needed.
Indeed, Moselmane’s comparison of the PRC’s excellent response to the new virus with “the slow, and at times baffling and confused messaging by the Morrison federal government” is actually rather understated. That has not stopped the Morrison government and this country’s top health bureaucrats from endlessly praising themselves. They have only been able to get away with this because the “response” in the likes of Trump’s America, Johnson’s Britain and Bolsonaro’s Brazil have been so frighteningly disastrous and because the mainstream media have done their best to hide and distort the successful response by the PRC and to minimize coverage of the successes of other countries that have taken effective measures to curb the virus spread, like socialistic Vietnam.
Peter Costello’s Sydney Morning Herald Leads the Charge, Hard-Right Shock Jocks Follow
It is little surprise that it was the Sydney Morning Herald that cast the first stone in the attack against Moslemane. This paper had been targeting Moslemane ever since he made a 2018 speech hailing China’s lifting of 800 million people out of poverty. In that speech, Moselmane spoke of the need for China to gain greater influence in the global media given that this media is currently in the hands of China’s Western opponents. Moslemane pointed out how the Arab world has seen the power of Western propaganda in manipulating the public, leading to death and destruction. Alarmed that a mainstream politician had the audacity to so openly challenge the Cold War drive against the PRC and to so bluntly call out the pernicious role of Western mainstream media, the SMH looked for a way to discredit Moselmane. The best exposé that they could come up with was one seven months ago that in classic Cold War McCarthyist shock-horror fashion “exposed” how a staffer who works one day a week for Moslemane’s office once attended a training course at the Chinese Academy of Governance which the SMH says also “trains senior cadres of the Chinese Communist Party.” Big deal! What are they going to dig up next: that one of Moslemane’s staffers once ate at a Chinese restaurant where a member of the Chinese community, who had once met with a visiting Chinese Communist Party leader, once also ate at?
Led by its fanatically anti-communist Political and International editor, Peter Hartcher, the SMH has, in fact, been spearheading the Cold War fear campaign against socialistic China. It is ably assisted in this by its sister media organisations like Channel 9 and the hard right radio “news” station 2GB, all of which are part of the very same corporation that owns the SMH: Nine Entertainment Limited. The biggest stake in Nine Entertainment is held by filthy rich media mogul Bruce Gordon, with other major shareholdings owned by various wealth management funds and private equity groups. Needless to say, a media organisation owned by ultra-rich capitalists is inevitably going to produce content favourable to the political interests of the capitalist exploiting class and, thus, hostile to socialistic China. And in case anyone falls for the “balanced”, “independent” pretensions of the SMH, it is worth pointing out who the chairman of this corporation that runs it is: none other than the Treasurer in the right wing, former Howard government, Peter Costello!
The SMH journalists working under editor Peter Hartcher delight in buttressing their China-bashing propaganda by “unofficially” quoting as “sources” their mates in ASIO and other sinister Australian spy agencies. Meanwhile, Hartcher works closely in promoting anti-China hostility with Beverley O’Connor’s The World program on the ABC News channel. Peter Costello’s boy, Peter Hartcher, is also a Visiting Fellow at the Lowy Institute, the right-wing think tank that has a major influence in shaping Australian public opinion. Formed and led by Australian billionaire, Frank Lowy, and with a Board of Directors dominated by Lowy and his sons, as well as other capitalists like the chairman of the ANZ bank, the Lowy institute naturally promotes the interests of Australia’s big end of town exploiting class and, thus, is known for aggressively promoting an anti-China and broadly war-mongering agenda.
With the Lowy Institute providing the academic “expertise” and the likes of Peter Hartcher’s SMH and Beverley O’Connor’s The World providing overall political direction and a “centrist”, “liberal” cover, right-wing politicians, the Murdoch media and 2GB shock jocks are then all stocked up to sell the masses the anti-PRC agenda in sensationalist and extremist forms. And so it was with the campaign against Moselmane. In the days following the SMH’s exposé, the anticommunist uproar against Moselmane that Peter Hartcher and Co. had hoped for duly erupted. Egged on by rabid right-wing presenters Alan Jones and Ray Hadley from 2GB and Peta Credlin from Sky News, extreme right wing politicians queued up to denounce Moselmane. Federal Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton demanded Moselmane’s removal from parliament. NSW leader of the far right One Nation party, Mark Latham, attacked Moselmane’s stance as “disgusting and indefensible.” Credlin and Hadley basically accused Moselmane of treason for simply praising another country’s response to the virus threat and for criticizing the Australian prime minister’s response. The Murdoch print media and the Daily Mail soon joined the witch-hunt too, of course. So too did hardline supporters of Israel’s genocidal oppression of Palestinian people who saw an opportunity to go after an MP known for his sympathy for the Palestinian liberation struggle. Moselmane was born in South Lebanon, the part of the Lebanon that has suffered most from the Israeli regime’s expansionist aggression.
However, it was not just the hard conservatives who went after Moselmane. The most extreme attack on him came from a minister in the former Rudd government, Stephen Conroy. Speaking on Peta Credlin’s Sky News program, Conroy branded Moselmane “an absolute disgrace to the Labor Party,” adding that it is “astonishing he’s still in parliament.” Meanwhile, NSW Labor leader Jodi McKay stabbed her upper house colleague in the back by not only refusing to defend Moselmane from the witch-hunt but, instead, fully joining in. In an interview with 2GB’s Ray Hadley, McKay viciously attacked Moselmane:
“I can assure you… he will never be in the shadow cabinet….
“His actions have been appalling, I can’t say that to you enough.”
Moselmane’s factional ally in the ALP, shadow minister for transport and corrections, Chris Minns, and Labor shadow treasurer, Walt Secord, also both joined in the attacks, respectively branding Moselmane’s comments as “inappropriate” and “extremely stupid.”
Top Scientists and Public Health Officials Sing the Same Tune as Moselmane on China’s Response
The way that the “centrist” SMH set up Moselmane to be savaged by the Hard Right can be compared to that of the villain in an action movie who inflicts a wound on a captive and then leaves them to bleed in shark-infested waters knowing that the victim’s blood will attract killer sharks. While their sharks did their expected savaging, the SMH pretended to be serious in their coverage. To try and give authority to their attacks on Moselmane, they claimed that, “China has been widely criticised by academics and health experts for downplaying the extent of the outbreak in Wuhan.” Of course, academics and health experts are like everyone else subject to political influences. Being a middle class layer, scientists, doctors and top level academics, like other middle class layers in these reactionary times, can be quite conservative and many identify their interests with those of the ruling capitalist class. Thus, mainstream media seeking to attack Red China would no doubt always be able to find a few health experts willing to sing the tune that they would like to see amplified. Yet many serious scientists are driven by dedication to their work and to their areas of research. As a result, contrary to the misleading assertions of the SMH, the truth is that, in the face of anticommunist pressure, the majority of top Western infectious disease scientists and public health specialists have actually praised China’s response to the virus outbreak. On 19 February, 27 eminent scientists, academics, infectious disease specialists and public health officials from the U.S., Britain, Australia, Germany, The Netherlands and other regions published a “Statement in support of the scientists, public health professionals, and medical professionals of China combatting COVID-19” in the prestigious, peer-reviewed British medical journal, The Lancet [1]. The statement lauded China’s efforts to suppress the COVID-19 threat:
“We have watched as the scientists, public health professionals, and medical professionals of China, in particular, have worked diligently and effectively to rapidly identify the pathogen behind this outbreak, put in place significant measures to reduce its impact, and share their results transparently with the global health community. This effort has been remarkable.”
This, too, was the finding of a WHO investigation into China’s response to COVID-19 led by Canadian epidemiologist, Bruce Aylward, and consisting of 25 international experts from the U.S., Germany, Japan, Singapore, Nigeria, China, South Korea and Russia. The report by the investigative mission found that [2]:
“In the face of a previously unknown virus, China has rolled out perhaps the most ambitious, agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history.
“Achieving China’s exceptional coverage with and adherence to these containment measures has only been possible due to the deep commitment of the Chinese people to collective action in the face of this common threat. At a community level this is reflected in the remarkable solidarity of provinces and cities in support of the most vulnerable populations and communities. Despite ongoing outbreaks in their own areas, Governors and Mayors have continued to send thousands of health care workers and tons of vital PPE supplies into Hubei province and Wuhan city.”
Indeed, in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, ABC News reporters were constantly disappointed as they posed leading questions to infectious disease specialists inviting them to attack China’s response only for the experts to respond with praise for China’s pandemic suppression efforts. Thus, the Australian government-funded broadcaster was forced to hop from interviewing one medical expert to the next in search of someone who would feed into their Cold War agenda. Yet the Australian government’s own top health bureaucrats also lauded China’s efforts. And let’s note that these are highly-paid government bureaucrats who have worked closely with the right wing Morrison government and have supported most of the Liberal government’s pandemic response strategies – including its initial politically-directed travel bans specifically focused on – and restricted to – the Australian regime’s adversaries. So they are hardly communist sympathizers! Yet, in a media conference on January 30 alongside health minister Greg Hunt, Australia’s Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Professor Paul Kelly, responded to a journalist’s question about whether Australia’s case numbers would stay at the then low level by saying [3]:
“It depends a lot on what happens in relation to China getting this under control, and they are doing a marvellous job at the moment and it’s a very different approach to what we experienced with SARS some years ago.”
Australia’s chief medical officer, Brendan Murphy, also hailed China’s efforts to stem the virus spread in an interview the following day [4]:
“Clearly, it is not yet contained in China. But they are making Herculean efforts to do so.”
Of course, Australia’s capitalist media ensured that the live interviews where these comments were made were the first and last time that these statements were aired. And they sure weren’t going to report on these comments praising China from Australia’s top public health officials! Yet it was not just senior public health officials and infectious disease specialists who were saying the same things that Moselmane would later say about China’s response to the coronavirus. None other than U.S. president, Donald Trump, the person who has most viciously been trying to blame China for the pandemic over the last few weeks and the man who is the talisman of the extreme right-wing shock jobs who savagely attacked Moselmane, heaped praise on China in the early days of the coronavirus outbreak. Thus, in a tweet on January 24, Trump said [5]:
China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!
So why did Trump praise China and President Xi’s response to the coronavirus in late January and why was Moselmane witch-hunted for giving similar credit to China and Xi just two months later? Well, when Trump was commending China’s response, not only he but nearly the entire capitalist ruling classes in the U.S., Europe and Australia believed their own propaganda that their social system was superior to China’s and, thus, they would be little affected by the virus then ravaging China. They expected that the damage caused by the coronavirus in China would hurt her prestige, undermine the credibility of her socialist system and weaken her economy. Trump believed that he would be facing a weakened PRC opponent in political conflicts and trade disputes and it would, therefore, pay him to sound magnanimous. Two months later the reality turned out very different. The virus caused far more death and economic damage per capita to the U.S., Britain, France, Germany and Australia than it did to China. China, on the other hand, had been able to suppress the virus spread so effectively that she was now giving huge amounts of aid to developing countries to assist them with their pandemic response. This infuriated the rulers of imperialist countries like the U.S. and Australia. For it reinforced a trend where China’s mutually beneficial relations with countries in the South Pacific, Asia, Africa, South and Central America, and the Middle East was enabling these countries to eke out some greater independence from the plundering Western powers. Moreover, far from showing the relative weaknesses in the PRC’s system, the much more successful response of China to the virus threat in comparison with the capitalist countries has shown the superiority of her socialistic system. As far as the capitalist elite in the West are concerned, for anyone to point this out is taboo. For one it would make it harder to sell to their own masses their Cold War drive to “contain” and strangle socialistic rule in China. Furthermore, for anyone to highlight China’s superior response to the pandemic touches off the greatest of all fears of the rulers of Australia and other capitalist countries: that the masses in their own countries will draw the conclusion from this that they need to get rid of the capitalist system and bring socialism to their own countries. Thus, by late March, for Shaoquett Moselmane or any other high-profile person to praise China’s response to the pandemic simply became intolerable for the capitalist ruling classes. Just as significantly, those who sought to score political points against China over the pandemic hoped that by late March, the population would have forgotten all the praise heaped upon China’s response two months earlier by scientists, Australia’s top public health officials and, of all people, Donald Trump.
Some of the medical experts who, in the early days of the pandemic, praised China’s response to the coronavirus. Left: Australia’s then Deputy Chief Medical Officer (now Acting Chief Medical Officer) Paul Kelly. On January 30, he responded to a question about Australia’s future case numbers by saying that, “it depends a lot on what happens in relation to China getting this under control, and they are doing a marvellous job at the moment ….” Centre: Australia’s then Chief Medical Officer, Brendan Murphy. On January 31, Murphy stated in an interview about the epidemic that, “clearly, it is not yet contained in China. But they are making Herculean efforts to do so.” Right: Canadian epidemiologist, Bruce Aylward, who led a team of 25 international experts in a WHO investigation into China’s response to COVID-19. In a 24 February 2020 press conference reporting on the mission, Aylward informed that: “In the face of a previously unknown disease, China has taken one of the most ancient approaches for infectious disease control and rolled out probably the most ambitious, and I would say, agile and aggressive disease containment efforts in history. China took old-fashioned measures, like the national approach to hand-washing, the mask-wearing, the social distancing, the universal temperature monitoring. But then very quickly, as it started to evolve, the response started to change. And it moved from this sort of one-size-fits-all approach to a science-and-risk-based approach, which was really tailored to allow it to use different containment approaches and measures, depending on the context, the capacity and really the nature of the coronavirus circulation…. they took this old approach and then turbo-charged it with modern science and modern technology in a way that was unimaginable even a few years ago…. What they’ve done has only been possible because of tremendous collective commitment and will of the Chinese people from the most bottom-level community leaders we met and talked to, to the governors at the top. It was an extraordinary, what we call all-of-government, all-of-society approach ….” However, as Moselmane found out, by late March, once it became clear just how poorly the capitalist countries had responded to the pandemic compared to China, any doctor, politician or other public figure praising China’s response was likely to be demonised and pilloried by Western ruling classes and their media hounds.
“Revelations” of Moselmane’s Calling Out of White Australia Racism Takes Witch-Hunt to White Heat
A week after their original exposé of Moselmane’s statements lauding China’s effective response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the SMH had a new revelation. They reported that in a February 5 opinion piece for the East China Normal University, Moselmane had attacked the Australian mainstream media for having “publicly played racist cards, offending and insulting many Australian citizens, especially Chinese residents” in actions that “further deepened the already great suffering of the victim.”
“Today,
the obsolete scum of ‘white Australia’ is once again flooding, and the theory
of yellow fever has once again surfaced,” Moselmane wrote.
“Some
mainstream media have bred and spread these racial viruses in our multicultural
community with the purpose of inciting hatred.
“Today,
media xenophobia and full-scale war against China have become the norm.”
