Above: protesters blocking an Italian port to prevent shipments to the Zionist occupier.
The reason why I feel a need to counter the accusations about China assisting the Gaza genocide at this particular moment is that in recent times, the propagators of this narrative have been notably going on the offensive. Greg Godels of Marxism-Leninism Today, whose anti-China arguments I partly rebutted in an essay last week, has put forth the idea that the PRC shares culpability in the genocide for being too passive. This argument came to my attention because it aligns with the anti-China position of Greece’s KKE, which this week put out a statement that accused China of failing to rectify social inequality. This also isn’t true, but my focus here is on why attacking the PRC over Palestine is counterproductive—and why when we reject this practice, the path to an actual workers struggle for sanctioning “Israel” becomes all the more clear.
About the status of the PRC as an anti-imperialist force, Godels wrote that “If a genocidal assault on the Palestinian people by a greater-Israel theocratic state is the signal imperialist act of this moment, where are these anti-imperialists? Have they organized international opposition, stopped trade, imposed sanctions, withdrawn recognition or cooperation, sent volunteer fighters, or otherwise offered material resistance? In the past, Chinese and Soviet material, physical aid benefited Vietnam fighting imperialism; the Soviets pushed to the brink of war to support Cuba against imperial threats in the early 1960s; the Cubans fought and died in Angola against imperialism and apartheid in the 1990s. Even the US joined the Soviet Union in thwarting British, French, and Israeli imperial designs on the Suez Canal in 1956.”
To understand why China isn’t taking on the same role in Israel-Palestine that the USSR took in these conflicts, and why a thinker like Godels would view this as the wrong decision, we need to analyze the ideological divide between the KKE’s camp and the PRC’s camp. This is a divide where one side wants socialism to keep the same form it had in the past, because this side necessarily associates the past with what’s successful; while the other side seeks to act according to the new conditions. And it’s only when we take on the 21st century-oriented way of thinking that we can effectively organize the workers, whether on Gaza or on anything else.
When China declines to end trade with the Zionist entity, or otherwise copy the types of interventionist policies that the Soviet Union adhered to, this is because China views those policies as having largely been a waste which contributed to the USSR’s downfall. The PRC’s goal is to build up its economic strength, and to do what’s most rational from the perspective of a state. As Mao clarified, when a state trades according to its own best interests, this does not necessarily mean it’s assisting the states it trades with; this simply means the economic factors have aligned in a way that makes such trade the logical outcome:
Trade must not be confused with participation in war or with rendering assistance. For example, the Soviet Union traded with Germany and Italy during the Spanish war, yet nobody in the world said that the Soviet Union was helping Germany and Italy in their aggression against Spain; on the contrary, people said that it was helping Spain in resisting this aggression, the reason being that the Soviet Union actually did give help to Spain. Again, during the present Sino-Japanese war the Soviet Union is trading with Japan, but nobody in the world is saying that the Soviet Union is helping Japan in its aggression against China; on the contrary, people say that it is helping China to resist this aggression, the reason being that it actually is helping China.
At present, both sides in the world war have trading relations with the Soviet Union, but this cannot be regarded as assistance to either, still less as taking part in the war. Only if the nature of the war changes, if the war in one or more countries undergoes certain necessary changes and becomes advantageous to the Soviet Union and the peoples of the world, will it be possible for the Soviet Union to help or participate; otherwise it will not. As for the fact that the Soviet Union is obliged to trade to a greater or lesser extent on more or less preferential terms with one or another of the belligerents according to how friendly or hostile it happens to be, that depends not on the Soviet Union but on the attitude of the belligerents.
The same applies to the PRC, except in this case the given workers state is trading for a purpose that’s itself beneficial to the national liberation cause; because China has become so economically strong, it’s changed the global power balance, and thereby given the Palestinians international leverage which it lacked during the unipolar era. It’s when our popular movements understand this context around why China has taken such a posture towards “Israel” that we can grasp what the present conditions call for. They do not call for the PRC to become like the new USSR, which of course wouldn’t be feasible regardless; they require the world’s workers to build up independent proletarian power within their own countries, and wage a struggle which adds to the gains of the successful revolutions.
This was always the path that the workers movement needed to follow; it’s the only logical course for us to pursue. The greatest problem our movement came across during the Cold War era was that the globe’s biggest communist parties failed to pursue their own paths, and instead followed the opportunistic Khrushchevite ideology that had taken over the Soviet Union.
The parties that aligned with the USSR to this extent, including the enormous communist party in Indonesia, embraced Khrushchev’s notion about “peaceful coexistence” between the workers and the capitalists. Because Indonesia’s communist leaders became enamored with appealing towards the country’s national bourgeoisie, they were blinded to the full reality of the violent campaign that the CIA was planning. And when a U.S. military coup happened in 1965, the party hadn’t adequately warned the people about the threat, or worked to arm them. This let the military murder hundreds of thousands of its political opponents, solidifying the dictatorship’s control and ensuring Washington’s victory in the Cold War.
This was the most grievous harm that came from the crude economism of post-Stalin USSR, and of the parties that uncritically went along with its dogmas. And it’s another reason why China’s non-interventionist practice makes sense; one of the negative effects of the USSR’s interventionism was that it encouraged much of the world’s communist parties to mechanistically tail after the ruling Soviet party, instead of thinking for themselves and acting according to their own local circumstances. It also fostered sectarianism, worsening the damage from the Sino-Soviet split. The globe’s communists should not be copying the CPC; if we were to only do what the CPC does, then none of the world’s communist parties would be backing Russia’s anti-fascist war, simply because China has declined to take an explicit position on this war.
Today, the party that plays such an interfering role is the KKE, which has corralled numerous other communist parties towards taking its anti-China, anti-Russia, and anti-Venezuela stances. The KKE embodies the very worst parts of the USSR’s leadership, the ones that were introduced by Khrushchev and led to the collapse of Soviet socialism. The CPC has not tried to bring any other party under its ideological command; all it’s needed to do to majorly change the global power balance is keep building up economic power for China, and for the other formerly colonized countries that it works with. If we’re serious about defeating Zionism, we’ll learn the lessons from the last century’s liberation struggles, and forge our own paths instead of blindly following an arbitrary authority.
The KKE’s real problem with the CPC is that it does what’s best for China, rather than what the KKE says is best. The argument about how China isn’t doing enough to fight “Israel” might sound compelling, until one understands which actors in the communist movement are actually worthy of being exposed: self-appointed socialist authorities like the KKE leadership, or like the pro-imperialist “socialist” Zohran Mamdani. They’re the ones who are holding back the pro-Palestine struggle within the imperial countries, and we should be struggling against them. The main point isn’t to combat the opportunists, though, it’s to bring the masses into the struggle. If we construct avenues for struggle which are truly independent, and guided by rigorous investigations into what our local conditions require, we’ll succeed in this mission.
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