in Moscow conceded the possibility of an alliance with a nationalist bourgeoisie in colonial and semicolonial countries, and under the stewardship of Stalin and others, a United Front was formed between the CCP and the Kuomintang, the bourgeois nationalist organization founded by Sun Yat-sen. In 1923, a proposal was passed at the third conference of the CCP that allowed communists to become members of the Kuomintang, and for the Kuomintang to be considered part of the ‘revolutionary alliance’ of the four classes.
This would turn out to be a disastrous mistake on the part of the CCP. As the labour movement grew in strength, with many trade unionists being CCP members, the Kuomintang grew nervous and in 1927 massacred tens of thousands of workers and trade unionists, destroying China’s labour movement and sending the nascent CCP into retreat in the countryside. There, they found their base among the peasantry and sharpened their vision of Chinese socialism. In the ensuing battles with the Kuomintang in the 1930s and 1940s, ‘Chinese socialism’ developed to become what it largely is today: collective, though party-led, and ultimately aimed at ending foreign invasions, maintaining national sovereignty and establishing an independent republic.
Marxism was largely absent from the beginning. Anti-imperialism and nationalist resistance – backed by a coalition of social classes – drove the 1949 Revolution, and the ruling class used patriotism to mobilize this bloc of the four classes for nation building after 1949. Since then, Chinese socialism has become a reactionary ideology of the state, markedly in its suppression of dissent. In 1980, Deng Xiaoping stated that ‘the only goal of socialism is to make our country strong and wealthy’ – essentially collapsing the difference between Chinese socialism and nationalism.
Throughout my time in China, I could see this everywhere I looked. Not only is there blatant public prejudice against minority migrant workers, there is also little institutional protection for them. No existing legislation ensures punishment of discrimination against ethnic minorities. Racial crimes are not even recognized. There are no statistics on the number of racial attacks and incidents. Some companies offer better pay and working terms to Han Chinese than to migrants who are also ethnic minorities. Other firms have taken children from impoverished minority communities in rural areas and made them work for a pittance, as in Guangdong. But the most important minority issue for the authorities is crime control. In late 2007, the Guangdong public security bureau highlighted ‘public safety’ as the most important aspect of ‘migrant worker management’. I saw how migrant workers in the cities are physically segregated from the rest of society. In public places, such as the train stations, they are put into a special queue for peasant workers (nongmin-gong), to be dealt with separately. I asked a station staffer in Guangzhou why. He replied, ‘You never know what problems they will cause…and there are too many of them.’ Public security officers often walk up and down these queues armed with taser guns, in case of trouble. Despite all this ‘public safety’ management, in reality it is the migrant workers’ personal safety that is in jeopardy.
The frustration of the villagers affected by the earthquake lingered in my mind. I wanted to see for myself just how slow the reconstruction process was. I decided to go to Wenchuan. But in inland China, thinking about visiting a place is one thing, and getting there is another. No trains went to Wenchuan, though it was only about four hours’ journey northwest of Chengdu. I called the bus station.
‘There are no buses going to Wenchuan. The road is closed,’ I was told. ‘Even the taxis can’t go there. The roads are still under reconstruction.’ This was four months after the earthquake, but after all, a lack of transport had been the main reason given for the delay of rescue immediately after the disaster.
I decided to travel to Dujiangyan, sixty kilometres northwest of Chengdu. From there, I was told, it would be a three-hour trip to Wenchuan. Although the roads were in poor condition, I thought a taxi driver might well say yes if I paid a bit extra.
Dujiangyan, a tourist resort, was once chiefly known for its 2,200-year-old irrigation system, built in 256 BC, under the provincial governor Li Bing, to harness the wild Min River. It was an impressive engineering project using a central dam and artificial islands to split the Min into an inner stream for irrigation and an outer channel for flood control. The irrigation stream is still in use today. But Dujiangyan is now famous not only for its ancient history but also for the terrible damage it suffered during the 2008 earthquake. Five schools and a city hospital collapsed along with other buildings and all were still under reconstruction at the time of my visit.
When my then partner John and I arrived at Dujiangyan after a forty-five-minute bus ride, we were confronted by ruined buildings and piles of rubble. The streets were so much quieter –few signs of tourism after the quake, obviously. I asked around for taxis. No one wanted to go to Wenchuan. ‘It’s not permitted. All roads are closed,’ the drivers all said. Eventually, I had to give up the idea of ever getting there.
On to Plan B: A visit to Juyuan Middle School in Juyuan village, on the outskirts of Dujiangyan, 110 kilometres from the quake’s epicentre. Chinese media had reported 250 students and teachers killed; the international media put student deaths at 900. Sixty parents of children buried under Juyuan Middle School attempted to deliver a petition to the local authorities in June 2010, asking the government to launch and publish an investigation, and were instantly arrested by the police for crimes of ‘subversion’. Meanwhile, local courts wouldn’t take up the cases, and lawyers have been warned by the authorities to stay away. Huang Qi, an activist who demanded an official inquiry, was detained on June 2008, then sentenced on 23 November 2009 to three years in prison for ‘illegal possession of state secrets’. In early February 2010, Tan Zuoren, another activist, who had investigated the deaths of children in a number of schools that had collapsed, was jailed for five years for subversion.
Juyuan looked like a postwar village. Not a sound along the street. I asked John to walk away in another direction, to avoid attracting attention, since he is white. He went off to see a river that runs alongside the village, while I walked slowly toward the ruins of the middle school. I saw a few villagers sitting on benches outside their residence.
‘Is that the Juyuan Middle School?’ I asked them, pointing to a huge pile of rubble circled by a metal wire fence.
They looked slightly worried. One of the two women replied. ‘Yes, that’s where the school was. It will be rebuilt on another site a mile away.’
‘Is it being constructed at the moment?’ I asked.
‘No. The building work hasn’t started yet,’ the woman answered. ‘It’s been four months already.’
‘Do you know why there’s a delay?’ I asked.
One of the men became cautious. He raised his eyebrows and said: ‘You are supposed to report to the local authorities first before talking to any of us.’
‘Have you been told not to talk to people from outside, then?’ I asked.
‘Yes. You report to them first. If they permit you, then you can come back to talk to us,’ the man replied.
I walked on, toward the school. It was a horrifying sight. Its four-storey buildings had collapsed completely, like a spilled box of matches. There was only rubble, surrounded by metal wires around the site. Nothing had survived.
But this was not the work of a natural disaster; this was a man-made catastrophe. At the time of its original construction (the east side was built in 1988, the west side in 1995), the building had been certified as meeting the standards of China’s 1978 Construction Earthquake-Prevention Guidelines. However, following the quake, construction ministry expert Chen Baosheng told the Southern Weekend that there had been many fundamental problems with the building of the school. The plank boards pulled from the wreckage ‘were like something that someone just hurriedly put through a wire-drawing machine, without