Again Moselmane’s statements are a rather accurate description of what is happening on the ground. One has to be blind to reality or in complete denial to not know that Chinese and other East Asian background people in Australia have been subjected to numerous horrific racist attacks by “the obsolete scum of ‘white Australia’” over the last few months. People of Chinese appearance have been bashed in the streets, at supermarkets and on public transport. They have had threatening racist graffiti scrawled on their homes, had rocks thrown through their house and shop windows, been verbally abused, spat and coughed on and been ordered out of shops and other public places [6] [7] [8]. Racist scum have even abused nurses, doctors and other essential service workers (like bus drivers) of East Asian background and in some cases stalked them in a threatening manner [9] [10] [11]. It is therefore very understandable – and indeed completely necessary – that China’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism last night issued an urgent alert warning Chinese tourists not to travel to Australia. The alert correctly informed that “racial discrimination and acts of violence against Chinese and Asians in Australia have increased significantly.”
Resist the Despicable Racist Attacks against Ethnic Chinese People!
Horrific racist graffiti and death threat sprayed on the home of a Chinese-Australian family in the Melbourne suburb of Knoxfield. On another night, racist scum also threw a large rock smashing the family home’s window. As Moselmane correctly pointed out, some mainstream media have incited racial hatred by breeding and spreading racial viruses.
It is undoubtedly true that the attacks on Chinese and other Asian people have been fueled by the mainstream media and by the anti-China rants of the likes of Peter Dutton, Pauline Hanson, far right Coalition MPs George Christensen and Andrew Hastie (both of whom have previously spoken at racist rallies infested by Neo-Nazis and other white supremacists and anti-Semites) and rabid anti-PRC Labor MP, Anthony Byrne. This is proven by the fact that many of those committing racist attacks on the streets have done so while repeating the same anti-Chinese and anti-China diatribes as the right wing shock jocks and the rabid anti-China politicians [12] [13] [14].
Yet it is not only the most rabidly anti-China politicians and the most openly racist-inciting media presenters that bear responsibility for the renewed escalation of racist attacks on Asian background people over the last few months. The more “moderate” politicians in the Liberal Party and the ALP, who largely all support the Cold War drive against the PRC, and the “centrist”, liberal media who promote hostility to Red China, like the SMH and the ABC, are also guilty of breeding and spreading racial viruses. There have always been broadly two types of white supremacists in Australia. The first type are the openly rabid ones that can scarcely hide their hostility to all non-white skinned people. The second type are the more disguised types. They claim to be, or even consider themselves, non-racist and describe themselves as “centre-right”, “liberal” or even “progressive.” Many of them even like to make themselves feel good by expressing sympathy for people of colour when the latter are victims of racism. Yet, when a non-white people organise themselves into a militant anti-racist resistance force or into a powerful country, like the PRC, that challenges Western domination of the world then they think that this is absolutely unacceptable and you see all their latent prejudice oozing out. The “liberal” and “centrist” Australian media and the mainstream Australian politicians are of this second type of white supremacist. Of course, the mainstream media and politicians attacking China are not simply driven by racism. An even bigger factor is their hostility to socialistic states. Yet ever since the 1949 Chinese Revolution brought the toiling masses to power, hostility to China in the U.S. and Australia has combined anti-communist Red Peril fears with racist Yellow Peril xenophobia.
ABC and SMH journalists nevertheless insist that being anti-PRC does not mean that one is anti-Chinese. They are fond of claiming the authority of “experts” to push their Cold War agenda against the PRC. Yet many of the world’s leading scientists have drawn a direct link between the recent political attacks on China over the coronavirus and the racist attacks on Chinese people on the streets. Thus, a strongly worded editorial titled, “Stop the coronavirus stigma now” in the 7 April issue of the British scientific journal, Nature, the most prestigious scientific journal in the world, stated [15]:
“US President Donald Trump has repeatedly associated the virus with China. Brazilian lawmaker Eduardo Bolsonaro — the son of President Jair Bolsonaro — has called it `China’s fault’. Politicians elsewhere, including in the United Kingdom, are also saying that China bears responsibility.
“Continuing to associate a virus and the disease it causes with a specific place is irresponsible and needs to stop….
“Failing to do so has consequences. It’s clear that since the outbreak was first reported, people of Asian descent around the world have been subjected to racist attacks, with untold human costs — for example, on their health and livelihoods.”
Scott Morrison, Anthony Albanese and the “centrist”/liberal SMH and ABC have been just as guilty as Trump, Bolsonaro and many British politicians in promoting the “China’s fault” theory. They are, thus, just as guilty for inciting racist attacks on people of Asian descent. Of course these politicians and journalists would react with outraged denial if they were confronted with this truth. Yet they know full well that when they incite hostility to socialistic China they are doing it in a way that appeals to – and hence breeds – Yellow Peril racist fears. Afterwards they rub their sullied hands thoroughly with liberal doses of hand sanitiser and then, with all the “honesty” of Donald Trump, smugly express “shock” and “anger” when the rabid rednecks that they have just incited carry out racist attacks. But let us not be fooled by the “moderate” pretensions of the likes of SMH’s Peter Hartcher or the ABC’s Beverley O’Connor. Alongside their shock jock counterparts, the ruling class Australian politicians and the inherently divisive, dog-eat-dog nature of the capitalist system, these liberal media commentators share much responsibility for the terrifying rise in racist attacks on people of Chinese appearance over the last few months. Individually each of them may be personally responsible for just one or two percent of the racist attacks that have taken place. Yet given that there have been literally thousands of such attacks (most racist assaults and verbal threats are never reported but one Asian-Australian site collected details of over 300 separate attacks in just 5 weeks), each anti-China journalist or politician can be personally blamed for causing many individual attacks that would not have occurred had they not made their own contribution to the total dose of Red Peril and Yellow Peril hysteria. Put another way, several racist attacks would not have taken place had, say Peter Hartcher, not added to the incessant anti-PRC, “China is to blame” propaganda. We should keep this in mind when determining the methods by which we must resist these filthy, anti-China scum in the mainstream media.
Left: Political editor of The Sydney Morning Herald, Peter Hartcher, speaks at a forum of the right wing think tank, The Sydney Institute. With his fanatical anti-communist attacks on Red China, Hartcher has done as much as anyone in the media to incite anti-Asian violence in Australia. Right: One example of the result of the “blame China for the pandemic” propaganda spewed by the likes of Hartcher, the Murdoch media, 2GB and the Australian government and ALP “opposition”. One of the two white racist rednecks, screaming that Asians brought “corona here,” in the process of abusing, kicking and spitting on two Asian sisters in the Sydney suburb of Marrickville on 30 March 2020. Of course, the oh-so-“respectable” “centrist”, Hartcher, claims that he is only attacking the Communist Party of China and actually “abhors” racist violence. However, the truth is that he and his ilk know full well that when they incite hostility to socialistic China they are doing it in a manner that harnesses – and hence encourages – Yellow Peril racist prejudices.
Yet when Moselmane exposed media xenophobia against China and how Australia’s mainstream media “have publicly played racist cards”, he put his finger on a really raw, infected wound. Although capitalist rule in Australia has created one of the most racist societies on the planet, the ruling class insists on denying this. One reason is that they are well aware that their rule over this land was established through genocidal dispossession of this country’s first peoples, the Aboriginal people. They know that this truth is recalled whenever people like Moslemane, regardless of the context, speak too starkly about the reality of racism in Australia. They know that recalling this truth in turn damages the “legitimacy” of the Australian nationalist myths that they so depend on to bind the working class masses that they exploit to their self-seeking, ruling class agenda. Secondly, unlike their Western European counterparts, the immediate overseas neighbours of Australia’s ruling class are hundreds and hundreds of millions of non-white skinned peoples in the Pacific and Asia. These are the people that Australia’s imperialist rulers need for both trade and for labour to be exploited by Australian-owned multinational corporations. Any exposure of racist xenophobia within Australia damages the corporate elite’s lucrative business operations in the Asia-Pacific and their imperialist meddling in this region. For these reasons, the ruling class considers it almost as much an act of “treason” for a mainstream politician to bluntly call out White Australia racism as it is for a politician to make comments favourable to the PRC workers state. So when Moselmane’s comments attacking the mainstream media’s role in inciting racial hatred were publicised, the witch-hunt against him reached white heat. Within hours, Moslemane was forced to step down from his position as deputy president of the NSW upper house. He remains a seated member of the upper house.
The Years-Long
Re-Emergence of Cold War McCarthyism
Today’s anti-China witch-hunt is, if anything, even broader in who it targets than the 1950s McCarthyist witch-hunt in the U.S. and Australia against anyone suspected of pro-communist sympathies. One does not even have to be branded a communist to be attacked today, as Moselmane found out. One has only to be a public figure who says anything positive about socialistic China. Two and a half years ago, former Labor federal senator Sam Dastyari was driven out of parliament following a 17 month-long witch-hunt for simply once saying that the South China Sea issue is an internal issue for China. However, whereas Moselmane has, to date, courageously stood by his factually correct statements applauding China’s pandemic response success, Dastyari apologised for saying what is true about the South China Sea issue and today cravenly condemns his past actions as he seeks to climb his way back into the political establishment. Yet Dastyari’s apologies at the time were not enough to stop the rabid anti-communists from howling him out of his senate seat.
Last year, there was an even more bizarre witch-hunt. The target, Gladys Liu, a Hong Kong Chinese woman is someone who is not only not a communist but actually a member of the conservative Liberal-National federal government; and a person with some pretty reprehensible right wing views to boot. Liu’s supposed “crime” is that she had once been a member of Chinese community organisations in Australia which apparently have members who are also members of other organisations that have loose ties to the Communist Party of China. For this she was viciously attacked by the media and by the ALP – the very same party that stabbed Moselmane in the back. Indeed ,the witch-hunt became so intense that members of the right wing, rabidly anti-communist Morrison government, eager to preserve their thin parliamentary majority, were able to correctly brand the ALP’s attacks on Liu as being racially-motivated and even McCarthyist.
In this stultifying anti-PRC atmosphere it is hardly just politicians who are being targeted. The capitalist media and politicians have been attacking any Chinese social organisation perceived as being sympathetic to the PRC or, otherwise, including members who are fond of Red China. In reality this means that just about any community organisation consisting of immigrants from mainland China could be targeted since the majority of migrants from mainland China are sympathetic to the PRC.
Last year, Cold War witch-hunting increasingly targeted international students from the PRC. Especially attacked were those Chinese students who dared to express their sympathies for Red China, especially in regards to the Hong Kong events. These brave students were slandered by the mainstream media. Rabidly anti-communist academics even called for those international students that too strongly promote solidarity with China to face academic disciplinary proceedings. Then, last spring, in a move squarely aimed at silencing through repression the voice of pro-Red China international students, the Australian government announced the creation of a new taskforce to look into “foreign interference” on Australian campuses.
What do all these attacks on Australian-Chinese community organisations, pro-Red China international students and the likes of Moselmane say about the supposed “right to free speech in Australia”? Actually, attacks on dissent and whistleblowers in Australia extend beyond the persecution of those accused of being soft on socialistic China. Today, a former Australian spy, known only as “Witness K,” is facing imprisonment for having revealed that Australia had planted huge numbers of listening devices in East Timorese government buildings in order to give the Australian government the advantage in a dispute with East Timor over gas resources [16]. The Australian regime is also prosecuting Witness K’s lawyer, Bernard Collaery, and two weeks ago Collaery faced a sinister, secret pre-trial hearing [17]. Yet another whistleblower that the Australian regime is persecuting is former military lawyer, David McBride [18]. McBride faces up to 50 years in prison for leaking to the ABC details of horrific war crimes by Australian troops in Afghanistan – including the murder of unarmed civilians and children. Last June, the Australian Federal Police even raided the offices of the tame, government-funded media channel, the ABC, simply because the ABC had publicised the information from McBride [19]. It is clear that the “right to free-speech” in Australia exists in name only!
Ironically, the extreme right wing media commentators who attacked Moselmane most savagely claim to be the most strident defenders of “free speech,” especially whenever the Racial Discrimination Act is brought up. Yet the “free speech” that these people want is only the “freedom” to vilify Aboriginal people, Africans, Muslims, Asians, LGBTI communities and women’s rights activists. They want the “freedom” to incite racist riots the way that Alan Jones incited the horrific December 2005 white supremacist riot at Cronulla Beach. At the same time these shock jocks want to completely silence anyone who dares to say anything positive about socialistic China.
The truth is that the “right to free speech” in Australia has become more like the “right” to say what is tolerable to the capitalist ruling class. True, theoretically one can say what one wants… as long as one is not a whistle blower! And for people whose voice is not heard by too many people, this right can even sometimes exist in practice. But for people with a high enough profile that their voice will be heard by many, anything that they say that cuts against the exploiting class’ interests too sharply – for example, by praising socialistic China or calling out White Australia racism too bluntly – will see them vilified, threatened, hounded and ultimately driven out of their positions. Look at the way that not only Moslemane has been witch hunted but the way that Sudanese Australian media presenter, Yassmin Abdel-Magied, was abused and hounded out of this country three years ago after she made an ANZAC Day post linking the phrase “Lest we forget” to the horrific oppression of refugees in Australian detention camps at Nauru and Manus and to the brutal oppression of Palestinian people.
In many ways, the “right to free speech” in this country exists in much the same way as “democratic rights for all” does. Theoretically, everyone has an equal vote and say in “democratic Australia.” Yet in practice, under this country’s capitalist system, it is the ultra-rich big business owners who are able to mould “public opinion” and control society through their ownership of the media, through their ability to disproportionately fund political parties, pay for political advertising, finance think tanks and hire lobbyists and through their numerous ties to the upper echelons of all key state and bureaucratic institutions. And whenever their domination meets a significant challenge, they don’t hesitate to throw out any coverings of “democracy” and rely on naked state repression. This is just like how their American capitalist counterparts are today unleashing riot cops and the National Guards to viciously attack those taking part in the ongoing anti-racist resistance there.
At the same time, in a society where workers are exploited and Aboriginal people, ethnic minorities, women and LGBTI communities face such oppression, it is vital that we defend whatever limited democratic rights that we do actually have. For it is the working class masses united with all the downtrodden that is the only force that can fight against exploitation and oppression in this country. That is why it is high time that we confront the growing McCarthyist madness and rebuff the attacks on basic democratic rights. Let us say: Down with the witch-hunt of Shaoquett Moselmane! No to the targeting of Australian-Chinese community organisations! Stop the persecution of pro-PRC Chinese international students! The right to free speech must include the right to praise – and indeed support – socialistic countries like the PRC! Drop all charges against whistle blowers David McBride, Witness K and Bernard Collaery!
Racism and Anti-PRC
Witch-hunting
As with almost everything else that is negative in Australian society, anti-Red China witch-hunting feeds off and accentuates White Australia racism: that very same racial virus infecting Australia that Moselmane dared to identify. So how did this racial virus spread? For starters, one should understand that the disease of racism is actually widespread within most capitalist societies. Exploiting classes breed racism to divide multiracial working classes. They also inflame racism in order to divert mass frustrations onto racial minorities and, thus, away from the capitalist rulers themselves. Moreover, in imperialist countries like Australia, a racial superiority mentality is transmitted in order to enlist the population behind ruling class acts of military intervention, plunder and paternalism in the poorer “Third World” countries. In Australia there is also a big additional factor spawning racism. That is the fact that capitalist rule here was founded on the genocidal dispossession of this country’s indigenous first peoples, a crime that could only be organised and “justified” by spreading the most extreme form of white supremacist prejudice imaginable.
