THE BIG STORY

Ferrari – coloured a revolutionary red –

prowled through downtown Toronto. The

engine made a patriotic roar. In Vancou-

ver, a black supercar sported the national

flag of the People’s Republic on its hood.

Aston Martins, McLarens and Porsches

proceeded through the streets of both

cities in an organized convoy. A Mer-

cedes-Benz in a disabled parking space

played the Chinese national anthem at

full volume.

This protest, which took place in

August, was a show of force from Canada’s

Chinese expats. The cause? Supporting

Beijing during Hong Kong’s pro-democ-

racy street movement. The upper-class

diaspora, many of whom moved to

Canada as part of a now-shelved immi-

gration programme to attract ‘immigrant

investors’ in the 2000s, was demonstrat-

ing its commitment to the territorial

integrity of ‘Greater China’: ‘Love China.

Love Hong Kong. No Secession. No Riot/

Violence’ adorned the placards outside

the Chinese consulate in Vancouver.

The irony is that many of these

wealthy expats settled in Canada to

escape the Chinese government’s capital

controls and park their money in lucra-

tive property on the other side of the

Pacific. But ironies and contradictions

are everywhere you look in China at this

moment in the early 21st century – or

what one day might simply be called the

Chinese century.

China in revolt

The violent clashes in Hong Kong

between protesters, the police and pro-

government goons provided some of

the most arresting images of the year.

In the Chinese-administered territory,

the failure to make good on promises of

universal suffrage or deal with economic

inequality generated a potent and leader-

less social movement: ‘7k for a house like

a cell and you really think we out here

scared of jail?’, went one spray-painted

slogan. But the Hong Kong crisis is also

just one of many social, political and

economic fractures running through the

People’s Republic as it settles into the role

of world superpower.

There was what scholar Leta Hong

Fincher calls the ‘feminist awakening’ of

the mid-2010s, when five activists were

arrested ahead of International Women’s

Day for organizing against sexual har-

assment. Under the ‘hypermasculine

personality cult’ of President Xi Jinping,

Chinese feminists have been struggling

against patriarchal attitudes in public and

the workplace, as Fincher documents in

her book Betraying Big Brother.

Then, in 2018, there was a clampdown

on students from several elite universi-

ties who had been supporting striking

workers. Over 50 were detained in August

and, in December, the head of Peking

University’s Marxist Society was arrested.

A manifesto calling for a ‘new society’

truly ‘led by the working class’ – and

denouncing the arrest of students whose

only crime was being ‘loyal to Marxism’,

the country’s official creed – was quickly

scrubbed off the internet.

And, perhaps most significantly, this

decade has seen a huge number of wildcat

strikes. The China Labour Bulletin, a

Hong Kong-based NGO, documents these

unofficial disturbances. Scroll through

its online map and the country turns

red with dots: there were 1,750 strikes

and workers’ protests last year, a figure

which peaked at 2,700 in 2015. These

can involve picket lines, work stoppages,

street blockades and even violent con-

frontations with the police.

‘There are workers on strike every

day in China,’ Han Dongfang, executive

director of China Labour Bulletin, tells

me. ‘They are being exploited because

they don’t have the rights to organize a

union or bargain [for higher wages]. This

is about survival and fairness.’

Red and green

China’s jingoistic middle class and restive

working class both owe their existence to

their country’s gravity-defying embrace

of turbo-capitalism. After the Commu-

nist Revolution in 1949, Mao Zedong set

about creating a developmentalist state:

nationalized industry in the cities, collec-

tivized farmland in the countryside, with

a basic degree of social rights through

co-operative healthcare systems and

the expansion of education among the

peasantry.^1

The collapse of this model – follow-

ing the largest famine in human history

during the Great Leap Forward – was fol-

lowed by market reforms. By the 1980s,

Deng Xiaoping was able to exploit a ‘com-

parative advantage’, in economist-speak,

unlike anything in the history of capital-

ism: a reserve army of several hundred

million labourers, with decent health

and literacy standards, under whose toil

China would become the workshop of

the world. The number of workers that

Deng set loose on the world economy

A

16 NEW INTERNATIONALIST

‘The ordinary

people, farmers

and workers, like

Xi Jinping, even if

he’s done nothing

really to improve

daily life, because

they hate these

corrupt officials’