Today, it is telling that the three politicians who have been most intensely witch-hunted in recent times for supposedly being soft on China – Shaoquett Moselmane, Gladys Liu and Sam Dastyari – are all among the very few politicians in this country from people of colour backgrounds. People who are not white simply have less leeway in this racist society. While hardcore white supremacists are opposed to all people of colour all the time, the more insidious, mainstream form of white supremacy embraced by the bulk of the ruling elite sees non-white people as acceptable until they do something which is deemed “wrong”, in which case all the prejudice gushes out and they will be attacked far more severely than a white person doing the same thing. Yassmin Abdel-Magied certainly copped that when she was cruelly driven out of the country in a barely disguised, racist and misogynist witch-hunt.
All this shows the limits of “multiculturalism” as it is practiced by the ruling class. In their warped version, people from non-Anglo backgrounds are free to practice their own cultures as long as they all accept Western domination of the world and the current social order in Australia where the capitalist big end of town rules and Aboriginal people remain dispossessed. Any non-white person who does, or even says, anything even slightly contradicting this status quo is deemed disloyal and “ungrateful.” We let you into the country so the least you could do is to… such is the attitude of ruling class-created “public opinion” towards people of colour who dare question, in even the most minimal way, the myths of the current social order. All the while this mainstream still claims to stand by “multiculturalism.” This shows that, in practice, the official form of Australian “multiculturalism” sees people of colour confined to a second class status. It is far, far from a genuinely egalitarian and anti-racist multi-racialism.
The same implicit, underlying racism that added to the severity of the campaign against Moslemane has also been evident in a vicious campaign against WHO leader Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, again for having the temerity to praise China’s effective response to the coronavirus outbreak. Dr Ghebreyesus, a microbiologist of Ethiopian background, is the first WHO chief from Africa. As far as unashamed racists are concerned, Africans are not meant to hold such senior positions in international organisations. More liberal, mainstream racists could tolerate Dr Ghebreyesus in this role as long as he did not do anything that contradicted Western imperialist agendas. When Dr Ghebreyesus simply stated the facts by praising the PRC’s response to the virus, all the underlying racism gushed out and he was subjected to incredible abuse and death threats. Although the WHO is an agency under the imperialist dominated UN, Dr Ghebreyesus has shown considerable courage to stand up to racism and colonialist attitudes. When two of France’s most senior doctors despicably called on national TV for testing COVID-19 treatments on Africans [20], Dr Ghebreyesus rightly slammed the remarks as “racist” and a “hangover from a colonial mentality” [21]. Just like when it was revealed that Moselmane had called out White Australia racism, Dr Ghebreyesus’ strong stand against racism only intensified the attacks against him. Yet he stood firm against these racist attacks too and called them out:
“I can tell you personal attacks that have been going on for more than two, three months. Abuses, or racist comments, giving me names, black or Negro. I’m proud of being black, proud of being Negro.
“I don’t care, to be honest … even death threats. I don’t give a damn.
Dr Ghebreyesus also called out that many of the attacks had been associated with supporters of Donald Trump’s favourite regime, Taiwan [22]:
“Three months ago, this attack came from Taiwan. We need to be honest. I will be straight today. From Taiwan.
“And Taiwan, the Foreign Ministry also, they know the campaign. They didn’t disassociate themselves. They even started criticizing me in the middle of all that insult and slur, but I didn’t care.”
Angered
by all the attacks on Dr Ghebreyesus, the African Union came to his defence
[23]. A statement released by the African Union on the very same day that Dr
Ghebreyesus called out Taiwanese racism, emphasised that:
“… the Chairperson of the African Union and President of the Republic of South Africa, HE Cyril Ramaphosa reaffirms his appreciation for the exceptional leadership of the Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, from the very earliest stages of this unprecedented global health crisis.
“The African Union has also commended the management of Dr Tedros in leading the global response to the pandemic.”
As an aside, we must note that it should be little surprise that many of the racist attacks on Dr Ghebreyesus should come from supporters of the Taiwanese regime, with the implicit support of the regime itself. Taiwan was created as a de facto state when leaders of the right-wing former Kuomintang regime and members of the deposed landlord-capitalist exploiting class of China fled that country’s 1949 anti-capitalist revolution and set up base in Taiwan. Since then, the Taiwanese regime has been a stalwart of support for reactionary causes. Taiwan was one of the strongest supporters of the former Apartheid regime in South Africa. Backing the Apartheid regime against those fighting for black liberation, Taiwanese ambassador to Apartheid South Africa, H. K. Yang, stated that: “South Africa and my country are joined in the fight against communism. We are in favour of free enterprise, democracy and freedom” [24]. Taiwan, the former Apartheid rulers of South Africa and the murderously racist Israeli regime established a triangular axis of collaboration on developing nuclear weapons [25]. Taiwan was instrumental in enabling the former Apartheid regime to acquire nuclear weapons.
Cold War Witch-hunting Will Lead to Greater Repression of All Progressive Forces
The Australian ruling class has already harnessed its drive against those accused of being “soft” on Red China to power its push to constrict the rights of broader sections of society. Thus, two years ago, under the cover of contrived fears about “Chinese interference” and the supposed “threat” posed by the activities of pro-PRC members of Australia’s Chinese community, the Liberal government, with ALP support, rammed through two new laws targeting “foreign interference” that will provide pretexts for Australian regime crackdowns on protest movements and media reporting. Then, in the midst of the Australian ruling class spearheading outrageous attacks on China over the virus outbreak, last month Peter Dutton introduced into parliament the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Amendment Bill 2020. The proposed new laws will give the regime the “right” to prevent a person under ASIO investigation from contacting their lawyer, allow ASIO to expel an interrogated person’s lawyer if they deem the lawyer to be “interrupting questioning”, gives ASIO the power to question 14 year-old children and grants them the “right” to track people without the need for a warrant [26].
The Australian regime’s drive against Red China and those deemed to be sympathetic to her at home has fuelled a “national security” obsession that has in turn made it easier for the Australian regime to target dissenters who have no direct connection with Cold War issues. It is telling that although those who blew the whistle on the Australian state’s spying in East Timor were first raided in 2013, the Australian regime did not feel that it could get away with actually laying charges on the two whistle blowers – Witness K and Bernard Collaery – until a whole five years later. Although the anti-China crusade and the suppression of those exposing the crimes of the Australian regime in East Timor are not directly connected, it is undoubted that the “national security” fixation created by the escalation of anti-PRC witch-hunting over the last few years made the government feel more confident to pursue the prosecution of whistle blowers in 2018 than they did in 2013. It is notable too that the very same Peter Dutton who demanded Moselmane’s removal from parliament was just weeks later demanding the sacking of Victoria’s Deputy Chief Health Officer, Dr Annaliese van Diemen, for merely making a very insightful tweet comparing the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic to the suffering of Aboriginal people caused by colonial invasion [27]:
“Sudden arrival of an invader from another land, decimating populations, creating terror. Forces the population to make enormous sacrifices & completely change how they live in order to survive. COVID19 or Cook 1770?”
The obsession with “protecting national interests” that the Australian ruling class have whipped up through their Cold War drive is also being used by them to justify repressive measures and laws targeting workers’ industrial action and more militant unions, both of which are branded as harmful to “national interests.”
Bottom: Some of the Trotskyist Platform placards at the 17 August 2019 demonstration in Sydney against the pro-colonial rioters in Hong Kong included messages warning that the Australian ruling class’ campaign against socialistic China is fuelling a “national security” obsession that would be used to attack people and movements not even directly connected to the Cold War drive. Top: 18 July 2019, Canberra: David McBride, the whistleblower who revealed to the media details of horrific war crimes committed by Australian troops in Afghanistan speaks at a rally in his defence. The Australian regime is prosecuting McBride with charges that could see him jailed for 50 years for his brave exposure of “the Australian Defence Force’s unethical, harmful and highly politicised leadership.” There is no doubt that McBride as well as other persecuted whistleblowers, dissident lawyers and investigative journalists are victims of the “national security” hysteria largely created by the Cold War McCarthyist witchhunt against anyone deemed to be a supporter of Red China.
More insightful people, even those who do not necessarily have sympathy for socialistic China are starting to see the threat of broader repression posed by Cold War witch-hunting. Thus, although no mainstream politician from any party and not a single journalist, that we know of, from the main media outlets have had the courage to publicly defend Moselmane, there were prominent community voices that did protest against his witch-hunt. Prominent left-liberal Stuart Rees, an Emeritus Professor at the University of Sydney and the founder director of the Sydney Peace Foundation issued a statement condemning the witch-hunt [28]. In it, Rees insisted that:
“Mosselmane was the victim of character assassination for questioning anti-Chinese sentiment and for praising Chinese leadership’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic in Wuhan.”
An
article in the April 10 issue of the Australian
Muslim Times newspaper also condemned the witch-hunt of Moselmane [29],
noting that:
“The weak-kneed response of this onslaught against a colleague by the NSW Labor leader Jodi McKay MP is highly disappointing and shown to be a leader incapable of standing up for her colleagues and for what’s right.”
The article also quoted a protest letter to the NSW ALP leader by Chinese Community Council of Australia’s Dr Anthony Pun, where Pun stated that:
“…we are indebted to the Hon Shaoquett Moselmane MLC, who have shown empathy and compassion to our difficulties, particularly to racists taunts, racially vilification and hate speech…. We are aware of the recent media attempting to discredit him and saying that his remarks on China was inappropriate was unwarranted and simply wrong.”
The
Australian Muslim Times article also
reported on the statements of others who opposed the witch-hunt of Moselmane:
“Mr Bashir Sawalha, President of United Australian Palestinian Workers Association (UAPWA) has condemned the spiteful media attacks on Mr Moselmane and has also criticised the lack of support for him by Ms McKay.”
We welcome the fact that such a broad range of voices have condemned this McCarthyist witch-hunt. There needs to the broadest possible united-front push back against the Cold War persecution of people who make positive comments about the PRC or express support for her. And we need to the resist the broader attacks on democratic rights that such McCarthyist persecution is driving.
Ditch the ALP – Let’s Build a Workers Party That Will Actually Stand Up to the Capitalists and their Media
Despite being stabbed in the back multiple times by his own ALP colleagues, Shaoquett Moselmane has reaffirmed his commitment to the Labor Party. He released a statement that, while expressing deepest gratitude to those who offered solidarity with him against the recent attacks, asserted that “it is through the Australian Labor Party that we can advance the wellbeing and welfare of all Australians” [30]. Yet many of the supporters of Moselmane, who is rather popular amongst working class communities of Middle Eastern, African, Asian and South American origins, may have other thoughts. They would have been horrified at how the ALP leadership joined in the witch-hunt of the person they see as the spokesman for their concerns and would have noted how few – perhaps none (!) – of his Labor parliamentary colleagues actually publicly came to his defence in a forceful, high-profile manner.
Some of Moselmane’s supporters are likely amongst the many working class people who support the ALP through gritted teeth. Such people have long ago lost faith in the Labor Party’s commitment, let alone ability, to deliver meaningful social change. Many of these people have seen Labor Party leaders time and again betray promises privately made to them to make greater efforts to reduce inequality, ease the shortage of affordable rental accommodation and genuinely oppose racist attacks on non-white communities. Nevertheless these people, many from migrant backgrounds or lower-paid workers, cling on to the ALP because they hope that a few good people there can at least make some headway in changing the ALP’s stance, however minimally, on a few issues: perhaps make the ALP take a stronger stand on opposing job slashing by bosses, more truly stand for genuine multiculturalism, curb its strident support for Israel’s brutal occupation of Palestine and wind back its fulsome adherence to the U.S.-led Cold War drive against China. Yet, as the witch-hunt of Moselmane again confirms, these have proven to be false hopes. Despite the sincerity of rank and file ALP supporters who hold these illusions, the truth is that the ALP has never sought to curb the “right” of even profitable companies to slash jobs whenever that is what it takes to further boost their own filthy profits. And the Labor Party is just as rabid in supporting Israel’s murderous oppression of Palestinian people as the Tories are and just as fervent in lining up behind the Cold War drive against socialistic China. And as for the type of “multiculturalism” envisaged by the ALP, one has only to look at the actions of the previous two leaders of the NSW ALP. At a meeting in the Blue Mountains in September 2018, former ALP leader Michael Daley incited racial prejudice when he disgustingly blamed migrants – especially from Asia – for taking local jobs and pushing young people out of Sydney [31]. Four months earlier, Daley’s predecessor Luke Foley also inflamed hostility to people of colour by despicably claiming that refugees are swamping Western Sydney leading to a “white flight” of Anglo families from these suburbs [32]. Meanwhile, just last month, the last ALP NSW premier, Kristina Keneally, now a senior member of federal Labor’s shadow ministry, was blowing out of the same dog whistle to racism as Daley and Foley as she called for a cut to migration and for local workers to get a “first go at jobs” [33].
To all those disillusioned with the ALP because it fails to actually stand up to the big end of town and refuses to fully shed its own white nationalist prejudices let alone challenge these notions, we say that it is high time to throw the ALP into the non-recyclable bin. The ALP is useless as an instrument for progressive change. And the problem is not merely that the ALP has lost its way. The bitter truth is that the ALP was never on the right track. Let’s remember that the Labor Party was founded on the principle of the White Australia Policy exclusion of Asian and other non-white immigrants. It is true that in certain periods – like the Whitlam years – the ALP oversaw some progressive reforms. But these were only ceded because the ruling class was in a weakened position –it was losing the Vietnam War to the heroic Vietnamese communists during the Whitlam period and facing a resurgent left and workers movement – and needed to grant the masses some concessions. These measures were taken by the ALP in order to stave off a much more deep-going working class radicalisation that could have conquered still greater gains for the masses. Yet, even at the best of times, the ALP’s approach has always been to try and make some piecemeal reforms for workers while retaining the acceptance of the capitalist bigwigs. This program has been a failure because the interests of the working class and those of the capitalist business owners are completely counter-posed. Every time that ALP leaders kowtow before the capitalist class and their media, they make this ruling class stronger, which in turn puts the ALP under even greater pressure to prostrate before these bigwigs. Such is logic of the ALP’s irreversible spiral downwards. For example, by pandering to the Murdoch and Fairfax media and the likes of Hadley and Credlin in their attacks on Moselmane, NSW ALP leader Jodi McKay strengthened the authority of these capitalist media outfits. So when the Murdoch media went on a crusade against today’s Black Lives Matter protests, McKay was under more pressure to bow to the wishes of Murdoch’s media than she otherwise would have been. This she duly did. Yesterday, Jodi McKay attacked Liberal premier Gladys Berejiklian from the right for not having then banned the planned protest. “Is (Premier Berejiklian) really giving her approval for a mass rally with potentially thousands of participants, when the maximum number of people allowed to visit a private home remains just five,” McKay told Murdoch’s Daily Telegraph [34]. It was this white supremacist-pandering attack by the NSW Labor leader on Berejiklian’s supposed softness on the protest that then pushed the conservative premier to move to ban today’s antiracist demonstration.
What we need is a workers party that in direct contrast to the ALP is not interested in gaining the approval or even the tolerance of any section of the capitalist class. Such a party would be based on the understanding that the interests of the working class masses can only be advanced through consistent opposition to the entire capitalist class. It would fight to restrict the “right” of capitalist bosses to slash jobs and fight for laws that would force company owners to increase their hiring of permanent workers at the expense of their profits. The workers party that we need would understand that advancing the masses interests can only come through building genuine workers unity. That means replacing the ALP’s hypocritical platitudes to “multiculturalism” and “reconciliation” with a merciless war against all outbreaks of white supremacy. It would fight for mass union/Aboriginal/Asian/Muslim/African mobilisations to crush violent redneck attacks, for the immediate jailing of all police and prison guards responsible for the deaths of Aboriginal people in custody and for the granting of all the rights of citizenship to all refugees, guest workers and international students. Such a party would also stand by all the peoples of the world subjugated by the same Australian capitalist class that exploits workers here at home, by the peoples subjugated by Canberra’s Washington big brother ally and by all those downtrodden by the reactionary regimes supported by these U.S. and Australian imperialists. That means it would oppose Australian imperialist plunder and paternalist bullying in the South Pacific and would demand the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all U.S. and Australian troops from Afghanistan, the Persian Gulf and all of the Middle East. It would also oppose all U.N. and U.S. economic sanctions on the peoples of North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela and Iran. A true workers party would also demand the removal of all Israeli troops and settlers from all of the West Bank and Gaza and fight for the destruction of the racial-supremacist Israeli state and its replacement by a bi-national, secular workers state where Jews and Palestinians will live together in socialist harmony. Most crucially, the international policy of a party that truly defends workers interests would emphasise the unconditional defence of socialistic rule in China, North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam and Laos against imperialist military pressure, lying propaganda campaigns and Western-backed anti-communist forces. This policy is essential despite the bureaucratic deformations and capitalist intrusions that distort socialistic rule in these countries. In short, what we need is a party that will defend the states where workers have achieved power abroad while fighting for workers rule here in Australia.
From causing a growing gap between rich and poor to its inability to provide secure, permanent jobs to its flawed response to the pandemic to the racist state brutality that it administers, capitalist rule is every day making life more miserable for the masses. The widespread revelations of racist state terror against black people and the brutal response of police to Black Lives Matter protests not only shows the true nature of capitalist “democracy” but exposes the blatant hypocrisy of capitalist regimes when they make allegations against the PRC, DPRK and other socialistic states over “human rights”. Now in the U.S., many working class people are questioning their faith in capitalist “democracy” and for the first time in a long while have begun to take the political offensive. Here in Australia, today’s mass anti-racist protests are a sign of the potential to turn around the ruling class’ decades-long offensive against Aboriginal people, other people of colour and the broader working class masses. Yet, as we look to possibly move onto the front foot, we need to guard our rear against attack. The more that we resist, the more that the exploiting class will fear the spectre of communism and, thus, the more that they will resort to Cold War witch-hunting and propaganda campaigns. That makes it doubly important to resist the Cold War attacks on those who sympathise with, or praise, the PRC and other socialistic countries. Let us condemn the witch-hunt of Shaoquett Moselmane and demand: No to the targeting of Australian-Chinese community organisations! Stop the persecution of pro-PRC Chinese international students! Rebuff the all-sided attacks on democratic rights that the McCarthyist anti-PRC witch-hunt is fuelling!
References
Charles Calisher, Dennis Carroll, Rita Colwell, Ronald B Corley, Peter Daszak, Christian Drosten, Luis Enjuanes, Jeremy Farrar, Hume Field, Josie Golding, Alexander Gorbalenya, Bart Haagmans, James M Hughes, William B Karesh, Gerald T Keusch, Sai Kit Lam, Juan Lubroth, John S Mackenzie, Larry Madoff, Jonna Mazet, Peter Palese, Stanley Perlman, Leo Poon, Bernard Roizman, Linda Saif, Kanta Subbarao and Mike Turner, Statement in support of the scientists, public health professionals, and medical professionals of China combatting COVID-19 (published 19 February 2020), The Lancet, Volume 395, Issue 10226, E42-E43, 7 March 2020, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)30418-9
Don’t Let Rich Business Owners Make Workers Pay for the Pandemic – Force Them to Keep Paying Wages from the Profits They’ve Leached From Workers Over the Years!
No Job Cuts! No Unpaid Stand Downs!
3 May 2020: Australian billionaire James Packer spent much of last year cruising around in a $200 million super yacht. He is now lazing about in his $20 million holiday mansion in a U.S. resort. Packer can afford all this. This main owner of hotel and casino operator Crown Resorts has made a fortune from leaching profits out of the hard work of Crown workers. In the last five years, Crown’s owners have extracted a total profit of $4.2 billion. Yet within hours of the March 22 announcement that clubs and casinos needed to close due to COVID-19, Packer and Co. stood down without pay thousands of workers. Around 95% of the 11,500 strong Crown workforce has been cut. This is outrageous! Consider this: assuming that the average annual wage of a Crown worker is $60,000, probably an overestimate given how badly hospitality workers are paid, then Packer and the other shareholders could pay all the stood down workers their full wages for six and a half years out of the profits that they have leached from these workers’ labour in just the last five years!
Packer is hardly alone in acting this way. Right across Australia, the owners of cafes, restaurants, gyms, airlines, tourism operations and factories are throwing onto the scrap heap the very same workers who made these capitalists their fortunes. We must not stand for this! Ultra-rich business owners should not be allowed to retrench workers or stand down workers without pay. We must force them to keep on paying us in full out of the profits that they have leached from our labour over the years.
Early June 2020: James Packer aboard his $200 million superyacht. Just six weeks earlier his Crown Resorts stood down without pay over 10,000 of the very workers whose toil made this greedy, lazy billionaire his fortune. Merely selling the superyacht that he bought last year (out of the profits extracted from these workers) could alone have covered the full pay of all of Packer’s stood-down workers for nearly four months!
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It is Workers Who Are Bearing the Economic Pain of the COVID-19 Pandemic
For years, Australian governments – Liberal, ALP and ALP-Greens coalitions alike – have kept the dole at cruelly low levels. The right-wing media have “justified” this by insulting unemployed workers as lazy. However, with so many workers now thrown onto Centrelink queues it is hard to sell that lie. So, now the new line that the regime is selling us is that “everyone needs to share the economic pain” caused by the pandemic. Except it is workers who are being made to bear all that pain! Sure, there are also some small businesses that are not making a profit right now. But let’s not buy the line that those small business owners using hired labour are simply, innocent “battlers.” Many of these small business owners axing jobs now are the ones most notorious for illegally under-paying their staff and otherwise bullying their workers. And how many workers employed in small businesses see their supposed “battler” boss turn up each day in a flashy Mercedes or BMW!
Let’s remember that when any business using hired labour, big or small, winds up, the owners still have all their personal wealth that they have extracted from exploiting their workers as well as all the money that they will get from selling the equipment and other business assets that they had bought from the profits sweated out from workers’ labour over the years. Just look at how little the high-profile failure of Clive Palmer’s Queensland Nickel affected his wealth. After Palmer sacked 237 workers in early 2016, he then infamously refused to pay even the entitlements of the further 800 workers who lost their jobs when the company was liquidated shortly after. Today, despite his company’s collapse and all the pain borne by the axed Queensland Nickel workers, Palmer still manages to be Australia’s eighth richest person with nearly $10 billion in wealth!
Far from “sharing the pain”, many bosses are using the current crisis to, instead, inflict pain on their workers. Knowing that the massive job losses have left those still employed feeling insecure about their jobs and, thus, less willing to challenge bosses, business owners are ramming through attacks on working conditions. The conservative government is right behind them. Last week, industrial relations minister Christian Porter slashed the notice period that bosses have to give before making cuts to pay, penalty rates and leave entitlements to just 24 hours. Meanwhile, some corporate bigwigs are using the cover of the pandemic to push through job cuts. In March, ANZ bosses slashed 230 jobs as part of a long-plotted “cost cutting” drive.
Typical of the bosses busy retrenching workers are the ones heading major pub operator, Redcape. Redcape’s biggest stake is held by American banker, Ken Moelis, but Australian tycoon, Rhonda Wyllie, also owns a multi-millionaire dollar stake. Wyllie, whose family’s wealth is $420 million, is a politically-connected property mogul who had then foreign minister Julie Bishop at her obscenely opulent 2018 wedding. Right: Whyllie (left) and Bishop (right) at this latter event. Whyllie, Moellis and co.’s company wasted no time in responding to the pandemic restrictions by axing casual staff and standing down, without pay, most of Redcape’s permanent workers. This despite Redcape’s owners having exploited $153 million from their workers in just the last four and a half years – enough to pay the 800 cut workers in full for around five years!
Bosses Putting Workers’ Lives at Risk
Driven by this same pursuit of “cutting costs,” many business owners are putting those workers lucky enough to still have a job at risk of contracting the coronavirus. Qantas has such lax safety systems that even the limp government regulator, Safework NSW, issued the company a mandatory notice on March 2 because Qantas did not ensure that PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) was provided to Sydney ground crew performing the crucial role of cleaning aircraft of wet wipes, used tissues, used face masks and sometimes even vomit and blood. Then the Transport Workers Union exposed how after a Qantas baggage handler at Adelaide Airport was found be infected with COVID-19, Qantas bosses did little to put any protections in place. As a result within 17 days, another 17 baggage handlers, three other Qantas workers and 11 close contacts became infected.
In many cases, bosses are not only putting their workers at risk but placing those they supposedly serve in danger too. At many hospitals and private aged care facilities, bosses have failed to provide workers with adequate PPE; and at best only after the virus has already spread. At a Western Sydney Anglicare nursing home, 14 residents have tragically died from COVID-19 after a worker was infected.
The higher paid strata of administrators of government-run facilities are often little better than their private sector counterparts. In Tasmania, the virus jumped from two infected North West Regional Hospital patients onto medical workers. The lack of adequate PPE, which medical workers have angrily exposed, enabled COVID-19 to then spread like wildfire amongst staff and patients at the hospital and a neighbouring private hospital. Three days ago, the twelfth person died from this particular outbreak that has infected at least 73 health workers.
Since we can’t rely on the bosses to ensure a safe workplace, the workers movement must fight for the following:
Union/worker safety committees at each workplace. These will struggle to ensure that each workplace is safe and has proper pandemic deterrence procedures. If any site is found to be dangerous, workers should walk off the job until the site is made safe. Workers to be fully paid during any such walk-offs.
Temperature testing of all workers and others entering work sites.
All workers at hospitals treating potential COVID-19 patients and at all aged care homes to be supplied with full head-to-toe PPE. The provision of such space-suit style PPE to nurses, janitors and doctors in China is part of why that country was so successful in responding to the COVID-19 threat.
All workers to be granted unlimited paid pandemic leave for COVID-19 treatment or quarantining or for caring for ill people. Instead of bosses blaming workers for outbreaks, they should pay sick leave so that workers don’t get hit with the choice between poverty and risking spreading the disease.
Similarly, all casual workers must be immediately granted permanency. These workers must have all the rights of permanent workers – including sick leave and guaranteed minimum work hours.
Not Bailouts of Capitalists but Jobs For All Workers At Full Pay
All of official society, business owners, media commentators, the ALP “Opposition” and even, to a significant degree, the current leaders of our trade unions – have been cheering the government’s JobKeeper scheme that pays the owners of certain businesses $1,500 per fortnight for each worker that they keep on their payrolls. However, JobKeeper does not apply to most casual workers. Yet it is precisely such workers who have suffered the biggest job cuts since they often work in the hardest hit sectors like hospitality and retail. Also, often working in these areas are international students and visa workers. Yet the scheme will not apply to them either. These people now face destitution as they are not even eligible for the dole. Despicably, Morrison’s response to their plight is to tell these people to “make your way home”! For many this is not even possible as they not only have no money to pay for airfares but often cannot do so due to travel restrictions. The workers movement must actively demand that, to the extent that JobKeeper actually helps workers keep their jobs, it should apply to all workers. Let’s stop our wages being undercut by the forcing of destitute people into illegally-low-paid jobs in the cash economy! Let’s demand:
Immediate permanency, with all the rights of permanent workers, for all casual employees!
Full citizenship rights for everyone here including international students, refugees and visa workers!
Other than those explicitly excluded from JobKeeper, there are many others that the scheme will not save the jobs of. Since it only applies to large companies that have lost more than 50% of their revenue and smaller businesses that have lost at least 30%, workers being axed by firms experiencing lesser downturns will not be helped. Moreover, since the subsidy is barely above minimum wage, many bosses are choosing not to utilise the scheme because they simply don’t want to top up any wages out of their own pockets. Other capitalists are refusing to re-hire cut workers because they wanted to “prune” staff anyway.
There is another huge problem. JobKeeper is financed not from wealthy company owners but from the public budget. And you can bet that it is working class people who are going to be made to cover most of the resulting public debt. We face cuts to public service jobs, the further sell-off of public housing, the return of the dole back to near starvation levels, more health and education services being made user pays and further privatisation. What makes this more terrible is that some of the capitalists receiving JobKeeper subsidies did not actually have plans to cut their workforce because they needed to keep exploiting their workers to protect profits or market share. Thus, many billionaire and multi-millionaire capitalists are now going to receive huge donations from the public budget that amount to a combined multi billion dollars amount. That’s why in counter-position to JobKeeper, we need to fight for jobs for all workers through forcing the bosses to retain more workers than they want to at the expense of their own profits. That requires militant, mass struggle.
Even at this time of pandemic restrictions, strike action is still possible. Last month, MUA-organised Hutchison workers walked off the job for ten days over the company’s callous indifference to the threat of a pandemic spread at its Port Botany terminal. Moreover, social distancing measures will inevitably ease, giving us more freedom to launch the mass actions so urgently needed. We should then fight to stop wealthy business owners planning to permanently shut down operations by holding mass protest occupations of their facilities (while maintaining safe social distancing) to prevent them from selling their assets. However, given that many workers being axed are at smaller sites with less industrial power, the workers movement must also unite behind common demands for laws to ensure jobs for all workers. Let us demand:
A ban on all job cuts or unpaid stand downs by any firm whose total profit over the previous, say seven, years exceeds any current losses.
A ban on all cuts to wages and conditions from pre-pandemic levels.
The forcing of any company still making a profit to increase its number of full-time paid employees by at least five workers for every hundred thousand dollars of monthly profit.
Any business that violates these measures to be confiscated and transferred into public ownership.
Workers are NOT “All in This Together” with the Greedy, Rich Bosses
To wage the desperately needed fightback, the workers movement must change the program that currently leads our unions. Right now, pro-ALP union leaders have completely bought into the “we are all in this together” mantra. They have been cheered on in this by the corporate bigwigs, the right-wing government and media commentators. The ACTU leadership has been so compliant that industrial relations minister Christian Porter called ACTU leader Sally McManus his new BFF! Even the more militant Victorian CFMEU head, John Setka, has cheered the “unprecedented co-operation” with bosses associations saying “For once, we are all in the same boat.”
But far from being “all in the same boat”, the greedy bosses are actually throwing workers off the very boats that these workers built as soon as these boats run into rough waters. It is this same “we are all in the same boat” nonsense that saw the 1980s Accord between unions, bosses and the then ALP government. The Accord was essentially a no-strike pledge by union leaders in exchange for promises of social programs. In reality, The Accord saw the then Hawke and Keating Labor governments preside over the biggest increase in inequality in Australian history. Since then a less overt, but still underlying, “all in the same boat” ideology has seen union leaders, for the most part, shy away from organising militant industrial action – a strategy that has weakened our unions and led to the undermining of working conditions and rampant casualisation of the workforce.
Central to the “we are all in this together” ideology is the myth that workers and bosses share a common “national interest” in promoting the profits of local companies. Thus, the union leadership’s long-term “strategy” to stop job cuts has been to call to protect Australian businesses from imported goods. However, the last couple of months have exposed how utterly bankrupt this protectionist strategy is. For all the recent huge job losses have absolutely nothing to do with overseas competition hurting local businesses. The job cuts have actually been concentrated in sectors – like restaurants, shops, personal care, tourism and gyms – that simply cannot by their very nature be replaced by imports or by overseas contracting. Meanwhile, not only are travel disruptions reducing imports to Australia, those cuts to imports are causing job losseshere as Australian businesses are deprived of needed supplies.
So we desperately need to exorcise our union movement of the we are all in this together or common national interest myth that currently haunts it. Our unions need to be re-oriented on a program based on a clear understanding that the interests of the capitalist business owners and those of the working class are at all times counter-posed. At times of crisis, like today, this conflict of interests actually becomes even sharper. Central to such a class struggle understanding is the truth that job losses are not ultimately caused by foreign threats to local business profits but by the greed of capitalists and the irrationality of their system. Thus the fight for jobs for all requires not helping local bosses to make more profit but actually, in a sense, the very opposite: mass struggle to force these bosses to hire more workers at the expense of their profits.
One positive development that lasted for a short period is that after years of focusing on demands to keep out guest workers, our union leaders, albeit not very energetically, did rightly call for JobKeeper to be extended to visa workers and international students. However, this emphasis did not last long at all. Today, Sally McManus and some other union leaders gave legitimacy to a newspaper opinion piece by one of their ALP parliamentary mates calling to cut migration and for local workers to get a “first go at jobs.” The divisive, nationalist article was written by senior federal shadow minister, Kristina Keneally, who sounded a good deal like a Peter Dutton, Pauline Hanson or Donald Trump. Such pitting of Australian workers against international and guest workers, far from saving the jobs of local workers, only divides workers from our true allies – the workers of the world – and, thus, makes the workers movement less able to mobilise effective action to stop job slashing attacks by capitalists. It is high time that our unions strongly reject all divisive, protectionist demands that call for putting local workers ahead of our international worker comrades whether they be calls to slash immigration, demands for more “local content”, demands for “Aussie crews on Aussie ships” or calls to keep out visa workers. Instead, our unions must demand that all those working here (including on ships servicing here), no matter what their nationality, get the highest local wages and conditions, must fight to win full citizenship rights for all visa workers and international students and must make persistent efforts to unite local and international workers against job slashing bosses everywhere in the fight for jobs for all. As the threat of job losses at British magnate Richard Branson’s Virgin shows and the fact that the most powerful Australian capitalists – like James Packer, the Murdochs and Anthony Pratt – have major operations abroad highlights, we need unity and solidarity with our worker sisters and brothers around the world today more than ever.
In waging a fight for jobs for all, the working class must unite in common struggle with all downtrodden layers especially hard hit in recent weeks. Standing by those sleeping the streets, couch-surfing or struggling to pay rent, the workers movement must demand a six-month freeze to all residential rent payments, an immediate end to all public housing sell-offs and the requisitioning of all unoccupied properties of people owning more than three homes and their immediate conversion into low-rent public housing or rent-free housing for the homeless. The workers movement must also stand by Australia’s brutally oppressed Aboriginal people who face extreme racist discrimination at the best of times but who are now, with police having greater powers arising from pandemic restrictions, copping even more racist repression. That means we must strongly stand by homeless Aboriginal people being especially bullied by police. And we must join in the recent, powerful call by the families and friends of Aboriginal victims of deaths in custody to release all of our Aboriginal sisters and brothers who are languishing – now more than ever given the dangerous and repressive covid-19 conditions – in Australia’s many brutal prisons and cruel detention centres.
Don’t Let the Capitalist Rulers Blame Others for the Suffering and Job Cuts since the Pandemic Hit
Any fightback that the workers movement tries to wage will be undermined if the ruling class succeeds in shifting the blame for the pandemic and job losses onto others. Hard right media shock jocks and coded messages from the government have despicably sought to blame Chinese people. This has led to an explosion in the already alarming number of racist attacks against people of colour in Australia. People of Chinese appearance, including medical workers, have especially been abused and violently attacked. The working class must stamp out such attacks. Workers of Asian background make up an important component of the Australian workers movement and we need to resolutely fight against racism if we are to preserve our own unity and focus the masses on who our enemy actually is. So, while workers rights activists should respect genuine social distancing regulations, when a racist attack is threatened, we should make an exception and take mass action to defend those targeted and to painfully rebuff the perpetrators.
The main way that the capitalist rulers are trying to shift blame for the deaths and economic pain caused by the pandemic is to make ridiculous smears against the People Republic of China (PRC). The fact is that China gave Australia and the world much warning about the COVID-19 threat. Indeed, Australia did not even have a single confirmed case of COVID-19 when China took the unprecedented step of shutting down a whole city of 11 million people to contain the virus. That the virus still spread so widely here is because the Liberal government, with ALP support, in order to underhandedly promote anti-China fears within the Australian population, maintained for a long period restrictions only on travellers from China (and later from South Korea too) while not taking measures then to screen and test the large number of people returning with the virus from Europe, from cruise ships and from the U.S. Furthermore, the capitalist system, in which those who control production only have things made if they can find a way to extract a profit out of it, meant that Australian manufacturers have only in a very limited way switched over to producing pandemic response items like protective suits, medical masks, infra-red thermometers and testing kits. The resulting scarcity of these items has greatly weakened Australia’ response. In the end, these shortages have only been eased after China came to the rescue in recent days with large shipments. So the attempts by Australia’s capitalist regime to blame the PRC are total rubbish. Indeed, the Liberal government’s China-bashing call for a supposed “independent inquiry” into the earliest phase of the pandemic are much like its 2014-2015 Royal Commission into the Trade Unions, a witch-hunt aimed at smearing their target and justifying attacks against it. If we allow the capitalist ruling class to deceive the population into blaming China for their current hardships then the masses will likely stay away from any attempt to resist the capitalist class’ attacks on workers’ jobs and conditions.
There is another reason why the Australian regime and their big brother allies in Washington are so hysterically attacking China over the pandemic. The PRC’s stunning success in responding to the COVID-19 threat, versus on the other hand the seriously flawed response in Australia and the catastrophically botched one in the U.S., has shown the superiority of the PRC’s socialistic system based on public ownership and working class rule. The capitalist rulers around the world are terrified that their own masses will see this and, thus, conclude that socialism is what is needed in their own countries too. Indeed, that is precisely the conclusion that we must draw! For although working class rule in China is bureaucratically deformed and threatened by the presence of a still significant capitalist class, recent events have proven that such a socialist system, even in a flawed form, is far better able to protect the interests of the masses than the chaotic capitalist system. Thus, because the key sectors of the Chinese economy are dominated by public ownership – including banking, construction, ports, airlines, heavy industry, communication and mining – China was able to switch over its economy to building brand new emergency hospitals and pandemic response items in a flash. Moreover, the fact that the Chinese working class, in as imperfect a way as it is, have control of the PRC economy through their state means that the rise in unemployment in China since the pandemic has been relatively miniscule compared to the massive wave of joblessness that we are seeing in the U.S., Europe and Australia. So, yes, we definitely do need to fight here for a system based on public ownership and working class rule. And when business owners respond to our demands for them to retain more employees than is most profitable for them by saying that “this is not practical” then the workers movement must respond: if you capitalists cannot run the economy in a way that provides jobs for all then the economy should not be in your hands, we working class people will take it off you and put it into our own, strong and able, collective hands.
The Western capitalist rulers are right, from their point of view, to fear that the existence of socialistic rule in the world’s most populous country is an existential threat, if only by example, to capitalist rule in their own countries. That is precisely why it is in the interests of working class people and all the oppressed here to stand by socialistic rule in China. For the existence of Red China strengthens our own struggle against capitalist exploitation. So let us oppose the Australian regime’s participation in the provocative U.S.-led naval forays through distant Chinese waters and let us oppose its fulsome political support to counterrevolutionary forces within China – like the yuppy, rich people’s opposition in Hong Kong.
May 1, U.S.A.: Workers at Amazon, Target and other retail giants stage protests and walkouts over poor pay and the companies’ failure to provide workers with adequate protective gear during the pandemic. Militant class struggle is needed here in Australia to both demand a safe working environment and to fight for jobs for all by forcing companies to retain more workers at the expense of their profits.
The Capitalists Have Waged Class War on Workers for Decades – It’s Time to Wage Class War on Them!
For the last several years, most workers have barely received a pay rise even while rents have been rising significantly, electricity costs are climbing steeply and out of pocket medical costs are increasing. In the meantime, company profits have skyrocketed. As a result, the wealth of Australia’s richest 200 people went from $197 billion in 2016 to $342 billion in 2019 – a staggering 74% increase in just three years! But now that some of them have run into choppy waters they are dumping overboard the very workers who produced their spectacular wealth. And then they tell us that “we are all in the same boat together.” How dare they! Workers who have just been axed by their bosses must feel nauseous when they encounter such rubbish as they queue up for hours before opening time outside Centrelink offices while wealthy business owners drive past in their flashy prestige cars.
So let’s completely reject the lie that we are being sold by the big end of town, with the complicity of the current ALP leaders of the workers movement, that “we are all in this together.” Let’s never lose sight of the fact that while it is the pandemic that necessitates social distancing restrictions it is a choice of business owners to lay off or stand down workers without pay rather than pay their workers out of the profits that they have sweated out of these self same workers over many years. Let’s build mass working class struggle against the bosses to force them to re-hire retrenched or stood down without pay workers as well as all longer-term unemployed workers. And if James Packer complains that he can’t afford this, we should demand that he sell the new super yacht that he bought eleven months ago. That alone would give him enough money to fully pay all his stood-down Crown workers for nearly four months. Let’s win jobs for all through waging class war on the very exploiting class that has been waging a one-sided class war on us for the last three and a half decades!
Photo Above: Medical staff in China’s Wuhan celebrate on March 9 after all COVID-19 patients at the temporary hospital that they worked at were cured and discharged from hospital.
Socialistic China is Overcoming the COVID-19 Virus Threat
30 March 2020: Over the last few days, huge crowds in Wuhan have lined the streets to thanks the nurses and doctors from other parts of the Peoples Republic China (PRC) who heroically volunteered to go to Wuhan and help treat COVID-19 patients. The medics were given honorary police escorts as they went in buses to Wuhan airport to fly back to their home provinces happy in the knowledge that, in part through their brave efforts, the people of Wuhan have, at least for now, overcome the virus threat.
Please see the following short but powerful and emotional video of the people of Wuhan thanking the medics. The nurses and doctors leaving Wuhan break down in tears of joy as they receive thanks from Wuhan residents. The video can be accessed through our Facebook post on the subject here: https://www.facebook.com/TrotskyistPlatform/posts/2807949902592547?__tn__=K-R
The people of Wuhan now feel safe to congregate together in huge numbers, confident that the virus threat has been overcome.
The Peoples Republic of China has reduced the number of community transmission cases to almost zero. This is a stunning achievement for a country with 1439 million people – that is one in five of the world’s people. There is of course still a danger of a second wave. An average of around 30 to 50 people per day infected with COVID-19 have been coming into China as large numbers of Chinese people residing in the U.S. and Europe rush back to the safety of China. However, the numbers of COVID-19 infected people arriving are tiny compared to China’s overall population. Moreover, those infected people have been quickly identified and moved into hospitals for treatment.
Unlike Australia, the U.S. and many other countries, China has not closed its borders to citizens of any country at this time, despite the main risk to China now being from imported cases. Those coming into China are required to quarantine at designated hotels but this rule applies to everyone whether they are Chinese citizens or foreign nationals. Certainly there is nothing in China like the outrageous quarantine at the Christmas Island Detention Centre that the racist Australian regime forced mainly ethnic Chinese Australians – who had left Hubei Province – to have to endure when they returned here in early February. And from accounts of foreign nationals quarantined in China, it seems that they are not subjected to the harsh conditions experienced by those recent arrivals from overseas put into compulsory quarantine in Australia who have complained about intimidating guards, bad food, no fresh towels and no cleaning done (see: https://www.sbs.com.au/…/australians-in-quarantine-at-sydne…).
When the Australian mainstream media have had to grudgingly acknowledge that China has been at this time largely able to stop further spread of the virus, they have spun the myth that this is due to “authoritarian” measures. This is a lie. Indeed the lock downs currently in place in Britain, Spain, Italy, India and many other countries are in many ways stricter than the ones that were in place in China. To be sure, Wuhan had been in a stringent, complete lock down and so were many other parts of Hubei Province. However, Hubei only makes up 4% of China’s population. To be sure, in the rest of China, schools, universities and all non-essential workplaces were also closed as the PRC authorities extended the Chinese New Year holidays that had begun when the outbreak emerged and prioritised saving lives and stopping the spread of the virus over business profits. However, in these parts of China outside Hubei, including in major cities like Beijing and Shanghai, people while discouraged from unnecessary travel and required to wear masks when outside, were still able to move around. By contrast the lock downs in Britain, Spain, Italy, India and many other countries are completely nationwide.
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So why has China, at least for now, been able to achieve a victory over the COVID -19 threat? Simply, it is because of the advantages of her socialistic system based on public ownership of the economy and working class rule – despite the fact that the workers state in China is bureaucratically deformed and undermined by the wavering government having allowed too much of a capitalistic private sector. So socialistic state-owned developers in China were mobilised to build two massive brand new hospitals in Wuhan in less than two weeks. They also converted in rapid time, large numbers of public facilities like gymnasiums and cultural halls into makeshift hospitals. This meant that although Wuhan’s hospitals were at the start overwhelmed, before long all COVID-19 patients in China could actually be treated in hospitals rather than be made to self-quarantine at home, as is the case with most corona virus infected people in Australia and the U.S. deemed to be “non-serious cases.” By ensuring that all people confirmed to have COVID-19 were treated in hospital and that others suspected of being infected were moved into either hospitals or centralised quarantine, the PRC guaranteed not only the proper treatment of infected people but, through ensuring that all infected people could be guaranteed food and essentials without having to go shopping for such goods, they ensured that the quarantine of these people was total and thus that they would not spread the disease to others.
Moreover, China also had a massive mobilisation to test people for COVID-19. This included not only specific testing for the corona virus but very frequent temperature testing of people in their homes, workplaces and at public transport venues in order to identify people who were more likely to have been infected. As a result COVID-19 patients or those considered likely to be infected could be identified early and sent for treatment and quarantine.
Meanwhile, Chinese state-owned manufacturers – even aircraft manufacturers, car factories and oil giants – were quickly turned into factories making masks, ventilators, personal protective gear for medics, thermometers and testing kits. Such a mobilisation on this scale is not possible in capitalist countries because the private manufacturers here are totally driven by profit and will only agree to switch production if they can make a quick buck out of it. Similarly, if private developers in Australia had been asked to build a massive brand new hospital in ten days they would have demanded a massive premium for such an urgent construction and would have wasted days if not weeks haggling for a bloated price before even thinking about starting construction. In contrast, in the PRC, not only does the socialistic public sector put social needs above profit but because the smaller private enterprises are beholden to the large public sector that dominates the markets and supply chains and because private firms have a tenuous existence under a workers state, even some private companies felt compelled to join the mobilisation to provide for the medical relief effort.
A society dominated by a collectivist economy breeds a collectivist, community spirit amongst its people. So in China, during a crisis, people, by and large, have a sense of civic duty and community responsibility. To be sure, given that there is also a sizeable private sector in China that operates alongside the socialistic state sector and which operates largely on the capitalist mode, the dog-eat-dog mentality dominant in capitalist countries has infected Chinese society to some degree and there were some cases of selfish behaviour by individuals during the outbreak. Moreover, in a country with a population 60 times that of Australia’s, one could find a few cases too of over-zealousness by local officials. And the Western media did their best to try and find such isolated cases and deviously portray them as the norm in China. So too did Australian prime minister Scott Morrison when he deceptively claimed, at a recent news conference, that China’s response to COVID-19 was typified by welding doors shut to quarantine people (how many actual cases of that happening in China were there – like five cases in a country with a population of 1439 million!). But for all the cases of self-centred behaviour by a small number of individuals and the cases of bureaucratic heavy-handedness by a few Chinese local government officials, the big picture reality is that China’s current victory over the virus threat is in good part due to the overall community, collectivist spirit of her people – a spirit that has been created by the dominance in the PRC of the socialist economic mode. It was this spirit that led to a massive grassroots mobilisation in China to respond to the COVID-19 threat. Neighbourhood collectives, Communist Party of China local committees and volunteers organised to ensure deliveries of food and other essentials to people in lock down or quarantine as well as for vulnerable people like the elderly and disabled. They also organised frequent temperature testing for people in their own neighbourhoods. Meanwhile, they provided care for the children and even pets of nurses and doctors from other provinces who volunteered to join the emergency medical brigades to Hubei Province.
The capitalist Australian media are doing their best to mask this truth about China’s mobilisation to overcome the virus threat. Other than spreading the tale about “authoritarian methods,” the other way that the media are shrouding the truth about Red China’s stunning mobilisation is by trying to find some capitalist country that they can hold up as a positive model of successful response to the virus threat so that people don’t focus on the elephant in the room when it comes to successful response – Red China. The country that the Western media have designated to be their capitalist positive model is South Korea. Yet South Korea’s rate of COVID-19 infection among its people at 188 cases per million people is more than three times China’s and is actually in fact slightly higher than Australia’s rapidly climbing infection rate is at this point. And South Korea’s number of deaths per million people is already 35% higher than China’s and is climbing at a much higher rate than China’s death rate is climbing. This is despite China having had the added difficulty of being the country where the virus first spread in a big way (at least in terms of known spread) and thus had to not only take time to recognise and identify the threat but had to develop treatment methods from scratch. The fact is that the model of successful response to COVID-19 is socialistic China and not capitalist South Korea.
Tragically, at this time 3304 people have died from COVID-19 in China as part of the more than 35,000 people who have been killed by the disease worldwide. Our solidarity and heartfelt condolences go out to the friends, loved ones and families of all the victims of the virus in Australia, China and the entire world. But to put things in perspective, the number of deaths per million people in China from COVID-19 is not only significantly lower than in South Korea but it is already (as of 30 March) three times lower than in Germany, three and a half times lower than in the U.S., six and a half times lower than in Sweden, nine times lower than in Britain, 17 times lower than in France and nearly 85 times lower than in Italy. (see the second last column in this real time table for example: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries ). This is despite the virus having basically been contained, at least for now, in China while it is spreading at an frighteningly increasing rate in these capitalist countries.
The PRC has now moved in a big way to provide aid to other countries affected or potentially affected by the virus. In Iran, the worst hit country outside Europe and the U.S., China actually first sent in medical experts to help with the virus response on February 29, when she was still in the heaviest days of her own battle with COVID-19. In Iraq, a PRC medical team helped establish a new COVID-19 testing facility that has quadrupled the daily testing capacity of that war-torn country. Meanwhile, the PRC has sent several sets of medical experts as well as large amounts of ventilators, medical masks, testing kits, medicines and protective equipment for nurses and doctors to the country with currently the world’s highest death toll, Italy. China has also flown in medical experts and/or donated badly needed medical supplies to Cuba, Laos, Ethiopia, South Africa, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Algeria, the Philippines, Egypt, Chile, Cambodia, Serbia, Spain, France, South Korea, Japan and dozens of other countries.
That so much can be achieved by a socialistic country so squeezed by the relentless pressure of richer imperialist powers – and one which is undermined by the intrusion of capitalistic enterprises and weakened by the lack of genuine workers democracy – shows what we could achieve in a fully socialist world. At this time of public health emergency and with millions of working class people in Australia and the rest of the capitalist world being thrown out of their livelihoods every day we need to fight all the more energetically for a society based on public ownership and working class state power.
Above photo: The Christmas Island detention centre where Chinese-Australians who had recently been in Wuhan are being held.
MIXED MESSAGES & RACIST TRAVEL BANS FROM THE CAPITALIST AUSTRALIAN REGIME
WHILE RED CHINA RESPONDS TO THE COVID-19 THREAT WITH SOCIALIST PLANNING AND BY BUILDING TWO LARGE NEW HOSPITALS IN TWO WEEKS
Resist the New Strain of Anti-Chinese Racism Sweeping Through Australia
5 February 2020 – People of Chinese ethnicity in Australia are once again under attack. The latest bout of anti-Asian racism is being masked as fear of the novel coronavirus. People of East Asian appearance have been abused on public transport, at shopping centres, in schools and even at hospital waiting rooms. In a typical incident in Sydney, a white person yelled at an Asian background mother travelling on a train with her baby in a pram. The despicable racist demanded that the Asian-Australian woman go to a corner of the train because she was “spreading viruses.” Meanwhile, last Friday in Port Hedland, a Woolworths staff member threateningly ordered customers of Asian appearance out of the store over supposed virus fears.
Anti-Chinese racism is hardly new in Australia. From the time of Captain Cook’s landing 250 years ago, the colonial regime’s murderous dispossessing of Aboriginal people has infected the culture of Australian society with virulent racism. Daily nourished by the capitalist ruling class’ ever present need to divert the anger of the masses whom they exploit away from they the exploiters and onto racial minorities, the virus of white supremacy has been able to mutate into many different strains. That is why the number one migrant-based target of racist attacks will swap from Chinese migrants, to the Vietnamese community, to South Asian students, to Muslims, to African (and especially Sudanese) youth and back again to people of Chinese background. Overall, the Chinese community have probably been second only to Australia’s brutally oppressed Aboriginal people in being hit with White Australia racism. Many of the diseased racists attacking the community today are hardly genuinely concerned about the coronavirus. Indeed, some of the people they are targeting are not even of Chinese origin – let alone recent arrivals from China. But the rednecks hardly care. For them anyone of East Asian appearance and indeed any person of colour is “fair” game.
The spread of anti-Asian bigotry is being encouraged by Australia’s capitalist elite. The newspapers in Australia owned by billionaire magnates Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan have sought to spread prejudice against the Chinese community. Sydney’s The Daily Telegraph had a huge front page headline, deliberately written in bold text made to read as a command, that shouted, “China Kids Stay Home.” However, what has most spawned xenophobic fears are the actions of the right-wing Morrison government. On Saturday, they announced an outright, temporary travel ban on Chinese nationals and other non-citizens who have arrived from China. As a result over a 100,000 international students from China are not able to return for the start of classes. Many are furious at the Australian regime. And because the government’s ban was implemented without any notice, a large number of people were left stranded when they arrived in Australia only to find that a ban on them had been decreed while they were mid-flight. In Sydney airport alone, some 80 Chinese people were detained, many of whom were interrogated for hours while being denied access to food. Many of these people were either then placed into detention or were immediately deported back to China regardless of their health. The Chinese embassy has rightly condemned this outrage and called for compensation for the victims of this draconian policy.
The Australian regime’s travel ban goes directly against the recommendations from the World Health Organization (WHO) warning against such actions. Yesterday, the WHO head emphatically stated that:
“We reiterate our call to all countries not to impose restrictions inconsistent with the International Health Regulations.
“Such restrictions can have the effect of increasing fear and stigma, with little public health benefit.”
Very few other countries have applied the same blanket ban on arrivals of non-citizens from China as Australia has done. Those countries that have are Trump’s United States, Rodrigo Duterte’s Philippines, Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel and Narendra Modi’s India – all countries administered by vicious, right-wing regimes – as well as the Ardern government in New Zealand, which is a coalition between the social-democratic Labour Party, the Greens and the xenophobic NZ First Party. Russia and Singapore have also imposed harsh restrictions on the entry of Chinese nationals but have not gone as far as the likes of Australia and the U.S.
Where the Australian regime is completely unique is with its quarantining of those Australian citizens evacuated from the virus epicentre of Wuhan in an immigrant detention centre 2,600 kilometres from the mainland in Christmas Island. Even the proudly racist Trump regime has not gone that far! Already many newly arrived evacuees have expressed their outrage at the conditions that they face in the detention centre which is unclean and has poor food. One evacuee, Belinda Chen, who is at the centre with two of her children, told ABC News that “the hygiene issues make it worse than a prison” and that her children were “too scared to touch their beds.” Even the mayor of Christmas Island denounced the government’s policy as “regressive colonial era ideas” that “would create a convict colony.”
The only reason that the government has implemented such outrageously heartless measures is because most of the evacuees are of Chinese ethnicity. You can bet that if the evacuees had been wealthy white businessmen they would not have been dumped in a remote detention centre. And as an Asian-Australian activist, Erin Chew, aptly said of the travel ban:
“When previous viruses happened such as mad cow disease or the swine flu, Australia didn’t ban non-citizens from Britain and the US. Nor was the blame placed on the people in [those countries].”
The Morrison government knows that its policies are doing much to nurture hostility to the Chinese community. The aim of the Liberal-National government is to send a message that it is OK to exclude Chinese and other non-white people. They want to legitimise White Australia xenophobia. Yet the Coalition is hardly alone in doing this. After initially being critical of the Christmas Island detention plan, ALP leader Anthony Albanese has now fallen right in behind the government’s travel ban policies saying yesterday that: “Australia has got to make decisions in our own national interest.” Indeed, it was actually Queensland Labor premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, who egged on the Morrison government to place the travel ban on people coming from China in the first place. Just hours before the Morrison government announced the ban, Palaszczuk called to stop all incoming flights from China and apply in Australia the same ban implemented by the Trump government. We say: Lift the Morrison/Palaszczuk/Albanese ban on arrivals from China! Support Beijing’s demand for the Australian regime to compensate arrivals from China deported due to the travel ban! Bring everyone from the Christmas Island immigration detention centre to the mainland! Let them stay in their own homes! Free too all the refugees and other immigrants detained in Christmas Island, Nauru, Manus Island, Villawood and other Australian migrant detention centres!
IRRATIONAL FEAR-MONGERING, INADEQUATE PUBLIC HEALTH MOBILISATION, RACIST FAKE NEWS AND SOME MORE RATIONAL SPECULATION
The Australian government’s xenophobic policies under the guise of containing the new virus outbreak have no scientific basis. In creating an irrational panic about the coronavirus, Australian mainstream politicians and media are spreading a thinly veiled racist message: that people ought to be scared about the “evils” coming from China. At the same time, the Australian regime has failed to mobilise the health and production resources needed to provide sufficient testing of people with symptoms, adequate numbers of testing kits and enough protective masks for health workers. Moreover, they have been incapable of ensuring the creation of adequate public hospital beds and spare capacity in the health system to deal with a potential rapid virus spread in this country. For the coronavirus is indeed infectious and deadly. To date 492 people have died from it worldwide.
Thanks to the swift action of the Peoples Republic of China’s (PRC) authorities and their transparency in sharing information, the spread of coronavirus outside China is at the moment – at the start of February – limited. To be sure, if the virus were to spread widely into countries with less capable health and social systems than China, the effects could be devastating. And even though Australia is a wealthier country, you can’t rule out the possibility, given that everything in capitalist societies run for the sake of profits for the big end of town, combined with the Australian regime’s tendency to swap xenophobia for sound scientific practice, that the ruling class here and similar capitalist ruling classes abroad will botch their response to the new virus.
Encouraged by the xenophobia and anti-China bias of Australia’s mainstream media, conscious white supremacists here are spreading fake news stories in order to create hostility to the Chinese community. One social media post, that went viral, masquerading as if it was from Queensland Health, warned people to avoid suburbs in Brisbane with a certain proportion of Chinese background residents in order to avoid contracting the virus.
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Meanwhile, within Chinese communities, there is widespread speculation that the new virus was spread by the U.S. regime as a New Cold War attack on Red China and to help Trump get the advantage in his trade protectionist campaign against the PRC. Unlike the racist fake news stories, this speculation is more plausible. This is because U.S. intelligence agencies have actually used such biological warfare methods in the past – namely, against socialistic Cuba. To damage the Cuban economy, the CIA once spread swine fever in Cuba causing Cuba to have to slaughter 500,000 pigs. Most seriously, in 1981, the CIA spread dengue fever in the island causing the death of 158 Cubans. What has heightened speculation about the virus outbreak were findings by Chinese scientists reported by China’s official state media seven days ago. The scientists found that contrary to interim findings that the virus had spread entirely from Wuhan’s Seafood Wholesale Market, the virus appeared to have spread from multiple locations (see: http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-01/29/c_138741063.htm). In the rare case that a virus jumps from an animal to a human, it is likely that this will occur at one location and then the virus will spread from one human carrier to the next. Should multiple animal to human transmissions occur, the probability that they will take place almost simultaneously at multiple locations is tiny. So if initial transmissions to humans did, in fact, occur almost simultaneously at multiple locations, this opens up the possibility that the virus was deliberately spread. One of the telling things about the 1981 dengue fever “outbreak” in Cuba is that it started simultaneously in three different parts of the country. Nevertheless, to date, there is no direct evidence that the coronavirus was started by U.S. intelligence agencies. What there is evidence of is that while the coronavirus was first discovered in Wuhan, the human form of the virus may not have initially started in Wuhan or even in China but rather was accidentally brought there from abroad by carriers with mild symptoms and then spread rapidly once it got into the Wuhan’s Seafood Wholesale Market. Experts in Japan have suggested that a few of the 14,000 people who died of influenzalike symptoms during the last U.S. flu season may have actually died of the coronavirus rather than influenza but the U.S. health system at the time had not picked up that they were victims of a new virus.
ANTI-CHINESE BIGOTRY WAS ALREADY RAMPANT BEFORE THE NEW CORONAVIRUS EMERGED
The new strain of anti-Chinese racism spreading through Australia in recent weeks is hitting a Chinese community already under attack. From racist assaults against Chinese high-school and university students in Canberra bus stops and class rooms to violent attacks on Asian-background residents in busy Sydney suburban streets in Randwick and Burwood, the last three years have seen a wave of violence and abuse directed at people of Chinese heritage. There are three factors spawning this outbreak. First is the racist scapegoating that the capitalist rulers engage in against all people of colour in order to blame others for the social decay, lack of secure jobs for young people and lack of affordable rental accommodation caused by their system. Second is the growing economic nationalism in Australia. Those who claim to stand for workers interests (like the ALP and Greens) but who have no program for militant struggle against the real cause of unemployment, casualisation and low wages – that is, the capitalist bosses and their greed – seek to improve conditions for the masses by setting them up to support protectionist schemes against foreign guest workers and imported goods. Such economic nationalist schemes do not protect the interests of local workers. Overseas producers simply respond with their own counter-measures and all that ends up happening is that workers of different countries are set against each other leaving the Aussie bosses as well as the overseas cohort of capitalists laughing all the way to the bank. Regardless of the intentions of those who promote it, such economic nationalist schemes inevitably rebound against local migrant communities who become targeted as a fifth column of the overseas producers supposedly “stealing Aussie jobs.” Given that China is by far Australia’s largest trading partner it is inevitable that the xenophobia spawned by protectionist agendas especially targets people of Chinese background.
The biggest factor that has germinated anti-Chinese racism in recent years is the Australian ruling class’ anti-communist campaign against socialistic China. Australian politicians and mainstream media are making increasingly hyped-up claims against China. They accuse the PRC of everything from cyber-hacking, to “threatening Australia’s sovereignty,” to supposed bullying behaviour in the South China Sea. The most ridiculous claim is the one that “China is imprisoning over one million Muslim Uighurs.” This assertion has about as much credibility as the fake news stories doing the rounds saying that eating certain Asian food like fortune cookies could spread the coronavirus! The outright lie about the detention of Uighurs is spread by some of the most openly Islamophobic regimes in the world, including the Trump regime, the Morrison regime and fascist-infested governments in Switzerland and Austria. However, the lie is so grotesque that it has been completely refuted by most Muslim majority countries, not only those friendly to China like Palestine, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Algeria, Djibouti, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Iran, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan but even by many Muslim-majority governments thoroughly subservient to Washington like those in Bahrain, Egypt, Kuwait, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Yemen. The effect of all this anti-communist, anti-China propaganda is that backward parts of the Australian population come to see Chinese people as savage and as a “threat” to Australia’s people. This became heightened further last year during the anti-communist protests by pro-colonial, rich kids in China’s Hong Kong. While Australia’s establishment hailed students who held rallies in Australia supporting the anti-PRC rioters in Hong Kong as “expressing their right to free speech”, international students from China who expressed their right to free speech by bravely rallying in defence of Red China were pilloried for “interfering in Australia’s internal affairs.” Most sinisterly, early last spring, the Australian government announced the creation of a new Federal Government taskforce to look into “foreign interference” on Australian campuses – a move clearly aimed at intimidating pro-PRC Chinese students studying in Australia.
The anti-communist section of the Chinese community has also played an active part in the campaign against the PRC and her local Chinese and international student supporters. Even though anti-Chinese prejudice could rebound against them, they have nourished a movement that combines anti-communism with white supremacist racism. Thus, Hong Kong anti-PRC students distributed at a rally that they held in Sydney’s Martin Place last year a leaflet calling to keep out of Australia migrants from the PRC. Meanwhile, members of the far-right Chinese group Falun Dafa – that masquerades as a religious group but which has an agenda of racial segregation, the shunning of mixed race people as “subhuman,” extreme homophobia and hostility to women’s rights movements – has held joint meetings with violent Australian white supremacist forces.
CHINA’S RESPONSE TO THE VIRUS EMERGENCY SHOWS THE GREAT ADVANTAGES OF THE SOCIALIST SYSTEM
China’s response to the new virus outbreak is a stunning refutation to all the propaganda spread against her. She has responded with humanity, speed and coordination. Fortunately, China has not gone down Morrison’s road of holding anyone who has been in Hubei in remote detention centres. Instead, people have been asked to self-quarantine at home and wear masks when outside. Those ill are moved into hospital and many people who are thought more likely to have been infected have been moved into hotels or newly furbished accommodation in public buildings. What has enabled China to respond so effectively is that, despite her wavering leadership having allowed too much capitalism into the economy, the PRC remains a socialistic society in which public ownership plays the dominant role. And it is the PRC’s socialistic state-owned enterprises that have been at the forefront of her response to the virus epidemic. State-owned energy companies are providing free electricity and gas supplies to makeshift new hospitals and state-owned pharmaceutical manufacturers are leading the drive to provide badly needed medical supplies. One state-owned developer even built a 1000-bed hospital in just 10 days in the virus epicentre of Wuhan. Try doing that in a capitalist country! A capitalist developer would demand a massive premium for mobilising that amount of labour and raw materials in such a short time. Here, reconstruction for most of those who lost homes in the bushfires has not even started, even for those who lost homes early in the fire season.
In capitalist countries, the system runs for the profit of the business owners. During the bushfires, many business owners and supermarkets here got away with cruelly jacking up their prices to take advantage of desperate bushfire victims. But in China, when some tried that – including outlets of French supermarket chain Carrefour – they were promptly stomped on by PRC state authorities. Meanwhile, even private business owners in China have been ordered to step up production of masks and medical kits to aid the medical emergency. This reflects the fact that the PRC – for all its bureaucratic deformations and its leaders’ concessions to world capitalism – is a workers state that was created by the 1949 revolution. One way that the PRC state has moved to limit the spread of the virus is by extending the Lunar New Year holiday. While we only get one day off for New Year, in China they already get one day off for January 1 plus five week days off for Lunar New Year (people in the PRC get a minimum of 18 workdays off for public holidays each year as opposed to 9 for most people here). Now the Lunar New Year is being extended across China by a few days and in some regions by much longer. If a government tried to do that here, the capitalists, whom the governments ultimately answer to, would have the measure stopped as they are not about to let their filthy profits plummet by giving workers longer holidays. Meanwhile, back in China, the empowerment that the masses feel in a workers state has led to a huge grassroots mobilisation to respond to the crisis. Teams of volunteers are being established to provide food for potentially infected people self-quarantining. Neighbourhood committees are organising people to go around with loudspeakers spreading scientific information about the virus. Celebrities and entertainers are providing free live streaming entertainment and exercise programs to liven up the moods of those stuck at home due to self-quarantining.
OPPOSING ANTI-CHINESE RACISM MEANS OPPOSING THE COLD WAR DRIVE AGAINST THE PRC
Everyone who is not blinded by either white supremacy, “First World” arrogance or anti-communist hostility can see that the PRC is doing an excellent job responding to a serious virus outbreak in a developing country with a population density fifty times greater than Australia’s. Following an inspection trip to China, WHO Director General, Dr Tedros Ghebreyesus hailed China’s mobilisation:
“China identified the pathogen in record time and shared it immediately, which led to the rapid development of diagnostic tools. They are completely committed to transparency, both internally and externally….
“The fact that to date we have only seen 68 cases outside China, and no deaths, is due in no small part to the extraordinary steps the government has taken to prevent the export of cases. For that, China deserves our gratitude and respect. They’re doing that at the expense of their economy and other factors.”
Yet the capitalist-owned Western media are desperately thrashing around trying to find some angle that they can attack the PRC over. So are those sections of the Australian Left – unfortunately the majority right now – who are lined up behind the capitalist class’ Cold War drive against the PRC state. Thus, the Socialist Alternative (SAlt) group, in an article published two days ago, claimed that: “When it comes to the political system, there’s no denying that local authorities in Hubei province tried to hush up the outbreak in December. Chinese people suffer from their corrupt political leaders.” Although SAlt do also criticise the U.S. and Australian rulers as well, their attacks on the PRC are even more extreme than the mainstream media which grudgingly has had to acknowledge positive aspects of the PRC’s response to the coronavirus.
At the same time as echoing the anti-China propaganda of the Australian ruling class, SAlt are emphatic in stating opposition to anti-Chinese racism. They are part of a left social democratic and left-liberal milieu who think that it is possible to both join the Cold War crusade against Red China and stand against anti-Chinese racism. Others in this trend include other left groups like Solidarity and Socialist Alliance. The main element, however, and the one who the social democratic “far left” groups pander to is the Greens. The problem is that it is not possible to walk on both sides of the streets in this way! Ever since China’s 1949 anticapitalist revolution created near hysteria amongst the Western capitalist establishment, anti-communist hostility to the PRC has gone hand in hand with anti-Chinese xenophobia. For example, the anti-PRC, “pro-democracy” movement in Hong Kong that these groups all rabidly support, are characterised by a nativist hostility to Chinese people from mainland China. It is hard to fathom but the yuppy rioters in Hong Kong, seeped as they are in the values of the British Empire, believe that, even though they are themselves ethnic Chinese, they are superior to Mainland Chinese because they are closer to being British! No wonder Western, extreme white supremacists have been flocking to join the anti-PRC protests in Hong Kong as have more mainstream hard right forces, like Liberal MP, Tim Wilson. Wilson, who visited Hong Kong to march with the anti-PRC forces, is notorious for having been a director of the extremely conservative, Institute of Public Affairs, as well as for speaking out for the “rights” of vile racist media commentator Andrew Bolt. Today, the pro-colonial opposition in Hong Kong is demanding the complete closure of Hong Kong’s border with mainland China to keep out mainland Chinese. The likes of the Greens, SAlt and Solidarity are in a united front with people in Hong Kong – and their Hong Kong student supporters in Australia – who have as a central plank of their platform a xenophobic measure to keep out people from mainland China that is even more severe than the ones that the Australian government has implemented. Meanwhile, progressive NSW Greens senator David Shoebridge has made common cause with the most hard-right politicians in Australia in his xenophobic opposition to the China-connected Chinese language institute, the Confucius Institutes program.
Stepping back a little, the basic reason why it is not possible, regardless of ones intentions, to consistently oppose anti-Chinese racism if one is supporting the Cold War drive against Red China is that both anti-Chinese racism and hostility to the PRC are policies undertaken by the capitalist rulers because it serves their interests. Racism serves the exploiting class because it divides and diverts the masses that they exploit. Propaganda against the PRC serves Australia’s capitalist rulers because it serves to “justify” their hostile actions against Red China. These actions include a military build up targeted at China, the deployment of Australian naval vessels and aircraft thousands of kilometres away from home in waters off China and Korea and the supporting of anti-PRC Chinese exile organisations. Those actions the Australian capitalists see as necessary because they know that supporting the U.S.-led drive to undermine socialistic rule in China is in their very own interests. Although the Australian capitalists make a fortune from exporting to China, they calculate that they could make even more if socialistic rule was destroyed there so that China could be turned into a giant sweatshop and market for unrestricted capitalist exploitation. Quite bizarrely, while the Australian ruling class opposes the PRC precisely because it remains a socialistic state, groups like SAlt and Solidarity oppose the PRC because they claim that it is actually “capitalist.”
But facts speak loudly. And the fact is that China has responded to the novel coronavirus threat with compassion and with a determined mobilisation that is only possible when the decisive sectors of the economy are in the hands of the people. In contrast, the response of the Australian capitalist regime has been shaped by xenophobia and cruelty. That gives us just one more reason why we need to eradicate capitalist rule in this country: along with the need to stop union-busting attacks on workers rights, to stop the degrading treatment of unemployed workers and to bring secure, permanent jobs for all, alongside the need to end homelessness and achieve a massive increase in public housing, the need to bring true equality for women, the need to stop racist state terror against Aboriginal people and the need to stop the Australian military’s role in imperialist wars abroad and to stop the Australian capitalists raping the people of the South Pacific.
However, capitalism does not fall by people simply saying a lot of times how bad it is. It comes through the masses being trained in struggle against all the particular atrocities of capitalism and against all the contagious ideologies that the capitalist rulers seek to infect the minds of the exploited masses with. That is why we in Trotskyist Platform are proud that we not only stand against anti-Chinese racism but stand against all the different components fuelling it. Today, we fully solidarise with the stand taken by those in the Chinese community who are bravely starting to respond to the epidemic of racism that has accompanied the coronavirus outbreak. We fight for actions to demand: Immediately lift the ban on arrivals from China! Bring everyone from the Christmas Island detention centre to the mainland. Let them stay in their own homes! We also say: Down with protectionism! Down with xenophobic campaigns against Chinese imported goods and investment! Say no to campaigns to keep out guest workers – fight for full rights of citizenship, local pay rates and full union coverage for all guest workers! Very crucially right now we also fight to mobilise struggles to demand: Down with the repressive attempts to silence the political voice of pro-PRC Chinese international students! Down with the Cold War witch-hunt against the Confucius Institutes, Huawei, Chinese international students and Chinese community social groups with links to the PRC! Defend socialistic China against the U.S./Australian capitalist rulers!
We have confidence in the future success of this program, even though xenophobia and Cold War anti-communism is running rampant right now. This is for one simple reason. While this program is against the interests of Australia’s capitalist ruling class it is very good for the vast majority of this country’s people. Working class people and all the oppressed need to fight against racism and xenophobia if they are going to be able to unite into a force capable of challenging their oppressors. Defending socialistic China is in the interests of the masses because having the world’s most populous country remain under at least some sort of socialistic rule enhances the struggle for liberation of the working class and oppressed the world over. Indeed, that is partly why the Australian ruling class has been so nervous about the presence of a large number of international students from China. On the one hand they need these students as a cash cow. On the other hand they are fearful that these students might start telling their Australian class mates and friends that all that they hear from the mainstream media about China is false; and having lived in both socialistic China and one of the more developed of the capitalist countries, Australia, that they still love the PRC and still support socialism. The Australian rulers are fearful that if these pro-PRC students become involved in political activity here, what the Australian regime sees as the virus of support for socialism could spread from China and infect people in Australia too. We say let it spread rampantly! Let as many people know the benefits of socialistic rule – even when it exists in as imperfect and unfinished a form as it currently does in China! The “right to free speech” must include the right to support socialistic countries like the Peoples Republic of China! Down with anti-Chinese racism! Long live socialistic rule in China!
MEDIA COVERAGE OF THE SYDNEY STABBING ATTACK AND THE NEW COLD WAR AGAINST RED CHINA
22 August 2019 – A day cannot go by without the Australian ruling class ratcheting up its Cold War against socialistic China. Today, the right-wing NSW government expelled the China-connected Chinese language institute, the Confucius Institutes program, from teaching at NSW schools. The decision was welcomed by ruling class politicians of all stripes. Rabid anti-China Greens MP, David Shoebridge, hailed the decision saying: “I am glad to see the department is cancelling this arrangement, it is unfortunate they can’t cancel it immediately.”
But perhaps the biggest indication of how rabid the Cold War witch-hunt of supporters of Red China is becoming can be seen in the media coverage of a seemingly unrelated event: last week’s stabbing rampage in the centre of Sydney. We know that a 24 year-old woman was stabbed to death by the attacker and a 41 year-old woman was injured after being stabbed in the back. The name of the young woman who was killed is Michaela Dunn. A former student at the University of Notre Dame, Michaela loved to travel the world. We express our deepest sympathies to her friends and family. Her mother described her as a “beautiful, loving woman.” She was much loved by her friends too who described her as “incredible”, a “true delight” and a “bright young woman.” Outrageously, much of the media only focused on Michaela’s occupation as a sex worker rather than as a whole person – thus adding to the widespread stigmatisation and dehumanising of women who work as sex workers.
But what of the woman who was stabbed but not killed? Media footage showed the woman as she was about to be taken away in an ambulance. It was apparent that she was a woman of East Asian background. However, the media revealed almost nothing about her. Later they said that her name was Linda Bo. What the mainstream Australian media hid from the public is that Linda Bo is a Chinese national – that is, a person not only of Chinese ethnicity but a citizen of the PRC (Peoples Republic of China).
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This was definitely not just an oversight by the media. In dealing with other crimes they invariably report if either the suspects or the victims are nationals of another country. Moreover, Chinese state media within hours published that the Consulate General of China in Sydney confirmed that the woman who was injured in the attack was a Chinese national (see for example: http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2019-08/13/c_138306442.htm). And we know that the Australian mainstream media assiduously follow official Chinese media if only to disparage it.
So why did Australia’s capitalist media hide from the public that one of the stabbing victims was a Chinese national? Because to do so would have humanised people from the PRC! As part of whipping up hostility against socialistic China, the Australian government and big business media portray citizens of the PRC as brainwashed, interfering, undemocratic stooges of the Communist Party of China. To then report that a PRC citizen has been the victim of a prominent crime undermines that narrative as crime reporting so often emphasizes the common human interest aspect in stories about victims of crime (unless they happen to be sex workers!) and to portray a citizen of the PRC as a human being with family, friends, feelings and dreams just like everyone else doesn’t fit the picture of China that the mainstream media is now so focussed on drawing. The only PRC citizens who are treated like humans by the media are anti-communist activists who are, of course, lionised by the capitalist media as “brave fighters for democracy.”
It is not that there was any conspiracy involved here. The media did not all get together to secretly decide that they would not report that one of the stabbing victims was a PRC citizen. In fact, it was something even worse. All these mainstream media outlets, acting in the class interests of their capitalist owners, each independently decided to hide this fact from the Australian public. That’s how full on the Cold War campaign is against Red China and against anyone who supports – or does not oppose – it. In the face of this massive media propaganda campaign and the wide array of forces lined up behind the Cold War anti-PRC drive, those truly committed to the struggle for socialism must not flinch one bit. We must stand firm and not only take the correct position on paper in defence of the Chinese workers state (as weakened and deformed as it is by a degree of capitalist intrusion) but we need to actively fight for this line on the streets.
7 October 2019, Sydney: The “Stand With Red China” demonstration held on the NSW Labour Day public holiday hailed the 70th Anniversary of the 1949 Chinese Revolution and condemned the pro-colonial, anti-communist protests in Hong Kong.
Migrant Workers and Other Leftists March in Sydney for Socialistic China
7 October 2019: Left-wing supporters of socialistic China marched through the centre of Sydney today to “Stand With Red China.” The demonstration held on the Labour Day holiday hailed the 70th anniversary of the founding of the socialistic Peoples Republic of China (PRC). Noting that, “A Strong Socialistic China is Good for Working Class People in Australia and the World” the call-out for the action urged to “Condemn Hong Kong’s Pro-Colonial Rich Kid Rioters.”
Today’s rally pushed back in the face of an intense Cold War anti-communist, China-bashing drive by the Australian ruling class and their media. Australia’s entire ruling class media – from that owned by the right-wing Murdoch family tycoons to that owned by billionaire Channel 7 owner, Kerry Stokes, to the ABC and SBS – owned and controlled as they are by the Australian rich people’s regime – have been running daily news articles attacking Red China whether it be via insinuations about computer hacking, lying claims of human rights abuses or even blaming the Belt and Road Initiative promoted by China for declining tiger populations! Australia’s big business and government-owned media have, of course, also strongly backed the anti-communist, anti-PRC riots in Hong Kong. So has right wing prime minister Scott Morrison along with the rest of his government, with the ALP and the Greens taking the same stance. Today, Australia’s foreign affairs minister, Marise Payne, again spoke out fervently on the side of the right wing opposition in Hong Kong, saying that she is “very concerned” by the methods used by the Hong Kong authorities to protect the city from the most violent anti-PRC forces and demanding that the Hong Kong government approved by Beijing “address the genuine concerns” of the rioters. Yesterday, hard right Liberal MP, Tim Wilson, even marched with the anti-PRC forces in Hong Kong itself. Previously a director of the extreme conservative, Institute of Public Affairs, which later spoke out for the “rights” of vile racist media commentator, Andrew Bolt, Wilson had during the Occupy Melbourne protests called for water cannon to be used against protesters:
“Walked past Occupy Melbourne protest, all people who think freedom of speech = freedom 2 b heard, time wasters … send in the water cannons.”
But of course, pro-colonial, anti-communist protests are the type of “freedom of speech” that people like Tim Wilson and the Australian government really love!
Members of the Hong Kong, anti-China opposition carry American flags and call for Donald Trump’s re-election at a protest rally in Hong Kong. The anti-PRC opposition are a right-wing, procolonial, movement.
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Yet in the face of this anti-Red China tide, around 60 people participated in today’s pro-PRC march and others joined in on the spot at the final rallying point. The majority of demonstrators were mobilised to the action by the Australian Chinese Workers Association and by Trotskyist Platform. However, there were many leftists participating today from a range of backgrounds, including several people who are not part of any particular left-wing group.
The “Stand With Red China” demonstration in Sydney held today on the Labour Day public holiday.
The Australian Chinese Workers Association contingent – mostly working class women – carried the red, five star flag of the PRC and had placards in Chinese reading: “Australian Chinese Workers Association Congratulates the Peoples Republic of China on the Celebrations of the 70th Anniversary of its Founding.” Trotskyist Platform supporters carried many placards including ones that stated: “Defend Socialistic China Against Intimidation by Capitalist Powers. Down with the Capitalist Australian State’s Military Build Up That Targets Red China! U.S., Australian Militaries: Stay Out of the South China Sea!” and “Defend Socialistic China Against Imperialism! Resist Meddling in Hong Kong By Colonial Powers!” Our banner, which headed the march, read: “WORKING CLASS PEOPLE IN AUSTRALIA & THE WORLD: STAND WITH SOCIALISTIC CHINA!”, while calling to, “DEFEAT HONG KONG’S PRO-COLONIAL, ANTI-COMMUNIST MOVEMENT!”
At a couple of points during the demonstration, a few anti-communists, riding in an expensive looking black van decked in “Hong Kong independence” slogans, made a pre-planned attempt to use a sound system to suppress the voice of the pro-Red China demonstrators. However, prompt action by alert, pro-PRC socialist activists forced them to retreat.
Throughout the march, demonstrators
enthusiastically chanted, “P-R-C, Is Fighting Poverty!” (see: https://youtu.be/7RxhU2ZhPDQ), “Public
Housing for You and Me, Just Like in the PRC” and “One RED China” (see: https://youtu.be/erNt9jIjZd8). We also
chanted and sung, “One, Two, Three, Four, Socialism is What We’re For; Five,
Six, Seven, Eight, Defend the Chinese Workers State.”
Pro-PRC activists listen intently as Trotskyist Platform chairwoman Sarah Fitzenmeyer delivers her speech at today’s action commemorating the 70th anniversary of the founding of socialistic China.
One of the main speakers at the event
was Trotskyist Platform chairwoman, Sarah Fitzenmeyer. Here are some of the
points that she made in her speech:
“Seventy years ago a massive revolution by the toiling masses of China won them a momentous victory. The 1949 Revolution created a workers state, the Peoples Republic of China, a workers state that has achieved a miracle in the alleviation of poverty, a feat unmatched in size and speed in all of known human history….
Yet this inspirational socialistic rule in China is under grave threat. Ever since the 1949 Revolution, some of the overthrown landlords and capitalists and all the imperialist powers have worked together to try and destroy this workers state. Under this pressure, in the late 1970s, the Chinese government began market reforms that allowed a degree of capitalist intrusion. Although this was in some cases beneficial, the reforms have led to an increase in inequality. Dangerously, there are now capitalists in China who demand more and more rights to exploit. However, the Chinese working class masses are resisting them.
The masses worked so hard to achieve liberation in 1949 and to build a socialistic society and they certainly are not about to give any of this up now. Through the peoples’ efforts, China remains a socialistic state where public ownership continues to be the backbone of her economy. Today all of China’s major banks, her major infrastructure developers, her oil and gas sectors, the bulk of her steel and cement industry, her aircraft, ship and train manufacturers, her ports, shipping lines and airlines, most of her mines and even key consumer manufacturing sectors are publicly owned.
But the capitalist powers’ Cold War against socialistic China is getting more intense every day. The U.S. and Australian militaries are sending warships thousands of kilometres from their shores to the South China Sea in a desperate attempt to provoke China. Then there is Trump’s trade war. And let’s not forget the propaganda war. Every day brings a new hyped up anti-China story in Australia’s mainstream media. This is not simply a case of Australia’s rulers following their U.S. counterparts as the capitalist ruling classes in both countries share precisely the same goal of undermining, in every way they can, socialistic rule. Let’s not forget that the Australian regime banned Huawei even before the U.S. did. Recently, a high-level Chinese embassy delegation correctly identified Australia’s rulers as pioneers of the global anti-China campaign.
It was through combined military, economic and political pressure that the imperialist powers destroyed the former Soviet workers states. Let us make sure they are never able to do this to the inspirational workers state of socialistic China. If capitalist restoration were to take place in China it would reverse most of the huge strides made in poverty alleviation. Over the last 15 years, China has had by far the world’s fastest growing wages. They have been rising by on average some 10 to 15% per year. But if capitalist counterrevolution were to occur, China would be turned into one giant sweatshop for the mass exploitation of workers. That would allow greedy bosses to then drive down the conditions of workers here too. In contrast, if socialistic rule in China is able to grow stronger and stronger that will be good for the working class and leftists here. We can point to China’s drive to build public housing to motivate the struggle for a massive increase in public housing here. We can point to the public ownership of banks in China to strengthen our own campaign for the nationalisation of the banks where profits would be used for all rather than for the filthy coffers of the very few. We will be able to point to the successes of socialistic rule in China to motivate the struggle for socialist revolution here. That is why Trotskyist Platform calls for the working class and oppressed of Australia and the world to mobilise now so we can defend the Chinese workers state.
We say: U.S. and Australian militaries get out of the South China Sea! Stop the Australian regime’s military build-up against China! We also stand by those Chinese international students who are being so vilified by the Australian media and government alike for bravely speaking out in support of the PRC. We say the “right to free speech” must include the right to support socialistic countries like the Peoples Republic of China.
The imperialists’ latest favourite anti-Red China force is the anti-communist movement in China’s Hong Kong. The whole Australian mainstream media is backing this violent movement. So is Donald Trump and Scott Morrison. So you know this is not a progressive movement! The pro-colonial rioters in Hong Kong carry the old colonial flag of Britain. They say they are for democracy. Yet in 1967, the British colonial regime that they hail massacred and killed around 30 Hong Kong trade unionists and leftists when they rebelled against the horrors of colonial rule. And then today’s pro-colonial rioters have the hide to complain about supposed police brutality in today’s Hong Kong….
So who are these rioters in Hong Kong? They represent the interests of the upper class and upper middle class who fear that if socialistic influence from China is brought into Hong Kong they will be forced to share their wealth with the working class. Hong Kong is one of the world’s most unequal societies. And these rich kid rioters want to keep it that way! They are being backed and funded by billionaire tycoons like Jimmy Lai, a right-wing media mogul who is very much like Rupert Murdoch and his media company is helping fuel the riots….
Unfortunately, however, some people from the not so rich sections of the middle class also back the opposition movement. That’s because China and the Hong Kong government have agreed to keep Hong Kong capitalist and that capitalism is only leading to unaffordable housing and high prices for everything. That’s why Beijing must move to confiscate the wealth of the Jimmy Lais and other greedy tycoons and bring the means of production in Hong Kong into public ownership. That would take away the key source of backing for the rioters. Moreover, when the economy is in public hands and property speculators are brought to heel, housing can finally be made affordable, decent public housing can finally be provided for the hundreds of thousands of people living in the terrible so-called coffin homes and the long working hours of Hong Kong workers can be reduced with no loss in pay. If socialism is brought into Hong Kong it would be very popular with the masses. And even some of the middle class youth now in opposition will start to change their minds. For one China, under one socialist system!
Knowing all of this let’s now focus on what we need to do here. And what we can do here, matters a lot. The right-wing, pro-colonial rioters in Hong Kong draw a lot of their strength from the West, including lots of funding from governments, backing from the media and support on the streets from anti-communists. We need to counteract this! We must mobilise on the streets to demand: U.S., Australia and Britain stop your support and funding for anti-China groups in Hong Kong! Stop your anti-communist interference! By mobilising on the streets to oppose the anti-communist movement in Hong Kong we will give encouragement to the pro-Peoples Republic of China masses there.
Sisters and brothers, every day the anti-communist Cold War against China is getting more and more intense. The last Cold War against the Soviet Union was won by the imperialists. Let us make sure that they do not win this war as well!
… So, my comrades, my sisters and brothers, let’s work hard to defend the Chinese workers state as part of our fight for a socialist Australia and, one fine day, a beautiful kind communist world.”
